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. . .