On a recent -40C morning, I was impressed by the blanketed quiet and ice fog-dominated atmosphere. The only sound was the crackling of my clothing and bag as they became deep-freeze cold. It was dark as I walked to work, but later as the sun began to rise, it looked like this:
An ice foggy morning.
Visibility wasn’t great until the day started lightening and it became a little warmer. It was one of those mornings that produced some rather heavily frost-encrusted eyelashes. When I came inside, I briefly held them with my fingers to melt the ice.
The ice fog disappears.
Hiding under all that fog was an intensely blue sky and the whitest white snow, almost blue itself. It turned into a very beautiful day with almost blindingly bright sun, even though it was incredibly cold outside.
A couple of weeks ago we did some dogsitting for a friend of ours. Nan is a northern girl who looks to be half Exquimaux or Siberian husky and half German shepherd. She is very tall with incredibly slim delicate features and very soft fur.
No matter what her DNA says, she’s an amazingly even-tempered pooch who could probably turn the most determined dog-disliking person into a canine advocate. Gentle and cuddly, she loves to play and run and be fussed over and petted.
A very sweet pooch.
I’m afraid that M and I spoiled her just a little bit.
Of course, we’re missing our Rudy who passed away a couple of years ago, but maybe it’s time to bring another canine friend into our lives. 🙂
Right now we are surviving temperatures that are about -35 C. That’s pretty cold although I have experienced colder. When it’s this cold, it’s hard to remember that summer existed. It’s just a dim memory.
I pass this bush every day on my way to work.
And yup, I walk to work. Driving is not worth the trouble it would cause to start a vehicle.
It’s so cold that they have to be plugged in. And then there’s the scraping of windshields, the running of engines and the effort to get them out of the latest layer of new snow, even if I do have a 4×4. Needless to say, I don’t have a garage, which ironically, is something I’ve always had in the south. Up here, there aren’t many of them. For them to be of any real use you would have to heat them, and that makes them very expensive.
So, I walk to work. It takes seven minutes to get my gear on, seven minutes to walk there, it’s dark, and every bit of me is covered except my eyes. I peer under my big hat and over my balaclava. I’m under the time limit for frostbite to exposed skin in -35C, although a little wind can rapidly change that formula. A few days ago, I thought I had frostbite on my cheek, but no, it was just rather cold.
Everything is slower and takes longer. It’s life in the north. 🙂
I first published this post in 2012, not long after I started this blog. I was particularly annoyed about how pushed I felt to participate in the buying of stuff and produced this rant. I’ve made a few changes to it but otherwise, here it is again, in all its grinchy glory.
Ahhh … Christmas. That time of the year when people bolt madly about the mall, foaming at the mouth, their eyeballs rolled back in their heads; I sometimes wonder if we’ve mixed up the seasons and I’m seeing a replay of last Halloween’s midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead.
There’s been a couple of different versions of this movie with slightly different names, but you know. The one where the good guys are all trapped in a mall and their numbers gradually dwindle until there’s only two or three of them left, and they’ve run out of ammunition and water and toilet paper and they have to decide which one of them is going to dash out among the monsters to get to the only working vehicle that’s left in a radius of 100 km. Why didn’t they think of that before they trapped themselves in the mall?
I think that the Night of the Living Dead was here. (Glenbow Museum, Calgary)
Anyway, I’m digressing. Or maybe not. I don’t think that glancing around at the mall decorations would be any indication of what month it is anyway. Back in October I found myself tripping over the jingle bells while hunting for the Halloween pumpkins.
Or maybe that was Peter Rabbit.
Cupid?
I can’t tell any more. The so-called special occasions are all starting to morph into each other. The only thing I do notice is the surge in mania that accompanies this time of year.
It starts with Christmas music that’s supposed to put us in a seasonal frame of mind and get us to start parting with our cash as early as possible. The earlier we start, the more we’ll spend! Or some such reasoning. All it does for me is to get me going on my seasonal vocabulary, as in “Oh fudge, it’s ‘deck the halls’ again.”
Really, you say? Well, not really. My language tends to be rather … er … spicier. The fact is, if I hear those piped in carollers fa la la-ing one more time I’m going to hunt them down and strangle them with their own holly out in the parking lot. Shouldn’t they be done with that whole decking the halls thing by now anyway? They’ve been at it since they chased the headless horseman out of town months ago.
Then we’re supposed to decorate anything that stands still for longer than two seconds. Since the stores start this at the end of September, the passive-aggressive suggestion to the rest of us is that if we don’t buy our lights and holly and tinsel and get them up soon, we’re all really the worst kind of lazy procrastinators who probably don’t even separate our whites and our colours when we do the laundry, if we do the laundry.
We’re supposed to have a theme, and mulled wine stewing on the stove, and our houses are supposed to reek of pine needles and fresh cookies.
At my house, it’s more like this: theme – getting the laundry done this week without having a nervous collapse; baking – finding that pair of dirty socks that has been baking under the bed for so long that they’ve started growling; Christmasy smells – getting out the PineSol and cleaning the bathroom; mulling – trying to remember all the stuff I have to do this week and why it is that I’m doing it; wine – falling upon any wine that I can find and drinking it straight from the bottle before collapsing into the recliner and falling asleep and snoring in front of the news.
Wine for the whiner.
The next step in this nightmare on Mistletoe Street is the shopping. I hate shopping at the best of times but during December it’s demented. People don’t even know what they’re doing. All they know is that they have to buy twenty presents and get them wrapped up or there’s going to be hell to pay.
Living dead, indeed.
One pair of silver-plated, self-cleaning, automatic nose hair pluckers. Just what Auntie Jo always wanted.
If you can lift it, get it. Drag it over to the till and wait for an hour in the line. Find out what it is when you get home. Cover it in two hundred dollars of paper and stick it under the tree.
Then there’s jolly old Saint Nickle Ass. Ho, ho, ho. Sitting there cringing, his knees covered in a sheet of clear plastic, hearing the supplications of the tiny teenagers toddlers, an example for sociologists everywhere of how greed can outweigh sheer terror.
The merchants are rubbing their hands with glee …er … delight, warmed through and through with the spirit of Christmas cash … er … past.
The kids are wound up so tight their eyeballs are bulging. The list of what they want is terrifying and you better hop to it because they’ve got Granny held hostage up in the attic. Who says that this generation suffers from entitlement?
Anyway, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to carve my jingle pumpkin and deck the halls with zombies. Fa la la la la la la la la la.
What is it about the season that makes you want to channel your inner Grinch?
A recent flight to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories produced this airport photo of the setting sun.
Fabulous colours.
In this northern clime, the position of the Earth relative to the sun produces these spectacular, angled sunsets.
A few days ago, I took this photo as part of a series of shots.
Muted winter light.
I love the light here, especially at this time of year when it is scattered in the most arresting way. And it is now also becoming very precious as we move into the shortest days of the year.
The light dispersal as it bounces off ice crystals gives this picture a slightly pink tone.
I hope to take many more pictures as I explore this land of light.
What are your favourite views at this time of year?
1. Thelma and Bleu Cheese An unhappily-married woman gets fed up with, well, everything, so she hops in a car and decides to just drive places and see what happens. All of her girlfriends have mani-pedi appointments that they don’t dare break, so Thelma is forced to take along a bottle of salad dressing to […]
A couple of nights ago, I took this photo of the Aurora Borealis.
See anything?
You might see a little something, but you will have to enlarge it – a lot.
Living north of 60 degrees N latitude means that the Aurora is spectacular. From the south, the Aurora assumes a fairly standard curtain-like shape. It hangs there high in the sky, its undulating green hem twinkling in the solar breeze. But It’s not always readily visible from the south (and by south I mean southern Canada). There’s light pollution, the earth’s position and distance to consider.
From here, however, it’s a different story. It’s a living shape – swirling into seashells and lodgepoles and disappearing into the horizon in a smoky streak.
You can see stars through it.
So, why don’t I have a better photo to share with you? Well, it’s a long story. Actually, no. It’s not. It’s a simple story.
I forgot my camera. Again.
My M and I were driving back from grocery shopping – we have to drive an hour and a half for that – and we had made a bit of an evening of it, too. A meal in a restaurant, like that.
It was about 10 pm when we started back and by then it was completely dark – a great opportunity to see and photograph the Aurora.
But the photo you see here was taken using my cell phone, and with something like the Aurora, that doesn’t work.
So I was a little pissed at myself for not bringing my camera, even though I knew there was a good chance that I would see the Northern Lights.
Essentially, I didn’t do my due diligence.
The are good photos to be had if you bring your camera. (The Pacific Ocean off Vancouver Island.)
Sometimes, that’s not important. It winds up just being irritating. But at other times, it can be downright dangerous. You wouldn’t want to fly with a pilot who hadn’t done her due diligence, for instance.
And then there’s the inbetween. Where you’re warned that you need to pay attention, that you’re getting complacent, that there is potential danger. For instance, that maybe your ex-narcissist is still lurking, still checking, still trying.
That happened to me last June.
All of a sudden, there he was, demanding my attention.
I hadn’t thought about him in any real way in a long time. Yes, I’d written about my experiences with him, but from the perspective that he was out of my life, that my chances of any kind of contact with him were becoming more and more remote with the passage of time.
But then, in June, he started actively trying to find me. And the indirectness of his actions scared me because his past attempts to re-establish contact had been very front and centre.
He went to my last workplace, claiming to be my spouse and asking for directions to my office. HR denied him any information and then phoned to let me know – the person he spoke with knew he wasn’t my husband and also didn’t like the vibe she got from him. So she took it upon herself to phone a former employee to give a heads up.
Then there was Dan, my son’s dad. We hadn’t spoken in a long time, but he phoned to tell me that Harry, my ex-narcissist, had called him looking for my address. Dan was concerned because he knew that I had experienced a lot of trouble with Harry.
Two warnings. Both from people who didn’t have to do anything.
Harry’s indirect approach had me worried. This behaviour told me he was planning some sort of trap or ambush. M advised me to go to the police.
I was in the process of organising that in my head when … my phone rang.
It was Harry.
There was an immediate ten minutes of non-stop murmle, murmle, murmle. It came pouring out of him, like a rusty faucet disgorging a hundred years of mind-filth: I’m doing this, that, this, that – it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good our relationship was great, was great, was great, you were so good, so generous, so good I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, so sorry I went to your work looking for you isn’t the Okanagan great? it’s so great, so great, so great things aren’t going as well as I thought for me the weather is great so great it’s great it’s all great may I darken your door again? when I think about it we had a great situation it was a great situation great situation, so comfortable so comfortable let’s meet for coffee.
See where that went???
My response: Harry. I’m sorry to hear that things are not going well for you right now. I’m not in the Okanagan. I am in the middle of moving to Winnipeg (fabrication) to start a research project at the university there (fabrication). I’ve bought a house there (fabrication). I wish you well.
Staying calm in the face of narcissistic yammering is a good thing. (Skaha Lake, Okanagan Valley.)
I quickly ended the call after making the point that I was (really) unavailable. Then I immediately changed my phone number. I had blocked his previous number but he had changed it – the only thing to do was to change mine.
I think I was lucky. I had warnings. The people he contacted didn’t give him any information. I actually wasn’t in the Okanagan while he was looking for me there. And lastly, I don’t think he was overtly looking for vengeance.
In the end, he was probably only looking for a place to hang his hat and was just running through a list of possibles. I don’t know how far down the list I was and it doesn’t matter.
But this event says a couple of things. One is that like the cat who keeps coming back, you never know when or where your old narcissist is going to materialise. Which reminds me – be sure to keep careful track of your online presence. That’s how Harry had firstly attempted to find me again – through an online reference. When it comes to the internet, you can’t be too cautious.
And the other is that you should never leave home without your camera. Who knows; you might need to photograph the Aurora Borealis.
An ice foggy morning.
The ice fog disappears.
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