An Hour On the John

It is the Thursday before THE Friday when John Watt, Dawson City DJ, will once again feature eclectic music on his CFYT community radio show, An Hour On the John. This week join John for a half hour story time (2:30 PM Yukon time, 6:30 PM Cape Breton time and 5:30 PM Ontario time) when he will read to his young (and old) audience. Story time will be followed by a special show honouring Johnny Cash which will start at 7PM CB time, 6 PM ON time and 3 PM Yukon time. To tune in online click on the post header above or on:

www.cfyt.ca

Then click on "listen online" and follow the instructions to set yourself up to listen on your computer.

Next week John is having an all request show, so email your requests (or comments or ideas) to:

anhouronthejohn@gmail.com

Or check out John's fan site on Facebook, An Hour On the John where you can leave comments and requests, and read the play lists for every show so far. Just click below:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dawson-City-YT/An-Hour-On-The-John/197127311104

Creatures of habit

Every morning at dawn Honey & I go for a walk in our woods, and every morning in winter she makes snow dog angels. Here's what she looks like.

De-fairy-foresting

The changing face of our forest world

Sounds like a cliche, doesn't it, but that's exactly what we have begun today. A huge machine arrived first thing this morning to take down mature spruce on the front part of our property. The spruce are becoming dangerous, some tall oldsters already coming down one-by-one in storms, others dying, infected by the spruce beetle that is beginning to decimate particularly the mature white spruce forests in our area. We felt is was better to manage our forest, clear the trees now for a small stumpage fee, rather than clear debris and deadfalls later.

One section to be cleared I am sad to lose, though I knew it was inevitable and had asked for a couple of years life-grace when we bought the property. It is a few acres of what I call my elf and fairy forest, thick with tall old spruce that block sunlight so that a deep soft layer of moss has grown everywhere, with pools of what we call caribou moss (deer like it too), a lovely frosted grey tufted lichen that we watched caribou feast on in the Yukon, and which makes a rough bright contrast to the deep greens of the moss. It's the kind of forest that makes you sigh with pleasure when you enter it, a place where you know magic can happen. But it is dying, and it is time to clear it and make way for sunshine and new plants and trees. (I think of Hair, and the song, Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, have been humming it as the machine rumbles and whines, while trying not to sing about the devil in my heart and letting the sunshine in and facing it with a grin...)

I went through my photos and couldn't find one of my fairy forest, perhaps because it is magical and shouldn't be photographed, but I did take a picture this morning from the edge of the forest at the opening of a path Andy cut. And Andy took a picture of the amazing machine that's clearing the trees. I found a youtube video if you're interested in seeing how it works, just click on the site below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtJT_cKBppg&NR=1

Governors Book Pub: Authors with Glasses

There is a new reading series in Sydney organized by Laura Syms at CBU called the Governors Book Pub: Authors with Glasses. (Click on the post header above or here www.tinyurl.com/ykgf52m to access the Facebook fan site for more information.) The series features area and from-away readers and an open mike. Tonight, Donna Troicuk and I are going to be the featured readers. Here's the scoop:

Governors Pub and Eatery
233 Esplanade
Sydney, NS
7-9 PM every third Tuesday

A close-to-home weekend away

For twelve years now, I have been getting together for an extended winter weekend with several friends: Bonnie Thompson, Marion Thompson, Debbie Lantz and Lois McVannel for a time. We have come together from where ever it is that we are living for three days of retreat. Our needs have changed for various reasons and the last few years we have made our own area our getaway site. This past weekend, because our usual cabin was booked, we took a cabin just down the road at Cabot Shores and we did what we usually do -- snowshoed and hiked, ate very well, drank, watched good videos (Away We Go -- a funny/sweet take on pregnancy and first-time parenthood), talked about the books we've been reading, solved some problems in our own worlds or at least came home with some ideas to keep ourselves sane. We share our fears and our aspirations and dreams. We've mourned the deaths of parents, siblings and friends and neighbours, and we've celebrated the same, plus the lives of our children and spouses.

Marion has become our "official" photographer and here are just a few of the photos she took this weekend. And yes, I did get my hair cut very short.

(Hi Lena!)

An ordinary day

Yesterday the temperature went up, the sky stayed grey and first thing in the morning Honey and I set out for a snowshoe to greet the day and to have a look at a maple that's a main character in the novel I'm working on, titled, for now, The Lazarus Maple. It's hard to tell from the photo, because it's hard to get a true perspective of the tree, nestled as it is along a stream bed at the bottom of a narrow gully, that this maple is 400 years old and has a trunk whose circumference could hold about 10 of me at its base. The photo shows the middle-top of the tree where the trunk branches and it's taken from the top of the cliff above the gully where the maple lives. The snow has now melted from the tree, but yesterday it looked as if you could snuggle into the soft downy bed of snow covering the thick branches and rest there until spring.