A week on Sunday 33/52

Welcome to a new edition of “A Week on Sunday”. Pleased to be home and back into the routine of things, here’s a little roundup of things I’ve noticed online and in real life. 

“Grey gold”

A fan of Australian, Beau Miles, I’ve been keeping up with the updates on his latest project to restore an abandoned cottage. It’s an unappealing adventure, but Miles is generous in sharing the ups and downs of his undertaking, and that’s what makes it interesting. In a recent video “stumpers” are hired to redo the foundation, and we get to meet a man named Danny who is not only in high demand for this kind of job, but who took the time to do a little research into the cottage’s history. The fact that Miles calls his new concrete stumps “grey gold” make me think of my dad who liked working with concrete and was foreman at a cement plant before he died.  

Clogs

Authors of the cookbook Kismet, Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, recommended Calzuro clogs for long days in the kitchen, and I took their advice when invited to help cook for a week for a girls camp in Quebec. The old sugar shack kitchen had two fridges on a slightly raised concrete platform. Inevitably, one day I rammed my foot on one of the corners, but hardly suffered any pain. The “co-polymer rubber compound” the clogs are made of provided not only good support but excellent protection. It was a worthwhile recommendation! (Mine are tomato-red, pictured here with the visiting kitchen mascot… a tiny dog named Pistache!)

Dinnerware

My son had a birthday party event on the western end of Portage Avenue and I took the opportunity to visit a Value Village I hadn’t yet been to. There were such pretty sets of dinnerware! How darling would it be to outfit a cottage with one or both of these?

Eating

We had company this week in the spirit of summer holiday gatherings with friends and family… We served mojitos and Hailee Catalano’s Maple Cheddar Snack Mix. 

Ina Garten’s Slow Roasted Spiced Pork is a reliable main when feeding a crowd and choosing the oven over the barbecue.

Besides salad and fresh beans from the garden, we also served Sohla El-Waylly’s Bravas Potato Salad which was a hit!  

Summer views

A few pictures from evening walks in Henteleff…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 17/52

Intro

Of what is a week composed? Of daily walks, and small routines. Of BBC News in the morning and bringing my 88-year-old mother-in-law to her eye appointment in the afternoon. Of making a shopping list on Saturday and dessert on Sunday. Of packing lunches in the evening and the impromptu visit of a nephew travelling through Winnipeg on his way elsewhere. Amidst these routines and events, the mind flits elsewhere, a stream of consciousness fed by podcasts and books and little projects. Here’s what caught my attention this week…

Intentional effort

When I was young, I thought that “bothering” was to be avoided, as in “bothering” people, and by extension that the point of life was to get to greater ease. I don’t think that way anymore, and the following quote from William James nicely contradicts the idea of wanting to get to “ease”:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. (Via)

In a similar vein is are two interviews of Stewart Brand who is promoting his latest book titled Maintenance of Everything. There is the idea of care - caring for tools, of “honouring the process of taking care of things and yourself and others” and there is the contrast with a world that is increasingly automated. He says at one point: “we're going to spend more and more of our life arguing with robots. These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're messing with it.” Stuck in line at a bank for half an hour, then with a teller for an hour and 15 minutes to resolve a small issue made me think “here we are, arguing with robots!”. The intentional effort manifested in the form of equanimity - a kind of caring for each other as we’re dealing with these robots.

Environment

Beau Miles recently concluded a series of videos on four different rivers in Australia, ending with the Murray River. I like how he grapples with being unable to end the story on a satisfying note, and how he includes his conflicting feelings in the video… His friend, Brian Wattchow, suggests “Unfortunately it’s going to have to be managed and rules are going to have to be imposed until we can get a whole new set of values and values for the river. It’s sad but I can’t see personal choice and individual responsibility saving the river at the moment.” His argument is consonant with Andri Snær Magnason’s observation on humility toward nature (quoted here).  

On the subject of rivers, but in Canada, is the CBC’s Ideas podcast episode “What the River Wants to Be”. 

Baking

This week I made Vaughn Vreeland’s Lemon Blueberry Cookies.

There remained, after this recipe, a lot of frozen blueberries left, and so I made a pie. The pie was unphotogenic, but delicious.

Walking the dog

This week, there was a bit of cold weather leftover… just enough to take pictures of the icicles formed on the branches from the preceding days’ higher water levels.

The sun came out, and so there was the view across the water…

I look down when I walk, eyeing the ground, surveilling Enzo who follows his nose everywhere. At one point I looked up and was so delighted to see pussy willows!

The last few mounds of snow that remain covered in grass look like wooly mammoths.

One day this week, we found a frog on our path! 

Enzo’s sniffing  caused it to raise its arms… “Leave me alone!” So we did…

Happy Sunday!

inspiration

Beau Miles has published a book. Now would you look at that cover photograph? I sigh. I admit, I’m a fan of his Youtube videos, my favourite being Run the Line: Retracing 43 km of hidden railway because it touches on history. But often, after watching any one of his videos, I want to go out and shoot my own adventure. I get a feeling akin to jealousy…

While thinking of this post, I started wondering why I found Beau Miles particularly inspiring, and thought of other YouTube videos I’ve enjoyed, a bit dismayed to come up with Casey Neistat’s channel, which I followed for awhile when he was living in New York. I panicked a bit… Aren’t there any women’s channels I like? Yes! In fact, Bernadette Banner’s vlogs on the subject of Victorian and Edwardian dress offered a fascinating glimpse into corsets, for example. And Ariel Bissett introduced me to “book tube” a few years ago. Liziqi blends a kind of tireless productivity with almost graceful romance in her vlogs, in which furniture is built, fields are sown and harvested, harvested materials are transformed and every day ends with an extraordinary meal.

So what is it about Beau Miles that I find so inspiring? I think there are two things: the first, is a sort of recklessness unfamiliar to me. I was raised with carefulness. That’s neither good nor bad, and I don’t mean Miles goes and risks his life for views. Rather, I think, I grew up feeling like things around me were fragile and that things had to be handled properly. This lent itself to ideas of perfectionism and scarcity. So, when Miles assembles things using found materials for example, the viewer gets to feel both the freedom of experimentation and a mastery of the tools that are handled. The results is therefore satisfying without being caught up in ideas of perfection. The older I get, the more I am intrigued by this idea of patina and lived-in spaces. (I mentioned that here.) Eventually, there comes a point, I think, when you’re not striving for an ideal image but rather, having acquired experience over the years, skill replaces self-consciousness. And this brings me to the second point. I think Beau Miles is an extraordinary storyteller. This is something you can glimpse in an interview he recently gave here, specifically, when he says: “As a storyteller, I know that you can come across a bit more loose and ad hoc and it’s just a bit more fun that way. But in my heart of hearts I kind of know what I’m doing.”

If you are unfamiliar with Beau Miles, I highly recommend his videos! See if you find them as inspiring!