Grace and Clare at last year’s Salvation Army Hamper packing.
The holidays are a joyous time, but it’s at this time of the year the plight of people less fortunate than me weighs on my heart.
I took Friday off with the girls to do some Black Friday shopping. As we were driving down Princess Street in Kingston, the girls said, “Mom, look at that poor man sitting outside that store. He’s homeless.”
Then Grace told me about a challenge they were doing at their school. Instead of getting chocolate advent calendars, they were going to donate a loonie or twonie a day to a homeless person.
I said what a wonderful idea and promised to do it too.
This week’s #HappyAct is to do something to help others this holiday season. Two great organizations that have a number of holiday volunteer opportunities and programs are United Way and Salvation Army. We’ve packed hampers for the Salvation Army for the past six years. It is always the highlight of the holiday season for us as a family and a workplace. A few years ago, I also shared this very special advent calendar for the holidays, a Kindness Calendar. To read more about homelessness and how United Way is working wonders to address it, see this blog post. Enjoy the spirit of the season.
We cut our pumpkins in half this year and have used them as makeshift bird feeders. The birds and squirrels love it!
Dorothy said it best, there’s no place like home. For the past two months we’ve been away almost every weekend to Peterborough for hockey. While I love watching Clare play, it means we haven’t been home much.
This weekend is the first weekend I’ve spent the whole weekend at home. I forgot how much I enjoy being at home.
First, there’s the joy of sleeping in. Being able to get up when your body is finished resting, and not having to rocket out of bed, and get the kids on the bus and rush off to work is one of the best parts of any weekend.
I can sit (hallelujah!) and read the papers and enjoy my coffee and look out my sunroom window at the squirrels and blue jays at the feeders.
We go for long walks in the daylight, a real treat at this time of year. Late in the day, as the sun fades, we start a fire, and sit with a glass of wine before making supper. We may even go for a long winter’s nap.
I remember one time when Clare interviewed Dave’s mother for a school project, she asked Donna, “What’s the one biggest change you’ve seen in your lifetime?” Donna responded, “People don’t sit anymore; they are always rushing to do something.”
This week’s #HappyAct is to enjoy time at home. As your body goes into hibernation mode this winter, don’t fight it, embrace it.
First, let me start by saying no artefacts were hurt in the writing of today’s blog and no disrespect to anyone personally, but screw you Marie Kondo.
Marie Kondo is the Japanese organizing expert and author of the best selling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up whose craze of decluttering and minimalist philosophy swept North America a few years ago. People started throwing items they didn’t need or were just collecting dust in the spirit of simplifying their life.
If you Marie Kondo’d your house, and it made you happy, good for you. I happen to like my stuff and embrace clutter.
It’s not the things themselves, although I find them all beautiful and make my house feel like a home, it’s the memories they represent.
The two stained glass cardinals that sparkle in the sunlight in my living room window remind me of Dave’s mom and his Dad.
The original watercolour of a fish hovering over a lake by local artist Alana Kapell has a spiritual quality and reminds me how lucky I am to live on a lake, and the fish are calling.
A framed handpainted feather of a tropical bird reminds me of the trip Dave and I took to Costa Rica before the kids were born.
The beautiful hand carved wooden mirror with a rose made locally in Perth Ontario and given to us by my best friend for a wedding present reminds me of Leslie and our wedding day.
The hand carved loons and bold beautiful native fish carving above our entertainment unit reminds me of trips to the St. Lawrence River and Vancouver Island.
These are all my favourite things and I love them. So screw you, Marie Kondo. In the spirit of the holiday gift giving season, embrace your favourite things, find that perfect gift and memory for someone and enjoy.
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.
After work on Friday night, Clare and I stumbled across the street from my work to catch a quick bite to eat at the Pilot House before her evening volleyball tournament downtown.
It had been another long brutal week at work. I was cold, tired and hungry and knew we wouldn’t be getting home until late, and up early the next morning for more volleyball and hockey.
As soon as we walked into the bar, the stress of a long week started to melt away like the cheezy melt on the menu as the hum of laughter and conversation, and the warm, cozy atmosphere of the bar washed over us.
The Pilot House is your quintessential neighbourhood bar. Regulars perch on stools or mill about, slapping each other on the back as they share jokes and stories from the day. The beer flows freely, and the smell of fish and chips and vinegar permeates the air.
If they have menus, I’ve never seen one. The menu, which most of us know by heart anyway, is written in chalk on a blackboard. The only reason you look at it is to see what the day’s specials are.
In marine navigation, a pilot refers to anyone who steers a ship, and the little pub is awash in photos and memorabilia from the days when off-duty pilots of ships would meet there. In the old days, the building housed maps and charts for navigation. The pilots would take the charts and report for duty on their ship on the waterfront down the street.
It was the perfect tonic after a long week.
This week’s #HappyAct is to visit your local watering hole and enjoy a pint and cozy atmosphere to escape a cold winter’s night.
What’s your favourite local watering hole? Leave a comment!
Are you smarter than a Ryerson grad? If you’re a university alumni living in the Kingston area, come out Monday night and find out.
For the past four years, my Ryerson alumni group has been running an alumni challenge trivia night at our home pub, Tir Nan Og. Each year the event has grown. At first it was just Ryerson versus Queen’s (boo…) but now McGill and Royal Military College participate, and others are welcome too.
I suck at trivia but my friend and fellow Ryerson alum Michael Onesi, who works for Queen’s by the way (traitor) is our ace in the hole. He’s actually won HQ Trivia three times. He is a trivia god.
Trivia is as Canadian as butter tarts, hockey and double doubles at Tim Hortons. One of the greatest trivia games of all time, Trivial Pursuit was created by two Canadians, a photo editor for the Montreal Gazette and a sports editor for The Canadian Press. And of course Alex Trebek, host of Jeopardy is Canadian!
To get you in the spirit, see if you can answer these trivia questions about trivia:
Which big company turned down the rights to Trivial Pursuit (and are probably kicking themselves to this day?)
How much did the friends sell the rights of the game to Parker Brothers for in 1988? a) $10 million b) $40 million c) $80 million
What were the shapes of the pieces in Trivial Pursuit?
What is the singular form of the word trivia?
Why is trivia sometimes associated with scandal?
Who holds the record for most wins on the show Jeopardy?
How many wins in a row did he have?
If you’ve competed on Jeopardy before, what other game show are you ineligible for?
In the trivial pursuit spirit yet? This week’s #HappyAct is to join your local pub’s trivia night, or come out to ours. The action goes down at 7. See you there!
Trivia about trivia answers:
1. Virgin Group
2 c)$80 million
3) Triangles or cheese wedges
4) Trivium
5) In the 1950s, trivia became popular on American television, but it was discovered the producers of shows like the $64,000 Question and Twenty One were feeding the answers to contestants. This became known as the Quiz Show Scandals
There’s a new term being used in mental health care circles: self-care. It means doing all the things human beings used to do naturally to be healthy: get enough sleep, eat right, exercise.
Whenever the medical profession comes up with a term to describe what should be a given, you know we’ve gone off the rails as a society.
There are multiple elements to self-care: physical, spiritual, emotional, mental, and social. Self-care is really about “communicating with your soul and saying, Hey, what do you need right now?” I’m just going to focus on physical self-care in today’s post.
Let’s face it. If we were our own mothers, we’d be yelling at ourselves every minute of the day to take better care of ourselves!
What’s brought us to this sad state of affairs? All the obvious answers, when combined together make up a lethal Molotov cocktail of bad health factors: sedentary office-based work, too much screen time, fast food and processed food, driving everywhere, increased stress factors…the list goes on and on.
We have become our own worst enemy. And we need an intervention.
I’ve been particularly bad the past few weeks, eating poorly and compounding my poor health by not taking time to rest when I had a nasty cold. So I’m taking a self-care pledge. I pledge to:
Pack a lunch each day
Go to bed at a reasonable hour and within the same hour range (eg. between 10 and 11 every night)
Walk every day
Get up and move every hour
Eat more fruit and vegetables
Who’s with me and what will be on your list? Leave a comment.
Yesterday, my friend Annie from Montreal and I spent the most amazing day picking grapes as part of a community harvest at Scheuermann Vineyard in Westport.
The owners Allison and Francois couldn’t have picked a more perfect day. As the first rays of the sun crested the hills over the rows of their picturesque vineyard, carload after carload arrived to help with the harvest.
We first rolled up black netting that had been protecting the vines from birds, clipping it to the metal wires so snow wouldn’t build up in the months ahead. Then it was time to start the harvest.
The French have a word for harvesting grapes: la vendage. It has such a wonderful sound to it, and rolls off the tongue as sweetly as the delicious juice of the grapes we snipped from vines.
We picked Vidal, a beautiful, light green grape. When picking grapes, you work in pairs facing each other through the vines. The buddy system ensures that no grapes are missed and left on the vine. The term picking grapes isn’t quite accurate either. You snip the stems from the vines.
Harvesting grapes can be back breaking work so each person sits on a stool. You “pick” with your partner, placing the large bunches of grapes in bins, working down the rows from post to post.
The owners Mom, Francine won the prize for most innovative stool–tied to her bum!
The fruit was magnificent, large green bunches hanging off the vines—Francois later told us it was one of their best years yet.
The day was spectacular. We took a short break to drink coffee from mason jars and have some homemade cookies, then it was back to the vines. By early afternoon, as our mouths were starting to get parched, they delivered cold beer and homemade pizza to us in the fields.
Francois’ son photo bombed this picture of us leaving the fields at end of the day
We worked hard, but it was so worth it. By 4:15 all the Vidal had been picked. It was time to celebrate.
We ran into our friends Tim and Susie and had a great day and dinner with them
Our gracious hosts uncorked Vidal and Cabernet Franc, which we sipped in big Adirondack chairs overlooking Wolfe Lake. Then dinner was served, a delicious harvest meal of garlic potatoes, cauliflower, roasted carrots and beef, topped off with the piece de resistance, homemade apple pie and pumpkin bread pudding with caramel sauce that bubbled on the pot in front of the open fire.
Scraping all the stems away from the destemming machine
We dined al fresco as Francois and his hard working crew poured container after container of grapes into the destemmer (which removes the stems), then into the press to extract the juice.
Emptying the grapes into the presser
We picked 10 tons of grapes, about enough to make 10,000 bottles of wine. I was in heaven.
This week’s #HappyAct is to join a community harvest. Vive la vendage. And special thanks to my camera shy amie Annie for making the trip and being my picking partner for the day. Same time next year–a la prochaine!
This year the fall colours have been particularly spectacular. I tried reading up on why, but got lost in words like chlorophyll and carotenoids. I don’t care about the science. I’m just grateful for the beauty of the area we live in.
Here is a photo essay from my Thanksgiving weekend. Enjoy the colours while they last, and Happy Thanksgiving!
On my morning drive this week, I saw this sign on a local church: “Not one person can do everything, but every person can do something.”
In a few days, my company will kick off our annual United Way campaign. Our theme this year is #WorkingWondersTogether.
I’ve always been a huge supporter of United Way, but this year, the campaign has touched me on a deeper level than ever before.
It started in June when Dave and I spent a week in Vancouver. We hit all the normal touristy places–Stanley Park, Granville Island, and the seashore parks. One day as we were walking around Chinatown, we ventured into an area bordering Gastown that had the highest concentration of homeless people I’ve ever seen. It was devastating.
In Vancouver, the services for people “sleeping in the rough” and who are struggling with addictions are all within a city block, causing people in need to congregate close to where the services are provided. While the need is just as real in other cities, services are spread out, so the stark reality of the plight of homeless people can be more hidden.
I couldn’t fathom how a city so rich in wealth, dripping with million dollar homes on every street corner, could allow such poverty to exist.
A few months later, my friends Jill and David, who lives in Australia visited and stayed overnight. After a sumptuous dinner, over a glass of wine in my comfortable home, we were talking about homelessness. David has some knowledge in this area. I asked him questions about people he knew, how they came to be homeless and the burning question, what can we do to give people a hand up and help them on a healthy path?
I now look at people “sleeping in the rough” differently. Now, when I see someone outside a grocery store in need, I ask them if I can buy them some food. While I still feel helpless to change their situation, I’m compelled to do something.
This week’s #HappyAct is to #WorkWondersTogether. Every one of us can do something to effect change. For every day of our campaign, I am going to do one small thing to make this world a more wonderful place. Join me, and give what you can.
Ed. note: This picture is of me and my amazing friends and Empire Life co-workers Dale Mainville and Jessica Schonewille who do so much to make the world a more wonderful place at our United Way BBQ on Friday. And no, I haven’t gained weight, it was so cold we had three layers on!
I had a hot date on Friday night, and it wasn’t with my husband.
The man I went out with is witty, charming, and loves to laugh. He has a way with the ladies and knows how to carry a conversation.
We chose a romantic restaurant in west Burlington, the West Plains Bistro. I ordered a glass of French merlot and let the full-bodied red scintillate my taste buds as our server lit our candle, creating an intimate warmth and ambiance.
We shared a delicious beet and goat cheese salad, eating off of the same plate, European style. The warm, crusted goat cheese on greens was adorned with capers and roasted chick peas, creating a delightful rich mix of textures and flavours.
My date ordered the grilled pickerel with wild rice. I chose a seafood pasta brimming with lobster, crab, mussels and shrimp. We shared a coconut cream pie with raspberry sauce. Our forks entwined as we devoured the heavenly creamy filling.
Dinner was a delicious prelude to the main event: a live production of Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers by Theatre Burlington.
The three act play takes place in an apartment in New York’s dirty thirties. Barney Cashman decides he wants to have an affair to spice up his love life and invites three different women to his apartment for a mid-day tryst. I warned my date not to get any ideas.
It was steamy, passionate and dripping with sexual innuendo. It was also very funny and in the end, Barney discovers he is a decent, gentle and loving human being after all and can’t go through with it.
At the end of the night, I thanked my date for a lovely evening and drove him home to his apartment. I went upstairs, beat him at cards, then kissed him goodnight.
He was the perfect date, which shouldn’t be a surprise since it was 27 years ago this week I married his son.
I love my father-in-law very much. Here’s to you John, and thanks for being my date Friday night (but I think this week, I better plan a date with your son instead…)
Happy Act 