Yup, it snows here.

Here's a shot taken just YESTERDAY.  That's snow on the ground.  Lots and lots and lots of it (we ended up with about 25cm).  This zima has been particularly cold, grey, rainy, and snowy.  What you can't see in the picture are the 35kph bura winds.  Brrrrrr.

A word to the wise:  if you are thinking of moving here, make sure your accommodations have really good heating for the winter months.  And if you've got a car....get snow tires.  You'll seriously be glad that you did.

And now, time for some nice hot kavu by the fire. 

Easter egg hunts & asparagus

I think I figured out how the whole Easter-egg hunt came to be (and if this isn't true, then it is a really good idea).  This past Easter weekend, I had the opportunity to pick wild asparagus for the first time ever.  Wild asparagus grows all over the place in Croatia....in wooded ares, usually under trees, near walls and under bushes.  It is INSANELY difficult to spot.  I'll try and get a picture when I go out again today and post it here, but mainly wild asparagus is really really thin, and brown and thus nearly impossible to see against the brown leaves on the forest floor or against the thin shoots coming up from the bushes at this time of year.

To be able to spot the asparagus, you really need to sort of scrunch down and try and see them at eye level.  Pretty difficult when you are an adult.....but I thought to myself that a small child would be at the perfect height to spot the asparagus.  And if you gave the child a basket to carry into the forest, they'd be able to carefully carry the tender shoots.  All that is left is some sort of incentive for the children.  I mean, I was a child once, and I can't imagine any circumstance that would motivate me to go combing through the underbrush looking carefully for asparagus............except maybe the promise of chocolate.  Yup.  That would have done the trick for me.  And therefore I got the idea that maybe the original Easter-egg hunt went something like this:  kids were handed baskets and told to go hunting for asparagus shoots and to try and find some chocolate eggs hidden in the brush.  Kids could eat the chocolate they found.  And kids would be rewarded with extra chocolate depending on how much asparagus they toted home in their baskets.

Makes sense to me.  A win-win situation for everyone involved, yes?

Sretan Uskrs to everyone!

Nanowrimo 2010

How did an entire year go by? Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) starts next week on November 1st. I haven't touched my Nanowrimo 2009 project AT ALL! Not at all. Not even one word. As a matter of fact, I can't even remember what story I was working on. How did the time go by so quickly???

I'll be digging up my old project this week and taking a cold hard look to see if it is worth re-jigging, or if I should learn from it and try something new. It seems that life in Croatia is different than my old life in Canada. My old life was consistent, predictable. And thus I could work on my writing in a consistent and predictable way. My world was not changing much inbetween writing sessions. But here in Croatia, my life changes minute by minute. Not much is consistent and nothing is predictable. So when I put down a writing project for even a couple of weeks, I return to the project which is in the same condition when I left it. But I'm not in the same condition. I've changed. My life has shifted. Things are not the same. I'm not the same person I was 2 weeks ago. So taking up an old writing project becomes difficult because I am a different person.

Ever heard of that old telephone game where one person whispers a sentence into another person's ear, and that person whispers it to the next person's ear until 10 or 12 people later the last person says the sentence out loud and it resembles nothing like the initial sentence? So, something like: Barney has a grocery store, comes out as: Aliens make good traffic cops.

That's sort of what's happening with me and my stories right now. Hopefully a month of Nano will help.

I'll keep my fingers crossed, .....