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.
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