Category Archives: DISPATCHES & RAMBLINGS

ON STICKY NOTES & LYING FALLOW

Posted: May 1, 2022

There is a young lad I sometimes see when I am out to the stores or just going for a walk. As I get older, I don’t have as good a handle on age as I once did, but I would place him at somewhere in his early thirties. Until a few months ago I only had a nodding acquaintance with him. Our paths would cross enough that we would acknowledge that we had seen each other before – something of a notion that we were functioning together in the same little island in the sea.

But one day when sharing a park bench, I could hear from his headphones a band I have liked since the seventies and one that is not well known to his generation – Weather Report. When he took off his headphones and pulled out a journal to write something down, I remarked the bridge in the song. As it turns out music is his field. He is a musician/producer/ composer. It also turns out, as I have learned over a few conversations since that time, he goes to the park when he hits a creative wall. Sometimes it’s just a clearing of his head that he needs.

Last week was a fairly intense conversation. He is plagued by this question of the determination of when something is complete. In the non-creative, real-world-functional-stuff this does not come up. I have either pealed the potatoes or there is more peeling to do, but in the creative world there is no bell to say the meal is ready for pick up, no green light indicating its good to go.

Because I have been on the planet long enough to be his dad, and observed this mental maze before, I was able to share what I have learned about it, while observing similar creative humans.

The mind is really strange item. And the desire to make an artistic product the best you can produce when combined with the judgement that comes from putting your name on something as complex as art, is a challenge. It comes from the underlying problem of the final work being made up of those bits of nothing you have combined, whether it is notes for music, words for prose, or the elements of visual art.

One thing that I know he already does well is to go for that walk, and take his mind off the problem. The truth of it is that a persons mind is never really off the job, but the effect of doing something else, diversion,  means the mind can work it without you getting in the way. One  artist I know claims this is the real reason for sleep.

Some creatives have found the formula in working with an editor or to collaborate with someone else. Often the completion of a project is more easily identified than when working on a project alone. He shared that he loved doing this but had a rather upsetting recent break up with a musical collaborator and is not looking for another collaboration situation right now.

But there are also tricks and techniques for learning how to get your mind into the right place to sign off on a project. I shared the experience of a friend who was studying architecture. On the first day and the first class the exercise was to draw in pencil a facade of a building the student liked. They had fifteen minutes. Some of course at the end of the fifteen minutes were still figuring out what scale to use, others were creating a grid so the visuals could be accurate, but most had a finished drawing a façade and some were quite detailed. The instructor pointed out what had clearly been a matter of time mismanagement for some of the students in their desire to make it so perfect in scale and representation they did not get anything on the page and had missed the opportunity to show others what they actually thought. After some discussion it became clear that the students understood the value of the exercise – there are times where completing is the task, so they will be measured on that, not on the results.

A pretty good lesson, I think. But the exercise went on.

They were then given ten minutes to erase the drawing, crumple up the paper, smooth it out and then do the drawing again. Once again a few were challenged by this – either bogging down in erasing to make the paper completely free of any trace of the previous image and did not get the task completed, or the notion of crumpling up the paper before doing the new drawing was a leap a few could not fully embrace. Most instantly understood the significance – nothing you produce is precious – be prepared to mash it up and come back to it. The really important aspects or ideas expressed the first time will come back quickly and the drawing can be produced in less time.

Finally, after much more discussion the exercise took on another iteration. They were allocated five minutes to erase that drawing, do the crumpling up but this time to try to get it down to a very small little wad of paper before opening it up again. Now the challenge was to do the drawing with the hand they do not usually use. By this point all the students were on board and understanding the exercise. The drawings they produced were very rudimentary, but while pared back in detail and accuracy, most of them captured the essence of the best parts of their design. Every student completed on time and every drawing, while sloppy and basic had some architectural elements that could be discussed.

My young friend enjoyed hearing the story and related it to a performing a song night after night on the road, and cutting out the junk verses, and the trappings that are not needed and getting to the real elements of what makes the song work.  Or going from the fully enhanced product to an unplugged version.

It was a springboard for us talking about some other techniques. I have never been a farmer but have some extended family  members who are. They use the technique of letting a field lie fallow to regenerate. Over a period of one or more years the field would not be in production, letting it rebuild its nutrients. Leaving a creative work of any kind for a period of time does not change the work but you do come back to it somewhat refreshed as the creator of it and can see it in a new light and with some edits may be more easily identified as complete or the deficiencies identified to correct to complete.  This I have found works very well for me but unfortunately while the technique works like a charm, it can also become a nasty excuse for procrastination.

A real challenge for many of us is to find the way to access the second most important thinking organ in your body. We all use our minds, but what we think of as the gut is often better at processing complex decisions. But how do you access it?  My buddy Jim had a big investment company and tried to use consensus management as much as possible. When dealing with difficult decisions where various scenarios and proformas and risk analysis had been employed and put into the mix for decision making, the decision would usually fall out of the research. If the answer was not apparent, you needed to go back to do more research on the various risks, or opportunities. But when the answer would still not rise to the top, he would write a definitive action plan on a little yellow sticky note and post it on the fridge of the coffee room – WE ARE GOING TO BUY XYZ BUILDING, for example. This is the technique he has used in all his big life decisions as well – changing jobs, buying houses, having kids. If the next morning you get up and feel good about that definitive action statement, it’s a go. If you wake up at four in the morning in a cold sweat and go to the kitchen and rip it off the fridge, your gut has let you know.

But after sharing with him all the wisdom I could muster on the subject he raised another one that is as good as the rest – feedback. Hearing from others does not help you create but it does tell you how your work is received and that might prove to be a guide. His conclusion was to post a piece of his music or two on a platform that is a bit of showcase for his kind of music and see the comments that come back. Ultimately its his work, and his decision to keep it as it is, or erase, crumple it up and do it again. But getting a response from the public to what in his case is a largely solitary act of writing music, isolated from the rest of the world, was his conclusion. Many a musical performer have let their music evolve and respond to the audience.

Part of my sharing with him also got me onto thinking about those things in my life I have not completed. Some of these I have good explanations for, others I do not.

If there is one thing I have learned from Covid, it is the little day to day interactions we now experience, that  in the past would usually not be indulged, today are often what sustain us. I have a new young friend, his name is Jared, and we are learning together.

Django

LEFTOVERS

Posted: April 1, 2022

Leftovers. Just the name has a bunch of strange connotations for people. I knew a couple of kids in high school who cringed at the idea. They had moms who were workaholics who would make something totally unmemorable on Sunday and make a big batch of it so that is what they would have each night of the week. YIKES.   One was the kid of a doctor. Her mom must have had some idea of nutrition, but she would make this monster mound of rice or pasta with lots of pork and chicken and vegetables, and it would start out as fresh, and could have been good but always was executed badly, and by the end of the week would resemble what I imagine boiled brains to be like.

So those are not the leftovers I am talking about. My notion of leftovers is cooking with leftovers in mind. It has become one of my most popular demonstration courses in the little cooking classes I have been doing at the marina. Some people who are living on their boats have families but most are couples or singles so the classes have been popular and anything that can make meal prep time more inviting is welcomed.

My passion for leftovers comes from three sources. Living on a boat means I am not as cavalier as some who have kitchens with an abundance of refrigeration and preparation space so that drives part of my motivation. Part of it comes from my time with my Bebe, my paternal grandmother for those of you new to this website, who lived in a time and place where farm to table was not a new notion but the only way it was done. Whether it was  a fish from the ocean or vegetables from the field they were picked, taken to market,  and mainly eaten that day – and no parts wasted as the remaining elements were worked into the next days meal. And the third part of my passion for leftovers comes from my experience on the big cruise ships as an application of conventional commercial techniques. Any product that is brought onto the ship as an edible makes its way to a plate. Where waste is generated on a ship it is with the consumer once it hits the plate.

But before I dive into this topic further, I should reveal my passion (borderline lust) for refrigeration. Refrigeration is just about the coolest innovation in history. Yes, I realize what I just said. I think it is a bigger deal than the microchip or the internet or putting some inbred scientist on the moon. Refrigeration, particularly in hot climates has done so much for nutrition and disease reduction and for the rest of the world for time management. It has also been particularly beneficial for the female gender. Living on a boat, I don’t have as much fridge and freezer capacity as most people so I use it judiciously, but there have been times in my past where when I have been working in land-based kitchens, the most important appliance in the room was always the fridge and freezer. While it is true that we all have preferences in ranges and kitchen layouts and steamers and countertops,  a good cook or chef can cook with a little butane flame on the hood of car, but still needs a way to keep ingredients fresh until use.

 

Some of the notes I get from readers remind me that more pictures are a good thing. Well I recently discovered a couple of images from Walters kitchen. It was full of refrigeration. A large fridge with freezer space as well as a couple of under counter freezer drawers and a pantry with another freezer as well. If you are new to this website you can read about my life with Walter in posts from April and August of 2016.

 

THINKING ABOUT MEAL PLANNING WHEN SHOPPING

Some people think about ingredient shopping as one-off exercises for each meal, other than those staples we keep on hand that have many applications.  For these people cooking is a new hobby. The recipe is consulted, the list made and ingredients purchased, the meal prepared and enjoyed, pictures taken and posted on Instagram. When I reference meal planning or grocery shopping this is not the model I am talking about. Grocery shopping is an exercise to get all those components for multiple meals, where the orchestration of the next several days meal planning has been considered.

This whole process of what is being acquired, how its being used and the associated meal planning is something that commercial kitchens do very well.

In a commercial kitchen a whole chicken is cut up and those fresh chicken supremes  or breasts are on the menu for tonight. For tomorrow, the thighs, and other good proteins go into the chicken pot pie, and the remainder goes into the pot for chicken stew or chicken stock/ soup the day after. It is a matter of mindset going into the exercise. It is very efficient if planned and very cost effective as often a whole chicken does not cost much more than two breasts.

Planning a week of meals, even if you shop multiple times a week sets you up for using different components over that time, with fresh elements being added as you go.

 

FOOD PREP FOR MULTIPLE MEALS

While the prep stage is hyped up as a sexy fun thing to do, with wine flowing, lots of conversation and nibbling on some apps while prepping the main course with some nice music on in the background, it is often something less exciting than this – particularly if its food prep just for yourself or a regular meal for the family and not a special dinner. So using that preparation time for multiple meals really helps.

One thing I really like when I am not cooking for a group but only for one or two is to prepare the protein the way you would for  a dinner for six, but pull all but the components you would be serving that night aside early before fully cooked. Grilling for example. Prepare six fresh chicken breasts,  grill them and then take four of them off the grill after they get their marks for presentation, but before being fully cooked and put two of them away in the fridge and freeze the other two. The next night or the one after, take out the two from the fridge, and just put them in a covered heatproof container with a little white wine in the bottom and cook at 350f for 20 minutes. They will be fresh, tender, and often moister than the original ones.

A similar trick is when you come home from the market or grocery store with a bunch of pork fillets or chicken that was on at a good price and you are not even planning on having for several days and planning on freezing. Get them all on the grill, or in to roast to give them their presentation and do the heavy lifting on cooking, then freeze them all. When you want them, just pull out the quantity you need, let them defrost in the fridge and they are ready for that same reheat technique.

Similarly, if you have worked up a pretty nice salad dressing, make up enough for a couple of servings and put it in the fridge, making the salad a little less time consuming in a couple of nights.

 

MAKE THE WHOLE GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS

Ciara has been living on the boat long enough that she is really onto what I do. She has come to asking me whether we will be having end of week soup. As the week progresses and the fresh green beans are not as fresh, and the wonderful mushrooms are looking tired, I just grab a basic can of vegetable soup (when working land-based and not on a boat, it would have been a nice vegetable stock I had made some time before and divided and frozen) but instead of adding one can of water (or store bought stock) with it I will add three, then put in a lot of past-their-peak green beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli,  slice up a few potatoes fairly thin and perhaps a carrot the same way, and maybe a stock of celery and  a half an onion cut up pretty roughly. The components are just what you have left at the end of the period before your next shopping.  If you don’t have much that week for the pot throw in a handful of dry pasta or rice. This is what you do with the rice or pasta that is left after accurately measuring for rice or pasta dishes and you have some small orphan amounts. We all have these.

It just all goes into the pot and after simmering away for half an hour I will try it, usually adding a few fresh herbs and sometimes some garlic and pepper. I never add salt to soup I make this way as the little can of  soup I start with always has too much sodium to start with, so this treatment really rounds it out.

I then have this as a little side soup for the next several days.

And sometimes on the second day or third day I will then, with the soup ready to go and only taking a heat up time, I put my effort into making a little focaccia bread or a foucasse to have with it.

 

SOME THINGS ARE BETTER AS LEFTOVERS

Its easy to think of ways to work all of your food products as left overs and plan your meals accordingly once you get your head into it. I love a slice of fresh baguette with piece of brie cheese on it and a little dab of red pepper jelly. Equally there are few things worse than a day-old baguette with anything. But it can be fabulous for a bread pudding, or cut  into cubes, tossed with some olive oil and dried herbs and put in the oven at 375f on a baking sheet for just a few minutes (turn them at least once)  and they are the best croutons for a Caesar salad.

The result is that the second day or third day is a meal as good as the first, but with a different application of the original product. The trick of course is to plan your meals ahead based on the sequencing. Most big commercial kitchens have boards letting the prep staff know what the big plan is for a moving multi-day cycle. You just need a little notepad.

I do this same application a lot with my little fresh herb garden I keep in a few pots. When I get a bit too much basil ahead for example I will just roast up some pine nuts and make some pesto to use that excess. Another one I like for the herbs is making herb infused oil. Sometimes I use olive oil but other times vegetable or canola and just wash the herbs that are extras, cut them up (not too fine) and put them in the oil for a few days, then strain off the herbs and the oil will have a nice herb taste.

LEAPFROGGING

When I am cooking for just one or two, I will also leapfrog dishes so the leftover stigma doesn’t kick in.  The grilled chicken on Monday (that I did a couple extra breasts and pulled out early as described above) will appear again two days later, but with different vegetables and perhaps a sauce I have made with the extra prep time available. Any day I am doing a protein from scratch I will just do steamed vegetables but on the days I am just doing  a reheat of the protein that’s the day I will spend more time on a better vegetable recipe that will also last a couple of days. It makes the exercise of preparing a meal for one or two much less overwhelming as part of each days main meal everyday is already done.

 

So those are my thoughts on leftovers. I know that sometimes in my little posts  I dive into heavier topics but in a world that has a lot of problems and many of us have the associated anxiety that comes with each of them, sometimes meal planning, including thinking about leftovers is just a nice way to put one foot in front of the other to move forward.

 

Django

P.S. When I was working on this post, Martha strolled by and asked what I was working on. She was dropping off the bottles of wine she and Malcolm buy for us every week in exchange for me preparing most of the meals. Now Martha is a bit older than I, in her late seventies I think, but when I told her the topic was leftovers she immediately asked if they were “the ones remaining without a connection after speed dating?”  I may never think of  leftovers the same way again.

CHOICES

POSTED March 1, 2022

I was chatting by email with my friend June recently about the frustrations of computers when one program is not talking to another because they are of different generations or other issues. The truth is I was having the problems and she was sympathizing with a guy who had made the wrong choice of machine. She told me about the first computer she chose. It was an Apple and it was in the 1980’s. She was setting up a business with a partner and dealing with a fellow who was selling them out of his garage. He would make the modifications for ram etc. right there on the work bench. My choice at the time was set by my employer – a terminal for access to a big mainframe running IBM. Through the 1990’s and beyond the choices in computers were Apple for people who wanted better tools for graphics, and other creative elements and the IBM/ Microsoft products for business people.

But what it really said to others when you made a choice of computer for your home life was that you either:

  1. Cared about the world, were a good person, and could walk tall or,
  2. You were a money-grubbing-capitalist-weasel with no redeeming features.

While this may have been largely true,  over time it became clear that some of us who were tied into a system because of our employer may have been part of the big evil machine but perhaps were not really out to end civilization as we know it. But that’s the thing about choices – sometimes they define us or give off a message to others that may or may not be true. That choice to wear a Rolex or a Swatch says something but the interpretation we put on it may reflect our own experience  or sensibilities and may not always be accurate.

It is also interesting that our personal choice when combined with similar decisions by others puts us in a certain group and in so doing, the risk grows of identifying those who have chosen another approach. The othering is one nasty consequence some will make of choice. You’re a Democrat so you are not a Republican. You chose that computer type, so you are not on the right side. There may be other factors at work in your decision  and your thinking may be more nuanced than the simple binary decision but that decision  now sets who you are – you have made your choice.

This judgment of others based on some simple choice test is widely applied and at times entrenched in various government or private sector policies. It was common practice at one time for employment recruiters to use the Gilligan Test in asking  a young man to choose between Ginger and Maryanne as this would say so much about his priorities, beliefs and would be a good predictor of his decision making going forward and in general the future ahead of him. I can recall a conversation with  an openly gay friend in the mid 70’s who in such an interview pointed out the attractiveness of The Professor which must have put the recruiters into overdrive in their analysis. He got the job.

It is always interesting to me the choices made for children that in turn are then interpreted by others as their choice. Most of us are born into a household of a particular religion and do not have parents who encourage us to go out at a certain age and research which one really reflects our values. It is  often the same with politics.

And what of the choices that are not really choices at all but pre-conditions for something else. If you want to have a certain online service you are choosing to adopt that companies cookie policies or policies for sharing your data. Or you are a woman and you want to marry a lad of  a certain religion you must choose to adopt that religion as your own. Yikes.

Of course, it is all about the magnitude. Buying one brand of toilet paper or another is not a big deal – either one will probably be used for the same purpose and get the job done. But the choice to go to war, have a child, or smuggle that dope into another country well that opens up a very different set of consequences.

And of course at the core of it, choices come with consequences. Some are small, some are huge. Many have consequences that can be known ahead, and measured but some have consequences that can not be envisioned when the choice is made, and the magnitude unknown.

Some are the triggers for a stream or chain of consequences. That fellow who braved the trip to Australia in the nineteenth century and married another crazy risk taker becomes the beginning of a family line who are tied to that place from that point onward.

Some of the consequences from a choice we make are not shouldered by us but by others like those voters in the United Kingdom who chose to leave the European Union, or those voters who have elected various tyrants just out of spite for the previous leader. The world lives with the consequences of electing the class clown. Or the person who in high school chooses a field of study for college or university that will often set them off on a path for their studies, then on to a career in that area of study and then poof, before they know it they are pretty baked into that cake.

I think it is this link of choices and consequences that is the key to all of it. I am not a parent but the good examples of parenting I have seen beyond providing, and caring and making time, seem to have a good handle on setting out for their children what the consequences will be if they make certain choices, making sure those consequences are reasonable (to the extent they are within the parents control), and then making sure to follow through on those consequences. On a regular basis I have heard these parents last words as their teenagers go out the door in the evening to “make good decisions”.

And some choices come with commitments. Go down a certain road and there are no U -Turns allowed. That is now your trajectory, and your obligation.  A buddy of mine who has a bit of a fetish about measuring risk has said that other than suicide, the only choice or commitment that can not be undone is in having a child. Buy the wrong car – sell it. Take the wrong job – find another. And yes, marry the wrong person and while not done lightly, end it. But once you are a parent you are committed to being a parent of that child forever.

I find it quite the irony that the exceedingly positive notion of choice, the freewill to make a decision from various options,  is so uplifting a concept, but the reality is the choice we make is fraught with risks and consequences.

But of course, it is the duality of that interconnected relationship of choice on one side and the consequences, risks and commitments on the other that is at the heart of living.

Django

TORONTO ART.ca

POSTED: FEB 1, 2022

For some time you have heard me chatter on about meaning to get to writing up a couple of sections on this website. The two in particular that I have been really bad at getting to are The Chef Upstairs, and TorontoART.ca

Well at least for The Chef Upstairs I introduced the topic in some detail in a post on July 7, 2020 about the bombing at Kings Cross in London that Janice and Jim had been involved in. No, they didnt set the bomb- they were just in the tube at Kings Cross when it went off.

But the TorontoART.ca website section has been one I have avoided. While it was a massive part of my buddy Jim’s life it had a lot of moving parts and I was not clear that I could do it justice. That is partially because it had six hundred members and whenever one would contact Jim to ask if there will be any write up he would forward me the emails.

So here we are in 2022 and I am dedicated to getting into better shape, getting a few of my short stories published and grabbing the bull by the horns on some of these tasks that I have procrastinated on.

So check out the new section TorontoART.ca in the tabs and you can see what I have done so far. As there were about six hundred active members on the site I am not going to put in images of all of them but have started with putting in some to get rolling and will be working on adding more artists images over time.  This of course is a classic procrastinators commitment.

Django

YEAR END 2021

POSTED: January 1, 2022

2021: Well there is a year to kick to the curb! What a bust. Like everyone else I started the year not believing this was to be going on indefinitely and looking forward to my shots. Got the shots. One, Two, Three.  Feeling better about the future. Then omicron.

Traditionally I do  a round up of the letters I have received over the year. On ones that are focused on topics that are hopelessly personal I respond to directly, but most are of a general nature and if more than one hit on the same topic I respond here.

There is this crazy thing that has been going on with this website for the last several years. Each year there are more and more regular readers and each year there are fewer emails. One day I may succumb to the use of social medial platforms but not to this point. So, if I haven’t made it clear to date you can reach me at djangobisous@bell.net

Here goes.

Are you going to be stuck in Malta for 2022?

Stuck! Stuck? Malta  is quite a special place, with some great people, a really multicultural vibe and a fantastic climate. While it is true that I had never envisioned myself staying in one place this long,  Malta is a damb nice place to hang out. I have also carved out a very enjoyable life here, something that had escaped me until just a few years ago. I get to teach some simple cooking classes, do the cooking for Malcolm, Martha, Gerhardt and Gabrielle and in exchange they pay for the groceries and wine. So with some sales from the Django Store (you can go there after reading this posting, LOL) I am actually getting a bit of money ahead for when En Plein Air will need some attention beyond the usual upkeep. Based on that  I fully expect Ciara and I will stay here until things really do improve with this pandemic.

For a while you were on a real rant about U.S. and other politics and now you seem to have changed the channel – what’s up with that?

Well, when I was doing that critical analysis and political review (ranting)  Donald Trump was very much on the scene and with him in office, and Putin in the Tsars thrown, it was hard not go down that rabbit hole. The world today is not really much better – the climate is a mess, most countries are inching to the right (although it was nice to see Chile move to the left), Hong Kong and Ukraine are about to fall, the spread between the haves and have nots has been growing, and oh yea- we still have this pandemic and much of the world is focused on its own well being and not on that of pandemic in the third world.

Beyond those world events, this year, like most Canadians I was beaten up by the whole discovery of all those indigenous children who had been abused and died in Canadas Residential Schools. This is not ancient history, in my time  kids were still being sent to these places. The Turks hang their heads in shame when they think about what the did to the Armenians, the Germans when they think about the Holocaust, and the Americans and others, slavery, and this is right up there with those awful acts. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a start.  Reading their Calls To Action is a good place to start if you are not familiar with this: calls_to_action_english2.pdf (gov.bc.ca)     The Canadian Government is working toward  various restitutions, reconciliation and compensation. Almost all churches and religious groups involved have apologized and are taking steps to acknowledge their roles. Yet the Roman Catholic church continues to refuse to apologize. Perhaps its time to tax the church properties.

So yes, I am still mad as hell, disappointed in my generation, and totally at odds with uncontrolled capitalism, but I am not going to dwell on politics in 2022.   I have  stress based neurological disorder, and other than my concerns about these topics I now have carved out a nice life. Some people have helped with that, but I am now almost self sufficient. I get to enhance peoples lives every day both here in real life and from the emails I get from people who like what I write. And most of the emails I get are ones from people who are struggling with understanding life, just like I am, and if some of my ramblings have helped them that really makes me try to be better each day.

Your cookbook reviews are interesting and quirky. Many more of those coming up in the next year?

Quirky? Quirky?  Thank you.   There are so many fabulous chefs, writers, and food reviewers out there that I don’t try to do the straight review. I just tell what I think of a particular cookbook or how to approach a dish and that’s it. One review that I have been meaning to get to is based on those really out-there cookbooks that are fabulous at covering some really off beat topics. Some are the favourite recipes of famous people, so you get a bit of insight into how they think. Others are really off beat cooking techniques like manifold cooking. My buddy Jim has a stack of them, and I can spend hours with a bottle of wine going over them. I did that one afternoon and evening when in Canada in the fall and took some pictures and notes and am working on some of the recipes.  So yes, expect to see that in 2022.

You have described your life during Covid as “hiding under the bed with a bottle of wine” – is that the forecast for 2022 now with Omicron?

Well Ciara and I, and almost everyone I know has there three shots, and have a good set of protocols for living in quasi – isolation. With that said at my age I don’t want to piss away any of my remaining functional time on the planet so I have some personal goals for the year ahead. I am not really one for New Years Resolutions ( I have a bunch of unused ones that are in a box under the bed and when I am hiding there with the wine they are sort of right in my face) but I do like to set some goals for the year.

A few weeks ago, before we knew we were going in for another round of this Covid business and starting to let a bit of optimism creep into our lives, I was out for a walk and was chatting with a fellow who seemed to be a bit older than I who was walking his Beagle in the park. He seemed like a nice lad and we had a good chat. When I asked him about when he had received his booster he laughed and said a long time ago – “one of the advantages of being old”. He told me he was 92. That is old enough to be my dad!

Now this is a guy who is very lucid, could probably beat me at backgammon and was out doing his regular walk with his dog. I had to ask what the trick is. He of course talked about moderation and a getting a bit of exercise but talked more of enjoying each day while making plans for the future.  He doesn’t like the idea of not moving forward, even though we are in a pandemic,  so he has some goals for the upcoming year.  Some were quite modest, but some were it seemed to me somewhat ambitious. He says he has always objectively looked at his skill set and experience and set goals that are just one little notch above what he has done before. He also tries to not repeat what he has done before in travel, initiatives, or adventures. Wise fellow. I look forward to running into him again.

I am thinking through my thoughts for the next year. Its easy to just slide into the notion that we have to sit and wait to be told its safe to come out from under the bed, but my meetings with people from my reunion last year and a variety of conversations with friends going for the big sail or renovating a lighthouse have me ready to take on something new this year.

And before wrapping this up I was sent a picture by a buddy who is a bit hyperactive and who historically has lived for making plans for the future. He plans house moves and trips and his finances and what to have for dinner next month so for him Covid has been a really scary thing. He has been learning that he can’t plan anything as so many things change. It has been good for him, I think.

The image he sent me was one of him poking fun at himself as he has taken to using the term pencil booked as everything he plans he has to be able to erase with the changing Covid situation. His Delta erasure has seen a lot of action, and he now has a fresh, new, Omicron one. While he is  a bit more of a planner than most, I think it says it all for most of us.

See you on the other side.

Django

THE TURNING POINT

POSTED: December 1, 2021

One of the lads I was able to reconnect with at that high school reunion was Tom G. He was  a really talented musician when I knew him in high school and continued composing and performing as his main focus for his adult life. When he wasn’t composing, or on the road with various bands he spent his time managing craft fairs and running a music store he owned with his brother in Ottawa. It was named after  John Mayalls seminal album The Turning Point.

I happened to be a John Mayall fan myself repeatedly listening to  all the albums John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers produced in that late sixties and early seventies era. But its other things that have me thinking about Turning Points  these days.

While considered in its original use it is simply a descriptor of any change in direction or focus and does not have values attached to it, most of us associate it with a positive turn of some kind. Its that turn in the story or the point where the old drunken sheriff decides to put down his whiskey bottle, put his guns back on and clean up the town, or a predominantly white jury in the American south makes the decision to convict the white murderers of a black man. Most of us who have decided to stay with the living are by definition optimists so we always look for this turn, and root for the underdog or hope to see things unfold as they should.

But sometimes turning points are negative ones, where with just a little bad direction the elements can be set in motion to have things go very wrong. This is particularly the case with young people.

A while back, I was heading off to get some groceries on my little fold-up bike one morning and I encountered a carpenter who had himself in a pretty precarious position. He had a small beam above his head but had his foot twisted in some debris. Dropping the beam safely was not an option but he could not free his foot. I arrived just as another passerby did as well and we got the fellow out of his jam. He was a  bit shaken up and I offered him some coffee from my thermos as we chatted about the job he was working on. As a small contractor he told me he occasionally needs a second person but doesn’t have enough work to ever hire someone regularly. So he plods along working small jobs and occasionally, (rarely I think) gets himself into these kinds of problems.

I joked that the old square, that I had grabbed from the back of his truck to help pry him loose was not going to be much good if it was used that way very often, and he told me a story. It seems that particular square which hangs on the wall in the back of his truck he never uses as he has newer and better ones but he keeps it for nostalgic reasons. He was given this square by the carpenter he apprenticed with many years before. It was quite old when he started with the carpenter and that was many decades before. The carpenter gave him the square on his first week as an apprentice and had him build a section of a platform they were doing for an outdoor public seating area. After a morning of working the carpenter then checked the finished components  the apprentice had built and showed him how every corner, every joint, every aspect was not square. The young fellow felt humiliated and was somewhat ashamed and put the square on the various points and found they were all correct from his standpoint. Over lunch his mentor showed him that the square he had bestowed on the young lad was indeed not square at all.

The message was to always check your tools yourself, sharpen them as needed, maintain them regularly and don’t rely on anyone else’s figures, dimensions, or representations. A bad square will make everything wrong in the first place and the errors will just compound. So that square travels with the carpenter today, as a reminder of his apprenticeship and of the lessons learned.

He gave me his number and said if I ever needed some help with refinishing En Plein Air to give him a call and he would give a very good price on any work I needed.

I felt good about the morning and kept his number. But more than that the story about the square stuck with me. The more I have thought about it the more the cumulative effect of one good decision or event or one bad decision or event can just snowball into a full-fledged success or disaster.

The financial world is rife with this. Cumulative interest if working for you can create a small fortune, or if working against, be your downfall.

I know this of course when out navigating on the water. Now to be fair I don’t do this much – I have always had a captain who makes those decisions but I have great respect for what’s at stake as a slight miscalculation at the beginning if not corrected will have you end up hundreds of miles off course.

But so many life decisions are like this as well. Link up with the right partner in life or business and things can truly blossom. Or make a bad assumption that you cumulatively base more  decisions on, and it can be ruinous.

The high school reunion I was at has me thinking about this in terms of personal evolution. The little bad or good decisions made early on have had such an impact on what happens later, unless there is a serious influence to change that direction.

I am not a parent. I don’t know if I really wish I had been and at 67 years old it’s not something to think about now. But in working with kids through the years and reflecting on the insecurities I know many adults have, it is pretty damb clear that the perspective a parent gives at a critical stage in a kids upbringing matters more than almost anything else.

Over the last twenty months of Covid, I have seen some rather extreme examples of how well and how badly it can go. Some parents are so stressed out, under financial pressure and generally so freaked out that I think they are permanently bending the square their kids will learn from. Others, under the same pressures seem to be able to relate to their kids that there are some things we can change, and some things we need to roll with because we can’t and learning to roll with them is the key.

My mother used to talk about the depression in fairly glowing terms. They were dead poor, there was little food, the future was bleak, but it was a time that both her mother and father were home and could do things with them. They learned to sew, cook, cut firewood, clean, cut grass, do gardening , and paint the house, together. Along the way there was a bit of math, geography, history, reading  and some life stories as well.

I am sure there will be some kids that will come through Covid remembering these times as some of the best years of their lives and be set up for whatever nonsense is thrown at them later. Its all whether someone shows them the square was bent and teach them the tools of how we cope with adversity. I think I have been offering that in my little cooking classes at the marina, but I am going to offer up an extra dollop of it for the young people in my classes from now on.

Django

The Turning Point

A ONE MINUTE HALF CENTURY

POSTED: November 1, 2021

Yes, I made it to my reunion and back. It was all  part of my trip involving my short stop in Ireland and then several days in Canada.  I filed the police report in Cork. I made it to Canada and my teeth are cleaned and inspected.  I am to be getting a new mouth guard in the mail. I got to check in with my doctor, and my neurologist. The optometrist I usually also have an appointment with,  like all other optometrists in Ontario, is on strike. Yeah, in the middle of a pandemic. Now there is entitlement!

But the real feature of the little time away was to reunite with my high school graduating class. For those who don’t follow this website of mine regularly you may want to go back a couple posts to August 1st, FORTY-EIGHT.

Now the idea of getting together with a lot of people you have not seen in about half a century is a strange notion to start with. The people you always cared about from those days you probably kept up with anyway and the others – well the only real thing you have in common is that you went to school together. I was musing about this on my flight over but came to realize by my flight back, that while you may not share common interests or beliefs given that you all lived in the same neighbourhood, have experienced the same sequence of world events and are the same age we really did all have a lot more in common than not.

 

That fact became clear when hearing the one-minute summaries. Each person was given one minute to talk about what they had been up to in the last forty-eight years as a way to get some info out there so everyone would not be repeating the telling of their history over the rest of the evening. It is interesting what someone choses to talk about when it is a summary of their life since high school and they only have one minute. I expect that if it had occurred ten or twenty years after high school there would have been a lot more focus on the business card – a life defined by the persons occupation, and their credentials. If it had occurred at that ten- or twenty-year mark as well I bet that there would have been more of a competitive vibe –“ I am an astronaut, and you are not”.

But forty-eight years after high school graduation– man that’s a lot of business cards under the bridge. So, at this reunion the topic of partners, children, grandchildren, community work etc. all made more significant appearances. Of course, the big superficial novelty is the skinny high school guys who now look like Humpty Dumpty, or the people who had long hair who now have none at all.

It was during Covid times of course so we all got checked for our double vax at the door, but then let our guards down and there was a lot of hugging. I got to thank a woman who, in class all those years ago, had an uncanny way of looking at me when I was just on the brink of being out of control. June still has the same eyes and did not realize that there were many a times I stepped back from some stupid antic because of her look. An amalgam of pending disappointment, with a bit of sternness that I was about to take away some quality time for her in biology class with my inappropriate behaviour.

There were some who were inspiring with the leading-edge stuff they have done in medicine for example. Most just told the stories of how they put one foot in front of the other, went to university or college for something they had an interest in, then worked at whatever that thing was, married someone, had some kids and then retired.  But for me I loved hearing about the offbeat paths taken. Tom and his career in music and managing crafts shows, how Tanya’s nursing career supported her lifestyle around the world etc. But I was really taken by a woman who left after grade twelve.  She did not graduate with us from grade 13. At the time you could take a four-year diploma after grade 12 if you wanted to go to college or work instead of going to university. She started as a secretary right after grade 12 but enrolled part time in college for office management and business admin courses. The years passed and she moved to being a legal secretary, and kept taking courses, eventually finishing an undergraduate degree and finally, law school. Today she has her own law practice.

As most of us have had to work to survive the occupations we took up to a certain extent did partially define us. Certainly, some occupations compensate better than others, offering more options for how you live your life, but one thing that really struck me when looking back over this long period and over these many lives is not that the particular occupations define us but our approach to those livelihoods. Some people live for the end of their shift, whether its at an auto plant or a surgical room, while others enjoy their Monday morning as much as their Friday night. I saw many examples of the continuation of those traits from high school right through to retirement at that reunion.

But what I also saw was how some people can change. It may be just their own evolution or because of the relationship with a  life partner or a business partner, but some do transform themselves. I don’t mean just the outward side of changing occupations or activity set,  but the personal evolution aspect.

Its also interesting when pushed to talk about your 48 years in one minute, what can be said and not said in just a few words. “My partner beat cancer three times”. It takes about three seconds to say that phrase and it reflects decades of anguish and pain and leaves the question open as to whether there was a fourth time. Similarly, “I have a troubled child”, just points to a very dark doorway.

The one-minute exercise makes us look at what we are, and what we value. A great partner?   A good parent? A dependable friend? Or just the guy with more donut franchises than anyone else?

Some of us came a distance for this reunion, while others walked to the venue. I think in that regard we all have a different set of memories of the geography of the time. I had not been back to that neighborhood in a long while, and could hardly recognize the block the restaurant was in. It was only a short distance from where I delivered pizza (check out the posting on Sept 19, 2020 CLEANING OFF THE GUCK) but that building is now a condominium.

I found it interesting that some who did not have that far to come did not attend. I don’t know if it was the experience of high school or what we build up in our heads about those years afterward that kept some away. I hope they make it to the next one.

Name tags are a must after forty-eight years. Some people I recognized instantly but many others would have been a struggle with out the identifiers. Some didn’t recognize or remember me so the apologies I had prepared were not needed. LOL.

I loved the reunion and as I sat on the plane reflecting on it, the looking back over those years actually has me looking forward. Is what I am doing now what I want to do? What should I do with the next twenty years of my life?

Its easy when you get over a certain age to think that your big adventures are behind you but as I was reflecting on these things this week in writing this post, I had a note from a buddy who is contemplating a trip next spring.  It’s a sailing trip down to Panama, and  to go through the canal. After that its all sailing north to Washington State. Time to mix it up after a lot of years in Key West.

As an experienced sailor he knows what risks lie ahead with over  forty feet of fiberglass and an adventurous perspective.   A few years back when the Stones played in Havana he sailed down from Key West for the concert and back. One way was a nice day on the ocean. The other was sixteen hours of hard sailing with Mother Nature reminding him of just who is in charge.

Now he is of an age that some would say he “is old enough to know better” but I think he is just about the right age to appreciate and savour the experience. I will live vicariously through his notes to me on his trip, but it does have me thinking….

 

Django

GETTING AWAY

POSTED: SEPT 28, 2021

When I started this website I just posted my pieces at random times. Sometime a month or two would pass between posts and then I would go for a while where I was posting multiples a month. Now that I am in something of a regular gig teaching little cooking classes and making lunches and dinners as a paying routine for my neighbours I have slid into a regular thing of posting always on the first of the month.

So why am I posting today on the 28th?  Well, I am in a bit of a scramble as I am off to Ireland for a day then on to Ottawa Canada for a weekend. I am sure I will probably have something to say on the adventure when I return but for now my thoughts are on the whole notion of getting away.

Early in the pandemic I had a little trip to Ireland to speak to Ciara’s ex, which was eventful/frightful (see various posts from March 2020) but other than that I have been here in this little spot in Malta and for the most part don’t go much further than I can easily get to when walking or riding my little fold up bike. Even En Plein Air only gets me out on the ocean occasionally these days. So I have not had the benefit of getting away as many people have enjoyed during this pandemic.

Most have gone to their cottages, some have gone camping and some on vacation. All of these approaches  have something of the same effect but the people who have really had it good are ones who have had a regular place to go to, whether modest or grand, whether for a few days a week or to move to for months at a time, especially if that destination is a special personal place with memories and alternative experiences.

When growing up in eastern Ontario Canada we had the wonderful benefit of a lot of little lakes all around. The population of Ottawa was not large, about three hundred thousand when I was a teenager. When Canada changed over to metric in the early 1970’s many of us joked that in metric it might be about four hundred thousand!  The result of an abundance of lakes and not a big population was that most families had a cottage of some description. Wealthier people were on the best lakes, with the best waterfront, and the biggest shoreline and beautiful classic cottages.

But even those with more modest incomes, particularly those people who had some manual dexterity or worked in the trades would get a small lot and build some kind of place to get away to.

And it is the getting away that mattered. For a kid the big change was the different activities – swimming, boating waterskiing, bonfires, fishing, canoeing. But more than this it was a change in norms and expectations of behaviour, a change of neighbors and friends, and generally a place to cut loose and not be as structured in your life. For adults it was also that change in behavioural expectations as well, where the conventions of city life were left back in the city and everything was more relaxed. Even parents in serious endeavours left their business cards at the office. And of course this predated smart phones and even the internet, so people who were away, truly were away.

The result of course was that people might change houses often, or move for a better job in another city, but the cottage – well that was somewhat sacred. It was also often a meeting place of various family members for holidays and celebrations.

In northern climates it takes on a special significance as the long winter months take their toll and the summer is a time to get outside with nature that has reappeared after her nap. Spend any time with someone from Canada, Norway or Michigan and you will soon learn of their cottage life.

A lot of cottages are handed down in the family, creating some crazy partnerships as most families would have more than one child but only one cottage.

In my circle of friends most families had a cottage they went to and imagined going there for the rest of their life, but few aspired to having their own. Not my buddy Jim.

As soon as he was working and had a bit of extra money he and Janice bought their first cottage lot. It was up on a small lake close to Parry Sound which for those who don’t know it is a community on the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, a very large  bay (190km x 80km) of lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes.

It was about 3.25 hectares (8 acres) with about 125 Meters (400 feet) of waterfront. A couple of years later with a few more bucks in his jeans the road went in, and a dock. Then one Thursday he was siting on a flight from Vancouver flying home to Toronto as he did every second week in those early days of his business, and noticed an ad in the paper he was reading for a little log cabin that was available, but it would have to be moved.  It was not expensive, but more money than he and Janice had at the time.

Over the flight he pulled the little cut-out add from his pocket a few times and looked at it. When the flight  landed in Toronto it was about 11 pm and he called the number in the ad to see if he could come to see it then. It was located about two hours away from the airport in Toronto in a little village called Mount Forest so he could be there by about 1:45 AM he told the bewildered fellow on the other end of the line.

The owner of the place was older, and assured Jim that:

  1. there was no frigging way he was letting Jim come over in the middle of the night and
  2. that on Saturday they were having a showing to all interested parties from 10 to 2 and they would then determine who they were going to sell it to. The fellows tone also suggested that they would probably not sell it to a nutbar who calls at eleven pm expecting to come to tour a house at 1:45 or 2 am.

By Saturday Janice was as pumped about it as Jim and as they drove to Mount Forest where the place sat, with little Jade in tow, they talked about the endeavor of moving a log cottage about 300 km  to their property and the tasks involved to be ready.

As they drove in the road to the place, as Janice tells it, they were so excited to see the little log cabin,  but all along the driveway in were the cars of the other potential buyers. The array of BMW’s, Porsches, and Mercedes were quite a contrast to their Isuzu Trooper with a kayak on the roof.

The little log cabin was just as represented. Built from large logs using the Scandinavian scribing technique instead of the north American chinking technique, pine floors of 2 x 12 tongue and groove planks, a little loft for sleeping, one small bathroom and a woodstove/fireplace for heat, it was an adorable little place with a footprint of about 660 sq. ft. and total area of about 800 sq. ft.

Things were a bit chaotic as the little cabin was overrun by all the people looking at it, poking around and asking questions. And then the process began. Everyone had to go outside and one by one the people who had registered to see it had their chat with the owners. Most of the potential buyers were confident they could cajole, coerce, or convince the owners to sell it on the land where it was sitting, next to a stream and idyllic pond, and one by one were rejected. The existing owners were selling it because it sat on the best part of the lot, and they had decided to build a much larger place to retire there so that is why it needed to be removed.

It came down to only a few potential purchasers left and for some reason the couple decided Janice and Jim should get the place for something less than the asking price instead of a much higher bid from another couple who were going to have to find a lot, buy it and then be ready for the move.

It was fall and over the winter Jim worked up the drawings and got the building permits and contracted with a local contractor in Parry Sound to build a foundation. While this was going on the owner of the little log place, who was an engineer and pretty handy himself, was removing the inside of the place (flooring, kitchen windows interior doors and trim) and storing it in a barn.  By spring they were ready and a log builder with a big boom truck had been hired to mark the logs, take it apart one log at time and put it on a sixty foot flatbed to be moved to its new home.

Lots of challenges occurred when for example the flatbed could not get in the road Janice and Jim had built and they needed to hire a smaller boom truck to move the logs in one at a time. But eventually it was assembled in place fully exposed to the rain that spring. So, the race was on to get a roof on it and get the windows and doors back in. Jim’s dad, Janice’s cousins husband John,  who was a carpenter, and various others worked away with Jim to get it enclosed.

J. & J. Log Cottage

For that first summer, Jim took all his holidays as Fridays and Mondays and for each of those four day weekends he would drive up from the Toronto area,  the two hours in the morning early and drive home late so he could see Janice, Jade, and newborn Jason, and did that for every four day weekend for ten weeks. He put over 85,000 km on that Izuzu Trooper that summer, but by September it was ready for them to use that winter. Over the next few years Jim worked away on it, putting in the floor, the bathroom, building new kitchen cabinets etc.

With time, and his business growing they bought the next two lots so they had 1,200 feet of waterfront, more boats came along, the “barn” was built on the next lot over they had bought, and plans were underway for a larger cottage. They went as far as designing it with an architect  but then when they could not find a builder who had the skills involved to build it, decided to build a ski place outside a little ski town that Jim had done some development work in when he was first starting out. They already had a little house there to stay in for their ski weekends. Having spent about nine months designing their dream cottage of about 9,000 square feet for the cottage lot they spent only about five weeks designing a smaller  post and beam ski house for that 15 acre site.

They went in the ground on labour day weekend and by December 31st 1999 this five thousand foot place was finished.

J & J Ski Place

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So why am I going on about these places? Well they were both pretty important to Janice and Jim, and recently there has been a real milestone in their cottaging life.  To understand the significance, I will need to go back in time a bit.

Jim retired on his 48th birthday and he and Janice thought they would try living at their big ski place and eventually downsize their home in Toronto. It did not work out well.

They felt much too isolated, particularly in the winter, and neither of the kids were coming up to the ski place or coming to the cottage. After some reflection they sold the cottage, and eventually sold the ski place and then downsized their house in Toronto. For the first time in their married life they did not have a second home, but Jim had this idea to find an old farmhouse in Provence, Brittany or Normandy and to rebuild it.

And that’s where Key West came in. Every year the artists collective that Janice was associated with in Toronto would take her work to show for the Art Basel Miami weekend and she would have lots of art sales. Each year she and Jim would tie into going to that show in South Beach a trip to Key west, a place she had lived as a child in the 1960’s. They liked France better than Key West, but with a dog, they could drive to KW from Toronto with Tuli. So Key West became the Provence project.

The right “borderline derelict” house was found, acquired, and they set about to restore it. It was from the 1880’s and had a colourful history as a private home, then a general store, then a few apartments, then back to a single home and in the 2008 mortgage mess, an asset handed back to a bank.

The first few months saw them drive down pulling a big two axel enclosed utility trailer each time with furniture from their cottage and ski place to “seed the memories”. Some trades were hired for the regulated stuff or things Jim was not up to – electrical, plumbing, a new metal roof, and pool digging but otherwise it was all about Janice choosing finishes and Jim executing the work.

J & J Key West Cottage

In the first summer Jim went down to work on it alone when the pool was under construction but otherwise it was all done when they would be there from January to April each winter for the last six years.

So that brings us to early March 2020 when at a big ceremony in Key West Janice and Jim were awarded a nice plaque for their restoration and preservation work on the house. The ceremony occurred at Truman’s Little White House where the president spent much of his time in Key West.

It was the culmination of a lot of work and when the other recipients for 2020 went up to receive their awards with their architects, historians, contractors, specialty sub-trades and consultants it was just Janice and Jim in their case.

The reason I am writing this piece today is because of what came after that ceremony. Yes , Covid really hit hard in  the next week of March, 2020 and we all got messed up by that, and in Janice and Jims case they scooted back to Toronto before the border was closed. But during this they also made a decision to sell. Difficult health insurance issues with Jim’s neurological situation, and climate change that does not bode well for a flat little island in the middle of the hurricane corridor, are what pushed them to sell a little place they loved. They had even tried to find a purchaser who would let them rent it back in the winter but that did not pan out. So a buyer was found,  their things were moved to a storage unit and they are now people without a place to get away to.

I don’t find this strange as I have never had a second place. At times I have barely had one place, so its hard for me to get my head into their situation, but I know that without a second place, and more importantly without a project, they may be feeling  a bit adrift, especially with lots of Covid restrictions.

 

Django

After writing this little post, I was speaking to Janice about the arrangements she had made for my upcoming trip to Canada and she says that Jim is looking at ads for barges and floating homes, and has also remarked at how much fun it might be to restore a vintage Airstream trailer, or to renovate a lighthouse on Prince Edward Island….. stay tuned.

MEASURES

Posted: Sept 1, 2021

I was cooking one afternoon a couple of weeks ago for our usual evening dinner with Malcolm, Martha, Gabriel and Gerhard and was watching the Olympics. I am a bit of an Olympics junkie, watching whatever event the live feed is spitting out  and absorbing all the minutiae offered whether about the athletes personal bests to date, their training regime, the diets, previous records or performing in different weather conditions. Now when the Olympics are not on, I have no interest in diving or running or throwing a shot put, but during the Olympics … well that’s anther matter.

So leading up to the Olympics I go into training. The exercise of watching hours of coverage is just the opposite of exercise so you need to be in shape. Nevertheless, by day three or four of competition my gut is large, my eyes the size of saucers and I should not be allowed to operate heavy machinery.

To offset these perils of binging the Olympics, I try to do other things while watching, like cooking or refinishing part of the mahogany on some of En Plein Airs trim. It is actually a nice combo.  While cooking and enjoying the heptathletes competing in the long jump I  realized how my relationship with measurement has changed over the years.  The Olympics is all about measurement of course. Whether it is the length they have flown through the air on a pole vault, thrown a javelin or the time it takes to run 400 meters it is all about those measures.

Growing up when I did (born in 1954) and where I did (Canada) we had a legacy of Imperial measures from before the enlightenment (when we changed to metric in April 1975) so like many of my age from Canada, I use a crazy mix of measures. I drive in Km/hr, do my carpentry in inches, think of temperature in Celsius and weigh myself in pounds. Add to this the other common  measures  – teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, half cups, B cups and C cups.   I envy the younger people who have a more streamlined life.

It got me to thinking about an old buddy who has an interest in measurement. He collects various old instruments for measuring and has a particular fixation on those measuring or calculation  devices that were the state of the art – until they were not.  Its tough to decide where his interests fit on the fetish spectrum. Watching the Olympics from Tokyo reminds me that the Japanese have a term Otaku which means: an interest that is more than a passion and less than an obsession. Good term if you don’t want to call it a fetish, I think.

Of course, he as an Astrolabe and a Sextant, the original GPS devices for sailors to determine where they were in the ocean from the location of the stars and would be seriously messed up on cloudy or rainy nights.

Slide Rule With Holster

He has several slide rules of course. The slide rule was the device that was the best tool we had until electronic calculators took over that role.  Right up to the early 1970’s  this was a compulsory math instrument for high school students. It was what many of the calculations were done on for the Americans to put a man on the moon. If you were an Engineering student in the 1960’s wearing one in a holster on your belt indicated you had a license to calculate.

This took on a competitive aspect of course when various universities would compete for doing calculations and these competitors would use both their eye/hand coordination, and muscle memory skills with much too large a mental processor to zip the sliding parts back and forth to come up with the answer in record time.

 

 

 

One of my buddy’s valued objects is a slide rule he bought from the University of Chicago Engineering School of computing.

Engineering Lab Slide Rule

It is almost eight feet long and was attached to a wall behind the instructor in a large lecture hall. The professor would demonstrate its use to the eager engineering students and they would follow along using their regular sized slide rules.

Tech Nerds In Foreplay

 

 

So what happened in 1974? Well, the electronic calculator cost had come down enough to make it suitable for general use by the public and overnight the slide rule was not only second fiddle, but was eliminated. Poof.

Some measurement devices do endure of course. He has an Omega Seamaster Professional Chronometer– the same one that James Bond had in one of those thrillers but my buddy claims his malfunctions because all it does is tell time. And the time it tells of course while not as precise as the least expensive of smart phones today is pretty damb accurate and based on a technology that has not changed essentially in hundreds of years.

I think that part of his interest in these technologies and their obsolescence is looking to find what are real measures that last and have meaning, like the measure of a person. Relationships, integrity, loyalty. It is interesting that none of these are really quantifiable yet are more highly valued as measures than the quantifiable ones.

When I worked on the food prep areas of cruise ships, we had to be precise in our measures so Mr. Mcgillicutty’s  soup would be exactly like Mrs. McGillicutty’s and so when he raved about it over cards, Dr. Garfunkel would  order it the next day and have the same dining experience.

And as a guy who likes to cook and occasionally bake, I get the importance of the use of measures, but increasingly I am drawn to those things that are more fluid or nuanced than precise. If you read many of my posts you will know of my bromance with Jamie Oliver and Jacques Pepin and the whole movement to experimentation, adaptation, and interpretation. Those concepts require some structure, and a goal but not as precise a measurement.  Now I am talking cooking here, not baking – and measures in baking are a bit fixed.

It was only after I wrote this and was relating to Ciara the focus of this piece, that Ciara pointed out the obvious.

Django’s Measuring Cup

I use a measuring cup that was given to me by my Bebe. Now, if you don’t know who that is I would suggest going back to my posts from 2020, 2019 and few from 2015 and earlier.  She is my paternal grandmother, from  a little island off of Brittany, who has now passed. She gave me an old glass measuring cup when I was first starting to work on the kitchens of ships and she mistakenly thought that my job related to making food, more than the truth of it which was working in a food preparation plant for pigs at sea. It was very tired even then, and over the years with use, and too much time in dishwashers, all the numbers have worn off completely but because it was from her it is one of the few measuring cups I have on En Plein Air, and it is what I use almost exclusively and  think of her when doing so.

But the point here is that it is reflective of my take on the world today. I know that when it is largely filled, its one cup, and when its about half full it’s ….well you guessed it – half a cup. It is important that we get things largely right and measure them properly but perhaps not as important that we be precise and beat ourselves up or beat up others for not being as precise. This “sorta measure” is where I am today in trying to understand how to move forward in understanding life, particularly life in Covid times.

After reflecting on this clear glass object a bit, I decided to introduce another item in the Django shop. It is the Django Bisous Measuring Cup. There are no measures, but you will still know how to use it. Coming soon….

 

Django

 

Measurement Park

P.S.

After posting this I received a note from the partner of the buddy who is into collecting all the measuring stuff.

I had called it an interest and his partner pointed out to me that when they moved to their current house they did so partially because the little park that is close to them is called MEASUREMENT PARK and has various measures shown on poles.

Ok, so that definitely puts his interest on the fetish spectrum.

 

 

FORTY-EIGHT

Posted: August 1, 2021

In the spring of 1973 I graduated from Champlain High School in Ottawa, Canada. That was forty-eight years ago. And about a week ago I received a note from my longtime buddy (and classmate) Jim H. who still lives in the Ottawa area, letting me know there was a movement afoot to have a reunion on October 2nd , the first for our year.

Wow.  A high school reunion. There are few things that conjure up such a mix of emotions. I know that for some the nine weeks from hearing of this until the actual event will be the period to: lose 40 pounds, get a facelift and win a Nobel prize for physics. Well, I never was much good at physics. Physics and a few of the other sciences did various cameo appearances on my high school F column with the regulars Math and French. Yeah French, and I have a French heritage. I am kind of squeamish when it comes to surgery so that puts the face lift out of the question for me as well. Forty pounds? I think it might be easier to get that Nobel prize in the nine weeks.

Now while high school is a pretty crazy time in the evolution of teenagers it was particularly strange in that period when I was there – 1968 to 1973. Yes, that is a five year period because at the time Ontario Canada offered a four year high school diploma for anyone wanting to pursue the trades or community college and a five year diploma for most people who aspired to go to university or had parents with such aspirations for their offspring. I had such parents.

And what was happening in that 1968 to 1973 period? Well at the beginning of that period the Cold War was still hot, the war in Viet Nam was heating up as both a war and effectively a civil war in the United States as well, and  Martin Luther King had just been murdered in April of ’68.  In 1969 gay rights in Canada were opened up, the Americans put a man on the moon, and by October 1970 the War Measures Act was used in Canada to try to manage the FLQ,  a Quebec liberation group. Women were fighting for their liberation, race relations were poor, particularly in the U.S., and as we now know, the Canadian Government with the Roman Catholic Church ramped up both the Residential Schools and the forced assimilation of our indigenous peoples with the sixties scoop. Shameful. It really was a very screwed up time on most fronts and many of us had parents who had no idea how to cope with the perspectives their teenagers were developing regarding many of these issues.

In contrast to those turbulent times the soundtrack for our high school life was amazing. It started with The Beatles releasing The White Album and then Abbey Road and the Stones releasing   Beggars Banquet and Let it Bleed. Led Zeppelin was formed.  By the summer between grade 9 and 10 we had Woodstock. If you are new to this website you may want to look back in the archives ( MY VERY FIRST POST,  posted December 14, 2013) to Jim C’s Woodstock experience and the recent follow up to that  (WOODSTOCK: 50 YEARS LATER, posted August 15, 2019). Every week a new album would come out that today would be considered epic. And as if to celebrate our graduation in 1973, Pink Floyd released The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Of course, that flood of new music was also reflecting growth on some amazing music from before and I have great memories of sitting at Jim H’s living room listening to Gene Vincent Rock and the Blue Caps Roll, or his fathers Dave Brubeck albums.

And that’s the really fun part of memories. It is not just the music but the link of that music to what we were doing at the time.  I have fond recollections of lounging in the dark listening to the Moody Blues in Myles C.’s basement after a warmup joint outside, and singing along to The Who, Rush  and Black Sabbath  while riding in Bo M’s amazing Datson 240Z with the music just loud enough to have the whole city turn to listen.

Ahh, the cars. Bo always had a nice ride, as his dad was in that business and Bo would clean the cars and sometimes bring them home. Jim H’s parents had the ’66 corvette stingray fastback, and Steve Z. got a brand-new Corvette for graduation. The rest of us mortals, rode bikes, motorcycles, took transit, walked, borrowed our parents’ cars or had really old junkers. I had an 80 cc Yamaha motorbike, that spit and coughed and farted all the way to wherever I was going. My main man Jim C. had saved a lot  so that in January 1970 when we both turned sixteen, he had bought a three-year-old Volks Beetle  and drove it to the driving test – Yeah, don’t ask.  He delivered pizza with it part time and loved that thing. But one sunny Sunday morning in August  of that year on a tight bend near his parents’ cottage he rolled it.  That turned him on to doing autobody and worked on a lot of other guys cars over the rest of High school.

For some of us we did not do high school well. At the time, what we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder was in its early stages of identification and treatment,  and the confusion for most practitioners was that some inflicted with this had  a big attention deficit while others had not as much but a lot of hyperactivity. For most of us with it , the identification only came much later than high school, after some seriously disastrous experiences. I have ADHD but unlike my buddy Jim C. who was given an extra dollop of the H part I got an extra dollop of the AD part. It meant that I was laid back and identified as “mentally lazy”  and he was identified as “overwound”. I just cruised through high school failing stuff and for him the behaviors are as if you took  a regular kid, gave him a bunch of amphetamines, a couple of double espressos and send him off to school each day.

He channeled it into track and field – literally to run it off. I, on the other hand, would self medicate. Both of these techniques work to a degree but only partially. Each of us only figured out we had this later in life and much too late to have a very positive high school experience – at least academically.

Our high school  was a little weird as well. We had a real range on the socioeconomic front – some not very well off, some exceedingly well off and most of us in the middle. When we were in grade 10 the school board decided to turn our school into a Francophone school and the English school would be phased out. We were the second last graduating class as the year behind us was the last intake of the English students.  I think it was a Canadian application of the U.S. bussing program that had been so successful. LOL.

The result of this phase out of the school’s intake was that each year the scale of the student body dwindled, and as normal attrition was also occurring with some families who would move away, the number of students in our year also went down in size, as no new families moving to the area  could have their kids join us as this strange orphaned school.  There were positives to this small size of course in that we were a tighter group and could do some things that at the time were unique like moving the whole bunch of us (students, teachers, admin people)  to camp together, but in general we could not put together a football team or have as many extra curricular clubs etc.

Looking back over almost half a century is also scary. We look at the choices we have made, the experiences we have had since high school and how we might have done things differently. I spend a lot of time writing on this website  reflecting on life, looking back and looking forward. I think if this reunion happened twenty years ago I would have been pretty uptight about it,  but now it has been so long it is just a novelty that we have made it this far and will be fun to get reacquainted. But it has taken me this long to get to that point that I can see my high school years more  objectively and pull out those positive memories. It is as if over the years I have gone through a set of slides and year after year thrown out one or two of the bad memories only to be left with mainly slides of the good times and the positives that have come out.

Forty-eight years is a long time. That number has significance for Jim as he retired on his forty-eighth birthday and significance for me as the trip we did in June 2004  was En Plein Airs forty-eighth trip moving people to safe points as I described  in THE NEW MILLENIUM, posted March 26, 2017.

My buddy Jim C. has a lot of travel points and has got me a ticket to come over, see my doctor, dentist, and go to the reunion. The flight is by way of Ireland so Ciara is joining me for that leg as both of us need to sign statements at the police station regarding the death of her ex husband and then she is staying on for a few weeks as she needs to do something to keep up her medical accreditation. I will be in Ireland for just a day and then off to Canada for a few days of quality time with my doctor, dentist, and people I have not seen in about five decades.

I am now off to the library to sign out a bunch of physics texts.

Django

High School Django

P.S. As regular readers know I don’t usually put in pictures of myself as I like to keep a low profile but here is one of me from my high school days in grade twelve or grade thirteen. I am going to spend some time trying to find some images of my classmates and if they are cool with it, I will post them here as well.