It’s been the wonkiest winter and it’s rarely been going below 0°C this season, except for a couple days immediately after Christmas, a couple days immediately after New Year, and this weekend.  I guess it never really gets that cold here until January/February… but I think it usually comes much more gradually than the 20-30° swings we’ve been experiencing.

In any case, I’ve already been looking forward to spring collections, even though I’m usually a fall collection sort of girl.  Look at this trench coat!

[2990 USD]

Kate Adie closing the NYE edition of From Our Own Correspondent:

It was a year which seemed to contain a decade of news.

New Year’s is fast approaching and I was thinking about what I am or am not going to do to celebrate (I think I might stay in this year, I’m really tired and I haven’t heard of anything particularly exciting, and also I am really cool like that) and also reminiscing about the New Year’s I spent in Harbin two years ago (o man, how time passes) and how awesome it is the way Russians do it.

Why yes, we are dancing around a Christmas tree.

And then this is where the internet took me last night: NYE → Russiansthis NPR piece about Russian New Year celebrations that turned up on my  Facebook news feed  → the Russian-American food blogger (Yulinka Cooks!) who posted it → a series of food blogs inspired by Russian and post-Soviet cuisine (I wish I could name them all because many were quite good, but the clicking-on-things was too spontaneous), including → the Gastronomical Me → and finally Nami-Nami, “an Estonian food lover sharing a delicious life and blog with an equally food-obsessed husband K. and two gorgeous kid

Perhaps it was this gorgeous-looking Canada-inspired ice cream (pictured below the cut) served with cloudberries, which is something special to the Nordic/Baltic region (we had cloudberry ice cream while couchsurfing in Turku, Finland), but I got stuck on this blog, and then somehow on Estonia.  And today at work, taking advantage of the holiday lull, I spent a few hours reading (the tangents keep going) about the country in post-war and post-Soviet times. Read the rest of this entry »

My boss gave me the afternoon off Tuesday. I had planned to go shopping (either for myself or for Christmas gifts, I hadn’t decided yet). I wandered around the Bay on Queen Street a little bit, tried out the Eaton Centre, decided against it, and went to get myself a crepe. I bought myself a smart phone back in September, so nowadays I have constant access to the Internet (although I try to keep the data off when I’m not using it to save the battery and also to reduce the temptation to Facebook from work). I had seen the news already the night before but I was reading again about how the Government of Canada had formally pulled out of the Kyoto Accord, and how it had banned face coverings from citizenship ceremonies. I got so bummed out that I just went home and took a nap. What a waste of an afternoon off…

And what a terrible way to react to policy decisions I disagree with (to go home and take a nap, I mean). Seriously, Jess…

I found out the night before after getting home from such a win at trivia (my first, actually). Now that French classes are over the holidays, I let myself join my fellow MPAs for Monday night trivia the way I used to. I used to go every week in second semester last year, but with the long commute home, it’s tough to stay out on a school night (work night) – I’m getting old. I got home, and I noticed those two news items on the BBC News front page (later I would find out that Canada made the BBC front page for a third item in the same day). Canada only ever makes the BBC News front page for the worst reasons (the first time I noticed was in 2006 when for the third time, a man entered a Montreal institution with a long gun and took out his hate). Beyond the way I disagree with such policy-making and beyond the way it offends my ideological sensibilities, I hate to see my home country on the news like this. Sure, we have a stable federal government for the first time in nearly a decade but it’s not a government or country I recognise. It’s true that I look back on the 90s with rose-coloured glasses. I was a child in a comfortable middle class family so the austerity measures that went with the early 90s recession didn’t hit personally. There were all sorts of things going on in the world, and I’m sure it isn’t the case that Canada represented itself well at every turn. But I know that I grew up feeling that Canada had good standing in the world, and even now I’m sure that was actually the case… but Canada’s standing in the world today? I really do worry, and it really does bum me out.

When I was in China, and my mum phoned me on New Year’s Eve to tell me that Stephen Harper had prorogued parliament for the second time, and I heard Jian Ghomeshi so sad at what the G20 had done to Toronto, I used to joke about how they were always fucking up every time I left the country. I came back… I was really inspired by what I saw from my fellow countrypersons upon the news of Jack Layton’s passing… but it’s not that shiny here these days, and I really worry.

I was clicking through the pages of “People You May Know” on LinkedIn (I’m fairly certain I’ve never given them access to my e-mail address book, but somehow it knows everyone - it kind of freaks me out), through people I do actually know, through people I’d studied with, through people who know people I know,through  people I don’t actually know at all, and through people I’ve had the opportunity to meet, but only very briefly.  One of these lovely people that I had the chance to meet very briefly in Beijing has a totally legit fashion blog: The Fashion Guitar.  One November entry focuses specifically on colourful coats. Of course I ended up in the ASOS coat department, where I found these three coats that I’d love to wear this season.

  

Last year, and especially this year, I’d been craving a camel coat.  I didn’t get that Mackage coat but I did end up spending nearly a week’s income on a duffel coat in the same family of colours.  Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t gotten tired of it yet (in fact, I’m very happy about it), but this emerald green, this lilac-pink business, and navy get really excited about possible coat purchases I should/n’t make. Read the rest of this entry »

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