Tag Archives: Canada

Hockeyeur

W has been following the 2020 World Junior Hockey tournament since it began in December, but had a movie playing on tv this afternoon instead of tuning in to the Canada vs Russia gold medal game. I asked him why. He said “I can’t watch it.”

I know the feeling. Too stressful even if the outcome hardly affects you personally.

I was totally prepared to celebrate a silver medal victory, especially since Russia had already trounced Canada 6-0 in their first game. Didn’t look good when they were down 3-0 starting the 3rd period. But Canada came back to win it 4-3. So now we can all scream and yell and hoot and holler and generally freak out about how amazing Canada is at hockey. Which we would still have been with a silver medal, but nobody goes batshit crazy over second place. Congrats to the Russian players anyway. They certainly deserved to be there.

Isn’t hockeyeur a great word? It came up on my predictive text. No idea why my predictive thinks I might suddenly decide to express myself in a different language. English is a big enough challenge. The word means hockey player.

hockeyeur (nom) féminin hockeyeuse

Joueur de hockey sur gazon ou sur glace, un sport qui consiste à faireentrer un palet dans un but avec une crosse.

(Player of hockey on field or ice, game consists of shooting a puck/ball into a net with a stick).  Makes the sport sound rather dull.

Anyway, lovely for Canadians to get some happy news and something to cheer about. There’s been a bit of a drought for that kind of thing lately, knowing crazy things happening in the world will no doubt have global consequences and repercussions. We are all part of the globe.

How do you like cartoon (Bitmoji) me up there? Like I might actually be able to skate fast enough to shoot ice into the atmosphere when coming to an abrupt stop. And not wearing a helmet! And smiling while wearing skates! Quite the fantasy. But cute. Cuteness is a big plus.

 

Oh Canada

IMG_3109

So this happened….

I don’t know, is there anything more Canadian than two RCMP officers dressed in red serge mounted on magnificent black horses in a Starbucks drive through? Well yeah, they maybe should have picked a Tim Hortons, but still. Lots of weird stuff happening during our country’s 150th birthday year.  This was in June (click on pic for link).

The only reason I know about it is because I looked it up on Monday morning after I was walking through my living room on my way to somewhere else and heard the clippity clop of big horse feet, and thought that’s pretty weird shit for this or any random little residential street.  So I looked out my front window as two mounted police went by my house.

This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder if you’re hallucinating, insane, deluded, dreaming, or all of the above.  I could so easily have missed it.  There was no time to grab my phone to take a picture because although they were going at a very leisurely pace, they were there and then they were gone in the time it took for me to pick my jaw up off the floor.

The only thing I could find online was this coffee run picture from a month ago.  I guess they may very well be doing these patrols intermittently all summer around here.  And I would have been oblivious to this news if it hadn’t walked by my front yard.

So, here’s a list of things I have seen this summer although I don’t live in a rural setting or by a pond or in a forest:

  1. A big black and white cat.
  2. Many dogs on leashes walking their humans
  3. A coyote
  4. A pair of mallard ducks checking out the neighbors driveway mud puddle
  5. Two jack rabbits. Or could be more, they all look alike.
  6. The resident squirrel and the encroaching squirrels he chatters at and chases away
  7. Many big black crows
  8. Lots of gorgeous magpies
  9. A few bluejays
  10. HORSES for the love of God.

So what’s next, elephants and UFOs?  I’ll keep you posted.

Hey, speaking of posted, I read in the local paper that postal workers want to bring back door to door mail delivery here.  Maybe not-so-disgruntled mail carriers will be the next thing I see from my very own front door.  Not holding my breath for that one though.

For the Love of Flat Bread

Funny what counts as inspiration and makes me want to blog all of a sudden.  This is mostly for my recipe-sending sister, to let her know I take her seriously when she makes a recommendation even if it takes me forever and three days to try it out for myself.

It’s coconut flour flat bread!  I followed the recipe!  Except for the part at the end where my one act of rebellion was to cut it into shapes instead of rounds.  Rounds give you too many left over pieces you just want to throw out.  This was less wasteful and more interesting.  The two pieces sort of shaped like Manitoba were just happy accidents.

It smells great when it’s baking and tastes really good with garlic and herb cream cheese.  And yeah, that was breakfast.

Here’s how easy it is.  Maybe you know what a big fan of easy I am.

Ingredients

½ cup coconut flour

2 (two) 15 ml Tablespoons + 2 (two) 5 ml teaspoons xantham gum

¼ cup melted coconut oil

1 cup boiling water

optional: 1 tsp spice of your choice (I used Italian)

Directions

Preheat oven to 355 F
Whisk dry ingredients together

Add water & oil. Mix with fork until no lumps and dough comes together.

Knead with your hands until well mixed.

Roll out dough in between 2 sheets of parchment paper

Cut into rounds with cookie cutter or oiled drinking glass

Line cookie sheet with parchment paper & fill with cut outs like cookies

Bake for 20 min until golden brown
Next time I might add some salt, and flip them over in the last five minutes so both sides get a bit crispy.  And of course experiment with the spices.

I’ve been so incredibly antisocial for such a long time this summer, if that’s what it takes for an introvert to recharge, I should be at about 120 percent by now.  I admit I sometimes talk to myself out loud lately.  You know, just to see if my voice still works.  This morning I had a staring contest with a jack rabbit until I asked him wtf he wanted and he took off.  The other day I watched the squirrel on our fence taunting three squawking crows.  Perhaps you are getting an inkling of why I haven’t been rushing to my iPad to record these and other extraordinary events for posterity.

And it’s been so hot.  When I shop I go early in the morning, get the mail from the day before, half close the blinds to the direct sunlight and read my kindle with a fan blowing in my face.  Play some computer games, check out the idiotic crap going on in the world, see if there’s weather watches or warnings.  Get quite excited for myself and my grass if it rains.  Wasn’t so thrilled with the latest tornado watch, didn’t like the black sky and hung out in the basement for a bit one evening.

Other than that and having family here for the Canada Day weekend and talking to and texting W sporadically, there is nothing to say.  So I have been saying nothing.  And doing next to that.

I am alive and eating flat bread.  Life is good.

Picture Stories

Yesterday I took a photo album down from one of my library shelves and flipped through it looking for a picture to scan to my iPad.  (I have recently learned how to do this….so now there may follow a series of these scans complete with my observations and thoughts and general rambling comments.)  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

We have a couple of albums containing photos from my and W’s childhoods, and then the books are for the most part neatly organized chronologically from before we were married up until we had grandchildren growing up.  By that time most pictures were being uploaded from cameras and saved to hard drives and I imagine some photo album manufacturers have gone out of business between then and now.  So these albums will soon be museum worthy. Unless museums cease to exist.  Or the house burns down.

The album I randomly selected is one of the last ones I put together I think.  It is such a hodgepodge of photos it made me think of my mother.  She stuck pictures in books to keep them nice, but in no discernible order whatsoever.  (We did ask her why, and she said it was so that whoever wanted one after she was gone would get a bit of everything in one book.)  This one I put together isn’t that diverse, but it is pretty mixed up.  I guess I am becoming my mother in more ways than I know.

image
That’s not a bad thing of course. Here she is in 1936, 19 years old, wearing a pretty dress and sensible shoes.  She was in Teachers College in Stratford, Ontario.  I wonder if this was a professional photo, because it looks like the colours were touched up, or even added later.  That’s a tropical rain forest kind of green.  She was doing something with her life, having adventures, and in no hurry to settle down.  It would be six years before she married my dad, (he was off having his own adventures in the Wild West) and ten years before my older brother was born.  She had her whole life ahead of her.  I think she would tell you now it was a good one.

William Lyon MacKenzie King was Prime Minister of Canada in 1936.  School children would have been singing “God Save the King” because that year there were three of them – George V, Edward VIII and George VI.  The start of the Second World War was just three years away.

It would be fun to pop back in time and let her know that this photo moment would be preserved for the next 90 years and end up on a picture album page shared with a few of her great-grandchildren.  But looking that far into the future might have felt like tempting fate.  And she would have pooh-poohed the whole idea and thought her dress was just this old thing and her hair was a sight and it would be ridiculous to keep anything for that long and that nothing about the picture was really worth saving at all…..

But here it is.  And I’m ridiculously happy to have it.

Wild and Reckless

foster hewit

Dad was never much of a hockey fan, although he liked to comment on Foster Hewitt’s play by play when the rest of us were glued to the tv on a Saturday night, cheering for the Maple Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada.

“What number is that fellow, Abandon?” he asked us once.

“Everybody is always skating down the ice with Reckless Abandon, if you can believe that announcer, and I don’t know, I’m wondering if maybe he has a younger brother at home called Wild.”

We stopped arguing which favourite player was better, Frank Mahovlich or Davey Keon, to laugh at the idea of the Abandon brothers making all the assists.

But then “He shoots…he SCORES!!” popped it right out of our heads.

 

Five Sentence Fiction –   Abandon

Time to Rest

Rest in Harvest - William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Rest in Harvest – William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Today is excellent timing for a day of rest.  Yesterday was one of those crazy work days that made me bone tired.  Only two of us working, no time for lunch breaks, lots of appointments, the requisite number of idiots to appease, amazing sales, and at the end of the day all I could think was – so what.  That’s tired.

“Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”

―     Maya Angelou,     Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

So today I am officially withdrawing from my cares.  Oh well, who am I kidding?  I do this every day possible even without any cares to withdraw from.

It’s also time for our Canadian Olympic athletes to sit back and relax and bask in how proud we are of them.

gold

Here’s to all the medal winners and all the participants.  Just getting there is also amazing.  Apparently bars in some cities opened this morning at 5:00 a.m.  We’re all crazy.

So I imagine this is how many people will be feeling tonight –

“My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast.  The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover’s croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I’ll make you, don’t resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch…..

Laura Acosta”
―     Lynne Sharon Schwartz,     Fatigue Artist  

Ha – I love it.  Someone else who is madly in love with a bed.

Have a happy Sunday everyone.

Cin’s Feb Challenge Day 23 – Rest. 

Happy People Dancing

Do you have any idea how many happy people there are in this great big world?  Thank you to my sister for sending this and reminding me.  It’s a video you’ll want to watch more than once or twice. (In Canada apparently our best dancers are from Toronto because they’re the only Canadians who made the cut.)  Don’t worry – the rest of us will keep practicing!

We have one more day of dancing left before the 21st.  Let’s make the best of it everybody!  Put on your dancing shoes.