Seconds anyone?

Last night we had fresh bratwurst sausage from the market downstairs. We also had mushroom risotto and green beans. I am a big believer in presentation and what I was really going for was a cheerful meal because sometimes I think sausage can look a bit sad. Our meal was rather mirth-y, but good.
Today I went to the farmer's market and drank in the beauty of some gorgeous Fall harvest. I love this time of year for corn and potatoes and fresh tomatoes that are coming in late. I bought some sweet potato and an orange skinned melon and the prettiest little tomatoes. I served them just like the picture above with a bit of fancy salt some chopped green onion and some olive oil. They tasted really sour, we didn't eat them so I stuck them in a baking tray with some more olive oil so I can roast the sweetness out of them. I will throw them in tomorrows dinner or make a pasta sauce with them.
I baked the sweet potatoes and I am roasting an acorn squash with a bit of butter and brown sugar right now. I plan to add them in to dishes over the next few days.
I love summer's harvest of fruit so much but it's the Autumn harvest that I enjoy cooking with the most. It's finally cool enough in here to leave the oven on for long enough to roast meat and veggies.

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Yesterday Lorna and I drove her 90 year old Grandma from Vancouver to Chilliwack. I sat in the backseat of the car and listened to the sweet sound of this old, dear woman and I heard the accent of my Grandma, my Mother's Mother gone for many years now. They were close friends.
The sun was shining on my face and as I tried to stay awake and listen to her soothing voice I felt the valley I grew up in surround the car, and me, and I was transported.
It was a clear sunny, lush fall day, blue sky, impossibly green fields and chocolate cows laying in the open. Lazy cows, full of grass, making the most of it.
The mountains seemed to rise up around me and cradled me and I remembered how pretty it all was, the valley I grew up in.
It was bliss.

How's the water?

Spent Friday at Bunsen Lake with some lovely friends and a couple of their kids. It was very nice and the water? Cccccccold. But I swam in that sucker. Glacier fed. Refreshing. The picture above almost shows how truly beautiful the view is at this lake. If I turned to the right you would see that the small beach was littered with rug rats screaming and digging in the sand and generally having lots of summer fun.

I don't have kids so there are certain things that can't help but illustrate how different things are than when we were kids.

Sunscreen, OMG I saw kids running around with thick, white layers of sunscreen over every bit of exposed skin, not that there is much of that to be seen with long sleeved swim suits and all. I understand why. It amazes me how kids will just come to their moms stand in front of them and allow themselves to be smothered in the stuff, no fussing, no questions, it's their normal.

At one point, around the time that everybody seemed to decide it was lunchtime, including us, I saw something that cracked me up. Three boys around 10 or 11 were sitting by us on the beach in a big round blow up floaty thing eating their sandwiches and generally goofing off. One of their Moms decided to get a picture and while she was focusing in the kid in the middle told the kid next to him that his sandwich was stinky. They all started cutting up and the kid with the stinky sandwich looked confused and took a whiff of his sandwich and said, "What, it's prosciutto??"

I don't know why I thought it was so funny but I'm pretty sure that I never even heard the word prosciutto until I was in my late 20's. Later I saw the prosciutto kid swimming in the lake with a silver swim cap on his head. I didn't see anybody trying to beat him up either.

Oh yes, times have changed.

We stopped for an ice cream at a little store just outside the park gates. They actually had Tiger Stripe ice cream! That's orange with licorice stripes and I probably haven't had it since I was a little kid. Man, it was good.

Some things never change.

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

I'm in need of some excitement in my life these days. Going to work, coming home, making dinner watching movies or just regular TV is nice once in a while but too many days in a row makes me crazy. I don't do well with too much routine, it makes me bored and when I'm bored I get anxious. I get the "is that all there is" feeling and as Jeff Kay would say, "I can't have that".

When I was in my 20's I was already with Superman. I had been in a very bad relationship back home that taught me a lot of hard lessons fast and being in a small town and running into your ex and his new girlfriend everyday was starting to get old. I moved to the big city and tried to make my way. I lived with a high school buddy and his boyfriend in the West End of Vancouver for the first few months. It was fun but after a while buddy's boyfriend was tired of having me around and I realized was never going to meet a nice straight boy in Canada's gay capitol. So I moved to the East Side and the rest is history. How do you describe 20 or so years of your life especially when it takes you from you 20's into your (just barely) 40's. I kind of feel like it might be as interesting as having someone describe the strange dream they just had. Interesting to them but mind numbingly boring to me. I'll try to just stick to the interesting parts. haha

Yah, I'm grasping here. I should have some good stuff after our gig at the Country Fair Friday night. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures.

Stay tuned for exciting stories like, Why no babies? Un-wedded bliss. How close did we get to "making it" with our 90's original, alternative rock band? How to start a business with almost nothing. How do I define success? Do I think my life is interesting? I sure do.

Yup, I suuuuuuuuuure do...

Ummmmmm...

Why don't you tell me what you want to hear about next?

What kind of milk comes from a forgetful cow?

I grew up in the Fraser Valley, we moved to a brand new subdivision nestled in some of the most beautiful fertile farmland in the world. The valley is surrounded by mountains and our neighbourhood was surrounded on all sides by water including the mighty Fraser river and a series of sloughs and creeks. Besides all of the new houses and streets carved into what was formerly acres and acres of farmland there were also working farms, horses, cornfields and cows, lots of cows. Fortunately when they decided to subdivide this beautiful land they chose to keep a lot of it as it was, forever. Behind our back fence there was fields, fields of corn or corn stubble or cows, lots of cows. When the cows weren't grazing in the field they were in the barn or when the corn was growing in the field the cows lived at the farmers barn at his house abou 1/4 mile down the road.

Lots of cows means lots of cow shit. When the cows were living in the barn the farmer would gather all the shit and put it in some sort of holding tank. I was never in 4H or anything so I don't know what the farmer did to the shit to make it liquified but before the field was tilled and planted there would be a period of a couple of weeks when the farmer would spread his liquid gold on the field. Along came the Honey Wagon.

The Honey Wagon was a lime green contraption pulled behind the tractor that literally flung liquid cow shit in a majestic arc for a good 20 feet behind it. The farmer had so much shit that the field would get many, many layers. My Dad used to say that it was really the only way for the farmer to deal with the amount of poo the cows produced and was really more about trying to get rid of it than the positive effects it had on the corn field. The corn the farmer grew in that field was inedible to humans, it was called "cow corn" and it was chopped up and used to feed the cows. That's right it's The Circle Of Life, start humming cheesy Elton John song.....now.

I wish I could describe the eye watering stench that we had to put up with during this time. It was a choking, pungent, cloying smell and just when you thought you couldn't stand it any more it got stronger. You could actually tase it in the air. And yet, I think we kind of got used to it. I only started to complain about it after I had moved away from home and would go back to visit my parents. I could hardly stand it.

To this day I can not drive by a field of cows without honking. I honk the whole time I'm driving by and those cows hardly ever even look up. Smelly jerks.

I also cannot drive past a golf course without honking, but that's another story.

Does anybody feel like a burger?

Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?

I am at a loss this morning. It's down right cold in here and I wonder how we managed to get fall weather in spring. I'm having a hard time warming my brain up and writing something interesting.

Superman has become obsessed with my blog. I know, real writers and people who have been doing this before it was cool don't call it a blog. I call this a blog. Anyway, every time something even remotely interesting or funny or outrageous happens he asks me if I'm going to blog about it. When he misbehaves or acts like a jerk I warn him that I am going to blog about him. "I'm gonna say bad stuff about you on my blog." Then he quotes back nice things that I wrote about him. 'You said I was a lovely man."..and he is, when he's not being a jerk-ass.

Hi Honey! I know you're reading this.

Okay, how about a story?

When I was a really little kid I was obsessed with The Tommy Hunter Show.

"For 27 consecutive years on television "The Tommy Hunter Show" brought wholesome family entertainment into living rooms all across this great country.Whether they watched from a home on the rocky shores of Prince Edward Island, from a high rise apartment in downtown Toronto, or from a remote farm house on the Prairies, families came to know Tommy Hunter as a true friend. " They forgot to mention the Fraser Valley, British Columbia's Green Heart country suburbs. It was also the longest-running nationally-broadcast country music show in North America. (1965 -1992).

Tommy hunter really was my true friend. My Mother tells the story of how we would gather round the TV and devour The Tommy Hunter Show every week. I think it was on a weeknight and it went a little later than my official bedtime. The deal was when Tommy Hunter was over I had to go straight to be. I actually remember sitting with my nose up to the screen and when Tommy said "Good night everybody" I would say good night back and run to bed. I didn't need to be told twice.

Around this time my Dad worked as the assistant manager of Woolworth's department store. This was the only real department store in town and had been around for a long time. He also ran the sporting goods department there before he left and opened his own shop a few years later.

Anyway, it came to pass that Tommy Hunter was promoting a new album and was coming to Chilliwack to play and make some public appearances. My Mom and Dad told us we were going to get a chance to meet him in person and I was just so excited. I must have had a picture of him to sign or maybe a record but those things are long gone. Too bad. Tommy Hunter came to Woolworth's to meet the public an a Saturday afternoon and there were a lot of people there. I remember waiting for him and just being so excited to meet "Canada's Country Gentleman". I loved this man. When it was finally my turn to meet him, I walked up to him, he said hello and signed something for me and that was that.

My parents asked me what I thought about meeting Tommy Hunter. All I could say was, "That wasn't Tommy Hunter." They did everything they could to try and convince me but I was so sure I had been duped and all that waiting around was for nothing.

I think I was 5 or 6 and I guess without make-up and his fancy suit and guitar, and everybody looks taller on TV, or shorter, I don't know. He was just...different.

My Tommy Hunter was black and white. I didn't need to see him in colour with all his human qualities. I believe I chose to think that I never really met Tommy Hunter. Not my Tommy Hunter.

I still do love him.

Have you ever been disappointed meeting someone special in person?

Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?

When I was 15 years old my older brother started a band with two guys who are also brothers. The idea was that they would put together a country and western band for their sisters wedding. The guys used to rehearse in our basement because our parents were cool about that type of thing. They honestly enjoyed having assorted bad teenage bands in the basement on Saturday afternoons. Afterwords my Dad would say things like, "That drummer doesn't really know how to keep time too well." or "I think you need a new guitar player." He was usually right.

Being 15 and already being a somewhat experienced singer, I was hanging out a lot and learning all the words to the songs. Of course when the singer they had in mind for the band dropped out I told them I would sing for them until they found someone else. So there I was singing country classics at the age of 15, singing about heartache and love and drinkin' and never having experienced any of those things. I did develop a powerful crush on the drummer who was about 10 years older than me, but that's another story. After the first rehearsal the guys decided that I would be the new singer for The Ramblin' Rose Band and we had exactly one gig, the wedding, and we would learn enough material to do the whole reception.

When the wedding day finally arrived we were as ready as we could be. I had to sing the first waltz for the newly married couple, Can I Have This Dance (For The Rest Of My Life). I was so nervous in the beginning but as the night wore on it was getting more and more fun, the crowd was getting into it pretty heavily and I discovered my new calling. The reception ended up being an epic party that went late into the wee hours with lots of drinking and bridesmaids getting felt up and people telling each other what they REALLY thought of each other. I figure I sang for about 4 hours straight and I think when we ran out of material we just started at the beginning of the set list and played them all again. I loved every minute of it!

After the wedding the guys thought we should continue with the band and see if we could get some more gigs. One of the brothers lined up a bunch of shows in a row at a series of Legion Halls around the province that would require us to go on the road for a few days. I couldn't believe my luck. I mean this is exactly what I wanted to be doing. I figured I would go on the road for a while, who cares about school, I'd hone my chops and be a star by the time I could legally get in bars at 19. My parents were not so excited. They were dubious at first and never really agreed to any of it but things seemed to move forward anyway with me in denial and knowing it would all work out.

The weekend before the "tour" my brother was out for a jog at night in a local park. Running down a path, minding his own business when he was stopped short by an almost invisible chain pulled across the path. When your legs stop moving and the rest of you doesn't the natural thing to do is to throw your arms in front of you to stop your face from hitting the ground. When a person falls that hard with their arms straightened in front of them the results can be devastating. In his case it resulted in multiple fractures to BOTH elbows. He came home from the emergency room with both arms in casts crossed over his chest. Needless to say my Country and Western career was over for a while. The tour was cancelled.

Years later I sustained an almost identical injury to one of my elbows involving roller skates and homegrown. Sitting in the local Emergency room the doctor came in to give me the bad news. He said it was broken and it would require surgery eventually. I was crushed. In a bid to make me feel better the Doctor said, "Don't feel too bad, a couple of years ago I had a guy in here that broke BOTH his elbows!" He was talking about my brother.
Do you think things happen for a reason?