Do They Have Halloween In Canada?

yes they do.

scenes from a basement apartment

We the People...

Our somewhat limited storage space and tricky-shaped entrances have totally dictated what furniture we moved here with, and what was sold in a garage sale in Denver or left in storage in Michigan.

So, when the timing is right, we willingly participate in the friendly neighborhood commerce of the garage (or in our neighborhood, sidewalk) sale. Fortunately for us, the tradition is as equally Canadian as it is American, including low prices just asking to be bartered even lower. Which my husband did in order to snag this dresser for me. Because my clothes are piled in wire crates on the closet floor like a six-year-old.

That'll do.

What's funny is we can't escape how intertwined some of these cultural events are between our north american countries. Check out the drawer liners.

Bryan and my youngest stepbrother took one look and started singing Schoolhouse Rock's song for the Preamble to the Constitution. We are barely 80 km/50 mi from the U.S. border, but somehow it's mysterious and funny to me that this dresser found its way to our Canadian apartment.

all things moist and muggy

Okay, I can admit it. I took the high, thin, humidity-free atmosphere of Denver for granted. In my mind, summer was still seatbelt-burning hot with or without humidity, and the dry winters left my skin as dry and easily split as onion skins. The house we rented came equipped with a swamp cooler- simultaneously the grossest and most apt name for an appliance I have ever come across. Anyone living in the Midwest (or anywhere less than a mile above sea level, really) could only laugh at the need for a machine that puts cold moisture into the air and shoots it INSIDE your house. Outside of high altitude or desert climates, humanity is engaged in a year-long effort to suck all that moisture out and away from living spaces.

And now that we're back in it, that humidity is undeniable. And it doesn't get much more moisture-prone than our native North American climate, in a basement, with no dehumidifier handy. Doors have swelled in their jambs and won't shut. Baseboards are curving away from walls like a caterpillar in mid-hunch. Glasses bead with sweat the minute they're filled with anything cooler than room temperature. Salt and sugar, even in their snug tins, clump together in chunks. And we have entered the ritual of two cold showers a day- sometimes three. We move the box fan from room to room with us. We find Toby sprawled on the cool slate tile in the dark bathroom. We exert minimal energy. We sweat anyway.

And even when Denver was broiling away during the day (a mile closer to the sun means you are bound to get a wee bit sweatier!), the chill of high-altitude nights was a gift. The worst of the heat always left with the sun, and on the good nights a breeze followed. Sometimes the wet wool blanket of humidity feels like it's trapping the heat and holding it to the ground, wrestler-style, and even after the sun goes down the relief is minimal.

Is it any wonder that after growing up in this sort of environment, autumn is my favorite season (one that is just not the same in the eastern suburbs of Denver- THAT I am not backing down on)?

One thing that has been helping that I've never tried before this summer is watermelon juice, with a splash of gin and a slice of lime (or as my husband has named it, 'watermelgin juice!'). But it is so, so refreshing.

Watermelgin juice and box fans are our best friends these days, when all we can do is lie low and wait it out.

In the crazed aftermath of disaster

There was an earthquake today, and I MISSED IT.

A 5.0 earthquake rippled out from an epicenter somewhere north of Ottawa, as far south and east as Quebec City and NYC, and as far west as Milwaukee and Chicago (as confirmed by my dad, who was at work downtown).

How you miss an earthquake, I cannot explain, but everyone upstairs skipped down claiming the building shook and maybe we should check for explosions. Turns out it was just some intraplate action. No big deal.

I stumbled upon this live blog set up at the Globe & Mail website, (at the bottom of the article) and for 2 1/2 hours I found it both fascinating and entertaining. The main first chunk is mostly comments from readers, with some interaction from the facilitator, but eventually they interviewed a couple of geology professors, fielding questions from readers. As one of the commenters put it, "The ability to talk to each other and talk to experts in tandem is exactly what's been missing from real-time coverage."

I don't know if this is a common tool for the media, and it's probably the most useful for extreme weather occurrences like this one, but is live blogging widespread? I'm sure people sit on message boards during World Cup games or red carpet events or political speeches and spout outrageous opinions and pick fights-- but what about events that benefit from the perspective of an expert? And the opportunity to have a question answered by that expert within minutes? I trust that the Globe & Mail is actually speaking to a professor, as opposed to the facilitator of a fan website making nonsense up in their mom's basement somewhere. That's the difference in useful live blogging to me, and I'm curious if it's going on in more places than I think.

second day of summer

what our summer looks like so far...

the glory of the green bins

In addition to trash and recycling pickup, Hamilton also implemented an organic waste pickup in 2006, intended to divert compostable organic waste from their rapidly rising landfills into reusable compost. It seems that they were motivated mostly by the lack of space to get rid of garbage, but it's having more diverse and positive results than that, which is cool. It makes sense in that it means (according to Hamilton's statistics, anyway) that up to 40% of residential trash could be diverted to farming or landscaping instead of taking up space with general garbage; it subtracts negative elements and adds positive elements elsewhere, simultaneously.

And seriously, from my perspective, it has literally cut our garbage volume in half. Of course, we're at a particularly frugal phase in life so we're just buying less stuff in general, but still. It takes a fraction more of my time to pay attention to what waste gets thrown in which bin, but it makes a remarkable difference.

The Green Bins take everything from fruit peels and egg shells to meat scraps, wax paper, popcorn bags, those greasy pizza boxes that recycling WON'T take, coffee grounds, dryer lint, and pet hair. What I appreciate is that the City takes a lot of materials that you shouldn't use in your own home composting, like meat scraps, dairy products, and ashes.

Other cities in Ontario have similar programs, as well as parts of New Zealand and the U.K. I'm not sure about the United States, though. Has anyone heard of programs like these in their home towns? I can only imagine the benefits once the initial costs were out of the way- the room saved in landfills, as well as the shared benefits of all that combined compostable material for farms, parks, gardens and yards... such possibilities.

A patriot questioning patriotism

On my way to work this morning, I landed on a radio station (and now I can't even remember which one) in the middle of an absolute rant from the two morning hosts. They were tearing apart a column written by Gil LeBreton of the Star Telegram in Fort Worth, Texas. And they were having themselves full-on, angry, meltdown conniptions over it.

The column basically criticizes Canada's pride, self-promotion, and patriotism in the media during the course of the Olympics in Vancouver; most insensitively, LeBreton draws comparison after comparison to the 1936 Games in Berlin, casting Canadians as the Nazis. These thoughts alone render him tactless and remarkably short-sighted in my mind, but he lost additional points by complaining about how self-focused Canadian publications, tv networks, and Canadians themselves were.

Now, I can't truly take up this argument with him because he was in Vancouver in person and I wasn't, so his observations are his own and I can't dispute that. But I did watch Olympic coverage on CTV, as well as NBC, and I can't come up with a better way to say it: is this ever the pot calling the kettle black. Did anyone watch NBC's coverage in Beijing, which in essence was the Michael Phelps Fan Hour(after hour after hour)? What, there were other events not taking place in a pool? I had no idea!

From my perspective, American primetime coverage basically sticks to three or four shining heroes, a fraction of the events, and only occasional, brief features on athletes from anywhere else. (I haven't read a newspaper regularly in a long time, unfortunately, so I can't speak to that.) LeBreton laments, "But for the most part, the most underappreciated soul at these Olympics was an American or a European on the medals stand."

Wow. I don't know whether to laugh or yell at my computer screen. Americans are never underappreciated, because we make sure of it ourselves, which sometimes ironically dead ends into less-than-enthusiastic international opinion. You should have heard these guys on the radio. Not exactly thrilled, and directed at America as a whole, not just this one man. And it's not just them; the Star Telegram has received comments and letters to the editor aplenty in response to this column.

I guess it boils down to this: Americans are not the only people entitled to national pride. Our patriotism is a beautiful and binding connection for our country, and especially a country as diverse as ours. And if people like LeBreton recoil when other nations display a similar confidence and enthusiasm, that's unfortunate. I can understand Canada's efforts to rouse some visible (and audible) patriotism surrounding the Olympics on their home soil, especially with its loud, swaggering North American brother watching. Why does LeBreton fault them for that, while ignoring very similar attitudes within the borders of his own country? I'm baffled.

what a game, eh?

Anna and I just got done watching the Gold-medal hockey game between Canada and the U.S. What a game, eh?

The only comparable experience that I can offer is watching a football, or soccer, game in a British pub. Possibly in a sense that was foreign to me, there was a sense of national pride and devotion attributed to a sporting event. We watched this Olympic game amongst our Canadian housemates. We, of course, were pulling for our home country (I wore my USA Olympic shirt) and had a ton of fun.

When the U.S. scored that tying goal with 30 seconds left, I just laughed in how awesome the game had turned out. 

More fun, however, was the inner turmoil our landlords had when their kids were demanding their attention as Canada was in overtime. We laughed at how in Canada, hockey just might prevail over parental duties...  joking of course.

While "we" lost the game, it certainly was an experience Anna and I won't forget soon. I just wish that the American team could have smiled as they received their medals.  Silver isn't that bad.

we don't have a dishwasher.

So, this has become a part of daily life.

We are both guilty of letting messes collect, clutter, and multiply until we can't take it any more and launch ourselves into a cleaning frenzy. This was the result of one such frenzy. I'm pretty sure the dishes included the aftermath of a chocolate pie made from scratch, several rounds of coffee, Toby's bowls, and about five meals including tupperwares full of leftovers.

We aren't alone in the dishwasher-free-zone; none of the three families living above us have one, either.

We're the only family unit with a dog, though, and while everybody does the wash-and-dry routine, not everybody experiences this routine:

daily routine from Anna Dyer on Vimeo.

I am fully aware of my dorktastic sources of entertainment. There's no saving me.

Go Americanada!

While Vancouver is probably further away from Hamilton than, say, Colorado, I still feel a bit closer to the excitement of the Olympics being in Canada. Fortunately we still get NBC's coverage, so we are able to watch both the Canadian and American highlights.

So, in many respects, GO CANADA:


And in many other ways, GO USA!!

The caption for the first pic is: "Who lives in Canada? 'I do!!'"
And the second : "Ssshh. I'm secretly routing for the States..."

Thanks to Ashley and Mike for the apparel. They were included in a lovely care package.

I wear them both, but not the USA one in public. That's not how you make friends.

Oh, and I think that Toby believes I'm going to play fetch in the second picture. He got excited.

Get Your Timmies

This is Bryan posting now. Anna is asleep and I've taken over the blog.

I've decided to take this opportunity to discuss one of my favorite features of our new town - Tim Hortons.

While we were living in Colorado, I always felt that there was one major flaw: there was no legit drive-thru coffee option. While they had plenty of Starbucks, Caribou Coffee and well, more Starbucks locations, these rarely had drive-thru windows and none were all that great. When Anna and I visit family in Illinois, there are plenty of Dunkin' Donuts locations (and their coffee is brilliant). Likewise, when we visit family in Saginaw, there are plenty of Tim Hortons locations.

Well, here in Hamilton there is a Tim Hortons on virtually every corner (although, not any of the corners closest to us... but that's a fluke). In fact, the very first Tim Hortons was in Hamilton, Ontario. Now, it has taken over Ontario, most of Canada and is infiltrating the U.S. (Saginaw has three locations! - Saginaw doesn't have three of anything).

Tim Hortons is literally a Canadian phenomenon and has become closely connected with Canadian culture. Everyone drinks it. And, I have noticed, it has produced its own special words and phrases. So, a term like "double, double" (which means two creams and two sugars) are common when ordering coffee anywhere. Earlier in my Canadian commuting, I incorrectly ordered at a Tim Hortons. I asked for a "regular coffee with Splenda." I meant a "regular" as in, "not decaf." But, "regular" means a non-decaf coffee with cream and sugar. The lady taking my order asked me to repeat myself. She then said, "Then you don't want a 'regular,' you want cream and Splenda?" I was confused.

Since Tim Hortons is so huge in Canada, a trendy person like myself finds himself in a conflict. It's not cool to do what everyone else does or to shop at the company which dominates the market. So in the U. S. going to Tim Hortons can be seen as rebellion against Starbucks. Here in Hamilton, Starbucks are out-numbered like 10 to 1. Buying a Tim Hortons coffee is supporting the man.

And yet I it's just so damn good. Our Canadian friends, the Boskers, call it "liquid crack" (or something along those lines).

Oh, and P.S. Canadians like hockey. FYI.

Happy Family Day!

This holiday has technically only been observed in Ontario since February of 2008. Arizona is the only U.S. state that observes it, but they've been doing it since 1978. How did I miss out on this my whole Illinois life? (Although, we had President's day, which is for all practical purposes the same thing.) Literally everything is closed today- schools and offices, and even grocery stores and gas stations. I, on the other hand, had my first (training, really) half-day of work and I drove past a park and frozen lake crawling with kids playing hockey. So that's where they all are!

Or, if you would like to spend Family Day doing something other than playing hockey, try the local family nudist resort. Yep, it's real. (Here's a question: why is a single female daily pass $10 less than a single male? Thoughts?)

Sunshine State to Land of D-Deficiency

Well, here's a first for me.
"...the one vitamin that is most often deficient in Canadians - Vitamin D."

Their commericals pop up occasionally on local TV channels. Maybe this is marketed elsewhere in the U.S. and I've just missed it, but Vitamin D deficiency would NOT be an issue in Denver.

cadence and fervor

This morning over blueberry walnut pancakes, I met a woman from our neighborhood who has her share of stories to tell (although, what person over the age of seventy doesn't have stories?). She is one of those marvelous people who connects to younger generations effortlessly, without sacrificing her own history and wisdom and perspective. This way of reaching out isn't common, at least in my experience. And I wonder if the lack of it from both younger people and older people leads to the apparent disregard we have for the lives of our senior citizens sometimes. But that's a tangent.

Mrs. T recently lost her husband and described the process of writing his life story to us. Many of her grandchildren are too young to have known him, so she wants to bridge that gap with her memories. He was a talented carpenter and built their home from the ground up, and she wants them to know he had "gold in his hands." Her softspoken love for him is simple and alive, and I don't doubt that her descendants will see that in her writing.

Her descriptions of her husband made me think of a chunk of a book I have been browsing through: Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor. In the introduction, he writes:

"My dad and I were as different as could be (I made sure of that), but his life had a clarity that I find in poetry. He was a carpenter, and if I close my eyes, I can see him, thirtyish, handsome, sawdust in his dark hair, running a 2x4 through a circular saw, trimming it, holding it up to the studs, pulling a nail out from between his front teeth, taking the hammer from the loop on his pants where it hung, and pounding the nail, three whacks, and a tap for good luck. This simple act, repeated a thousand times as he built the house up over our heads, had the cadence and fervor of poetry. He didn’t earn his daily bread sitting in a conference room, manipulating people, moving big wads of cash around, spinning a web of hogwash: compared to that, his life was poetry. When he bowed his head and gave thanks before a meal, it was always the same words, the same cadence. When he took a chicken by the legs and head, there was a plain cadence to that. I hear that whack in poetry."

I love that poetry does not always have to portray an epic adventure or a tragic love affair. It can just as easily give voice to our everyday moments and commemorate the simple but extraordinary people we have lost. Our stories come in so many different and surprising forms, and for me it never gets old.

a new necessity

The last few days around here have been just mild enough to wipe out the last traces of snow, and trickle down rain here and there. Never mind that it's still January in Canada; Mother Nature behaves however she feels, apparently. But this is bad news for a couple of newbies with a dog that must be walked 3-4 times a day. My Uggs and Ugg wannabes just aren't cutting it. After 15 minutes outside, it's like walking with two soggy loaves of bread strapped to my feet. It's going to be quite a while before we have any disposable income, but when we finally do, one of my first frivolous purchases is definitely going to be a pair of Wellies. Something like this:
Cute AND practical! (Come on, the color is 'Aubergine.') Not to mention, they could very well come in handy even when I'm not sloshing around town with Toby. I may get the chance to get involved in a community garden this spring, which could be amazing. And my pride just won't allow me to wear Crocs, even though I know, I KNOW, they are great for gardening. If the community garden comes together and I sweat too much in the knee-high Wellies, we'll reconsider. Because my feet sweat a lot. I can admit it. But, one problem at a time.

bon hiver

As much as I love winter with its clean air, quiet beauty, and wool-and-flannel-inducing wardrobe, moving in winter is no skip through the snow. Between college living situations, getting married, and moving across the country once or twice, I've moved in just about every weather scenario; and I can only remember one other time I moved in the winter. It was late January of 2004 and my dad helped me clear out my dorm room before I left for a semester in London. Over a foot of snow had fallen and I remember us tromping in and out, in and out, trailing snow as we went. But, that was one afternoon. We moved to Hamilton in roughly three trips, and we encountered some nasty lengths of blustery highway with a fully loaded trailer more than once.

Despite the messiness of moving in snow and wind and ice, the biggest concern for me has been our dog, Toby. We already knew his adjustment process was going to be slow, having uprooted him once already, but now that we're in an urban environment for the first time in our adult lives, it's taking him a little longer this time around. He's a 70-lb. black lab who lives, and I mean LIVES to run. He probably has roughly 2% body fat, and it's the dead of winter. Of course, it's only three days in, so he'll get there. And there's a leash-free park in the area that we'll have to try out soon. But it would have been easier in warmer weather; walks would be less hampered by the layers we humans have to wrap ourselves in. Daylight wouldn't drain away quite so quickly. We wouldn't worry about jagged ice under wet paws.

Today, while we were on our mid-day walk through our quiet alley and around the block, the chill wasn't quite as sharp and icicles were dribbling off every roof. While we were skirting puddles I realized, even though it's only mid-January, how wonderful it will be to watch spring unfurl through our neighborhood. I haven't seen it alive yet, so I have no idea what's coming- which trees will blossom, which yards will reveal daffodils and crocuses, where urban birds will weave their nests. Winter's beauty is cut short in this environment, where traffic noise comes and goes like tides and salt encrusts anything that moves. But the days are getting longer, minute by minute, and warmth is coming, bringing just a bit more freedom for us and for a very lively dog.