my winter garden

It is finally snowing — real snow, the kind that comes down in giant, fluffy flakes, the kind that stays on the ground. The kind that covers everything in adorable mounds of white.

This is important because snow cover is essential to my winter garden. My winter garden is the most perfect of all my gardens — the snow hides all my faults. All the plants that I didn't know what to do with, all the bushes I didn't prune, all the weeds I helpfully "forgot" to weed and all the plant matter I never got around to deadheading. There's the promise of spring and some irrational optimism that this year, this year I am going to be better. I will weed. I will clean up after the flowering masses. I will be a new person: the kind of person who gardens.

By way of pictoral demonstration — this is what it looks like outside, right now:


It is snowing. Heavily. And this is what I decided to do, this very afternoon:


I brought the garlic in. It had been harvested and had been sitting outside, "drying out," since ... er. July.

This whole "being a gardener, being a better person" thing ... it's a work in progress.

lazy afternoon

Look what I did today!


Oh, I have missed this. It turns out to have been a longer hiatus than either of us wanted or anticipated — just over nine months for me. And the baby is worth it, of course, but oh — I do love this.

There's a little bit of cognitive dissonance right now — I haven't climbed in so long that I no longer have any idea what I can and cannot do. They have some really nice, crimpy and technical 5.11s up right now that are incredibly enticing, but I don't think I'm quite there yet. Quite. Half my brain knows this. The either half just wants to throw myself against the wall and stick somehow.

So I stuck to easier climbs: I started on a 5.8 with a slight incline, which was nice and didn't require any thought, although I could feel the muscle strain. And then I did a 5.10c, which was crimpy and should have been a cakewalk, but wasn't. (I finished it. I couldn't allow myself not to. But it wasn't as pretty as it should have been, and my footwork, thought never my best feature, was just sad.) And now my fingers hurt. As they should.

One of the things I'd missed about climbing — and exercise generally, although, for me, it's particular to climbing — is going out for food afterward. I'm not the kind of person who worries about calories or "working off" a meal, but there's just something immensely satisfying about eating right after a good workout. It's the gratification, I think: there's you, bonetired and happily exhausted and ravenous, and then suddenly — through very little actual effort — there's food, all hot and caloric and yummy. (It has to be hot, and preferably greasy. A cold chicken wrap would just be wrong.)


There's a new café in our gentrifying neighbourhood, the Lazy Daisy, that I've been meaning to drag Pd to try. It is all about organic and local whole foods, and it's lovely. And, even better, it turns out that they serve brunch.


And it turns out that I am a sucker for foam art, so I am theirs forever. (This is hot chocolate, not coffee, but the principle holds. It's all the same foam, in the end. And yes, I had what amounts to an organic, free-range, locally-sourced Egg McMuffin. I regret nothing.)

Also lovely, and something I had missed?


The equally traditional, equally satisfying post-climbing nap.

housekeeping

After nearly two years here, we finally have a doormat. The doormat.


We originally saw this saying on a tin sign in a store in Ottawa, years ago. When we bought the house and needed a doormat, we knew this was the one we wanted. The problem was, we suddenly couldn't find it — anywhere. Granted, we didn't look very hard; we had a tiny Ikea one that did for us in a pinch, and who thinks of doormats in the summer? But as we walked the baby from her doctor's appointment yesterday, we saw it. So we bought it.

I amuse myself by wondering if any of our family will fail to see that it's a joke — although I will admit that it's a lot funnier (and the stakes are slightly higher) now that we've added a baby and grandparents into the mix.

(And now, looking at this picture, I realise that we should probably touch up the paint on the kickstep this summer. Oh, photographs. The truths you tell.)

a holly jolly Christmas

Happy new year! And it's only the third day — that's not bad. (We'll ignore the fact that I only posted twice in the latter half of 2011. It's a new year, after all. New beginnings.) I was going to get right into it, write about knitting, cooking — or maybe the fact that it is, for the first time this winter, actually winter, frigidly cold — but then I realised, no; you probably want to know about Christmas. And because it still is, after a fashion, Christmas (the ninth day, in fact), and on Christmas one is obliging and friendly, that is what I will post.


We had, actually, a lovely Christmas, spent with Pd's family. We went up to the farm, close to Georgian Bay, and I think it says something about the oddity of this winter that we just barely scraped up a white Christmas. There was a smallish storm on the 27th, but on Christmas Day itself there was just a light dusting of powder on the deck, and perhaps an inch or two on the ground. Normally, by this time the farm is buried under several feet of the stuff. The farm is about half an hour away from Blue Mountain, and there were, literally, cheers when the snow started falling on the 27th.


We tried to go light on the presents this year, but it was open season on the grandchildren. All of the kids were out-sized by their presents, in weight and area. Luckily, ours is still very little, so it was mostly clothes and books, and one already-favourite jiggly horse (official name: Sir Prance-a-Lot. No, really).

My favourite is a blank measuring tape where you can mark down her height at Important Life Events. It's a great idea — easier to move than marking her height on the doorjamb — but the significant downside is that it is incredibly hard to measure a baby.


It took us a couple of tries, and it's still not accurate. Still, it's a little sobering — the measurement looks so long. What happened to my wee little baby?