I’ve posted the first set of photos from the trip to Canmore I recently took with The Redhead. Here’s a sample:
The rest of the photos are in my Canmore photo album.
Categories
Category: It Happened to Me
“Trust me, you’ll really like this place,” said Pete, who was driving
us through a series of darkened streets lined with warehouses,
factories, industrial lots and not a single human being in sight. “It’s
an awesome restaurant that used to be downtown, but decided to keep
their costs down by moving out here.”
Jeremy looked about suspiciously. “Uh, this restaurant isn’t running out of the back door of a dog food factory, is it?”
We’d taken so many twists and turns through obscure streets from our
start near Don Mills and Eglinton that I had no idea where we were. We
finally turned onto a street that I recognized — Laird Road — and
there it was, nestled between an auto body shop and something equally
industrial: a restaurant marked Marvellous Edibles.
In this neighbourhood of factories and yards full of trucks, I was
expecting one of those greasy spoons that happens to make the world’s
most fabulous banquet burger. Instead, we walked into a place that had
the decor of a French bistro.
It was packed with customers, and all of them were tucking into very
delicious-looking dishes. I saw a woman enjoying what looked like a
glazed duck on a bed of noodles, while the man beside her appeared to
be enjoying some kind of tenderloin with garlic mashed potatoes.
Someone else was taking their first sip of a steaming bowl of
apparently homemade chicken noodle soup, brimming with noodles.
We managed to get a seat despite not having made reservations. Pete and
I ordered the pork chops with spetzl and
red-cabbage-and-caramelized-apple casserole. The pork chops (CDN$18)
were perfectly done, and covered with a creamy mushrooms sauce and
slices of giant mushroom, and the spetzl and casserole matched it
perfectly. Jeremy had the steak and frites (CDN$16), which he reported
were delcious. The frites came with a side of “Cafe de Paris” butter
for dipping. It’s probably the kind of thing that would make a
cardiologist scream, but it’s oh-so-tasty.
Dessert was equally fantastic. Along with everything else on the menu,
they make everything themselves, even the bread. Jeremy had a
raspberry pie (CDN$7), Pete had a chocolate-raspberry mousse cake
(CDN$7) and I decided to have a slice of something they rarely
prepared: a cocount banana cream pie (CDN$7), piled high with
freshly-whipped cream and cocounut and packed with banana slices on a
thick shortbread-like crust.
I’m going to be atoning for this at the gym tomorrow.
The service is friendly, and the owner was going from table to table,
making sure that everyone was happy and making recommendations (he said
I should try their bread pudding next time).
If you like simple food prepared exceedingly well with the freshed of
ingredients in a nice bistro atmosphere, you’ll love this place. The
prices — pretty cheap considering the quality and generous portions —
will make you love it even more. It’s worth the car trip (it’s not
conveniently close to the subway), but be forewarned that the place has
a following — make reservations. For more details, take a look at their site.
(Special note to The Redhead: Next time you’re in town, I’m taking you there for dinner.)
Categories
Dad’s getting better
Friday’s night’s hanging out at bedside with Dad was a pretty quiet
affair — it was just me and him in a darkened room in the Intensive
Care Unit of St. Joseph’s. He slept most of the time, while I quietly did some light reading (really, it’s one of the simplest techie books of all time).
Saturday’s visit was completely different. I arrived in the afternoon
to find the room filled with people: Mom, my sister Eileen, my Aunt
Beth, who’d flown in from the Philippines the day before, and Letty, a
friend of the family. Dad’s bed was set so that he could sit upright,
and Eileen was spooning him some soup. He asked for some hot chocolate.
He seemed better, even making his usual observational and irreverent
wisecracks.
Someone mentioned that Aunt Beth (who is one of Dad’s younger sisters)
is Dad’s guardian angel. Every time his health takes a turn for the
worse, she comes over, and within a day or two, he gets better. Kudos
to her for leaving Manila (where the weather seems pretty nice right now) for Toronto, where we’ve been enduring temperatures of -25 degrees C
(-13 degrees F). Perhaps her visit, combined with some antibiotics, and
the removal of a blood clot and a couple of infected, unsalavageable
toes, made the difference.
I’m sure your kind words and prayers also helped. Thanks to everyone who wrote in via comments and email. You’re great people.
Back in July, I wrote:
Memo to my future self, six months from now
When you read this in the archives, be sure to say this to the cute
girl sitting in your lap: “See sweetie, before I met you I’d completely
given up all hope of meeting someone.”
Then cover her with ice cream and nibble on her bum.
The Redhead just pointed this out to me.
Um, what flavour, sweetie?
Categories
Dad Update
Dad’s had diabetes for a long time. For those of you not familiar with the disease, it’s most simply described as a failure to produce insulin (a discovery made right here in Accordion City),
which functions like a key to “unlock” the energy stored in
carbohydrates and sugar. Without insulin, you could eat your fill and
still be starving your body.
One of the side-effects of diabetes is that your organs will fail. In
Dad’s case, it was his kidneys. Luckily, his sister, my Auntie Beth,
kindly donated a kidney to him (kidneys are redundant systems — you
can live with just one).
Unfortunately, receiving a donated organ requires you to go on a
regimen of drugs that suppress your immune system. Without these drugs,
your immune system may start attacking the donated organ, mistaking it
for some kind of invasion. A suppressed immune system is essentially a
low-rent version of AIDS. Bacterial infections that would bounce off
most of us can make someone with such an affected immune system ill,
possibly fatally so.
Dad recently got an infection in his toe, and it just got progressively
worse. The whole foot’s no longer a pretty thing to look at, and the
infection’s making the rest of him feel ill. It was decided that either
some of the foor went, or he did. He was last-minute scheduled for
surgery last Sunday.
On Saturday, he noticed some numbness in his leg. Mom, who’s a pretty
observant doctor, gave him a quick checkup and noticed the signs of a
blood clot. She rushed him tot he hospital and the clot was removed.
However, over that period of time, his kidney was starved of blood and
wasn’t functioning at all. We’re currently waiting to see if they
kidney was just shocked by the lack of blood and on its way to
recovering, or whether it’s out of commission for good.
He had a couple of toes removed on Sunday — the thought of losing body
parts makes me cringe — and the doctors are waiting to see if they
have to remove more toes, or the foot, orf a bit of leg.
Dad was taking it as well as possible under the circumstances; he even
joked that he’d better not find his foot for sale at an antique shop.
He’s currently still in the ICU at St. Joe’s, and he’s sort
of fuzzy, drifiting in and out of consciousness. When he’s conscious,
he’s about as lucid as someone who’s just woken up. We’ve been able to
have conversations — he asks “How’s the job going? How was the wedding? How is your new girlfriend?”
For now, it’s a matter of waiting and seeing how his condition evolves.
His ICU nurse tells me that it’s good for him if there’s family in the
room, even if he’s not always conscious (apparently, it keeps him
better oriented), so I’ve been spending my evenings by his bedside with
my laptop getting work done and just being a smiling face whenever
needed. It’s the least I can do for a guy to whom I owe everything.
If you’ve got a spare prayer, wish, good thought or even a fung shui furniture move, could you please offer one for him?
…and surprise, surprise, it’s not a photo of me or an accordion. It’s one of The Redhead,
taken at the supermarket. We’d just finished some breakfast and were
about to start shopping for ingredients for a New Year’s Eve dinner
when I said “Hey, hold that pose.”
As I mentioned earlier, she was an excellent travelling companion and a lovely wedding date. Plus, she’s been writing such nice stuff about me!
Monday’s and yesterday’s sleep deprivation-fest ended with a standby
flight on the “red-eye” from Calgary to Toronto and an arrival time of
7:45 a.m.. Since The Redhead didn’t have to fly back from Boston until
about 7 p.m., I dropped her off at my house to catch some sleep while I
went off to work.
Then drop The Redhead off at the airport (always a sad thing).
Then back to work.
Then over to the hospital to visit Dad, who’s stable and resting in the ICU (long story).
Then over to my sister’s house for dinner.
Then home, where I got a call from The Redhead to tell me that she’d made it home safely.
Then fourteen hours of blissful sleep.
I’m no longer functioning on caffeine, willpower and autopilot and I’m
feeling pretty sharp again. Regular blogging will resume later today.
In the meantime, here’s some reading:
A Saddam Hussein impersonator comes out of his spider hole and back into business. Jerry Haleva, who played Saddam in Hot Shots (the first movie and part deux), Mafia!, The First 20 Million is the Hardest and The Big Lebowski, went into retirement last year at the start of Gulf Wars II: Clone of the Attack. Now that Hussein’s been captured, he’s decided that it’s appropriate for him to resume his most unusual hobby.
A snippet from the article:
But
now that Saddam is in the custody of the United States Army and is
awaiting trial for war crimes, Haleva feels ready to resume making fun
of the Iraqi dictator. “I have to be fairly selective on what I can do,
because of my real job,” he said. “But if the right opportunity comes
along and I have time for it, I’m always interested.”
The only thing that may stand in his way is Saddam’s scraggly new
beard. “Clearly, we have different grooming habits now,” Haleva
remarked.
Burbs vs. downtown. The
National Post is running a series of articles that “examines the
eternal struggle within all of us: the choice between the monster
suburban home with plentiful parking or the modest plot in the city
with the coffee shop around the corner.”
As you may know, I’m renting a
modest plot in the city with a number of coffee shops (and bubble tea
shops, for that matter) around the corner, and I respect the decision
of folks like my sister, who lives in the near ‘burbs with a large back
yard, which is great for her kids. I’m a creature of both downtown (most days) and
the suburbs (weekly visit with Mom, Dad, sis, bro-in-law and nephews) and have always had a fascination with cities and suburbs,
and this series of articles has piqued my interest.
Here’s the first article, Get me outta here!, and here’s today’s, Where everybody doesn’t know your name. I’ll probably throw in my own two cents later.
Have a good day, everybody!