I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. . .

It's SNOWING!!! We have had an unseasonable amount of snow for BC, but it is quite New York-esque--I love it! It has been snowing on and off for about a week--just when I started commuting to Bellingham, WA for work. There were a couple harry drives, but now I'm home through the holidays!

We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas!

Hobbies and Holidays

I turned 25 this year and felt so blessed by the friends and family that made it special! Some friends came over for the evening--our original plan was to go to a Christmas light show, but the weather was bad, so they surprised me with a cake and party hats!

On our way through Toronto in early December we visited Jon and Amber and they made a special meal and cake and we celebrated there too! Not captured on picture, but who still made me feel special--Andrew, he got up early to surprise me in the morning and blessed me with his thoughtfulness and generosity. Bob, Shiela and Grandma and us shared dinner on Thursday night and I talked with my family back in NY for awhile on Friday. I was reminded how loved I am and how God has blessed me so richly through these precious people.

Andrew and I found our first Christmas tree together. Actually, it's not really a tree. . .it's branches stuck in a 5 gallon bucket. We had long discussions about the pros and cons of real trees and decided we wanted a real one and we wanted to find it ourselves in a forest. We looked in a couple places with no luck, but Bob and Sheila came the to rescue and offered to prune their Scotch pine and give us the branches to solve our tree dilemma. A little fishing line and wire and the branches settled themselves into a nice tree shape. It has lights on it now, and we are quite pleased with the result!

I am an American and struggle with understanding Canadians' fascination with the sport of curling. (for my fellow US citizens, curling is like shuffle board played on ice--it's the game I always flip past when I'm looking for figure skating during the winter olympics). I live in Canada now, so I am doing my best to understand and participate in my new culture. Several of our friends here play in a league, so Andrew and I went to watch. I asked a lot of questions and I think by the end of the match (or whatever the event is called), I had a pretty good idea of how curling worked. So I took my new knowledge to the ice. Hmmm, not so successful. The way it is supposed to work is you kneel on the ice with one knee down and that food braced in the starting block. The other foot is on the ice on a "slider" which allows you to slip down the ice in a kneeling position, holding the rock out to the side (the rock is what you are going to send down the ice where it hopefully will land in the target or knock your opponent out of the target.) I thought it couldn't be that hard. . . I pushed out of the block and stopped about 3 feet later (you should be able to slide about 20 feet). To try to save my dignity it pushed the rock down the ice. . .and watched it barely clear half-court. My faithful friends and husband supported my efforts with roaring laughter and a second chance to entertain them. (As a reference, I didn't even slide to the nearest edge of the target.)
For those of you who know Andrew, you know that "Hobby" could be his middle name. Lately it has been bonsais--trees that are trained to remain small and are manipulated into beautiful shapes. The trick is finding a tree that looks old, or at least has a large-ish trunk with interesting twists and/or roots that can be exposed a little to help the shape flow. During our Christmas tree hunt, we found a little hemlock with lots of potential (and it was agreeable enough to grow in a spot where it was legal to take it). This is the tree when Andrew was almost done with the initial shaping--bonsai take years and years to reach their final shape.

One of his other hobbies is cheese making. We made a wheel of goat cheese in September with the intention of letting it age until we left for Nepal. We couldn't wait that long, so we tried it. Definitely goaty, but quite tasty!

This is the "before" picture.

Andrew contemplates his next move. . .

Guess who????

There's no real point to this post (besides reinforcing my new habit of frequent blogging). . .just a little fun playing on yearbookyourself.com. This is Andrew in 1970. I'm sporting my 1962 attire. I guess we can't laugh at our parents any more. . .we look just as silly!

As you can see, we are not the most frequent bloggers. Still, I was surprised to get on the blog and see that our honeymoon was the last post! Well, if anyone is still following us, you can catch up on the last chunk of our lives--we have great pre-New Years resolutions to be more consistent. Andrew's sister-in-law has taught us a thing or two about blogging--hers is updated daily with photos and videos of our 7 month old niece, Abigail. You won't be as interested in watching us sit or crawl or eat mashed bananas, but we can probably find enough stuff to keep our friends amused. :-) Here goes!!


Andrew and I came back east to speak at a couple churches and to spend US Thanksgiving with my family (dad,mom, two brothers, and a sister-in-law.) We drove down south where my brothers and cousins live. The thing to do around here on Thanksgiving is to get together with your neighbors and walk around the "hood" and, as Dan (my brother says), "eat donuts and feel good about ourselves." Here we are at the end of the walk doing just that.

I'm not very savvy with chronology on this thing yet. . . this is the "turkey trot" I mentioned above. The warm, sunny weather was a nice change from the cold, snowy north east and rainy, rainy northwest.

If you have to fly across the continent during the Thanksgiving holiday, it sure pays to fly through Canada because their Thanksgiving travel price hike ended a month ago. It is even better if you can stop and see family partway through the trip. We flew from BC to Toronto and spent a day playing with Abby (our niece) and hanging out with her parents. Andrew is coaxing her to crawl (her newest feat) by building a tower just outside her reach.

Prior to going to the east coast, we spent a weekend with our friends Paul and Lindsey at her parents' house in Washington. The creative placement of these pictures make the flow hard to follow, but what you see below is a snorkel stove. These stoves load from the top and have a special air vent that allows almost the entire stove to be submerged in water. The watering trough looking thing is really a watering trough cum hottub when mixed with a snorkel stove, garden hose, boat oars, and about 5 hours of heating time.

The hottub was our reward after a hard day of playing. We picked the remaining apples from the orchard and used some for conventional uses like pies, while others were used as. . .ummm. . . . . baseballs

Our friends' property. Beautiful!

Andrew's nature photography. These fall leaves are from his parents' backyard. I've really learned to appreciate the beauty of detail.

We had a ton of fun this autumn picking wild apples and making lots of cider, applesauce, and deserts. Andrew and his friend Dan got excited about making a cider press. The design wasn't completely successful, but we got almost 4 gallons of cider and a fun evening with friends.

The cider begins to flow into our optimistically-sized pale. So fresh and so tasty!!

This was not the original cider press idea, but we found that it was more effective at getting the most juice out of the pommace (I insisted it was pulp--what you get when you crush apples--but Andrew was right--the technical term is pommace. Thanks, Grandma for letting us commandeer your pillowcase!

The orginal design--very creative. Scrap wood, 4 ton hydraulic truck jack (the kind you use for changing flat tires), cheese cloth, and a little elbow grease.

Honeymooooon!

If you're looking for a great bed and breakfast in the wilderness of Pennsylvania, this is it! We spent the first two nights of our honeymoon here in this little cabin nestled in the woods.
This is Bamfield on Vancouver Island, part B of our honeymoon. We had a cabin on the boardwalk right on the edge of the harbor.
What did we do on our honeymoon??? Mushroom hunting!! As you can see we found the forest to be abundant with several kinds of edible mushrooms. Here we have winter chantrelles and "regular" chantrelles. (I apologized to Andrew for mucking up the blog with such generic lay terms :-)Andrew deciding which mushrooms to eat first. This was probably the hardest decision all week.

A view of the boardwalk as it passes through the town. Lots of foggy mornings in Bamfield!
Many people in Bamfield have the ocean for a front yard.
The center of town.We waited for a clear day to go kayaking and finally got one!! Our cabin is in the background. We paddled up the coast and through several inlets. We saw lots of sea life, birds, and even several bears poking around in the tidal pools. Andrew got a video of one of them.

Climbing Lady Peak

That is Cheam down to our left as we climbed Lady out in the Chilliwack valley area. Beautiful day!
The wild alpine flowers were out in all their splendour.
Indian Hellebore. In my early plant foraging days I once tried to convince my aunt that it was edible and to let me try it. It is deadly poisonous. Thank you Joy.
And the hikers.

The Wedding

Flying high with the Reiswigs

Paul, Lindsey, Colleen and myself borrowed a plane for part of the afternoon and went to Idaho. It was a super great day for a flight.
This is the cockpit of one of the planes that Paul flies for Empire. We visited the airshow at the Fairchild Airforce base and schemed our way into the cockpit so Paul could show us the dials, buttons and other bits and bobs.
Paul and I pulling the plane out onto the tarmac.

Colleen attempting to pilot our plane-she did a good job. (Don't let Andrew's face fool you--I had everything under control!)