"Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith".

It's from 1 Peter. Quoted because I've been wondering for a while why "stedfast." (and not because I'm sermonizing.) It was topical today given the state of things in the cell block, and I was thinking about it. It's a passage that begins Compline every night in my prayer book.

Old English is Stedefaest. Run the A&E together. And it has to do with standing fast. Where 'stede' means place (like a homestead). And faest meaning 'fixed firmly in place'. So stedfast or steadfast, I can't find any explanation why one is better than the other, sounds pretty solid.

This week I reread Kingsley Amis - Stanley and the Women. One of my books that came up on the barge.

While I was reading, I realized that the last time I read it, I had imagined the details differently. As in, the main characters lived in a different house. And I could slightly remember the other house I had put them in, when I read it before - it was on the other side of the road, and the tree that Stanley's mad son sits in was on a boulevard. But even after I remembered, I couldn't put them back in the original house. Maybe this is just something that happens as time passes - characters in books get bored with their surroundings and move house.

It's a New Year.

The phone was ringing in the other room, this morning. I woke up and thought, why aren't I at work? We were out late, karaoke and some homemade salmonberry liqueur that I could still taste. Not an unpleasant feeling, necessarily, but I was a little groggy.

On the phone was the young man in the guard room. He said to me, in a tone of voice I'm sure I've exhibited before in similar circumstances,"I've been here for 11 hours and they've been screaming and throwing up all night. I've called everyone on the guard list and nobody can come." I told him I'd be right there.

So I spent my New Year's Day watching people sleep off their parties. None of them knew where they were when they woke up, either.

As a side note, if you are ever incarcerated for public drunkenness, please refrain from throwing up in the cell sink. Somebody has to clean that up, you know.

Well. Christmas was quiet here, except for the dull roar of the Xbox360 that Ian and I purchased on our little trip... Now I'm just enjoying the relative quiet of work in a week where most folks are off. I got Christmas Day and Boxing Day off (something that never happened in my years of retail) and I will get New Year's Day off next week. So two nicely broken up weeks, and no school and no Beavers and no School Board and no hockey and lots of chocolate.

Patti lent me Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, because she was surprised I'd never read it. Karen gave me Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, for Christmas, for the same reason. Both good, in very different ways. But not Karen and Patti can't agree on who gets to read Barbara next. Although since Karen just went off on a cruise to the Caribbean, I'm thinking it'll be Pat.

Can't sleep tonight. My right foot and hand are acting up again. Stupid. Gonna go back to bed and try to wrap them in blankets until they stop hurting. If I'm tired enough this sometimes works.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned here that I hate Seinfeld. I don't have anything else to say about this, just sometimes I like to see it in print. And please know that if you like Seinfeld, you are entitled to your opinion. I won't even hold it against you. I think it must be a lack in me, somehow, rather than in Seinfeld fans. There's a gene I'm missing, maybe. Maybe it's the same one that lets people tell right from left, or makes them think it's a good idea to use the word "supposibly".

I have a tin of Quality Street. Residents of this house keep taking the lid off it and then dropping all the chocolates on the floor.

and I miss Jazz at this time of year. No-one's eating tinsel and throwing up on the rug, or stealing candy canes and crunching them behind the couch. I suppose the kids would do this if I asked, but it would hardly be the same.

Yup, this is noon. that's as much sun as we see right now. it doesn't really rise, but it's there. next week it won't be. there, I mean....

Ok. Because I read Delia's, this is my "Fifty things I love" list. They are in no particular order.

1. Coffee with real cream and lots of sugar.
2. Yams. Especially if they're in sushi.
3. The X-Files.
4. Nevil Shute. Or any other author with his laconic way.
5. Frogs.
6. Brie.
7. Waking up in the middle of the night with a revelation of some sort.
8. Dancing.
9. The Tragically Hip. In concert with me there dancing.
10. Lucy (my new niece).
11. Frozen blueberries with my cereal.
12. Noon in December in the Arctic. (picture to follow)
13. Driving the snowmobile too fast and listening to Justin Timberlake. Yes, they do go together.
14. The feeling of tiredness after a day of excellent skiing.
15. Scrabble.
16. Really short hair on men.
17. My job.
18. Long walks in the dark with someone to talk to.
19. London when it's raining and warm.
20. Ayya Khema.
21. Ecclesiastes. (1.9The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.)
22. Candles that don't smell like flowers.
23. Sandalwood.
24. Puppies that will sit on your lap.
25. Blackcurrant tea.
26. Singing. (not that I can, really, just that I enjoy it)
27. Hugs. Especially unexpected ones.
28. Paradise Valley behind Mount Temple.
29. Books that make me want to read them slower.
30. Old cemeteries.
31. Zombie movies.
32. REM and the Indigo Girls. This is cheating, it's two.
33. Knowing the answers.
34. Cooking for people.
35. Croissants. Especially in Paris. Heck, any food in Paris.
36. Going on trains.
37. Snorkeling in warm, warm water. (are there two l's? Snorkelling? Snork.)
38. Baths.
39. Laughing until I cry.
40. Leonard Cohen.
41. The feeling just after tequila hits your stomach at the start. (later is sometimes not so good.
42. Holding hands.
43. Smoking. (but no, I'm not.)
44. Talking all night.
45. Peonies.
45. (it's a tie) African Violets. Because they're fuzzy.
46. My blue sweater.
47. My grannie's cross. (and I'll probably not lose it, cos I had it tattooed on my ankle.)
48. Thai food.
49. Ian Rankin.
50. T.S. Eliot. For I have known them all already, known them all:—

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?




And if you have read this, consider yourself tagged... you're it. let's see your list :)

Miguel, before he left for Kugaaruk this week, told me that he'd made some chicken broth icecubes. I imagined that said icecubes would be handily stored in plastic bags in the freezer. I was a bit in awe of his domesticity (although the day I came home from work late at night and the upstairs of the house was a chicken-smelling sauna wasn't so pleasant).

Ian poured himself a pop at dinner time, then turned to me and said, "I don't know about these icecubes". I said to him, "what's wrong with them?" He replied, "they look as if someone wasn't paying attention when they made them." I said, "Your dad made chicken broth cubes, I suppose those could be them. Did you pour pop on them?" He said, "Oh, ick."

I'm feeling a bit better than when I wrote my last entry. But I'm tired. The Beaver/Cub Christmas party was tonight and I had the craft table. We made angels with doily wings. Last year I tried God's Eyes with them (you know - you do the cross with popsicle sticks and then wrap different coloured wool around) but most of the kids just made blobs on sticks. At least with the angels it's kind of obvious - that's an arm, that's a head. There's a very small boy who reminds me a lot of Ian when he was little. He's really too young for Beavers but his big sister goes. He's three and a half, and he has that sort of translucent skin and big sticky out ears. He's gotten braver, since September, and today he was working on his angel and talking away to me, it was very sweet. At first when his mum dropped him off at Beavers and went to her yoga class, he would just sit on the window ledge with tears welling up in his eyes and watch us mournfully. He made a great angel, then glued one googly eye in the middle of its forehead and fell about laughing.

I'm going to bed. I had both trouble sleeping last night and trouble getting out of bed this morning. I was still awake I think at three. Then the alarm went off at 6:45 and I told it to fuck off and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, and this is the problem whenever Miguel goes away - he's actually away quite a bit as he's in charge of five or six communities in the region and all are fly-in communities - he's the one who gets up in the morning. He gets up, makes coffee, turns on the pellet stove, plugs in the car, putters around upstairs for a while and then brings me coffee at 7:30 so that I consider getting up. This morning I was still lying in bed at 8:10 and I'm supposed to be at work at 8:30. I walked in breathless at 8:35, hoping there was no-one there, but unfortunately we had folk in cells and the day guard hadn't come so they were all waiting for me...

I don't know. I've been keeping an online diary for almost ten years now, I started some time back in 1999 with Diaryland, but increasingly lately I can't really think of much to say. The feelings of wanting to project myself out there are not strong any more. I really needed a place to put my feelings when nobody would listen to them, but now I have quite good friends and I'm not spending my evenings surfing the net and emailing people. I barely respond to emails. I rarely send emails. I don't phone people, either. But then I never really was very good at that.

Also, on something of a unrelated note, I've decided that I don't want to feel guilty about things any more. I've done things wrong in my life, yes. I will probably continue to do things wrong. If I continue to feel guilty, though, I lay myself open to the possibility of being manipulated. Some in my life now and before, do not feel guilty. Why should I? I owe nothing. I have better things to do.

yesterday when I was cleaning my bedroom, and I was rearranging things on top of the dresser, I realized I could hear a voice. I poked my head around the corner into Miguel's painting room and found that the radio was on, playing Mozart. No voice there. I went and opened all the drawers in the dresser, to see if someone had secreted something in the drawers, a walkie talkie or whatever. The voice went on. It sounded serious. I couldn't quite catch what it was talking about, but it was a male voice.

I moved back into the bedroom and sat on the bed. It occurred to me that perhaps this was it - I was losing my mind. I wondered if I should try to concentrate on what the voice was saying, or should I maybe ignore it. I put my hand in my pocket to get a Halls and found my IPod. It was on. I must have jostled it and turned it on, and it was playing an interview with a Holocaust scholar that I had been listening to earlier...

So, not insane quite yet. Phew.

We have cold. It's minus 40 and foggy today. brrr.

It's my birthday. I'm plus 40 today.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the party my friends had for me last night: they invited everyone I work with and all their significant others, plus other friends and I think it's the first time I've had a birthday party in a lot of years. More than 20, I'm sure. It was funny, Bryan Adams was on the stereo for a while, and one of the guests said she had taken her two boys to one of his concerts when they were living in Ontario. I said, he was the first concert I went to, in I think 1983. A young girl sitting opposite me said, "Boy, he must be old - I wasn't even alive in 1983". Sigh.

Miguel made me a cake - cheesecake, mmmm. The kids brought me breakfast in bed this morning, but I unwisely turned my back on half my bagel and Joeby ate it.

I went to church this morning, and I think that if the minister who is visiting at the moment decides to come and be the regular minister I will have to go back to my solitary practices because he is exceeeeeeedingly sexist and generally belligerent, and I don't think I can bear any more. He's leaving next weekend, so I won't have to go to any more of his services in the next little while, but he's muttering darkly about coming back. I don't really want to go into it, because it's all too silly, but he's managed to offend just about all the members of our little assorted "Anglican" congregation (it's the north, this is only one of three churches in town - Catholic and Glad Tidings are the other two, so we have all the non-Catholics and non-Holy Rollers by default - we have a couple of Mennonites, some United Church folk, one lady who is I think a Baptist, and three of four actual Anglicans including me).

This afternoon I am doing nothing. I think Miguel's parents are coming for dinner, but at the moment Ian and Rachel are at Cadets, Kirsten's cleaning her room and Miguel's downstairs painting, and I am sitting listening to the wind.

I know I've talked about this before. We played Trivial Pursuit tonight, the kids and I. Miguel is sick (he has a man-cold, which as we all know are much more debilitating than girly-colds) and was in bed.

Anyway. Did you know that the person who spent the longest time in jail after Watergate was Nelson Mandela? Or that the tennis player called SuperBrat was Marilyn Monroe? This last was my fault, because Ian was losing so I was mouthing "John MacEnroe" at him but he didn't quite get it. I liked some of the clues Kirsten gave him - the question was "Who made a boat out of gopher-wood?" and when he drew a blank she said to him, "He wasn't married to Joan of Arc..." and Ian got it.

And. As I said before, sometimes the explaining just gets too tedious. What was Watergate? I just said, "It's a long story."

Lucy is home safe with her mom and dad. Things are good.

It's Halloween. I had lots of candy, but the third group of trick-or-treaters let themselves into the porch and stole most of it. I walked in just in time to see them putting the bowl back on the freezer mostly empty. However, we haven't had many kids knocking on the door, and I don't really need to eat it myself, so - oh well.

my baby niece's name is now officially - Lucia Skylar, Lucy for short. And she's doing better, they're going to move her out of the NICU soon, she's sucking her thumb and cuddling with her mom. Thanks to those who prayed...

So on Friday, my brother and his wife had their first baby. Which makes me an aunt, for the first time. The baby is a little girl, and first reports on Friday, when my brother phoned me at work, were that everyone was happy and healthy. All according to plan.

What wasn't expected, yesterday morning, was the call from my mother, saying that the as-yet-unnamed baby girl had had a seizure and been taken to the intensive care unit. Later calls revealed that she had suffered two strokes, and her left arm had a residual twitch. My mum was a wreck, and I called her a couple of times yesterday to make sure she was ok.

This morning Mum called again, to say that she had spoken to my sister-in-law's mother (baby's other gramma) and that she had been told that they don't expect Sweetpea (that's what they're calling her at the hospital, given that her parents haven't been able to agree on a name) to have any more strokes, and that they're not sure whether the aftereffects will be lasting or not.

So, if you have a little bit of room in your prayers, there's a tiny Sweetpea in Calgary that needs all the prayers she can get...

The bay is freezing up...

Miguel built me a shelf for my singing bowl and candles. The cross in the picture underneath is at Eyam, a plague village near where I was born, in England. The stained glass window is in the Anglican church in downtown Melbourne.

A few years ago, Miguel and I made this coffee table. Now it's sitting in front of our new stove, in the ground floor of the house. The coffee cup is mine, I have not moved it. I am, in fact, still a terrible housekeeper.

All our stuff is here!

It was on the barge I could see from my window last weekend, and we went down to fetch everything out of the large wooden box it came in, on Tuesday. In the middle of a howling blizzard. Miguel wasn't tremendously impressed that we felt we couldn't wait until the wind dropped a bit and we wouldn't be stung with driving snow, but it felt like we'd waited long enough.

After everything was unpacked, we had three casualties. One mug of mine, that I quite liked, a jug I didn't feel very precious about, and Kirsten's favourite ornament. The box containing my good china was all lopsided and battered looking, but when I opened it up, the dishes had just moved over to one side of the box, and were unharmed. My friend who has been here about 8 years says it's making her want to get her stuff out of storage in Saskatchewan.

Now, all my pictures are up, my desk is sitting in the living room, and the books are happily in the bookcase. I had people over last night, and I was able to put chips out in the wooden bowl I got for an engagement present, and salami on my glass tray with cherries. It's funny, but the things I missed were little - my tiny green tea cups, my singing bowl, my Spanish shawl, my great-grandmother's bible. I got up in the middle of the night last night, and had juice in one of my little tea cups. Just because I could.

One of the reasons I cherish my IPod is that I can download podcasts of CBC and BBC radio, to listen to while I'm cleaning, at work. Today I was listening to Anne Lamott being interviewed on CBC, and she said something that I ran to write down (in my dispatch book, because it was on my desk, hopefully nobody will need that page for a file)
"The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty."
So I've been thinking about that, today.

I've finally ordered a Book of Hours, to use all by myself. I've got a bunch of printed out stuff stuck in a book, but I've been craving a real book. Eventually I want to make my own, but I think that is a project that will have to wait... I've been practicing calligraphy but it's still very slow. And I find that my mind wanders and I lose my place. More concentration is needed. The story of my life.

The cadets have gone 'camping'. I say that because the cadet rescue phone tree has been activated, I got a call about an hour ago saying that the weather has turned, the wind's getting up, and they want us to go fetch them back.

Also, out my window, I can see a barge at the dock!!!! I'm really hoping all my lovely books are on it, and that they didn't get all wet and freeze on their long Arctic Ocean voyage. I'll let you know how that turns out.

My dad had cardioversion this week, they put him under again and shocked his heart, and it went back to normal rhythm and stopped being in atrial fibrillation, which it has been since his operation.