Wow, that month went by fast! What happened?
Winter started out officially and efficiently on December 1
with our first snowfall—all of 1”, which disappeared fairly shortly afterwards. Then everything settled down to a somewhat
sedate state with moderate temperatures, fog and sun, and little bits of snow
now and then.
The fog can be anywhere from a wisp to pea soup, the latter
of which is unwelcome, but it does have the side effect of creating beautiful
hoar frost. Every picture becomes that
of a Christmas card.
Our neighbours at the bomb pit continued to amuse us hugely;
after trucking a large number of loads of rock out, they then trucked in even
more loads of sand. It looks like they
have laid out the area for the foundation of the house (doubt if they will have
a basement!) and all is quiet until next summer. The mild December permitted more work time
than they had expected.
The deer continue to wander back and forth on a fairly
regular basis, and one doesn’t even need the game camera to get a good shot.
We have been going for ambling walks through the neighbourhood
to keep Brian moving, and just at a 90 degree angle to our road you can look
over a completely different terrain.
Looking to the south, instead of looking at grapevines and orchards, you
can see the rolling hills of cattle county, complete with wide open grazing
areas.
We came across a funny sign in
our neighbourhood. Lots of properties
have ‘No Trespassing’ signs on them, and in the valley there are a lot of signs
saying ‘No National Park’. This sign just appeared to be vehemently negative.
Christmas festivities got started on December 15 with our
annual Fire Hall Potluck Dinner. It is
extremely well attended with well over 100 people, and a monstrous spread of
offerings from all participants. Door
prizes, table decoration draws, and speeches keep things moving smartly. Everyone chips in a few bucks for our road
clearing crews, and each crew member generally gets a $50 Tim Horton card to thank
them for their efforts. Our roads are
well taken care of!
The next event was on December 21 when one set of our
neighbours invited us to join them at a school concert in Midway, about an hour’s
drive east of here. They were really
pumped about the event, so we accepted the invitation even without knowing much
about it. It turned out that this was the
secondary high school in Midway (population 694) and the music teacher was an
extraordinary woman who used to sing opera, and got the kids totally involved.
Six performers did two sets of music, the first of which was
more traditional melodic Christmas songs, and the second which included
excerpts from The Sound of Music. (I was
so engaged I didn’t get a picture of them for the Christmas portion, but they
looked excellent in formal evening wear.)
Then they started singing! Their
voices were absolutely professional sounding and very touching given the small
community (lots of family members there to cheer!) and the intimacy of the
small theatre in the school.
Then we discovered we knew the father of two of the singers
and had met the son Mattius while his dad was doing some work at our place.
Here they are singing about the Little Goatherd. The second from the left is Antonia who is
the twin sister to Mattius to her left.
Clearly not identical! Mattius is
at least 6 foot 6 inches tall, very slender, and has the most amazing bass
voice. No matter how carefully dressed he
was, his shirt cuffs always extended beyond his suit jacket by at least 3”!
Christmas decorating started in fine fashion, with Caribou
now pulling a sleigh with a solar panel to power the sparkling lights on the
rim while Eagle was carrying in bows for gifts.
Regrettably I missed Sasquatch, who posed as a snowman this year. The boys at home were prepared to welcome their
holidays with their usual exuberance.
Our five bird feeders are well attended, and we are getting
a good assortment of flying pigs coming around.
Mountain Chickadees (see their white eyebrows?)are fearless and will come to the feeder
even if I am inches away from it. The
Hairy Woodpecker is also reasonably comfortable with my presence, especially
because the Stellar Jays and Clark’s Nutcrackers will dominate all the feeders
unless I am around. Mr. Nutcracker
hopped from branch to branch, trying to figure out how to approach and not be
seen by me, without any success whatsoever.
Brian and I had a great Christmas, and we are very proud to
announce a new member of our family, born on Christmas Day.
Meet R2V2, our robotic vacuum, named after my favourite
movie hero.
Now you have to understand us old farts. For years, we would go to other people’s
places, and if there was a baby they would place it in the middle of the floor,
and we all would watch the baby. This obviously
puzzled those of us who were childless.
No so now! On
Christmas Day, we got R2V2 all charged up and then let him loose. We generally run him on a random pattern, and
he beetles about, crisscrossing the floors, until he has determined that
everything has been covered to his satisfaction. For two hours, Brian and I followed V2
around, marveling.
It actually is amazing
to consider the programming in this little beast to make him work around
furniture, avoid falling down stairs, and inspect every corner thoroughly. If he runs into problems, he beeps to call us
to rescue him. When his charge is near
the end he beeps, works for another 10 minutes or so and then docks himself
back onto the charging apparatus to get properly fed. The first shock was how much dust this little
sucker picked up. The second shock was
how must dust he could again pick up 3 days later. I might have to decorate him with little antennae
just to give him that little extra jaunty touch.
Here’s hoping that 2020 will be a good, happy, and healthy
year for all of us! Thanks for visiting.
