Reflections on Reflections

Happy Birthday Mags!

I finally got my new reflector in the mail.  Hooray!

The problem is, when I bought it, I thought, oh, 44″, that’s the size of my TV, I can live with that (because for some reason it was half the price of the smaller size).  But then I got it and was shocked at how huge it was.  And then the Pie told me that 44″ was the size of our LAST TV, not this one, which is significantly smaller.  Oops.

So this one has a shiny silver side, a shiny gold side, a white side, a black side, and even this nifty translucent section — for softening harsh sunlight.  I doubt I will be using that one much while living in St. John’s, if these gray skies are any indication.

My first experiments with the reflector therefore had to be with a gray afternoon sky as my main light source.

So I took a grapefruit. It was what happened to be there when I thought of this.  This is the control shot. The following photos have been cropped but are otherwise unedited.

Here it is with the silver.

And the gold, to warm it up a bit.

And the white.

I didn’t try the black one because I needed all the light I could get, but that’s what I got so far.  I’m looking forward to experimenting more in different settings.  But I do wish I’d gotten a smaller one.  I guess I could just get the Pie to hold it for me …

Going Postal

You may recall that in the spring I acquired several envelopes of vintage postage stamps once belonging to my great grandfather and I was casting about, trying to figure out what to do with them.

In the interim, my dad found some more of them in a filing cabinet, and now I have lots.

It took me a good hour to sort them from his weird Scottish code to something that I could understand.

And now I’m going to show you two things I did with them.  I’m sure I’ll do more in the future.

The first idea I had was to enlarge two of the stamps I liked very much.  To do this, I took a close-up photo of each using my macro lens and some bright light.  I was originally going to scan them instead, but I found they lost a lot of their depth that way.

This is my improvised light box: a bright window, a white sheet of board, and a clean surface.

I touched up the images to improve the contrast and remove imperfections. I love the sheer size of my new computer screen for doing this. No more sticking my nose to the screen!

After alterations:

So here are the two I want to blow up. The mountain goat:

And Expo 67.  You can see that by taking a photo instead of scanning you can pick up the slightly raised red ink on the expo67 and the 5.

Then I had the Pie take the images to our university’s printing services and he came home with these nice big printouts.  I bought a special pair of scrapbooking scissors at Michael’s that resembles the edges of a postage stamp, so I cut out the stamp image to look like a giant stamp.

Then I simply inserted it in a photo frame of the appropriate size and shape.

This extra one is for Rusty, because he’s an ice maker (and does curling ice), so I thought he would like it.  Three stacked one on top of the other I think makes the colour contrasts stand out nicely.

The other thing I did involved a stamp series, which I simply placed in a collage on black paper (for contrast) and inserted in the frame.

This is actually two series together, both of Queen Elizabeth, both representing certain elements of Canadian culture and industry.

For added interest, I did a little research on each stamp (Collections Canada has a comprehensive list) and printed out the information to accompany each framed picture.

I challenge you to a pumpkin-off!

Or, to be more precise, I challenged the Pie to a pumpkin-off.  You see, we don’t really get trick-or-treaters on our street.  Like, at all.  So we long ago gave up on decorating for Hallowe’en.  But carving pumpkins is just so much fun.  I used to get really elaborate with mine as a kid, using those tiny knives to get tiny details and scraping away layers of pumpkin to create a translucent layer of orange pulp.  The Pie, on the other hand, says that traditionally he had two pumpkin styles: one with two pointy teeth, and one with one snaggle-tooth.  And in eight years together we have only carved pumpkins together once.  So why not do so now?  We won’t have anyone to show them to, as we don’t get trick-or-treaters here on Elizabeth, but at least we’ll get to enjoy them.

Some tips for happy carving:

Give your pumpkin a good scrub to loosen dirt and other unmentionables (they come from farms, people), especially if you’re planning to eat the contents.

Cut your “lid” just slightly larger than your fist, and cut the sides at an angle so it stays in place.

Incorrect angle. Don’t worry, he fixed it on the next stab.

The correct angle.

Scrape the inside flesh as thin as possible, leaving maybe 1/2″ behind.  This means that you get to keep most of the flesh for cooking without having it left out to spoil.  It also makes it easier to do more detailed carving.  And to add to that, if you’re going to go for the translucent look, where the light shines through the pumpkin flesh, it’s a good starting point for thinning the flesh to where you want it. I find a metal spoon works really well for good scrape-age.

We had three separate bowls going while we were carving, to save us time later on. One was for the pumpkin seeds, another for usable/eatable flesh, and the third for scraps and bits of skin we couldn’t eat. Gren thought all of them were for his personal consumption and was quite put out when we wouldn’t let him have more than a few pieces to himself. I guess after a puppyhood of digestive issues where we gave him pumpkin on a regular basis, he’s developed a taste for it.

Also, it’s a good idea to go into pumpkin carving with a plan. The Pie and I took two different routes: he went with a stencil of Spider-Man, and I free-handed an approximation of Grenadier. So he was going to scoop out all the black stuff on his, and on mine, the black stuff is untouched pumpkin skin, the gray is scooped out but not cut pumpkin flesh, and the white is entirely cut out pumpkin.

The Pie taped his design to his pumpkin, making sure to cut darts in the sides so it would fit on the curve.

Then he set to work with a wee punch, poking holes around the edges of his design to use as a guide for cutting later on.

Then he started peeling off the skin of his design with a sharp knife. You’ll note he kept a copy of his stencil by his side so he could remember which parts he was supposed to cut and which parts were negative space.

I drew my design directly onto my pumpkin skin with a pencil. It doesn’t leave a huge mark, which is good if you decide to change your mind later on. Which I did.

Then I started peeling and cutting, according to my plan, which I kept at my side.

Can’t say the finished product looks much like the subject, though.

When we got to a certain stage we started testing the translucence of our pumpkin with LED tea lights stuffed inside. It’s a simple matter to scrape away more of the flesh from the inside and out. I went with a bit of texture on mine to emphasize the fuzziness of my hound. It does show up when you look at the lit pumpkin up close.

So here’s my finished pumpkin, from the ears angle:

And from the tongue angle:

And the Pie’s, from one angle:

And a bit closer:

I made Gren pose with the finished version of him. He was not amused.

And who won the pumpkin-off? Well, Gren seemed to like mine best, as he kept licking it. So I’m going to take that as a vote for my side.

Plus we definitely plan to have some posts in the days following Hallowe’en about the things you can do with your carved pumpkin.  Stay tuned!

On Top of Mount Scio

On Thanksgiving weekend, the Pie and I decided to take a hike to somewhere we’d never been.  St. John’s has an extensive concourse trail system and in our four years here, we’ve explored a good part of it.  Gren definitely has his favourites, as well.  On this day, though, we left him at home.  He doesn’t have the same energy as he did when he was a puppy, so we knew that he would get tired long before we did.  If you’re ever thinking of getting a dog to encourage you to exercise, don’t get a corgi.  They are so lazy.

Anyway.  We took the Long Pond to Oxen Pond Walk.  One of our regular walks with Gren is the Long Pond walk just behind MUN’s campus, so it was familiar territory.  The trail to Oxen Pond, however, is a bit more of a hike.  In fact, it pretty much goes straight up Mount Scio, which is kind of the backstop for the city.  There are a good many stairs, which my poor battered knees protested before long.  The view once you reach the top of the mountain is pretty epic, though.  You can see all of the North Valley, which is where we live and where Memorial University is.

You might want to click on the photo above and zoom in on my Flickr page.  MUN campus is in the foreground in the middle, hiding our house, with the Health Sciences Centre and hospital at the left side of the photo. At the centre of the shot you can see the two clock towers of the Catholic Basilica. To the right of that are the red roofs of The Rooms, our museum. On the other side of the Rooms is a giant hill leading downtown, which you can’t see in this picture. The vee of water behind the church and museum is the opening to the Narrows and St. John’s Harbour. The water to the left is Quidi Vidi Lake, which empties into Quidi Vidi Bay. The river that feeds Quidi Vidi Lake, Rennie’s River, actually gets some of its start from tributaries up here on the mountain. And that’s your geography lesson for the day.

From the top, we took the trail along and down a ways until we crossed Mt. Scio Road and entered the MUN Botanical Gardens.  Because we are Memorial students, we got in for free!  Of course, it being October, much of the showy summer foliage has died back, but we spent a good 25 minutes tooling around the edible and medicinal herb gardens, marveling at how people figured out which herbs did what when you ate them or boiled them or steeped them.  This one was of particular interest to me, a long-suffering victim of chronic UTIs.

Another part of the ornamental garden illustrates the various plants that live in Newfoundland’s climates. Many of these plants adapted well to extremely harsh conditions, and some of the environments in this province have been re-created here. I took a picture of this one because it grows in our backyard (on almost pure gravel) and I can never remember what it’s called.

Inside a shelter there was also a neat little succulent and cactus garden, with a few flowers thrown in.

A little of a last hurrah for warmer weather.

Once through the ornamental garden we finished the trail down to Oxen Pond. We had self-righteously refused to buy duck feed at the admissions desk, because as a rule we try not to feed wild animals. However, as soon as we arrived at the pond we were greeted by some very hungry ducks.

Who soon called in all their friends.

From all the way across the pond.

Eventually we were mobbed and had to leave when they started yelling.

With angry quacking ringing in our ears we continued along the trail to the fen, admiring the lush moss along the way.

In the summer in a bog you can see all manner of cool things, like orchids and lady’s slippers and iris and stuff like that. You might remember some of that from our trip to Gros Morne last summer. But most of those flowers have died back by this time of year. What remains, however, are representatives of the province’s official flower: the pitcher plant. I think carnivorous plants are so cool.

I petted this one (though I probably wasn’t supposed to). Those little hairs are quite soft.

On the way back, we marveled at some more Leslie damage.

A moose path leading who knows where.

And some truly epic fungus.  Here is a small sample.  I don’t know why Newfoundland doesn’t have a booming mushroom industry, considering how damp and dark it is.

Not to mention this poor tree, which was covered in galls. Galls are reactions to irritants for trees. Like an oyster covers a grain of sand in mineral deposits to make it smooth, a tree grows these bulbous things around stuff like insects and worms and fungus and stuff to protect itself. Neat, huh?

So even if it wasn’t summer, we still got to see some cool stuff, which we probably would have missed had it been overshadowed by the more ostentatious products of warmer weather.

This is why the trees on my street grow on a slant.

If a post about origami dishes or cheesecake doesn’t come up at 7AM NST on Wednesday it’s because of this.

Meet the storm known as Leslie. Because of this I am intermittently without power. And I didn’t have anything already scheduled in WordPress.

But regularly scheduled posts will return asap.

Comfort, Company, and Compromise

Okay for real it’s autumn.  The time has come for me to finally start cracking down on my thesis.  My outline has been approved by my committee and I’m ready to go.  The problem is, until Saturday, my “office” (read: the tiny rolling desk I moved into) was stuck in a dark corner of our bedroom for the whole summer.  I love our bedroom, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a place conducive to dissertation-writing.  I wanted my office back.

But my office looked like this (Corgi sometimes included).  That giant queen-sized bed pretty much takes up the whole room, which is only about 9 feet squared.

What’s left goes to the freezer.

We didn’t want to get rid of the bed if we could keep it — it’s very handy to have a spare place to sleep if you have unexpected guests or your spouse is sick or what have you (normally when this happens one of us [ME] sleeps on our tiny loveseat in the living room).  But holy crap a bed takes up a lot of room!  Of course it would be a simple matter to get some form of hide-a-bed or convert this sucker to a murphy bed or something like that.  But we don’t have any money and this isn’t our house, and we’re only going to be here another year anyway.  We just need a band-aid solution to get us through the year — a year that includes me writing the equivalent of a textbook.

So we had to do some shifting around.  And of course when you’re doing this you don’t want to spend an hour or two shoving furniture needlessly across your floors.  No.  You want to go in with a plan.

What do you do?  Well you map it out.  My husband studies cartography, so this was right up his alley.

First, you need to measure everything — the furniture, as well as the dimensions of your room.  Make sure when you’re measuring the room that you include the floor space of the room (that is, from baseboard to baseboard) and not from wall to wall.  Baseboards usually account for an inch or two in depth and that could mean a whole lot when it comes to fitting stuff in.  Also make sure that you can account for the full swing of a door, be it a closet or the main entrance.  You may think you can deal with a door that doesn’t open all the way, but trust me, that will get irritating pretty quickly.

Conveniently, there are tons of programs out there on the internet that can help you to map out your future room.  The one we used here wasn’t the greatest, but it suited our purposes.

The big issues for us in planning out our room were that the room itself only has two electrical outlets, and that the longest wall is taken up halfway through with an electric baseboard heater.  Oh, that and the huge honking bed we need to fit in there. So this is the room as it stands right now. The desk and chair to the left are what needs to fit in the room.

We tried out all sorts of permutations, and eventually we had almost agreed on getting rid of the bed altogether and just sucking it up for the next year.  It was the freezer that was causing us grief.  It would fit in our bedroom, now that we’d moved the desk, but did we really want our freezer in our bedroom?  Probably not. But it had to go somewhere. As far as my office move-around went, however, we ended up putting everything back (virtually) pretty much where it was originally, and just swapping out the freezer for the desk. Presto-change-o.

In the end, we decided to shove the freezer into our dining room.  I may eventually switch it up with that table in the corner (but as you can see the aesthetics of the place are pretty much ruined with all the craft stuff I’ve got on the go at the moment).  It doesn’t do anything for our dining room, and it makes it a little annoying to manoeuvre around the table now, but we don’t really have the time or money to have big fancy dinner parties anymore, and we really only use the dining room for a workspace and to have breakfast on the weekends.  So it will do.  For now (meaning I’ll probably re-evaluate my priorities and move everything around sometime in the next month or so — the way things are is already bugging the OCD in me).

And my office?  Well, it’s not perfect by any means. All the pictures are now hung up wrong. When I sit at my desk I get a bird’s eye view of what’s in our recycling bags. But it’ll do.  For now. It’s a compromise.

End of Season Review: My Three Boat Tours

Our intrepid hero

As our chapter of Newfoundland living draws slowly to a close (our five years are almost up!), the Pie and I are trying to take any opportunity to experience the good things and the amazing things that this province, and the St. John’s area, have to offer.  And this summer, owing to the generosity of my law firm and some fortuitous Groupons, I ended up taking not one, not two, but THREE boat tours of the area, with three different companies.  So I thought, now that the boating tour season is almost over, I’d give you my opinion on the whole enterprise, so that if you’re in the area next spring and summer, you can decide if you’d like to try this experience as well.

But first an Ali-cized version of Newfoundland history.  As you may know, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has been the location of various fishing colonies from Portugal, France, and England (and a few others) for the past five hundred years.  Legend has it that the first Vikings to visit North America stopped here first, and that they could walk from their ships to the rocky shores on the backs of the plentiful cod in the water.  All that cod meant a lot of fighting over fishing rights, and after a few switches back and forth, England eventually won out (although France and Portugal still have their own interests).  Newfoundland became part of the Dominion of Canada after World War II, and here we are.

Imagine cod cushioning your feet from these jagged rocks.

In 1992, the cod fishery was so severely depleted that the government declared a moratorium on cod fishing — there simply weren’t enough fish in the sea anymore.  This resulted in thousands of fishermen losing their traditional livelihood.  If a Newfoundlander can’t fish cod, is he really a Newfoundlander?

Who says size matters?

Some enterprising fishermen came up with some new ideas about how to put food on their tables.  They converted their fishing boats into tour boats, adding seats and life jackets and taking out the nets and hauling equipment.  Tourism in Newfoundland began to thrive.  And from May to September every year, you can take a tour with one of these companies and see all the sites that Newfoundland has to offer — from the sea.  In May and June, if you’re lucky, you can sail up close to a massive ice berg as it makes its way south to melt.  In July and August you can sail alongside all manner of local whales as they, too, migrate to other waters.

From whaling and codfishing to eco-tourism.

My first tour happened back in late June.  My law firm charted an Iceberg Quest boat to take us from St. John’s Harbour around Cape Spear to Petty Harbour.

View of the harbour, from the Narrows.

It was a calm and sunny afternoon as we pulled out of the harbour, but once we hit the currents of the North Atlantic, the swells got a bit higher and the spray off the bow was enough to thoroughly soak most of us in minutes.

Me and Mel, thoroughly soaked.

There were a few members of the party who had to make use of the barf bags on board.  I’m sure the open bar didn’t help.  I kept getting salt water in my rum and Coke (which actually didn’t end up tasting that bad). But those of us who had our sea legs had a great time.

Everyone had to have a Titanic moment.

My favourite moment of this particular tour was when we rounded Cape Spear, which is the most easterly point of land in North America.  And at that particular moment, I was more east than Cape Spear.

East-er than the east-est

We did catch a glimpse of a humpback whale off our bow, but it was gone before any of us got any good pictures of it. This is the dorsal of a minke who was too camera shy and gone before long.

There were birds all around us, though, and they were interesting too.

We pulled into Petty Harbour nicely sauced and just in time for dinner.

Chafe’s Landing is a restaurant just a few steps from the harbour and is rumoured to have the best fish and chips on the Avalon Peninsula.  And I’m here to tell you that those rumours are TRUE.  It was incredible.

We took a bus back to St. John’s as the sun set, all happy, salty, and full of good food.

While the staff were friendly they weren’t all that talkative with us.  Perhaps because this was a private charter they weren’t required to give us the rundown on the things we were seeing as we sailed around the Cape.

A particular benefit of Iceberg Quest is that they are the one tour company that sails directly out of St. John’s Harbour, so if you’re in town and you don’t have transportation, it’s the way to go.  I think that because it is directly out of St. John’s that the tour cost is probably quite a bit more expensive than those which operate outside of town.  Because the firm paid for it, I have no idea how much it actually cost. But the boat was flashy and shiny and big.

My second tour was with O’Brien’s in early August, and the Pie and I got a Groupon for a four-person pass at half price, which cost us about $120.  We took Cait and Jul and drove to Bay Bulls one morning for a 9:00 AM sailing.  As we left St. John’s and headed south, it got foggier and foggier, and by the time we hit Bay Bulls we could barely see ten feet in front of us.  Not to worry.  We were experiencing what is known as “capelin weather,” which meant we were in luck.  Capelin are tiny fish, about four or five inches long, that provide the main source of food for not only the cod, but many other species of wildlife in the area.  Capelin migrate through here in the summer, and are usually the most plentiful (like, you can scoop them off the beach with a shovel) after several hot days in a row followed by a cold, muggy, foggy spell.

Despite the weather being the pits most of the time, Newfoundland is definitely beautiful, rain or shine, and we were quite taken with the shoreline emerging suddenly from the mist, and disappearing just as suddenly.

Then we hit the mouth of Bay Bulls and saw a giant patch of birds, all feeding from the same place in the water.  This meant capelin, and so, if we were lucky, it also meant we might see some whales.  Then, not a hundred metres from where we were, we heard a humpback take a deep breath.  Then, a few seconds later, we smelled it.  Whale breath is not a pleasant thing.

Over the next hour or so, we were joined by two more humpbacks, who were very curious about us and the other tour boat next to us.  Instead of gorillas in the mist, we got humpbacks in the fog.

Justin, our highly experienced (and musically gifted!) guide, said this was the best year for whales he’d seen, and he’s been doing this for twelve years.  He was very good about explaining to us exactly what the whales were doing when we couldn’t see them.  You see this round patch of water?  That’s the whale’s footprint, essentially.  You get that sort of upswell when the whale makes a deep dive.  It sticks around for a surprisingly long time.

Whenever we thought the whales would get bored with us and take off, they would surface again and just sort of hang out between our two boats.  It was truly incredible.

At long last we had to bid the whales adieu and keep to our schedule.  We headed a bit further out of the bay to Gull Island, which we smelled before we saw.  This area is an ecological reserve for seafowl and has the largest population of puffins in the entire world.  But it’s also home to a huge number of other birds, and we got to see them all.

As we headed back to the Bay, we piled into the cabin for warmth.  When you sail through fog it tends to stick to you, so we were all coated with a light, salty mist, and our hands were so cold it made holding our cameras tricky.  But it was definitely worth it for such an amazing experience!

My third tour was actually just yesterday (because I’m writing this on the 24th of August), and I wrangled another Groupon package deal for four with Mullowney’s Boat Tours for $110, which was half-price.  Trav was staying with us at the time and so the three of us went.  I ended up giving the fourth ticket to one of the other passengers.  The highway to Bay Bulls is only one lane on both sides with little room for passing and we got stuck behind the slowest person alive on the way there, meaning that we arrived at Mullowney’s five minutes after 12:00 PM, the time the boat was supposed to sail!  We thought we had missed it entirely but fortunately, because I had made a reservation, the boat was waiting for us.  They had heard from other passengers that the traffic was bad and they stuck around until we got there, which was really nice.

Despite it being noon, Trav is not yet truly awake.

Today when we left Bay Bulls it was sunny and calm and absolutely glorious.  We had layered up in anticipation that we would get cold and we actually found ourselves to be quite comfortable, even a little warm, in our jackets.  Now, this is the North Atlantic, so for it to be this calm and quiet was extremely unusual.  If you do a tour, make sure to dress warmly.

It had been three days since any of the local tour companies had seen any whales, so we didn’t get our hopes up this time.  It is the end of the whales’ migratory season anyhow.  Because I wasn’t looking for whales, I got to focus a bit more on the sea birds around, and we had a great time laughing at the antics of the puffins, who are the most ungainly flyers I have ever seen.  The other birds regarded them with disdain, and chased them down for their fish.

Gull chasing a fish-laden puffin. Gulls are huge jerks, apparently.

Despite not seeing any whales, we all agreed that we’d had a great time.  Mullowney’s takes a bit of a different route from O’Brien’s, so the Pie and I got to see different sides of Gull island than we’d seen before, and it was nice to observe their habitat when it wasn’t shrouded in fog.  The pleasantness of the day alone made puttering around on the sea a true delight, and the companionship of our friendly young guide Alastair made for an entertaining trip.

Overall:

I can’t say that I had anything other than a very pleasant experience with all three of the touring companies I used this summer.  The staff were all very friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable about both sailing and the areas we visited, and I know from speaking to several of the employees that the companies are not in competition with each other.  That makes for a much friendlier environment, and they help each other out when it comes to spotting whales and bergs and the like.

When you take a boat tour there’s no guarantee that you will see whales or ice bergs or any of the more spectacular things out there.  There’s not even a guarantee that the water will be calm or the sun will be shining.  But even if you don’t get the jaw-dropping experience of seeing giant whales or colossal ice bergs, you can still appreciate nature writ large as you sail past Newfoundland’s ragged coast line and you hear the cries of hundreds of sea birds all around you.  Any day you go, whatever you see, you are guaranteed to have an experience you won’t forget any time soon.

More on the boat tour companies in this post:

Iceberg Quest: http://icebergquest.com

O’Brien’s: http://www.obriensboattours.com

Mullowney’s: http://www.puffinswhales.com

Driving “Up Island” in a Smart Car

This is my last post about our west coast trip, I promise.

While we were staying in Victoria, the Pie and I took two days out and drove up to Courtenay to visit Tim, one of the Pie’s childhood friends from Ottawa who had made the move west.  Tim was best man at our wedding.  There’s pretty much only one highway that goes the length of Vancouver Island, and if you go anywhere north of Victoria you are going “up island”.  Courtenay-Comox, while situated pretty much in the middle of the length of the island, is considered to be the farthest you want to go up island.  When I was a child, I actually thought it WAS at the northern tip of the island.  It turns out instead that nobody really wants to go that much farther than Courtenay-Comox, and the best way to go further is to take a boat.

So we rented a car.  My firm gets me a corporate discount at Enterprise rentals, and they’ve always treated me well.  Since it was just the two of us and we were only traveling for two days we rented an economy-sized car.  I joked as we were waiting in line that I’d love to take the little Smart Car in the parking lot on our trip, and the Pie rolled his eyes.  Little did we know that it was the only “economy” sized car left in the lot!  Have I mentioned that the Pie is 6’4″?  This was going to be interesting.

Neither of us had ever driven a Smart Car before so we took it on as a challenge. Here is the super-awesomely small rear view mirror. There are no blind spots in this car, so it’s not a huge deal.

And the nonexistent leg room.  And the lack of gadgets. And our pasty, pasty legs.

But the whole roof was glass, which was neat when you are driving through the mountains.

Though because the car is energy-efficient, it seemed to always want to be in the highest gear possible, which meant it rumbled along like it had a diesel engine.  An engine that never wanted to accelerate, and that shifted violently, like a newbie on a standard transmission.  And it was an automatic!

We booked it up to Courtenay, sliding through Chemainus and its famous murals and Nanaimo, where we got a coffee.

We hit Tim’s place in the mid-afternoon, and he took us out to Stotan Falls to cool off, as it was about 33°C and sunny.

This series of short falls is a very popular place to come and sit in the sun and the water.  While much of it is very shallow, the limestone has worn away in spots to form these potholes, which can catch you unawares.

Some of them are large enough to tuck yourself into, as Tim demonstrates here.

And you can swim in the deeper, cool water just after the falls.  Floater that I am, I nearly got swept away because I couldn’t get my feet under me, but Tim hauled me out safe.

In trekking around, we also got to see some neat fossils. That’s my foot, for scale.

As well as the sheer neatness of the geology of this area.

That night we drove to Comox and had dinner on the sandy beach near CFB Comox.  While planes took off behind us, the sun set to our left.

The water was so warm that even the Pie went into the ocean and swam.  This is a history-making moment, people.

This dog never left the water!

On the way home we got a brief tour of the organic spa that Tim owns with his partner Lisa.  If you’re ever in Courtenay and you need a massage, Ziva is the place to visit.  After my ordeal in the rapids I could have used a massage myself, but it was late.

The next morning, after saying our goodbyes, the Pie and I began our trek south, though in a more leisurely manner.  We stopped at a farmer’s market in Qualicum Beach, which happens every Saturday.

Our breakfast consisted of some locally roasted organic coffee, local tay berries, and home-made cinnamon sticky buns.

The tay berries taste like a combination between raspberries and blackberries, and look like logan berries (what’s the difference, anyway?).

The cinnamon buns were so sticky and delicious we may have died a little.

These were my sticky and stained hands at the beginning of breakfast.  By the end I was a total mess. The camera was going to get sticky if we took a picture of that so we refrained.

Then back to our Smart Car, which we had dubbed Blinky.

To give you a sense of scale …

We paused at the Little Qualicum River Falls, which were stunning.  I took way too many pictures, but you can see some below.

And had a brief stop in Cathedral Grove, home to some of the oldest and tallest trees on the island. We didn’t stick around too long, because the Falls hike and the Falls themselves had made us very thirsty.

Then we had lunch in Coombs, which has to be one of the weirdest towns I have ever seen.  This exporter seemed to own the whole place, and had these strange (and not for sale) sculptures all over the open space.  The wooden and marble sculptures inside were even more fantastical, and many of them were pornographic.  We weren’t allowed to photograph any of them, though, and I’m not even going to get started on some of the strange chairs they had there.

In the same place was Goats on Roof, a market place specializing in imported foods.  And all sorts of kitschy Asian paraphernalia, like these lanterns, which hung everywhere in the store.

Let’s not forget that there were actual goats on the roof.

It was a long drive both ways, but in the Smart Car we only went through one tank of gas, even with all our perambulations.  It was a nice change of pace to be on our own schedule and under our own steam, and we quite enjoyed the trip.  I was very sad when we had to return Blinky.  Not a good car for highway driving, but a fun challenge nonetheless.  And backing up was AWESOME. What a fun trip!

Childhood Revisited on Vancouver Island

We spent a week on Van Isle after Krystopf and Atlas’s wedding.  It was really cool to show the Pie all the things I used to do when I was growing up.  I lived in Esquimalt, the town next to Victoria, for five years from 1990-1995, and it was definitely a memorable time in my life. We visited all the tourist-y spots in Victoria, and I took lots of pictures of the time we spent there (you can check out some of the photos here), but I’d like to focus more on one particular place we visited.

If you grew up in a military family, chances are you spent some of your time living on a military base somewhere.  That’s common enough.  Esquimalt is home to three such military bases: Workpoint, the army base, Naden, the navy base, and Dockyard, which is also a navy base.  Thing is, there were only seven houses in Dockyard, which is not open to the public, so the fact that I got to live there for five years was a unique experience.  And what a great place to grow up!  There were only three little girls on a top-security navy base and we had the run of the place.  How safe can you get?  Of course, it was the only place I have ever had a gun pointed at me (I walked a little too close to a US nuclear submarine one day and learned never to do that again), and the only place I have ever been forced into the back of a military police car (totally not my fault, I swear), but these things happen …

This is where my “arrest” took place. According to the MP who picked eleven-year-old me up, I was trying to climb a barbed wire fence. To break into the base. Where I lived.

My parents and I revisited the Dockyard in 2002, just after the horrors of 9/11, and it was a different place indeed.  The genial commissionaires at the gate were replaced by very serious soldiers holding AK-47s, and in my walks around the place I definitely didn’t feel that same sense of safety that I had as a child.  I think it was more that I was the outsider at this point.  This was no longer my home.

It seems that the schtick with the guns at the gate has only recently been removed, and we’re back to the genial commissionaires again, but even so, my dad had to get a special pass just for us to go and check the place out again.  Much of the base was under construction, and a lot of the operations there have been shut down since my time, but it was still so familiar.  As we drove around, my dad would talk about the history and use of the buildings we passed, while I would add my own anecdote about which battlements and cliffs and trees were climbable and which hidden places had the best blackberry bushes and apple trees.

The playing field behind our house where the Coast Guard used to land its helicopters (and take all the laundry off our line and put it on our roof) is now a parking lot.  The arbutus tree that the paratrooper landed in accidentally (and whom my dad rescued because he had the tallest ladder handy) has been cut down.  The student barracks with its secret tunnels (where we used to catch the cadets sneaking out for a drink) is now empty.  The deer are the same, though.

These pesky deer are so plentiful and so damaging that in Victoria they are considered vermin.

These tiny things are everywhere in the city, especially the base.  They swim across the harbour from the conservation area and eat all the plants.  Which I guess is why the base’s famous rose gardens are all gone. Even the ships are different, and the buildings mostly empty.

Those things have always been hanging in that window.

Some things never change, though.  This was my house.  It looks the same, except the garden is smaller.  My parents do love their gardens.

And directly across the street was the ocean, and this, Dead Man’s Island.

If you slid down the short cliff (now there are stairs built)  then you were on MY beach.  In the five years we lived on the base, I think I was at this beach every single day, rain or shine, or even snow (which did happen occasionally).

This fallen tree has been on this beach for as long as I can remember, though in my day it jutted out over the water and made for an interesting place to jump off into the frigid Pacific.

On a clear day you can see the Olympic Mountains, in Washington.

You can see the seal resting on a submerged rock in front of those exposed rocks.

And there is always stuff to be found, if you’re looking in the right places.  Like these tiny crabs I routed out from under a rock. They’re well-camouflaged.

And some bits and bobs of pottery and sea glass.  I still have some pieces I collected as a child.  You may remember I made some of them into my marine mobile a while back.

It was nice to play around for even a few minutes in a place where I had spent so much of my life.  We have lived so many different places, but this place is the one I remember the best, so it was nice to see it again.

The original wall to Dockyard, before it expanded.

On Monday I’ll have my final trip post for you, about the Pie’s and my adventures in a Smart Car.  Stay tuned!

Chinese Chicken and Pork in False Creek and the Awesomeness of the Internet

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JUL!

Atlas’s dad has a philosophy that we are born with a spirit and a body.  The body is tied to this earth and will return that way when its time is finished, but the spirit can live on in a new body.  And that spirit is always looking for the good in life, the good people, the good experiences, and so it will actively seek out those who it remembers were good in a previous life.  His family and our family, he says, get along so well because our spirits were friends in a previous life.  It’s a lovely sentiment.

As a child in a military household I moved around quite a bit, and I never stayed in any city longer than five years — until I moved to Ottawa, that is.  So every time we moved I felt like I was starting a whole new life, with new friends, and that my old lives were somehow over.  Visiting the west coast this summer was for me a revisiting of an old life, a way of showing my husband the way I used to be (and I’ll have more on that in a later post).

I had a friend in elementary school when I was living in Esquimalt.  Her name was Jordana* and we were friends from when my family was posted out west in grade three, to when her family, also military, was posted away at the beginning of grade five.  When she moved away I thought I would never see her again.  This was of course before Facebook and even email (this was the early nineties) and so the only way to reach each other would have been through letters, and if you’re never going to see a person again, what’s the point in wasting a stamp?

Our grade four class picture, for embarassment’s sake.  Jordana is third from the left in the centre row, and I’m sixth, with my bad-ass Casio watch and my hefty bangs.  This photo is courtesy of the gentleman sitting directly below me in this shot.

I joined Facebook in 2007, twelve years after leaving the west coast and fifteen years after I had last seen Jordana, and we reconnected over the internet.  At this time I was getting ready to move to Newfoundland with the Pie and she was settled in Vancouver, so it was unlikely we were going to run into each other any time soon.  Even so, we communicated back and forth sporadically and learned we had much in common.

Then my brother decides to get married out west, and Jordana and I figured this was our chance to finally meet up after TWENTY years apart.  She and her partner Daniel live in False Creek, a nice old area next to the water.  On our last night on the mainland, the Pie and took the SkyTrain from Coquitlam to Vancouver and trailed our way over to their place for dinner.

Their view of False Creek.

And you know, it was instant chemistry between the four of us (which, if you have ever tried to make friends as a couple, you know is a hard thing to accomplish).  Jordana and I talked our faces off for about four hours straight, while the quieter gentlemen exchanged views on computers and other manly endeavours.  We took a walk along the seawall after dinner, and Jordana and I both took a ton of pictures. Obviously.

And the food, cooked by Daniel, was excellent (yes, I’m finally getting to the recipe, sorry).  We had an amazingly tender chicken and a barbecued pork dish with the most incredible dipping sauces.  While Daniel’s not super keen to share his recipes, Jordana was very persuasive and so I now have them in my hot little hands.  And while Cait and Jul were here (and since they brought most of the spices from Ottawa for us), we decided to try it out.

For the Chicken:

First you start with a whole chicken, about 1.6kg or 3 1/2lb.  Take off all the fat that you can see and wipe down the inside with a paper towel, or two, to remove any goop in there.  Gross, but worth it, trust me.

Then find yourself a pot large enough to fit a bunch of liquid and a submerged chicken. Into that pot, chuck 1.5L (6 cups) water, 250mL (1 cup) soy sauce, 250mL (1 cup) shaohsing wine (also known as shaoxing), 150g (2/3 cup) light brown sugar, 1 large knob of ginger, peeled and sliced, 3 cloves garlic, sliced, 4 heads of star anise, 2 sticks cinnamon, and 3 pieces dried mandarin peel.

Yeah, that’s a hefty load of ingredients.  Cait and Jul brought the more far-out stuff with them from Ottawa, as I can’t get it here.  Anyway, bring all those ingredients in the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer all that spicy goodness for about 20 minutes.

Then you can submerge the chicken, breast side down, in the pot and raise the heat again to bring it to a boil.  Then turn it down again and simmer for another 20 minutes.

Flip the chicken over and allow it to simmer for a further 3 minutes, then pop a lid on the pot and remove it from the heat.  Let the chicken cool in the stock.

When the stock is cooled you can take the chicken out.  If you plan to use the stock later (which you really should), then you need to strain it, bring it to a boil again, and then cool it and chuck it in the refrigerator.

As for the chicken, well it’s now up to you to do what you want with it. You can chop it up in a salad, or slice it thickly and re-form it on a plate (which is what we’re going to do).  You can also fry it in peanut oil and serve with salt and pepper and lemon juice.  It goes well with cilantro and the dipping sauce we’re going to make in a minute.

For the Pork:

This recipe calls for pork neck, which I can’t find here.  I know it’s a poor substitute, because the consistency is all different, but I’m going to use a pork shoulder here.  I’m sorry.  If you can’t get a neck, try to find something with a bit of fat on it, if you can.

First you want to mix up your marinade.  Take 4 tablespoons fermented bean curd, 3 tablespoons soy sauce, 5 tablespoons shaohsing wine, 3 tablespoons yellow bean sauce, 4 tablespoons hoisin sauce, 4 tablespoons fine sugar, and 3 garlic cloves, minced.  Stir that into a frenzy.

Cait described the Yellow Bean Sauce as looking like “someone threw up in a bottle.” Seems about right.

I was more grossed out by the fermented bean curd though.

Cut the pork into 4cm (~2″) strips and pour the marinade over the meat.  Leave that for about 2 hours.

Preheat your oven to 240°C (this is 464°F, so I would err on the side of caution and go with 450°F).

Fill a baking dish with water and fit a wire rack over top.  The ones with the folding legs are handy here, as you can use more water, and then it will keep the pork moist. Put the pork onto the rack and cook for 30 minutes.

Remove the pork from the oven and heat up 6 tablespoons honey.  Brush that over the pork and leave it to cool.

For Sprinkling:

Slice up some fresh cilantro to sprinkle over everything.  As well, mince up some ginger and mix it with some black rice vinegar and leave that to sit for an hour or so — it goes fantastically with the chicken.

Serve the whole thing with some scented rice and some steamed greens.  We fried up some baby bok choy as an accompaniment over jasmine rice.

*Jordana is a blogger herself, and a much busier person than I am.  She writes about fashion here and here, and about travel here.  She even has her own online clothing store.  Check her out if you’re interested!