Merry Christmas everyone! Wherever in the world you may be, I hope you're safe and warm and enjoying some Christmas cheer.

Fresh log on the fire, refill the bird feeders, get a cup of tea. It's so nice to be home, even  though it's cold, rainy and very grey. 

My son Tom left on Sunday, after we'd celebrated his 25th birthday (wow, he's old). He and I headed out on Saturday to cut our Christmas tree around the corner at the farm where I spent summers as a kid.  We gave Tom a chainsaw for his birthday, so it came in handy right away. (You wanna believe that it's not the kind of gift a mother feels comfortable about: sharp bits! moving fast! loud noise! requires a lot of safety gear! I don't even like to think about it. But I do like to think of getting the patch of scrubby alders and weedy birches thinned out behind the house. He's careful and responsible and has been using chainsaws for years, so, yup, I just have to get over it. Being a mother of adults is hard.) 

He also got me to shoot a gun for the very first time in my life. Just a 22, and I put a hurtin on an oil container that some asshole left in the woods. Just once, that's enough for me.  I live in the woods, I should know how at least. I learned something else: I'm right-eye-dominant. When I lifted the gun to aim, I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.Why couldn't I aim the thing? Tom says, close your other eye. Ah, yes. Left-handed, but right eye dominant. That could take some practice. 

Apart from tromping around in the woods with Tom, we've been doing a fair bit of rest and recuperation since we got home. I knew the trip was going to be wearing, but Randy's knees put up a long and painful protest. Neither of us wanted to face another trip up and down that ladder. By the time we finally hoisted ourselves out of the car, he was pretty crippled up. Much better now after a couple of weeks of taking it easy-ish. It was good to have Tom here for some heavy lifting - they moved the tools from the garage into the new basement workshop. Now Randy's making noises about getting started on my kayak and possibly a stand-up paddleboard. You can take the man away from the boat, but then look what happens. We have three boats in storage for the winter, and two more cooking in his head. 

The last couple of days on the boat were busy, covering the booms and the masts, getting the crane and crew to lift the masts back up to the deck, and covering the whole boat with sunshade. It was cold and windy that day, of course, but maybe that made it easier to jump in the car and drive away when we were done. Time for someone else to take over.

Randy is sufficiently in the festive spirit to venture a trip to town this morning to do his Christmas shopping. He did some scouting beforehand on the internet - the Canadian Tire weekly flyer. I can hardly wait. 

The mizzen had developed a patch of rot near the base. The repair involved removing the rotten bits and scarphing in new pieces of clear spruce.

Cutting back to solid wood.

Cutting a new scarph in the original wood.

Preparing to expoy in the new pieces. There's lots of chiselling and shaping that happened to fit the new pieces.

Clamping the new sections in position.

Shaping the new sections.

Stained, epoxied and first coats of varnish applied.