OK, Nic pointed out that the “12 Days of Christmas” apparently begin on Christmas Day, which means the last one of these 12 days is today.
Still, I feel this does not explain the preponderance of so many Christmas decorations that are still up. Some yards are still chock-full of inflated Santas, and festooned with sparkly lights. The lobby of our building still has the Christmas tree up. It’s just weird. It’s all going to clash with Valentine’s Day marketing soon. Not that people decorate their yards for Valentine’s Day. At least not yet.
Anyway, ho ho ho from New Westminster!
A snowman very happy to still be around on January 5th
Yes, I’m a few days early, but unless there is a radical shift in the weather in the next few days, we will not only not see snow for Christmas, it will continue to be unusually mild, with most days averaging 10-11C, where the norm is 5-6C.
As I look out my office window, I can see green grass and, well, weeds, but everything is pleasantly green. I don’t need to wear five layers to go outside. I might get wet, depending on the particular time and day. It’s nice.
And yes, could this be climate change? Is this mild weather secretly bad and a dark omen of a crazy weather future? Maybe, but I think this time it’s more due to the effects from El Niño, which came in this year and didn’t really affect summer much (last year’s summer was a lot hotter and humid), but does seem to be taking the chill off winter. And I’m not going to object to that.
Tomorrow it is officially the first day of winter. If it is snowing, I will update this post to add a nelsonlaughing.gif aimed at myself.
Here I am on my stylin’ wheels in 1966. As a kid, Christmas was always good times. Presents, lots of food, yummy snacks, no school (okay, that part started around 1970) and sometimes snow to play in instead of rain. And since I never had to shovel it or drive in it, snow was always awesome. Snowmen, snow forts, snow whatever, it didn’t matter!
Christmas 2009 has come and gone and unlike last year’s silly snowpocalypse, there was nary a flake to be seen fluttering across the sky this time. In fact, the past few days have been dry, cool and sunny, save for today when the fog rolled in.
The trip back on the ferry in the early afternoon was a bit unusual in a few ways. First was the fog. It’s pretty rare for me to be traveling to or from the island in the fog so it was kind of eerie to have the ship glide into a huge bank and be lost from the world, the ship’s horn blasting every minute or so to warn people in smaller boats who thought it was a great day to go blundering about the strait in zero visibility. Periodically we’d come out of the fog and into sunshine and it was then that the other unusual part of the trip was most noticeable — the water was almost completely calm. I mean, there was barely a ripple in the surface. It was like gliding through a pond. A really really big pond, but still. Rather weird but soothing at the same time.
Christmas dinner this year was especially daring as I broke tradition and ate a Brussels sprout. It was okay. I suppose I can cross it off the list of foods I hated as a kid (and I hated a lot of them — I was a fussy eater). Next year I’ll try a sprig of asparagus if I’m feeling really crazy.
While staying at mom’s I was compelled to take a picture of a painting that hangs in the guest bedroom.
At first blush it appears to be a rather benign pastoral scene painted by someone who is obviously not a professional artist. Let’s call them earnest.
But on closer examination I discovered a Lovecraftian horror:
This is not a woman and her young daughter out for an innocent stroll picking flowers and enjoying the sun. No, these faceless horrors are merely in disguise, waiting for the moment to turn their mishapen fleshy hooks onto the unaware and claim their souls as their own, sending them into the spiral of madness that comes from staring into a face that is an evil blank canvas of poorly-shaded skin.
Also, the parasol looks like it’s been turned inside out. My theory is that it’s actually the leathery skin of some unnamed thing that went rogue and was made into this particular object to serve as an example to others who would dare challenge the ways of the Great Old Ones.
