Author: Dan Dickinson

Summer meat

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No, this is not a porn review.

I really thought that when I became (pseudo) vegetarian, summer would be excruciating. I thought that not being able to have hot dogs and hamburgers would suck the most during barbecue season, but then I realized…it’s not like there’s a whole lot of discernible meat in hot dogs or most store-bought hamburgers. In fact, hot dogs taste nothing like meat…they just taste like a slightly unpleasant excuse to eat a bun with some condiments on it. Therefore, veggie dogs — which I’ve had a few times now — taste just fine because…well, you can’t taste them. Like I said, they’re just bun, mustard, relish and bbq sauce delivery vehicles.

The lack of hamburger hasn’t hurt me either. I actually have access to a lot of very good veggie burgers all year round — Hero Burger, the nearby Jason George pub, the Auld Spot — but GB also showed us how to make very tasty burgers (the vegetable/lentil type, like the Auld Spot’s, not the meat-replica type) which we tend to only do on the barbecue.

I don’t really miss steak that much…I liked it, but I never craved it. What I do miss is barbecued Italian sausage. I tried the tofu version last night; again, you can mask the fact that it probably doesn’t taste very good with condiments, but it was definitely missing the sausage-y flavour. But for every n sausages that I don’t eat some pig lives, so I can suck it up.

[tags]veggie burger, veggie dog[/tags]

Three weeks of mornings

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Now that I am in full scramble mode to write my final term paper, I have resigned myself to the likelihood that I will not have an evening off* until Jul 24, the evening it’s due. Last night we had a drink and dinner at the Auld Spot with CBGB and got caught up on baby Liam’s feats of strength, and then came home to tie off some small errands.

This morning we had brunch at Toba with my friend Joe and his girlfriend, then grabbed some pretzels, cheese & strawberries from St. Lawrence Market north and visited the Vu condominium sales centre. We’re not looking to move any time soon, just wondering what’s out there in the neighbourhood. Already we feel like we want more space.

Anyway, it occurred to me that the only leisure time I’ll have in the month of July will likely happen before noon on Saturdays and Sundays…so I enjoyed the hell out of this one.

* except the two Summerlicious dinners next week. And the FC game two weeks from today.

[tags]auld spot, toba, vu condominiums, toronto fc[/tags]

Final thoughts about our trip

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  • Pictures of our trip are finally in a Flickr set. I uploaded the 30 I liked the best. Somehow we managed not to take any pictures in Vancouver…I guess we were too busy drinking and cycling.
  • Speaking of drinking, up until the last evening (when we were all about Belgian) we managed to drink only BC wine & beer for the entire trip. Some favourites: the Mt. Begbie Tall Timber Ale, several Mark James microbrews, the Blasted Church Hatfield’s Fuse and the Sumac Rudge Meritage.
  • Google Maps puts the trip from Calgary to Vancouver at just over 1,000 km; including side trips we covered just under 1,200 km. We filled the gas tank of our brand new Toyota Corolla once, in Revelstoke, at a cost of $50. We pre-paid the fuel option on the car for $60 (so worth it…I would’ve paid more than that to fill it up since I brought the car in right at E, and I didn’t have to drive around downtown Vancouver looking for a gas station) so ultimately we paid just $110 for all that driving. Not bad, considering all the griping I hear from drivers these days.
  • Animals spotted: a bear (from the safety of the Whistler gondola), marmots, hares, several gophers / prairie dogs / Richardson’s Ground Squirrels / whatever they were, chipmunks, a pika, an elk & a few big-horned sheep crossing the Trans Canada.
  • The flight attendant I spoke to on the Toronto–>Calgary flight told me about her brother’s blog, where she said he talked about “weird” music. I was trying to describe to her what I usually listened to, and she said it sounded like what her brother wrote about. She gave me the name of his blog. I checked it out…yup. She was definitely in the right ballpark. Check out Everything is Pop.

So…where to next?

[tags]mt. begbie brewery, mark james group, blasted church, sumac ridge, toyota corolla, everything is pop[/tags]

Hoteliers: fear my web 2.0 wrath

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Random catch-up from the last week, including some highlights of the thousands of feed items I just blazed through:

.:.

George Carlin died last Sunday. I had no idea. That’s what happens when you’re out of tv/internet/newspaper range for 4 days. Carlin was an important entertainer, a rare animal indeed. Jessica Hagy from Indexed puts it nicely:

.:.

I watched three movies on our trip, mainly on the flights from and to Toronto: Charlie Wilson’s War (which I never did finish…our descent began before I caught the end, but I don’t feel like I missed that much), Ocean’s 13 (yawn…the last two have just been issues of GQ magazine put to celluloid) and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (and you shall know it by its bleak, bleak trail of dead…yeesh). Philip Seymour Hoffman was the best thing about the last, and the only good thing about the first. If that guy had “leading man good looks” he’d be a superstar. I suspect in about ten years he’ll be regarded as one of the finest actors of our generation, if not the finest.

.:.

Richard Florida pointed to the chart below, by Dave Lakeland, showing the cost of gas vs. the GDP per capita (all in the US) for the past twenty years. Very interesting.

.:.

I actually quite look forward to this phase of a trip, where we can finally see how all the pictures look (Nellie’s 22″ iMac gives a much clearer idea than my tiny little sub-laptop) and I can write reviews of the hotels in TripAdvisor. Three of the hotels will be getting rave reviews; one will get faint praise and one mild scorn. Mmmmmm, feedback.

[tags]george carlin, indexed, richard florida, cost of commuting, tripadvisor[/tags]

Felix!

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Tonight was a nice wrap-up to our trip: I got to see Stanzi for the first time in ages, and I finally got to meet her fiance Trent. We all went to dinner at Chambar (yum…Belgian beer!) and caught up. They just finished a 200km canoe trip down some rivers up north, which made our little hikes seem pretty sad.

Most exciting of all for Nellie: seeing Alessandro Juliani (aka Lt. Gaeta of Battlestar Galactica) eating dinner at the restaurant.

Now we’ll just relax and get some rest before our flight back tomorrow. As much as I hate the idea of the trip being over, it’ll be nice to get home again.

[tags]chambar, vancouver, battlestar galactica[/tags]

BSS & HEPA

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Just got home from the Yaletown Brewing Co. where we watched Spain beat Germany 1-0 in the Euro final. Two things I love about the YBC, even more than their sister Brewhouse in Whistler:

1. The music. Last night, when the DJ started after 9:00, they played some really good songs, including “7/4 Shoreline” by Broken Social Scene, “First Day of Spring” by The Gandharvas, “Common People” by Pulp and “Connection” by Elastica. Surprising stuff for a pub that hosted by no less than 3 stagettes in the time it took us to eat dinner.

2. The men’s washrooms have Dyson Airblades. It seems funny to refer to a washroom hand dryer as cool…but it’s cool.

And now we wait to see what else our last full day in Vancouver — and on vacation — brings. Still waiting to see if we’ll meet up with Stanzi this afternoon, but other than that I think we may just rest, pack, do our web check-in and find a quiet place to eat dinner.

[tags]yaletown brewing company, euro 2008, dyson airblade[/tags]

I can has watterfrunt plz? Kthxbai.

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After a big breakfast downstairs at the hotel, Nellie and I went down to the marinaside and rented some bikes from Reckless. For $30 we got two bikes for 2 hours (though we only stayed out for about 75 minutes) and cruised around the waterfront. We went all the way down past English Bay (where I stayed during my first visit to the city) to the entrance of Stanley Park, all the way back around False Creek past BC Place and GM Place and Science World, then back to Yaletown to drop off the bikes.

There were tons of cyclists, roller bladers, walkers, strollers…everyone was out. It doesn’t hurt that it’s another beautiful day. David Miller should force every Toronto city councilor to come do this.

Just about to jump in the shower and head off to the pub to watch the Euro Cup final.

[tags]vancouver, yaletown, reckless bike stores, toronto waterfront, david miller[/tags]