The snow ploughs are out in force again tonight (as in one of our pictures from last winter), but we're carrying on regardless, as my father would have said.
On Sunday, we managed to fly to Lachute for lunch, although our friends didn't, the other three planes being grounded due to frozen mechanisms or unwarmed engine oil. Chris and I floated through the sky at a lower altitude than usual, watching the establishment of ice-fishing "villages" all the way along the Ottawa River between here and Hawkesbury. We circled over one to watch a fishing hut being dragged into place across the frozen bay.
I was given a life-changing piece of equipment for Christmas—a slow cooker—so that when we return from an outing we're now greeted by the aroma of a ready-made supper, and all we have to do, before tucking in, is set the table.
Chris went back to Nortel on Monday and I set to work tidying up our messy house and baking Welsh cakes and flapjacks in preparation for the nine Spanish-speaking ladies who came here for coffee and conversation yesterday. We talked about what we'd been doing over the holidays and Beryl made me feel muy envidiosa by showing us her photos and describing her sun-drenched week on the Riviera Maya in Mexico.
Never mind. I've also started reading a book about the Australian outback, another excessively sunny place. This is a Christmas present from George, Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. What it's teaching me about the Aboriginals is quite a revelation. It seems to show that our society underestimates these people. After leaving Jenny at the ski-slopes, by the way, on New Year's Eve, Chris and I were walking down a quiet side street into the village of Wakefield when a couple of Canadian aboriginals came along in the other direction, looking a bit drunk. One of the men came right up to us. Chris looked alarmed in case we were about to be accosted, but I smiled at the native man and wished him a Happy New Year. He beamed all over his face, held my hand for a moment and then went on his way with the other fellow, apparently satisfied with the encounter. There was a spontaneity about this incident which I keep remembering. My behaviour was right for once. What happened to my usual wariness?
Another absorbing book I'm reading is the biography of Anton Chekhov that my mother left here after her last visit. Chekhov and Chatwin—now there's a nice juxtaposition!
Today I have trudged through the snow to the bank, the supermarket and Shafali's new coffee shop and have sat down to prepare some teaching notes for my next few German sessions with the Konversationsgruppe, then this afternoon I have been working on the first five pages of the Flying Club's Newsletter, of which I'm now the "managing editor" (as Joe Scoles called himself when he had the job). I have a new tool on the computer called Pages which allows me to cheat by using templates. This evening I slithered and stumbled into town through the storm again (better than driving: Chris did an involuntary 360° turn while trying to drive home from work this afternoon) in order to play the piano at Jack's flat for my husband's singing lesson. Chris sang Where e'er you walk (Handel), O Isis und Osiris (from Mozart's Zauberflöte) and songs 1 and 3 from Schubert's Winterreise.
While I have been writing the above, Chris has been updating his own blog with a post about "Anaximander’s opposites".
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