TubaOrNotTuba

I need to know who I am.  In large part because we have a rule. Around here you must be willing to identify your father. Let me explain. This is a small community it always has been. In fact back at the turn of the last century we had not yet reached 100,000 people. If you went out looking for a spouse there was a good chance that you were going to come across people related to you by blood. And by religion but the blood was more important. The rule goes way back. In fact I’m sure that when my grandparents met in Boston back before the depression they asked each other two questions. Where are you from and then who’s your father. I have the privilege of being able to tell someone else who were my parents and how they met. And who were my two sets of grandparents and how they met per. Angelo I have little fact to basically to back it up I can probably tell you other generations. In keeping with that I was one of the first in my line to find a spouse from outside of the province. My children are following in the same rule line. After all if you don’t you tend to find other problems. In keeping with that I can easily imagine although I have little fact to back it up what what it was like for my grandparents and my great grandparents to go out socially. The music tended to be found in the kitchen and the people around the kitchen table were probably people that you already knew. Someone coming in from outside would be welcomed but we would be what’s the word suspicious. I think back to my grandparents in Boston managing to find someone from home tamari and then heading back home as quickly as they could to start raising their families. My parents did something similar. They knew each other from school and when my father moved to a newer community he found my mother I assume within days. Something about going across the road to get tea. I can only guess because it is now too late to ask pointed questions. So for the rest of you ask those questions while you can because you are on a timer. And once the timer goes Ding you’re back to making up your stories.

Life in this century means adopting to new technologies. Like if someone says make a list. You can go old school and find some paper and pencil. You can try typing it with your skinny finger. Or you can simply point at the microphone and say what’s on your mind. Lead me it works less room for confusion than you might think. We’re heading into another round of visitors that means thinking about food. In fact more than just thinking about it there are those in the group who actually expect to eat. I could pretend but I’ve moved past that I am now the senior citizen in the room and I expect other people to make choices. If someone says get chicken I know that we no longer turn to the bucket we could but the drive is a bit long instead we will source some fresh meat and turn on the hot thing in the kitchen and before you know it we will have genuine food on our plates. Magical when you think about it. Or we could skip to something more obvious. I considered pizza but I was voted down period. And the dogs? They don’t get anything to say in this situation. All they can do is indicate their agreement with our choices. This is summertime and we are doing our best to make it through from early morning to late night. Last night there was some sort of bug scare. I came awake too loud voices telling someone else how to avoid some mysterious bog on the floor. I did not see it and I did not need to this was the problem of others I simply rolled over and went back to sleep like any old person would do. You see you can go into mature mode if you have to. I am a model of behavior. And when it comes time to say what did you do during your summer holidays I will answer no idea. It all happened around me and I was simply a spectator. What about you did you make great plans to have them fall through? I don’t really want to know you know. Title summer plans

I really should have held to my original plan. Learning about where I would like to travel next. Instead I fell into the shallow end of the pool. Figuratively. On TV we have the Olympics. Today’s sport of choice fast swimming. I get the feeling it takes longer to announce the time of the wind that does to actually swim it. And the fault lies not with the swimmers nor the chronograph but with the commentary. People have been waiting for years to say everything they know about an individual sport or contestant. Do I really need to know that that person placed fourth in a match six years ago? Not really. I would be better off to turn off the sound and imagine what’s going on. After all they are swimming in lanes and they’re all going to the same destination. How last can I get. I think we should add something to these events. Having them swim with dogs might be an idea. It would also up the speed of the events I’m sure although the dog might get distracted by all the chatter in the stands. Seeking the eventual treat. You can tell they do not watch sports often. I think the commentary is a disease rather than a cure. And the Olympics are just a way to prove to the rest of the world that you can say anything you want about anything because there is no fact checking going on. People are much more interested in the event on the screen. I did hear that there is an event called speed walking and that is more my speed. If I can find it. It could give me ideas on how to get from point A to point B without falling over. Besides that it’s a wonderful day outside one of the hottest in a long time.

We have a pair of older dogs visiting us. Apparently the dogs are starting to protest against being taken to the beach every afternoon. I feel the pain. Try to imagine life as a dog where all you can see an eye level is sand and where you cannot drink the water ’cause it has too much salt and where the sun warms your fur to a point where you really become uncomfortable. I have never tried drinking the water nor have I tried to see the sanded eye level and I do not have a fur coat but I feel the pain. I offered to keep the two dogs here but there owners have decided that the separation anxiety is too great one should ask for the owners or the dogs. Meanwhile today is warmer than yesterday and we started the AC early getting ahead of the curve if you will I just look at the number of hours remaining until sunset and I am trying to decide how best to kill time. Like should I go and sit in the cool corner in the basement or should I turn on the cold shower or should I pretend to be happy. I will test my options. I did manage to get a really good sandwich out of the visit because on the lunch menu today with something involving chicken salad. We no longer live next to a deli so that option has been rare. In fact I think I have been converted to an all fruit menu. Let me count the ways we have apples and bananas and oranges and plums and probably some other things I haven’t found yet but I have the whole afternoon ahead of me so if there’s something else hiding in the fridge I will find it. Colour me determined. Title sympathy for the hounds

I have determined through my life that attracting attention is more of a challenge than we like to admit. I have been trying for decades. I have tried various methods. For example back in high school I alternate between a tuba and the timpani. Big noise in a small space. In university I pivoted to photography. Got a good camera and the largest flash I could afford. Great lights in the small place. And then finally when I went out into the professional world I opted for performance. Not exactly performance but as Shakespeare put it all the world is a stage. And when you are at the desk in front of a classroom of teenagers you learn immediately they’re getting their attention can be a challenge. Don’t even go to keeping that attention. But I toughed it through and for anyone planning life in the public eye just accept that not every day will be an easy one. You will need a great deal of patience and you will need to adapt your methods to your audience. It does not need to be a trumpet or a flashing light or even a great script. Accept that others will eventually notice. If it is for the wrong reason then that is not your fault. If none of these methods satisfy your need to be noticed then go for interpretive dance. I have it on good inference from a squirrel that this is also a method to be in front of others. But you do you.

Today they cleaned my BBQ. I had managed to avoid that job for several years going back to before the great wasp infestation. Put a barbeque on hiatus for several years and cleaning becomes less of a priority. Not that I was ever a slob about the thing I did get rid of most of the really evident grease but I was afraid that today they were going to wash and dry the cast iron grills. That does not work for me. They did relax. They did simply heat it up and do some brushing but I was afraid. This is a good BBQ. One that has served us faithfully for almost a decade unlike those cheap ones that we threw out every couple of years when we lived in the big city. It seems that now that the BBQ has been proven to be safe we will start to enjoy some of that box of meat in the freezer lean being a synonym for good meat with little fat. I know there are those that like to barbecue every day. I was never among them. This was a cooking method when you had a lot of time in good weather. I will see and maybe I will profit. In other notes of notice I think that the others have avoided going to the sea glass festival. I mean how much jewelry made from scrap glass do you need in a lifetime. And since I do not hunt for the best lobster roll I would have also missed out on that little detail. We are in full tourist season. None of this sort of thing takes place in the month of February. Other priorities. What I have been doing is trying to avoid tripping. There are two beige dogs in the house and the only time they make a big noise is when I bump into them. 

Not going to lie. Some of my high school courses were better than others. I fondly remember something taken in my final year when I studied about how cities evolve. The catchy title was urban geography. We had a keen teacher. Fresh out of college. And what he did was had us survey our own community to see how things had evolved over a period of a couple of centuries. Going house to house trying to put a birth date on the property. What I learned as a take away was that towns and cities do evolve. What my family new is now quite different. And from there I will move to something I watched this afternoon. I ended up in one of those rabbit holds where I visited a small steel town summers in the Rust Belt. I recalled a movie called Deer Hunter and I suspect that it was made in this part of the world. Wonderful houses that over time have changed vocations. Note that the houses are probably still standing because tearing down something it’s almost as much work as putting it up. The point of the video was to let anyone who was interested know that properties still evolve. In this case classic homes mutating into restaurants because that’s what the market will bear. When the narrator mentioned that someone will buy a half dozen properties tear down almost all of them and then try to maximize the value of a single place it made so much more sense. The evolution of a town if you will. And now I also want to rewatch that movie given that it took place at a time. When I was barely aware of where people lived. I want to see if my impressions have stayed with the test of time. I can do that I suppose. And as for the Rust Belt the majority of those factories have rusted away. Hence the name.

My withdrawal from that job known as cooking has limited how I snack. A much larger amount of fresh fruit for example. And I have fully embraced the idea of season agnostic. That means that winter or summer if I open the refrigerator and find a tub of ice cream I feel obliged to check it out. We do not keep a wide range of flavors because we are subject to the rules of the marketplace. Right now all that we have in hand is a product marketed as orange pineapple which brings back many memories of being young. A flavor that has been available locally for all of my life. Yes I know I should be doing something else with my time but it’s just too easy to find the scoop and find the ball and find the tub and treat myself. Not never more than once a day. There are rules of course. As I prepare today’s article the rest of the family is out doing things outside because it is a beautiful day. I think that involves the beach. Something else that I do less because once I figured out that I could no longer find my way back off the beach I had to decide whether or not swimming for the mainland was an option. Happily no. If I can’t see it I can’t go there. So back to my relaxed life at home with whatever I find that I might like in the kitchen. Yes this is the season for nectarines and I’ve had that as a treat as well. Did you know that if you leave the long enough the stones are not as difficult to remove. I must do more research on that. Because it is summer we have visitors that is the rule as well. There have been different car loads over the last few weeks and there will be more because we’re still in the month of July. We will wait until the visitors have run out and we have run out of ice cream to go and see what the world has to offer.

I heard it on the news so it must be true. They were last evening busily evacuating a park. Not just any park. One of the good ones. You may have heard of it. Jasper. I even went there once. Something about a forest fire or maybe a grass fire. The report was unclear but obviously this was not something that was supposed to be going on. We get a lot of reports about big fires elsewhere but they rarely seem to be centred on places that I have ever had any reason to look for on the map or visit. All I could say was not Jasper. Two famous for allowing a fire. Don’t we keep firefighters on site all the time just in case. Apparently not. The park will have to take his chances like everywhere else. Imagine the the water bombers coming in. The part of being captive to the news is that I hear a lot of stuff that really should not catch my attention. A war in a foreign land that’s life a tidal wave you need a notion for that but a National Park one of our nation’s treasures on fire it seems wrong on all levels I guess I’ll have to listen to the news this evening to see if there has been any change in the last day. I wonder if I know anyone who is there camping right now. I know a lot of people . In other camping news we had a visit from people we met at different times over the last two decades. Fellow campers if you will. And in listening to them I realized that the clock has not stopped for any of us. We are all now mature people. In the sense of getting close to our expiration dates.

There was a time in my life when I advised people on where to go and eat. Part of my professional role. Nowadays, I would not know where to turn. For me, most of my best meals come from my local kitchen and I do not want hundreds of strangers coming in and trying to shoulder up to the table. Today I did what most people do. I turned to social media and allowed a couple of influencers to show me around town. Excuse me. City. We are bigger now. And what I’ve learned is that the addresses have not changed only the menus. Did you know they now serve curry locally? The things you learn from social media. But it turns out that my city is doing well. We have developed a reputation as a place to go and get fed. Maybe I will go out this summer and test the menus. I have no intention of advising others but if someone from my family asks I will have an answer that reflects this era. I also learned that the lobster roll is now considered to be a delicacy rather than something that your mother would do in the kitchen in a rush. Like I say, times have changed. I have no idea about the cost of things on the menu. That will require more study on my part. After all social media cannot give me all the answers. And if you come to my city come ready to enjoy. Apparently we now do food properly. Yes there are still things that people have been eating for decades. The lowly French fry is still a staple. But we have discovered other things that I have never eaten. Looking at you oyster.