It's always a bit of an adjustment after spending days with my family. Some things I am ecstatic to return to, like my mattress or my own bathroom. But other things I look forward to less, like being in an empty apartment without any siblings to make fun of. At times I think it would be nice for more of my family to live in the same city, so that we could get together more frequently without the expense and hours of travel it requires now.

Last year I was back at home for about 36 hours, having spent the majority of my vacation on the coast taking nearly all of the main forms of transportation available to me (train, plane, boat, automobile). Travel this time was a lot simpler and was relatively stress free in comparison the previous year's extravaganza. I'm usually a pretty quiet passenger. I'll make conversation when necessary and serve as a good navigator and deer spotter when required, but I prefer to daydream while watching the passing landscape.


And now, back at my other 'home' it's a return to business as usual. At least until New Year's.

Drove home (or rather was driven) today by my chum of all chums Wade.

I think I say this every year around this time, but I really love wrapping presents. It's sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. I say guilty, because it seems like a sort of frivolous thing to take pleasure in doing especially when so much wrapping paper is thrown away every year. I like it when gifts are presented prettily though, so I do my best to be resourceful with my wrapping materials. I save old wrapping paper, I reuse ribbon, I wrap gifts in remnant fabric or old flyers or magazines. It takes a bit of effort to save all of these things, but it makes me feel a bit better about balancing out my desire to give gifts that look nice and reducing some of the waste that the holidays inevitably brings.

Tonight, after an evening with friends, delicious homemade 'za and a movie, the gentleman and I got into a bit of a discussion about waste and ostentatious displays of holiday enthusiasm. On our way home we stopped by this house that has one of the most ridiculous displays of Christmas lights that I have ever seen.


The house is over-zealously decorated with thousands of lights, with seemingly no real reason other than the owner has a lot of lights and clearly a love of really bright and loud Christmas lights display. It was a sort of mess of themes, the yard being decorated with lit pink flamingos, cinderella's carriage, flying reindeer, a moving aurora borealis or magic carpet... lights everywhere in a blazing National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation sort of way. In that sense it's sort of fantastic, but in a slightly frightening way.

I must admit that I was not nearly as bothered by the display as the gentleman was, but then his issue with the way the house was lit up was one of much more philosophical significance than I had been considering. Totally simplifying our discussion, essentially what the gentleman was saying was that he disliked the display because it represented the sort of intense individualism present in our society, where we just do whatever we want just because we can. And I get what he's saying, that light display could easily be perceived as wasteful, not only in the time involved in preparing it but also in the energy that such a display consumes. Sure in this case it is only one individual who is footing the bill, but as the gentleman posited (and I'm really parsing down our conversation here, these are not direct quotes), that time and money might have been better spent in ways that would more helpful to society.

Of course that's the argument for everything. I don't disagree with the logic and argument that the gentleman presented, but I don't really think that this show of lights is really the best example of the type of villian that is ruining the world. From the little that I know about this particular light display, it takes the owner two weeks to set up, he uses $50,000 worth of lights and costs approximately $300 in electricity. His motives seem to be fairly tame. He doesn't profit off of the display, it's a hobby and he gets enjoyment out of people who drive by to see the lights while they are on for one month of the year. If I were to agree that this display of lights was really a horrific display of conspicuous consumption, then what would I have to make of the time I spent wrapping all of those gifts from me, from the gentleman or from my parents? Surely the money spent on those gifts could have been better directed towards some worthy cause, my time better spent advocating for some charity. Are those darling little packages tied with bits of ribbon any less offensive than the dazzling array of LEDs?

The conversation surrounding the lights was not one that the gentleman and I were able to reach any conclusions on, nor is it likely to. But I'm okay with this as it allows me to appreciate the display for its photographic potential while still being taken aback by the gaudy fury of it all. This duality of perspectives also allows me to give presents (and wrap them too) while remaining mindful of the reasons why I am giving gifts, so that I don't fall prey to the pressures of holiday consumerism.

All this from an afternoon of wrapping presents and a five minute conversation on the way home.

On Saturday night Team Awesome Bowling Club was brought back to life. The boys and I used to go out once a week last year and we always had fun. But then summer rolled around and it was too nice to spend our evenings inside a bowling alley. So we put the little bowling club on hiatus. After a few failed attempts this fall to revive our recreational slumming, we finally succeeded with a trip to Bonnie Doon lanes on what was an extremely cold night.


Although it wasn't quite the same without Billy being there, we all had a good time. Wade and I had spent most of the day together taking pictures of a former colleague's new baby in the morning and then dancing in the aisles of Ikea. It was the first time since the summer that we had spent that much time together. I had missed his company. In fact, I've been missing all of the company of my bevy of platonic boyfriends. We don't spend nearly as much time together as we used to. Curse our letting work get in the way.

It is a mere technicality that winter does not officially begin until the 21st of December. I've always found that to be a bit ridiculous, because I've always lived places where autumn is fleeting and is almost always ended early with the abrupt arrival of the ice and snow. Of course what comes with all this ice and snow is the cold and an increasing dependence on the automobile. Even my ardent pedestrianism wanes when the temperature dips below -20. I find myself taking the train to work and happily accepting rides from friends when we are headed out in the evening.

But even during warmer times this city is autocentric. This was made painfully apparent to me the other night when Tom and I met after work for a little photo excursion downtown. We had been planning this for a few weeks as I had been so busy during the fall that I hadn't spent much time taking photos or visiting with the silver fox. Tom had been prowling about on his own recently, taking some fantastic night shots of the city and my jealousy was growing. So we arranged for a little evening shoot.

Our original plan had been to photograph the downtown library from the outside looking in, but we quickly became sidetracked by a visit to the the downtown parkade that Tom had photographed the week earlier.


I don't know if such an idea would work, but it could be a way to make downtown's surplus of parkades into something more functional and interesting.

There was a brief time this past summer and fall where my trusty SLR went unused. It was the blasted gadget called the iPhone that was to blame, it being small and capable of some stunning photographic results with only a few simple taps of a finger.







In fact, the results from the iPhone were so consistently lovely that I even began to be accused of favouring it over my 'real' camera.

Maybe it was the constant heckling from the elitists that got to me or maybe it was being required to take photos and video for work plus the sale plus having just been paid and my dreams of shooting with high ISO. Whatever the reason, now I have a new camera as part of my collection. The results are also consistently lovely.




The camera bits of my iPhone are now getting dusty.

No one seems to be complaining.

And just like that it's winter. Talking about the weather seems like a pretty boring thing to do, but when you're as moody as I am, then the change in seasons is a big enough deal to require some sort of cathartic release. The one consolation of all this new snow and the cold has been that it's sunny. Clean, fresh snow and sunny days reminds me of the winters of my youth. You know, when I was young and optimistic. This makes things a little bit better.

In my defense I do try to get out and do things when it is cold outside. On Sunday, despite the chilly temperatures I ventured out of doors to go to the Luminaria festival at the Devonian Botanic Gardens.