Christmas dress for Evy

Photo: newly shortened Christmas dress for Evy.

Today I hand-hemmed a fancy Christmas dress for a four-year-old. I was with my friend while she shopped for her granddaughter. When she expressed regret that this one was too long for Evy, I volunteered to shorten it.

Sitting by the Christmas tree with needle and thread mined rich veins of memory.

First, Christmas dresses and little girls. When our daughter was this age, we got her a fancy Christmas dress in red with black velvet trim and a crinoline skirt. She was mighty pleased, and I took a lovely picture of her wearing it with the new ice skates Santa brought her the same year.

Next, hand sewing. Until a few years ago, I used to sew a lot, and was willing and able to do finishing work by hand. Now I do most sewing, including hems, with my old Bernina sewing machine. But the skirt of this dress was cut on the bias, and I had to gather the top part of the hem, iron it down and then do the stitching by hand. A lesson in patience, and memory.

Finally, Evelyn. When I was a child, I adored the name Evelyn, and in fact, the first doll clothes I ever made were for my doll Evy. Once very popular, this name is now rare. Until a few years ago, Vancouver had an Evelyn club for women who shared that name.

May Evy enjoy the Christmas season in her fancy dress, not only this year, but next, when her Mom will be able to let it down, because I turned up the extra fabric rather than cutting it off.

Slush, "snumps" and "slush bombs"

I know all about slush (see yesterday's post), and I've been familiar with the "snumps" so elegantly named by Michael Enright and Jane (whose last name I can't recall) on a CBC program a few years ago. Snumps (snow lumps) are the dirty blobs of snow that fall behind cars as the temperature rises. They are formed when the fresh snow comes unstuck from the metal of the wheel wells.

But slush bombs? They seem to be a new weapon. The story on the front page of The Vancouver Sun, complete with video, reports that  these 'slush bombs' endangered drivers and damaged vehicles. This happened yesterday on the new $3 billion Port Mann Bridge during the first snowfall of the year. Lumps of ice rained down from the cables, smashing windshields and mirrors, even crashing through a sunroof to injure someone.

This is weird. We have other suspension bridges in the area -- notably the Lions Gate, built in 1937. No ice bombs fell on it. And we also have the huge Alex Fraser Bridge, much newer and longer that the one across the First Narrows, and it too seemed to be slush bomb-free.

To add insult to injury, commuters had just started paying tolls for this newly completed and much-touted crossing of the Fraser. Then yesterday it proved to be a minefield (mines from above).

The builders of the bridge are throwing up their hands, using a modern paraphrase of the Act of God argument: the conditions were rare, and it could happen to any man-made structure.

Only it didn't. It just happened on the New Port Mann. Even though the whole region had more or less the same weather. Maybe those soaring post-modern cables are too numerous or too steep.

Meanwhile, the story made the Globe and Mail too. Engineers are looking at ways to stop the bridge hail from happening again.

Slush

Photo: slush on green crosswalk

Vancouver snow can have many phases in a single day. Morning revealed the delight of fresh snow, an equal and forgiving cover of all things. Snow rarely lasts here, but slush can look clean and beautiful, as it does on this green crosswalk.

The next phase is water. As the temperature rises, the melting snow can't move down the storm drains fast enough. Downtown, slushy lakes formed at the curbs. Too wide to jump over, they obliged me to wade. Even though I sprayed my winter boots thoroughly in the summer, they soon began to take on water. By the time I got home, they were soaked through.

Right: At VCC Clark Skytrain Station, a puddle forms on the bricks as the soft snow turns to water.

By tomorrow morning, most if not all of this snowfall will be gone.

We will recall only its transient innocent whiteness, an interval confirming the arrival of winter.

It will be back to business as usual for a Vancouver winter: rainy grey skies.

Life is not meant to be an adrenalin bath

Not sure how it happened, but somehow society has normalized the adrenalin rush as a way of life. Must get here, must get there, make this phone call, send this email. Make more money, then spend it on gadgets that keep us busy all the time.

People are overbooked, and the frantic pace of life has led to an epidemic of sleep deprivation. The US Centre for Disease Control has called this a public health epidemic, and a UK study says lack of sleep has now begun affecting children. On top of that, many if not most have poor diets, as revealed by the proliferation of fast food outlets and overweight people, as well as the evolution of grocery store shelves towards more ready-to-eat foods. For many people, normal habits like cooking meals at home, sleeping eight hours, and taking walks after dinner now seem impossible.

I know Vancouver doesn't handle snow very well, but I hope that tonight the promised snowstorm will come. Maybe it will encourage us to look around, breathe, walk in the winter wonderland. Most importantly, it might make people slow down, accept a slightly less frantic pace than usual, at least for the few hours until it melts again.

I hope that my readers will make it a priority to take care of themselves this coming Christmas holiday. Turn off the cell phone and computer for awhile. Sleep in, cook at home, play outside and take the time to relax and just chill. Even a short period of midwinter stillness will begin to mend frazzled nerves, make us whole again.

Stalking the winter solstice, but light will return

The winter solstice is only three days away. Each day the light is less, and we stay at home near our brightly lit Christmas tree. These are days for making warming stews and drinking hot chocolate.

I look forward to the annual jigsaw puzzle time that is coming. After we've eaten the big turkey dinner I cook each Christmas for the family, I go into a state of total relaxation. That's when I like to hunker down over a jigsaw puzzle.

Nobody cooks for a couple of days; we all relax into our favourite activities, and as tummies dictate, we make turkey pickle cranberry sandwiches or simply enjoy a warmed up plate of leftovers.

Today I finished work for the term, and we held a luncheon party to celebrate our outgoing department head.  Except for the office cleanup, which I plan to do on Wednesday, the term's work is done.

As I have nothing terribly pressing to do tomorrow, will stay home, cook my stuffed eggplants, and then lie back on the sofa and finish reading the latest Anne Perry mystery. Every so often I will look up at the gorgeously lit Christmas tree, and pet the cat if he deigns to come and lie on my lap. Absolute bliss.

The jigsaw, however, is not allowed out till Boxing Day for the very good reason that I will become totally engrossed and pore over it for hours every day. While others rush around to the Boxing Day sales that have sprung up in recent years, I reach back to an older tradition. When I was a kid, that was when we went skating, played with our new toys, and read our new books, and yes, started a jigsaw puzzle.

The joy of my jigsaw downtime is very precious. It can only happen in that very special week between Christmas and New Years, when everything seems to stop for a few days of home, family and rest, before things gear up again in the New Year.

This is 2012, but I'm not concerned about the end-of-the-world predictions based on the Mayan calendar. Such predictions of doom have a long history. For some reason, such ideas seem to appeal to the human psyche.

When I was at university in the late sixties, two friends and I agreed to meet at the Tower of London on March 15, 1984, an earlier occasion when the world was supposed to end.  Even at the time, we thought it was more of a laugh than a threat. Of course, we were young; 1984 seemed a long way off.

Late in 1999, when Y2K was considered a serious threat, a friend told me he decided not to send his wife and children on a holiday to Cuba because he feared that the airline computers would crash and prevent them from returning. A systems analyst himself, my friend had to work, so he couldn't go with his family to Cuba and take his chances.

Y2K turned out to be mainly a marketing opportunity. Everyone had to get a new computer, or hire someone to fix their old one so it wouldn't crash.

Like Sam Dwyer, I prefer to see the Mayan end of the world prophecy as another in a long series of false alarms. I hope and believe that humans are evolving. Next year, we'll once again have a chance to make a new start. We can work harder to appreciate our blessings, and treat our families, our neighbours and our planet better than ever before.

My continuing education

As another term winds down, with all but the final paperwork done, I am left thinking once again about how my work as an educator provides such an education for me.

This term, from the research reports alone, I was treated to new insights about lots of things -- from Galapagos turtles to the undersea earthquake that triggered the 1970 snow and mudslide that buried the Peruvian village of Ancash, to the history that led up to Iran's nationalizing the country's oil resources.

Factual information is by no means all I learn. From my students with their rich variation of languages and cultures, I am constantly faced with other thought patterns, other ways of looking at the world.

My classroom is a microcosm of contemporary multicultural society, and I notice, term by term, how culture evolves. Right now I'm observing in real time how people develop ever more facility in using digital devices, especially smartphones. It has to be said that many of the younger students are becoming overly dependent on them.

Technologies come and go, but it remains a real privilege to work with students from around the world, to talk with them and coach them and learn from them, both directly and indirectly, about a myriad of things.

Now another class has ended; people who spent nearly four months sitting cheek by jowl are now scattering to go their separate ways. Many, of course, will move to another class at the college, but the classmates will change next term.

Though I'm still not using a smartphone myself, when the next class convenes in the New Year, we'll be working in an upgraded "smart classroom." I hope the students and I don't get too carried away with delegating our smarts to machines.

As an educator, I am of the view that we should define ourselves not by what we own, but what we know, how well we think and what we can do to serve the world we share.

Enter -- the Dragon, or There be dragons

Photo: Dragon fruit at Two EE's Farm, Surrey

Welcome to the dragon! The scary voice was a chilling invitation to ride the rollercoaster at the PNE. This kid size ride has been defunct since 2003.

When my daughter was little, I don't know how many times I rode the rattletrap thing at her side. We used to enjoy the voice -- an invitation to thrills and chills -- in my case, more than the ride. (I did find courage to ride the big roller coaster once -- but that's another story.)

I have been thinking of dragons recently -- they are mythical animals, and yet they exist in so many cultures, and are intertwined with a variety of stories and symbolic meanings.

In Vancouver, one tends to think first of the Chinese dragon in all its variety. Symbolizing the emperor, this mythical animal is featured in the Chinese Zodiac. Here in Vancouver it can be seen in the annual Chinese New Year parade, during the Dragon Boat Festival, and of course, on the backs of silk kimonos in the shops of Chinatown.

From the British Isles, we hear of the English patron St. George killing a dragon, and from Ireland, we know of the Celtic dragon, as painted on the boat of Michael D'Alton, which is the office of the School of Bio-energy Healing.

Dragons can also be found in the mythology of Greece, Iran, India and various European countries. A very small lizard found in Indonesia bears a strong resemblance to a dragon. Dragons are also found in Japan, and I'm sure this listing of dragon culture is not exhaustive.

What are dragons really. and where do they come from? Perhaps they refer to some collective memories we have of the dinosaur age -- as those are the animals they most resemble.