It was a good time to recuperate from the marathon leading up to the release of my first album, to enjoy the company of my little family, and the the friends who make up our extended family, to soak up the sunshine.

In a word, delightful.

Some friends brought a birthday cake with a typical Chinese gizmo — a flower-shaped candle holder, where you light one candle in the middle, which then results in the entire gizmo opening up like a lotus flower, auto-lighting more candles and squeaking an electronic Happy Birthday tune in a continuous loop sequence. Trouble is, it does not come with instructions on how to turn that tune off. We could not figure it out and ended up throwing it in the public garbage pail on the floor, where it merrily continued squeaking loud enough that I could hear it around one corner in the aisle and the thick metal door of the apartment. So, I am sure, could the neighbours. This device was obviously inexhaustible, as it was still squeaking happily away this morning, but by now from a garbage bag all tied up and waiting to be collected.

Most likely, the garbage truck driver or the staff at the dump are still enjoying the merry tune this very moment. If this were not happy, noisy China but Germany, the police would likely have come in the middle of the night on a noise complaint.

I’m exhausted, but I can’t go to bed yet. I’m ensconced in my home-away-from-home, Easter Seal House in Vancouver. In the morning, I’ll be taking my daughter for her regular neurology appointment. She hasn’t had a seizure in almost three years, but the fight against her epilepsy isn’t entirely over yet. In preparation for her EEG, she has to be sleep-deprived… which means Mama has to be sleep-deprived, too.

Ah well, no different from any other night, really.

And it was such a wonderful day. The sun was shining in a blue sky in Whitehorse. Jade was a delightful travel companion on our flight down to Vancouver; she charmed everyone around her with her happy chatter and questions.

And some other exciting things happened, too.

I got a message first thing this morning from a local woman who does a show on the local French CBC radio station; she wanted to play a song from my upcoming album and promote the release concert. I got another e-mail from a producer who broadcasts for CBC North out of Montreal and I will be doing an interview with her early next week.

So that was fun.

Then, while I was downtown running some super-quick errands in preparation for the trip, I decided to pick up a copy of our local entertainment magazine, What’s Up, Yukon. Turns out, this issue contains a review of my album. And I’m thrilled with the review. (I’ll put a link up here once it’s available.)

THEN! When Jade and I boarded our Air North flight, I pulled out the in-flight magazine, Yukon North of Ordinary. I’ve been so busy, I hadn’t had time to see if the Spring issue was out yet. So it was pretty thrilling to open up the magazine to page 79 and find this:

The article was written by local journalist / blogger / amazing mother of three (soon to be four!) Sarah Niman, and I can’t believe how much information she packed into two pages. (I’ll put an electronic copy of that up sometimes soon, too.)

THEN!!

I arrived at Easter Seal House and found that the four boxes I was expecting here had indeed been delivered. Here’s what’s inside those boxes:

Hot off the presses!

Just over a week left before the album release, and I have a gigantic to-do list to wrestle into submission. But it will happen. And, you know, that will be an amazing day, too.

I made an amazing carrot soup tonight. I know it’s bragging, and it was kind of accidental, but everyone who tasted it agreed.

So, I’d loved to have photographed it properly and presented it to you like this:

This roasted carrot soup picture looks totally awesome, and I bet it tastes divine, too. If you want to try making the soup pictured here, I stole it from http://beingsuzyhomemaker.blogspot.ca/2011/02/roasted-carrot-soup.html. Click on the pic to go there.

Instead, this is what I’ve got for you:

Beautiful colour, but not such an impressive picture. But you know you’ll want to make this soup.

The problem with carrot soup is that the flavour depends so much on the quality of the carrots. And let’s face it, in the middle of winter, a lot of carrots have become kind of bitter, bland, or otherwise uninspiring, when what you really want is sweetness, with just a hint of zing.

That, my friends, is what this soup delivered. Pure, sweet, carroty goodness. My method was the taste-test-add-taste-again method, but I’ll try to estimate quantities for you.

Heavenly Carrot Soup

• 3 tbsp coconut oil
• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 5 or 6 large carrots, washed, unpeeled (so easy)
• 1.5 – 2 L water
• 1 tbsp savoury
• 1 tsp celery seed
• 1 – 2 tbsp salt
• 2 – 3 tbsp creamed honey
• 2 tbsp fresh-squeezed lemon juice
• fresh mint for garnish

1. In a large pot, melt the coconut oil. Add chopped onions and cook until softened. Some slight browning is okay. Just let them cook while you chop the carrots.
2. Discard the tops of the carrots and chop into 3-5mm circles. Probably you could chop into any size you want, but I wanted these to cook quickly. Add the chopped carrots to the pot.
3. At this point I also added three peeled and chopped broccoli stems that I happened to have hanging about. I don’t think they did a thing to the flavour, but you know, in the spirit of full disclosure here…
4. Add 1.5 to 2 L of water and bring that baby to a boil. Turn down to a slow boil or hot simmer. Whatever you feel like. I was impatient. Dinner was late as it was.
5. Add the savoury, celery seed, and salt. I used coarse sea salt because I ran out of the fine stuff. I figured it would dissolve anyway and it wouldn’t matter. I like to be kind of generous with salt, I admit it. Salt to your own taste.
6. Add enough honey to make the soup as sweet as summer carrots.
7. Lemon juice adds just a slight puckery zing to the soup that is otherwise just too sweet. Don’t add too much or it’ll just taste like lemons. Fresh-squeezed is SOOOO much better than the bottled kind. I happened to have some leftover from last night’s dinner (but truly fresh-squeezed would have been even better, as I find it starts getting bitter when it sits out). But, hey, even bottled is better than none at all.
8. After the carrots are cooked soft, get out your handy-dandy immersion blender (or transfer in batches to the other kind of blender) and whirl it all up until smooth(ish).
9. Ladle into bowls and garnish with fresh mint. Ooooh, yeah. Mint and sweet carrots are a match made in heaven, baby.
10. Michael had his soup as-is. Halia’s got the ice cube treatment. I added a splash of almond milk to the middle of mine. It was aaaaaalll good.
11. Enjoy!

Here’s a PDF version of the recipe if you want it to be easier to print: Heavenly Carrot Soup

I also meant to write a blog post about Jade turning 7, because she is a truly amazing kid. But I didn’t do that either.

But since the last post I wrote over here, I’ve written seven posts over on my other blog. (Sorry, guys. Not sure how that happened. Lots of them are just really status updates.)

And guess what else? I finished recording my very first album. This project I’ve been breathing and dreaming forever is actually wrapped up, and the actual honest-to-goodness CDs are being manufactured right now. The album is going to be released in less than a month.

Anyone else feel like squealing with me???

Back in real life, the laundry is overflowing (and I just discovered that the cat’s litter box has been tipped over, onto some of that there laundry on the laundry room floor…ugh) and the dirty dishes are propagating at an alarming rate. And my blog reader is into the hundreds of posts I haven’t read, too.

But, dammit, life is good right now.

How are you doing?

I don’t think I mentioned it before — whoops! — but my original song I’m a Fool for You was chosen by a jury to be part of Yukon Women in Music‘s newest CD.

(Just look at the artwork! Isn’t it gorgeous? The painting in the background was donated by local artist Emma Barr.)

The gorgeousness keeps going inside the album, too. Fourteen songs are on it, in all sorts of styles, and I can’t stop listening to it.

And you can hear them all live at the Yukon Arts Centre this Saturday evening. I’m so excited, I could bust!

There’ll also be a reception afterward, so you can have your CD signed by your favourite artists and view the original painting by Emma Barr. (Which, by the way, will be going up for auction in a month or two.)

You can get your tickets on the Arts Centre website or by phoning the box office at 667-8574.

(Our last CD release concert sold out, so do get your tickets!)

Now, should I go with the long red gown… or the crazy colour-shifting shoes…?

Halia, whose name means “in remembrance of a loved one” holds a poppy from our garden (2010)

I have a bit of a complicated relationship with Remembrance Day. Growing up, there were ceremonies at school every year. The focus always seemed to be on World War II.  (In fact, I seem to remember feeling that war was a thing of the past.) I remember classmates talking in class about grandfathers or other relatives who had been at war, who had died, or who hadn’t.  I felt painfully awkward…because the side of my family I know best is my dad’s side. The German side. No one ever said anything, but as a child I always had this sense that my family was on the wrong side.

I know very little of my German family’s experience of World War II. When I visited my Oma and Opa, I saw the rusted old bike leaning against the fence on one side of the yard, obscured by weeds; every autumn it became increasingly buried in the fallen leaves of the giant chestnut tree. That bicycle wasn’t to be moved because, rumour had it, it had saved Opa’s life more than once during the war.

I really don’t know what role Opa played in the war effort in Germany. I have a vague notion that it was his language skills that were used, since he was multi-lingual. (I grew up believing he spoke seven languages, but my dad made a joke once that Opa’s languages are a bit like a fishing story, growing with each retelling. So, really, I have no idea how many languages he spoke.) (But wherever did he learn Chinese in the first place?)

My Oma would sometimes tell a story of the years following the war. She lived in Berlin with her two sons, my uncles; food was not plentiful and certainly not very exotic. I think perhaps it was my uncle Diethelm (but perhaps it was Friedhard?) who figures in the story, seeing an orange for the first time around the age of five and thinking it was a ball, having never seen an orange before.

I always felt it was taboo to ask my family about their experiences during the war years, so I never asked.  I don’t think I felt this way just because they are German. I know Michael has said that his Grandpa wouldn’t talk about his war experiences, either. And, though unable to fully imagine the horror of fighting in a war, I can imagine why none of them would want to talk about it.

On the other side of the world, what was the war like for my family in Taiwan? At the beginning of the Second World War, Taiwan had been occupied by Japan for 44 years. I have only a few stories about what life was like. How my grandmother was one of only a handful of non-Japanese students who made high enough marks to make it into a prestigious school. How her pierced ears made her a target for mockery, being called a barbarian because piercing was not a Japanese custom. How my grandfather’s brother went off to fight (in what war?) and never came home again. How my grandfather himself studied medicine and became a doctor in Japan. That the Japanese ran horrific prisoner of war camps. Tidbits, really.

And so, for many years, the not talking and not asking aspect of Remembrance Day left me feeling, more than anything, ignorant.  Like there are things I can’t honour and pay my respects to, because I don’t know a thing about them.

This is not to say that I feel nothing on Remembrance Day. The speeches and ceremony never fail to get me right in the gut, never fail to highlight the great cost of the sacrifice made by those who fought, and the price paid by the families they left behind.

And of course I now know that World War II is not the only war of significance to remember, nor is war a thing of the past. I haven’t had a chance to participate in a Remembrance Day ceremony in many years, but today Jade accompanied Michael to the ceremony here in Whitehorse. I hope, as my kids grow up, I can help fill in some of the blanks I didn’t have the courage to ask about while I was growing up.  So they can know what it is they are remembering and what they are honouring.

Mme. S told us Jade was a joy to have in the classroom, and a very sweet girl. (We knew that, of course. *ahem*) Unlike many kids, she is able to concentrate on one task for a long time, and it can sometimes be difficult to get her to move on to the next activity of the day. (Yep!) She is not very enthusiastic about gym class. (Yeah . . . I identify with that, although Michael is a bit bewildered.) Did we have any questions?

Jade’s kindergarten teacher had mentioned that it can take Jade some extra time to learn things. So I asked Mme. S if she had any concerns for Jade’s learning in the classroom. She furrowed her brow. No, not at all. And she’s very enthusiastic about reading. (We knew that!) In fact, Jade was placed in one of the more advanced writing groups. (They’re learning to print, so I don’t mean writing novels, or anything.)

I don’t want to brag about Jade. I’m just so happy and so proud of her. After all the pummelling her brain took at the hands of epilepsy, she managed to heal, and she’s thriving. She’s excited to learn, she’s stoic about her special diet, and she’s full of life . . .

I still think she’s a miracle.

That’s because all my online time was getting sucked into this:

That there is a screenshot of the front page of my website. I poured myself into it for a couple of months. I had a pretty clear plan of what I wanted when I started, so I figured it wouldn’t take long, but… well, you know how it goes, right?

So my new website is where my other blog lives, of course, and it’s also the place where I post upcoming shows. I’m going to add a store once my album is ready.

Oh right, did I mention? I’m going to be in the recording studio starting this Friday. THIS FRIDAY!!!! So yeah, there’s a lot of work that has been going into that, too. (I’m going to tell you a secret: I’m excited, but I’ve got big butterflies. GIANT butterflies.)

One of my very favourite things about my new site is that there’s a spot on it for you to sign up for my newsletter. I am very excited about this! And I’d LOVE for YOU to sign up for my newsletter! I’m planning to send out the very first issue next week, with stories about how recording is going, photos of the work happening in the studio, and other fun stuff that I won’t post anywhere else. So you’ll totally be part of an exclusive club. (Besides that, when you sign up, you get a free download of one of my songs.)

So that’s where I’ve been between the end of Frantic Follies season and the beginning of my Nunavut/Ottawa tour. I’m about to plunge headlong into the next step of my music career, and I’ll come up for air here when I can. It’s been quite a journey here, hasn’t it? I feel like I’ve been so many different people on this blog — newlywed up north, Yukon transplant, new mother, grieving mother, health advocate, ketogenic cook, gluten-free cook, musician… Thank you for coming along for the ride.