A few Christmas decorations

Well, I haven't travelled any where of late, just been tearing up the road between the house and MUN for work. In my non-working hours, I've spent a bit of time making some Christmas decorations. I'm teaching myself to crochet, so the crochet snowflake chain and the crochet stars (which I just strung together) to hang in the window have been good practice.
Below is a close-up of the gingerbread house that Pat and I just assembled. It was Pat's first gingerbread house buiding ever, but since he's working in construction these days the skills transferred over well. I haven't done a gingerbread house since I was a kid back with my Mom.
This is Pat's gingerbread man, complete with shocking blue eyes and curly brown hair.I made a few knitted decorations which I felted, including this snowman who has turned out rather demented-looking. I think I need to find something for his nose to soften the face. The way the hat shape turned out makes me think that he's an angry Russian. And the face makes me think of The Nightmare Before Christmas.And on to other people's decorations. I was behind this truck at a stop-light (it just turned green as I took the picture) a couple of weeks ago. First time I've seen a tree in a truck.

Driving in The Shininess

A photo I took (from the passenger seat) of the view through the windshield as we approached a set of traffic lights with cars lined up in 3 lanes. All the lights reflecting off the wet pavement made it very difficult to see. It's like this many nights in St. John's (humidity comes out of the air as it cools down, I suppose). I call it "The Shininess".

Scotiabank expands across the universe

I've been watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica (the remake series) recently. Today, while watching an episode, this scene caught my eye:

(this image is a screen-shot and is owned by whomever owns Battlestar Galactica)

The heading of "Cylon-Occupied Captrica" is to indicate that the planet Caprica, one of 12 colony planets of the people who feature in the TV series, has been taken over by the enemy synthetic race of Cylons. That's not why I put the picture up though - take a close look at the logo atop the central tower in the image.

It's the Scotiabank logo. So perhaps I should switch banks, as clearly no one can match this bank's number of service locations.

Photos From the Archives (and the scanner)

I was putting away some photos and stumbled upon some other old photos that are personal favourites.

Below is a couch on fire.
I took this photo on Christmas Eve in 2001. My family had decided to swap our couch in the den with a better one that was in the basement. So my dad, my uncle, and I moved the couches around, and then we hauled the old one out in the backyard. The three of us so hated that couch - its cushions had the habit of sliding out from underneath you, leaving you slumped in a trench in the back, and the seat was too wide so that most people's feet couldn't reach the floor - so we decided to dispose of it in fire. My brother and aunt were somewhat fond of the couch, but we wanted to make sure that it could never surface again, so it was burned before they got back home.

It took a bit to get it burning (I think we may have used some oil to accelerate it), but once it caught fire, up she went. It was rather fun to stand round and watch it burn; I suggested at the time that we should make it a Christmas Eve tradition to burn an old piece of furniture, but it never caught on.


Now, what do you think this photo shows?That is the antenna on the hood of the old Corsica that I was driving back in 2001, covered in ice crystals. I came out of the house one morning in February to walk the dog before going to school, and the entire world was covered in little crystals like that.


Finally, I think this is one of the funniest photos that I have taken. Just read the sign, it says it all (a clothing shop on Princes Street in Edinburgh, in June of 2002).
(If you're having trouble, it reads: "Mr. Toskana has had an expensive divorce and now needs the money, so sale now on!")

Gros Morne Mountain Hike, Or the day I really thought I wouldn't make it

Back in August, in the aforementioned trip across Newfoundland, Patrick and I spent some time in Gros Morne National Park.

Now, if you've read about my previous travels, you'll know that I'm not opposed to a long walk. I've walked 10 miles in the pouring rain just to get to a ferry on a bus-less day. According to my Dad, I move faster than most armies when I'm out doing long-distance hikes.

However, I do have some weaknesses in hiking. One is hills. I grew up on PEI, where there may be hills all over the place, but they don't keep going up for that long (all less than 500 feet). So hills do slow me down and tire me out, but I can generally plug away and manage them eventually.

But I have a greater weakness than hills - heat. Heat wipes me out from any activity other than laying in the shade and eating frozen things. And by heat, I mean anything above 25 degrees Celsius. We can probably blame my inability to suffer heat on my ancestry; my genes expect me to be in the British Isles, not in a Canadian summer.

So what this is leading me to is the day that Patrick and I climbed Gros Morne Mountain, or as I called it, the Overgrown Gravel Heap. It was hot and humid that day - in the vicinity of 30 degrees Celsius. To do the hike, you start with a half hour walk through the woods and then a bog, going slightly uphill all the while, to get to the base of the mountain. Then you have to climb it (the rocky path up the middle of the picture below).
Midway through the first "easy" section of the hike, I felt like I was the unfittest person imaginable. My energy was gone, I was stumbling along unable to lift my feet, hunched over and I felt like I was on some sort of death march. I told Patrick so, but he insisted on me coming along, saying that it would be cooler on the mountain because there would be a breeze. Let's just say it wasn't cooler enough.

Here's Patrick starting up the mountain, amongst some of the smaller rocks we would climb through.

The photo below is looking back down the mountain from where we'd climbed so far. By this point, I was climbing from large rock to large rock - moving for about a minute or two, and then sitting down on a large rock for a minute or two. It took us over two hours to climb the mountain itself, about 400 metres (the mountaintop itself is 800 metres above sea level). It was breezier, but it was still too hot for me.
The rocky, flat top.

Looking down at one of the ponds and towards the coast on the other side of the mountain.

Anyway, the hike was finished (after coming down the other side of the mountain you go around the base and it takes even hours more) with me exhausted. I would do that hike again, but only if it were a cool day.

Camping in August

I'm going to do a few posts about my holidays back in August, since I didn't get around to it at the time. Patrick and I travelled across Newfoundland to go to PEI. We spent a week camping in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which is the most number of days I've camped consecutively. I've wanted to do a long-distance camping road trip for quite some time (like going cross country) so this gave me a taste of what such a trip could be like. Anyway, here's a few photos of the camping specifically; I'll put up photos of the sights later on.

This is Patrick's tent that we used; it's just large enough for two people to fit in. While sitting in the tent in one campground that was dominated by RV's, I heard some kids walking pass exclaim "Wow! That's a small tent!" The owner of the campground was incredulous when he saw the size of the tent.

The back of the loaded-down truck with tailgate being used as a cooking storage space. The big bag of stuff wasn't ours, but stuff I was transporting to PEI for some friends who were moving.
Patrick, having mastered his family's old French gas stove, served as the chef, whereas I acted as the prep cook and dishwasher. Here he's cooking up some sausages and frying some potatoes I believe.
Being the East Coast, the weather was not always spectacular and sunny. On one night when it started pouring just around supper time, we fortunately had a spare tarp to set up a crude shelter so we could cook and eat in relative dryness.
Another meal, cooked on that rainy night, of chicken, potatoes and vegetables and gravy. Not thwarted by being outdoors, we ate pretty good.

"The St. John's Left Turn"

At a lot intersections in St. John's, left turns are not permitted. Since I'm still getting to know many parts of the city, I will often have a plan in my mind of how to get somewhere that will be foiled by one of these "No Left Turn" intersections. In many cities, one would just make a left turn at the next intersection and then go down that side street and turn left again to get back to the street you originally wanted. In St. John's, this doesn't seem to work most times, as it might be quite far until the next street, or because the city lacks a grid-like pattern.

So I've occasionally found myself performing a manoeuvre I have decided to call "The St. John's Left Turn" (illustrated below in a sketch I made - the path of the vehicle is the green dashes). Since turning left isn't allowed at the intersection, I go straight through it and then make a left turn off the road into the next avaiable parking lot (conveniently, there always seems to be a business with a parking lot of some size not too far from these no-left-turn intersections). I whirl around in the parking lot and then go back on the street in the opposite direction, so as to make a right turn at the intersection on to my desired street. Voilà, a left turn.

Berry pickin'

I've been going out berry picking about once a week, when the weather's good, in the last while. September was blueberry picking, and Patrick and I went out to Blackhead (just outside of St. John's) several times, walking up the hill along the East Coast Trail and then going off-trail berry hunting. (All the photos herein were taken with my phone, so they aren't the best). The blueberries were good and thick, and I now have a freezer largely filled with bags of blueberries.

This is the view of St. John's (between the hills in the distance) from up the hill in Blackhead.

The sea was quite foamy and it was reflecting off of the rocky shore, resulting in interesting, irregular shapes.

Yesterday I went out to Logy Bay with Patrick and his dad to go cranberry picking, again along a section of the East Coast Trail. Cranberries are sneaky little berries, hiding under other vegetation, and I had to be pretty much down on my knees before I could spot any of them. They were sparser than the blueberries, although I did find them in bunches when they were growing near a stream or on boggy ground.

Some unhidden cranberries:

Looking down the hill toward the coast (Patrick is kneeling down picking just near the coast).
Just before leaving to go home, we stopped in at MUN's Ocean Science Centre, where we had parked as it's at the base of the trail. They have two tanks with harp seals in them that we watched swimming around for a bit. They have a web cam that you can connect to here.

And darkness descends

Yesterday's forecast for St. John's

Something a little foreboding about one day of sun and then clouds as far as one can see.

I've been away from the blogging for a while now, but I might have enough spirit to get back at it again, at least here and there. I've got some trip photos I'll try to whack up soon.

How big is that plant in the window

My garlic plants looking out the front window (dreaming of being big trees, perhaps). This is the big excitement in my life at the moment (teaching occupies my days but it's not exciting). I planted two garlic cloves a week ago. The one on the left started shooting up within a day and is now just over 6 inches tall. The other clove, on the right, started about four days ago. I put the plants in front of the window during the day and pull back the veil curtain, and when I'm walking up to the house in the afternoon it has appeared to me as though the plant is peeking out, waiting for me to come home (I miss having a dog).

And yes, they are planted in a plastic ice cream container. I've become one of those old-lady-types who saves all my plastic tubs for reuse. Or in the case of this one, gets them from other people since I don't buy ice cream much these days. In other old-lady-behaviour news, I've also started filling a jar with boiling water to take to bed with me to keep my feet warm on cold nights, since my room can't be heated well without making other parts of the house scorching. And my hip was aching, but that was from fencing lunges.

I've planted some green onions today (by snipping off the white bulb bottoms of green onions from the supermarket; they already had little roots on them), so we'll see how that goes now. The space by the window will be getting crowded.

More cold

No, not a mistake photograph - this is a frozen pond with drifting snow blown by a fierce wind (see below).

This is my first experience of a real winter for several years now (since early 2006), so I'm getting accustomed to cold again and also getting back into winter sports I haven't done in years.

There was some good snow earlier in the month, so after school I was heading up to Pippy Park (right in St. John's) and going cross-country skiing or snow-shoeing. The trails were pretty well groomed there due to skidoos using them, so to snowshoe I went off-trail and ended up frightening some dog-walkers when I finally re-emerged on to the trail from the bushes and spruce trees.

The other weekend I went "up the Southern Shore" (south of St. John's down the coast of the Avalon peninsula) to visit my boyfriend Patrick at the cabin (a cottage we'd call it in PEI, but a winterized one) he's living in for the winter at Kingman's Cove. We went for a walk through the woods (no need of snowshoes as it was a packed trail), but then couldn't find a return trail through the woods and so ended up walking along the frozen pond for about a kilometre in a bitter wind (and unblocked wind since we were on a pond). We walked backwards to keep the wind off our faces, and then when we reached the end of the pond we were able to walk over a hill across the barrens (wind at our backs, fortunately).


Caked with snow from the walk on the pond (all in good fun). I turn pink both when cold and hot, just the colour I'm meant to be it seems.
Part of the community of Kingman's and its cove.
The snow melted (except for frozen banks) this past week, but then froze all over the ground, so there's a lot of ice about. I've considered skating instead of walking along the sidewalks. I went with Patrick for a walk in one of the parks and ended up sliding on ice whilst grabbing hold of fences and flailing about to regain my balance like I was in Mr. Bean sketch. Unfortunately, there's no photographs to document that.