first advent

I love advent.

I love making a wreath.

I love the anticipation of lighting the candle

and reading about the meaning of each advent Sunday.

 This year I bought "fresh" greens instead of foraging through the woods

to cut dormant pieces of spruce

which inevitably dry up within the first week.

 I still used lots of odds and ends from along the ditches

 but the fresh greens are oh, so very nice.

 May the HOPE of this advent season

be with you all.

the cultural center

 We wandered in here to warm up a bit and 

ended up staying a long....time.

What a gloriously beautiful building.

The domes are stunning, as is the entire building.

Enjoy the tour....

the bean

 This is the scariest and most intricate

parkade I have ever seen.

The apartments are above and the cars below.

Scary!!

 

 What the locals (and everyone else) calls

"The Bean"
is actually Cloud Gate.
Cloud Gate weighs in at over 110-tons, and is 66 feet long and 33 feet high.
"The Bean" was created using a huge number of individual stainless steel plates.
Cloud Gate's seamless surface is the result of thousands of hours of polishing.

the windy city

 Howard arrived home from South America a week ago last Tuesday,

had two nights at home

and on Thursday afternoon we were on the plane

to Chicago!

 He had meetings and a fund raising event there

and I was able to get a day off work and go

along for the ride!

 We spent two days walking and walking and walking.

It is the way we love to explore a city

but man is it tiring!

 Chicago's architecture is pretty famous and rightfully so.

Some of it even a bit infamous...

 This was something that even Howard hadn't seen yet

on all his trips to Chicago.

We were told that it is in fact something new.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Lots more pics to come!

remembering my grandpa dennis

 I "borrowed" this from the Dennis Clan facebook page.

My cousin, Della, posted it.

Grandpa was born 25 December 1893. "All of the boys except Beecher went out to work as soon as they finished elementary school. Stanley and Percy took up carpentry, and worked under Wilfred Maynard in the construction of at least one house in Birch Hill, PEI. They were working in the United States when the Great War, now known as World War I, broke out in 1914. Both of them came home, enlisted in the army, and went overseas. While serving in France on railroad construction crews, they answered a call for volunteers to go to the Middle East. One could write much about their adventures there, including Percy's close call with malaria, which he contracted while their unit was encamped in a mosquito-infested valley in nothern Palestine..." 

Page 13, The Dennises of Port Hill Farm, Arnett Dennis, 2000.

Grandpa stayed in France.

look who came to visit!

Ben and Katy started grade 1 together at BFA

and ended up graduating together as well.

That is a pretty rare thing at BFA.

So, Ben is pretty special to all of us - 

we've seen him grow up, just like one of our own kids!

He was up in Manitoba for 4 weeks doing

aerial surveying

and he had a few moments off and enough time to connect

with Katy and even with us one evening.

The chickens were part of the evening's stories.

I made them for Katy when she was in grade 3 when

her life revolved around pigs and chickens....