Maritimers like me have this twisted view of Ontario as a land of concrete and no Alpine beer. At the east end of Lake Ontario, however, a cottage on a clean lake in the woods is far closer than it is from Halifax. This spot is 40 km from downtown Kingston.
Category: Me and Mine
Zooming South
It being an exceptionally clear evening, I went up to the roof and did the binocular trick looking south and this is some of what I caught. Above, over Simcoe Island, a laker and a lighthouse. The light may well be the East Charity Shoals Light I saw from Cape Vincent facing fairly straight west from there. Correction: This is a lighthouse on Pigeon Island about 4 miles south west of the nearest tip of Wolfe Island and 4 miles northwest of the East Charity Light. The Laker route is quite far south as well, staying beyond the US boundary. I’d estimate the Pigeon Island Light would be about 20 km from here and that Laker about 25 km. Here is the entire photo taken through the binoculars.
Above, over Simcoe Island, the plume at Nine Mile Pt, NY, near Oswego. The nuclear plant would be about 75 km straight south of here. See this article on the search for the plume. Here is the entire photo taken through the binoculars. You’ll notice that the actual 543 cooling tower is under the horizon.
Above: this view again over the west tip of Simcoe shows islands on the horizon which may well be Main Duck Island and its neighbour to the left whose name I do not know yet. The gap between the islands is about 35 km south south west of here. Here is the entire photo taken through the binoculars.
Above: One more. I think the white thing is the East Charity Shoals Light which would be about 22 km south south east of here. Below is a blow-up of that portion of the photo.
And below is a US Coast Guard image. I need to get out the compass one clear day to check all these guesses.
Local TV Dies A Little More
It had been getting a bit crappier than I was comfortable with lately due to cuts but Clear Channel affiliate WWTI ABC announced today that it was cutting its 6 pm and 11 pm news broadcasts to focus on hourly updates and weather…oh, and the internet. [I think they will be investing in the use of technology – wizards!] Just a year and a bit ago, they had an hour and a half of local Watertown, NY news and sports every evening at 6 pm and more at 11 pm with a special Friday night high school sportscast called the Sportsblitz…or rather the Sportsblitz.
Now, the best source of corny local sports is gone. How will I know how Lafargeville or Pulaski do in high school lacrosse next spring? How will I follow Sackets in the Class K, Division XXIV NY state boys basketball regionals? Why do I care? Through my life, local TV news has going the way of other slowly dying things. In the good old days, CBC Halifax TV in the ’70’s had the resources to do news broadcasts from Tomaso’s pizza and other wacky places and WLBZ Bangor brought Dick Stacey’s Country Jamboree to the Maritimes via cable TV (blogged about here…it even made The Christian Science Monitor), Wingham Ontario’s CKNX-TV in the 1980’s did a feature on my brother in law and his chicken that would ride on his bike handlebars, Pembroke CHRO-TV in the ’90’s, now an Ottawa station, covered the local court scene I was working in. It is not entirely over as Kingston still has an hour of local CKWS news at 6 pm and another half hour at 11 pm and Watertown NY still has one local TV newscast on WWNY-TV but they are affiliates using a lot of national feeds and the local hokey sportscasts are the first to go.
Sad. We’ll all eat the same cheese from squeeze tubes by the time I am 83.
BBQ
One thing about growing up Canadian, you have a sneaking suspicion that you have missed out big time on the whole BBQ ribs thing. You can brag about Canadian beer, about how its a dry cold so you should suck it up or how watching hockey is sooooo much better than any other team sport but then you remember how all those things would be improved by a pile o ‘ribs and you know something is missing. In this morning’s New York Times there is a description of New Yorkers lining up at a ribs-fest:
In New York, demand for great barbecue tends to outstrip supply. A few weekends ago, thousands of ‘cue-seekers descended on Madison Square Park for the Second Annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, hoping for a shot at Mike Mills’s Memphis baby backs and Ed Mitchell’s North Carolina ribs. The lines were epic. Some waited it out. Many fled to nearby Blue Smoke, figuring that New York barbecue is better than no barbecue at all. And quite a few — present company included — hopped on the subway to Chinatown and sated the craving with a huge pile of Cantonese spareribs.
I know that fever, BBQ rib fever. Apparently, I live 2 and a half hours north of a very legitimate ribs joint, the Dinosaur BBQ in Syracuse but it looks too bikerish for the kiddie set. Regardless, we are not going that far south this weekend, heading for Oswego checking out the canal, Fort Ontario and Rudy’s, more of a fish joint on the beach, an inland Bill’s. The Kingston Brewpub does a very nice smoked ribs but they are not cheap and not plenty. My ideals would be like the lobster feeds of youth, picnic table covered with newspapers and piled with red sea spiders. Does such a ribs place exist in Canada?
Saranac Lake
I could yap it up like a Saranac Lake Chamber of Commerce membership nominee. Suffice it to say it is a beautiful town to which we will return.
The view to the south from the fifth floor of the Hotel Saranac.
The view to the west from the same fifth floor of the Hotel Saranac.
Beach
Surprised to find ourselves facing 22° C, we headed to Scarborough Beach south of Portland. This is what happy feet look like in the big ocean: [2.5 MB mpg]. Never had ice cream head ache below the ankles before. Happy kids nonetheless: [2.9 MB mpg].
Ugly Jerseys
I do not often endorse a business here but, as I have written before, one I love is Premiershirts which as I understand is a hobby turned business from a nice friendly guy in Oldham, England. I noticed he got a mention in an article in this month’s When Saturday Comes – which should cause a good bit of free buzz -and that he has updated his Hall of Shame of the worst jerseys of all time including Coventry’s 1970’s brown get up shown right.
Elizabeth Cottage
At the corner of Brock and Clergy up from the Hotel Dieu Hospital and half a block down from the back door to the Royal Tavern sits the Elizabeth Cottage built in the 1840’s. It was the private home of the architect of the Kingston Pen and is now a national historic site. I was thinking of typing this out but I am too lazy so here is the FedGov’t plaque out front.
Rev. Whillans’s War
The father of my Owen Sound connection, my great-grandfather-in-law, was a chaplain in the First World War, Rev. William James Whillans of Winnipeg. This evening, hunting through photos, I came across a post card sent from the front as well as a few others. He is the jaunty gent in the lower right of the first photo.
This is an example of the postcards I discussed in an earlier post. As you can see from the photo below, he was involved with those doing the fighting.
…with a few of the saved from the trenches
…in the trenches…
…and Rev. Whillans with one particular bear brought from Winnipeg during WWI.
Cousins
On Saturday afternoon, the four year old cousin had her birthday. Lots of family photos. Many Canadian men begging for grilled meats causing much shovelling of snow from around the gas BBQ at brother-in-law’s.
March is clearly the snakey, cabin-fever month after the glum of February. The maple syrup shacks are opening up in defiance of both Lent and winter, making the first agricultural crop of the year, boiling tree sap down something like 1/20th. Through the spring the sugars made by the tree shift from the first light runnings to dark.
As it roasts, baste a leg of lamb in dark maple syrup after poking it full of garlic and rosemary.