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It's beginning to look a lot like summer, actually it looked a lot like summer in January. Maybe it'd be more appropriate to say it's beginning to feel a lot like summer. The other day I woke up and it was pissing rain for the 5th or 6th consecutive day and I got on my bike and went about my daily-tasks, whistling along to my bike-tires splashing through puddles. Summer is a beautiful illusion, it's in the mind, not the skies.
There's a lot of excitement happening, big things are happening, lots of fun is being had.
Andrea and I celebrated 6 months with each other a couple weeks ago. We drove out to the beautiful Cowichan Bay region to partake in the 2nd annual prawn festival, which ended up being profoundly lame as a festival but still awesome as a day by the bay. We had some junk-food and walked around the romantic little sea-side town, then we drove into Genoa Bay which is a little speck of a town in an inlet in the Strait of Georgia. We went to the Genoa Bay Cafe for dinner, it's pretty much the only business in the town. We shared some mussels, Andrea had a seared chicken breast with yummy mashed potatoes and mushrooms and a pear jus and I had lamb-chops with risotto and chimi-churi. Strange but delicious combination.
That's an image of the route to the remote town of Genoa Bay, followed by a picture of a floating-house in Genoa Bay.
Two weeks ago we ventured to Salt Spring Island and I practiced my new driving skills on the winding roads of the island. We checked out the Saturday market, then went to the Salt Spring Island Cheese farm to see the goats and sheep but the main-stars ended up being the adorable family of dogs that live on the farm and the cat that parks itself directly on the ashphalt of the walk-way to the farm who befriended Andrea. There were also two lambs that stole the show from the full-grown sheep and goats. I bought some surface-moulded/ripened soft goats cheese. We went for dinner before catching the ferry, Andrea ordered lamb which I thought was pretty hilarious considering she was swooning over them at the farm.
Andrea and the cat, me playing catch with one of the dogs, LAMB!
A few days ago we spontaneously went to Vancouver because my old-friend Nick was in town from Ottawa visiting another high-school friend, Tyler, who lives in Kelowna. We met for beers and then we called up our good good friend Katie who lives in downtown Vancouver and she came out with ANOTHER friend from high school, and some of Andrea's good friends came out too. We had a great time until around 2 or 3am when we realized we'd neglected to negotiate a place to sleep for the evening. We got in a cab and told him to take us to the cheapest hotel he knew of which ended up being a really really nice, quaint building called the Victorian Hotel. It was kind of a hotel/hostel on the grander scale of hostels. The bathrooms were shared but really nice, and the room was private and charming. The next day we went to the Granville market and ran into one of my ex-coworkers, Dawn, who now works for Osake sake on Granville. She gave me some Kasu which is the lees left over from fermented rice during the sake making process. I'm gonna use it to make An Pan which is An, a sweet bean paste stuffed into Pan, a sweet bread that looks like a burger bun. The kasu contains naturally occuring yeast and quite a bit of alcohol so I'm hoping the bread will rise without packaged yeast, we'll see.
Now the weekend is winding down and I have plenty more to look forward to for future adventures. My Dad and sister will be arriving here soon and I can't even imagine what we'll all get up to, when they leave I'll leave with them for a 2 week vacation across the plains of this great country, ending in Ottawa for a week's stay. Around the same time my great friend Robbie will hopefully be making his move to the Island and staying with me while finding his footing in the area. Very exciting!
Oh and I've been cooking unrelentlessly, I think I'm starting to get kind of good. Just a little bit...
I think I'm beginning to represent some sort of image of a man...just wanted to get that out of the way. I never put much thought into what a man is, I know what a man is not and I know what holds one back from being a man and I definitely embody some of those characteristics. Ironically part of being a man is posturing which is exactly what prevents him from being everything he can be. Fear I guess. To begin to mold a man though is a process that preempts the posturing that fills in the cracks in the concrete once the statue is completed, and I'm still at that molding stage. Actually, quickly considering the men in my life, I'd have to say the statue never really sets at all. Life is an artistic process forever, always reflecting on oneself, doubt, refreshment, layering, forgetting the ugly and the true that once lay dominant on top the canvas.
Anyways, it's been a thought I've been considering for probably the last year or so. There's like this pride that you have to take in your decisions, to trust that for the harm they might do to others (or for the benefit too) that they are a reflection of who you truly truly are. And that's assuming that one knows precisely who they are, and not everyone does, but in my case I have a fairly good idea, and I'm being granted now in life the great opportunity to be long past cause, being in the midst of action and having a new morning at the crest of my life. I can look back now at the struggle of identifying myself and see the gifts that will come. That's what the shaping of a man feels like. Reflection, it's a whirlwind but it's calming too. Right now is like being the passenger in a storm.
The artistic force that's shaping me is obviously food. It's painful how gradual the process is. It's difficult too, to identify where I want to take it. How much is my career going to be dictated by industry? Will I be able to put myself in a position where I control my relationship with food? That's ultimately what I want. I want to seed and to pick fruit, to kill and skin and butcher, to ferment and to knead...I guess what I'm saying is I still have a dream of living independently, free from the chains that form the so called circle of industry and economy. But is it realistic? Will I be able to form a situation in which I own property and owe only to myself and my family coming from a background where I've already created not only a fiscal debt but a debt to a craft that never by nature allows perfection. It is an art-form after all and the only future that art breeds is a frustration that I don't think ever matures. You either burn out or fade away. I've already seen the son of the labour of food-industry and it's rarely an image that I want to one day be. That's for the future though. And in some way I am building towards that. My job here is very nurturing, probably the best I've ever had. The creative opportunities are excellent. It's almost like being in college again. The fridge is so big and the boundaries are so far out of reach. In 4 months I have moved through the company quickly which is part circumstance but also, and this is based only on evidence I've observed, not on anything anyone's told me, on passion. I am not a skilled cook, not yet, technical precision is a long loooooong way away, but the passion in me to acquire precision I think is clear to some of the decision makers at the hotel. I was recently offered a position in dinners, two of the current dinner cooks are returning to their studies for 6 weeks and after spending about a month in banquets, and then breakfasts, and then a brief stint on lunches I'm moving to the near pinnacle of it. It's really exciting. To be blunt, the people I cooked with on breakfasts and lunches were discouraging. I served food I didn't wanna serve because I had to, on dinner the circumstances are completely opposite. There is no buffet, there are no 30 year veterans who cook now relying on habits instead of their senses, there's intelligence and stimuli, I'm stoked.
I'm being molded now by a new friend too. She's really good to me and I'm trying to be good to her too. But the last month has been difficult. My patience and energy are really low. Early in the month I left work with a migraine that was beyond description. I thought there was something very wrong with me. It lasted 2 days. After that went away I woke up with a sore back, which over the course of 4 days escalated into an inability to stand-up straight at work. More than once I was reduced to finding a quiet corner and doing squats against the wall in an attempt to straighten my spine. After that healed itself I was stricken with a group of kankers that made kissing my new friend painful and unpleasant. That's gross, I know, but people who know me well know that I have a history with kankers, I'm just prone to bad break-outs. On Friday I found out I'd been briefly layed off from work, it's only for a week but that is a serious damper to my life-style. And finally, I've been diagnosed with mono, so if I've kissed you recently you might wanna consider gettin' your blood checked...it's been a bit of a rough month friends, a bit rough. But hey, at least I've got the time now to sit here and write this. And back to what I was saying, my woman is a good woman. She's strong, smart and her heart is bound to her with love. She has a great deal of respect for humans but she knows them enough not to trust them, she's great. She brought me soup and orange-juice last night. She'll kill me but below is a picture of us at her birthday, you're welcome Mom. Our other friend in the photo is a Korean exchange-student who was for real the life of the party with hilarious jokes.
This is a picture of myself, Ben, who I guess has an issue with my odour, and Robbie. My friend posted it on Facebook yesterday. Sometimes you see glimpses of your past that you don't expect to be reminded of...it's one of the nicer surprises in life. I really like this photo because at this time in my life I had resolved some personal conflicts and had decided to stay in BC once I'd returned to attend graduation. I miss these fools so much. Two of the best dudes I've ever known, and I've known some really good ones...but these dudes, they're real. Such real dudes.
I could go on but I should save some for another chapter which at the rate I've been writing won't be posted for another year.
