Holidays

Let's see...

Last night Leah and I met after work and went to the Festival of Lights, in Kensington Market. This festival/parade is basically a pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Giant puppet-mask costumed actors stage various crazy scenes in the street, involving the cyclical life and death of summer and winter. Stilt walkers and fire-breathers do their respective things. And various shadow shows, costumed singers and paper-mache creations play out on rooftops and sidewalks. All of this is accompanied by the drumming of the crazy marching/dancing band that winds its way through the market.
We missed the grand finale in the park... Leah tells me that mostly it involves more drumming and the burning of giant effigies. Partly, this is a little too pagan for my liking, and partly it was freezing and I was hungry... so we went to Tastys and ate blue-cheese burgers.

The parade was fun - although it is a little scary when you overhear someone telling their kid that this is what Christmas is really all about. I am glad that we get to celebrate something a little more significant than the shortest day of the year.

After all of this, we went home and finished watching the Office. If you don't mind some pretty crass humour here and there (there are only one or two spots where they go way over the line), I highly recommend it. Hilarious, but with much more depth than anything I have seen on TV in a long time. (OK, so we haven't even had a TV for a long time, but trust me...)

In 4 hours I will be on Holiday.

Ouch

Today I burnt the mess out of my tongue whilst eating some delicious Tim Horton's turkey and rice soup.

Quick

This last weekend we were involved in a chaotic dinner event for new immigrants to Canada. Ironically (for me at least), we played the part of the Canadian hosts. It was fun.
Also, we had people over for dinner on Sunday, after church, to help us eat a lot of left over turkey.
For the rest of the weekend, we did dishes.

My silk-screened cards turned out OK, despite being a bit frustrating. It all comes down to having the right tool for the job - or in my case, never having the right tool for the job.

Also - The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom is a crazy book. I highly recommend.

I haven't decided if I fully recommend the TV show The Office (the BBC version - I have not seen any of the US version)... I will say that the few episodes that we watched last night were funny (and sort of not funny)

Happy Holidays

This is what it looked like waiting for the streetcar this morning...

Unfortunately, we are going to be quite busy the next few days, otherwise I'd be hitting up the giant hill at Cedarvale Park with some cardboard. Maybe if there is still snow everywhere on Sunday...

Some animal links...

Scientists discover what might be a new mammal - it is crazy that there are still things on earth that we haven't found yet.

Also, this guy creates some pretty neat things out of chairs and nikes.

December

So, three weeks until the holidays... I am looking forward to a week off. Somehow, 10 days of vacation a year seems a little unreasonable to be a socially acceptable and widely practiced norm.

We made a big breakfast this Saturday for 11 people... pancakes and fruit for everyone. It was just the warm-up for this coming weekend. Turkey for 10...