Thursday, or Thereabouts - October 30, 2014

Trick or Treat - the 2014 Edition

Halloween 1987

In Canada, Halloween costumes have to be both fashionable and endurable. They have to fit over snow suits and galoshes. They have to maintain their integrity in some of the wildest winds and torrential rains. Last year it was rain and wind. What will it be this year? Snow suits according to the latest weather forecast. Tomorrow will be the coldest of the season so far with what I call "snain" - that snow-rain mix that splats faces and pumpkins. There's nothing quite like a Halloween in Canada!

In school way back when, there were no costume parades or parties but still there was no shortage of Halloween themed activities, from art and music to reading, writing and yes even arithmetic. A whole week of decorations, singing, stories and math problems featuring ghosts, goblins, witches and jack-o-lanterns. It was fun and a great run up for the big night.

Honestly, I would have been horrified if I had to wear my costume IN THE DAYLIGHT, IN SCHOOL! That would have been enough to bring on a sore tummy on the morning before school for sure. My preferred characters for Trick or Treating were pirates, gypsies and tramps (no thieves - lol), and the outfits were hobbled together from stuff in the house an hour or so before heading out. The one exception was the very special year my parents bought me a pirate costume. Dad made the eye patch. My Mom was not a seamstress, but she did know a thing or two about makeup. There was an awful lot she could do with a burnt cork, baby powder and red lipstick. She also had that big jar of cold cream for getting all the stuff off afterwards.

My mother's speciality at Halloween, at any time actually, was conjured up in the kitchen. Beyond the orange and black wrapped candies, apples, peanuts in the shell and packages of sunflower seeds, many of the treats were homemade and every kid knew which house in the neighbourhood had the best ones. For years, our house was #1. Mom made popcorn balls, rounds of white popcorn held together by molasses syrup boiled to the hard crack stage. With buttered hands so the hot syrup didn't stick, Mom quickly assembled the hardball sized treats. The hot syrup always burned her hands no matter how fast she worked.

Gone now are such delectables, even the apples and peanuts are absent from the treat bag; there will be zombies and vampires out tomorrow night and probably lots of Princesses of Arendelle, but very few pirates and tramps. And it's been a very long time since I've heard anyone utter my childhood chant, "Shell out! Shell out! The witches are out!"

The 1990 Carving Fest

I've still got to carve the pumpkin and buy the treats but the resident canine is all set and ready to go.

(please note: I am neither the instigator nor the designer of canine couture. Our daughter is.)

Sophie the Snake Charmer, Halloween 2014

Happy Halloween! Be careful out there.

©2014 April Hoeller

Thursday, or Thereabouts - February 6, 2014

Enough Already!

How can something that was so wonderful and so celebrated just 8 weeks ago, be so annoying and downright tiresome now? Magnificent white landscapes that sparkled and amazed now evoke groans and curses, even from that most ardent lover of winter, me. It still is pretty in it's own way but my heart no longer burns with devotion. Another 18cm fell from the sky yesterday and I can't remember if I've ever seen this much snow on the ground since we moved here in 1978.

The view from my kitchen window Wednesday morning

After 20 minutes behind the snowblower

Deep, really deep.

But sunset is getting later...

Even Sophie looks disgusted

But here's what I thought of as I shovelled off the deck:

Sunday morning brekkie in June on that very same deck. 

Oh joy, oh bliss! 

All in good time, all in good time.

©2014 April Hoeller

Monday Moanings - June 24, 2013

Summer time and the living is...

I have grown into a summer time whiner. I don't like the bugs; I don't like the heat; and I really don't like the humidity. I don't like having to keep the shades drawn all day to keep out the sun. I don't like freezing in an over air conditioned shop then being suffocated in the outside air. Whine, Whine, Whine.

But here's the good news: more than the flowers and veggies, which I do appreciate and enjoy especially if someone else tends them, I really like, love in fact, a good summer time thunderstorm, a ring tailed snorter. Nothing can beat that noisy, flashy, splash of refreshment. This 2013 premiere spell of 'triple H' weather (hazy, hot and humid) holds the promise of a few good thunder boomers and I'm primed and ready.

As a kid I loved the summer. Happy days of wind in my face bike riding, and hot days cooled in the backyard pool made summer an absolute delight. We didn't have a heater so a pool freshly filled in June began at 16C (or less!) and crawled its way to a blistering 23 by mid August. Those were the days of Fahrenheit, so "Arthur" our pool thermometer actually registered 74. One banner year I recall ''Arthur' made it all the way to 78F. In the early part of the season, while Dad was at work, Mom and I added buckets of hot water to the pool. Dad came home, splashed his hand in the pool and announced, "It's warming up nicely!" Mom and I just smiled. It was our little secret.

I had another summer secret. I hated thunderstorms; mostly they scared the living day lights out of me, especially the night time ones. They lit up my bedroom, casting scary shadows across the walls. Worse than the lightning was the thunder. Those ear splitting, room shaking, gut vibrating booms were worse than my worst nightmare. I recall lying in my dark bedroom, hands cupped close to my ears. A flash of lightning gave life to the shadows and I began a countdown, my small voice quavering in the dark, "One and one thousand, two and one thousand, three and one thousand, four and one thousand..." until the crash of thunder stopped the count. Each group of four in the countdown, that is every four seconds, between lightning seen and thunder heard measured one mile of distance to the storm centre, or so my Dad the weatherman said. As the number of seconds between flash and bang decreased, fear increased - exponentially. I never cried out - at least not that I remember. I took it to be a badge of courage to make it through the storm (there's got to be a morning after?). Instead I counted and shuddered, and counted and moaned, and counted and whimpered, drenched in sweat under blankets and pillow. The end of the world was at hand.

Small vestiges of  these terrors of the night remain. In the dark bedtime hours, a low rumble in the distance rouses me. A flash of light dances around the room, confirming the source - a thunderstorm is coming - and the familiar countdown sequence so deeply imprinted on my being begins again. My gut clenches involuntarily in memory of stormy nights past. Most often I just roll over and fall back to sleep but every once in a while the storm is big enough, flashy enough, noisy enough to fully waken the old fear machine. I tug the pillow tightly around my ears, stretch out my leg until toes touch a sleeping husband for reassurance that I am not alone. In the darkness a whimper is heard. Surely not I? Hot panting breath hits my not quite buried face, then a cold nose nudges my cheek followed by a heavy paw on my arm. "Just thought you should know mummy," eighty pounds of hyper-vigilant canine warns, "the end of the world truly is at hand."

Thursday Thermals - April 11, 2013

I promised an update today on my serious 'bum in chair' writing and here it is: some 3000 more words have  made it onto paper since Monday afternoon, for a total of 17,517 since January 20th (see Monday Moanings - April 8). Woo hoo! This is especially gratifying as for some reason I chose to focus on my mother's last months on this earth for this part of the memoir, and the weather here in my part of the world has been nothing short of miserable - enough to suck back the ink in any pen.

Spring has been pretty much a non-starter this year, reluctant would be a generous description. My current 'forecast' is that this season of promise will amount to the two or three days between the furnace going off and the air conditioner coming on. You heard it here first!

I confess to being somewhat of a weather geek. First thing every morning after a passing glance at the outdoor thermometer, I fling open the drapes and scan the sky, then it's over to my PC for a check of the weather radar and forecasts (multiple sources). I love a good thunderstorm and marvel at its development in the clouds. It's in my genes.

My Dad, Bev Cudbird, was a weatherman, a meteorologist with Environment Canada until retirement and then the staff meteorologist for radio station CFRB from the late seventies to the early 1980's. I like to think he pioneered that media role. Of course radio has some definite advantages over TV; presenters don't have to worry about what they're wearing, and as in my Dad's case, one doesn't even have to be in the studio. Most of Dad's broadcasts came from the upstairs den in my parents' condo in Etobicoke. If you listened carefully to some of those broadcasts you could hear the chattering of the two teletype machines that spewed out the latest observations and forecasts on reams of newsprint paper.

For Dad there was no room for moaning and groaning about the weather, though there was plenty of room  to chastise forecasters for spending so much time peering at radar and studying forecast models, that they forgot to look out the window. I can see him now, tearing off a sheet from the teletype, looking at the latest official forecast, ripping it in two and yelling, "Look out the goddam window!"

He would take a day like today with its snow, cold and ice pellets and tell us how good this is for soil moisture and lake levels, how good this is for food crops - bright green peas, long orange carrots and later in the season, bright red tomatoes, warm from the garden. So that's how I'm going to look at today - a luscious tomato in the making!

Thanks Dad!