Christmas Eve 2011



Vegreville Pysanka

Shanon holding up the Vegreville Pysanka

Bill, Donna, Harley and Marley



Penguin hors d'oeuvres

New Buzzword Alert and Random Ideas

When you've received a nasty mail, you can say that you've been "e-nailed"!

I am going crazy for coconut scented shampoo, conditioner, and moisturizer these days.  The coconut fragrance transports me to the sandy beaches of Hawaii.  But I noticed something this morning.  The name of my moisturizer is "Desert Essence".  That's kind of a weird name for a moisturizer, don't you think?   Especially a coconut one.

Today I bought toe separators: blue, sparkly, gel forms that look like a blue, sparkly gel version of brass knuckles.  You put your toes in the holes and they stretch them, ostensibly to relax and "refresh" your feet, and relieve aching caused by tight shoes, bunions, etc.  So far, my toes are just cold.  They miss snuggling with their neighbours.  And, no, I'm not going to post of picture of them.

All Blacks Win World Cup and I enjoy the last blueberry cinnamon muffin

It's a good day so far.  Woke up early on this morning (it's 7:37 as I write this) to learn that New Zealand has won the Rugby World Cup.  I'm a fan of the All Blacks, mainly because there are so many gorgeous players. I developed a big crush on Carlos Spencer back in 2003 when I saw him lead the haka at the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Sydney.  No word of a lie, watching that is HOT. Go to YouTube and search on "carlos spencer haka" and you'll see what I mean. Here's a link to a photo at least: http://www.marca.com/2009/01/30/mas_deportes/rugby/1233333242.html .  Sadly, Carlos is no longer an All Black and therefore not featured in the calendar.  To add insult to injury, he has cut his hair and dyed it blonde AND moved to South Africa.  I'll still cheer for the ABs every time.  Coolest sports team, best uniforms. (I initially wrote "I'll root for the ABs every time" but then remembered that "root" means something different for Kiwis....hmmm Freudian slip?)

What else make this such a good day?  There was one homemade blueberry cinnamon muffin left over and I just enjoyed it with my coffee.  I don't have a lot of housework or errands to do.  There is one snoozing cat, Nelly, stretched out on the bay window seat and another doing inappropriate things to a jacket left on the settee. Xander, the latter, seems to have questionable "relationships" with a couple of my sweaters and my housecoat. And the cushions on our couch. I feel kind of embarassed for him, but I don't want to punish him and give him some kind of complex. He's already very high strung. 

Penelope, the former, is sauntering towards me and within seconds she'll be climbing over the computer keyboard and onto my chest.

 So, I'll sign off for now.  Enjoy the week!

It's been ages since I last posted.  It's funny; I feel a strange pressure to write something "worth reading", so I just don't write.  It's not that I don't have ideas for topics - those usually come to me during the work day and I've forgotten them minutes later - I just don't do it.  So, from now on, I'm just going to write whatever, things I think are cool, fun, amusing, interesting, etc.  At the very least I'll have some kind of snapshot of my life (and so will my 6 followers, who are mostly family members and what appears to be a golden retriever....well, it's actually my friend who uses the golden retriever's picture as her profile pic).

My history with cars

Lately I've been fixated on buying a car....a Fiat 500.  One of the cute new ones.    They're all the rage.  I love the old ones, too, from the 60s especially I think, but the new ones are easier to find in Canada.  The picture above is of an old Fiat 500....see how you can tuck them into the tightest spots?I've never owned my own car, as in picked it out myself, paid for it myself, etc.  I drove my parents' cars as a teen and into my twenties.  A 1966 Mustang black top.  Second-hand Mercedes sports car.  A diesel sedan that sounded like it was making ice.  A beat up 1968 Beatle Bug.  Pretty cool cars, overall; I was lucky.  My history with cars, though, is not so lucky.  I crashed the Mustang; I almost took the door of the sports car off pulling out of the garage (helps to close the door before backing up) and the dashboard of the Volkswagen caught fire one day.  It also rolled all the way down the hill into someone's yard another time.  When I met Bill, I attempted to drive his 84 Volvo station wagon.  Even though I'm of Scandinavian background, I'm not built like the Swede they had in mind when they designed that model.  Even with the seat all the way forward, my stubby little legs wouldn't reach far enough for me to press the clutch pedal down far enough.  Not comfortable.  Plus, I was so unused to driving a standard transmission that I would grip the gearshift handle so hard that the top popped off, disconnecting the overdrive.  It was an ordeal. There were tears (Bill's).  That thing was a tank.  Boxy, but safe.  So, for the life of the Volvo, I became one of those women who lets her husband drive all the time.  Eventually, Bill got a company car - a Dodge caravan minivan - and, since we don't have children, we decided we didn't need two family cars, so we shipped the old burgundy Volvo wagon by train out to Vancouver where it lived out its days happily with my brother and his family.  Two company cars later and we're cruising around town in a not so cool pseudo SUV -  cappuccino coloured....or as Bill likes to say, beige.  Our friends call it the Earth Destroyer 2000 - Earthy D. for short - but it isn't really a gas-gulping SUV. Still.  So, my idea is to get a Fiat 500, call it Dante and paint flames on it (inferno, get it?).  But I can't really justify buying a second car at the moment....so I've promised myself that if I finish my novel - still in outline stage - I can buy myself the car.

Freaky potato

It doesn't look like the Virgin Mary or Mother Theresa or anything, but man this is one weird purple potato.

The Hawks and Hummingbirds of Summer 2011

Our house backs onto a small forest....which backs onto the Airport Parkway. Although we live in the city, this strip of forest gives us at least a glimpse of wildlife. There are rabbits, mice, the occasional deer, groundhogs, squirrels, chipmunks, and birds, especially cardinals. The trees provide a buffer for the noise of the traffic. In summertime, with just enough imagination, the sounds of the traffic can almost sound like the waves crashing on the shore. It's not disruptive, actually. We haven't used our backyard much in past years, save for the occasional bbq. I find it too hot and get bothered by all the mosquitoes. So, this year we decided to get a gazebo structure, so we could spend more time outside. Bill's out there, now, cleaning his large format camera, while I sit here in the air-conditioned house. It's a little too hot out there today at 35 degrees Celsius. My plan is to get a pool, eventually, because I'm an overheater and that would help a lot in the summer. I should join Overheaters Anonymous, a support group for the thermoregulation challenged.

This year, the dominant natural feature of the back woods has been several hawks which have claimed the forest behind our house as their hunting ground. I'm in awe of these birds of prey and love to hear their screeching and to watch them swoop down and fly by. One of them spent a while investigating our new gazebo - and then christened it with hawk doody. We felt suitably honoured.  I've name this bird "Hawk-sley Workman" after a Canadian musician.

At the front of our house, we have a hummingbird feeder, for our viewing pleasure and to tantalize the felines in the house. They love to watch what I call the "bite-sized morsels" coming to the feeder and zooming off. Recently, there have been many butterflies, too, and dragonflies, and other large insects bumping into the bay window. Zander has dived headfirst into the window more than a couple of times. Penelope doesn't move a muscle, just chirps at anything that interests her and then lolls her head around and looks at whomever is nearby as if to say, "are you going to fetch me that or not?"

Kathmandu and Patan - Our April in Nepal

The idea of going to Kathmandu first entered my mind when my mom confirmed that she was going for a couple of weeks to teach a workshop at a teaching hospital there.  I felt a little protective of her, I guess; I didn't want her to be so far away.  What if something happened, what if she got sick (as is the norm in Nepal for foreigners)?    But more than that, it seemed like a great opportunity to share a unique and amazing experience with mom.  When I spoke to Bill about my idea, he was all for it, to my relief.   So, we did it.  We went to Nepal for three weeks in April and loved every minute of it, as did Mom.  She had rented an apartment in Patan, just across the river from Kathmandu, with three bedrooms, a spacious living room and kitchen, two bathrooms and a "didi"- a housekeeper - to tidy up, do dishes and laundry, and make food if we wished.  All this for $35 US per day.   After we had experienced the traffic, tourists and noise of Kathmandu, we were happy that we were "living" in Patan.  Tourists usually do day trips to Patan, as opposed to making it their home base.  As a result, it has not been taken over by tourism as much as, say,  the Thamel neighbourhood of Kat.   There are fewer touristy shops, fewer trekking outfits, fewer touts, and fewer hostels and restaurants, but just as much beautiful architecture and just as many intriguing hole-in the wall shops and hidden courtyards. 

Since we hadn't really been planning to go to Nepal, I admit I knew very little of it.  Kathmandu I pictured as a small mountain city filled with groovy hippies and weather trekkers and mountaineers.  Wrong.  Big, big city.  Let me try to describe it in a few sentence fragments.  Kathmandu:  densely populated, surrounded in the distance by mountains, of course, busy, choked with traffic.  Stray dogs barking and trotting around, and the odd cow ambling through the streets.  There is so much beauty and colour.  Women in bright saris, some with the slash of colour on their foreheads - the tikka or bindi.  Men wearing the skinny white pants, tunics and vests and the traditional Nepali caps.  Gorgeous wood carvings on doors, posts, and window frames.  Buckets of spices, food being cooked on the street, boxes of chicks for sale.  The endless blaring car horns.  Flowering trees spill into the streets and over the electrical wires.  And, the thing that I loved the most, the warm eyes and smiles of the friendly, wonderful people.

More about Nepal in the next post......

Lucky me - How world disasters make my little problems seem like luxuries



Family portrait - Marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands

Always good to start out with an amusing photo.  Sunday of a long weekend.  March 13th .  It's hard to avoid thinking about the work week ahead, but I do try my best.  It's another grey day, after a foot of snow, then rain for a couple of days.  I'm worried about the foundation of our house.  Our bay window cracked - for no reason - the other day.  First I blamed the cats, since the crack was on the inside pane.  I thought maybe they were being tormented by the limping gray cat from down the street who jumps up to steal glimpses of them.  We have little streaky paw prints on the outside of our windows from his "visits".  Maybe Penelope charged the window and the force of her hard head cracked it. The break in the glass did seem to follow roughly the shape of a little kitty head before continuing upwards.  Or maybe Zander took a running karate leap at it.  He can achieve a lot of air without much effort.  He boasts the advantage of a consistent weight of 7.5 pounds (I can eat as much kibble as I like and I don't gain an ounce!)   Now, I know that everyone thinks their kids/cats/dogs/ferrets are special, but even I had to admit that the cats breaking the window wasn't a likely scenario.  Foundation settling?  Unrelenting freezing and thawing?  Weight of the snow on the roof?  The earthquake last summer might have weakened it.  We do have a couple of cracks in the wall, too, so, maybe foundation work is in our future.  The idea of that stresses me out.   That is, until I think about the aftermath of the earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand and Japan.  Suddenly I feel very lucky to have this small problem....to have a house, even, and a roof over our heads.  Clean water.  I could go on and on.  This year is definitely about perspective for me.  

The abundance of my life, everything I have, seems slightly ridiculous, and I'm not even overly-spoiled or wealthy, by North American standards.  How many hair products or mini hotel shampoos and shower gels do I need, really?  For my dental care alone:  toothbrush, rubber tip instrument, floss, between-teeth mini-brushes, mouthwash, and nighttime appliance to mitigate teeth grinding (caused by what?  All the stress of my relatively cushy life?  Or the guilt?).  Why do my towels have to match?  Why do I feel I should replace them when they start looking a little tattered?  They still do their job.  I've got a whole linen cupboard full of placemats, tablecloths, bedding, and dishtowels.  Extra blankets and pillows, just in case.  Our culture brainwashes us into thinking we need everything and it all has to be like-new and coordinated.  And our lives need to be made as easy as possible.  God forbid I actually mince garlic without the help of my handy-dandy garlic-mincing gadget.  And, choice, oh we must have choice.  We aren't like those countries with only two breakfast cereals to choose from: Corn Flakes or Cheerios.  We have a WHOLE WALL of cereals to choose from at the grocery store.  It's so embarassing.  I was going to go shopping after writing this blog, but I'm re-thinking that.

Saturday March 19th - I got onto Facebook a few weeks ago.  I'm not yet sure if I regret it.  After the initial crazed thrill of finding old friends and catching up, I've settled into a more relaxed kind of relationship with the thing.

I've snooped around friends' friends lists and have been surprised and shocked - mostly in a good way - by some of the things I discovered.  One former friend from high school, who seemed years ago to be heading towards self-destruction, is still alive and, by the look of it, thriving.  From a stoned streetkid to a yoga buff.  I smiled when I saw her healthy face grinning at me from her profile picture.  Another friend just adopted a baby.  I chatted with the very first friend that I remember, from when I was about five years old.  I friended the "little boy" for whom I was a nanny for a year in the mid-80s.  I'm gladdened by the indications on his page that he has a job, he lives abroad, he has friends, he travels.  As a child he was a little neurotic and sad, but extremely intelligent and sweet.  His parents were in the midst of divorcing and he had a steady stream of nannies in his very early years.  I certainly didn't have any childcare experience or any insight; I was a self-centred twenty-year old and I left after a year, like all the other nannies.  But, it looks like he made it through.  He can partially blame any abandonment issues he has on me, though. 

Reconnecting with old friends forced me to examine my own path.  A friend from my year of studying in France asked me to describe a typical day in my life.  That threw me into an introspective panic.  Hey, no fair.  I just want to find out about you.  You can think what you will about me, based on my carefully-selected profile picture (must be flattering and make me look slimmer than I am), my "likes and dislikes" and even my friends.

So now I'm obsessed with describing my "typical" day.  It looms before me like a big snoozefest.  What DO I do every day?   I'm tempted to make my life sound as exciting/fabulous/glamorous as possible.  Maybe I should just describe an ideal day.  Nah.  If too many people do that, we will all feel inadequate.  But, wait, Facebook also encourages us to share the very, very, very mundane.  I used to make fun of the status updates on Facebook; they couldn't BE more boring, I'd say.  Who cares if  "Veronica is delinting her favourite sweater with her clothes shaver", if "Topher just salted the driveway", if "Bella is loving her new spatula", or if "Brittany is all about chunky heels this season"?  Well, it turns out that I kind of do care.  Sometimes seeing those updates is comforting.  Your people are out there, going about their days.  It's not the content of the update.  It's the fact that it's there.  I hope people care about my little life, too.

Shanon is going to have some cinnamon raisin toast and put a load of laundry on.  Ah, this is the life!!  

Grandpa Pete, the American hockey star

Growing up I didn't know much about my paternal grandfather, Pete.  I knew only that he was an American hockey player and died when my dad was just thirteen.  I was in my early thirties when I finally asked my great Aunt Audrey for more specifics about my grandparents and discovered that Pete wasn't originally American.  He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and then had moved to Canada or the States.  It's not clear whether he was ever Canadian, even though he lived in Calgary at one point.  My father didn't talk about his parents much; he lost them both when he was so young, I think for him it was far too painful. 

Thanks to the internet I've learned more about Pete.  I found his stats from his hockey career, for example.  He played semi-professional hockey in the American Hockey Association between 1925 and 1936, and in the Praire Hockey League, for the Calgary Tigers, in 1926-1927.  He was described as "a player from Scotland", who stood 5'8" and weighed 154 lbs.

Pete settled for a time in Calgary where he met his wife-to-be, Margaret.  From the list of teams he played for, I can piece together where he was between 1926 and 1936: Minneapolis, Detroit, Calgary, Kansas City, Oklahoma and St. Louis.  He and "Peg" had three children and from the photos, the family seemed happy and quite well-off.   After his hockey career ended, he worked for the Falstaff Brewing Company, in what capacity, I don't know.  Sales, I imagine.  Sadly, he died at the age of 42 from cancer of the sigmoid colon, in Kansas City, in 1947.  Apparently, Pete was a bit of a hockey celebrity in Kansas City and when he died, his obituary focussed on his exploits as a "puckster" (I love that term!).  His wife took the three children to live with her mother in Victoria, BC, but she died a year or so later of rheumatic heart disease, leaving their three young children orphaned.

Although my dad spoke little of his parents, he did talk about his early years in the States and was definitely nostalgic for the towns and places of his childhood, the soda fountains, the baseball games, Lake Okoboji,  Hydrox cookies (more about them later), and, yes, Spam.  (In later years, he participated in the Spam carving contest in Seattle.  He made a "spam pan"- a sam pan boat made of spam, of course.)   He had a baseball signed by Stan Musial from a World Series in the 30s.  He'd get annoyed with us kids if we "skipped" the American history questions in Trivial Pursuit.  And, of course, he was a hockey fan, especially of the American teams like Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.  He got me to write fan letters to the players, when I was 7 or 8, probably knowing that if I wrote a cute letter, I'd likely get the autographed photos!  I wrote to Bobby Orr and Jim and Joe Watson of the Philadelphia Flyers and sure enough, I did receive photos and autographs, but I'm dismayed to say that I didn't keep them.   Dad was a good athlete himself, but I don't remember him playing ice hockey.  He went to medical school, got married and started a family when he was very young.  My brother Todd and I are from his second marriage, in his thirties.  We remember him playing in a floor hockey league.  This wasn't your usual old-timer league; this was full contact hockey.  Todd said that dad separated his shoulder during a particularly rough match.  As for my generation of the Mitchells, we did our bit (a very little bit) for hockey.  Todd played ice hockey and I played field hockey.  Todd moved on to tennis in high school and my figure skating practices didn't leave me time to try out for field hockey when I got there.  I really wish I had though.  I was more naturally talented at hockey than at figure skating.  My sturdy family genes built me for sports requiring hand-eye coordination, not those needing flexibility!!  I mean, my husband can point his toes more than I can.  Enough said.


Shanon as Uncle Sam -an homage to my grandpa?

And as far as Hydrox cookies go, they were the original chocolate sandwich cookies, before Oreos.  And they had...and have...quite a following.  Dad loved them and bought several packages every time we went to the States.  They stopped making them a while back, but from my recent Google searches it looks like they could make a comeback.  Check out this Wall Street Journal article, if you want to hear what gave Hydrox such a loyal following.  http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120069573721101481.html

I even made up a joke about Hydrox cookies once:  Question: What do you call a double-stuffed Hydrox cookie?  Answer:  A dihydroxide.   That one's for you, Dad.

Notes to self going into 2011

I've gathered up the scraps of paper from my "to do" folder.  On the right side of this folder are all the "pending" things:  bills not yet paid, prescriptions to claim, coupons, and gift certificates; on the left side, I find my "life list" and a bunch of notes to myself....ideas, thoughts and reminders written down.  Now that it's the new year, I figure it's a good time to sift through them and see where my head was at last year.

I look over the first one; it contains the usual:  all the things I'm going to do to get in better shape and how I'll eat better - more salads, fewer carbs.  Didn't do it.  Then there's a note titled "things that don't make sense".  First one:   the expression "Expect the unexpected" - if you expect it, then it's no longer unexpected, so this is an impossibility.  Next is a comment about the product "Oil-free" Oil of Olay.  What??   I find a list of projects that includes making a photo album for a friend in the big city who moved into a bedbug-infested apartment and had to throw away lots of photos.  Another project idea states simply "book".  That's a big vague.  Verb or noun?  Read? Write? I'm thinking it was write.  I guess I should have completed my first novel by now.  Didn't do it.  Then there's a scrawled reminder never to use the expression "senior moment" or "Alzheimer's moment" when joking about being forgetful, out of respect for those who actually are forgetful, in a pathological way.  It is ironic, though, that I should write myself a reminder for that.  Then there's a list of websites where you can buy surf-inspired decor, a note about a screenwriting certificate program at NYU and, written on another torn up page, a movie idea::  Gidget-inspired movie, but with the lead character being a middle-aged woman.  Starring me, I imagine, and Joe, my hunky fireman/surf instructor in Hawaii.  A girl can dream.  Lastly, I've also written a short paragraph about my frustration with people who decide they don't want something in their grocery cart and, instead of taking it back to where it belongs, they ditch it on any random shelf....even if it's perishable.  So a carton of milk is ruined; big deal, right?  Wrong.  The damage caused by this laziness and inconsideration might not end there.  Suppose 10 hours later some young, dim grocery clerk finds the milk sitting next to the Pop Tarts and puts it back in the fridge.  Then, some unfortunate consumer buys it and soon spends 48 hours vomiting from food poisoning and misses his daughter's wedding.  All because Jane or Joe Grocery Shopper couldn't be bothered.

The last note I find states simply: no time to waste.

Note to self:  don't keep those notes to self; they're quite disturbing when viewed as a whole.