Justin + Gwen December
This indulgent holiday month, me and Gwen spent a lot of time either inside or on the move! We got our tree right after Thanksgiving this year and Gwen enjoyed putting up Christmas lights and decorations around our house. To get intothe holiday spirit, we saw the Nutcracker nearby, and found an oat eggnog that we preceded to buy a gallon of.
At home, I’ve been painting more, trying out watercolors a bit more seriously, and I have been enjoying it! Next, I’m hoping to get gouache, based on the art I really like in the Sibley guides. At first I thought it would be a good coffee table book, but after reading it, I quite like Sibley’s book about understanding the internal lives of birds through observations, with lots of illustrations. I like the way he talks about the way we talk about instincts- in us, there is a “deep stirring” that pushes us to eat good food and avoid snakes, but in animals we often talk about instincts like it makes them nothing other than robots.
The next weekend, we had Gwen’s holiday orchestra concert, enjoying some Mozart alongside holiday tunes. We hit the holiday market in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore and went to the Everyman Theater, which we had never been to. We saw And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which was really good! The acting was great and the play tense and satisfying. The next weekend we had our Christmas party + book club. Of course, I cooked a lot! I had a seitan roast, maple mustard carrots, lemon cream pasta, maple brussels, and bread! The party went well, with a Secret Santa exchange of books.
Another highlight was the garden of lights at our new nearby botanical garden- Meadowlark.
On the week of Christmas, we lazed around the house before going to CT to my mom’s place. Our first married Christmas at home was a lovely time playing video games, cooking every day, having hot chocolates, and watching extremely good and extremely bad movies.
After Christmas, Gwen had to keep working remotely, but I continued to spend my free time well by painting more, watching movies with my mom, and going out a couple times. I enjoyed seeing Connecticut where I grew up in the new light that wildlife photography and birding give which is all the animals around! We went to Hammonasset Beach State Park, and I most wanted to see an American Bittern- an elusive straw colored heron which hides in marshy reeds. This was a great spot to see them, but it ended up being cold, rainy, and gross. Not without any payoff though as there was about a dozen hawks, close views of kinglets, and our first good scoter pictures. If I hadn’t looked around the animals at home, I wouldn’t have seen a blue jay scoop up a mouse right next to the house! He brought it up to a branch and imperiously looked down at it. I never knew blue jays hunted such big guys!
