Our vacation life here in Penticton continues to be easy and fun. We arrived near the end of October, and it felt like we’d stepped back in seasonal time. The grass was green, the leaves were still on the trees, and after one brief dusting of snow, we saw none of the white stuff until after Christmas day.
We’ve established our lazy daily patterns of late breakfasts, TV and computer watching, and generally just taking it easy. Ann is swimming. I’ve done the occasional walk. And we’re both still practicing the ukulele.
Oh, and of course Maxi, or as I’ve taken to calling him: Sir DemandsAlot, is his normal cute self — most of the time 😉 .
For those who have not visited us, the Penticton house is on the edge of town, in a semi rural area. We get a fair bit of interesting bird an animal life, including quail, owl, doves, deer and new this year, racoons (no pics though).
Christmas season had me singing with two local choirs. There were four concerts over the span of a couple of weeks, and it all went well. It’s nice to be singing with a group again, even if the music is not really my favourite stuff. The Tuneagers is a choir for seniors, although in this case “senior” means anyone over 50.
There are some good singers in the group, although it’s not what you’d call a great choir. But it is fun, and the music is challenging enough at times.
We celebrated Ann’s 56th Birthday with a nice dinner and some relatively fine wine. Oh, and more than a few Irish coffees. The flowers from Ottawa are still on the table, and still looking pretty. Maxi loves them too!
Since moving back in here I’ve been baking lots of bread and tortillas. Nothing new there… but Ann has become the master desert maker. Yummy chocolate chip-peanut butter cookies are her standard, but recently she tried her hand at cinnamon rolls. They turned out amazing:
December rolled on to the big santa day. We enjoyed the gifts from Calgary and Ottawa. Normally we cook a full turkey dinner on the big X-mas day, but this year we were invited over to our neighbours for the big meal.
It was a wonderful evening of eating and chatting. Mike & Carol have done some amazing things, including travelling via RV and canoeing. They seem interested in our sailing life, so we bored them with some pictures and a short video. And then we played cards, where somehow I managed to win big time. Guess I’m highly skilled at random chance 😉 .
The following day (Boxing Day) it snowed for real, which finally made it feel more like x-mas. This Penticton weather is pretty nice, but I do miss real winters and heavy snow. It was nice to see it coming down (even though it meant shovelling). We cooked our big meal, and have been enjoying turkey dinners ever since.
And not to be outdone by the Calgary crowd, Ann picked up the Globe & Mail monster crossword. She’s been working on it ever since.
She even gets some help from a certain fuzzy master:
The New Year beckons. Happy 2019! For Auld Lang Syne…