Merry Christmas or Happy Whatever Works Best for You

I has a vision for a Christmas card, but it was not to be this year. I envisioned taking Sue out to pretend to hang decorations on a snowy bough in the park. But it has been rather green here for the most part.

So this is it, I'm afraid.

It is most certainly not my best card ever and not even the best of this series, which I have shown here previously. But it is red, and red goes with Christmas more than any other colour IMO.

I used that photo in the Christmas card and letter than I emailed yesterday. I usually keep my Christmas wishes brief, but given the year that we've been through, I found myself rambling on and on and on this time.

Of course, I will spare you that long rehash since I gathered my material and thoughts from my blog posts of the past year, and most of you have read them. It was good to jog my memory like that. I always seem to need a little nudge for my memory to kick in. Once I am nudged, however, I do remember without having to actually re-read an entire post.

This probably won't be my final pre-Christmas post, but I wanted to get it out there before we got too close to the day.

So ... Merry Christmas to you. My particular season is Christmas, and so that is how I say it, but I am not offended by any form of seasonal greeting, so please insert whatever works for you. I mean well by my greeting and wish you well over the holiday and beyond.

No More Turkey for Us

Do we get marks for trying? E for effort if not excellence?

Yes, we do try and try again as the saying goes. But don't expect us to try again again, if you follow. No! One again is enough.

You may recall that we were less than enthused about our Thanksgiving turkey dinner ordered from a local hotel. It was expensive enough, and we didn't much care for it.

Being slow on the uptake, I suggested that we order two servings of the Christmas dinner offered by a local service club. Well, bless their hearts for trying, but it wasn't very good with thin, runny gravy, lumpy potatoes, and hard carrots.

The stuffing wasn't bad, and the meal was not terribly expensive, and considering that they were amateurs, I am not really complaining, 

What I am doing, however, is saying that we won't do it again. 

It doesn't work. Perhaps our past, home cooked, turkey dinners were just too good by comparison. Also, turkey dinner, whether for Thanksgiving or Christmas is meant to be a family feast. Turkey for two just isn't right.

That is a double strike if you will: poor fare plus missing family.

The meal came warm although we still needed to nuke it a bit..

I could tell that I wouldn't like the carrots, which pretty well have to be roasted into some blackness for my taste, so I didn't even put them on my plate. Sue tried them and didn't like them at all.

So, no more ordering turkey dinner. After all, we have our own butterball.

After dinner, we did reclaim some of our annual Christmas experience by watching the old, Alastair Sim's version of A Christmas Carol. We have watched this faithfully for decades. 

Later this week, we will watch the George C Scott version.

The only other movie that we will be almost sure to watch is White Christmas although in this house, we tend to watch it closer to New Years.

A Fitting End to 2020

This has been our Christmas tree since 2005 when we first moved to the Ottawa Valley. It's a small, pre-lit, fibre optic tree that does its job without taking up much room in our smallish place.

However, it hasn't quite made it through its 16th season, which seems like a fitting end to 2020. It had a good start, but then some wires burnt out. Perhaps someone can salvage it at some point, but I am afraid that we will need to go through the rest of the season treeless.

Fortunately, we have many other decorations that you have see here and here (and there are more), so we are not bereft of Christmas cheer.

It is somewhat fortuitous that I took the above photo because I have never photographed the tree seriously before. In actual fact, this is handheld, so not as serious as it could be either. But I think it came out well enough.

At the same time, I also shot a little video. Once again, I was lazy and didn't use a tripod, but it is what it is. In the background the rotating light in the porch is also active.

A Thrill and a Letdown

Shauna dropped by on Wednesday after work to show us her sparkling new Honda CRV. It was still afternoon, but we are very near the solstice, so the dark comes early and lasts long, and, therfore, the pics are lacking.

How exciting for her, but how disappointing the next morning when she had trouble starting it.

It has been very cold which plays havoc on car batteries. Our 11 year old CRV has been kicking up a bit of fuss when trying to start it in the past few days. The neighbour has had issues with her car and a friend with his.

This is a typical winter pattern, but one doesn't expect it in a brand new $6mln (or almost) vehicle, especially not in a Honda. We are on our second CRV, and the first might still have been running if it hadn't been for a significant mishap. The second one we bought used, and it is perking along pretty well in its 11th year.

Apparently, Shauna's woes have something to do with the fob and not the battery. I don't know about these things as ours still starts with an old-fashioned key. Can you imagine? It's like I come from 1947 or something.

Fairy Tree

Fairy Tree, or would you prefer faerie tree? I am adaptable, and you can have it as you like it. 

I didn't see it, but Sue did after we had walked on the bridge that you see in the background in order to take the historical plaque photos that I posted here, yesterday.

Surprisingly, the faerie parts are not buried in snow in mid-December.

Someone derived some pleasure from doing this as we did from seeing it. I wonder how many people have actually noticed it. 

The Plaque has been Installed

I had never quite forgotten about the proposed plaque over the past two-and-a-half years, but I had certainly pushed it to the back of my mind.

But just a few days ago, the following photo appeared on one of our community fb pages -- the curator of our museum posing with an historical plaque about the bridge on which it is displayed.

The main photo on the plaque (see below) shows a photographer standing on the bridge taking a photo looking upriver toward downtown. As you can plainly see, it was a railway bridge and was used as such for more than one hundred years and was still used by trains for a few years after we moved here in 2005.

If you choose to click on the following image, it should expand enough so that you can read the description. Among other information, we learn that the base photo was taken in 1905 by a photographer who photographed another photographer taking a photo looking upriver toward town hall. The person who took the photo also shot wide enough to also capture the full scene. I love it. Maybe I should replicate the photo someday.

Back in 2018, the museum curator asked if I would scan the original photo. She already had it in mind to have this plaque made, but she just had a print and would need it scanned in order to make the display. It was a long image which wouldn't fit in my little scanner, so I scanned it in two parts and then put the two halves back together using modern software.

I thought that the photo possibly was not originally sepia but just faded from b&w, so I did some conversion and also cleaned up the image a little although the original is certainly an absolute treasure.

Finally two-and-a-half years later, I was looking at this finished product on fb.

Of course, I had to visit the display in person and asked Sue to take this photo.

I wish that someone had thought to colour correct the inset photo of a train on the bridge. It has a blue tone which doesn't fit with the rest of the plaque, and that gnaws at my photographic sensibilities (said half jokingly and half not). 

Back in 2018, I had done a number of scans for the 200th anniversary calendar for 2019 and used the same photo with that colour cast removed. 

In that calendar, for every month we juxtaposed a photo from the past with one of the present. In this case, the bridge is now part of a recreational trail that wends its way through several counties. On the day that I took the modern photo, we gathered several people who were affiliated with the museum and had them walk along the bridge. The composite depicts past and present use: a train of the past and pedestrians of the present. But you can see that this version of the old train photo does not have that blue cast.

I will leave you with another image from the calendar, this one from the main bridge looking downriver back toward the same railway bridge as above, which is faintly visible in the distance. There was quite a change in land use along the riverbanks over the century or so that separated the two photos.

I enjoyed doing the work of designing the calendar and am now pleased to see that the historical plaque has seen the light of day. In particular, I love the convergence of a modern photographer in 2018 editing a photo by a photographer who himself (likely a he) photographed a photographer way back in 1905. As I mentioned above, it now occurs to me to replicate the photo in the present, but on a very frigid day like today, I will shove the thought to the back of my mind for now.

My Photoshoot with Santa

I received a text from Bob Santa yesterday morning, asking if I could  take some photos of him in his full Christmas regalia. I knew that he would want me to use his camera, but I took mine along too and got a few shots of my own. Little did I know at the time that Santa is a twin.

First, we went to the Julie and Dancing Unicorns sign where Sue and I had recently posed. What a fine Santa whose beard is entirely his own!

But that was Santa Bob. His twin brother Santa Robert also showed up.

I managed to snag just one photo of the twin santas just to prove that I write the truth. However, I was never able to tell Bob Santa and Robert Santa apart.

We went to a few more spots as Santa was ... err Santas were ...  looking for the reindeer. It is important to keep track of their hooven whereabouts at this time of year and to make sure they are in flying shape for the big night that is impending.

Whether the reindeer were found or not remains Santa's ... err Santas' ... secret, but I did get another photo of one or t'other.

It is Santa (I can't tell which one, but the other twin was searching elsewhere) asking Roy Brown* if he might have seen the usually trusty steeds.

Soon, I lost track of him/them. I expect that the reindeer were found and something magical happened, for there's a special kind of thing that happens between santa(s) and reindeer at this time of year.

.

* Roy Brown was the Canadian pilot officially credited with shooting down the Red Baron. He was born and raised here in Carleton Place, and this statue was officially erected just last week. Someday, I will show you the whole setup, but this was all about Santa ... err the Santas.