best non-kid-related of 2020

logically, most of these would be place-related photos, but, as we all know, the place to be this year has been in the house. more so in montreal than other parts, because by march, when lockdowns started everywhere, we had already been sick and tired of being locked down by the season. so there you go, an entirety of a post with pictures mostly from our home - not as bad as it may sound, actually, because 1) we have a home!!! and 2) we're not bored of it yet. and also, hopefully, some small stories to go with the pics. so, i mean, you're free to read!
 here it starts: middle of winter, and the house seen from the street after a fresh snow. it looks pretty cozy, and i've said a lot of times that our small corner has an even more villagey feel in wintertime, when it seems far far away from everything else. 

i could not do this post without including our first quarter helpers, avva and thatha (grandma and grandpa, actually great-grandpa, but that's too complicated for Rada). and the funniest pic of them both that i have is from Ikea, from our big week of non-social-distancing at the beginning of march, right before they left. it was spring break, so B. took one week off work so we could socialize with his family and take them out in montreal...good idea, bad timing, but no one got Covid, so there you go. i don't even remember how we thought of it back then, which now sounds very strange. obviously we wanted to take them to Ikea for the lovely food and for the extensive walking indoor possibilities (it was still freezing cold outside). we were also researching getting a sofa or armchairs (ended up getting two chairs, but much later). anyway, it was a fun day. followed by days at the main foodcourts downtown (the horror! the horror!), but somehow i don't have pics from there.

introducing the weekend breakfast tradition: sometime last winter i started to do pancakes on saturday morning, because on most other mornings i was working and had to leave the house at 6 a.m., so a bit of indulgence seemed very recommended. my in-laws were still here, so i ended up doing a whole big stack every time.i like making pancakes, because it's easy and reminds me of grandma's romanian pancakes of way back - also, B. had just bought a new all-purpose blender, so making whipped cream just became a lot easier. 
a separate story, and reason for this picture, is that last winter we bought our first set of dishes - plate and cup pictured here, there are also smaller plates and bowls, a.k.a. we are adulting! before, we used to subsist on plates and cups that i had haphazardly bought second-hand or had gotten from former roommates etc : still lovely, but completely mismatched and some chipped. as a minimalist that he is, i think B. was getting headaches every time he opened a cupboard, but as a plain old cheap person, he lived by the "why throw it if you can use it" adage, so all went well until we had guests staying over. pretty impulsively we got (actually 2 sets) of Corelle from Walmart - it's laminated glass, and nothing broke or got chipped in 1 year so far!!!

this is probably end of march, and i like the picture because it frames our favourite neighbours' house so perfectly in our front room window frame. obviously i'm going to end up having the same picture taken every season, will refine it to every month and then i'll have a collage printed for a calendar. at least that's the idea, and in a few more years we can make it work!
unrelated, but totally related: our front room is huge, and it suffers from lack of wall art i.e. framed posters etc., which, i have argued to B. multiple times, would fill in/tie together/personalize whatever we're trying to do there. invariably he says, let this place look whatever until the kids grow old enough to stop destroying it and covering it in toys - and theeeen, in about 5 years, we'll have a do-over. and honestly there are other priorities, e.g. fix the basement into a livable space, consolidate the shed and carport...buy a car...switch rooms so that every person ends up having their own space...however! from time to time, the specter of wall art haunts me and keeps me up at night. this is how i spent a bunch of time looking online for paintings from the tretyakov gallery in moscow. i don't know much about art, but i used to have a tretyakov gallery album as a kid, and some of those paintings are very strongly etched in my memory. i'll leave links to some of my favourites below:
1. rooks
2. boyarina morozova
3. wedding on tomorrow street

from the same room, bringing you: the advantages of working from home. it must have been april (although the way B. dresses can be highly deceptive; i'll bet you he doesn't have socks on right now, and it's mid-december), i was going walking with Rada in the mornings, and B. would get installed on the futon after his morning meetings, and work waiting for us to be back. 
see, that table under the window is prime real estate in this house. except we haven't really come up with a proper way of using it. B. has his own office and was working mostly there even in spring/fall, because it's easier to get isolated from whatever noise is happening elsewhere in the house. all through 2019 i had tried to make it MY workspace, and it worked to some extent, But:
- can't be used while Rada is at home, she has to be away at daycare. therefore lockdown = no room of my own; at least while kids need 100% attention (usually 200%)
- can't be used while it's cold, i.e. basically from october to april. probably not doable even with a heater, cause right now in the mornings the temperature is about 14-15C. 
so what's happening right now is, we've installed the keyboard on the table. it covers it completely. sometimes (rarely) Rada gives it a thump while waiting for us to get ready to go out. mostly, it will all just have to wait until next spring. 

our pear tree was one of the most rewarding things in our home this year - only the surprise of actually getting some fruit, nevermind the whole pear jam/jelly/cake activity frenzy. also being able to gift something to our neighbours, which is a big part of feeling we live here.
and i remember seeing the flowers first and being like no, no, i'm not going to raise my hopes up - just because the previous year we hadn't gotten anything in the way of harvest. well, i took the picture anyway. there are lots of pear trees in our neighbourhood, but shockingly i haven't seen any proper apple trees, either on the side of the street or in yards; the only visible stuff is crab apples. i have to ask around what's going on, but i'm guessing people here are more into orchards and less into home production? 

i think this year B. only mowed the backyard twice, which probably is the minimum acceptable if you don't want be driven out of the neighbourhood with pitchforks, as i mentioned elsewhere. again shockingly, the first mowing occasion happened exactly as my friend a. was coming over to drop off some baby stuff with me, i.e. the only actual house visit we've had during the whole of the pandemic. i might have said "a. is coming, you'd better make that yard look presentable", with the result being that B. was in full sweat, the yard half-mowed, and our friends stared at us from the porch for half an hour - nobody went into the house. a wonderful end of may day. anyway, i made bouquets, and i also wrote this (i was writing back then!):

 (postcards from home) 

2.

We’re keeping the dandelions til June,

pretend it’s for the bees. Mornings, barely

awake, I smile to think of them in the yard,

half-closed little suns. Our neighbours

are out planting seedlings. I hear the screech

of the laundry line pulley, picture a string

of motley legs and sleeves flapping for spring.

walking around the neighbourhood, i always have houses i want to take pictures of, and this is a good example. on gouin street, very close to the river. i've been told most of the houses on these streets were first built as chalets - seasonal cabins for refuge out of the city, probably at the beginning of last century. this place is clearly lived in (flowers, planters, AC) yet manages to send a gloomy ruin vibe, what with the dark wood and being all encased in vegetation. obviously the pic doesn't do it justice. one small thing that fascinates me is the ships in the window, set in front of the curtains, i.e. to be admired from the outside.

i'm not gonna lie, i'd like some gentrification to reach our corner at some point (we are currently predicting we'll be fully gentrified in about 20 ys, by which time we hope to be retired and moved out, but maybe it'll pay off pice-wise). BUT, major BUT, i hate it every time i see old houses sold out and demolished to make space for a new set of identical condo buildings. the neighbourhood is full of real estate development posters, and there is one of these developer guys in particular who i feel is my personal enemy. he's doing a couple of projects here and there, and everywhere i've walked this spring: up on our corner, two blocks away, further east on gouin....i see his mug on one of those boards,ugh. and those buildings look the same!!! grey with black, somber, massive - full garage, two or three entrances, that kind of thing. the little houses have charm and spirit, and i'm sad to see them gone. like, look at this one in the pic, with the demolition notice on it. 
the old neighbours told me they were happy we bought our house, cause they were sure it would become a condo thing. which makes me think, what will happen when/if we move out? i don't want to die here, but i want to live here for a long time, and i don't have roots here, but i care now, and i'll care even more in a few years. how can i make sure the house survives? (B. says if we manage to keep it until it's 100 ys old, it can become one of those museum-houses on the history tour)

sunflowers in the old italian lady's garden. this end of summer (august-september) i finally stopped to talk to the old lady. we used to see her all the time among her plants, so one time i was passing by with Rada i asked her if she had plants for sale. we ended up buying from her some raspberry bushes (i think they're either frozen or rotten already,by the fence, but we'll see next year) and a small apple...sapling? i don't even know if it qualifies as sapling, or if it'll ever get planted, but ok, it lives by our sink now. then i went back and bought some toddler clothes she was holding for a sale that had been cancelled (obviously), just because i was bored, and if i was bored i figured she was probably even more bored than me (maybe?). her french is about as good as mine, no english. she is the age my grandma would be now, had 7 siblings, and came from italy with her husband after WW2 (i think 3 other siblings came too). they bought a house in the plateau, then had a grocery store in hochelaga, then one here. she still rents the house in the plateau, which must be worth around 1 million now. has 2 daughters and 3 grandchildren, and honestly i could tell you stories about each of them. 

sumac, hydrangea and wild rose. not much story to this picture, based purely on loveliness. it's one of a large set in which i was trying to capture the changing colors of fall, and this i think caught some of the green on the underside of the pink flowers, the maximum of red in the sumac tree, and some extra yellows behind and on the side. there's a big tree one house over which turned completely orange as a background to the sumac, but it lost its leaves pretty quickly. 
omg, our maple tree shed leaves forever! i barely finished raking sometime end of november, right before the first snowfall. not very spectacular, just small yellow leaves. my beloved pear tree does turn red, but also sheds very quickly (is this a thing about red leaves, that they fall first? i'll have to observe a couple more years before reporting). 

a perfect serendipitous moment in the park, right before halloween. the leaves were orange and the light was sunsetty. i had taken Rada for a last walk after daycare, because it was a warm-ish dayand no daylight savings yet. of course she wanted to go to the park. i like how we continued to go to the park even when it was closed, even if we never stopped at the swings or in the sand pit, even during summer when it reopened for a while and there were children there. we would just do a round, look at everything and describe what was happening. once there was a group of children with balloons. once the sun was setting behind the trees and Rada thought it was the moon. this time we walked in the leaves and shuffled them good.