Saturday, August 14 2010

Gardens, Parades, Road Trips, Et Cetera

Life's a beach, but someone's got to do it

It's been a couple of fun weeks here at Chaos Manor: vacation, Vegas, cooking, gardening, birthdays, road trips, and some very merry afternoons on the patio. We had a little bit of inclement weather in August, but fortunately we chose to go to Nevada for precisely that period, so walked into 42 degree C (about 8 million F) sunshine in Vegas. Fortunately it was a dry heat, which means I had to drink four times as much to keep hydrated . . . I love that kind of weather!

It's Mojito weather!

We managed to keep our cool, but the gardens went out of control. We got a lot of great veggies this year.

Green things to left are cukes, purple-orange up top are heritage carrots, taters in the middle, the rest zucchini

We're almost at the point where we're breaking into houses to leave bags of zucchini, and it's only been by dint of eating stir-fry twice a week that we've kept ahead of the broccoli.

 

Carrots foreground, broccoli and cabbage middle, grape vines left

There was trouble in paradise, however. We went to water the garden one morning and to my dismay the entire Concord vine was dead. Every leaf and branch sagged, limp and lifeless. I have to admit I engaged in a fundamental attribution error, thinking someone had spiked the vine with a defoliant--it's an open public space and there have been incidents in the past with Children of Modern Society ruining plants and stealing produce.

I hate the beaver

But when I looked closer I saw that the trunk had been severed 30 centimetres (a foot) above the ground, at a point where it just poked through the fence. It wasn't clipped or sawn, and there were absolutely no wood chips. The severed end displayed a series of long parallel scrapes at an odd angle. Looking at the square holes in the fence it became obvious that the angle was from corner-to-corner of one of the squares. With a bone-chilling wave of terror, I knew I was facing man's deadliest enemy.

Warm-blooded killer of vines! I curse you, beloved national symbol!

Our garden is next to an estuary and bird sanctuary, and beavers have set up a dam and seem to be thriving there. If it were the old days I'd have a fine top hat and some stew by now, but in today's Canada you can't even use harsh language on varmints, and they recently made beaver repellent a controlled substance. Looks like we'll have to wait another five years for a crop of Concords.

But that incident didn't keep me from pursuing other fun stuff. August 1st marks BC's provincial holiday, where we celebrate not being Ontario. White Rock does a fine job and this year the fireworks were spectacular and all the events were great bunches of fun, but the one thing we love the most is the Festival of the Sea Torchlight Parade. While technically there were no torches (smelly and kind of dangerous, really) it's held after sunset and local community groups come out and strut their stuff.The fun part is that the parade is right under my balcony! It's a wee bit like Mardi Gras, although people would probably be willing to throw me trinkets to keep my shirt on.

Of course we all wore hats. How do you watch parades?

This year we had Charles and Marie over for dinner and as is our custom we cheered the various floats and kids marching, roundly booed the local politician slinking along in his corruptionmobile, and had a rollicking good time.

Just kidding fellows--keep up the good works

My favorite part has always been confusing the poor Shriners. I'm not a member of a lodge, but I wear a Fez around the house, you see (need it for pipe smoking and harrumphing purposes) and when they roll by in their little cars I wave and they always wave back, vastly confused. I make up for this by always buying one of their raffle tickets at the mall every year, but it's good clean fun.

We also had time for a high-speed road-trip to Kelowna, to have lunch with my sister and her husband, and to pick up some wine from Calona winery. They carry the Sandhill Small Lots bottlings up there and I snagged a half-case each of One, Two, Three, the Petit Verdot and a case of their Rosé. The pink wine is ready to drink now, although being a blend of Gamay Noir and Cabernet Franc it's got a lot of backbone. I had a  bottle of the Petit Verdot with a steak a few days ago, and even after an hour of decanting it was still really stiff. I think in two to four years it'll soften up and be a lot more generous. The other three, I'm not even going to look at until 2015.

Is there more? Sure, I didn't even cover Las Vegas, adventures in pickling or grilling Hobbes. But I'm all out of frivolity time--there are 138 emails in my inbox, a stack of mail and correspondence a foot high, and a lot of meetings I need to prep for. Golly, it's like it all waited for me. Fortunately, waiting at home are some of those peaches I bought up in the Okanagan on our road trip. My favorite hot-days treat is to peel one, slice it into a glass and top it off with Spatlese Riesling.

Actually, it's even better than it looks

Ah, it's great to be back, and my barrels and sur lie project missed me, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Tally-ho.

Posted by Blithertim AT 7:57PM

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