I know Canadians and Siberians would scoff at this post - but holy HELL, it's cold in LV at the moment!  It's so cold that even the locals are talkin' about it - it's one of the main stories in our daily newspaper every day this week.  Last night when we went to bed, our thermometers told us it was approaching -28 degrees celsius (that's about - 18 degrees farenheit).  It's been so freezing that the boys got two days off school last week. Mind you, I think the rule about primary school kids not having to go to school if it's under minus 20 was invented for those poor country kids who have to walk 3 kms to school.  Not the spoilt city kids who go from a heated house to a heated car to a heated school.  In my book, the boys should TOTALLY have been at school every day last week - but I just couldn't let them down when they were excitedly jumping around in their pyjamas because the thermometer said they were getting a day off...  could you?  Don't you remember the days in Brisbane (if you grew up there, that is) when you wished for the thermometer to hit +40 degrees so you could get a day off school?  I can't remember if I it ever happened.  But I certainly remember wishing, hoping, dreaming that it would.
So last week I left the kids all toasty at home and braved the walk to work.  In this cold your nose hairs snap freeze everytime you breathe in.  Your face  has pins and needles from the freezing air, and after a 10 minutes or so, the tips of your toes and nose start to get sharp, searing pains.  Or at least that's what it's like for me.  The cold is all pervading, and although our new house is well insulated, the sub-zero winds (dare I call them - evil Latvian draughts) seem to find their way in through random cracks and tiny un-insulated portions of wall.  As a result, I no longer have any water in my kitchen or laundry taps - the pipes are full of ice, as they are for many other home owners around the country.  Lucky the loos still work :)  Power lines for trolley buses are snapping, in Vilnius the central heating central burst last week. Our wood pellet heating system is chewing through the pellets, and even so, our indoor temperature would not be more than +16 or 17 degrees. Great temp for museum objects, not so comfortable for humans.
On a lighter note, cold days like this always come with no cloud cover and bright sunlight on white, snowy terrain.  Ice flowers on windows and clear, crisp, crunchy outdoor dashes - to the car, to the shop, back home again.  Friends of ours are going on a quick trip to Italy, leaving tonight, and are looking forward to "winter" Italian style - can't help wishing it were me.  Instead we get to babysit their dog until they get back, and I am under strict instructions to take it for a walk twice a day.  HA!!!  Poor pooch will have to make peace with one quick - VERY quick - trot around the local park occasionally...

I don't know what's going on around here, but my tough 6 year old (who, at times, I could swear is a reincarnation of Mick Jagger) is starting to express his musical preferences.  If you asked him, he would probably tell you his 3 favourite songs are:

1. Eye of the Tiger (Survivor)
2. We Will Rock You (Queen)
3. Another One Bites the Dust (Queen)

closely followed by 4. TNT (AC/DC)

And I just wanted to ask: where the FREAK did the boy even HEAR these songs?  We have a very different set of songs on high rotation here at home.  Why the FLYING FRUITBAT is he not singing me refrains from Belle and Sebastian, or Beirut, or even LCD Soundsystem, or any of the other hundreds of groovy tunes blaring out of our home stereo??? Huh?  Instead he (and his older brother, yes, he's in on it as well) is "kicking your can all over the place, singin' "we will, we will ROCK YOU!"....

I guess I should be grateful its not Russian Euro pop.  Yet.

I don't care what the grown-ups say.  I think snow is awesome.  Pretty much every adult I've talked to in the past few months has said that they are glad there's no snow this year - you have to scrape it off the car when you want to drive, you get puddles of melting ice in the entryway, you have to  shovel it off the sidewalk, it makes icy slippery footpaths, kids keep losing their gloves, etc etc.  And YES.  All those things are true.  And yes, all those things suck.

Yesterday night I came out of work and walked through the park to the bus and the whole world had transformed while I was indoors. Eventhough it was almost dusk, everything was white. The ground was white, the tree branches were covered in white, the road was white, parked cars were white.  Bikes and people made black tracks in the snow as they drove past.  The big, fat flakes were coming down slowly, in a whispy dancing cloud all around.  And at that point, a big wave of pure joy came over me. I walked through the dark in this new world with the hugest, childish grin on my face, grateful for the snow and the insane beauty it brings. All the adult practical considerations be damned.

Best thing was also that I had my own personal soundtrack going - I've lately rediscovered the joy of walking to music on headphones.  You know, when you walk with headphones on you see the world totally differently, like you were in your own film clip...  a bit dangerous when crossing roads, mind. Walking through the dusky, snowy landscape with that "striped sunlight sound" made famous by Brisvegas darlings, the Go Betweens, and replicated by many others, was awesome!

Photo above - our street at about 1am yesterday night. Photo by Jem


This is what we've been waiting for!  This year we don't have to make a formal excursion to the park for the boys to play in the snow - we just shove them out the back door.  Luxury.



What do you do when you've lost ALL of the pairs of gloves your mum bought you at the beginning of winter (that's six.  Did you get that???  I said SIX) ?  And suddenly there's snow outside, and no one helps you find any gloves, to make you sorry you've lost them?   Huh?  I think you all know the answer...

Guess what I got yesterday with my Christmas money.  A pair of pulse warmers - and I'm happy as a clam.  Ok, lets call them wrist warmers, for those of you who aren't as pretentious as I.  And before you think to yourself "what a useless piece of 1980s accessorizing", let me rave a little bit...

Wrist warmers, as far as I can gather, have been a traditional part of dressing in the colder climes for EVER.  They are a little-known piece of traditional Latvian dress, and were knitted from fine wool with glass bead decorations.  Latvian wrist-warmers were used for two reasons:  Firstly, as a decorative way to hide those dirty shirt sleeves before the Whirlpool and Omo revolution.  But secondly, and probably more importantly, they were used as an element in dressing warmly.  I suspect they were so important, because they cut off the draughts going up your coat sleeves.  Because for Latvians, y'see, the draught is arch-enemy extraordinaire - draughts cause  all manner of diseases, they can be blamed for anything from pneumonia to toothache to marriage breakdowns.  And that's not just in winter - oh no.  A draught through a room in summer, when your back is all drenched with sweat and you can't sleep, is an unspeakable horror, something that is bound to hospitalize you.  And to think in Oz we called them cross-breezes and designed houses to "catch" them!  So wrist warmers make complete sense for a culture trying to stamp out draughts - these nifty little woolen tubes will take care of breezes in unwanted places, that's for sure.

I have wanted a pair of traditional wrist warmers for ages but was always put off by the fact that most of the ethno-styling women around me were knitting their own - "they're so easy", apparently - but I didn't let the Latvian-women's-self-sufficient-craftiness fool me. I'm not having 10 failed attempts at knitting something so seemingly easy, before giving up in disgust! So this week a friend took pity on me and sold me a pair of wrist warmers whipped up by a lady who learned the art as a part of living tradition - she learned to knit them from an older relation who learned from her grandmother, who learned to make them from.... you get the idea.

I'll admit it - I've taken the easy road and bought myself a warm pulse.  Apart from the small smile of satisfaction I get when I see my beaded wrists peek out from under my coat, I've got to say - they really help with warmth!!!  Who would have thunk it.  The tight, protected glow that is created almost instantly after putting them on is truly amazing.  I actually found that they were the first thing I took off in the shop yesterday, when I felt overheated - because they really do make a difference in body temp.  I am already planning my next pair. 'Cause they come in all colours and patterns y'know - next I want grey, with deep red and green beads, like berries in the forest...

So there.  Is that enough convincing for all you Aussie craftswomen feverishly crocheting granny squares to start knitting wrist warmers?  Aussie winter is only a few months away, y'know!

How wonderful to disappear into the wilderness of the Latvian countryside for over a week at Christmas. No internet, no TV, just a roaring fire in the hearth and lots of food and twinkling candles in the Christmas tree.  Amazingly this year, there has been no snow - it hasn't even fallen down under zero degrees during the day - which means muddy and grey behind the window.  This year we also celebrated NYE in the country - I had dreamed of doing so for years.  Much to our surprise, everyone we mentioned it to was willing to drive the two hours into the bleak snowless cold to celebrate along with us -  so we had a fun time days holed up around the fire, listening to and playing music, going in the sauna, telling new year's fortunes and playing board games.  The boys and the rest of the visiting kids went on several boys' own adventure expeditions around the lake (with bows and arrows and wooden swords and mum's mobile phone, for security calls and taking photos of wild animals).

When I was younger I was always the conservative party animal who stayed sober and drove everyone home at the end of the night. After that I was pregnant and breastfeeding for years.  Lately however I've found myself drinking more - perhaps its the whole 6-months-of-cold-and-dark-in-Eastern-Europe vibe?  Or maybe because I'm working more intensively?  Whatever the reason, this NYE I learned my lesson after having a close encounter with a bottle of moonshine distilled from homebrewed beer (google tells me that distilled beer is just whiskey, but I tell ya, this didn't seem anything like whiskey to me), and have vowed never to touch booze without international alcohol certification again.

New Years day dawned sunny and gorgeous, with a very light dusting of snow - like icing sugar - on everything, and the puddles slowly starting to turn into ice. And maybe it was the moonshine talking, but I must admit I was happy at the prospect of a little bit of real winter, bracing air, frozen fingers and toes - the way familiar landscapes are transformed into strange worlds when they are covered in snow.
So here's a happy one to all of you, hope you find beauty in your indigenous landscapes, with or without snow...


One way we told fortunes was by lighting a candle in a little boat - that each person swirled into a bowl of water.  The boat stopped at the person's fortune for next year (written on slips of paper around the outside).  Both Jem and I got "Many visitors from far away lands" - so we're waiting for ya!