Welcome Sights

Here's a couple of sights when you enter our house. Plastic moose, a skull stone, an owl-within-an-owl carving, some metal hitching piece, stone from Gody and Naomi's wedding and a castle on a cloud. And then there's our wedding rings, surrounded by wood knots (forever, you know). Right where we can see them, admire them, when our hands are covered in bread dough or are occupied by house and home tools.

And this, I believe, may be a colour palate for the outside of the sauna building come this spring. Steve thought that Hugo Bay should be the inspiration (seeing as we were standing there when we were talking about it) and we quickly found the stones and snippets of trees to match. Sauna is coming along beautifully--all insulated, pine tongue-and-groove verathaned, just need to complete the wood siding on the inside of the sauna walls. We also have a debate about light fixtures going on. Doesn't everyone have a debate about light fixtures? And doesn't "magical" always win? (It's my blog, after all.)

Shots of Fall

It's the type of weather that has people raking lawns, pruning trees into November. Here's a few shots from this weekend:

• Steve superimposed
• Evil Berries Wonderland
• Prairie Chicken Claw (Steve's shot...it was a good life)

Crunch and Moo

My sister is a baking elf. If she were to open a bakery café, she would have a large and faithful clientel, drawn back by her particular magic. Like Chocolat, but no full-skirted cutesiness. More like a pyjama-bottom and running-top production. Her baking vocabulary includes "handfuls", "I found some" and "it's got everything". I never know if she has a recipe nearby or if she really knows what makes a cake the right consistency or which ingredients keep cookies together.

This particular beauty was her own birthday cake creation: chocolate and peanut butter baked to "moo-i-ness" underneath a crunchy, almond-slivered top. No eggs, cause no eggs were in the house. She ate the top (smart girl) and formed the bottom into a fudgy likeness of London (with hyena-ish ears). We all sat around the kitchen table, followed her lead and left the forks in the drawer. Death by chocolate.

Qallupilluit

Qallupilluit: Female ocean creatures of Inuit legend created to keep children away from the cracks in the ice. The story goes that if a child comes too close to the cracks without their parents, the Qallupilluit will rise up from the waters and take the child to live with them forever on the ocean bottom.

Qallupilluit are short with cold blueish skin (according to Vladyana Krykorka's illustrations in Michael Kusugak and Robert Munsch's A Promise is a Promise). They wear parkas made of loon feathers and their wild hair is home to fish, crab and seaweed.

Michael Kusugak came to our school a couple of weeks ago and told stories in his singsong voice. Like Robert Munsch, he tells his stories to groups of kids over and over before he begins to write it down. He had our students hanging on his every word.

We read his story, A Promise is a Promise, soon after his visit. Once again, the kids were listening, slack-jawed. Their eyes were wide whenever the Qallupilliut spoke in voices that sounded like wind blowing over the ice. Just the right amount of creepiness for a lead-up to Halloween.

And the perfect idea for a Halloween costume. I love this holiday! Unfortunately, when I reused the feathers for my loon costume at the social the next night, things didn't go over as well. Lots of "What are you supposed to be?" and "That's abstract." I guess my skirt wasn't short enough.