New Death Defying Adventures In the Canadian Wild And Other Stories

You will not believe what happened next. No, seriously, you will. It’s nothing special. But I thought, a little sensationalism wouldn’t hurt, after the decades we haven’t given a sign of life. After the great flood came and went. After the blizzard buried us in three snow flakes or four. After wild animals have taken over our habitat. After the days have turned to nights and the weekends to mere Sundays. Are you still following?

Done. That’s it. That’s all I have. Because the days are a bit uniform recently. We get up in the morning, after a more or less quiet night, more or less well rested. We look at a few beautiful photos our lovely neighbors sent over during the night, and drool over how much their kids have grown and how beautiful snow is and so on. If I’m lucky and we haven’t overslept, I get a few minutes of quality time with Albert while I get him ready for the day. Agnieszka makes breakfast. In a box for me, which I take to work and eat in front of my screen, in lovely twilight. The two of them go on to lengthy walks and send a few beautiful photos back to our neighbors, so that they have something to drool over before they go to bed. Come Sunday, we go for walks together. Because, you know. My Saturdays are reserved for people who make a heap of money by not knowing what they want, why they want it and, especially, can’t understand why WE don’t know what they want, either.

Anyway. Here be pictures. Starting off around the Lost Lagoon. (It’s not lost, really. We found it long ago.)

The way to and around the lagoon has suffered somewhat from the recent frequent rains. Small brooks are suddenly rivers, benches have seemingly retreated to the middle of the lake and it’s getting a bit adventurous to walk our usual route. It’s usually closed from one end, but when we went the other way around last weekend, they probably figured ‘Nobody’s crazy enough to try to cross this puddle’. But we are, of course. Also we have good shoes. So I didn’t even get wet feet. Notice how I said ‘I’? Well, Agnieszka got wet feet. But I had Albert strapped to my chest, so I was more important for once. 🙂

Also, because it’s gotten quite cold, we had days where it was quite the winter wonderland! (For reasons I will tell you later, you might end up seeing some of these again soon… but that doesn’t put you off, does it?)

Hahahahaha. Frozen fish.

I’m only kidding. They’re fine. Really, they’re still moving. Don’t worry.

I always thought that bridge could be straight from the Lord of the Rings. And in this light, AND with two Hobbits on it? Pure magic.

Next stop: the playground and English Bay.

Please also enjoy this storm selfie where we all look particularly striking.

That night, we went to the other side of our little peninsula, because we wanted to see some of the Christmas highlights. Gaga found a list online, with awesome Christmas trees and awesome gingerbread exhibitions and awesome everything. We were a bit late (Daddy had to spend some extra time on the beach in the storm), so we saw only part of what we wanted to see. But, uhm, a Christmas tree wasn’t part of it. Unless, of course, you count a five meter tall plastic structure with lights and bling bling stuck on it. Do you? Neither did we.

Okay, let’s play a not-so-funny-and-only-half-interesting game of ‘connect the dots’. This is the overgrown building, and the tree that cast a shadow on it, blocking out the Indian Summer found in this older post. Question to the photo nerds about the star around the street lamp: is it one streak per aperture blade?

Are y’all paying attention? Not too long ago, I shot very different photos of these houses, as they were dressed up for Halloween. Whoever lives there certainly takes these things very, very seriously.

This, believe it or not, is the very same moon you will find in the last picture of this blog post. And uh… okay, enough of the dots-connecting business. Over to the gingerbread houses. We were joking with Lena about crazy gingerbread architecture recently. Turns out, other people don’t just joke about that.

We-ell. This one’s slightly racist, though, innit? At least, they didn’t give Santa a healthy brown tan. That would just have been too much. Oh, and then there’s this… just to make us feel better about our modest but recognizable gingerbread houses:

Wait, what? What IS that? And do we even want to know??

It’s been a while, so: moonshine selfie where we all look… I don’t even know how.

Another highlight from the list: the Lights of Hope. A hospital. Every star is a big donation. Don’t know the rest of the story. But hey: blingbling! (Nah, this is quite nice, actually.)

Completely unrelated but so cute, here’s a few images of Albert.

That’s his favorite book. It shows images on one side and the related sound on the other. Albert can play it both ways: he can make the sounds to many of the images in the book, and FIND the pictures when we make their sounds or say their names. Like… horse (tongue-clicking and mouth-farting), lion (roaaaar), dog (hau hau), cat (maaaa), goose, duck, police/fire brigade, car/tractor/plane/combine/dish washer/microwave (brooom), pain (aua aua), kiss (smooch), monkey, stink (bleh), sheep and goat, water/fountain/drink, cow/ladybug (yeah, they apparently make the same noise… well, they both have dots, so that makes sense), wall socket, silence (no sound but a finger on the mouth), diaper (wrahwrah), pigeon (grrrrrruuuu) and, of course, food. (Happa happa.) He’s crazy good at communicating.

I cut his hair, by the way. Before:

Mad professor evil genius look. Especially with the rest of dinner still smeared all over his face.

Way more serious. We could almost take him out to MORE dinner sometimes. 🙂

I think I used up most of our recent photos pool now. Let me end with a picture of of a sunset (we get so many of them), a picture of a mistletoe (they are everywhere, you really have to look out who you’re walking around with) and a picture of the moon, as seen from our apartment. Because I said so. Good night, you!