Category: Me and Mine

In My Day Unschooling Was Called Being Rich

I was fortunate in my education, having the opportunity to go to university with people whose last names were shared with grocery store products, beer brands or our political betters. As often as not, they got tagged poor little rich kids and with good reason. Well, apparently, this opportunity to be adrift in the world is now available to all:

The family practices unschooling, which encourages kids to explore the world and learn to find their places in it outside the confines of school. Proponents say it raises self-aware, inquisitive and worldly young adults who care about learning and have pursued passions they wouldn’t have otherwise found on the scheduled treadmill that is school. A new “unschooling school” is slated to open in Toronto this fall, a private learning centre where five-year-old students will mix with 18-year-old students and learn whatever they want to learn.

Having hated and thrived and having kids who have been battered and boosted at school, the running away approach has no appeal for me. A pal once old me that no one is worthless, they can always serve as a bad example and schooling has confirmed the value of that. Learning to be able to tell a good idea from a bad one, a thoughtful adult from a dull one and a project worth attention from one deserving disdain are all lessons learned through school. Filtering the meanings of these things imposed upon the kids is what happens for us at home. Letting a kids learn whatever they want to learn is like letting them eat whatever they want to eat.

Easlakian Vintage Base Ball Madness Strikes!

A lovely day was had by all. Kingston St. Lawrence Vintage Base Ball Club loses 3-2 to a NY Selects team from Canton and Rochester NY in the final of the RMC tournament. RMC 1 lost to the Selects 7-6 in the first round while the KSL took RMC 2 by 17-3. I got a single.

Friday Bullets For The Big Ball Games

What a run of attention getters. Taxes due. Election. Royal wedding. Osama killed. And what is most on your mind? The Royal Military College annual vintage base ball games, of course. This year, the Kingston St. Lawrence takes on RMC at the historic Cricket Fields in Kingston, site of actual pre-vintaged base ball in the 1870s. After all the stuff going around, there is nothing like the prospect of playing ball without a glove, the smell of the grass and the anticipation of a beer after. Bought a new bat. Sweet.

  • – This guy could be Prime Minister in 40 years and still be considered young.
  • – Interesting insights to the events around the killing of Bin Laden over at Castle Argghhh!.
  • – Here comes the left!
  • – Someone told me there was still a recession. I don’t think that’s really true anymore.
  • – A beer law Canadians are too backward to want.
  • – Has anyone noticed that the TSX has been collapsing since the Tories got a majority?

Gotta go. Going to take more of the day planning how to take this beard down to a long moustacheo. Don’t know whey I am having to make up manual bullets. Maybe it’s just Opera. Too lazy to check other browsers.

Book Review: Edinburgh Pub Walks by Bob Steel

epw1I get cranky. Especially when I have had a cold since Thursday and couldn’t get out on the snowshoes this weekend as planned. Heck, I really could not maintain much of a level of consciousness given the fever here, the aches there and the surreal effect of cold medication. Not prime time for the beer fan. So, it’s a good thing we have books for these drier stretches. I got this one in the mail a few months ago. Been wondering when I would post about it. I really should post more reviews of CAMRA’s excellent books but when this rare review copy came, I noticed my street address was off by about 127 front doors. Some guy two tenths of a mile away must have a great collection.

Anyway, I love this book. Why? Well, for one thing I am familiar with some walks covered having family that live on a few of the streets named upon the maps. I have spent some time there. I even dodged an indignant but well emptied bottle flung from a terrace far far above one Saturday at Hibs when Georgie Best was a no show and my father decided to leave early. But those connections to the town aren’t what makes this book work for me. No, its the maps themselves that draw you in. Bright, well laid out and placed smartly on the page they offer clear instruction by the clever use of colour leaving no real need for a table explaining what means what. Then there are the photos which make you want to crawl right though into that place in Prestonpans or the other on Rose Street. [Sadly, it appears that the Rose Street Brewery, where I spent a few happy days in 1986, is not more or at least not worth mentioning.] And then there are the walking tours. I don’t know of any North American pub guide based on this idea but it is an excellent one. Implicitly moderate or perhaps otherwise sensible, the 25 routes provide more information than a traveler might ever require and maybe even enough to keep a local well occupied.

The book seems to have been backed by the combination of CAMRA and Caledonian Brewery which might lead one to worry that a fix was in. Not a chance as there is every indication of as ecumenical an approach to mentioning tap offerings as you might wish. Well worth the investment for anyone there in Edinburgh or planning to be.

Friday Bullets For The Day Of Mr Interesting

A big day. An idea I have helped frame has turned into a 26 person meeting. Yesterday, too, I had to report on work to a multi-level meeting with about as many people. I sat next to someone who crossed borders to get there and who has a profession utterly different from mine. But we chatted about stuff that help frame a big idea. I don’t know how my path got set out as it has but every since I started spending my time in big meetings about ideas that become neat things I have liked my job more. It reminds me of playing with Lego.

  • Willie Mays! I still have Willie Mays baseball cards that I bought in grade one. I think I always like Willie Mays because of how close his name was to Oor Wullie.
  • Is there a “difference between the public square and the common room of a private club”?
  • Onions actually slinging low.
  • “…40 per cent of Canadians think they are worse off now than they were before…” Worse off? Certainly not improved. Chretien created the changes we will still live by. National discourse certainly lessened by the bear of little imagination.
  • Extreme Shepherding!!!
  • Vintage base ball breaks out in Hamilton. Need to speak to those people.

Gotta go. Gotta go play with the Lego of the mind.

Galeville Grocery Shuts After 84… or 156 Years

galevilleMy math is pretty bad but not as bad as the news out of Liverpool in central New York near Syracuse that the Galeville Grocery has shut after being a grocery store since 1926 and a building since 1854. Reader Jack forwarded me last Friday’s news in an email earlier this week:

Even into this week, this storehouse turned store was a draw for customers prowling tightly drawn aisles, seeking canned goods, lottery tickets, plastic containers of bread crumbs, foreign and domestic beers, pool supplies, Italian bread, meats, sandwiches. You name it. But life moves ever forward and sometimes, there’s no time for nostalgia. Galeville Grocery becomes a part of the local Byrne Dairy family. It gets a new building in 2011, one designed to look like the current, but with 21st century touches to reach a 21st century shopper. The floors won’t creak and the cramped checkout counter will likely be larger. The aisles will be wider and the selection, some of it already with the Byrne Dairy name on it, may not be as wide and deep, but convenient, fast and easy. We’ll likely see some of the same, familiar faces.

Gee, I’m a 21st century shopper and I kind of liked the old place. I’ve been stopping there since at least 2004 soon after we moved to Ontario. I always seemed to find a well priced beery surprise I hadn’t seen elsewhere. And there was the service beyond even the counter guy loading your trunk for you. I really appreciated that time that I drove back 30 miles after realizing I didn’t have my receipt for the border declaration to Customs Canada – only to watch the staff dive into the trash to find it. But then there was the sad news of the passing of owner Bernie Rivers this past summer and one can imagine the prime location and all the good will lead to a great offer for the property. Don’t know if good beer sales will continue especially with the move Wegman’s has made over the last few years to fill central New York demand. I’ll keep an eye on it but it’s probably the end of an era.

Twenty Years Ago, A Christmas Eve In Scotland

One of my favorite Christmas Eves was twenty years ago tonight, in Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland. I was visiting my uncle, auntie and cousins and had settled into a week long stay. It didn’t take long for it to seem like to everyone in the village I was that “coosin frae Gan-ee-der.” People shouted hello to me from across the street, a colonial vestige of something, a bit of all their people who had gone away. I had been there a few years before by myself so was renewing old friendships but this time I had come there from a new direction – from Poland where I had been teaching English as a second language in a small city on the Baltic coast. And I’m still married to the guest I brought along, the one I had met only a few weeks before, back there well east of Germany where the Soviets still had tanks. All in all, a complex bit of culture shock going on: from the nutty affluence of North America to the balance of hard luck and new hope world of the land keeking out from behind the Iron Curtain and then on to somewhere in between, an old village in the old country in winter.

In that village there was a pub. The Golf Inn. Down the street and around the corner from the family home most evenings we played pool, drank a lot of Guinness and sat around and talked night after night with family and friends, greens keepers, university students back from college all curious about what we had seen in the East. We were there on Christmas Eve, too, dressed up a bit more and well fed by auntie, packed in with the neighbours likewise having a great old time when, at 11 pm, without any warning to we two Canadians in the corner, all moved as one across the road to the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, for the service. It was magic. Never been in a church before or since after a night filled with beer and friends. Before and after the dour sermon, there were great big men swaying in kilts, well oiled from the evening to that point. They sang in congregation and beefy harmony in great booming voices. Unlike this night, twenty years later in another church in another country, I am now not sure if they sang the Viking meets Italian carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” but they may well have:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

After church, we were with the half that did not pour back into the pub to continue. We had to get back. There were plenty of guests in the house besides ourselves, generations of relatives that all had to get up in the morning as one. We walked together back round the corner and up the street in the cold still dark night full of the singing, the beer, the night.

Beau’s Thursday Night Tasting In the Backyard

A fun way to spend the evening. Beau’s had their quarterly business meetings in town and they all came over for a few hours of opening bottles – including the father, son and a sizable host. We nine started well with two saisons and biere de garde: Hennepin, Jack D’or and 3 Monts. Batch 10 from Pretty Things was much better than the more recent bacth 13. Lesson: let it sit.

Things got a little wobbly with three Quebec takes on Belgian white beer. We thought RJ’s Coup de Grisou was fine and a good value beer. And Barbier from L’Ilse D’Orleans was not well understood given its level of rich maltiness. But Blanche from Charlevoix was a revelation in nasal interaction with beer. Freesia. Fabulous.

Three more bottles were opened. Trade Winds Tripel from the Bruery was a bit muddled with a nice aroma. Too much of the malt ball for the style or maybe just our level of interest given the other choices. Next, the Poperings Hommel Ale, as always, was amazing. The greatest pale ale in the history of the planet? Could be.

Then the taxi was called for the eight to be off. It was time. The mosquitoes had begun to bite. Just time to open a quart of Drie Fontienen’s Oude Gueze, one of the few beer that could follow a Poperings. Like any divider of people, some were not with it. They got the first taxi. The rest of use stood on the driveway, waiting on the warm quiet summer night sipping. Then the taxi and then they were off and away.

The 2010 Sackets Harbor NY Vintage Base Ball Tournament

Another great time was had by all even if we had to play 18 innings of 1864 rules baseball in a row on a 85 F day under the beating sun. The Kingston St. Lawrence VBBC tied the Sackets Harbor Ontarios 12-12 in the first game and lost 7-1 to the Genesee Nine of Rochester. Highlight was the nine run second inning in the first game. Low light was being on base and realizing I was not actually aware of the rules one needed to know when being on base. Got tagged out at home in the fourth inning of the second game. You know, one truly ought to give ‘er when one has the opportunity.

Do Olde Geuze And Oysters Go Together?

oysgeu1-1I was out hunting for some Caribbean stout to go with the PEI oysters I picked up at the incredibly jambi Mike Mundell’s shop this afternoon. Without success. What to do?

I love oysters. I used to live in view of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on PEI’s north shore and heading over to Carr’s at Stanley Bridge for a half dozen Malpeques to suck back with my home brew. Despite the trade’s odd view of what makes for a benefit, the oysters know not what is done in their name. Quietly in their rocky shells they ignore such things, preferring to be pretty damn tasty and – at a buck and change – a great value.

So, instead of a strong sweet stout, I thought I would try them with a geuze, in the case a half bottle of Drie Fontienen’s Oude Geuze, the beer I had last New Year’s Eve. This one was bottled back on Friday, February 1, 2008 when I was having an Old Guardian for the twelfth edition of The Session. Let’s see what happens in mid-summer two and a half years later..

Wow. That is quite a combination. The barnyard funk of the geuze hits the oyster’s wharfy skank head on in your mouth. One of my more intense taste experiences when I think of it – which is all I can do given it is happening in my mouth right now. All that is missing is an overly aged chunk of blue cheese to make this as overwhelming an experience as it could be. But the aftertaste is creamy, like two waves counteracting each other leading to calm. The oyster brings out the apple notes and places the acidity in context. I am happily reaching for the next meaty oyster.

Success. Each assisted through the difficulties the other can pose. A vital combination.