This Weekend

P1060038, originally uploaded by palm0014.

Friday night after work, Vero and I headed to Toronto for the weekend for a family get-together celebrating Aunt Lana, Uncle Brent and Nanny Sybil’s birthdays. It was quite the momentous occasion since it hit upon some milestone ages of 50, 60, and 85 (respectively).

We arrived later at night than usual as traffic was heavy on the way down and I introduced Vero to A&W down in Kingston. While I do enjoy Arby’s, I figured a little change is good. I must admit their teen burger was top notch and the onion rings weren’t too bad either.

We arrived, chatted with the family, had a few beer and headed to bed.

The next morning, we hung around the house waiting for Troy to show up. Turns out that he had quite the bender the night before and wasn’t feeling all too well. The easiest way to get rid of that feeling is to pick up a few more beer so we headed to the Beer Store as well as picked up some ribs and other assorted goodies to munch on in the day.

Troy was gracious enough to impart some culinary knowledge to me and I learned how to marinate ribs (writing this out here for historical purposes so I can remember the next time); slicing the ribs in a diamond shape, putting six honey brown beer into the pan, cutting up orange wedges, let it sit.

Then we went ahead and made our own BBQ sauce. This consisted of dicing some onions (where I learned a neat trick of slicing the onion right up to it’s core and then cross-cutting them), adding some maple syrup, ketchup, mustard and…I’m at a loss. I can’t remember what else we put into it. We did two separate sauces; one mild, one spicy. Unfortunately for us, the sauce did not hold it’s spice and believe me, we put enough in. Perhaps we should wait until right before we apply it to the ribs so it keeps the spiciness. Once you get the onions to brown, you add some beer, crank it to a boil and all is good in the world.

After that was done, the main event happened. Seeing that it was everyone’s birthday, we concocted an idea to take a few pictures of ourselves, frame them and give them out as gifts. Vero, Troy and I slipped out of the house and headed to the nearest playground, put on our suits and Vero set us up on our very own photo shoot! I swear I now know how it feels to shoot a picture for an album cover! We had some great laughs as we posed around trees, swing sets, park benches, the whole nine yards. You can take a look at the photos by clicking on the photo above which brings you to the Flickr website. Take note that you can go through the entire album by either looking at the previous or next picture in the album! We couldn’t stop laughing during the process and we thought that everyone around the neighbourhood would think we are loony. We then headed to the Superstore to print them out and get some frames. Everything went off without a hitch as we snuck into the basement at Aunt Dinah’s and wrapped them up. None was the wiser.

Everyone started showing up at that point…Aunt Lana, Uncle Tony, Rocky and Jason, Uncle Billy, Aunt Val, Paige and Aidan, Sully, Dwayne and Wendy, Rick and Tracy showed up around supper time, it was a good count of people who showed up. We sat in the sun, had some beer, had an amazing feast of food, had some birthday cake, passed out the photos of ourselves which got some great reactions from people…it was a great evening.

One of the better moments for myself was when I finally suggested to Aunt Lana that I go out and pick up those comic books out of the trunk of her car. I had been holding back for the entire day as I didn’t want to seem TOO eager to dig into them. When I found a quiet moment, Vero and I hauled out three huge boxes from her trunk and brought them into the basement. Rick, Tracy, Paige and Aidan were there playing around and they were curious as to what I was bringing down the stairs. Rick and I then perused the boxes and marveled at the finds inside. It was quite overwhelming actually. I will talk about it more in a separate post as my feelings are too grand to reduce into a single paragraph.

A funny moment occurred when Aidan (age 4) saw the comics and wanted to look at them. Warning bells went off in my head and I figured it definitely wouldn’t hurt to give him a comic I didn’t really care about…so I went through the box and passed him a Green Arrow comic book wondering if he would be amazed at the artwork and the feel of the book in his hands…I was wondering if I was opening up a world of wonder to this child and consequently having his parents loathe me because they would have to spend thousands of dollars on comic books for him.

Lo and behold, this was not the case. He proceeded to flip the pages like a ragdoll, crumple, tear a page a little and Vero even said he sneezed into the book! I had a good laugh at this as the experiment was an utter failure but I also learned that I should hide the rest of the comic books for the rest of the night! I learned an important lesson that you should never be upset at a child and I wasn’t. Although Vero had a good maniacal laugh later on that night when she imagined some kids going through my entire collection of comics like they were construction paper and it as Arts and Crafts hour. I was not impressed with this vision and have vowed to put my comics at my parents house in the future. 😉

After perusing my wares, Troy came down and said the masses were requesting a little music upstairs. We hauled out the geetars, hammered out a cover tune or two, then switched gears and played a few originals (So It Goes, 705) which turned out surprisingly well for the first time playing it together. We had only heard the songs over the Internet before and it was pretty cool to have it happen in the moment. The rest of the night descended into a sing-a-long fueled by some rye. Rick grabbed us a drink of rye at one point and it wasn’t the strongest so he brought his ‘A-Game’ and topped them up to the point where my facial expressions would have made for good portraits. Vero handled the jambe drum and had Paige and Aidan dancing around. I must admit that the entire event was a little hazy in my memory at this point in the time as we just pushed out tune after tune. Hopefully we sounded alright to the crowd.

We ended the night with a nice bowl of Uncle Richards’s chili and Sully and Dwayne came back from another party and wanted to hear us play some more music. We played a few more tunes but Aunt Dinah finally had to pull the plug on us as people were already gone to bed and wanting to sleep. All in all, a grand night once again in Toronto. It didn’t end for me as I finally had a quiet moment with my comics I stayed for another hour or two going through each comic in the box. It was a great moment.

In the morning, I awoke to some breakfast and we cleaned up a little. We also played through a few tunes to get the hang of them as we are hoping to record in June when I visit London. Vero and I also got to see the photos from Uncle Richard and Aunt Dinah’s trip to Hawaii. They were fabulous photos and Hawaii looks to be quite the spot to travel to! They had a great time along with friends and I hope they keep traveling to tropical locales in the future!

Thanks to all who made us feel welcome during the weekend! We’ll see most of the relatives in about three weeks time when I head to Toronto and then fly out to British Columbia for a week!

***update*** I totally forgot to mention that my Dad’s uncle Gary (Nanny’s brother-in-law) won 3.5 million bucks last week. That was the big talk at the party this past weekend. I don’t think I’ve ever met him, but congrats anyhow!