Seymour's Solution

To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake it is necessary to stand out in the cold. –Aristotle

We got our first major snowfalls this past week on Vancouver Island. It started gently on Tuesday morning, which then turned into a not-so-gentle wind/snow/sleet storm. This is what it looked like on Tuesday morning before it got ugly:

Seymour's solution was to react thusly:

We don't experience the extra frigid temperatures that the rest of the country faces in the winter, but we find that with the trees around the house the sun doesn't come through many of the windows to warm the place up very quickly. It's the time of year when we decide to use the fireplace to get the temperature up to comfortable in the house:

It's also helpful to use the oven for cooking, so I started baking this weekend. I made a batch of gluten and dairy free brownies:

And then I made some rosemary foccacia bread:

And today I made some cranberry bliss bars and started decorating the brownies. These are treats for my workmates. I tend to make waaaaay to many of these things so that they end up living in my house until January, but I suppose that is not such a bad problem to have:

Doing all of this baking means I haven't made much progress with my knitting project this week. I also work part-time for my friend managing his snow removal contracts, so you can imagine that this week has been kinda hectic on top of my regular job. I have taken some of the quiter moments to sit by the window and work on my Christmas cards. I've learned that it's best to work on them in short bursts so that I don't get too sick of doing the same things over and over. It was lovely and calming to sit by the window and clean up edges while the snow fell outside:

After a couple of days with a white paint pen and some ink, I finished a whole bunch of them. These are the two main designs. I'm quite happy with how they turned out:

In my other spare moments, I changed the batteries in some of my string lights and got the mantlepiece all lit up. It's about as festive as this house gets for decorations, but I love it:

Meanwhile, Seymour is working on his wintertime napping. It's coming along very well, I think:

I feel uncharacteristically settled for this time of year. I felt the rush and anxiety of the end of the November last week, what with the snow storm and the chaos that came from it. Tonight, I feel this sense of acceptance of things that I've been feeling over and over this past year. I think I'm starting to learn that things are sometimes hard, no matter how hard I try to prevent the difficult times, but somehow I always get through it. Maybe it's age and maturity.

Or maybe I'm just learning to nap better. After all, I have quite the role model:

Have a great week!