Private Lake Skate

The population of this town we are in is about 110 thousand people. And it is surrounded by even bigger towns. Yet apparently none of this vast multitude, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, thought to check how the skating was on the Carruthers Creek pond --- except Grandma.

The skating (a bit to my surprise) turned out to be pretty great.

And we had the entire expanse to ourselves!

And here are more pictures, should you want to look further into this phenomenon. Oh, and here's a video, too:



There's another video also, if you haven't had enough.

We went to check out Ajax's winterfest today. Not the biggest event in the world, but it was something.

There were horse drawn wagon rides. I found it amusing to watch the noble beasts pulling loads of suburban folks past walls of suburban landscape. The horses didn't care. And the kids liked it. They are in the wagon, with mom, here pictured (near the front).

Ice painting was a neat idea; though by the time we got to it the ice was pretty well already covered, and there wasn't much paint left. What paint we had then quickly started to freeze up in the cup. No matter, the bristles on the paint soaked paintbrushes were pretty completely frozen solid already also.

But the funniest thing of all was that for some unknown reason the people in charge of the skating rink decided not to flood the thing the night before, so the winterfest ice was unskatable. Behind the empty ice rink you see the DJ stage. The DJ dutifully (stuffed in his parka) pumped out tunes all afternoon... to the desolate rink.

Besides this, and other things, there was an impressive array of bouncy castles. Istra went in one, but came back out in surprisingly short time. You see, you have to take off your footwear to go into bouncy castles. Istra said her feet were freezing. Inside the community center there was a craft area for the kids. The craft of the day was mounted snowflakes. For some reason both Istra and Emeth refused to do crafts, so we just sat in the library there and read a few stories to warm up.

There was also a little "lumberjack" show, with axes and chain saws. It turned out that where we ended up watching was exactly where when the guy came to do the chainsaw carving -- making those little chainsawed chairs out of a log -- he had his back to us. So for the chainsaw carving we mostly saw a bunch of buffalo plaid, with sawdust whirling out around it.

It was all good though. We stopped and got some crunchy cheese snacks on the way home.

(Click the link in the first sentence for a few more pics, if desired.)

Back to the Christmas, Part 1

Stollen

First Christmas this year was something a bit different. Bright and early, we packed up our traditional Christmas stollen, and the kids, and headed downtown to Anne's place for Christmas morning. Gramma had slept over there.

After opening presents, and brunching up on pizza omelets and garlic bread, we walked over to the skating rink. Both kids were enthusiastic this year about trying to skate. And both did really well, for really their first time seriously attempting it. Istra particularly, with her exciting new second hand skates, just did not want to stop. We went around, and around, and around, and around, and around, and around the rink. She even skated a little bit on her own. It was actually pretty fun (and not as entirely crowded as I feared it was going to be). 

You can see all the pictures here.

Stollen note: Selena tried to health up the stollen this year. She used dried cherries rather candied/maraschino cherries; and some of the loaves were made with 50% whole wheat flour. I unexpectedly found I liked the whole wheat stollen better than the pure white. Perhaps it was pscyhological. As usual, of course, a simple lemon icing sugar topping was applied to all stollens.