A Day To Remember

It was an ordinary day, in the way that all our ordinary days are filled with small miracles (SMs) and screw ups (SUs) we hope no one notices.

It started with Rick serving orange juice, toast, and eggs sunnyside up on authentic (Costco) home-baked hash brown patties: piping hot and as if McDonalds had recently changed their deep fat fryer oil.

Not that we’d know about such things. Just guessing.

The bread (SM) was from my baking yesterday.

It was not ordinary.

I’m embarrassed to say because I feel I’m a more humble baker than this, but it was FREAKING perfect. Crust 18 layers deep but only 1/8th of an inch thick. Crumb to make Mrs. Patmore weep. Able to absorb triple its weight in butter.

Give us this day our daily bread, hallowed be your name, etc.

Amen.

The eggs weren’t ordinary, either, unless you live in a world where fresh duck eggs, bought yesterday from the hobby farmer neighbour and almost 75% bigger and twice as nutritious (SM) as chicken eggs are normal fare at your breakfast table.

How have we lived this long (collectively, almost 120 years!) and not once have either of us eaten a duck egg until this morning? Rick was a little worried he wouldn’t care for them, as he doesn’t like goat products.

This will make perfect sense to those of you who like some (but not all) foods to be consistent with the standard bearers of their grocery aisles.

Un-friggin-believable.

Creamy, intensely flavorful in a non-goatlike manner… They were the Rolls-Royces of breakfast eggs, and calorie for calorie, about half the price as their free-roaming happy chicken counterparts.

Like all ordinary days, not everything rolls out with edges as smooth as a well-deserved Kahlua and cream after the last dishes are done on Christmas Eve.

We decided to paint the top of our little table for our north deck so it matched (more or less) our red Adirondack (Costco!) chairs with their gray-black-and red striped cushion. We had some snappy red marine-grade polyurethane paint left over from the canoe repaint this summer, so why not?

Let’s just jump right in to this thing!!

SU alert…

Apparently, sometimes a good sanding and coat of primer are advised between mixing two completely different furniture finishes.

Ironically, it looks sort of cool, in a distressed, couldn’t-have-done-that-in-a-million-years-if-we’d-tried kind of way.

Looking for input here: leave it as is, with maybe a second light coating to smooth the divots, or acknowledge the total fail and start over after inquiring into recommended steps? Leave a comment if you’d care to weigh in.

I didn’t mean to create Farah Fawcett hair (SU), either, although I am pleased that in case the style ever returns to planet Earth, I have finally mastered the look.

SM: Aforementioned bread, neighbour Rob Sawyer’s grilled artisanal hand-crafted frankfurters, Rick’s home-made wine sauerkraut, and French’s mustard for lunch.

Best. Frankfurter. Ever.

We’re considering initiating a Kickstarter fund to finance a consultant to help us figure out, for the good of humanity, how to coerce Rob into going into the processed meat business full-time.

Went for a walk with the dog (SM, how beautiful everything is in a rain forest community in the middle of September), chatted with neighbours, cleaned the bathroom sink…

Then in a transition moment, I drifted to the north porch to gaze into the woods beside our house for a moment, looking for inspiration on how to spend the rest of the day. I leaned my head around the huge post on the corner of our new deck.

It was weeping.

My first thought was “Huh! Sap.”

My second thought was, “Wow. It looks like it’s crying. I wonder if the wood is homesick?”

And my third thought was, “I wonder if buildings and the ground they stand on hold the essences of where their materials have come from, or what they’ve collectively become, or the memories that are created within them?”

And then I remembered today is September 11, and I remembered the buildings, and the numb horror, and the tears, and the sorrow and gratitude and resolve resonating at Ground Zero in New York City today.

It’s a good day to remember.

New Deck Photobomber

A Letter From Winston:

Dear Admirers,

My photography staff has been irksomely distracted of late.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain too strenuously as they seem to have finally clued in to the disgraceful lack of proper guarding posts from which to keep tabs on the neighboring riff raff. But what with the obsessing over engineering drawings, hand-digging trenches for the roadbed gravel to support the stone underdecking, dry stacking 90-pound Allan blocks, and so on, they have simply let my modeling career slip sideways.

Sometimes I think this world is going straight to the people.

Well, I’m a forgive-and-forget kind of poodle, and they seem to be back in the saddle, so let’s just say no more. I’m anxious to return to the craft.

And I do love my job.

One of the best parts of a shoot is the thrill of seeing that camera come out. Man, the adrenaline just flows!

It’s SO exciting to have to make those snap calls on how to set myself up for maximum lens interception to ensure a flattering result. For me, even small details that others might overlook, such as how to accessorize to set the mood, bring joy to my journey.

For instance, take this dazzling yet relentless execution of perfect right angles, re-angles, di-angles, and so.

One glance, and my inner knowing spoke to me: the scene just screamed for a rancid, broken-down, mud-infused tennis ball to soften the emotional focus.

Sometimes, all that’s called for is a subtle touch. In fact, some of my best work has been done by mere shadows and the dust of my footprints in the snow.

(If you’re interested, there’s more of my portfolio here, here, here, here, and here. Riveting stuff, really, even if I did let them ghostwrite a few.)

No matter the motif, the thing is to Stay. With. The. Task.

I believe that more Model Artists fail to get that critical last 10% by giving up on the potential of a shot, one shot too soon.

You just can never tell when the money shot will magically appear.

Take the above, for instance. What if I had said, “No… no… I’m simply too exhausted to continue.”?! The world would have been denied the perfect intersection of grand luck and great execution.

No, my friends, do not give up before the Muse picks up her Kong and goes home.

However, there’s no denying it: super modeling is not only very physically demanding, it’s also intellectually taxing, what with sorting through all the decisions regarding best angles, lighting, poses, accessories etc.

Better sign off now and tap a power nap. I need ALL the blood back in my head so I’m fresh for tomorrow’s shoot.

Love, Winston

Nori Sushi Nanaimo Restaurant Review

At 1:20 on a Saturday afternoon, the hostess put down the phone and called out to the staff at large, “No more reservations tonight!”

Nori Sushi is just that kind of place. The chefs call out genuine greetings to patrons as they cross the threshold, orders are sung out from the other side of the room, the phone rings frequently, and there’s a constant happy burble of delighted diners chowing down on amazing Japanese food. And the place was already sold out for the night.

In Nanaimo. On Vancouver Island. In early April. I guess offering the best sushi and sashimi on the Island in a casual ambiance with a welcoming vibe at fair prices will do that for you.

Tip #1: Make a reservation for a Saturday night dinner.

Yesterday they had red tuna available, so the tuna tataki above was even more melt-in-your-mouth outstanding than usual.

We had the pleasure of sitting at the bar where we could watch Kenny and James pull culinary magic out of plain rice and raw fish. Well, perhaps there’s a bit more to it than that.

It’s the perfectly cooked, slightly warm rice and fanatically-fresh cool fish. It’s the palpable pride in their craft, and the enthusiastic and upbeat front- and back-of-house teamwork. These are what make Nori TripAdvisor’s “#1 in Restaurants in Nanaimo.”

I really hadn’t planned to write this review when we first decided to nip in for lunch, so I let the delicious miso soup and tuna karrage appetizer drift away with our idle chitchat about shopping for brass hose bibs and onions.

I even neglected to take note of the brand of warm sake we ordered. (Gekkeikan, it turns out. And I’ll just leave this right here in case anyone’s taking note of Christmas gift ideas for us.)

At $8.99 for the medium bottle shared between the two of us, it was a GREAT choice with our meal.

But then James set our Dragon Roll down in front of us, and I started to pay attention.

At first, I was just taken with the delicate (and delicious!) flash-fried lotus root chips, and how much I was looking forward to the slightly salty “pop!” each one of those red and black flying fish roe would make in my mouth. Why, I wondered, did James use two different colored roe?

Then I looked again and saw the dragon, with its mouth open wide and its lotus-root wings furled out at the base of its long neck.

I asked James, and he explained that the “red” (they look more orange to me) are the regular “tobiko,” and the black are the same thing, just dyed black with octopus ink.

I learned something important about sushi yesterday: there’s more to the art than slapping around some sticky rice, fish, and seaweed and calling it “maki.”

There’s art…

… and propane torches.

James explained that the heat works to quickly pull forth and meld the oils from the fish, avacado, and their house-made Japanese aioli. He also said several other things about why they do it, but by this time, I was into full blown “photo composition” mode and missed it.

Sorry, but trust us: this is, bar none, the best sushi we’ve ever eaten, and if James says “torch it,” then torch it.

If you’re a foodie at all, the sushi bar at Nori offers front row seats at a live Cirque Du Inspiration.

I would just be thinking “Oh, no you didn’t!” and be snapping surreptitious iPhotos (at least, I hope I was a little surreptitious and not a complete pain in the patooty to my fellow diners) and be ready to burst into wildly inappropriate applause, and James would quietly say, “Not done yet.”

I have no idea what this thing of beauty is called, but I’m going to show them this picture next time we’re in and say, “This, please.”

And more of this, too, please.

Tip #2: Go easy on the soya sauce and wasabi “dunk,” or at least try a piece first as it’s delivered to your table. The chefs at Nori take great care to marry just the right flavors, textures, and temperatures in their offerings, and if a dish needs wasabi, it’s already there under the fish. If you habitually drown everything in super salty wasabi soup, you’ll be missing a whole world of wonderful.

In sushi as in figure skating, chefs are scored on originality as well as degree of technical difficulty. Nori has obviously put in their 10,000 hours of practice on both.

James is proud to be there. He told us he was there to learn everything he could from John, the gregarious and high-energy owner, and that it all starts with the quality of the fish.

We asked James how they source their fish, and he says that it’s delivered to them, but they make their vendors compete to ensure they are always presented with the highest quality fish that’s available in our market.

This salmon nigiri tiptoed on to our taste buds in silk-bottomed ninja slippers.

No words.

Thanks, John, and your staff, for another great meal.

Just one final question: when are you going to offer a cooking class?

Location:
6750 Island Hwy, Unit #203 (Right in front of Costco)
Nanaimo, BC V9V 1S3

Phone: 250-751-3377

Hours:
Wednesday & Thursday: 11:30 – 2:30, 5:00 – 9:30
Friday & Saturday: 11:30 – 2:30, 5:00 – 10:00
Sunday & Holidays: 12:00 – 2:30, 5:00 – 9:30
Closed Monday & Tuesday. (I love that their staff gets two predictable days off every week.)

Indian Temple Festival

The invitation came from Sharona, Chief Officer of Vibe, at Soul and Surf Resort in Varkala, India, during breakfast:
“In case you’re interested… there’ll be a temple festival going on this afternoon. There’ll be drums… and elephants… and, um, drums….”

Who doesn’t love a festival, and elephants, and DRUMS?! And Noah was pretty sure there would be cotton candy and balloons as well, maybe.

You could hear them before you saw them.

Noah was right about the balloons, complete with Angry Birds and 100 Or So Dalmations.

There were drums, as promised, and festive overhead banners lining the streets, and men with immense colorful pompom tower objects, decorated with swastika-like symbols (sort of) attached to chairs (sort of) that they had hoisted on to their shoulders and were twirling about as they walked.

Clearly, I could have done some cultural research before attending so I could make sense of what I was seeing.

Turns out, Hitler was a great appropriator of ancient iconic symbols, and I could have saved myself a few moments of “WTHeck?!” if I’d noticed the symbols on the twirly-gigs were “backwards” from those with which I was uncomfortably familiar.

On the other hand, simply taking it all in as presented to my Western sensibilities made for a lovely, mind-expanding afternoon of “tourist” with a captial “T.”

Disney-inspired dalmatians overseeing offerings to the gods.

Gotcha… Think: the Santa Claus parade at Christmas.

Some parade (and life) moments can take your breath away when you least expect it, for reasons you didn’t see coming.

#peoplearepeoplewhereeveryougo…

… with hopes, and realities, and frustrations, and disappointments, and dreams, and purses, all tucked up right where you know where to find them without looking.

Everyone’s just trying to make a little margin…

… and everywhere, little kids ADORE having the chance to play (literally) with the big kids.

Universally, those on the sidelines have a place in the play…

… and people always enjoy a hot oily treat with their festivities, especially if accompanied by a bell announcing the possibility, preferably half a block in advance to give you a chance to negotiate with the powers that be for why it’s a great opportunity and to scrounge around for loose change.

I could be biased, I suppose, since the young man (front left) was an Indian doppelganger for our own perfect Mathias, but I’m thinkin’ Bollywood’s a-calling for this kid..

I found myself wishing I was a talent scout right then.

The floats were truly impressive with myth-enacting animatronics that would have put the best of 5th Avenue windows at Christmas to shame.

But what was most interesting was that the advertising opportunity was not lost. According to literally everyone we talked to on the subject (granted, a limited set given the ~1.4 billion people who could conceivably hold an opinion), every parent in India wants–and believes–their child to have a future as an engineer.

Thank goodness, there are moments where, expectations for their glorious futures notwithstanding, kids are allowed to just be kids.

Aside from the realistic mane on ol’ Leo, there was nothing fluffy about these floats.

Again, I found myself wishing I had done some reading around who, from a Hindu perspective, might have been slaying whom, and for what reason.

However, what I did learn, real time, is that no matter what you might have missed from an academic point of view…

… you can always read the faces of the crowd to tell you more than half of what you need to know.

For example, as measured by the whites of their eyes, this float hit its mark as a religious morality tale: the little guy behind Grandma was clearly inspired to pay closer attention next time in Sunday School.

The drums kept coming, with sometimes modest…

… and sometimes more extravagant varieties of presentation.

These guys were beating their cadence with paddles on the sides of their swan.

It was a hot, humid, beautiful, exotic, and altogether human experience.

I came face-to-face with India’s very own Rufio. (I think I actually heard him crow.)

… and Peter Pan himself.

And yes, there were elephants.

For me, it was like spotting multiple Santas, each one completely singular in their own right, yet each one perfectly legitimate as representative of the uber concept, at the end of the parade: exciting, and a little weird.

In many ways, they will serve as a fitting reminder for me of my experience in India:

They were glorious, and humbling…

… and a challenge to my sensibilities as to how things “should” (or “should not”) be.

Come to think of it, India’s not that much different than Canada or the US in that way. No matter where you go, there you are, along with your particular perspective on “how things should go.” Just like American Express, you can’t leave home without it. International travel just gives you a shortcut to encountering it.

For some, however, those “preferences” are refreshingly simple to manage without stress:

Do you want the green elephant tooter or the blue one?

India Jet Lag Cure

Note: this post has almost nothing to do with India and everything to do with how to survive the first 48-hours with two little kids once you get there.

India will come later.

Say what you will about the insane spread and strange austerity of the Frankfurt airport…

... any airport that provides multiple football field-lengths of full-sized cots clearly understands its mission as an international jet lag way station.

Note to prospective traveling grannies: 30 hours of travel, plus a 13.5 hour time difference, plus the chaotic pace of Bangalore, multiplied by highly active two- and five-year old sleep needs = a serious need for a Jet Lag Plan.

Thankfully, Kate was all over it in the packing department.

Pool time!

For some, good hydration and a little yoga is key to a quick recovery.

For others, exercise and some hand-eye coordination flexing is the ticket.

Personally, I found a little adoring lens therapy went a long way to getting my head, heart and travel-hormones back in synch.

A little volunteer gardening also helped to get things grounded. While I’m not sure the chlorinated water was exactly what the poolside vegetation craved, it worked for J for at least 20 minutes.

Kate found that working on her recreational improv skills pulled things together…

… and J discovered you might as well work on your technique while you’re at it.

Football is tougher than it looks, you know.

Fortunately, things drifted back to where they belonged fairly quickly, or at least it has seemed that way to me.

I don’t know, though. Adults get jet lag too, and it fogs the brain.

Finally, for pushing the “please stay awake for just one more hour” envelope, an iPad, headphone splitter, and Shaun the Sheep cannot be recommended highly enough.

It’s now seven days later, and we’re all finally almost in the groove, just in time to have left Bangalore and land in the coastal resort area of Varkala. It’s so ~~stinkin’~~ blissfully hot and humid here that Bangalore was balmy in comparison, and I feel like I’ve entered a Bikram vacation zone.

But who knows? Maybe the languid, slo-mo mojo will improve my writing skills as I actually write about India next.

Time and things work differently here.

Rick and Kathy Play Games

Rick and I like to make up games.

It happens spontaneously when one of us does or says something, and then the other one makes a play on it, and… let the games begin!

We were sitting on our little cliff deck when the cormorants decided it was time to air out their collective pits. There was only space for one pair of outstretched wings on the buoy, so there was some vigorous feather wrestling over how many minutes constitutes a “proper turn,” and who was up next.

“Quick! Get the camera!”

We passed our beloved Nikon D1500 back and forth, trying different angles, focal lengths, and compositions. Once the birds took off in search of a more spacious perch, our attention wandered to what else might be interesting through the lens without getting our butts out of our really comfy Adirondacks.

Quite a bit, apparently.

“Hey! Wanna try shooting the same thing, and see what happens?”

We often see the same thing through quite different creative perspectives.

It’s a huge positive in our relationship: we double our fun when we get to enjoy the other guy’s experience of beauty and life, in addition to our own.

It’s like the “find the animal in the clouds” game. The first fun is finding the seahorse all on your own. The second fun is the challenge of finding the right words to guide the other guy into seeing it, too.

All I could see was the question mark, asking where the seahorse was.

The game taught us anew that clouds don’t have a monopoly on having worlds hidden in their textures.

Frankly, this was a bit freaky once Rick pointed out the gnarly old man staring at us from the bark.

In the warm afternoon sun, we found ourselves composing around the pools of golden light that dappled our lightly wooded shoreline.

Is “dappled” a verb? Yes.

It was camera therapy, with a buddy.

Life tip: when stressed, go zen behind the lens with a friend.

Shadow play was fun…

… as was playing upside-down.

And no, we did not experience any nasty surprises via large perching birds with an excellent sense of timing.

Taking time to let your focus drift to things just beneath the surface is a wonderful tonic.

Just ask Winston.

P.S. There’s another fun rickandkathy.com made up game coming your way shortly! Stay tuned for WWF_WTF (Words With Friends_Written by Two Friends).

“Brooklyn” Movie Review

If it’s been years since you’ve gone to the movies, Brooklyn is a great reason to go back.

I get why you don’t go any more. My own experience is that most of the marquee-grabbing movies today accost me with some, if not all, of the following affronts: extreme characters, breakneck plot shifts, violent visual upheavals, and eardrum-splitting surround sound, all of which seriously mess with my ability to suspend my disbelief.

Brooklyn, on the other hand, is an oasis of beautiful visual craft and storytelling I had forgotten was even possible in a movie.

Based on the novel Brooklyn by Irish novelist, Colm Tóibín, it’s a quiet movie of immense moments, of the ordinary human experience of leaving home, the loss of “normal,” and finding your way forward through discovering that you can’t go back.

In hindsight, I wish I had understood the moments were meant to be savored, each in its turn like a fine gourmet chocolate. It made me aware that I’ve held a different orientation to movies recently, one that is anchored in a plot-screaming headspace of “what will happen next?” rather than “what’s happening now?”

Brooklyn, on the other hand, holds you in the spell of the first blush of new love or a brilliant Irish acapella tenor giving voice to a homesickness so palpable you’ll have tears streaming down your face even if you aren’t weeping.

Despite being advertised as “a rich period drama [early ’50s] that tugs at the heartstrings,” (Wikipedia), Brooklyn is deftly punctuated with snippets of ordinary human hilarity.

Anyone who has ever shamed themselves with inappropriate–yet entirely uncontrollable–explosive giggles in somber surroundings will resonate warmly with the scene at the dining table of the rooming house as the exasperated matron tries, by sheer force of will, to stifle the giddiness of two flighty roomers. Similarly, eight-year old punk Frankie’s outrageous declaration that “We don’t like Irish people!” is sure to tickle self-aware social instigators who have ever been lead from the dining table by their ear.

Part of the fun is found in the dialogue itself. It’s replete with the quick Irish accent and wit that is a delight to both the ear and the mind, and Irish actress Saoirse Ronan as “Eilis” and her fellow actors deliver it all superbly.

In fact, the acting is so universally compelling, it felt to me that there were no “extras” in Brooklyn. It is as though every human on screen is a fine actor in their own right, each with their own fully fledged story to tell. Even if it was merely a wave goodbye from the deck of a ship, or the way an old gnarled hand held a soup spoon at the charity Christmas dinner in the basement of the church, I believed.

I won’t comment on set, costume, music, direction, etc., because once I was five minutes in, they were all invisible to me. The potent amalgam caught up with me 107 minutes later as I left the theater with a beautiful new story lodged in my heart and the fervent intention to watch it again, this time moment by moment.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn, the book, is all queued up on my Kindle for some cozy holiday reading. I have a feeling this may be one of those rare circumstances where the book will be better for having lived the movie. I’ll let you know in an update here when I’m done.