This morning a wet and steady snow is falling. Heavy flakes fall like white rain. This past weekend we experienced a major winter storm, and some areas to the south of us received 30 cm or more of the white stuff. Attila worked on snow removal all of his half day Saturday and all of Sunday. Tonight he will be back at it. It is very fortunate that we own a snow blower to assist with the task.

Life has been very quiet here, behind the veil of falling snow. Mist and I watch the snow, listen to Christmas music and happily spend our time together.

Mist has been somewhat busy trying to train her humans. Apparently, according to feline intelligence, they lack a sense of propriety in relation to home heating. When Mist deems the interior of the house below standard temperature, she will sit beside me, yowl loudly, staring at me until I rise and follow her over the fireplace. There she will sit in front of the fireplace and stare meaningfully at the glass door, willing me to understand that a fire would be appropriate NOW. We usually build a fire twice a day, so that Mist is almost always disappointed in her midday mission. The training of humans is a painfully slow task, requiring skill and lots of patience. Mist believes in our ability to learn though, of this she is quite certain.

Attila managed to find time on Saturday afternoon to hike into the bush, choose a Christmas tree, fell it and bring it in from the cold. Our trees are real “Charlie Brown” trees, spindly with a little bit of green at the ends of the branches. I have grown to love these trees, even though they fall far short of the ideal presented in the media, magazines and ads. This weekend we will decorate the tree with a few of our favorite ornaments and maybe even some lights.

I have been working on converting “A Christmas Story”, sung by Bing Crosby, from analog to digital. The record is old, 1957 and not in the best condition. After converting the sound track I have been working on sound quality using Click Repair and it has done a wonderful job. This album doesn’t really hold much in the way of magic for me personally, but for many people around my age it elicits warm Christmas memories. The sound of Bing Crosby’s voice does bring back some of the magic moments of my childhood though, so it has been worth the time spent restoring the recording. And, oh horrors, the song “An Axe, An Apple and a Buckskin Jacket” keeps running through my mind, over and over and over again. There are worse things.

Simultaneously, the conversion of “Family Christmas Favorites” is going very well. This album includes some carols sung by the Columbus Boychoir. The pieces performed by the choir bring tears to my eyes, as the essence of my childhood innocence is preserved perfectly in those sound waves from the past. Much in psychology describes the sense of smell as a medium able to transport us instantly to our former selves. Although aroma can carry me to other places and times, sound and vision are much more evocative. Each book in my bookcases holds a chapter of my former self, I can feel the person I was when I suspended disbelief to enter each world of the written word. Similarly, sound can change the context of my emotional existence instantaneously.

I did manage to get out to the library this week to select a few books for holiday reading. While there I took advantage of the high-speed connection to update the operating system and some of the software on my iBook. What took an hour with a high-speed connection would take two or more days to accomplish at home with the dialup connection. I doubt that high-speed access will ever be available in our neighbourhood.

It is a tortoise’s life we lead here.