Apr
29
I’m here to issue a first ever Not To Be Trusted With Knives correction! After I posted about how the city of Kelowna tore down the statue of Ogopogo that I love to visit , my friend Sandra emailed to let me know that it was actually a *different* Ogopogo statue – a giant Ogopogo head, in fact – that was part of a waterpark elsewhere in Kelowna. My beloved Ogopogo is still standing!
And there was much rejoicing!
Long live the Ogopogo!
Apr
27
So I’m pretty sad that the city of Kelowna smashed up the Ogopogo statue. I first met the illustrious Ogopogo on my first trip to Kelowna, when I went there with a band of travelling scientists. True story.
Me and a band of traveling scientists, sitting on a lake monster. As one does.
Whenever I went to Kelowna after that, I’d always go see the Ogopogo and it always made me smile. And I didn’t even realize that the last time I was there would be the last time I would see dear Ogo.
This photo is not actually the last time I saw the Ogopogo, as I didn’t take a photo the last time I was there. What was I thinking??
Apparently Kelowna decided that they want to put some sort of a water park there for kids and that it’s too dangerous for kids to climb on things and so they smashed the poor, innocent, unsuspecting lake monster to smithereens.
Goodbye, sweet lake monster. You are missed.
Feb
11
Each week in the newsletter at work, they do a short profile of someone working on the project. Just a few questions, like “What’s the last book you read?”, “What’s your favourite place you’ve ever visited?”, and “If you could have dinner with someone, alive or dead, who would it be?” A few weeks ago, they did my profile and my answer to that last question came to me immediately: My dad. He’s been gone six years now, and I really wonder what he’d think of all the things going on in the world these days. I wonder what he’d have gotten up to in his retirement years.
He’s been gone six years now, and I still think of him all the time. When I was fixing something around the condo, I was thinking about how he taught me how to use a screwdriver; when I shot two pucks just over the net in my game on Wednesday, I just wanted to call to tell him about it because I know he’d understand the mixture of pride (I lifted the puck that high!) and frustration (so close to scoring, but yet so far!); when I avoided a collision the other day on the way home from work when someone tried to change lanes without looking at their blind spot and so just swerved right at me, I thought both about how he’d taught me to drive *and* that I was screaming at the other driver just like he would have been.
Six years gone now, but never forgotten and always loved.
My dad and two of his brothers (Bob and Greg).
Dec
29
My mom found this teddy bear from my childhood and gave it to me while I was in Ontario for the holidays:
My sister had one like this that was bigger – his name was Mr. Moveable Bear, because you can move his arms and legs at the at the joints1. Mine was named “Baby Mr. Moveable Bear”, for obvious reasons2. I need to mend his paws, as the stuffing is starting to come out. Interestingly, his stuffing is made up of old nylons! Note to self: I’ve now found a use for my nylons once they get runs in them!
Nov
16
Can you believe that it was a decade ago that my PhD was bestowed upon me? A *decade*!!
I just cannot believe it has been 3,653 days since I walked across the convocation stage in my fancy shoes, my garish pink robe, and my puffy hat and officially became Dr. Beth. A lot has happened in those 10 years. I went from being an unemployed couch surfer with $72K of student debt to a job having, home-owning, cat-owning, student debt-free published author and absent-minded professor(ish) who added five more letters after my name beyond the PhD.
Also, would you believe that in all that time I’ve only once been called “not a real doctor”1 and that was actually just last week? True story.
Aug
4
When my dad was young, he and his brothers would go hunting with my grandpa. My dad’s older brother, Bob, used to say that if he died, he would be reincarnated as a duck and then one day when his brothers were out hunting, they would take aim at a duck, but would miss and the duck would laugh at them. My Uncle Bob died in a boating accident when he was 21. And then one day my dad and his brothers were out hunting and they took aim at a duck and were sure they had the duck in their sights, but when they fired, they missed and the duck quacked and quacked in the duck-like way that sounds like a laugh. Personally, I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife or reincarnation, but I always loved that story.
My dad used to raise pigeons for racing and every time I see a pigeon – which is quite often where I live – I think of my dad. In Pokémon Go, the most common Pokémon seems to be Pidgey, the pigeon-like Pokémon. Sometimes when you throw a PokéBall at a Pidgey (which is how you catch a Pokémon) you miss and I would swear that the Pidgey is laughing at me.
Feb
11
When my dad was young, he was in the Sea Cadets1. And when you got in trouble in Sea Cadets – which for my Dad was, apparently, quite frequently – they made you do chores. Now, my dad hated to do the dishes2, so when he was assigned to dish duty, he made a big show of playing with the bubbles and pretending to have lots of fun. “That’s it, Snow! You aren’t getting dish duty anymore!” Unlike dishes, he loved to peel potatoes. So when he got in trouble and was assigned to potato peeling duty, he made a big show of “Aww, man! Not peeling potatoes!!!”, and so henceforth whenever he got in trouble, it was off to peel potatoes that he went. Given that, as previously mentioned, he got in trouble a fair bit, when he got some time off3, he went into town and bought a potato peeler, because they only gave you a knife with which to peel the potatoes. A potato peeler is, of course, much easier on the hands and you lose less of the potato, so you have to peel fewer potatoes – and it takes much less time – when you use a peeler than when you use a knife. So when he was on potato peeling duty, he would take the bag of potatoes up on the ship’s deck, quickly peel all he needed to peel with the potato peeler that he had hidden in his pocket, but he’d put a bunch of the peeled ones in the bag with a few unpeeled one on top to make it look like he was only partway done. And then he would sit and relax in the sun and when his superior came by to check on him, he’d have a knife in his hand and would appear to be peeling the potatoes in the amount of time it should take if one were peeling potatoes with a knife.
Three years ago today, we lost my Dad. Today, I’m thinking of him telling that potato peeling story – which I heard many times during my life – and I’m smiling at his cleverness and how he liked to know that he was sticking it to The Man. I miss you, Daddy, and I think of you every single day, especially when I back into a parking spot4, put on my hockey gear5, or peel a potato.
Jan
3
I’ve been watching a lot of the World Juniors Hockey Championship Tournament this year, since for the first time in eleventy billion years I have cable TV1. The games go by pretty fast compared to NHL games, as there are a lot fewer TV timeouts, but when there are commercials, they’ve played a lot of commercials from the Canadian Tire Jumpstart charity ((As per usual, I have no affiliation with this organization – I just think what they are doing is awesome and wanted to share it here on ye old blog)) , which have been totally tugging at my heartstrings. I can’t find any of the current ads online, but here’s one from 2007 that will give you a sense of what they are like:
Obviously, I’m a big fan of sports and I was lucky enough that my family was able to afford to put me into sports when I was a kid – softball, skiing, and swimming were my main ones, but I also played some extracurricular sports at school: volleyball, track & field, and cross country skiing2. And I got a lot of benefit from this – keeping fit (and setting me up for a lifetime of physical activity), mastering skills, and learning about teamwork, for example. So these commercials about how many families can’t afford to put their kids in sports make me sad! I can’t even imagine what it must be like for a kid to want to take swimming lessons or play baseball or join a hockey team and not to be able to because their family can’t afford it. As I said on Twitter, well played Jumpstart! Those commercials definitely convinced me that some of my 2014 charitable donations should go to this organization. And I also wanted to spread the word about them here, in case others are looking for a good organization to donate to.
Also, watching World Juniors makes me think of my dad, as he loved watching that tournament. And my dad was not a big fan of charity as a whole, because he was concerned about how much of the money went to administrators as opposed to the cause you thought you were donating to3. So I was pleasantly surprised when I checked out the Canadian Tire Jumpstart website that 100% of donations go directly to families in need to pay for their kids’ registration fees, equipment, and transportation to their sport, as the Canadian Tire Corporation itself funds the administrative costs of running of the program. So I feel like supporting this charity is a nice way of honouring my dad.
Dec
25
The best thing I got on my trip wasn’t even a Christmas present. It was something that my sister gave me when I first got here – my dad’s old French fry cutter.
My brother-in-common-law is renovating my mom’s basement and while they were clearing out the old stuff, my sister asked him to save this for me. Apparently, when they got it, it was so rusty that they didn’t think they could save it, but after a lot of hard work scrubbing off the rust, it was, in fact, salvageable. I’d actually been thinking about it just before I came here and I had been assuming that it would have been rusted beyond recognition and would have have been unceremoniously thrown out.
When she gave it to me, honestly, I nearly cried. Not just because I really wanted this French fry cutter, but because it showed that my sister knows me so well that she knew how much it meant to me.
This French fry cutter, which we think my dad got from a restaurant when it closed down, holds a lot of great memories of childhood for me. As you may or may not know, I love French fries. As you also may or may not know, my Dad made the best French fries in the entire world. He had this French fry cutter attached to his work bench in the basement – he’d skin and clean a potato, put it into the cutter, and bring down the handle, and it would slice the potato into the perfect size French fries.
I have many a fond memory of the French fries my Dad would make1. At one point, he learned that the guy who ran the local chip wagon used peanut oil in his deep frier, so my dad got peanut oil and omg, those fries were delicious. Sometimes we’d have fries with grilled cheese sandwiches, where the grilled cheese sandwiches were made in the waffle iron. Sometimes we’d have French fry sandwiches, because there is nothing fries need more than to be stuffed between two slices of Wonder bread with Imperial margarine on them. And sometimes we’d just have a basket of fries, with vinegar and salt on them. But no matter how we ate them, I’d always be in heaven.
Thanks, Nancy and Jeff, for this most thoughtful and touching gift.
Dec
23
As previously mentioned, my favourite Christmas tradition is Baking Day. But another tradition we had when we were little was getting a new nightgown or PJs for Christmas Eve. I was reminded of this today as my sister and brother-in-common-law braved the icy streets and the even more treacherous mall-two-days-before-Christmas to acquire new PJs for my niece and nephew.
Thinking about this tradition reminded me of one year that, for some reason that no one seems to remember, we didn’t have any new PJs on Christmas Eve. My sister and I were very upset when we discovered this, but my Dad came up with a solution. At the time, he worked from Mack Truck and played on their hockey team. And he just happened to have the team jerseys at our house at the time, so my sister and I wore hockey jerseys to bed that Christmas Eve! We both have very fond memories of that year’s PJs!
And on a bit of a tangent, here’s a picture of me on Christmas morning when I was about five years old wearing my new Christmas housecoat!
