2013 beckons like the trail

Hope you all enjoyed your holidays and are excited by the prospect of new things ahead.  Happy New Year!


We spent a glorious portion of our holidays cross country skiing in Gatineau Park, which is only a kilometer from our house.  This incredible park is shaped like a huge pie wedge ( with the narrow tip near our house bisecting 2 sectors of the city of Gatineau) and contains over 300 kilometers of groomed trails for nordic skiing – classic and skate skiing – and also many trails for snowshoeing ( 8 people have been lost and rescued snow shoeing lately – no joke!)  I am so happy that we had almost 2 feet of snow around Christmas this year.  We’ve had hardly any the previous 2 years!  This is a good base for skiing into late March, as long as the weather stays below 0 at night.  Here’s the link to the park...
We started by getting out on the trail at 7:30 on Christmas morning.  My son declined the invitation and preferred to sleep…



                                                         

The trail beckons…
This shows how they groom the closed roads through the park with track setting equipment  - 2 sets of trails on each side for the classic skiers and the space in between for the skate skiers who take up a lot of room with the side-to-side skating movement ( like Biathlon skiers in the Winter Olympics). There are probably about 70 kilometers of wide roads like this, and while there are long flat rolling sections, there are some very challenging hills ( these I struggle with on my bike in the summer months)

                                                                   
                                                         


My ancient set of skis will lead the way!


                                                   


         Family setting off on a hazy overcast Christmas morning - -8 degrees Celsius.   Chilly, but no wind…

                                                      


Beautiful views at every turn

                                                             



There are smaller trails which form the majority of the 300 km network that are groomed by smaller equipment pulled by skidoos.  People are very passionate about their favourites!  These are narrower, wilder, windier and have even more challenging hills – up and down. Here’s my husband skating up a steep hill!  When he skis by himself, he wears much less clothing, but we are too slow for him and he gets cold!

                                                                                                       

                           


Another day, after Christmas, another foot of snow, on an 8 km ski to a cabin provided by the Park with a woodstove where you can eat your lunch and then ski back down the mountain!  The way out is all uphill – hard on my hip joints – what a whiner!                                         
                                      

                                         




Many fallen trees this year because of the wet icy snow we had first.  This makes a fantastic white tunnel effect along the smaller trails.

                                                                     



Me and happy boy on the way out to snacks at the cabin. He’d rather be downhill skiing, which is also a 10 minute drive from my house, but he’ll have to fund that himself…

                                                       



Skiing at twilight in the winter is so beautiful – here you ski on a bridge over a major road through Gatineau.  This is at the very tip of the pie wedge that is the park.  There are many many points of entry into the park that are more wild and scenic, but this is close to downtown for people who want to ski after work and unwind.

                                                     


May your trail lead you somewhere wonderful this year – I certainly intend to follow mine!
A happy and complete 2013 to you all, dear readers!

Ruby and lush green macro

I’m jumping in for a quick word before the holidays swallow us all up – in a good way, of course.  I took these pictures in the summer and found them again while cleaning up my photos.  Just fooling around with macro shots in the kitchen…it struck me that they are Christmas colours, well, sort of!  Close enough and just full of wonderful detail.  My afternoon glass of cranberry juice never looked so rich!

                                                       
                                                 

                                     

                                             


      Translucent ruby veils of colour… followed by the cut up Spring onions on the board to be tossed into the Jerk Pork Tenderloin marinade! (One of our favourite meals…)

                
                   


                           


Hmm, some polymer connections too, which is probably why I whipped out the camera in the first place.  I recall ,too, solemnly chopping up garlic cloves and admiring the wonderful shapes of the cross-sectioned garlic.  Can’t seem to find the pictures so maybe I just went ahead and cooked them!

Happy meals with your families!  Happy holidays if I don’t get back before Christmas!

(Living amongst) Bead Table Wednesday disorder

I certainly didn't intend it to be this way.  I never do.

But the good news is that I'm walking slowly and steadily towards the light and tomorrow at 3 PM will be the first of 3 or 4 scheduled updates for my stores!  I never stopped working over the summer (can't break that flow of ideas, after all..) but the finished work just kept piling up and now it is an absolute priority to get all this work listed.  Closure, and perhaps some money…what a great plan. Just as long as that light I see is not the oncoming train!

  Of course not, it’s the blinding light of my computer screen!     (had to move to the desktop though, my beloved Blackberry is too slow for this!)
                                                       
                                                                                            

Such a familiar and comforting sight, along with the knowledge that I’ll be sitting in front of it for a good little while ahead.  Ugh… familiar to lots of you.

                                           

I’ve been trying to organize a way to make listing faster, but of course, while setting up any new system, there is a period where you are actually slower than if you weren’t trying to improve everything.  Most of my stuff is one-of-a-kind, but there are certainly groups and subgroups, so I’m trying to make as many ‘generic’ draft listings as I think might be useful in Etsy’s not very user friendly draft listing folder.  (You can’t rearrange them, unfortunately…)  Generic listings such as ‘pod’ or ‘Complex pod’ or ‘strata bead’.  These generic listings contain the basic information such as  basic tags,price, materials and how, in general, this particular subgroup of pieces are made or came to be etc. Then, in theory, you just plug in the information relevant  to the particular piece you are listing, plop in the photos and list!  All this works because the draft folder allows you to copy your generic listing and by so doing, allows you to keep it for the next time that you have a piece in that series! I almost cried when I realized you could do this. This saves a lot of either flipping around in sold listings, searching for sold listings ( I just know I sold one sorta like last year etc.) and copying and pasting.  In a lot of the generic listings I’ve assembled variants that I’ve written about the pieces concerned. SO easy to cut, rather than find and cut and paste.  But it takes time and thought to organize the generic listings to my satisfaction.  When I become that self-disciplined and organized person that I am so looking forward to being, you know, the one who does at least 5 listings a day come hell or high water, I know this system will work well.  It’s already working well for some lines!

                           
                                      

I’m also changing the way I store the work before it’s listed.  I recently scored a hit on Kijiji and bought for practically nothing lots of those plastic cases with dividers and transparent tops so you can see through the lids without opening them.  Some of them are double-sided, very neat! Thing is, I used to store all my finished work neatly and separately in plastic bags, but they sort of became invisible and I sometimes forgot what I had. Also, there was a lot of  mucking about with bags while getting the work out to photograph, and then a second lot of mucking about putting it back into the bag with my sometimes arthritic hands and fingers. This works better – I have a case devoted to holding what is going to be photographed that session and then after the photo shoot it goes into a plastic jewellery bag and stays there until it’s sold.  (Those tiny jewellery bags drive my hands nuts but they do present well…)


                                            

So yes, when I get through this shameful backlog of work, I probably won’t need all these cases.  But it was worth the $15 to have them!  Sometimes, I make work and I’m not sure about it.  It’s great to have a dedicated case for work you’re brooding about. Then, after a little time, ‘tada!’ You can open up the case and see how it hits you with fresh eyes – all in one place!  AND, I might add, without having to paw through those damn bags.

Back to the grind.  Tomorrow, going live!