2013 in Toronto. I've turned this diary right side up now, so
that the entries read from top to bottom in the correct sequence.
April 30th.
Awelyn, a.k.a. "Deborah Wind", splashed into the water on Saturday
the 27th. The next day we had Aaron here overnight and then
he left for New York to visit his uncle before joining his parents
in Quito for the summer. He'll be back in the fall,
hopefully with Edwin and Any, and we'll take them all
sailing. My first tulip has bloomed, and our musical
activities are back in full gear with our jazz choirs, guitar
circle and a "casual jazz jam" with Matthew and Barb Parker that I
joined one evening. I have been invited back because they
like the mellow sound of my muted trumpet with my French horn
mouthpiece. In two days our first Helpx volunteer will
arrive, and we'll prep the garden for planting together, and get
the mast up on Awelyn. This weekend the Liaison Officers for
the Tall Ships will meet. The ships will return to Toronto
in June. The rest of the weekend will be devoted to Opening
Days at the tennis club whacking the ball and enjoying BBQ
lunches. Deborah will visit her Mom and sisters for five
days beginning on Tuesday.
May 21st. Our first
Helpx helper, Matthias Vogt, left yesterday after eighteen
days. He helped us put in the garden for the season, as well
as by mowing, hedge-trimming, dandelion digging, car-washing,
bicycle servicing, and so on - even some vacuuming. We made
some significant structural changes to the garden project,
including setting up a new container gardening experiment and
digging out a ditch. We've used landscaping plastic for our
strawberry bed as well this year, and extended its use on the main
kitchen garden. We've become faster at knowing how to roll
it out and apply weight to keep it from being blown away.
We've had our tulip season, with probably only one further week to
go. Peonies will burst forth in a week. Irises are in
bud, and our golden globe flower from northern Norway bloomed with
fifteen blossoms this year. I'm photographing everything to
determine what needs to be moved or re-positioned this fall for
next spring's emergence. I don't buy plants, except for some
vegetable seedlings. I just trade them. But it is fun
to develop the ornamental garden just a tiny bit more each season,
and enjoy the result each new spring and summer. I need to
remember to go to Rosetta McClain gardens frequently too. I
wonder what tulips they have? I've driven around the
neighbourhood looking with envy at some other colours and
varieties that neighbours have in their gardens.
Our next helpers, a young Spanish couple, will
arrive this Saturday, May 25th, and be here until the
31st. Preparations are slowly ramping up for the
arrival of the tall ships, our volunteer gig for mid-June.
Our own ship has its mast up and we went for our first sail of the
season with Matt three days ago, on Sunday. The jazz choirs
are still singing and gearing up for some end of year concerts,
one of which is the usual annual gig at the Liberty
Ballroom. I've been to my second local jazz jam with some
Humber jazz program graduates, which I've enjoyed. The yacht
club guitar circle look like they want to keep things rolling
through the summer months, which would be fun. They're up to
three organized sets of fairly good dance music, and are just
beginning a fourth. They were delighted when yacht club
members returning for the summer season sat in on their last
rehearsal and responded very positively to what they heard.
The musicians' confidence is growing and they seem to be getting
quite a kick out of their efforts.
June 5th. Our young Spanish couple,
Jessica and Carlos, turned out to be extremely quiet and polite,
quite shy, perhaps, and very helpful. They did mowing,
weeding and windows, and cleaned two sailboats. We took them
for a sail, and we helped them get set up with transportation
within Toronto, Canadian banking, currency exchange and SIM card
details. It's a good symbiotic relationship to have these
young European travelers come and stay in our house. We wish
we had more for this first two weeks of June, but so far nobody
has applied for this stretch of time. Still, the ones we've
had gave me a good head start on my spring chores, so it was a
great idea to become hosts ourselves.
These days are filled with music and
watching the garden grow. I'm creating a garden diary so
I'll know what to move where next fall, for the following
spring. The garden has definitely taken shape and is
becoming mature in character. I'm planning a special bed
that'll feature tulips in a row in May which are overtaken by
German irises by June and Cana lilies by July. The other
beds all have plants that fit well together, will be well spaced
by next spring, and blossom in a happy sequence through the season
with a minimum of fuss.
We continue connecting with friends two
or three times a week. We've gone square dancing one evening
with Pat and Clare, who are listing their home and preparing to
move to their beautiful new year-round "cottage" in
Uffington. Clare got laid off from his job with OLG after
forty years, just months away from when he was planning to retire,
they gave him a 22 month severance, so he came out well
ahead! He finds it a bit wrenching to separate from people
he's known like family for so many decades, but he's getting used
to it.
I created the spring/summer Halyard for
the yacht club and we finally got it published. Tennis house
league has been running for a few weeks. One jazz choir has
had a final wrap party and the other is preparing to sing at the
Liberty Ballroom, an annual gig that marks the end of the season
for that choir as well. The yacht club guitar circle has
continued past Launch Day and looks like it has the momentum to
continue through the summer. Last night we played outside at
the picnic tables, and we might sometimes play in the cockpits of
our sailboats. I'm hoping that one day we might even raft up
three boats on a beautiful evening out beyond the beach, and sing
across the lake. Sail Past is this coming Saturday. On
the following weekend we'll go to Lis and Ryan's for a BBQ on
Father's Day - Jenn's birthday party too, we hope. The Tall
Ships will hove into sight two weeks from now. That will be
a week of sailing and Harbourfront fun for us, before we visit
family out west to mark the middle of our year.
June 17th. We sold
Tiger Moth yesterday, for a good break-even price: what we paid
for her, plus what we put into her in terms of parts and
maintenance, including my own hours. I'm pleased. Yet again,
my web-page-with-photos approach to selling boats holds up.
I've bought and sold a dozen boats now in the past twenty years,
sometimes selling for friends as well. Most move quickly
because of the web page and because I know what to expect in terms
of price offers. This time I actually predicted to the
dollar to Deborah ahead of time what my buyers would offer, and
when they did, I accepted right away. When buyers make an
offer, they feel tense about whether they're doing the right
thing, and whether their offer will be accepted, or whether their
price is offensively low. It feels like a moment of
conflict. When the seller accepts, there's a sense of relief
and elation, and the sale process goes forward quickly and
happily. In this case, within a half-hour of accepting, I
was already helping my buyers, Jeffrey and Lillian by giving them
everything I could think of from my shed that would help them with
the boat, and by towing it to its new home for them.
Fortunately, they will sail out of SBSC, so it was a short
trip. Perhaps we'll stumble upon just the right small
trailer now, and drag that home to fill the huge empty space in
our driveway.
Last Thursday we sang at the Liberty
Grand for our third (the choir's fourth) annual appearance.
We sang four songs: Peace Like a River, I Will Sing Joy, Monday,
Monday, and Both Sides Now, in honour of Joni Mitchell who is much
in the news these days with an hour long CBC special interview
with Jian Ghomeshi. We were treated to a fabulously
delicious meal, free scotch and bottles of wine. The dinner
was the icing on the cake, the cake being the chance to perform
some well-rehearsed songs to an appreciative audience.
We've done our eaves. I did an oil
change on both vehicles in the driveway even though I swore a few
years ago I wouldn't bother doing that myself anymore. We
mowed and hedge-trimmed, and had Sol and Marcie here for Father's
Day lunch. Sol brought Deb a new ukulele made of very pretty
bubinga wood.
The weather is gorgeous and my garden diary is
filling up with photos and ideas as all the different plants take
their turns blossoming. We've had excellent peonies, irises
and lupins during the first half of June. We're slowly
whittling down the mountain of junk in the basement. Our
next problem is to figure out what to do with Deb's "Auntie
Anne's" paintings, which are the last things that came into our
basement after she died recently in her nursing home in
Montreal. After that, one of my goals is to keep plowing
through the letters and papers my Dad saved, reminding myself of
his life and times, and absorbing things I hadn't known about what
was going on in his life when I lived elsewhere, which was the
majority of my adult years, and in the years when I was too young
to know what was going on. Another goal is to convert our
music collection of hardware, LP's, cassette tapes and CD's to
digital format, and possibly even find them all a home in the
cloud, or at the very least, on a massive hard drive. I like
the idea of being able to access them from anywhere, and share
them with friends and family.
July 15th. What busy
month! We spent a week in June serving as Liaison Officers
(a kind of Port Captain) to the Peacemaker
at the Tall Ships festival at Harbourfront. The
Peacemaker is a gorgeous ship operated by the 12 Tribes
organization, who have fifty communities in various corners of the
world. It was fun getting to know this group. When
they cast off and left port, we drove to Alberta to visit my
family and help my mother who has sold her house and needed help
to prepare for her move. I enjoyed being at the annual
family camp out. We got back just after midnight this
morning, after another three long days of driving. The final
one was fifteen hours behind the wheel. We had no mishaps,
but a couple of close calls. One guy decided to pass coming
head-on on a two lane highway. Fortunately there was a
shoulder for me to dodge him. And there was a skittish doe
who almost joined a dozen of her kind who littered the shoulders
of Highway 69 in the Upper Peninsula.
Today I saw my yard for the first time in three
weeks. It's a rainforest. I've never seen it like that
in July. You could lose a long-eared rabbit in my
lawn. So we're very slowly opening mail, unpacking, but
pacing ourselves in temperatures of 33 degrees, 42 with the
humidex, which threatens to continue for most of this week.
We have many friends who are lining up to get together and catch
up, and various club events and activities: tennis, sailing, the
jazz jam and the guitar circle. It's a merry-go-round
without end, but we will have to remind ourselves to consider our
busy lives in a positive light, and be careful not to
complain. A carousel is a cheerful, bright, colourful
musical thing, is it not? So much for being retired, mind
you. There's a young Helpx helper arriving from France
tomorrow, Jean-Benoit, who will help me get on top of the chores
and have the garden whipped into shape before the end of July, and
we'll take him sailing.
July 19th. Our young French
Helpx helper Jean-Benoit, the fourth we've hosted (of maybe
eight or nine before the summer is over) is working out very
well. On Wednesday he plowed through our lawns for two hours,
and had to do multiple passes with our little push-mower.
He did a lot of raking, which I normally never have to do.
I usually let the clippings lie and be absorbed back into the
soil. On Thursday he beat back the overgrown hedge to the
shape it was intended to be. Today he restored our patio,
pulled the fierce weeds from between the stones, added more
gravel, and cleaned the stones. It's ready to host
visitors now. He has saved Deb and I each three hours of
hard work in the terrible heat over his first four days.
We were able to spend our morning garden time weeding
instead. I tied up tomato plants and exposed them to the
sun again from some monster field weeds that were already higher
than the tomatoes in just the month that we were gone.
I've never seen those before; no idea where the seeds for those
come from...blown on the wind? Donated by bird droppings?
We're already eating amethyst beans, swiss chard, arugula, and
the first red tomatoes. The strawberries are finished, and
it took some doing to find the plants in the long grass and
weeds that had grown right through and on top of the landscaping
plastic; but the raspberries are coming and I've eaten one or
two already. I suspect they're a bit late because of the
cool spring. We have small finger and regular eggplants
growing, and the okra plants are stretching up. Now that
the weeds are no longer depriving them of light, we should soon
get blossoms and fruit. Our first small zucchini
has appeared. With all these constituent veggies, delicious ratatouille will
soon be on the menu. We'll have a nice green tomato and
ground turkey curry - I'll pick up the green ones that I knocked
down while weeding, and put them into a curry stew that Deb
first made last fall. I can't wait to taste it
again. This evening we had a delicious fish and fennel
soup with Moe and Jennifer, using fish that Deb bought on a team
buying site, and our own new red potatoes, to go with a fine
salad that they brought which included dried cranberries.
They were a nice tart/sweet touch. Meals that include
anything from our own garden always make me beam proudly.
Aug 1st. We just delivered Jean-Benoit to
the subway. He'll spend six days in New York before
returning to Lyon, where he will prepare for the next year of his
engineering program. He was a great help to us in reclaiming
the garden, and he helped me take down half of the Manitoba maple
behind the shed, to get more sunlight onto my own vegetable
garden, and my neighbour's.
Our next Helpx helper, a young man from
Czechoslovakia, will arrive on the 9th. We'll have a
slightly older couple from France arriving on the 17th, and they
will be here until the end of the month. We have yet another
couple from the U. S. coming at the same time; the lady in that
couple runs a professional home cleaning business in her home
town, so I'm going to install them at Rod's house while he is in
Spain. Jean-Benoit did some work for Rod for two mornings as
well, for which he was grateful. Helpx is great! I
wish I'd clued into being a host myself a few summers ago.
Deborah and I have been helpers now for three winters, but only
became hosts this summer. I could easily see myself moving
into a larger home and staying on top of the yard work with the
help of Helpx guests.
Last weekend Deb and I went to Buffalo to stay
with Karen Yan for two nights. We spent Saturday doing their
annual
Garden Walk, and on Sunday we went to the AMSF AGM. We
continue to stay busy, socializing almost every night with Ian and
Ursula, Rod, the Rotarians, Sheila, Moe and Jennifer, and other
friends. The guitar circle sets are tightening up and I've
been playing lead guitar. I was surprised and
delighted only three weeks ago when the riffing I was doing on my
un-plugged guitar suddenly began to come to life under my fingers,
and the other guitar circle band members snapped their heads
around and said, "Hey! We've found our lead
guitarist!" I have a small Marshall amp and a
"gummy bear" transducer pick-up that sticks to the body of my $50
Beaver Creek guitar with a bit of putty. The sound could be
better, probably with a more appropriate amp for a nylon string
guitar, but it works, and I've had fun. Last Monday I
bounced between guitar, keyboard, harmonica and trumpet, as well
as lead vocal on some songs. The downside is that it
is just way too much gear to haul. I want to focus on guitar
and just play piano for myself at home, but they want the piano
and other instruments to be included on some songs as well.
There is certainly a lot that I can do on keyboard in terms of
signature riffs and solos, not to mention organ sounds, that I
can't yet do on guitar. That might always be the case.
Sailing has been hit and miss. We tried
three times to take Jean-Benoit for a sail. The first two
times the wind was from the east, and when that happens the waves
build across the entire length of Lake Ontario, so it gets really
lumpy on the water. The wind was not strong enough to power
us through the lumpy waves, so we couldn't really sail, although
we put the sails up for him and gave it the old college try.
On our third attempt there was even less wind, although what there
was came from the south. It began to rain as we arrived at
the club, in spite of the forecast for clear weather for the
afternoon. So the poor guy didn't have quite the sailing
experience we'd all hoped for.
The garden harvest has begun: mostly beans and
tomatoes for now, some swiss chard and some eggplant. When
we get a zucchini and some okra, we'd have a nice
ratatouille. We've had perfect weather for tennis during the
past two weeks, now that the heat wave has passed.
Aug 5th. I wrote a short article for my
yacht club about our week serving the Tall Ships in June, and
built an accompanying photo album.
We spent yesterday at Lis and Ryan's, having a
family BBQ with Rob and Cyn, Dianne, Lara and Miranda.
Dianne plans for the seven of us to meet down at Riverdale Farm
today, and Brian and Theresa will join us.
The coming week is filled with a tennis round
robin tonight, music with HYC guitar circle and then with Rod and
Martin. Two couchsurfers will arrive tomorrow for two
nights, and our next Helpxer will arrive on Friday. Next
weekend includes an annual street festival called Taste of the
Danforth, at which they plan to set a Guinness World Record for
the largest Zorba the Greek dance. I could be persuaded to
get to my feet for that. Then our yacht clubs are holding
their annual Island Party, complete with a steel band. Life
gallops on at a breakneck pace.
Aug 14th. We've done a lot of visiting
back and forth with friends, and I rebuilt a broken guitar.
Rod got out of bed in the middle of the night and put his foot
through a nice and fairly expensive classical guitar. It
wasn't worth paying for the repairs at 12th Fret, so I tackled the
job myself, and it turned out quite well. Now it's
mine. I also lucked into a hard shell soft lined guitar case
that someone had left at the curb for the trash at 12th
Fret. It is perfect for the guitar and also held some brand
new nylon strings and a spring capo.
Rod is on his way to England now for a
month. We'll watch his house and get some Helpxers to do his
cleaning and yard work. We've had a couple of young
Couchsurfers from Belgium and India via Pennsylvania for two days,
and now we have a young man from Czechslovakia, Ondrej. He's
a nice young man who is looking for a job to take advantage of his
one year work permit.
I'm beginning changes to the gardens, front and
back, with the help of my Helpx helpers - extending the garden
beds and planning new locations for flowers and vegetables for
next year.
I'm still playing tennis, and music, and
gardening. We participated in an attempt to break the
Guinness record for the most participants in a Zorba the Greek
dance during an annual festival on the Danforth, and we had an
Island Party jointly with the other yacht clubs. It included
a meal, not great for the price, and dancing to a pretty good duo
that played keyboard and pan (steel drum) and guitar, while they
both sang. They used backing tracks on a laptop to get bass
and drums back up and some extra instrumentation as well.
Backing tracks still feel a bit like cheating, given
the attitude I and my fellow musicians held thirty years ago
about playing live music: is it "live", or not? But
that's basically what a lot of solo and duo working musicians are
doing these days in order to make a living, because entertainment
gigs don't pay enough to afford a complete band. It's one
step better than just a DJ because at least they sing
live, and play along, do instrumental solos and interact with the
audience. The pan player was an excellent, jazzy
musician. There's some skill involved. I've worked
with musicians who can't keep time well enough to play with a
backing track, and when the music goes off the rails, it's all too
often completely gone - like a train going off its track.
We delivered David's car to the airport, where
he and Margaret arrived after their two weeks in Scotland.
They jumped in the car and began their drive home to Alberta.
Aug 24th. Mom has moved into her new
house in Camrose. I spoke to her by Skype to her cellphone,
but she didn't have a landline for several days and won't have
internet access for a whole month, which seems like a bizarre
delay.
We've had a French couple here since the 17th,
Jean and Marine. Jean has a couple of weeks' holiday from
his job as a union technician for an auto manufacturer and then he
has to go back to France. Marine, a young female quality
control engineer, has been laid off and has opted for a six month
stint in B.C. training sled dogs. They've worked hard since
they arrived, and are several days ahead of their
commitment. Jean and I stripped, repaired and re-shingled
the shed, much better than it was before. We added felt and
drip-edge this time. It took us four very full mornings to
complete the job, even with a bit of help from my Chinese
neighbour who dashed over to help with the tearing off.
We had a lunch date with Chris and Mishi, and
took our new Helpxers sailing. Another couple arrived,
Rebecca and Greg. We installed them at Rod's and gave them a
list of chores to try and accomplish while they are here.
Rebecca is a professional house cleaner, so that should be great
for bachelor Rod, who has a lot of cleaning to do as well as a lot
of yard work and gardening. They'll spend about 90 minutes a
day working for him, and then they'll be tourists in
Toronto. They'll attend a special concert at Fort York
called Riot Fest, which takes place in a few different
cities.
Ondrej will return on Monday for another five
days, and he'll also work mostly at Rod's. He's got himself
a job at a Starbucks on campus at U of T, and rented a room for
September 1st. His next Helpx host after us wanted more
hours than he was able to contribute on top of his shifts at
Starbucks, so he asked to return here. He's a good kid, so
I'm happy to help him out a while longer.
The newly repaired guitar is working
beautifully. It has new strings, and sounds great.
Some of the damage is covered by a patch of veneer that creates a
two tone effect. It is shaped like a pick guard, so it
becomes a trompe l'eoil, and no-one notices that it is on the
wrong side of the sound hole until I point it out.
Sept 16th. This has been the "Summer of
Helpx". I was stalling on writing this diary entry, thinking
I'd make a slideshow of all our Helpx helpers this summer, along
with the many other things we did. We've had, if I'm
counting everyone correctly, at least ten Helpx helpers and two
couchsurfers, and we still have at least one Helpx helper lined up
to come before September is over - and yet another who thinks he
wants to come after Mom has come and gone in October. It's
been very good and very helpful to have them, a thoroughly
successful experiment. We've had lots of cleaning and yard
work and some useful repairs done, re-shingled the shed roof,
cleaned and shined one sailboat, and sold it.
Now that September is here I've moved into
Frostbite League at the tennis club, which runs until the end of
October. We're back at choir, and the guitar circle at the yacht
club had swollen to nine players last week. I'm going to
sing in a challenging performance on the 23rd, in a fairly small
choir introducing a new musical creation called "Abraham" by David Warrack, who is a
pretty well-known pianist and composer in Toronto. I got
shanghaied into that by our jazz choir conductor, Sheila
Brandt-Bennett, who is one of David's go-to sopranos. They
met when she closed out a career doing leads in London's west end
musicals with her husband at the time, Nigel Bennett, who is a
well-known actor on both sides of the pond.
After Rod got home from England, he was
delighted with the way I'd organized Helpx helpers to stay in his
home while he was gone, and all the heavy-duty cleaning and yard
work they'd done for him. Deb and I did some of that
ourselves, working alongside the Helpxers, and we made daily
visits to supervise and direct them. Rod is a bachelor, a
single Dad, and a busy writer and substitute teacher, so there was
a lot in his house that needed to be done.
Partly to show his appreciation, he gave me a
Yamaha pf85
keyboard with weighted keys that he'd dragged home from England
almost a decade ago and never used. It was leaning up
against his furnace with the plug clipped off to prevent the
hazard of plugging it into a Canadian wall socket by
accident. It is a 220/240 volt keyboard, but I put a new
plug on it and found a transformer just the right size, and
re-plugged that for N. America. The keyboard now works fine,
with good piano sounds and a nice Rhodes-like electric piano
setting. It is a huge improvement on the little Casio I
bought from another friend for $20 last spring, but not as
portable. It's incredibly heavy, actually. And/or, I'm
getting old and weak. I've created a nice little rehearsal
space in my basement and set the Yamaha up there permanently. I
can play there when we have guests living upstairs that I don't
want to disturb. Ondrej came for a visit and became the
first person to join me in a jam there, playing the guitar that I
recently repaired. I didn't need to plug him in, because the
keyboard's volume can be set as low as I want, unlike my upright
grand piano in the dining room on the main floor. We have
nice acoustics and acoustic ceiling tile in the basement room,
with lots of electrical outlets and good light. Some
previous tenants who worked at Long & McQuade used to have the
room set up permanently as their band rehearsal space. I can
see it slowly returning to that purpose.
Oct 1st. I managed to get the "Helpx
summer" slideshow done. It's here.
I sang with the eighteen voice choir that
performed David Warrack's "Abraham" at Metropolitan United on
Monday the 23rd, right downtown near Yonge
and Queen. It was a powerful and memorable composition, one
of the first four segments he's written for a new "interfaith"
oratorio which encourages Muslims, Christians and Jews to come
together through their common progenitor. Sheila encouraged
me to come along and volunteer because I'm a good reader with good
pitch and reasonable volume. I was initially reluctant,
partly because of commuting for rehearsals but also because I
wasn't sure that I was really a good enough singer to carry it
off, but I was thrilled with my own performance and with the
choir's performance. My own voice opened up, and the choir,
filled with professional singers and much bigger voices than mine,
filled that cavernous church with sound. We were recorded,
but in spite of begging several times for a copy of the recording
to share with my family out west, my requests were never responded
to with anything more than promises from Sheila Brand. That
left me with a sour taste. All that effort, driving and
personal inconvenience as a volunteer for David's personal glory,
and he couldn't repay me with the simplest request, or take the
time to explain why he could not, if there was a reason.
Lesson learned.
Vanessa Quensiere came to stay with us for a
week. She was a young 34 year old French woman taking a
sabbatical from her stressful retail job in Paris. She
worked really hard at digging holes in my garden. When her
work was done each day she toured Toronto avidly, taking excellent
photos and keeping a blog of her travels. She's an example
of why we enjoyed being Helpx hosts this summer.
This past weekend Deb and I went to the 100
Mile Peninsula, courtesy of a marketing effort by the nine
municipalities of Windsor-Essex to attract retirees to
live there. They put us up for two nights at
Caesar's Casino hotel. We began our weekend with a
tour, whisky tasting and lunch at Hiram
Walker's gorgeous "Whisky Palace", with a great
recount of the history of Prohibition and the Italian mob
at this Detroit/Windsor crossing. A
bottle of CC that would sell for $7 in Canada in those
days would cost $75 in the U.S. My friend Rod is
convinced that his father, who owned a boat on a stretch
of shoreline and lived in a Victorian house in Hamilton,
made his fortune bootlegging from 1920 to 1926. He
suddenly returned to England, possibly on the run from
competitive rum-runners, and bought half of his
hometown.
We explored the "Speakeasy" room in
the basement, where Al Capone and his cronies sat in
safety and security to discuss their purchases of cases
of Canadian Club Premium. I took Deb's photo with
her arm draped over a cardboard cut-out of Al
Capone. Someone like Rod's father would then be
hired to take on the risk of getting the cases across
the river. We're told that the river bed, then
only 6 feet deep, was littered with bottles in those
days, but there are probably few left; it has since been
dredged to accommodate boats with deeper draft.
However, I have fellow scuba divers who've done drift
dives in the Detroit river and pulled out old bottles.
We had dinner at a famous Italian
joint with excellent food, dating from those days, as do
many of the Italian families who still dominate the
economy and social scene. The tour organizers drove us
all over the peninsula in a limo for two days, and fed
us lunch on the second day at Oxley winery
after a tasting of four excellent wines. This
was the first tasting where I was so impressed with the
wines that I actually bought two bottles and had to hold
Deborah back from buying four! I haven't been this
impressed at any winery in Ontario, B.C. or New
Zealand. The two we brought back are so good that
we'll have to save them to share with genuine wine
connoisseurs.
We had dinner on Boblo
Island, and saw how the current developers are
trying to bring it back from its decline after once
being a major playground in the area. It's a beautiful
little island, but development has been hobbled by
financial issues and by access. In general we're
pretty impressed with the safety, high quality, low
prices, great climate, and burgeoning municipalities
here on the 100 Mile Peninsula. It seems as though there
is an excellent chance for real estate appreciation,
with the border crossing development that is happening
here right now, continuing industrial activity, and an
influx of retirees to a location that is on the same
latitude as northern California. It boasts pretty
fine weather year-round, by Canadian standards, and it
has ongoing agricultural bounty.
We went with open minds, eager to learn how we could improve our
lot and maximize the pleasure of our remaining years by
relocating. We could cash out of our bungalow in Toronto and
buy a home there, the same or a little better, for half the price
we'd get for ours; but after all the work I've put into our
garden, difficulties with public transit (when we get too old to
drive) and the daunting reality of replacing all our current
friends and activities, we've realized that the chance that we'd
relocate there is fairly remote.
Kenton and Sarah have just had their
first baby on Sept 29th, a daughter they named Ella Sophia
Gilchrist, which sounds quite lovely. Like her cousin
Callum, she will be the subject of many photos and videos.
One of our couchsurfing hosts in
California,
Maureen Entera, will soon be in our neck of the woods. We
expect and hope she'll be here to enjoy a reciprocal stay with
us. She's in NYC and will go on to Buffalo, possibly to be
hosted by another host/surfer friend of ours, Karen Yan.
I've written about each of these ladies in earlier diary
entries.
Our regular activities continue:
getting the garden ready for winter; playing and singing at
Matthew Parker's jazz jam every few weeks, playing at the HYC
guitar circle weekly, singing at Sheila's jazz choir, and still
playing tennis with highs of 23 and lows of only 12 even through
the first week of October. We'll have another sail tomorrow,
and after that we'll consider whether to hold out for another one,
or to drop the mast. Half of the sailors on my dock have
already dropped theirs. Yacht club social events continue in
full swing. Even though we know that the dreary winter weather is
on its way, we have enough joy in our lives, routine and
otherwise, to keep us getting up cheerfully each morning.
Oct 23rd. I'd say that October has been
an eventful month, but for the fact that every month seems
event-filled. In the past three weeks, apart from dinners
with Ian and Ursula, Lawrence and Joan, and Lara, we finally got
Aaron out for a sail and then had one beautiful sail ourselves on
the 14th. Two days earlier we'd tried to take Entera out and
had to turn back. Entera, who was here from Santa Barbara,
was breaking out of her usual pleasant surroundings to indulge in
an adventure to see friends and family. She was our
couchsurfing host two winters ago, and we were able to reciprocate
here in Toronto for five days. She met Sol and Marcie, who
were here for Thanksgiving dinner, an annual tradition. A
few days later, Mom arrived. We spent a week visiting her
eastern family members, including a trip to share Rob and
Cynthia's first meal in their new house (Deb's fish soup), and
lunch with Tom and Lloyd. Brian and Theresa stopped here for
burgers one evening. We visited with Janice, and Mom
rehearsed with us in our jazz choir and performed with us on
Sunday afternoon. Lissy came along to hear us, and she and
Ryan stopped back at the house afterward for a taste of Dock 57.
While Mom was visiting with Janice one day, Deb
and I dropped Awelyn's mast in about two hours - pretty slick
work. Now we face a weekend of preparing our boat and cradle
for haul-out, and I'll do a six hour shift on the docks in
the cold and rain this Saturday, the 26th, setting the
slings for the crane under each boat so that they can be lifted
from the water onto their cradles in the club parking lot. Tennis
and all our musical activities continue. I try to balance my time
between trumpet (mostly working on old jazz standards and playing
with a group of jazz musicians at a jazz jam every few weeks),
piano at home and sometimes at the yacht club, and guitar, using
Youtube and the guitar circle as my focus. We're down to one
jazz choir a week now. November will be a month of music, reading,
studying Vietnamese to prepare for our upcoming winter adventure,
getting our fill of sitcoms and movies, winterizing the house and
putting the garden to bed for the winter.
Nov 6th. We've had our first couple of
light frosts. There's nothing left to harvest from the garden
except swiss chard and kale. All of the old plants are
pulled and the planters are dumped out. I did my haul-out
tow boat shift on the 26th, and our own boat came out early the
next morning. I gave up on the HYC guitar circle for now,
since five of them split off to do a Monday thing. I'd been
lobbying for a different day, but didn't get what I asked for, so
I left them to join a Community Swing Band on Tuesday evenings,
which is a lot of fun. They gave me the 3rd trumpet
chair. There are four of us, a full section, and we make
fine brass harmonies. Six saxes sit directly across from us,
and they comment on how rich and wonderful the full chords sound
with no missing parts.
Andrew, Fifi and Christoff took us to a sushi
buffet to celebrate and thank us for Andrew getting his first pay
cheque as a certified teacher. I helped him at many steps along
the way with his teacher's college application, advice and
assignment editing while he was in school, and a bit of
hand-holding while he waited anxiously for news that he'd get an
interview. Greg Martin and I put him through a mock
interview to prepare for it, and he finally got hired.
We've had Marg over for dinner, and we will
join Ian and Ursula for "sausage night" this Friday. Adam
is home from teacher's college in Ottawa and will do a practicum
at Henry Hudson Sr. P. S. When he graduates and gets hired
next summer, I'll go through my teaching library looking for
material and books that might be useful for him. I held onto
most of my stuff when I retired in case I changed my mind or
wanted to go back, but after four years of retirement and
financial stability, the odds of that happening are becoming more
remote.
Tennis continues with a small group of
die-hards as long as the courts are dry, with one game scheduled
for Friday afternoon. One net remains
up for the winter. The yacht club's Commodore's
Ball is this Saturday evening. On Sunday evening
we'll attend a choral and brass concert of Andrew's groups, with
him conducting.
I've been reading my grandfather's diaries from
1929 onward. He was 28 by then, had graduated from Dalhousie
in medicine and already worked in Edmonton and in Alabama.
He was in Lisbon doing language and medical studies for a year, on
his way ultimately to Angola. He'd write entries almost
daily. It was a simpler, less busy time, I guess. A
lot of trivia, but gives me insight into his life and times.
Maybe he'd use these entries as reminders for when he'd correspond
in letters with family and friends in Nova Scotia. I'm
thoroughly content to write my own entries once a fortnight.
Although my life seems busier, there's less that feels as though
it needs to be recorded. It's an interesting
comparison. As I continue reading, I expect to gain more
insight into the difference between living in 1929 (and onward)
versus 2013.
Nov 20th, 2013. We attended the
Commodore's Ball, and Andrew Chung's excellent choir and
Silverthorn Symphonic Winds performance. We had a "sausage
night" with Ian and Ursula. I had my usual weekly tennis
games, swing band and jazz choir. We had a visit with Moe
Scott, attended our second Quebec Square Dance, did a course in
defibrillation using the AED machines, had Lara and Lis and Ryan
here for fish soup one afternoon, and drove to Barrie to have
lunch with Brian and pick up a computer server rack for Rob.
We had a tire repair on the Suzuki, and had to put a gallon of
coolant into the truck to get heat out of it. The vehicles
are closing in on a decade of service. I might begin
thinking of the right sort of replacement vehicle(s), perhaps one
between the two of us, with a Zip Car membership to provide us
with a second vehicle. But what sort of vehicle? Will
we want to pull a trailer in the coming years? Hmm...