You say plum tomato, I say a roma

I love a fresh roma. I like to to roll one around in my hands, feel its weight and its skin. When I make sandwiches for the boys to take to school I’ll put together a number of ingredients, but slicing up a roma… I pause, salt and pepper a slice for myself, and savour it.

I remember one of the first visits to a girlfriend’s home in my teens, about 35 years ago, and talking to her father. “Do you like tomatoes”, he asked. Sure, yeah, yes, I do, I love tomatoes. “What kind of tomatoes do you like?”, he asked. He had me there. I’m not sure at 16 I even knew that tomatoes came in more than one kind. I’m not sure, I said. He named off a list… Big Beefs, Giant Something-er-others, and on and on.

I have to be honest, I still can’t name gardener’s varieties but I can say if I had a wish, if I had a million dollars, I’d have a greenhouse and in it I’d have romas, lots and lots of romas.

Exploring Avalon

A good friend had been offering me the 50 cent tour of the proposed gated wilderness community development above Portuguese Cove for some time now and Sunday past I took him up on it.

What’s a gated wilderness community you ask? Well, presumably its a subdivision with walking trails and water access that locks out the riff-raff so you have the wilderness to yourself. At a price of course, and as some have pointed out, its perhaps not even entirely within the law to gate off a wilderness stretch to hikers & hunters. I’m not sure this area has attracted people to hike, picnic or hunt in the past but here it is and its branded Avalon Park.

Avalon Park ‘Private Wilderness Reserve’ is an ambitious subdivision concept just outside Halifax. Coast Magazine ran a story about this place last fall but I remained unaware of it until my good friend peaked my interest with his speculations on how anyone could put so much investment into a mosquito bog.  So I figured I’d bite, and see if there’s a building lot I would be ready to move on to. What better time than the bleakness of January, my theory being if you’re thinking of buying a property, might as well look at it during its worst stretch of the year, not the best.

Subdivision really seems inadequate to describe the work that has gone into this residential development. Walking paths, gazebos, footbridges, granite boulder placements beefing up entrances to lots and articulating waterways, small docks on lakes and ponds for canoeing or kayaking are all impressive.

We found the road chained for the winter and only took a short walk up Deerfield Avenue to check out a few 4 acre, $280k building lots. Wait, are there avenues in the wilderness?  Apparently so, and commanding views, for sure, even at this distance of several kilometers from the coast I can see having a second story deck and watching the ship traffic enter the Halifax Harbour.

I imagined what it would be like to watch a thunderstorm move through Halifax from here. Not many good sized trees in this area, strike that, there are no trees of any real size, at this end of the ‘park’, so not really a ‘cozy’ spot. I thought I wouldn’t mind building here if i happened to win the lottery, though my friendly guide suggested there are plenty of nice properties in the area for much less than the asking price here. Not with the gated entrance proposed for this, neighborhood of course.

I’ll look forward to returning in better weather and following the map the full stretch back into the bogs, er, I mean wilderness to see if there are lots with more tree cover. We’ll be watching to see how Halifax takes to the concept of a gated wilderness community development.

Our neighbour has Christmas people trapped in a bubble

We didn’t put any lights on the porch this holiday season, and relied on the neighbours around us to carry the holiday decorative weight for our block. Lights appeared before December on a few homes and a few weeks before the big day the folks next door put up the inflatable display they’ve used for a few years now. It features a snow globe with snow blowing around inside and a midget Santa and polar bear waving.

Twitter: ‘This Other Life’?

“And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection – certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real – this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.” - Douglas Coupland, ‘Life After God’

No Business Like Snow Business

Lets play catch up. I’ve been decked for over ten days by a ruthless cold that left me gasping for breath and sapped of energy. Its Wednesday morning and Halifax has been slapped upside the face last evening by snow, ice pellets and drizzle. I stepped outside this morning and pondered my long held feeling of being glad I live in the cold northern climate of Nova Scotia with no poisonous snakes, nasty ugly large spiders or scorpions. I might have traded a few snakes for the load of snow around the car this morning when I was chiseling out blocks of icey snow and hand stacking them on the rasised garden beds.

I had planned on attending a workshop on web accessibility today but bailed on it. Yesterday we closed the office early because of the bad weather, I’ve got meetings thursday, friday is a holiday at The Big University and I’ve got a backlog of work after taking six sick days in the last two weeks. Right now I’m going to take it easy, get caught up and look forward to a three day weekend.

Hannah Minzloff’s Underground

I usually walk to work from the Hydrostone neighbourhood in north-end Halifax to The Big University in the morning and often hop on a bus to go home at the end of the afternoon. The other day I caught a number 80 going down Halifax’s Robie Street and had the good fortune to have a bus that was displaying Hannah Minzloff’s exhibition of photography, Underground, all along the advertising banner space on the bus interior. The show was part of the Halifax Festival of Photography, Photopolis.

What great luck, I had seen her website but it didn’t occur to me that I’d get to see the show on wheels so I was pleasantly surprised to find it. Hannah is a member of Halifax’s cooperative Viewpoint Gallery for photography. You can join their Facebook group and stay tuned to show annoucements.

The Cold Stagnant World of Captain Star

Just received a copy of The Captain Star Omnibus in the mail from my publishing mogul brother Chris Paul and Sybertooth Publishing in Sackville, New Brunswick. If you were a fan of the cult classic show Captain Star that ran for 13 episodes in Canada and the UK 1997/1998 and later in the U.S., you’ll love this packed Omnibus of Steven Appleby’s work.

“Captain J. Star: rocketship captain….artist….tomato enthusiast…traveling salesman….hero. In fact, as has often been said, The Greatest Hero Any World Has Ever Known. Some consider him mad. Other say ‘demented’.  But within these pages, we shall discover the unvarnished opinions of those who know Captain Star best – his companions on his voyages across the cosmos in the Boiling hell, who have faced terrible dangers, and run away to face terrible dangers another day; who have lost count of the number of planets named after him; who have saved the Universe and then taken a break to snack on halibut – his faithful crew…”

Sybertooth has an excellent list of places you can get your copy. If you didn’t catch the series first time around head on over to the collection on starofspace’s Channel on YouTube.

Every Other Day of the Week is Fine, Yeah

When there’s a big dump of snow overnight in Halifax I appreciate hearing the monster sound of neighbour Archie’s snow eating machine. I don’t think Archie likes me, he scowls at my backyard feeders because they attract birds, doesn’t like flowers and is annoyed at the idea that our rose petals might blow onto his property. Archie is a hedge man. He is, however, really good about using his snow eating machine to clear his neighbours sidewalks when he does his, and so I appreciate him doing it very much.  He probably started doing our lawn with his gas mower and our walk with his gas snow blower when the elderly couple lived in our house before us. Archie is older than I am but he either had been doing it for so many years that it became routine, or something to do with my using a push mower and shoveling by hand, or all of that. He’s a grump, but he steadfastly does our lawns and walkways.
This Monday morning didn’t prove to be good weather for the snow eating monster machine, the snow being soaked with rain in the early hours. Archie and I found ourselves shoveling slush and frequently stopping and chatting about people having heart attacks doing this. He says the guy that used to own the corner store at the end of our lane just went for a triple bypass.

By the time I left for work there was still no word on The Big University closing and I hopped the bus not wanting to risk the walk. I was surprised people were on the roads they were so bad in North End Halifax, on our street a car went sliding past the house, like a slow motion movie scene, on the glazed road.
Made it in to work to find The Big University closed until 11:00. All my office mates are in and students are sitting in the lobby. It appears as though Big U was slow to put out the word that they were closed for the morning although other Universities and schools managed to make that call by 6am and catch most commuters. I’m here, I’m dry and my back is only a little sore from shoveling snow. Ah, yes, its 10:30 am, sitting at my desk and the cellphone just got a text message the University will re-open in an hour. Nice.

‘Monday, Monday it just turns out that way…’

Real Time Flight Tracking

Following WestJet 532 Real Time Toward the Great Lakes

A damp, chilly Halifax Sunday and I’m occaisonally peeking at the track of WestJet 532, making its way from Winnipeg to Halifax. We’ll head out to YHZ to pickup Goldilocks, with any luck it won’t be snowing badly yet. Alex thinks its far too geeky but I think its cool that you can punch in a flight at FBOWEB and get a google earth file from the page to load up and watch, close to real time in a simulated 3D earth view. I think its way cool.

Infinite Heat

I must have been thinking about the -13C temp outside as I got ready to head to work this morning. I felt compelled to snap a photo of our poor old stove which has more than served this kitchen well. It’ll probably up and die on us just when we least expect it to. Infinite heat it says, surely not meaning I can turn the burners up beyond the temperature of molten lava. That leaves, I guess, the infinite heat of running this stove to eternity, beyond my running out of money paying Nova Scotia Power to keep it going, beyond my life and all those who will inherit this old box. That’s reassuring that we’ll get more use of it yet. Guess I’d better give it a clean this weekend.

In more positive news I picked up this cool olive wood cooking utensil while I was grocer-ing at the StupourStore.

It’s been rubbed with mineral oil and ready to go. I can just see it in action now…. maybe I should just go home now and cook something. Anything, just to check it out. Better than metal, way better than high temp plastic and a good replacement for one of those dry looking old cookery stickeries that are probably made of softwood and never seem to easily clean. Hmmmm, it just reminded me looking at its shape, the one time in my life I threw a boomerang and tried to follow it’s path up into the sun then back and hit me, in the crotch.