New Year's Eve at the Shuswap

December 31, 2009

We had Indian food on the last day of 2009: cauliflower subjee, dahl and the third dish is called rice and peas, but to get the idea of the taste you have to add in the idea of onions and cumin seeds fried in some butter before they are cooked with the rice and peas. Mmmm.

Ringing in the New Year was done in the traditional Catalin way: 12 grapes, one for every stroke of midnight, all to be eaten in the first 60 seconds of the new year, to get the maximum good luck that they will bring.

Different iterations of us watched two movies: Nothing but the Truth, a movie about U.S. national security, and Thirst, a Korean vampire film. Intermittently, Duncan and Alex played video games, ate popcorn and chips.

I made my first mistake of the New Year just before bed. While cleaning up after the party, I watered the first one of the seven geraniums that have just been brought in from the garage so that they can start getting maximum sunlight. Before going to bed Steve asked me if I had poured his drink down the sink. Truthfully I could say no.

Then he changed the question to, did you water your plants with my drink.

I am trained to leave half filled coffee cups alone, but I don’t yet have the talent to differentiate glasses of water that can be used on plants from Sprite with some Rye in it. This morning I am going to check my plants and make this into a scentific experiment: see if plants fed alcohol thrive or wither.


Glen, Janet and Laynie brought over a 12 inch lemon tart which was cut into 12 large pieces and we ate vanilla ice-cream on the side. Aunt Janet gave Alex and Duncan gingerbread men that come packaged with icing so that the boys could decorate their own cookies. Duncan especially enjoyed sucking the icing out of the plastic package after the decorating was done.

David Camps helped us all play a Dr. Seus “The Cat in the Hat / I Can Do That” with him, making sure that the cards to play the game were distributed to all and that the trick-a-ma-stick under which we were to crawl stayed standing. David is the only one who could really fit under it with instructions like, "Slide under the trick-a-ma-stick with a cake on your head."

Happy New Year from our house at the Shuswap to yours.

Arta