Closing down for Christmas

It’s 5:10pm and dark on Sunday, December 18, 3 days before the longest night of the year.  By the 22^nd, the first day of winter, we will already be heading towards summer, and I will be in Victoria, BC, I hope.  I’m going to drive there on Tuesday, weather permitting, to spend the holidays with mom and dad and Barbara and Terry. 

My Christmas party was a success.  Most of the people I had invited came.  They were in the mood to see each other after not really getting together much in the last 6 weeks.  The few who were not members of the Vernon Outdoors Club mixed in well.  They all moved around and talked and laughed and ate and drank and stayed quite a long time.  It wasn’t exactly a cotillion, but I have made a puny entry into Vernon society and am satisfied with that for the moment.  Maybe next year I will break into the higher strata of Predator Ridge and The Rise.  Only people from Vernon will appreciate the heights to which I aspire.  Enough.  I overestimated how much eggnog people would drink, probably because my own capacity for drinking it knows no bounds.  I will take what is left to my parents who share my enthusiasm for it.  Dad has been losing weight lately and having to drink supplements; I’m sure he’ll prefer a bit of brandy and eggnog. 

I think my back spasms were the result of my doing too much hot yoga in the sauna and steam room at the Vernon Rec. Centre.  I haven’t been there in the last 3 weeks and all is well now.  This weekend of training for the volunteer program to work with disabled skiers was a qualified success.  I learned a lot, including about my own disabilities.  I have no upper body strength, so I will not be able to work with a sit-ski.  But there are many other things I will be able to do.  The program is well established at Silver Star, and the people involved, although they are all volunteers, run it in a professional way.  They are knowledgeable, skilled, and very humane.  They have a lot of equipment that will take time to learn about, but this weekend was an introduction.  I will not be working alone for the first year.  The snow conditions were good and the weather was warm, ideal for slow practicing on easy hills.

I had a very good class on Friday with Kiran at Immigrant Services.  Unfortunately, Misoon’s husband is still not well, but at least they know what is wrong.  He has angina and will have to live accordingly.  I went to visit her at their carwash on Friday.  She was nodding off in the office; she has to cover all the shifts at the moment.  Very different from the work she was educated for, teaching.  Such is the life of the immigrant. She thinks we will be able to get back to our weekly meetings at Tim Horton’s in the New Year.  I hope so because I think they were good for both of us.  I’m going to happily slack off for the holidays.

Merry Christmas to all

It’s 7:30p.m. on Sunday, December 11, 2011, and I’ve just driven home from Kelowna.  I visited and exchanged gifts with Jules and Carol and then with Peggy and Bert.  I ended up having wine and dinner with the latter. The Christmas entertainment has begun.

 I put up some lights and decorations last weekend and then realized that nobody would see them but me.  So I decided to have a small party.  Without thinking about it much, I took a picture of the front door, downloaded it and turned it into an enigmatically worded e-invitation to drinks and dessert on Thursday, Dec. 15.  Had I thought a bit about it, I would have realized that I was asking for confusion.   It was not clear whether I was inviting the spouses, or not.  Some took it for granted that I wasn’t and others that I was.  I then had to phone the former and make sure they realized that their significant others were welcome.  Of course this ballooned the party to potentially 30 and necessitated my going through old recipes and planning to make more desserts, which I haven’t done yet.  Then I realized that another element of the evening that I hadn’t sufficiently thought through was my plan to have make-your-own eggnog.  I would place a bottle of brandy and a bottle of rum beside a punch bowl of nog.  But I don’t have a punch bowl any more.  It’s one of the many things we got rid of before moving to the condo in Ottawa.  That kept me awake for a while on Monday night, but Mo solved the problem the next day by saying I could use her mom’s, which she had been given and used rarely.  So the party’s on, and at the moment I am in turns looking forward to it and to it’s being over with.

Saturday was a great day of training for SSASS, the adaptive ski program that I have volunteered to help with.  When I awoke at 6:30 and looked outside at the grey morning, I wanted to roll over and go back to sleep.  I had had a back spasm, the first of my life, in the middle of the night and was thinking of using that as an excuse.  But I was supposed to drive Mo and decided I couldn’t let her down. So I packed the Rough Guide to Korea in my backpack and was prepared to spend the day at Silver Star reading it if my back hurt.  But it didn’t, and the day turned out to be sunny and warm.  Our instructor was very enthusiastic, and he knew how to teach skiing.  I learned a lot and am now much more eager to face the two days of instruction next weekend.  I was afraid I might not ski well enough to be able to do it, but not any more.

I met the woman I will be teaching at Immigrant Services.  She’s from India, in her early fifties and speaks English quite well, but she wants practice with pronunciation, reading and writing.  It looks promising.  

The front door picture for the invitation to the party

The living room decorated for Christmas

The fireplace 

Christmas preparations

This is Sunday, December 4, 2011.  I awoke to hear a joke on the CBC radio that made me laugh and get out of bed in a good mood.  It was about a man who gave up trying to unsnarl the Christmas lights.  He just hung the gnarled ball above the front door and told his wife the lights were up.  As I laughed, I remembered Jim’s ill-humored efforts at Christmas decorating.  Men, I thought.  But by 4:00pm, I was laughing ‘on the other side of my face’.  That’s an expression my grade five teacher used to use. “ You’ll soon be laughing on the other side of your face”, she’d say in a threatening tone if you had found something funny that didn’t amuse her. It conjured up an image of contorted features that wasn’t pleasant, but I had never understood what it meant until this afternoon.  I was dedicating the day to Christmas preparations and got to the lights around 3:30.  Jim and I had bought them to decorate the condo on our last Christmas.  We put them up together and liked the bright white stars streaming down the west windows so much that we left them there. I finally took them down in March and just shoved them into plastic bags.  I ended up bring them to Vernon.  When I took them out of the bags today, I knew I was in trouble.  The lights hang in many strings from a couple of central wires, and each light is surrounded by a pointy little plastic star, brilliant when lit against the night sky, but challenging to unravel after they’ve been two years bunched in bags.  By  4:00pm, I was much more sympathetic with the man in the joke and Jim than I had been at 8:00am.  The lights are up, lit and sparkling in the living room window.  And I am sobered again, as I have been so often in the last 22 months by having to do something that I have never done before.  Hanging Christmas lights is no laughing matter, unless you’re watching someone else do it while you drink a rum and eggnog.

Skiing in Vernon is great.  I’ve been cross country many times and downhill once, and I still can’t get over leaving home with no snow and ending up less than half an hour later in mid winter conditions.  The only draw back is the fact that the car gets filthy every time you go up.  They use less salt on the roads here than in the east, but much more very fine sand.  However, the people I ski with are often members of the Vernon Outdoors Club, and they continue the practice of car pooling and paying the driver.  So you can go to a car wash and spray the dirt off the car whenever you drive.  Learning Korean is still the hardest thing I’ve done in years, but I like Misoon, and we enjoy our lessons at Tim Horton’s.   I’m going to meet my student at immigrant services this Friday.

 Living alone so far from friends and family is hard at times, but doing new things is both sobering and a laugh, and learning to help and be helped by strangers is a lesson I think I needed.       

The Black Prince cabin at Sovereign Lake Nordic Centre

The end of the fall centre piece.  I'll happily keep the orchid Bill and Paula gave me and the card from Joanna in Dubai, but eating all the squash is going to be difficult.