Happy Solstice, and Wassail!

The snow is still com­ing down as I write this, at past mid­night. It has been snow­ing since mid-day and shows no sign of let­ting up. Pam and I decided we would cel­e­brate both this unusual (for Van­cou­ver, any­way) weather, as well as the Win­ter Sol­stice (which I blogged about back on the 9^th of this month) by going out into the weather, embrac­ing the white­ness that is envelop­ing our city.
We took a route that had been cited in the Secret Lantern Society’s Win­ter Sol­stice Lantern Fes­ti­val web site, from the Lau­rel Street over­pass (that lets you go from 7^th Avenue all the way down to the False Creek sea­wall). The scene was one of those mag­i­cal win­ter nights, when every­thing is trans­formed by the falling snow and Christ­mas lights:

At the end of our walk, we ended up join­ing some of the other Sol­stice Cel­e­brants on Granville Island. Here’s a video that I took of some of our trip. The Flip cam­era did a fair job with the dim light. I exported the video, con­verted it to DV for­mat and edited it in iMovie:

We returned home to a feast of roast chicken (I had roasted it just before we left), mashed yams and cab­bage cooked with double-smoked sausage. We were hun­gry, and tired, but the food and a lit­tle red wine hit the spot.
The only thing we didn’t have was actual Was­sail, but I did find a recipe online at The Acci­den­tal Hedo­nist:

Was­sail
2 pints and 1/4 cup brown ale (win­ter ale and scot­tish ale will also suf­fice)
3–4 cin­na­mon sticks
4 cloves
Zest from 1/2 lemon
4 apples
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup port
1/2 tea­spoon ground cin­na­mon
1/4 tea­spoon ground all spice
1/4 tea­spoon ground car­da­mon
1/2 tea­spoon ground ginger

Pre­heat your oven to 350 degrees F.

In a large sauce pan, pour in 2 pints of ale. Add the cin­na­mon sticks, lemon zest and cloves and bring to a sim­mer over low heat.

Take an apple, and score it with a knife around the cir­cum­fer­ence of the apple. Place in a bak­ing dish. Repeat this step for all of the apples. Cover with one cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup of ale, and all of the port. Cover bak­ing dish and place in oven, cook­ing for 30 minutes.

While apples are bak­ing, place remain­ing sugar and spices into the sauce pan, ensur­ing it’s well mixed.

When apples are done bak­ing, place entire con­tents of bak­ing dish into sauce pan. Allow to cook over a low heat for another 30–40 minutes.

Serve hot, one-two ladles into your favorite mug.

Serves 6–8

Here’s to the begin­ning of Win­ter, but at the same time, the start of the Earth’s jour­ney back to longer days ahead of us.

The Countdown Begins

It’s Decem­ber, and that means 2 things: 1) a busy social cal­en­dar and 2) the count­down until the Win­ter Sol­stice. First, about the par­ties and other cel­e­bra­tions, we actu­ally started the sea­son in late Novem­ber at the Narvey’s who held a hol­i­day party plus view­ing of the Canucks game (we lost, but Pam won the pool!). This past week­end we had a nice time with Matt and Oana, who this year decided to cel­e­brate both Kram­pus and Saint Nicholas Day, since Oana’s sis­ter Nico­letta has him as her Saint (I’m not pre­cisely sure how that works, but I guess I’d get Saint David, the patron Saint of Wales, who has his day on March 1, right?) There was lots of great food, includ­ing the tra­di­tional stuffed cab­bages, a Roman­ian spe­cialty that Matt made along with cheeses, sausages and breads. I remem­ber my grand­mother, who was Russ­ian, used to make the best cab­bage rolls or  ‘Prachas’, as I remem­ber her call­ing them (also known as Gołąbki in Pol­ish). Pam and I brought some veg­gies with spicy peanut dip­ping sauce (not exactly tra­di­tional, but prob­a­bly a good foil to all the heav­ier, East­ern Euro­pean fare). This com­ing Thurs­day is the recep­tion and cel­e­bra­tion of the Best of 604 Awards, a brand new event that reminds me that we have a ton of great blog­gers deserv­ing of recog­ni­tion in this area. I’m thrilled that I actu­ally know sev­eral of the nom­i­nees and hope they all win in their categories.

12 Days until we Start Mov­ing Toward the Light Again

Every year, around this week or so, I’ve got­ten in the habit of count­ing down to Decem­ber 21^st, the Win­ter Sol­stice or short­est day of the year. It’s a turn­ing point, as if we’re all tak­ing a stroll toward a darker and colder end of the solar sys­tem and sniff­ing the air, and then turn­ing around and head­ing back (I know, it’s not exactly that, but it helps me visu­al­ize bet­ter what’s going on).

We haven’t stopped watch­ing US news, a habit we picked up when we were fever­ishly glued to the run-up to the elec­tion. After that media extrav­a­ganza, it’s been the steady melt-down of the US econ­omy that has held us with mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion.  Of course, there have been some reports of eco­nomic trou­ble here, such as the news this morn­ing that the Bank of Canada had dropped it’s key lend­ing inter­est rate by .75 basis points to 1.5%, which is report­edly the low­est this bench­mark has been in a half a cen­tury. Nev­er­the­less, there doesn’t seem to be quite the tone of panic, fear and dread that we see and hear from the south of us.

So although it’s pretty gloomy out­side (heavy rain, wind and tem­per­a­tures that are slowly falling toward the freez­ing mark), we know that there will be that turn­ing point, and we know exactly when it starts, at least in terms of the num­ber of hours of pos­si­ble sun­light. On Decem­ber 22, the day will be a minute or so longer, and we are jour­ney­ing back to Spring, and even­tu­ally Sum­mer. My ace in the hole is that I know that as early as Feb­ru­ary (Feb­ru­ary! My yearly neme­sis!), there will likely be some cherry blos­soms here.  All we have to do is hang on another 20 days or so and we start to see signs of Spring!

Will the Inau­gu­ra­tion of Pres­i­dent Elect Obama a month later be the turn­ing point? Wasn’t that was his Elec­tion Speech was about ? (‘This was the moment’) Or didn’t I hear that phrase some­where much ear­lier in his campaign?

I guess we can wait for the turn­around, but the prospect of hun­ker­ing down for one or two years is not very appeal­ing. Life is short, and the inex­orable pace of move­ment on this scale makes plot­ting a turn­ing point some­thing that can only be done years later, when some his­to­rian or econ­o­mist, por­ing over the num­bers and trends points to a date and says ‘Aha! That was when things began to turn around.’ For us liv­ing through it, the eco­nomic sol­stice isn’t some­thing that we can count down to.

A Casu­alty of Eco­nomic Winter

There are also per­ma­nent losses; some com­pa­nies and insti­tu­tions that won’t live through this eco­nomic Win­ter to see Spring. Recently I learned that Out of Town News, the spir­i­tual and archi­tec­tural cen­tre of Har­vard Square (it even had the address of Zero Har­vard Square), will be clos­ing for­ever on Jan­u­ary 31 of next year. While I know that the days of news­pa­pers and news­stands are num­bered, I’m sure that the down­turn in the econ­omy has­tened the end of this insti­tu­tion, which along with the Wordsworth book­store (already gone for years — it closed even before we left), was some­thing that I’ll always see in my mind’s eye when I think of Cam­bridge. I have to admit that I only stopped in there a a half-dozen of times in the decade and a half I lived in Cam­bridge and the prices were nearly as out­ra­geous for mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers as they are at May­fair News near us now on Broad­way (It’s prob­a­bly not their fault; mag­a­zines in Canada are crazy expen­sive!). Per­haps Out of Town News was on the wane long before we even took notice.

Besides the cherry blos­soms, I’m look­ing for­ward to the fin­ish of some new addi­tions (a new Whole Foods on Broad­way! Woo hoo!), and even a new street­car line from Granville Island to Sci­ence world, along with tons of other new con­struc­tion for this city in this spring, and in the com­ing year in prepa­ra­tion for the 2010 Olympics. In the mean­time, time to head down to (hun­ker down in?) our win­dow­less but warm gym in the base­ment to lis­ten to pod­casts and pedal on the sta­tion­ary bike, think­ing of those new places I’ll actu­ally be cycling to in a few months.

Summer, Finally

Not so Hazy and Not so Lazy

Maybe it’s because we have our first bona-fide day where you could go out with­out a jacket. Maybe it’s because the sun truly doesn’t set until nearly around 8:30. Maybe it’s because Granville Mar­ket is brim­ming over with sweet local straw­ber­ries, most of the spot prawns and aspara­gus are past, and the heir­loom toma­toes are start­ing to appear. All of the above is con­tribut­ing to a feel­ing that we have finally passed into the sum­mer season.

For me, being between contracts/jobs and with some time on my hands, it means that I can enjoy some of this, although I’m cer­tainly not spend­ing my days at the beach. Next week, being the Canada Day and Fourth of July hol­i­day week, both Pam and I are going to get a lit­tle sum­mer break, with a trip to Whistler with my brother and his fam­ily. We’ve been look­ing for­ward to that for a long time.

Plan­ning for the Autumn Demise of Clas­si­cal Radio in Vancouver

Sum­mer is also the time when a few things end. This morn­ing was the last time that Tom Allen would do his ‘cage match’, a whim­si­cal fea­ture of ‘Music and Com­pany’ where he would pit one piece of music against another and call for a vote. This week’s final cage match theme was: ‘With a bang or a whim­per’, since it will be the last one of these bits of fun…forever. Rep­re­sent­ing an end­ing with a bang was Chabrier’s ‘Ah Hur­rah’ from the Opera, Le Roi Mal­gre Lui. The oppo­nent (rep­re­sent­ing a ‘whim­per’ or soft end­ing) was the last move­ment from Haydn’s clever Sym­phony No. 45, ‘The Farewell Sym­phony’ (where one by one, the musi­cians leave the stage until there are only 2 first vio­lins left to end the piece, a clev­erly chore­o­graphed hint to Haydn’s patron, the Prince Niko­laus Ester­házy that his court musi­cians as well as his com­poser were all home­sick and wanted him to close up the sum­mer palace so every­one could return home to Eisenstadt).

It was a typ­i­cal cage match; one part joke, one part seri­ous, one part drama. Like just about every­thing Tom Allen does on the pro­gram, it makes one think a lit­tle, and sets up the day. I will sorely miss this along with some of his other reg­u­lar fea­tures. Prob­a­bly my favourite comes at about 6:30 AM: This Day in… which observes some event in his­tory that shares today’s date. Today’s was the first solo cir­cum­nav­i­ga­tion of the globe in a boat by Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scot­ian sea­man who fin­ished the trip that he had begun in Boston three years ear­lier in 1895 on today’s date. Like so many other ‘This Day In…‘s, I didn’t know about this event, and felt the joy I often do from gain­ing a bit of knowl­edge just as I’m start­ing the day.

With­out going off on another rant about the stu­pid­ity and wrong­ness of the CBC get­ting rid of the best clas­si­cal music morn­ing pro­gram in the world, I’ve finally accepted the inevitable and made plans. A cou­ple of weeks ago I picked up (on sale) a curi­ous new device at Lon­don Drugs: a BLIK Inter­net Clock Radio. It’s a standard-looking radio (unfor­tu­nately with infe­rior speak­ers to the Bose Wave Radio that we’ve been using for the last 10 years or so) that ‘tunes’ to a stream­ing radio sta­tion on the Inter­net rather than local FM (although you can do that, if the Inter­net is down). I’ve tested it, and while there is about a 20-second delay while the sta­tion ‘resolves’ to the URL you’ve cho­sen, it will indeed allow you to awaken to over 9,000 dif­fer­ent sta­tions all over the world (although in prac­tice the num­ber one would want to tune to is a small frac­tion of that num­ber). I was able to set the pre­sets to the BBC’s Radio 3 (which I knew well from my days as a Grad Stu­dent), the local CBC Radio 1, NPR in Boston, as well as the national NPR sta­tion. I’ll look for some other sta­tions, as there are 8 pre­set slots. As you can imag­ine, retriev­ing and sift­ing through 9,000 sta­tions in a tree-like menu using a ter­ri­ble LED screen is a bit of a chal­lenge (oh, if only Apple would make one of these– I guess they do, it’s called a Mac Mini with mouse, key­board, speak­ers and a small flat-screen mon­i­tor run­ning a browser with some pre­set stream­ing radio sta­tion book­marks, but even some­thing like that is too large for a night-table). Most of these sta­tions have us wak­ing up at 9:00 AM East­ern on North Amer­ica, or 68(!) hours ahead in the UK. I fear that at noon 2:00 in the after­noon in Lon­don we may not get a com­pletely morning-friendly clas­si­cal music feed, so I’ll have to search fur­ther until I find a new place to tune to. Both Pam and I hope that we don’t have to resort to NPR, which always put me in a bad mood in the morn­ing, par­tic­u­larly now that it has moved so much far­ther to the Right polit­i­cally than it used to be (hear­ing the appalling Cokie Roberts sneer at the Democ­rats every Mon­day morn­ing got my blood boil­ing early in the week — funny, but that was my word, but appar­ently it’s still what she is doing, defend­ing Dick Cheney on the TV Pro­gram ‘This Week’).

While they are get­ting rid of Clas­si­cal Music on Radio 2, I do remem­ber the some­what encour­ag­ing news that the CBC said that they were going to add a stream­ing clas­si­cal music chan­nel on the Inter­net. I doubt if it will have the incom­pa­ra­ble Tom Allen on it, but at least there will be a Cana­dian alter­na­tive for our move from FM Radio to almost exclu­sively Inter­net radio from Labour Day on.

Pam's Photos, March Flowers and Disturbing Radio News

After many hours culling through the over 1,000 pho­tos that she took on her trip to Antarc­tica, Pam has put together just under 200 of them in a slide show on Flickr. Many are very impres­sive, and she went to some pains to anno­tate them as well. If you want to read the descrip­tions, you can access the indi­vid­ual pho­tos as well. I’m glad that she can share her trip with so many friends and family.

Spring has Sprung For­ward
One of the things I do love about the cli­mate here is the fact that our win­ters, while being plenty wet, dark and dreary, are not very long. Dur­ing our walk last week­end, Pam and I spied many clus­ters of cro­cuses, and I expect that we’ll be see­ing daf­fodils and tulips either this week or next. This is very dif­fer­ent from the win­ters I remem­ber in Boston, which seemed to stretch on and on. Ground­hog Day, as Gar­ri­son Keil­lor used to say about Minnesota’s Win­ter, was for us, ‘some sort of cruel joke’.

This week­end is also the start­ing gun that seems to set off a rush toward Spring, with the switch to Day­light Sav­ings time (which the Province sug­gests might be more aptly called ‘Daylight-Saving Time’, fol­low­ing the pat­tern of ‘man-eating’ tiger or ‘mind-expanding book’). At any rate, I’ll now leave work in full sun, and we’ll be get­ting up before dawn for just a lit­tle while longer.

CBC Radio Two to Change Pro­gram­ming Again?
I’ve learned that in Sep­tem­ber, CBC Radio 2 will once again be chang­ing their pro­gram­ming, and unfor­tu­nately for peo­ple like me, it will no longer include Clas­si­cal music before 9AM, and will no longer have any Clas­si­cal music after 3PM. As they slowly whit­tle away at the pro­gram­ming that I would like to lis­ten to, I’m going to be even­tu­ally forced to turn to the Inter­net (and, if I take the plunge, XM Satel­lite radio) for music that’s not in my col­lec­tion (and my col­lec­tion is huge!). That’s a shame, since I’ve found that Tom Allen’s won­der­ful ‘Music and Com­pany’ to be the only morn­ing radio show that has con­sis­tently made my day bet­ter. I fear I will be writ­ing him a fan let­ter as they can­cel his pro­gram in September.

It was bad enough when the CBC banned news longer than 3 min­utes from Radio 2. Now they are going to be ban­ning Clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming from much of their sched­ule. Not much left for me to lis­ten to, I guess. I keep telling myself that with the growth of the Inter­net to wire­less devices, it won’t be long before the WiMax (or other) cloud will make stan­dard ana­log radio a quaint mem­ory. Still, I fore­see a bumpy road before small con­stituen­cies like the one I’m a mem­ber of are squeezed off the dial, at least until we find our new broad­cast medium. Too bad you blew it, CBC.

Holiday Cheers

It’s under­stand­able that some peo­ple get depressed around this time of the year. There is the uncom­fort­able weather, lack of sun­shine, and inces­sant reminders of how we should all be out shop­ping, etc.. For­tu­nately, the flip side of that is that we can get cozy at home (with a tasty stir-fry of lemongrass-marinated beef), meet with friends in the evening (the blog­ger meetup was this Thurs­day night), give and get gifts, and per­haps even make plans for the new year. Pam has the jump on me this year in sev­eral ways: first, with one of the coolest gifts that you can give a nerd, an OLPC (One Lap­top Per Child) XO com­puter. Although it hasn’t arrived yet, I got the email con­fir­ma­tion of the gift so the cat is out of the bag. The way the OLPC pur­chase works is to ‘give one and get one’, so in get­ting me this inter­est­ing piece of tech­nol­ogy, Pam’s also insured that some child in another coun­try (like Uruguay and Rwanda) also gets one. It’s a project started by Nicholas Negro­ponte, the flam­boy­ant and charis­matic founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and now the of the Non-profit orga­ni­za­tion (OLPC) that has cre­ated the device with the idea of get­ting an inex­pen­sive (the orig­i­nal goal was <$100, the real price is now a lit­tle less than twice that num­ber) lap­top in the hands of chil­dren in poorer coun­tries all over the world, with the hope of bridg­ing the infor­ma­tion divide). Here’s an ad with Heroes’ Masi Oka for OLPC:

You can be sure that future post­ings will be about this new gift, and given that it has a pretty long wi-fi range and is one of the few lap­tops that has a screen that is vis­i­ble in full sun­light, as well as long bat­tery life and light­weight design, I’m hop­ing that there will actu­ally be some post­ings for this writ­ten on it (per­haps from the park out back?) as well.

Big Travel Plans

I men­tioned that Pam had the jump on me in the gift depart­ment. She’s also out ahead on plans for next year. She’s going to do some­thing that she’s wanted to do for years now: see Antarc­tica. In Feb­ru­ary (the end of sum­mer for that part of the world), she will first fly to San­ti­ago, Chile, then board a char­ter flight to the south­ern tip of Argentina at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego (the world’s south­ern­most city). At that point, she’ll board the ship Explorer II, a “Dou­ble bot­tomed Ice Class ves­sel with an ice rat­ing (Ital­ian RINA Class 1-D) that exceeds the require­ment for oper­at­ing safely in Antarc­tica” (thank good­ness for that, with the recent sink­ing of a ves­sel from Gap Adven­tures, the M/S Explorer) The ship cruises for 2 days through the Drake Pas­sage to the Antarc­tic penin­sula. She’ll spend about 4 days there, mak­ing excur­sions in Zodiac rafts to the ice,where hope­fully she’ll see pen­guins like these. There are plans to land on the South Shet­lands, includ­ing Half Moon, Cuverville, Paulet, Pen­guin, Goudier and Decep­tion Island, depend­ing on the weather con­di­tions. I’m hop­ing that she’ll be able to send some of the day-to-day details of her voy­age, although I’m not sure how easy email will be.

Before all of this starts, there are a few other (less impres­sive trips), includ­ing a visit to my par­ents’ house in Bal­ti­more, and a week in San Fran­cisco for Mac­World Expo. Looks like 2008 is going to get off to a busy start.