Month: April 2006

Situation: You’re at a 75th birthday party for your grandmother.
The people: A mixture of people that are old and young.
The talk:

Prety well everyone over 60 at this party: “Ryan, I haven’t seen you since you were this high!” (motions to their knee level)
Ryan: “Oh really.”

Then they walk away and I don’t even know their name because I was so young that I don’t remember.

A message to us all. When you’re going to comment that you haven’t seen a person since they were ‘this’ high’, do them a favour and tell them your full name, and how you are related to said person. It helps. Otherwise, you just have some blogger out there commenting on all the older people he met on the weekend but don’t know who they are.

I love when you see this massive arrangement of food laid out for you and you think “Alright, it’s feeding time!”

Then you begin to approach it methodically. Not too many carrots, a little turnips, oh, alright, I’ll take two scoops of potatoes. Let’s move onto the parsnips, and hey, is that brocolli? Ok, ok, we’re getting towards the end, WHOA, coleslaw! I don’t need that because right next to it is the STUFFING. MMMM…stuffing. No one will notice if I take two scoops of…ah crap, someone is eyeing up how much stuffing I’m taking. Better just put that extra scoop onto their plate. They’ll think I’m nice. Alright, onto the meat. Oh, here’s some ham and turkey! Bonus! Oh, no one will mind if I take that one with the skin on it. No one likes skin. Mini-pickles! Yum! A few buns here and there also.

Before you know it, the plate that you were trying to lay out nicely has become a disaster area with some potatoes mixing into the turnips and god knows what that monstrosity over on the far edge of the plate is. It’s a cross between brocolli, some sort of baked good and resembles The Blob. Then you top it all with gravy because you can’t really find the meat anymore and it just holds it together a little better.

Instead of a nice turkey dinner, you now have Easter Ghoulash on a plate. Top that off with everyone shovelling it in in 3 minutes or less and you have the typical North American turkey dinner. I say North American because I have eaten with some European families and they like these things to spread out over three days. In those cases I feel dumb for shovelling down the plate so I have to get another one just to feel like part of the crowd. Europeans are strange that way. 😉

I hope everyone had a similar experience when it came to Easter dinner. I know Mel and Mike were having an army over at their place so I can only assume that they also encountered this phenomenon.

I wonder if it would just be easier to actually MAKE a ghoulash for dinner.

Special thanks to Paul who pointed out this brilliant show coming out (hopefully?)

http://www.muppetcentral.com/news/2005/090505.shtml

Oh my, oh my.

It was a BEEEEAUTIFUL day here in Ottawa yesterday so we all know what that means. As soon as I got home, the BBQ came out, and beers were cracked.

I hooked up the BBQ in the backyard (which is our second BBQ at the house courtesy of Mike and Carrie’s) and it was all going well until Mike got home and mentioned that he had had problems with it in the past and that flames used to come out from the bottom. I figured I had somehow fixed it until I came back out and the thing was afire near the controls. Swift thinking of my part saved the neighbourhood as I braved my hands getting near the controls to turn it off. I’m making it sound worse than it was. It really wasn’t that bad. But I won’t be using it until it’s fixed.

By the way, there was a half eaten mouse in the yard in front of the BBQ. YUM! I just flung it over the fence at the pizza shop. Hopefully they get a nice topping out of it. Ewww.

Anyhow, my story really revolves around these AMAZING sausages I picked up. These were the ones that are so big, they stick outside the bun. I’ve only had those from the sausage vendors, not in my own home! I could not get over how good these sausages were. I proclaimed to Mike that I would never buy Johnsonville or any other pre-packaged six inch junk any longer. Go big or go home.

Because I was in such a great mood from the sausages (and let’s not forget the new Sam Robert disc I picked up), we called Eric over for an impromptu listening party of the new Jeff Martin album (which is excellent by the way…vintage Tea Party stuff really. Sounds like Splendor Solis and Edges) and popped in the Sam Roberts album afterwards.

All in all, an excellent night and I don’t think that will happen again tonight, but who knows? I heard it’s supposed to go up to 21 degrees today. Holy crap. Perhaps I’ll just get my bike ready to go out.

Well, maybe not this super version of him, but I sure can now!

During the weekend, I brought up the point that I was scanning some photos from the last Palmer Reunion in 1988 and wondered why we haven’t had one since.

Mom mentioned that it’s pretty hard to organize…

After a few bottles of wine and moose meat, I declared that I would be up for the task along with anyone else who would join in this band of merry Palmers.

Dad and his cousin triumphantly declared their allegiance to our quest and we began to think of how to go about it.

In the end, I think it may be a lot of work, but worth it. Also, it’s probably a heck of a lot easier than organizing a wedding. Get 100 people into a room and have a party. What can be so hard about that?

Here’s how I see the plan unfolding:

1. Determine who is interested.
2. Determine where to have it.
3. Book the place.
4. Tell the people.
5. Be there on specified date to attend family reunion.

Voila! Whoa, that’s quite the project plan!

So I’m sure in the next 1 1/2 years you will hear me talk about it in these cyber walls and I will be asking you for guidance all along the way. But with the power of Greyskull, we will have a Palmer reunion.

Onto Step 1: Who is interested? Must get contact names…

Well, I would say that the song is a relative success. We managed to get dad on the accordian for the first time and figured out what buttons he has to push. I believe it will be quite the event once we throw the fiddle and some percussion into the mix next Saturday night.

Enimem files for divorce with his ex-wife yet again. After three months.

Is it just me or was he running out of the creative spark so he realized that he should get back together with his ex then he would have another album’s worth of material to write about?

Classic rock star method. Break your heart, have a solid album.

I recently interviewed a co-op student here in the office about his life in race car driving which we then put up on the youth.gc.ca website.

Take a look here if you’re interested in how one gets into the sport of race car driving (and how they descend into a life in the Public Service!)