Yule fool!

Each Christmas, we have a drink of choice. Last year, it was brandy, lime & soda in honour of SJ's grandma. This year, it was the Chicago and the Old Fashioned. The first has brandy, Cointreau, a splash of bitters, topped with champers; the latter contains a magnificently muddled orange, maraschino cherry and sugar cube, topped with whiskey and soda. 
I can solidly attest that both are delicious. T can solidly attest that both got the better of him. We were all chatting happily after dessert, when T wandered away from the dining table. A while later, he still hadn't come back. I went exploring to make sure he was feeling alright. And there he was, tucked up in bed, still fully clothed and wearing his Santa hat. He had totally sneaked off, and won't live it down until next Christmas!

Three Chicagos

(like the Three Amigos, but tastier. ;)

Our Christmas menu was:

Hors d'ouevres: Smoked salmon and melba toasts with cream cheese, capers and lemon; smoked Applewood cheddar, 7-year-old cheddar, and Old Speckled Hen ale cheeses, crackers, mixed dried fruit and olives.

Starter: Spicy carrot and capsicum soup with onion and herb bread.

Main: Stuffed roast squash (aka pumpkin), with roast vegetables, mash and peas.

Dessert: Orange-and-candied-cherry cup cakes.

Drinks: Chicago, Old Fashioned, Mawson's Cabernet Sauvignon, Yalumba Shiraz Viognier.

And you know, after all the planning and frantic preparation, it's funny how Christmas always turns out to be such a chilled, wonderful day. Hope yours was too!

Beautiful day

It's Christmas Eve, and I just received the most wonderful gift I could have ever hoped for: A card from my big brother.
Through all the years you were gone, I looked for you, and loved you, and knew you'd come back to us when you were ready.
And if it helps any, your card made me cry too. So we're even on that front. 


Merry Christmas, everyone. Put your faith in Christmas magic. It does exist.

A new low

Today, I reached new depths of penny-pinching. I cut my own hair.
It's not as bad as it sounds. I only cut my fringe, because frankly, I refuse to go pay someone $20 to do it for me. However I am still wracked by memories of the last time I tried to cut my fringe. I was in Grade 9, and was running late for a band performance at my high school. Frustrated with my hair, I took at it with some scissors. In a sequence of events fit for the daggiest of TV shows, it turned out slightly crooked. So I cut it some more. And it was still crooked. So I cut it some more. In the end, I turned up to the band room in the knick of time, to be greeted with slightly confused looks from my friends and repeated "What did you do to your hair?"
Today, though, I was determined to move beyond my wayward teen efforts. Results below. I'm embracing the slight jaggedness as a fashion statement. ;)


Am I the only one who's tried this?

Foto Follies

It was -6 today, with a wind chill of -13. So I decided to go for a jog. Naturally. 
Suitably layered, I set out along the lakeshore near our home. But the jog ended up being more good-intention than good-exercise, because I kept getting distracted by the utter gorgeousness of the day. The light here in winter is astonishing. It whets your vision and gives the world an almost unnatural sharpness, as if tearing away the usual layers and filters through which I see the world, to reveal its very essence. Either that, or the cold was making me delusional.
Faced with the fierce beauty of ice buildup along Lake Ontario, all I could do was jog home to get my camera and bicycle, and head back to the lake.

Whither the tree?

Christmas has finally arrived here in Toronto, as has winter. Both have been looming for a while, but gentle snow falling outside and a flurry of cooking activity in my kitchen have marked today as my official start of the yuletide. 
But there's one significant absence: We don't have a Christmas tree. 
It was a decision made by happenstance as much as it was by bank balance (good trees cost $25 or more). For the last couple of years, we have gone with the boys to choose a tree, then brought it home to decorate. But A. and E. are now fully-fledged teenagers, and frankly, they'd rather hang with their friends in KW than come and visit us in Toronto. So that means we spend our weekends with them in KW, and never got around to addressing the whole 'tree' issue in T-dot.


Until today! In the antithesis of a Christmas miracle, I have made possibly the lamest pseudo-tree in the history of pathetic last-minute attempts by taping a string of Christmas lights to our lounge room wall, in the shape of a Christmas tree silhouette. Yes, this time it's even more lame than the cardboard tree I made out of a wine carton in Edinburgh. 


And it turned out to be even more pathetic than even I expected. I just brought my laptop to the lounge room to photograph my monstrosity, only to find it has completely fallen down. So please, witness what is left of my ultra lame effort to create a Christmas Tree Silhouette in tree lights on our wall.

Sigh.

Haiku me this, Batman

For no good reason, recently I decided to start writing all of my facebook status updates in haiku. Things I have learned so far:

- Americanisation fits perfectly, as it is lovely and neat and has seven syllables.
- Harper jokes are easy to fit in, but it gets more difficult when I try to add Ignatieff. (Seems a fair summation of the situation as a whole, really.)
- I've started reflexively counting syllables while thinking my idle thoughts. I do this on my fingers. The subsequent twitching, I'm now realizing, could be making me look a little insane.
- It's rather reduced my number of posts. I like to think this is a good thing.


Poetry buffs may also be interested to know I wrote my first pantoum yesterday. The first quatrain came to me while I was walking home in a drizzling rain that wafted nicely under the streetlights. The strictures of the form, though, took me to rather unexpected places during the actual writing. It was really fascinating. 


If anyone's played with this sort of thing, I'd love to know about it.

...

Oh, and here, for no good reason, is the Twinkie-and-Joe-Louis cake I made for my friends' combo birthday party. You know you want it...

Dutch

Newton's third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I'm starting to believe it also pertains to happiness, and that for every ounce of joy in this world, there's a corresponding amount of pain.
Less than six hours after writing my previous fairytale-post about lifetime friendships, I was informed that a friend of mine from years ago was killed in an horrendous workplace accident that day. 


I don't profess to be a close or integral part of Danny Cheney's life. I was dating one of his best mates back in the post-university days, so for about three years I was welcomed into their tight-knit, vodka-swilling, club-dancing group. (I like to think I added a certain cynical Brisbane air to their usual Gold Coast vibe.) 


After the inevitable break-up, I stayed in touch with a couple of the guys, but not Dutch. Still, I was impressed to hear about his career as a globe-trotting engineer, and totally pumped for him when he got married in April. Then, on the weekend, he went to work and didn't go home.


I know of death. I've lost relatives, some colleagues. People I consider friends. Indeed, Dutch is the second person in my life to be electrocuted in a cherry-picker-type machine. (At least Dutch died relatively within hours. It took a month for Tim to die.)


But this is the first time it's been someone from any of my crews (I've been lucky enough to have a few). Having now experienced the beauty of marriage, and to be nudging the deep joy of living as a fully established self, it breaks my heart to imagine losing any of it. The sentiment seems so trite, but the fragility and randomness of life has hit me in the gut.


So my heart goes out to Dutch's wife and step-daughter, his friends, his family. Everyone who knew the big guy with the huge grin. And I will do what everyone else does when loss darkens their landscape: I'll hold my loved ones that much closer, and cherish everything they bring to my world.


If you're reading this, you're one of them.
x

What flows from Sapa wine...

I was chatting to my lovely Irish mate R. on skype this morning, and suddenly an eagle-eye view of our friendship-as-landscape rose within me.


I was surprised. The path so far looked so very short, weaving down the muddy hillside from the Vietnamese town where we met, to this place six years on. Indeed, from that sudden vantage point above it all - earth laid bare - the track barely registered. Instead, it was surrounded by a vast expanse of untravelled ground, fresh and new and awaiting exploration.


For he is an old friend, and this morning I saw that such friendships work both in forwards and reverse: Not only is there ground behind you, but a world ahead. A world shared.


And it is beautiful!