What on Earth?

Some times it really is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'm trying my hand at a post that's told mostly in pictures.  For a writer, that's a challenge.  I want to explain everything you're about to see but I do believe most of the pictures are self-explanatory, so I'll restrain myself.  Can you guess what's about to happen in my kitchen in this shot?

It looks like we're about to begin a serious construction project, doesn't it?  Well, sort of ... but not quite.  Here's your next clue as to what we might be "building."

Okay, so now you know it involves flour ...

Ah, the plot thickens ... as does the sweet bread dough!  Taking a leaf out of my late father-in-law's book, the "squire" and I have developed our own method for baking bread on a large scale here on our country mile.  The custom-welded beater attached to the industrial-sized drill is the same set-up that my father-in-law created for his wife to do the huge regular weekly baking that she undertook for many years when the squire was growing up.  We inherited the whole apparatus when, after my father-in-law's passing many years ago, my mother-in-law moved to an apartment.  It's great for a woman  like me, whose physical limitations make much standing and rigorous kneading of large quantities of dough difficult.

With his help, the whole process is much quicker and easier.  The way to get your husband to help with the Christmas baking?  Make it about power tools!

Starting to look more like bread dough...

Then a little rising time...

Ah, that's exactly what I need.  Now comes the fun part...

It's actually very easy, if you know how to braid... and who doesn't?

And then just shape each braid into a circle, pinch the ends underneath, and voila!  With very little effort, I've created the first Christmas wreath bread.

After they rose once more, I brushed the breads with egg-white and decorated some of them with sliced almonds.

Ta Da!  A fair amount of time and very little effort produced enough wreath breads for my family in the holiday season and for gift-giving.

And what, you may wonder, were Coco and Baxter up to while we were busy baking?  Well, the sun room was so cozy and warm and there were those comfy couches...

Coco looks like she's plotting a big shock for unsuspecting Baxter, doesn't she, but they were actually very well-behaved all afternoon.  And, yes, of course, they do get a little nibble of the bread occasionally.

Picture Day

It's been a lovely, lazy sort of a day.  I awoke with the intention to do all sorts of things: clean my house, water my plants, sort some of the piles in my office, write some posts, start some articles for the paper, and cook a soup.  The morning was too slow and lazy in the woodstove-warmed sun room, so I gave up on the office sorting.  I made blueberry pancakes for brunch, talked to one of my sisters for at least half an hour, and then settled in my favourite recliner to "rest my legs for just a few minutes."

Of course, any time I choose to settle in the living room, I light Dad's candles.  Right now, because it's Christmas, he has two.  The angels will be packed away in the New Year but the other candle in the glass holder is his permanently.  Kate brought one of her favourite angels up from her room to share the Christmas moments because that little angel, with its slogan of "Forever in Our Hearts," was a gift for her college graduation from Mom and Dad.

 While I rested I started looking through the Facebook albums of close family.  I don't "do" Facebook but family members often forget that and I miss out on some of their activities because the general assumption is that anyone who's interested will keep up with them on Facebook.  So, I really enjoyed my catching up time in my husband's account with the IPad and, before I knew it, it was already 4:00 pm.  Then I scrambled to deal with a huge pot of turkey stock and did manage to create a delicious soup for our supper and freeze enough stock to make two more soups later.

And ... that's all I did so far today.  I love being on holiday and I love knowing that I have eight more days of this, as I booked the whole first week of January off work.  And my reward for that little bit of work I accomplished today?  I get to write, starting with this post and then anything I want.  

I'll also probably spend some time reminiscing as I look over more pictures, some my cousin in Germany sent me a few days after Christmas.  He was kind enough to share some photos he found on his computer of Dad in younger years visiting family Germany, probably around the time Dad's mother passed away in the late 1960s.  Receiving them felt like an extra, unexpected Christmas present.

Here's a montage of Dad with his sister and brother-in-law, two of Dad with his sister, and one of Dad's sister and mother, my Oma Sauerborn.  I met my grandmother only a few times when I was about three years old, so I treasure this picture, one I had not seen before, as I have no clear memories of her.

All in all, it's been a lazy and reflective day, a day on which I hardly cried at all, and I'm glad to have shared some of its nicest moments with you.

Merry Christmas to You and Yours

Christmas Blessings to You and Yours for 2012,

Many of you have sent  lovely Christmas cards and beautiful family photos this year.  I treasure them all.  Please accept this post with my wishes for a Merry Christmas and some updates on our family life as my greeting card to all my readers.

This year on our country mile has been good at times with happy and exciting events and very hard at other times.  As many of you already know, the hardest thing our family has had to accept this year was the very recent death of my beloved father.  He was only two and a half weeks away from his ninety-first birthday when he passed away, with all of us at his side, in the very early hours of November 14.  He was a real gentleman and a gentle man and we all miss him dearly.  I’m trying to remind myself frequently that I was very blessed to have had him in my life this long but I do still get overwhelmed by grief often.  Our family is different for having had him and now we are different for having lost him.

We are also very aware of the circle of life and how it works as were blessed on the same day, a few hours after Dad left us, with the safe arrival of my sister Monika’s first grandchild, the seventh great-grandchild for Dad and Mom.  As we said when we heard the news of little Cooper’s arrival, one soul struggled to leave this world for heaven while another new soul came from heaven and laboured to enter the world.  I like to fancy they passed each other somewhere on the way.

Off and on this year we have lost more trees on our property as many were damaged in the windstorm of two years ago and were easily felled now by high winds or, as happened in early October, unseasonal heavy, wet snow.  As our property changes we are resigning ourselves to less privacy and yet enjoying more wildlife exploring our yard and entertaining us.  The beagles, Baxter and Coco, are often frantic at the audacity of these wild intruders and make their objections loudly heard.  Thank goodness for understanding neighbours!

My husband and I have done some travelling this year and really enjoyed a lot of new experiences. Our favourite was a road trip to Texas in February.  We spent a day in San Antonio and then a few days in the Rockport area.  Rockport is right on the Gulf coast, near Corpus Christi, where we also spent a day seeing a few of the sights.  There’s nothing quite like sand, sun, and ocean in the middle of February, an experience we found so delightful we are planning to repeat it this winter, only a little longer this time.  If all works out as we hope, we’ll meet one of my sisters and her husband there, which is going to add a whole new dimension of pleasure to this trip.

When the travel bug bites, it itches for a long time and so in September we decided to scratch that itch again with a trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Niagara Falls.  I had never seen the Falls before and was particularly impressed with the Canadian side.  Even though I had injured my left leg in a nasty fall about six weeks earlier and was definitely still feeling the effects, I managed a lot of walking and all the stairs it takes to get anywhere near the Falls.  They were definitely worth the effort.  I had lost a fair bit of weight in the months previous to our trip and was I ever glad I did. All that walking helped keep it off, even when I sampled a few too many varieties of the delicious fudge available on Mackinac Island in Michigan!  You can read all about our trip and some of the events of our summer in other posts.

Writing this blog for you is something I still really enjoy, along with my two columns for our local newspaper.  Just recently I also wrote an article for a newsmagazine called ChristianWeek (you can find them on the Internet) and have been asked to do another for their February, 2013 edition.  I’m still always looking for new writing markets and opportunities and still working on that novel.  My counselling practice continues to be very busy and I’m working four long days each week, even though I had hoped that would change this year, and thus not finding as much time for writing as I would like.  We had a second counsellor in the branch office where I work for my agency for a time but she left us after only a few months when her husband was transferred to another province.  So, it’s back to just me, at least for the foreseeable future.

My husband, whom I affectionately call "the squire," continues to enjoy retirement and loves searching the Internet for travel destinations and planning our trips.  He also makes sure to check in on his mother in Winnipeg more often, as she has had some health issues recently.  When he’s home the dogs keep him busy and also keep him company when I’m at work or involved in church activities. We lost our beautiful German Shepherd, Lady, to old age at the beginning of January but two energetic beagles are a handful even without a German Shepherd to divert them with play.  

They don't look too active here, but you should see them just before their supper time!

 In the spring Garry built me a third raised garden, which I really enjoyed.  Our summer was quite hot and dry so some vegetables weren’t quite as nice as I had hoped but others, like the beans, were excellent.

With any kind of luck, my Mom, my mother-in-law, all our children, and their families will be with us for Christmas Day this year.  I’m looking forward to having 14 people at the table and I have an appropriately large turkey waiting in the freezer!  Gifts are purchased; wrapping is nearly done; the house and tree are decorated; and the baking is … well, let’s just call it a work in progress.  But it will be done; it always is.  I remind myself that Christmas is not just about food, although there’s a lot to be said for the smell of roasting turkey… and the taste of cheesecake.

Right now, thanks to days of fog and hoar frost followed by colder days that brought lots of fluffy snow, we live in a Christmas card.  The trees are coated with white lace crochet work and topped off with snow-sugar icing.  Every branch, twig, and pine needle has become an intricately beautiful work of art.

This picture and the one at the top are taken in colour!

All in all, it’s been a memorable year for our family; life has been very hard at times and yet very good at other times. The hardest times make a person appreciate the support and prayers of family and friends and so, as we count our blessings and grieve our losses, we’re still grateful that we can count you among our dearest friends. In closing, I wish you and yours a very blessed and merry Christmas season and offer best wishes also for a happy and healthy New Year.

A Blue and White Day

I'm feeling a little blue today.  Ordinarily a day like today would have been high on my list of favourite days.  Lots of good things have happened today, but I'm blue anyway.

It’s snowing outside, has been all day.  My world here at the end of my country mile has morphed into a snow globe, complete with huge swirling snowflakes, frost on the windowpanes, and doggie footprints in the new fallen snow. There’s a wind; it’s too raw and icy cold to go out.  I’m enjoying it all from inside my cozy house.  Everyone is safe at home.  And it’s the weekend … 

 

I’ve spent my day being good.  Chores are done; we had an excellent supper (if I do say so myself); I’ve caught up with essential emails; and I did some research for my next series of newspaper articles.  I’ve even begun a little Christmas baking, a lovely thing to do on a snow-globe kind of a day.  I think now I deserve to take the evening off and enjoy some pleasure reading.  As a treat before bedtime, I might start the next chapter of the novel I’m working on – but only as much as I feel like writing – absolutely no pressure tonight.

A few years ago, before Alzheimer Disease hid the best of my father from us, I’d have called home and talked to Mom and Dad, likely ending up in a religious or philosophical discussion with Dad for a half hour or so.  I miss that so much, miss him being there, even if I couldn’t talk with him like we used to.  And hence the blues.  

 But now I’m still going to call my Mom, see how the weather is treating her there, and enjoy a bit of visiting time with her.  Then it’s more “me” time.  And, hopefully soon I'll be more able to say what I used to say, "Don’t you just love snowy weather and weekends?"