Lobster for the family

Dateline: Whitehorse, Yukon.

Oh, I felt like such an expert, smug from having eaten lobster twice inside of two weeks and from having received hands-on, finger-lickin' good, "how to eat lobster" training from my friends Bob and Sue on the eve of my departure for Whitehorse.  Naturally, as a true-blue (brand-new) Bay-of-Fundy-er, I brought home lobster for the family... and passed on everything I've learned so far.

They enjoyed the lobster alright, but the real pleasure was mine, watching them dive right in and seeing the pleasure on their faces.  (And no, the champagne I was drinking -- recommended by Bob and Sue as the beverage of choice to accompany lobster -- had nothing to do with it!)

Lobsters aplenty...

According to Bob, newspaper is de rigeur because eating lobster is such a messy business if you're serious about it.  Also, it's best to remove the elastics from the claws before cooking the lobsters, because they can impart a rubbery taste to the meat.  That can be done by holding the lobster by its body and using a sharp knife; the claws stay safely out of reach of your hand.  (These lobsters were purchased pre-cooked.)

Lined up and ready to eat...

Daughters dig in... or, seestahs doing it for themselves...

Get that thing away from me!

No, really, it won't bite you...

Heaven, I'm in heaven...

Mmmmm...

Love those happy smiling faces!

Dibs on those scraps, muttahf***er!

(See what I mean about the mess?  Good thing we used the newspaper!)

Post-prandial contentment...

Thanks, Cath.  Oh, you're so-o-o-o welcome!

The snail went over the mountain

This is a photographic post I've been meaning to make for days, another (brief) series of photos from the beach, taken a few weeks ago. Now, with the winter storm raging outside, seems like a good time to revisit that golden afternoon.

The snail approaches Everest:

Beginning the ascent:

Summiting:

Aren't those colours amazing?  (I hope your monitor will capture them...)

Winter Storm

Winter came suddenly over the past weekend. It has been glorious here through November, but on Saturday the temperatures slid into the minuses and there was a snowfall during the night. Yesterday was sunny again, but today, after a beautiful sunrise, clouds moved in, the wind picked up and late in the afternoon it began to snow.

The headlines in the online Globe and Mail this evening say "Snow hammers East, West faces deep freeze" and "Eastern U.S. hit by blast of winter", so I guess we're merely the next locale in the path of this particular storm... but it's my first Maritime blizzard and I'm agog. My house is snug; I had no idea the wind was blowing that hard until I stepped outside... into an enveloping roar, the howling wind combined with the crashing of waves on the beach. In truth, about five hours into this storm not much snow has accumulated and it's a balmy zero degrees outside, so it's hardly threatening weather, but it feels absolutely... totally... wild.

Clearly Maritimers are very business-like about this sort of thing. Earlier this evening, the radio promised extra newscasts into the evening to keep us posted on the storm. Lists of event cancellations were broadcast and full listings were to be posted on the Internet. The plows have been out on the main roads... Spit spot; it's just another blizzard.

I'm glad the locals know what they're doing. Me, I'm sitting here listening to the driven snow needling against the windows and watching the lights dim and flicker. And thinking about the forecast which promises us +7 degrees tomorrow!

The fog horn

My new house is located a kilometre or so from the lighthouse at Quaco Head. "Head" is new geographic terminology for me; I've heard it, but have never seen a head before this one. Dictionary.com defines head as "a projecting point of a coast, esp. when high, as a cape, headland, or promontory". Okay, that describes Quaco Head pretty accurately. And explains why a lighthouse is warranted.

You can't see the lighthouse from my house... but you can hear the fog horn.  Last night, for the second time since I've been here, I awoke to its sounding.  I know fog horns from movies, descriptions in books or other artificial settings, never previously having lived where they were needed.  I think of them as having a deep bass bellow:  w-a-a-a-a-a-w-w.  But I'm guessing that modern technology has superseded the fog horn and replaced it with the fog signal, because this one's note is decidedly tenor, if not alto.  And the edges of the sound are crisp; no wallowing.

The sound is muffled, which makes sense of course, because the signal only sounds when the weather is inclement enough to obscure the lighthouse light.  In this case, as I discovered upon waking this morning, the weather in question was snow.

A number of seconds elapse between signals, just long enough for me to drift back to sleep only to be awakened by the next one.  I listened for a while.  I must have read somewhere a description of a fog horn's sound as "mournful", but this signal is confident and commanding: "listen up, you out there on the Bay, and steer clear of these rocks".  I found it comforting to know that if there were any lobster fishermen out on the water, hearing the signal they would be safe.  Lulled its repetitious tones and the warmth of my bed, I fell back into a deep, delicious sleep.

Here's what my backyard looks like in snow:

Lobster initiation... or, murder she wrote...

It's lobster season here.  The Bay of Fundy... which some say produces the best lobster in the world.  Fresh... from the ocean to the boat to me, within hours.  First, the innocuous pot in the fridge, where the victim is confined:

The wet newspaper shroud...  who would think to look beneath?

The victim; isn't he (I think it was a he...) beautiful?

A desperate attempt to escape...  But let's keep this in perspective: apparently Jacques Cousteau wouldn't eat lobster because he regarded them as bottom-feeding insects...

The crime scene...

Butter and garlic, accessories after the fact...

Wine: witness?  or accomplice...?

VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!  Note: appropriate and heartfelt prayers were whispered.

Wine, your fingerprints were all over the crime scene...

Recovering the body...

The autopsy...

Aha!  Just as I thought!  Further investigation is required....

The mystery deepens...

Like a true child of children of the Great Depression, she saves the best for the last:

The incriminating evidence...  (Wine, is that you again!??)

I admit... a lobster died in the production of this post.  The producer is deeply grateful to that lobster for its sustaining gift of life... and delicate flavour.  (Apologies to CSI -- Crime Scene.)  The producer also hopes she'll be able to sleep tonight.

Beach Geography

The first time I walked on Browns Beach (about three minutes from my home), I was captivated by the miniature geography that low tide reveals:

Deltas...

Deserts...

Mountain ranges...

Rivers... with standing waves...

Gorges...

Terraces...

Ridges...

Lakes...

Dunes...

Maritime sense of humour

A picture is worth a thousand words... (and click on the pic if you can't see the details)...

Trees

Here we have some typical Yukon spruce trees:



And here, the spruce in my new front yard in West Quaco:



Notice any difference? (Hint: only one of them looks like a Christmas tree...)



Next year, more lights and a maybe a star on the top!

What makes news?

I'm not sure which was more surprising. When I drove into the yard of my new home in West Quaco on October 6, 2009, the first thing I looked for (apart from the house, the yard and the view of the Bay of Fundy) was the pile of firewood I'd ordered in May... which wasn't there. On the advice of local neighbours, I ordered the wood in spring because apparently that's how things are done down here. The wood -- maple and birch mostly -- is cut green, so needs to season over the summer, otherwise it will burn green. I expected a substantial pile, because I'd ordered four cords. Not a stick in sight.

There are theories about what happened to the wood. It was delivered; neighbours saw it in the driveway. But within days it was gone. After some amateurish sleuthing on my part, I concluded that I'd asked all the questions I reasonably could of my new neighbours and called the RCMP. The constable I talked to advised that it would take a while before he would be able to get to the investigation. No surprise there. How urgent is a theft of firewood that happened 3-4 months previous?

So my jaw dropped when I opened the Saint John Telegraph Journal a day or so later, to find the article posted above. Wow. Interesting.

Every day the Telegraph Journal has a column of minor crime stories like this one. Somebody was caught hunting without a license. Somebody was driving over the limit. Somebody else was caught shoplifting. It used to be, in Whitehorse, that the local papers would give a weekly report on similar matters before the courts, but that practice ended years ago. After some observation of the Telegraph Journal, I concluded (rightly or wrongly) that it is so awash in advertising business that it desperately needs editorial copy to fill the pages, hence these reports on the minutiae of criminal activity in the area.

Maybe; maybe not. Perhaps there's a different sensibility here in New Brunswick. The Whitehorse newspapers' practice protects members of the small Yukon populace from embarrassment, gossip and speculation, and in that way, lets the community get on with the greater business of being a functioning society. But perhaps the downside is less public accountability and personal interest. I've lost count of the number of times that people I'm meeting for the first time have asked if I'm the person whose wood was stolen and have expressed their dismay and concern. They're shocked that such a thing could happen here and mortified that this was how I was "welcomed".

The wood is gone; the RCMP investigation has come up empty; my insurance deductible was $40 higher than the value of the wood; a replacement four cords of wood is neatly stacked at the end of my driveway. But look at all the food for thought there is in this incident. What's normal practice in one locale is unheard of in another... and vice versa. We live in a huge, diverse and very interesting country, we Canadians. When I saw this article in the newspaper, I laughed for the sheer delight of knowing how parochial it would seem to my Yukon acquaintances... but quietly I wonder of some of my new Maritime acquaintances would find Whitehorse unaccustomedly impersonal...

Who is Kate Eardley, anyway?

I've thought a lot today about the name for this blog, and who Kate Eardley is in relation to Cath Constable. So who is Kate Eardley? She's part of me; an alter ego perhaps, except that the dictionary defines an alter ego as a second self, as though separate, while Kate Eardley is in me and of me. Kate Eardley is slightly Victorian but thoroughly modern. She is named for my paternal grandmother, Kate, who was feisty and strong and ahead of her time... and for my maternal grandmother Rose, who was a Bowen originally, but whose married name was Eardley-Wilmot and who was resourceful and entreprenurial out of necessity.

Kate Eardley is a part of me that embraces those qualities. She is modest, perhaps even demure, but thoroughly modern, resourceful, practical, inventive, eclectic, strong in a gentle kind of way that makes her appealing to others, and unafraid. Cath is the part of me that is a poet, hears notes the piano cannot play, whose dreams exceed her grasp, who wears her heart on her sleeve and who has been bruised by life. It's not that Kate is unfeeling, but life doesn't fluster her. She not only turns lemons in to lemonade, she opens a bustling lemonade stand, branches out into cakes and tea and next thing you know has written a cookbook and is importing her own lemons.

So why name this blog for Kate Eardley? Because I'm at a turning point in my life and would like to make space for the Kate in me. Because Cath, who has lived an unconventional life, has had her heart broken enough times that she needs and deserves a rest from being "out there" all the time, to have a chance to spend more time figuring out how to express the music she hears but so far has been unable to play.

And why "wonderment"? Because overall, at this point in my life, I'm filled with awe and gratitude much of the time... that is, when I'm not puzzling over things that are new, bewildering or otherwise perplexing. I foresee two primary thrusts for this blog: one wherein I share things that are wonder-full, the other in which I wonder aloud about things I don't fully understand. I've always liked double entendres and this one seems to fit.

I have a lot to learn about publishing a blog. Bear with me; this is a good start.