Category: Me

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Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I turned 50 last week. The day itself wasn’t very remarkable — I worked a full day, and we just ordered some dinner. No big blowout trip, and even the little long weekend getaway we planned didn’t start until the next day.

Thursday

After another full workday we drove crawled to Elora, arriving at the Elora Mill just in time for our dinner reservation. We sat outside and ordered the Celebration menu, which was a four course tasting menu — or rather, two different versions, so we could share. I can’t remember all the details of each course, but here it is to the best of my memory:

  • Strawberry basil gazpacho amuse bouche
  • Tomato tart // duck terrine
  • Lobster in a tomato sauce // sourdough angel hair pasta
  • Seared scallops // venison
  • Black forest cake // pistachio cake
    • Wine pairings
  • Birthday cannoli

We went for an after-dinner walk, enjoying the temperate evening when such things have been in short supply.

Friday

Nice sleep-in. I went for coffee at Lost & Found.

I got back in time for some room service breakfast to arrive. We savored yet another kickass meal from downstairs, and enjoyed the view from our room.

We needed some exercise, so we walked up the hill to Victoria Park, took the stairs down to Irvine Creek, and took in the view of the gorge.

Once we ascended, it had warmed up quite a lot, and a drink was in order. We fancied a cocktail, so we went to The Lobby Bar. I had a pineapple vanilla sour; Lindsay had a hillstone crisp martini. Both were too sweet, and the vibe in there was weird, so we decamped for the Elora Brewing Company up the street. We took a patio table in the shade, and drank beers and ate pretzels and admired patio dogs.

We walked back to the hotel and just relaxed in that palatial room for a few hours. We’d liked dinner so much the night before we booked again for night #2. Our table wasn’t ready when we got there, so we killed time in the bar with glasses of Moet & Chandon Champagne. Once we had our table, we enjoyed yet another outstanding meal:

  • Sweet Corn Soup w/ tomato chutney, aged gouda
  • Goat Cheese Gnudi w/ fresh peas, red pepper pindjur, pickled biquinho peppers
  • Grilled Lake Erie Pickerel for two w/ soused tomatoes, frites, watercress aïoli
    • a bottle of Cremant d’Alsace Blanc de Blancs

No late-night walk this time — it had been a long day, and we were spent.

Saturday

Alas, it was time to leave Elora Mill. Not before another room service breakfast though — their apple cinnamon scones are ridiculous. We cleaned up and packed up and left Elora for part two of the long weekend: Niagara-on-the-Lake.

We headed merrily down highway 6 before getting caught in the predictable misery of QEW traffic. We scrapped lunch plans and picked up our wine order at Five Rows (and there ran into an old Arterra colleague). We stopped for groceries in Virgil and late lunch at Silversmith, then drove to our AirBnB.

See that pool? We dropped our stuff and jumped straight into it.

It was a big beautiful house, so we relaxed, opened a bottle of 2019 Le Clos Jordanne Le Grand Clos Pinot Noir, made nachos, played some trivia, and crashed.

Sunday

Another sleep-in. Another dip in the pool. Coffee & breakfast nachos. A few errands: two nearby fruit stands, more groceries, and a stop at the Pie Plate.

Back at the house we opened a bottle of 2024 Five Rows Pinot Gris, played a round of Pandemic, snacked on fresh local fruit, had a wee nap, and then jumped back into the pool. Over the course of the day we drank a bottle of 2024 Five Rows Sauvignon Blanc while Lindsay made me a big dinner: caprese salad w/ local peaches, shrimp + chorizo fajitas, and peach pie & ice cream. We paired all that with a bottle of 2021 Leaning Post Clone 548 Chardonnay.

We somehow digested all that enough to go for a chilly night swim.

Monday

First order of business: get up, get packed, and get out of the AirBnB. But not before one last swim in the pool. We took the leftover pie & ice cream and ate it in the park across the road.

We’d been wanting some sparkling so we drove to Trius. Not a good experience. We paid $25 for three of their premium wines. The premium sparkling was flat — they acknowledged later it was the end of a bottle that had been opened the day before. The other two wines were meh. Given all that maybe we shouldn’t have bought any, but we didn’t want to leave empty-handed, and I know their top-end sparklings are good, so we held our noses.

We drove back to NotL for lunch at Treadwell, a ritual when we’re leaving town. We still don’t know what was going on in the city, but there was no parking anywhere. We ended up parking ten minutes away – illegally, mind you, but so was everyone else’s parking spot.

Lunch was, surprisingly, just okay: my scallops & pork belly were decent, but Lindsay’s mussels were underwhelming. Then we split a lobster club that did NOT feel worth the $49 price tag. It used to be cheaper and better, TBH.

We walked back to the car and braced ourselves for our commute home. Happily, it went about as perfectly as could be: no traffic jams (other than the Gardiner, where it’s always bad), no accidents…just smooth sailing. We were home in less than two hours, where we were greeted by a yelling cat.

Epilogue

I have heartburn from all the rich food & drink, and my muscles are sore from five swims in 40 hours, but other than that…50 feels pretty great.

The bird is dead

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I deleted my Twitter account a couple weeks ago. I hadn’t really used it for a few years and let it go fallow, but the Nazi salute was the reminder I needed to delete that shit.

I opened my account in March 2007 (during, apparently, the “first wave of people to join“) and was a heavy user for years. The bigger my job got, the more my usage dwindled, to the point where post-2020 I was barely tweeting. Then Dipshit bought the site and I all but petered out. Of course, I stopped using my Facebook account more than five years ago, and my life has been noticeably better since.

I used to be such a believe in the power of social media. Long before Twitter or Facebook existed, I read The Cluetrain Manifesto and thought it meant the end of marketing lies and political falsehoods as we knew them. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more wrong about anything. For some reason deleting my Twitter account seemed like the last nail in admitting that. Maybe that’s why I haven’t switched to BlueSky. It’s not that I need to do this somewhere else. It’s that there is no “this” anymore.

7×7

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

My 49th birthday was earlier this week. No big celebrations; we were still recovering from the cold we both caught at the tail end of our India trip. I skipped some work things earlier in the week, and yesterday was the first day I even started to feel normal.

Today was nicer. I went for a walk, bought a book at Queen Books, bought us lunch and a Deep ‘n Nostalgic chocolate cake from hot new bakery Alice Marie, picked up some meat at Butchers of Distinction, and bought some mini doughnuts at COPS. I watched some Olympics. I snuggled with Pluto, who we’re cat-sitting for a week. There might be some Pandemic later. There will definitely be wine.

It’s taken some time to recover from this one, but sometime yesterday I became desperate to plan more trips. Not that there’s a single red penny left in the vacation fund, but that hasn’t stopped me. I want mountains. I want an AirBnB with a pool. I want a cool city with parks and wine bars. I want Nova Scotia at a time that isn’t Christmas. I want wineries. I want a language gap.

I just want something.

I hate winter

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It’s been brutally cold for the last 36 hours or so. Well, brutally cold for Toronto, not for the rest of Canada. There was at least a bit of sunlight, a rarity these last two months, but it was too cold to go outside and enjoy it. I feel trapped inside, though I’m glad we’re in the house and not the loft anymore.

I have to say: in recent years I’ve found Januaries and Februaries harder and harder to deal with. I’m not sure I’d be formally diagnosed with SAD, but I certainly recognize the struggle in myself in the tough parts of the season. So, I’m trying to push out of it. I have drinks lined up two old friends/ex-colleagues this week. Then Lindsay and I are going to a play on Saturday, and might work a dinner in there too. I’m also trying to organize myself into a work trip in March.

Lord knows, I can’t keep drowning myself in TV…though it’s been good TV. I finished the exceptional Better Call Saul, I binged Yellowstone (which is mediocre, but entertaining), I’ve started The Last Of Us and the new season of The Bad Batch, and I’ve somehow found myself halfway through The Staircase. Just as well there’re so many good shows; it’s been hard to watch both the Canadiens and Raptors lately. I’m basically hoping for good trade deadline drama and high draft picks.

To sum this year up: I know Groundhog Day is absurd, but — having a vested interest in eventually seeing the sun — I found myself wondering what the woodchuck’s prognosis for spring would be on Thursday. Of course, this is the year they found the poor groundhog dead.

Home?

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More and more, lately, I’m struggling to feel at home in Toronto.

I’m certainly engaging with it less. I used to go to TIFF every year, and Hot Docs. I used to go to concerts and beer festivals and Raptors games, and try new restaurants, and go to St. Lawrence Market every weekend. Obviously COVID put a serious crimp in those plans, but I haven’t seemed to recover. Anyway, I was tailing way off on stuff like that before COVID. Even moving to this side of the Don River has made it feel tougher than when I lived a block from Yonge Street. It used to take 5-10 minutes to get downtown in an uber; now traffic and construction are so bad that it seems to take 25 minutes to get any-fucking-where. I know I can fix this particular sense of disconnection by just doing these sorts of things again, but it just feels like so much more effort now.

I used to feel more connected to the city by taking transit everywhere, but now I drive to the office. I haven’t been on the subway in nearly three years, and given the kind of random violence that seems to happen on the TTC every other day, I’m in no hurry to get back on it. Speaking of random, people getting stabbed to death by swarms of teenaged girls, or getting jabbed in the back with a needle by a stranger, or having their homes sold without their knowledge…Toronto’s always been a big city and it’s always suffered from violence, but this feels different. Maybe it happens every time a recession drives more people to desperation or conflict and I just don’t remember. But this is my third in this city, and it sure doesn’t feel familiar.

An overtly corrupt premier. A do-little mayor who thinks more police funding is the right answer. House prices and rents so high that seniors and nurses can’t live here.

Ten years ago I wouldn’t have thought this, but…if it wasn’t for our jobs, I’m not sure I’d still want to live here.

That only took 46 years

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

For the first time in my life I’ve bought a car. I managed without one for a very long time — always living downtown, usually near wherever I worked, taking transit and ubers and using autoshare and otherwise walking everywhere. But now I have a job that will take me to Mississauga (!) a couple times a week starting in January, and to the Niagara Peninsula every so often, so it was time.

I settled on a BMW X3 plug-in hybrid, and I’m picking it up today. We did test-drive it, and it barely fits in the garage, so parking could be a pain. I guess I should get used to parking generally being a pain from here on out.

It was a valiant effort, I guess.

9/11/21

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

It’s kind of hard to believe it’s been twenty years. Really intense, indelible memories have a way of shortening time, I guess.

I still remember my colleague Dom standing up on his chair and telling us planes had hit the World Trade Center. I remember there was no TV in the office, and all the news sites we visited were overloaded so we ended up using Ananova, and going downstairs to the Radio Shack to watch the news through the window. I remember everyone going home early when the banks evacuated the big towers downtown. I remember stopping at the McDonald’s at Bloor & Avenue for some lunch, back when TIFF was centered in and around Yorkville, and hearing several American film industry people on their phones trying to figure out how to get home. I remember meeting my friend Jane on the patio at Hemingway’s (I was there yesterday for the first time in years, weirdly enough) that night as we tried to reconcile what had happened, gazing at it through the bottom of pint glasses. I even remember going to a Sigur Ros concert at Massey Hall nine days later (documented here, in what would end up being my first blog post, before I even knew the word blog I think) and everything still felt fuzzy and surreal.

It was an event born from decades of tragedy and violence, and begat decades more. It seemed trite and overblown to say it at the time, but with so many years of hindsight it really does seem one of the defining moments of history as I know it.

Cover photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Time for a change

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

I don’t talk much about work on here, but it’s not really a secret that I’ve spent my entire career — save a two-year stint in software which ended not long before the beta version of this blog was born, in 2001 — in banking. Next week, that changes.

I never really expected to work for a bank, despite having a business degree. I was recruited out of university by a very large one where I spent two years, then went to the afore-mentioned software company for a couple years, before returning to the same large bank for (*checks notes*) twelve years. In 2013 I switched to a much smaller bank, and did some cool stuff there, but about two weeks ago I gave my notice. I wasn’t looking to leave, but an opportunity came up, and when I sat back and looked at it, I decided 22 years in banking was enough. (And about 20 more than I ever thought I’d last.)

The opportunity that came up is actually in the wine world, so I’ll be excited to marry up my professional background with a personal passion. My current company didn’t even get that mad when I told them — they know how into wine I am, and how infrequently an opportunity like this would come along. I’ll have lots to learn in a new industry, but hopefully lots to offer as well. The only downside I can think of right now is that I’ll have to commute to Mississauga, which means I’ll have to own a car for the first time in my life.

So next week is my last week, and the rush is on to get everything wrapped up & squared away. I’m taking the final week of June off, to give my brain a bit of a break. I considered getting out of town, but between this final sprint and a huge deliverable that Lindsay’s working on, I think I might just spend those days lying on the couch, or sitting in the backyard, or maybe going to a patio. (Speaking of which: I went to Chez Nous on Monday, my first patio in…I literally don’t even remember how long.)

Anyway, I’m excited. It’s a little scary, but good scary. And I’m ready.

.:.

Cover photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Cover photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam on Unsplash

Comparing my discretionary spending pre- and post-COVID

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[Cross-posted from LinkedIn, with some revisions]

Prompted by my colleague Kat’s post “How COVID-19 changed my spending habits“, I decided to piggyback on her idea. Here’s what I found.

[But first, the mechanics: I analyzed my spending by week, and the dividing line I chose for pre/post-COVID was the end of week 12 — March 21. I worked my last day in the office earlier that week, and that’s pretty much when my spending habits changed. Also, I have to acknowledge how lucky I am that my income was unaffected by COVID-19, so I had the luxury of keeping my spending the same if I wanted to.]

Overall, my spending stayed mostly flat. Week over week my spending was only 2.2% higher post-COVID. I actually expected it to be more than that; not sure why. Maybe it’s all the boxes showing up at my house.

A few expenses, unsurprisingly, stopped dead. I’ve not been to the office since March, so my transit expense ended abruptly. Working from home also meant no more dry cleaning bills – you don’t need to dry clean t-shirts, right? – and I stopped buying lunches around the office. I’d also used a house cleaning service prior to COVID, but in a pandemic that’s a no-go, so apart from a one-time clean I had them do on the new house before I moved in, that expense also went to $0.

My Uber spending dropped more than I would have thought. That’s Uber ride share, mind you, not Uber Eats. Very, very different story there. Anyway, I guess I just had nowhere to go, so this (relatively small) expense line dropped 72%.

Oh, hello Peloton. I am charging, I can charge, I will charge, I do charge. Monthly, since May, when I got my bike.

The main event: food & drink. All told, this top-levelcategory was up ~12.5%, but there were several puts and takes in there:

  • Dining out at restaurants dropped by 92%, and I’m pretty sure all that’s left in that category is the odd visit to a coffee shop.
  • Ordering in / picking up food jumped plenty though, up 109%.
  • My weekly spending on groceries (including Goodfood boxes) doubled. Like, exactly doubled.
  • Spending on alcohol tripled post-COVID. *cough cough* Sorry mom. Now, I should qualify this: in raw numbers, alcohol spending increased just less than my combined dining (restaurants + ordering in) expense decreased. So I’m probably drinking more wine, but paying less restaurant markup.

Cash is effectively dead to me. Since mid-March I have used ATMs exactly twice, both times to withdraw cash in scenarios where I knew I’d need to tip people on the spot. Otherwise I’d be perfectly happy never to visit another ATM. (Again, I have that luxury. A cashless existence is, at the moment, more available to affluent segments than lower-income; in a world where we’re suddenly very aware of how germ-ridden physical cash is, we need accessible alternatives.)

And now for the completely obvious: I did not travel. Since writing this for LinkedIn I realized I missed one major category, largely because I budget for it separately: travel. That expense went down 89% in 2020. The only trip I took was to Madrid & Cairo in January. Other than that we had a single weekend away in Elora this summer. C’est tout. Pretty safe to say all that money went straight into the new house, as the back yard is as exotic a locale as I’ll see for the foreseeable future.

.:.

Cover photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam on Unsplash

Cover photo from LeslievilleMural.com. Mural by Elicser Elliot.

Riverside → Leslieville

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

A couple months ago I wrote about buying a house. It had a sixty day close, so the math says we’re moving this week.

The sale officially closed Monday, and I picked up the keys that night. People are coming tomorrow to pack our stuff, and the movers come Friday. At some point we’ll have to move Kramer. We’re dreading that.

The loft we’re in now was a perfect fit when I bought it back in 2017. I’d always wanted a hard loft, and it was in an exciting new (to me) part of the city. But now, in COVID times, with no return-to-the-office seeming imminent, the openness that once made the loft charming now makes it stifling, as does the lack of outdoor space. That said, I like the loft and the building so much I’ve decided to hold on to it and rent it out — a pain in the ass I do not need, but I was loathe to part with the place, especially in this market.

I remain very excited (if a little apprehensive) about the house. It has four bedrooms, which — after having only an open loft with no walls for 3.5 years, might have been an over-vector — and a beautiful back yard. It’s on a street which has always been one of my favourites in the city. It’s only ten minutes’ walk from where we live now (though if Google Maps is to be believed, once one crosses East under the train tracks, one lives in Leslieville) which means many of our neighbourhood favourites — I’m looking at you, Chez Nous and Boxcar Social — will remain.

Wish us luck over the next few days. Especially with Kramer.

.:.

Cover photo from LeslievilleMural.com. Mural by Elicser Elliot.