house (paint) update

Patrick and I stopped by the house today and they have painted! how exciting! The photos of the main space (from Patrick's iPhone - sorry for fuzziness) were taken from the living/dining room looking to where the kitchen and front door will be. I'm really excited about the colour - a kind of blue spruce. You just never know how it will look on a massive wall when you are looking at a chip. The facing wall and pretty much the rest of the house is a light beige. The red (a rosy/coral terracotta) is the feature wall in the bedroom.

You can see the bamboo flooring stacked up - it is acclimatizing to the indoor temperature as it is -30C outside.

Carpiquet

Carpiquet, Dieppe, Arnham, Cassino, Ortona, Normandy ..... all Canadian battles in WWII and all streets in our new nieghbourhood! Whitehorse is set up that way - each neighbourhood has a theme: Porter Creek is trees (elm, spruce etc); Copper Ridge is minerals/gems and you guessed it Riverdale has streets named after Yukon rivers.

But back to Carpiquet - it is a new road in Takhini North, which is a short walk to work. And we are buying a house on it! It is a half of a duplex and will be ready for us by the end of April.

The Yukon has a very crazy real estate market - there is a huge shortage and places get snapped up incredibility fast. The recession didn’t seem to affect the market here at all. So we feel extremely happy to get a place that is: in the neighbourhood we want, within our budget and is a quality new build.

It 1000 square feet - so close to the same size as our apartment and on such a beautiful lot. Here is the view out the living room window of the backyard and beyond!!!


(umm nevermind the construction debris)

It has been all very exciting and scary. As you can see it is a new build, so we got to choose our paint colours, granite counter tops, floor tiles (for the bathroom). Below is the bamboo floor sample, maple kitchen cabinets and paint chips (rosy peach is feature wall in bedroom, the blue spruce type colour is for one long wall that stretches from the kitchen to the living room, and the beige is for everything else).

spruce tip jelly

yes, you read the title correctly .... spruce tip




it is spruce tip collecting time in the Yukon ... or really the end of it. For a couple weeks in May you can go collect the new 'buds' just before the brown papery covering has fallen off .... before they get too mature. You can eat them right off the tree - they taste almost lemony. So Christine and I inspired by our new Miche Genest cookbooks went out into the woods to gather them up. Many bug bites later we emerged with a bag each!

The jelly is quite delicate tasting - I can see why many people say they use it like honey - a teaspoon in their tea. Apparently spruce tips are very rich in Vitamin C (and are brewed into a tea for sore throats/colds).

Recipe:

Pick roundabout four cups of spruce tips. Rinse in cold water and give a light chopping. Cover the tips with water and simmer for 10 minutes. Let stand overnight, strain with jelly bag or cheesecloth.

3 1/2 cups spruce tip juice
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 package (dry) fruit pectin
5 cups sugar

Mix juice with lemon juice and pectin, stir until dissolved. Bring to a boil - add sugar. Bring to a full rolling boil for 1 minute. Ladle into jars.

More about spruce tips here and thank you to Miche - do check out her great cookbook: The Boreal Gourmet (review here)

more fall colours outside my door

as promised here are more photos

sunday morning in the fall

sunday mornings are often often filled with pancakes for brunch. patrick whips them up for us around lunch time. this morning i made an apple breakfast cake. quite simple and tasty - it is based roughly on this recipe from d*sponge - theirs is still about summer fruit while i used fall-friendly apples and pears. i used more fruit 3 or 3 1/2 cups (theirs called for 2 cups of berries) and added pumpkin pie spice. it took a little more time to bake. oh and i would suggest sour cream or some yogurt with this - yum!

we are solidly into autumn here - the sweaters (rather than light summer cardigans ... they don't really count as sweaters) are out - these are the lighter pullovers and cozy cardigans ... not the massive ones .... hmm seems i have many classes of sweaters, but in my defense i do live north of 60: Fall arrives at the end of August; i scrape frost off the windshield most mornings now but thats OK - i don't need a coat yet!

here are a couple shots from my apartment patio. i'm going for a little hike this afternoon so may bring my camera as there are some lovely reds out right now too.

up the hill

213 steps 6088.1
Originally uploaded by Yukon White Light

just home from a walk up the cliff - where i live right now is in the older residential part of whitehorse right along the bottom of the clay cliffs. on the top of black street is a huge set of steps (200+ stairs) which i climb a few times a week, well at least at this time of year. it is so pretty up at the top you can see right across the city down to the river

this afternoon i took my knitting with me - i realized yesterday that i definitely do not have enough loops for the bathmat (like 150% more!) so loopy cotton loops .... solution? socks - yep i cut socks into loops. about 30 socks - i found a package of 20 youth sport socks for $5! plus a 10 pack that had white, pink, blue and purple socks. I spent last night cutting socks up as i watched the olympics. normally when patrick is away i rent girlie flicks (costume dramas and bollywood is my weakness) but the olympics are fantastic. not sure what is, i'd never watch bike road races, beach volleyball etc normally but during the olympics? count me in.

yesterday was pretty busy. i moved everything from christine + my house up the hill to the new place in porter creek. i spent friday night packing up and then on sat afternoon, four of my friends helped pack the boxes in the van and then into the apartment. took less than 2 hours! so i treated everyone to coffee and a treat ... ahhh.

still have to move patrick's place ..... that is the big stuff like couches etc but almost there.

summer sun

found this great little animation that shows our summer light
our days are getting shorter now but as much as might lament up here we still have lots of light at 11 pm and frankly it is just dusky at midnight. then around 2-3am it is getting light again.
it is funny how you never really know what time it by just looking outside ...

World Wide Knit in Public Day

WWKiP day was fantastic - we had 25+ people show up all different ages and sooo chatty! loved it! spoke for quite a while with this lady (she’d be in her 80s) about knitting and her 10 kids! She grew up in the Yukon - her best friend’s mother taught her knit as her mom didn’t knit - so at nine years old she began knitting her dad sweaters for work - her dad did the mail run between Whitehorse and Dawson City (this was before there was a road! about 500-600 km) - so cool and great