Christmas with the Alway's - the Dogs

The Alway hounds really enjoyd Mom's present to them - rawhide bones.

Christmas with the Alway's - the Cats

This tabby cat is resting on Mom's Christmas pillow present. He really appreciates hand work.


This is a bug jar. No real bugs were harmed for the entertainment of these cats.

Christmas Eve

This is one of my favourite evenings all year. The longest night is past, the lights are lit, the tree is sparkling and the best food of the holiday is still ahead. Here in the Yukon a gentle snow has started to fall whch is just the icing on the cake for me. Joy to you all, eat and make merry.

"Erase"

I realized today when I was writing to someone for a new copy of something I'd deleted that the word 'erase' has fallen from my vocabulary. Delete has now almost compeltly replaced the synonamous erase... A teacher told me recently that children aren't even taught how to write in school now, only to print. Signs of age on my birthday...

Christmas Reading

When I was a child my father read the Lord of the Rings every Christmas. Each year he found something new. My own ambitions are shorter, perhaps indicative of the rushed pace of our modern world. The last few years I've read and re-read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence. Each of the five novellas are part of the same imaginary world, and each has at least one character from the other. The setting is an idealized England sometime in the early 1960s. THe books fall in that category of what used to be called Junior Fiction; the step between children's picture books and adult fiction. The joy of them to me is the immidate transportation into the world of the children who are the protaganists, I am with them as they adventure and discover with the collusion of a few of the in the know adults.


What do you read at Christmas?

The Proposition Parka

For some reason the new to me parka I picked up at a yard sale this spring is a bit of a magnet for the gentlemen of Whitehorse. Last weekend I was at a quilting retreat with my dear husband. We were late leaving and he was bringing out some of the last boxes. I saw a pair of legs and called out; "honey did you bring all the boxes?" When the person attached to the legs came into view I realized at once my error; "You're not my husband". His reply? "You wanna give it a whirl?"

Then on Thursday I was walking along Main Street and stopped to wait for the light to change. The fellow waiting for the light beside me glanced over and asked; "can I buy to a beer" while nodding at the Town and Mountain lounge. I laughed and politely refused.

There is something about that parka I tell you...

Bohemian Waxwings

One of the wonderful things about late fall (really early winter) here in Yukon is when the bohemian waxwings descend on a tree near you and beak off about how amazing the berries are. Within moments the tree is stripped of berries and the birds are off. They arrived in our yard yesterday. For photo purposes it would be nice if the sun would come out, but it hasn't for weeks. Hence a dimly grey world.