Taking it slow

Life in lockdown is not so different from normal life for me. I don't have small children out of school to worry about and I can work from home with no great difficulty. With Mike and Child2 here with me, I don't feel particularly isolated, and I'm still in regular contact with my father and my aunt in England. We have plenty of space for a long walk with the dog (although he's getting on a bit and not as keen on a long walk as he once would have been...). I know we are luckier than a lot of people who are cooped up with less ability to get out in the fresh air.

What has changed is the pace of things. Not that my life Before was exactly a whirlwind of activity, but now I am not rushing to get out of the house before 7.30 to see my mother-in-law in her nursing home before going off to work, things feel much more leisurely. The library where I normally work was closed to staff from 23 March and I went in on the 24th to finish some jobs and pick up a few things (including the office orchid!). Working from home involves connecting to my desktop remotely and this can be a frustrating experience: there's a bit of a lag across the network and it feels like I am working in slow motion most of the time.

I think my brain is on a go-slow anyway, with a low-level background level of panic which actually reminds me of my state of mind back in May 2007, just before we left England for Canada. It's quite hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time: reading fiction seems beyond my capabilities at present, for example, and my sleep is disturbed. I feel unproductive as a result, but I am not going to beat myself up about that: if we can't make exceptions for ourselves in exceptional times, then when can we?

Outside of work, I'm focusing on watching the garden come back to life and getting comfort from the usual cycles of plants and wild birds. Humans might be making a mess of things, but Mother Nature is still doing her thing. Hope you are safe and well wherever you are reading this.

Relentless winter

I suspect that the first week in January is probably too early to be getting fed up of winter weather. We haven't had a full thaw since before Christmas, so the layer of ice that fell in the pre-Christmas ice storm is still there, and every so often the weather warms up enough to melt the snow on top of it, but never enough to melt that underlying layer of ice. Which makes walking outside tricky.

The children have not gone back to school yet as the last two days have been extremely cold and windy. Today we've had snow all day with 30mph/50km/h winds, visibility has been pretty low at times. You can see from the trees that the wind has pasted the west-facing trunks with snow.

Temperatures at the end of last week were around -25°C/-13°F. It's a bit warmer this week, but with the wind, it doesn't really feel it! We've been using the kids' toboggans (and the kids!) to bring wood for the fires down from the barns.

We don't rely on the fires now in the way we did in our first winter here, as the geothermal heating copes pretty well in averagely cold temperatures, but warmly glowing logs are a very welcome sight once the temperature dips below about -15°C/5°F!

Post-storm ruminations

Our power was restored at some point before midnight last night - a total of over 50 hours without mains electricity. We coped fairly well, although there are some things we might have done differently if we'd realised we were going to be without power for quite that long.

We've got a bank of batteries hooked up to the solar panels, so power cuts aren't usually a big deal for us. When the power goes down, there's a short pause, then system switches automatically over to the batteries and our lights come back on. On Saturday and Sunday we still had running water, thanks to that. We turned the geothermal heating off, but initially we still had the hot water heater running, which (in hindsight) we should probably have turned off sooner.

By Sunday evening we were running low on the backup power and there had been no sunshine to top up the batteries (there wasn't any on Monday, either - and a light dusting of snow came down and covered the panels, which wasn't going to help). We ran out of power completely at midnight on Sunday. The woodstoves did a good job of keeping the house warm, but I was worried about the water/sanitation side of things, as we need power to run the water pump. The usual advice is to fill the bath with water before the power goes out, but we hadn't done that and I wished we had - it would have been useful to have that water for flushing toilets. We drained the water that was left in the system into jugs and had plenty for drinking.

The fridge and freezers were without power for 24 hours and when I checked the fridge temperature after the power came back on it was only two degrees above the 'safe' zone on the fridge thermometer. We didn't open the freezers at all, so they should be fine after that period.

I was able to make hot food and drinks with the kitchen woodstove - we had omelettes, soup, quesadillas and a risotto during the outage. I'm really looking forward to being able to use my electric oven again today, though!

During Monday there were signs that people were working to get the power back on - at seven different times the fridge and freezer briefly came to life, raising our hopes, before subsiding back into silence. You realise how dependent you are on electricity when something like this happens. I spent my time reading to entertain myself, but the children both struggled without access to electronic devices (and through them, their social networks) - and we played a lot of card games. When the power came back on, Child#2 promised me that he'd never complain of boredom again.

The living room looked really cosy by candlelight, but I would have enjoyed it more if there hadn't been that nagging worry about when power would be restored and how we would cope for another day without it.

I'm very grateful to the power crews who have been working so hard to get everyone reconnected: I have a feeling that Christmas 2013 will be one to remember!

Flat as a...tortilla

I do try to resist getting new kitchen gadgets, but we eat a lot of shop-bought tortilla wraps and I thought it might be better to make them myself. Not least because the ones from the stores contain a long list of 14 ingredients, including carrageenan which is under suspicion of being a carcinogen (although the name suggests to me that it is in fact a species of leprechaun (which I also would be reluctant to eat)).

Therefore my birthday request this year was for a tortilla press, because, enthusiastic though I am, I can't face the effort of rolling tortillas out by hand. As today is pancake day, it seemed like a good opportunity to try it out.

It is a very simple low-tech device, made of extremely heavy cast iron. You make the dough (2 cups of flour (half wholewheat, half white), ¼ cup vegetable oil, pinch of salt (I forgot to add that, actually) and enough warm water to bind everything together - I did all this in the food processor as though I were making pastry), let it rest for half an hour, then it's time to play.

You have to encase the dough with plastic to stop it from sticking to the press. I cut a freezer bag open down the two sides and folded it over the lump of dough. Two cups of flour makes about 12 tortillas this size (6 inches in diameter).

Then you shut the top down, press down with the lever, et voilà!

I cooked them in a non-stick frying pan at a fairly high heat for about a minute each side.

I had a couple for lunch as quesadillas, with cheese and slices of pickled pepper inside.

But the true test was in the evening, when I gave the children the same thing for their tea. "You have to make these again!" was Child1's comment, while Child2, who invariably won't eat the cheeseless 'crusts' of quesadillas made with shop-bought tortillas, said "I would eat these without cheese". The dog, who usually gets to gobble down Child2's leftovers, was the only one destined for disappointment.

Not bad for a foodstuff made with three ingredients! I'd love to try making them with proper corn masa harina - but first I'll have to find a supplier...

Fried wontons

I'm not sure what it is about early November and fiddly Chinese food, but I decided to make wontons again this weekend, just as I did on the same weekend in 2010. Last time I steamed them, but as it wasn't a fasting day today (and as our new way of eating has been going so well), I decided to fry them this time.

The filling was a finely-chopped mixture of some of our winter vegetables: red and white cabbage, a carrot, red onion and two cloves of garlic, with a few mushrooms and some fresh ginger, salt and pepper. I put them all through the food processor which was very quick to do and created a fairly uniform dark purple paste.

A teaspoon of that mixture was put into the centre of each wonton wrapper, then the wrapper is moistened with water and folded in half over the filling:

and the two 'wings' of the hypotenuse are curved inwards to make a sort of dinner-napkin shape:

Child#2 and I got quite a good little production-line going (there were over 50 wrappers to fill) - this kind of fiddly food works really well when there is more than one person and it's easy for kids to do.

We covered the base of a frying pan with sunflower oil to the depth of a millimetre or two, then heated it over a medium heat for five minutes until it was suitably hot. We fried the wontons in batches of eight for a minute or two on each side, until they were golden brown.

The dipping sauce was a mixture of vinegar and soy with a crushed garlic clove in it. If I make these again I'd add a bit more heat to the vegetable mixture itself: these were a bit bland for my taste. They needed a chilli or two in the mix!

Recovering

We lost the top layer of plastic from the greenhouse over the winter and the remaining layer has been looking increasingly battered and torn.

On Friday it was really windy and we had to make some emergency repairs to stop the damage getting much worse. The forecast on Sunday was for a sunny day with little wind, which are ideal conditions for trying to put new layers of polythene over the structure. Four years ago Mike and I did this as a two-person job. This time, the children were old enough to help pull the sheets over the greenhouse. It was still very hard and hot work, but by the end of the day the sheets were in place and secured along three of their edges.

This morning Mike finished securing the fourth edge, along the arch on the eastern side, a job complicated by a phalanx of curious wasps. If you don't like wasps much (and I don't know many people who do), being at the top of a ladder while they are buzzing around your head can be rather stressful. As if being up a ladder, doing a tricky job, in blazing hot sunshine is not stressful enough. My job, as usual, was as ladder ballast. Silently-praying-that-Mike-doesn't-fall-off-the-ladder ballast.

We still have to sort out the 'skirts' of the greenhouse, securing the long edges which roll up below the wooden battens, but at least those can be done with feet on terra firma!

Baked beans and spaghetti squash

I'm reading Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy at the moment, which features a lot of cowboys. Perhaps that was why I thought of baked beans as a meal for today. I'm not fond of commercially-canned baked beans, but home-made ones are a different proposition entirely and they're something we eat fairly regularly in the colder months. I use dry haricot beans (called navy beans here) and soak them overnight. Then you boil them for an hour or so in fresh water.

Usually I add onions, ketchup, molasses, mustard powder, salt and pepper (in unscientific quantities) to the cooked beans  and the water they've been boiling in. Today I had a batch of rather battered tomatoes which I had to do something with in a hurry, so instead of using ketchup I cut out the good parts, whizzed them in the food processor then boiled the tomatoes down into a thick sauce (while the beans were boiling). I added a splash of vinegar to the tomatoes to get roughly the same effect as making ketchup.

Here's how the mixture looked before it went into the oven:

It's quite runny at this stage, which is what you want, as it then bakes for two to three hours at 325°F/160°C and a lot of the water is absorbed or steamed off. You can leave the lid off the pot towards the end of cooking to make sure that the texture of the sauce is the way you want it. I'd recommend stirring the beans every half-hour, too, so that they don't stick to the bottom.

After baking, the beans looked like this:

You can see from the line on the side of the pot how much the liquid level has dropped.

While I had the oven on, I also baked a couple of our Small Wonder spaghetti squash. I've been picking these for two weeks now and on Thursday I harvested the first of the New England Sugar Pie pumpkins, too:

In the past I've always cut spaghetti squash open (usually rather nervously, with a big knife and a conviction that I am about to lose a finger), scooped out the seeds and then baked them in the oven for about an hour. This week I discovered that you can also microwave the fruit, with much more speedy results. I also found out that you can cook them whole and remove the seeds after cooking them, which makes them a lot easier to deal with. The important point to remember if you cook them whole, whether in the microwave or in the oven, is to pierce the skin in several places with a knife. Otherwise you'll have an exploding squash on your hands. And all over your oven...

I tried this new method out today. It was a great improvement: once cooked, the skin was easy to cut through and the seeds came out with no bother at all, leaving the soft yellow flesh to fall away from the outer shells. This is definitely the best way of cooking them: no more near-accidents with big sharp knives and smooth-skinned squashes for me!

Spaghetti squash is a versatile vegetable - you can serve it as a side dish with some butter or oil and pepper, or use the strands in the place of pasta as part of a low-carbohydrate main course. With these ones I'm planning to stir in some parmesan and seasoning and then form them into cakes, coat them in flour and shallow fry them for supper. Rather like rösti or hash browns. Hm, the thought of that's making me hungry already and I've only just eaten the baked beans...

UPDATE: I mixed some crushed garlic, parmesan, salt, pepper and flour into the cooled squash, then coated them in more flour, egg, and breadcrumbs and shallow fried them in a mix of oil and butter:

They tasted great and, for once, everyone agreed with me. This is quite an achievement when you consider that Child#2 has recently taken to supervising me at mealtimes to make sure that I haven't sneakily inserted any zucchini into his food.

The flaw in the door

As we had a spare door after the bathroom work was finished, Mike thought he'd replace Child2's bedroom door with it. A few problems with one of the old hinges and one or two curse words later, the door was in place.

Here it is, fully closed up.

Turns out the bathroom door was two inches narrower than this bedroom door. So perhaps not such a good idea after all. We tried selling the improved ventilation angle to Child2 but he wasn't impressed. His old door is now back in its original place.

This house never stops surprising us with its little idiosyncrasies...

School days

Child#1 is embarking on her first year of high school next week and she spent part of yesterday at an orientation session at her new school, picking up a lock, student card and her schedule for the year. I took one looked the schedule and went "Huh?". Maybe not the most eloquent of speeches, but that document really confused me. Partly because it seemed to be written in code (I'm sure she's looking forward to her first lesson of PPL101b, for example), but mostly because it was so simple. For the first five months of the school year she will have the same four classes every day. Then in the rest of the year, she'll have a different four classes.

Each day of the week exactly the same and only four different classes: this is the 'semester system' and it seems very strange to me. I imagine it makes timetabling a lot easier, but it does sound rather monotonous. And odd not to be doing a core subject like English, French or Mathematics for half of a year! When I think back to my timetable for the same age (13/14), I had 13 different subjects (and 12 separate exams at the end of that year (now I'm feeling hard-done-by)). Seems like the kids specialise very early here. Will be interesting to see how it works out.

Taking the test

We reached another stage in our emigration journey today.

This imposing building is the immigration office in Kingston, where Mike and I reported earlier this afternoon to establish our identities, prove we could speak English - bit tricky for Mike, that one, but he seemed to manage OK ;-) - and complete a 20-question multiple-choice test on Canadian history, geography, economics and politics. It was fine. The questions were straight-forward and we were in and out of the building in one hour. There were only ten of us taking the test and curiously, Mike was the only man. We all had a bit of a chat before the test started and heard some horror stories from one of the women whose family had taken the test in Toronto, where there were many more people and it took three hours to interview them all before the test started.

When we got home, the children proudly presented us with a cake that they'd made to mark the occasion:

Hidden by the generous helping of sprinkles are the words 'Nice Job' and a thumbs-up. Good to know that they have confidence in our abilities!

We won't know for sure whether we've passed the test until we hear from the immigration office. If we have, then we'll be invited to a ceremony with a citizenship judge in September. Fingers crossed...

We're thinking we will have a party to mark the transition to officially being Canadians. It will be quite nice not to have to read the 'Discover Canada' book again: we've been having to learn the whole thing over the last few weeks. And we are comprehensively Sick To Death of it.

Old enough for Shakespeare

I remember the first time we took the children to a live theatre event. They were about three and four years old when we went to see 'The Tweenies' at the Manchester Evening News Arena. They were completely enthralled by the performance. So much so that when it was over Child#2 had a massive tantrum, distraught that the show had finished. He refused to walk and had to be dragged, bawling all the way, to the tram stop in Victoria Station. He wasn't much given to tantrums (if my memory is being reliable) and the fact that it was caused by an occasion we thought would be a great treat was particularly galling.

But that was nearly ten years ago and he's grown up a bit now. When I saw that there was going to be an outdoor performance of Macbeth in the County yesterday (performed by the Driftwood Theatre Group), I wondered if the children might like to go and see it. I wasn't sure if they were old enough to appreciate Shakespeare, but thought it worth a try. I'd seen open-air productions of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream in Oxford in the 1990s and they'd been excellent. I wasn't expecting to get the chance to relive those experiences out here in rural Ontario.

When I suggested it to the children they were both quite enthusiastic, although their cultural contexts for Macbeth might have given me pause. I asked Child#2 first and he was keen to see it because he'd recently seen an episode of The Simpsons which had featured Homer and Marge as Macbeth and his Lady. When I sounded out Child#1 she immediately thought of an old episode of Blackadder which had featured frequent mentions of 'The Scottish Play' and wanted to see it because of that.

So they both had a context for the play, although I wasn't sure that there were going to be quite as many laughs a minute in the real thing as there had been in the TV shows they'd seen. And sitting through a half-hour comedy is rather different from sitting through a two-hour tragedy. But I thought it was worth a try.

Having learnt from our firework-watching experience on Canada Day, we packed up garden chairs, sweaters and a picnic and made our way to Bloomfield, where we formed part of the very front row on the southeast side of the stage. As the sun went down behind the trees, the performance began and as the play became darker, so did the night.

There were perhaps 200 people in the audience, none of us very far from the stage, and the actors were coming and going all around us, making everyone feel very much part of the performance (if slightly distracted by some persistent mosquitoes and enormous moths). I really enjoyed it and, to my slight surprise, the children said that they did, too. I think it was the immediacy of it that pulled them in: it's very different from watching a play on a distant stage or on a movie screen. There were quite a few children in the audience and (I'm pleased to report) there were no tantrums or even complaints from any of them on this occasion.

Early-onset nostalgia

Child #1 is moving on to high school in September and it looks as though Child #2 will be going to a different one in the following year. Consequently, this week will be the last for them to be travelling home together on the same school bus. It's making me sad, this end of a stage in their lives.

Of course, if we'd stayed in England, this stage would have finished two years ago. Here, the elementary schools run to grade eight, rather than the more usual year six in English primary schools. So both children would have been in secondary education by now. I'm happier with the way it works here, although I didn't know about this particular difference until after we moved. By delaying high school to the age of 13 it feels like they get to be children for longer.

The transition from one school to another is celebrated in a graduation ceremony. This seemed odd to me, when I first heard about it. Graduation from high school seemed strange enough, but from elementary school? For all I know, this is something that is happening in the UK now, too, but neither of these transitions were marked by a school event when I went through them. I do remember being very excited about leaving both my primary and secondary schools, though. No nostalgia at all for me in those days. Must be something that comes on with age...

Last night was my daughter's graduation and although the school's gym was hot and crowded, the ceremony was enjoyable: it was great to see the young people being recognised for their achievements. I don't often blather on about my kids, so bear with me while I share the moment of happiness I felt as I watched my fledgling young woman dance with her dad.

After a long time of being the parents of two children, we're suddenly finding that we are sharing our lives with two young adults. I can't quite believe how quickly that has happened. It's wonderful to watch them growing up, but nostalgia for their almost-over childhood years can be hard to shake off at times of like this.

Now I'm going to listen to ABBA singing 'Slipping through my fingers' while I shed some tears onto my keyboard. With any luck I'll be back to normal by the time that yellow bus draws up outside again...

Deprived childhood

Growing up on the south coast of England, we never had much in the way of proper winters. Or proper summers, for that matter, I suppose, but that's a topic for another post. We got snow sometimes, but never all that much and never for very long. My brother and I had inherited an old toboggan which had been given to us by our grandfather. We lived half-way up a smallish hill and we would jump at the chance to ride the toboggan down the pavement/sidewalk on the rare occasions when it did snow. I remember our (utterly selfish) outrage when Mr Collins, our elderly neighbour, put salt down on his part of the pavement and spoiled our fun. I suppose we were about ten and eleven at the time.

We took our toboggan elsewhere and made a new slide on a pavement of a different road, a few streets away. The road was a quiet one, mainly inhabited by elderly people, but it had a nice slope and that was all we cared about. We had a great time for an hour or two, but the major disadvantage of our new toboggan run was that it was visible from the upstairs windows of our own house. Mum saw what we were doing and was (quite rightly) horrified - what if some of the old people had slipped and fallen on what was now an absolutely lethal pathway? She came to put a stop to our fun and I remember her being furious with us, although there is a blank space in my memory as to what the consequences of our selfish hour of fun were. If I'd been her I would have made us scatter salt on the slide, but I can't remember if that's what happened.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that we didn't get a lot of snow and ice to play with when we were young. There was sometimes a layer of ice on a puddle to crack, but that would be about it. I'm baffled now, by my own children, who spend hardly any time at all playing outside in the winter. On the plus side, it means that they're not getting up to the mischief that my brother and I were at the same age, so I'm not having to worry about what they're doing, but I can't help feeling that they're missing out.

I, on the other hand, am still making up for lost time. The recent thaw has thinned the ice over the stream. The winter-deprived child in me takes great delight in breaking the ice and creating mini ice-bergs and ice-jams. I know my eleven-year-old self would have been out there playing for hours.

So why aren't my kids?

"The best soup ever!"

Writing this down quickly, as it's not often I manage to please everyone with a soup that's mainly made of  vegetables.

Ingredients

Sunchokes (about two handfuls)
3 medium-sized carrots
Potatoes (two handfuls: they were a fingerling variety)
1 leek
Ground pepper
Bit of butter
1½ pints stock (I used ham stock)
2 broccoli heads
Stilton cheese (about a handful, once grated)
3 rashers of bacon, chopped and fried until crispy

Very precise measurements, as you can see.

Chop the sunchokes, potatoes, leeks and carrots into small pieces (about ½ inch cubes) and sweat them gently in the butter for a few minutes with a little freshly ground pepper. Add the stock and bring to a gentle simmer. Leave for around 30 minutes and then add the broccoli heads, broken into individual florets. Cook until the broccoli is tender, for about five minutes.

Remove the soup from the heat and stir in the grated Stilton. Blend until fairly smooth, pour into serving bowls and top with the bacon pieces.

I didn't get a chance to take a photograph of the soup (though there's a photo on this blog that gives the overall effect), but it got rave reviews from both children, which is quite miraculous. Especially as I had no idea what I was going to make for supper until about an hour before we ate it. In the days when I used to buy cartons of fresh soup, when we were back in England, my daughter's favourite was always Broccoli and Stilton. This is the closest she's had since - and I managed to squeeze in a whole load of other home-grown vegetables, too!

An improvement on the reaction to last soup I served up (butternut squash, carrot and lentil), which Child #1 says she had to pretend was chocolate sauce in order to finish...

Waiting in line... again

It's been a while since we last had dealings with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, but now we're back playing the waiting game again, this time for Mike's mum. At current rates of progress, it will be around four years from now before this latest application is processed and she will be able to come out and live here with us permanently.

It is frustrating. The kids love having their Nana here and we're all the family she has. If things had worked out differently, we would have all applied to emigrate together and wouldn't have had to leave her on her own in England. As it is, parents and grandparents have low priority for the immigration service and we just have to be patient. But when a person is nearer four score years than three score and ten (I don't think she'll mind me saying that!!), every year counts.

Mother's Day

Yesterday I set up my stall in the library in Deseronto again for the annual Sidewalk Sale. If the weather had been better, I would have been outside and there would have been lots of customers. As it was, it was cold, windy and wet and, consequently, very quiet indeed. I didn't manage to sell as many seedlings as I did last year. But it was only two fewer, so not terribly bad. One thing I changed this year was the range of tomatoes: there had been one would-be customer last year who had wanted beefsteak tomatoes, which I didn't have. This year, I grew Marmande tomatoes and the same man came back and bought 12 of them. Which shows that it pays to listen to your customers, I suppose!

Child1 came with me and was a great help in setting up and taking down the stall. During the (many) quiet spells of our stay our location next to one of the public access computers turned out to be ideal for her. I sat and read one of the library books - so it was ideal for me, too!

Today is Mother's Day and it is the first time that we've actually had one of our mothers here in Canada for the day itself. We put a bit of an effort into setting the table for lunch for once: the lilacs are in full bloom already, which provided an easy bit of floral colour (flower-arranging not being one of my strengths), as well as being a reminder of the mother who was missing.

I always feel ambivalent about Mother's Day: I know it's a fairly ancient idea, compared to Father's Day and Grandparents' Day, but even when my own mother was alive I thought it was a celebration designed only to provoke guilt and spending (and sadness, if you'd like to be a mother but can't be).

However, my cynical old iceberg of a soul is capable of being partially melted when I'm presented with something like this:

Although (if I'm completely honest) it may have been the correct placement of the apostrophe that caused me the greatest delight. ;-)

On swearing

I wanted to jot down a few unscientific observations on a linguistic area that I've been pondering for a while now: the differences I've observed in the use of swear words by citizens of the UK and by those of this part of Canada. I'm sure there are whole theses and many articles and other blog posts on the subject, but I've avoided reading about them so far.

I informally polled co-workers last week at the library (ranging in age from late teens to late 50s) to help me work out how they see some of these words. I also interrogated my children, as their language is actively being formed at school by listening to the usage of others. They also get corrected when they use words that their teachers or friends think are inappropriate; people don't tend to do that when you're a grown-up!

I'm breaking my discoveries down into three main types of swearing:

Regular swearing

Most of the swear-words in this section are used in both countries, although the teenager I spoke to said that she liked using the word 'bollocks', which she saw as a British swear word. Most of the usual swear words are the same, with the exception of 'pants' and 'bloody', which are much more specific to British, rather than Canadian English.*

Religious swearing

The first difference I noticed on moving here was the greater sensitivity to religious swearing. I didn't ask the women at the library about the use of the word 'God' (will have to do that next week!), but we did discuss 'damn' and 'Hell'. Neither of these last two words seems particularly taboo to me, but they are looked upon that way by my interviewees. I was fascinated to discover from my colleagues that 'Hell' is considered the worse word of the two. Which seems odd to me, as really it's just a place name. If I say "Bloody hell", then to me it's the 'bloody' bit that makes it more rude. It was interesting that the eldest of the women in the library managed to avoid saying 'Hell' even while we were discussing it, such was her aversion to the word. I guess teenagers here would not be given Paradise Lost to read, like we were.**

Swearing that isn't swearing

The day after my discussion with the library folk, I had a visit to the dentist's. There's a lovely hygienist there and we had a good chat while she was working on my teeth. Which isn't easy, as you know. One thing we talked about was the prevalence of fighting in hockey, which she described as 'stupid'.
"But I don't use that word to my son," she added.
This was a new one to me, but I asked my children about it and they confirmed that 'stupid' is another word that they are told not to use at school. My library informants told me that 'shut up' is also fairly taboo, which is interesting, given its recent change of use as an expression of incredulity in Valspeak. I'm now wondering how many other relatively inoffensive words I've been using turn out to be rude here.

Conclusion

I'm not someone who swears a lot.† Not in public anyway. But what I've come to realise over the last week or so is that I probably have been swearing (to other people's ears) without even knowing it. I'm sure my observations so far are only scratching the surface!

*'Bloody' may technically be a religious swear word, but I don't think that's common knowledge (and there seems to be some debate about whether it is or not).
**Well, only the first two books, if I'm honest.
†Except where tomato hornworms are concerned

Becoming Canadian

This has got to be the quintessential Canadian scene. A group of people thoroughly enjoying themselves on a frozen lake on a winter's day.

I have absolutely no interest in watching professional hockey and have some deep (but relatively uninformed) reservations about the way that youngsters enter the professional game here (this news item left an abiding impression). But I was bursting with pride at seeing my own son holding a hockey stick for the first time and getting the hang of skating with the help of some really lovely people. I would not want to see him involved in playing for a 'proper' team, but can't think of anything better than seeing him enjoy being on the ice like he was today.

And if that wasn't pleasure enough, there were marshmallows, toasted over a fire built on the ice.

I love this country.

A mouse ate my Christmas tree

The festive season is all about traditions, old and new. Becoming a parent means that you get to create customs for your new family and I went about this quite consciously when we had our first child. One thing I bought was a re-usable cloth Advent calendar in the form of a Christmas tree, which I thought would make a good leading-up-to-Christmas tradition for us to have, many years into the future.

This is how the calendar looked at Christmas 2005. You can see that there are small cloth decorations for each of the days before Christmas.

We've used it for ten years now and it is as popular with the children as I'd hoped it would be. I was consequently horrified this morning to find that it had been well and truly nibbled by a mouse. The middle section of the tree was ruined and the lower part of the numbered pouches that hold the ornaments had been badly damaged, with the figures 22 and 23 missing.

Now needlework is not something I can claim to be any good at. My mum had to invent a dentist's appointment for me when I was fourteen so that I could avoid the last dressmaking lesson of the year. I'd managed to completely ruin the blouse I was supposed to be making and couldn't face admitting it in front of the rest of the class. I've never enjoyed sewing since, so the prospect of making good this ruined tree did not appeal.

Luckily the ornaments were in fairly good shape, although the Noel heart at the bottom of this photo had been chewed upon and one of the others, a striped candy cane, had disappeared completely. Spookily, the candy cane was one of only two ornaments that represented something edible. This mouse was clearly smarter than the average rodent.

I was loth to throw the whole thing away and it did look as though it might be salvageable. There's me trying to lead a more self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle, I thought. I should be able to do this, just on principle!

I cut the damaged middle section of the tree out and re-sewed the top to the lower half. It makes the tree look slightly squat, but at least it's in one piece again. The lower part was more tricky, as first I had to patch it with green cotton (taken from the back of the removed middle section) and then create a new red part for the pouches. Child #2 had an old red t-shirt of roughly the right colour, so I used that. I knew that I'd never get the numbers to look right, as I didn't have any white embroidery thread, so I used plain white cotton and they now look decidedly rustic:

At least it's now usable again. I just have to find a replacement for the stolen candy cane. I even managed to mend my broken heart:

I'm hoping that my amateurish repairs will become a new part of this particular Christmas tradition: "Do you remember the year when a mouse ate our Christmas tree?".

POSTSCRIPT: The morning after I wrote this I had an idea for a replacement for the candy cane ornament. Using the old red t-shirt again, half a tissue, a piece of velcro from an old pair of my son's shorts and a piece of ribbon from my (sparsely equipped) sewing box I came up with this:

Return on investment

Now that the chickens are beginning to pay for their keep I've been turning my attention to the ways in which the other living creatures I feed are contributing to the household. As far as I can see, neither the dog nor the children are really turning any sort of profit. I saw this dog-powered treadmill in the Ameliasburg Historical Museum yesterday. I'm sure it could be adjusted to run on kid-power, too. Would just have to find a way of attaching it to the TV so that they could only watch it while walking or running...