Category: Family

Happy valentimes!

Dan Dickinson3 Comments

[Editor’s note: yes, I know I misspelled ‘Valentine‘. It’s a pop culture reference. Youtube it.]

I am indifferent about Valentine’s Day. I have no particular reason to hate it, other than that it’s a fake holiday invented to sell more stuff. Still, that doesn’t make me hate it any more than, say, Easter. But it’s not a big deal for me. Nor, before you jump on me with the obvious point, is it a big deal for my wife. Her birthday is less than a week before Valentine’s Day, and that’s the usually where I focus my energy, so Valentine’s Day usually consists of her cooking a simple yet awesome dinner (as she is doing right now) or an extravagant feast (as she did last year), and me sending her a card like this:

Not to worry, though, this isn’t going to be some Oatmeal-inspired screed against V-Day. I actually appreciate the occasional reminder to stop and consider how good I have things, including the lady in the kitchen.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me who my best friend is, and my answer is that I don’t really have one. I never have. I’ve had lots of close friends throughout my life, but never someone who I would say I was closer to than anyone else, and who would say the same about me. I’ve has periods where that happens, but then university ended or people moved or jobs changed and I wouldn’t say that anymore…which I guess makes them not best friend material, else distance and upheaval wouldn’t change that. The friend who asked me, who I would say I’ve been as close to as any of my friends over the past six years, has a best friend who remains her best friend even though they’ve been separated for years by thousands of miles. I can say that I have very few people who I intimately trust and who I think — against logic and instinct — would put my own well-being ahead of even their own. But the majority of those people are family, who would be excluded from the category of best friend, funny scenes from I Love You Man notwithstanding.

But that leads me to an obvious answer, which I didn’t come up with immediately, probably because it’s not a typical answer: my best friend is my wife. Of course she’s my best friend; I can’t imagine marrying someone who wasn’t. Most people’s best friend is someone who gets them, and who shares a lot of their interests and worries and ideals, and who they want to hang out with all the time. I guess in many cases that person isn’t their spouse, but for me it is. We’re different in little ways that make it fun, like her appreciation  — and my profound hatred — for the 80s, but she’s inevitably the one I want to share a beer with after work, and talk to about heavy shit, and jet off to New York with for the weekend.

So: forget Valentine’s Day. It’s tired and boring and meaningless outside of Hallmark’s ledgers, and I could say it to anyone without it meaning shit. Instead, let’s see if I can start a new trend.

Happy Best Friend Day, baby.

Status report: kickass

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This vacation is progressing exactly as I had hoped: quietly, and with a minimum of excitement. I am well-fed and well-rested. I have neither slept in an airport nor fended off surging coastal waves, so I count myself lucky. I’ve already gotten some cool presents. And I have lots more — family reunions, more presents, world junior hockey, our anniversary — to look forward to yet. Holidays FTW.

The wind-down

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Yesterday Nellie and I flew to Nova Scotia for the holidays. Well, sort of — we actually landed in Moncton and drove to my parents farm in NS. Drove in a rented Dodge Charger, no less. Anyway.

On the plus side it’s everything we were looking for: peace, quiet, family, dog, chocolate goodies, cribbage, nice weather, sleeping in and not thinking about work.

The only downside seems to be that — as is customary when I go into relaxing vacation mode — I’ve gotten sick. Twelve hours after leaving the office I had a full-on cold. Still, even that’s not so bad…it gives me an excuse to lie about, drink hot chocolate, eat oranges and watch TV.

Father's day

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

As you might remember, the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup ten days ago. This made me happy for several reasons, but it made gave Nellie an extra reason to celebrate. Her dad was a Blackhawks fan all his life, right up until his death twelve years ago.

After he died she always said that if the Hawks won the cup, she’d take the picture from the newspaper, frame it and have it placed on his grave.

And so:

Enjoy it, sir.

"Someone's ear is in danger of having hair brushed over it…"

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I learned something this weekend: that there are three indispensable ingredients of a great weekend. These are, in no particular order: beautiful weather, ample time and people with which to share it.

On Friday I did have to go to the office, but it was nice enough outside that I could walk there, and I didn’t stay long. By noon I was home, fed and ready to enjoy the unseasonably warm day. Nellie and I strolled down to the Bier Markt patio for sunshine and beer (me: Erdinger weiss, Weihenstephan weiss, Spaten lager and Delirium Tremens; she: KLB Raspberry Wheat, Big Rock Grasshopper, Okanagan Spring pale and Koningshoeven Tripel) on a lazy Friday afternoon. Nellie had an urge for an Urthel Hop-It so we wandered up to the Beerbistro in search of one; alas, they had none. So we availed ourselves of the rest of their collection (me: Maudite and Trois Pistoles; she: Durham Hop Addict and Koningshoeven Quadrupel) while making dinner reservations at nearby Harlem. We’d been there once last year and liked it and it felt like the right fit on a lazy Good Friday. One ill-advised cocktail later and were into the starter (catfish Lafayette…yum!) and then our mains. My pork hocks were okay, but Nellie wisely got the fried chicken. I didn’t mind that I missed on some of the flavour. The relaxation was tasting delicious enough.

Saturday was the first day in about two months that I haven’t had to go to work, so I celebrated by sleeping in. Despite it being another beautiful day we didn’t really get out and about that much as we were prepping for dinner with T-Bone and The Sof. Well…Nellie did the prepping, I just cleaned up and provided moral support. Anyway, after a great meal (baguette w/ honey, balsamic and goat cheese; sausage-stuffed pasta with pancetta and sage; steak from Cumbrae’s and three kinds of cheese) this is what our table looked like:

Just for the record, that’s:

  • Marie Stuart champagne (which we brought back from France last fall)
  • Nino Franco prosecco
  • Stratus Icewine
  • Z52 Zinfandel
  • Hidden Bench Fume Blanc
  • L’Acadie Alchemy
  • Noval 2001 Port
  • Blanche de Chambly
  • Christofel Nobel
  • Doppel-Hirsch Doppelbock

And yes, in case you’re wondering, Nellie does like to drink her beer from a wine glass toward the end of the evening.

Sunday was, blessedly, another lazy day. A good lie-in, brunch at the Jason George, a nice long talk with my mom who turned 60 (!) today and Zombieland (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which was excellent. Tomorrow it’s back to work, in spite of my best efforts to take a day off, but for the first time this year I feel like I really got my money’s worth out of a weekend.

Oh, and the other ingredient for a perfect weekend? Consecutive shutouts.

http://www.thebiermarkt.com/home.html

Hopefully it will be less successful than Operation Eat Chocolate Until Even My Puke Smells Sweet

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My my, what a Christmas morning. The crazy wind outside woke us up at 4AM, and we never really got back to sleep. We chatted with my brother and his missus on Skype for a bit at the end of their Christmas day (they’re in Brisbane), then extracted the goodies from our stockings, then had a breakfast of delicious Cumbrae’s bacon, biscuits straight from the oven and prosecco mimosas. Then, to the business at hand — the unwrapping of gifts. Here’s my haul:

  • Five books: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind, The Disappeared by Kim Echlin, Empire Of Illusion by Chris Hedges, The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels, and a book about Cumberland County, NS (where I grew up)
  • Three Blu-ray discs: Die Hard (which we watched last night, actually), Inglourious Basterds and Children Of Men
  • This t-shirt
  • Chocolate. Oh, sweet merciful frangipane, the chocolate.
  • A jar of beets. Which, on any day other than Christmas — when I actually really want beets — would be a weird gift.
  • A proper, game-style Montreal Canadiens jersey, which I shall wear tomorrow night at…
  • The Montreal/Toronto game at the Air Canada Centre! Nellie somehow got us gold seats. I don’t know whose soul she had to sell to do it. I don’t even care. If y’all tune in to CBC Saturday night, I’ll be the guy getting his ass kicked by angry Leafs fans.
  • There was also an Amazon.ca coupon which I promptly used against a massive order to clear off my wishlist: Star Trek, Heat, Fight Club, Band of Brothers, Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee and The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton.
  • Of course we got lots of little things in our stockings, my favourite being the latest issue of GQ (which Nellie got for me after reading this tweet, because she is simply awesome)
  • We got some shared gifts like some cool art from my brother and his wife, some blown glass coasters (with a backstory) from my mom & dad, and four bottles of delicious Alchemy from Nellie’s mom
  • Best of all, though, were the donations my family made in lieu of gifts, which through some good timing, generosity and a little voodoo were matched 300% and given to the United Way of Greater Toronto.

Right now the turkey’s in the oven, the mess has been carted away, Nellie’s watching the Blu-ray copy of Serenity I gave her, the cats are coming down from their catnip high and we’re sliding into sweet relaxation mode. Tonight there’ll be revelry with friends. Tomorrow we’ll do battle with the deluded sports fans of Toronto. Following that I plan on launching Operation Watch Movies Until Mine Eyes Do Bleed.

Merry Christmas, kids!

"Jesus Christ, Powell, he could be a f*cking bartender for all we know!"

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Chrtistmas feels different this year. Maybe it’s because there’s not been any snow in Toronto (until today, but apparently it’ll be gone by tomorrow afternoon), or maybe it’s because all I’ve been able to think about lately is work, or maybe it’s because I’ve not been on a flight to NS and then relaxing on the family farm.

But today after I got home from work, it started to feel a little more like Christmas. Different Christmas. We have our own little traditions, like watching Die Hard (for me) and Love Actually (for her), eating loads of delicious food from Cumbrae’s and About Cheese and Moroco and drinking the bottle of wine I got Nellie last year. It doesn’t replace all the other things that feel like Christmas…it just adds to them.

In that, I suppose I’m lucky. There are a lot of people who have bad memories of Christmas, or no memories of it at all. That surplus of good fortune, not to mention the fact that we’re both happy, healthy and gainfully employed, prompted and allowed me to try to do a little bit to help some of the people who aren’t so lucky. And I figure that should be a Christmas tradition too.

Whatever you might be celebrating, wherever you’re celebrating it, I hope it’s a happy one. And I hope the peanut butter balls there are as good as the one I’m eating right now. Cheers, everybody.

"Europe slid over the edge of a cliff."

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I’ve just finished reading book number three (in a planned series of four) about WWII: A Short History of World War II by (my uncle) James Stokesbury. Having covered the rise of fascism through the 1930s and the emergence of Nazism in particular, I used Jim’s book to refresh my memory of both the sequence and the context of the battles. I was reminded of two key things:

  1. Had Britain and France stood more firm in the face of Hitler’s aggression prior to his invasion of Czechoslovakia, and had it come to a fight, Germany would have been well outnumbered. France alone has one million men and superiority in both tanks and aircraft. The British had no army to speak of, but their navy was far stronger than Germany’s. The Czech army was nearly the equal (in number, anyway) of Germany’s. However, Chamberlain seemed determined to avoid a war — though with The Somme and Ypres barely twenty years behind them, you could scarcely blame the British for that — and he gave over the Sudetenland. The French had convinced themselves of two things: that defense would win the day (hence their commitment to the Maginot Line), and that they were badly outnumbered by the Germans.
  2. As a Canadian I’ve seen such a Canada-America-Britain-centric view of the war, and view of who won it, that I sometimes forget who actually won the war against Germany: Russia. It was Russia who swallowed up great swaths of the German army while Britain and America made plans, and while Vichy France collaborated. It was Russia who lost more soldiers in a single battle — the siege of Stalingrad — then did the U.S. in the entire war, and whose civilian dead numbered in the tens of millions. It was Russia who eventually took Berlin. And it was Russia, of course, who would not have even been in the fight had Hitler not broken his non-aggression pact with Stalin. As the book says, “Hitler’s choice may well have been the single most important political decision of the twentieth century.”

Given that, and given the bias my education has had toward the western allied powers, I’m altering my four-book plan. I’ve begun reading something which should give me a much closer look at the Russian side of the war called A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman. The battle of Stalingrad alone fascinates me, as it might have been the singular turning point of the war in Europe, but if the reviews I’ve read are any indication it should be worthwhile. Grossman was one of the few writers who didn’t simply act as a mouthpiece for Stalin, and the carnage inherent in this phase of the war, so often glossed over, should come out.

Things I learned this weekend

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  • Nellie’s vacations are always bittersweet for me. As an introvert I love the alone time, but I always miss her too.
  • Two years after I saw Once for the first time, I watched it again. Still just as amazing. The scene in the music store where he teaches her “Falling Slowly” gave me chills, just like it did the first time.
  • The city of Toronto is holding a design contest for a revamped north building at St. Lawrence Market. Good. I love the farmer’s market on Saturdays, but that building is both hideous and a logistical nightmare.
  • Eighteen pound cats do not enjoy falling into bathtubs full of water. They enjoy it even less when their owner takes too long drying them off because he’s nearly strained a rib muscle from laughing.
  • The Santa Claus parade seems ridiculously out of place when it’s foggy and 14 degrees. Oh, and fucking November.
  • That said, I’m excited that Swiss Chalet has the festive special up and running already.
  • There are few three-word sentences in moviedom as cool as “Gregor fucked us.”
  • If I ever own a house I’m going to make my living room into a replica of Cumbrae’s, complete with butchers and bags — bags, people — of pulled pork.
  • My team was teh suck last night (except for Carey Price) and hasn’t been very good at all this year.

The cool thing is, there's literally a field below his house

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As I have so many times before I made my Dad a CD yesterday. Or, rather, I compiled a playlist; I neglected to get a CD writer in my lastest computer — I simply never burn anything anymore — so my brother had to burn the CD. Thanks Andrew!

Here’s the playlist:

  1. Holly Golightly . “A Length of Pipe”
  2. Angels Of Light & Akron Family . “I Pity The Poor Immigrant”
  3. Dan Auerbach . “Heartbroken, In Disrepair”
  4. Elliott Brood . “Jackson”
  5. Damien Jurado . “Everything Trying”
  6. William Elliott Whitmore . “Johnny Law”
  7. Avett Brothers . “The Ballad Of Love And Hate”
  8. Detroit Cobras . “The Real Thing”
  9. Regina Spektor . “Field Below”
  10. Rural Alberta Advantage . “Rush Apart”
  11. Great Lake Swimmers . “Still”
  12. Bishop Allen . “True Or False”
  13. Alela Diane . “White As Diamonds”
  14. Metric . “Gimme Sympathy (acoustic)”
  15. Wye Oak . “For Prayer”
  16. Neko Case . “Middle Cyclone”

He will, as usual, love the Damien Jurado and William Elliot Whitmore songs. He’ll probably like the Dan Auerbach, Neko Case and Angels of Light & Akron Family. Not sure how he’ll feel about the Wye Oak or Bishop Allen, but I can’t just lob him softballs all the time, even if he is a senior now.