Co-Operative Christmas Dinner

 I recall Christmas' when my mother was up early to get the turkey in the oven in time for the meal to be served in the afternoon, and her Christmas mornings were spent preparing everything in the kitchen while we all tried out our new toys and tried on new clothes.

What's Christmas without Turkey?

Not so here in Ottawa this Christmas. We trained our children right, and they have both developed excellent culinary skills, and enjoy cooking. As a result the meal was a co-operative effort with everyone chipping in something. We elected to do Christmas dinner on Christmas eve because Alisha is going to Deep River with Mark tomorrow afternoon, so you get to read about our Christmas Dinner before your's.

I started my contribution the evening before. I was trying a new recipe for the turkey. Alisha swears that brining is the way to go, but my Christmas gift subscription from her last year to Cook's Illustrated” claims that salting, not brining is the best way to ensure a moist turkey with crisp and browned skin. I spent the evening pushing salt under the skin all over the 15 pound free-range “organic” turkey Ryan had purchased to allow it to salt overnight. This afternoon, I pressed herbs and spices under the skin, and Ryan and I prepared a dressing of local sausage bread and chestnuts.

Working Together

Ben prepared an appetizer of bacon wrapped chestnuts and jalapeno peppers in a delicious barbecue sauce, to keep our appetites at bay since we were not eating until at least 7:30 PM. They were hot, sticky and spicy-good! Alisha introduced us to the “Pim's Cup”; cucumber, citrus fruit & strawberries in a mixture of Pims, Ginger Beer and Lemonade over ice.

Ryan's Beans

Although not a traditional “Christmas” vegetable, Alisha decided to add beets to the meal. She boiled them, peeled and chopped them into cubes and served them with a very interesting garlic walnut butter and goat cheese. Unusual but very delicious. She also made a “nightshade” free sweet potato and orange marmalade casserole.

Ryan, along with helping with the dressing, took one of our traditional Christmas vegetables, and updated it by shredding the brussel sprouts and frying them with bacon and balsamic vinegar. They were delicious but hardly recognizable as our old favourite vegetable. Ryan also made green beans served with a shallot and filberts sauce. A bit “oniony” for me, but enjoyed by everyone else.

Regis cooked up her traditional cranberry sauce, and she sort of oversaw everything else and made sure that everything had a place to be cooked and came out of the oven and off the stove at the same time.

Now some things just shouldn't be “messed” with, so I brought my traditional steamed Christmas pudding from home ready to be heated up, but I changed the sauce, using rum instead of brandy as flavouring and added chopped filberts for a bit of a different touch.

The dishes are cleaned up, mostly by Mark who arrived too late to do much cooking. Regis has made some lunch-to-go turkey left-over casseroles for the children when they go back to work next year, and the turkey carcass is boiling away on the stove for a turkey soup later in the week. Everyone contributed to a delicious, successful Christmas meal.

Sunny Sunday

El Campello, Spain  is a tourist town. The normal population is 25,000, but in the summer it swells to 80,000. Being here in March, this is very evident. The building we are in has at least 8 apartments, and for most of the month there was only one other apartment occupied. On our daily walks down the beachfront we see huge waterfront apartment buildings with only one or two apartments opened. It seems that most of the buildings here are built with special windows that includes a solid metal shutter that can be pulled down; a very useful option when your house is only used part of the year. I suspect that is also the reason why I can choose between five different supermarkets – they are probably all busy in the summer months.

This part of Spain is a popular tourist destination for Europeans because it has a climate that is nice all year long. Even in the winter the temperatures get up to 15C, and it has an average temperature of 19C and usually gets 250 days of sunshine a year. To us, coming from Nova Scotia's winter with -10C and snow everywhere, it was a wonderful getaway, but for most of the “tourists” it is not time to come to Southern Spain yet. In the last couple of weeks we can see a few more apartments opening up, and a few more people on the beaches and promenade. Now the locals don't see it the same. We arrived on a Saturday, and the following day we walked down the promenade on a Sunday morning. It was sunny and warm (to us anyway), and there were many local people out for a walk with their dogs and families. They were dressed in winter coats – the big puffy kind  - and had on gloves and hats. Their dogs all had on winter coats! To them it was a cold day.

Well the weather has improved a lot and the Sundays have gotten progressively better. Last weekend there were people on the beach in swimwear. People stared at us for wearing sandals the first couple of weeks, but there are more and more sandals showing up. This Sunday dawned bright, blue and calm, so it was lovely. I'd estimate it was probably 23 in the sun, and you could see the promenade come alive.

The restaurants and bars along the promenade are full; especially the patios facing the beach. On most days only about a third are open, and we walk by many watching the wait staff and cooks chatting without any customers at all. We wondered how they could stay in business. Sunny Sundays certainly help a lot.

People are out in force. It is Sunday, so most people are dressed in their best clothes. Suits, dresses, skirts, fur coats. Although it is a long walk, the norm is dress shoes for men and heels for women. You can tell the foreigners; they are the ones wearing sensible walking shoes or “heaven forbid” sandals. Also popular with the women are boots, everything from thigh-high ones to short ones, but many with very high heels. Comfort gets no precedence over style for the Sunday strolls here.

The promenade has a real family atmosphere on Sundays. There are children everywhere. Young families push babies in strollers or buggies. Families stop into their favourite restaurants, for lunch, often sitting with wine or Spanish coffee long after lunch is done. It is a perfect spot for this. There are no cars on the street, and the beach is right across the road. When the kids get tired of restaurant they are allowed to go out onto the promenade to ride their bikes, inline skate, ride scooters, or just to go play in the sand. We would often see groups of children playing in the sand with no apparent supervision, and suddenly one of them would run across to the restaurant or bar to a table full of parents. The parents could see them all the time while still enjoying time with their family and friends.

The family outings on the promenade often include the extended family as well. We often saw grandma being helped along arm in arm with someone while the baby carriage was pushed by someone else. The children circled on all sorts of wheeled contraptions, making up for grandma's slow pace by putting three times the distance on their wheels. The promenade is paved with coloured tiles in a zig-zag pattern, and I watched one little girl walk the length following the pattern. We passed one family group that had given up on the walk, and had camped out by one of the walkways down to the beach. There were about 20 of them. The adults were sitting on the wall separating the promenade from the beach or standing around; all talking at once – I thought I might learn some Spanish on this trip, but I can't distinguish one word from another because they all talk at once. The children were scattered around the beach, playing in the sand, or riding bikes on the road and sidewalk, and the teenagers were off to one side chatting and texting. Everyone seemed happy except one little girl sitting on the wall in bare feet crying about something.

I can only imagine what this place must be like on a Sunday in July or August.

Skating on the Rideau

I have achieved another retirement goal. The first year our son Ryan moved to Ottawa for university we came up to see how he was doing over March Break, and there was still ice on the Rideau Canal, and people were skating on it. Ryan told us about the annual Ottawa Winterlude festival, and about how skating on the Rideau was a big part of the event. I decided then that it was something I wanted to do, but we were busy that year, I forgot my skates the next year, and the next the ice was gone by March even though I had my skates. By this time, retirement was just around the corner, and so I declared that skating on the Rideau would be one of my “Retirement Goals” - I would come to Ottawa during Winterlude, visit Ryan and skate on the Canal.

The Rideau Canal is part of the Rideau Waterway system, and extends 202 Km from Ottawa to Kingston. The canal is part of the 19 km of manmade waterways that connect the lakes and rivers on this UNESCO World Heritage Site completed in 1832, and still operating much as it did when opened. In the winter, Ottawa maintains about 7 km of the canal as the world's largest skating rink. The nice thing about this is that it is right in the heart of Ottawa, and is accessible by thousands of people from January to March.

When I retired in June last year, I set about proving to everyone that I didn't need to find work to be active, and I started doing all the things I had always wanted to do. Some of my goals were difficult – take up painting, write the novels I had been planning for 15 years, or renovate the house (Well, that;s my wife's goal really), but Skating on the Rideau was pretty easy; go to Ottawa, put on skates and go skating. Ryan said I could come stay with he and Arran, Airfares were reasonable, and I had nothing else planned for February.

When I started telling peole I was planning a trip to Ottawa, my dad and his wife said that they would like to come as well. Now the last time I was skating with my dad, I fell and dislocated my shoulder, so he, me & skating are not an automatic mix, but he is 80 now so I thought I might be able to keep up with him. With three of us travelling it became more logical to drive, and having no schedule to work around I simply kept an eye on Weathenetwork.ca, and choose a day with sunshine from Halifax to Ottawa. Then Dad's mother-in-law heard about the trip, and said that since we had room for another in the car could she come as well. So long as they were willing to travel my way, in my car I had no problem, and we had a lovely pleasant safe drive to Canada's capital.

Arriving in Ottawa Thursday evening, we met Friday to try out the ice. The Rideau Canal starts at the Ottawa River below Parliament Hill, and the city of Ottawa promotes skating on the canal as a major attraction during the winter. The city maintains the ice, puts special stairways to get to the surface, and benches to change into skates, places information about the canal , and installs a series of change houses, washrooms, and concession stands at strategic places along the canal. All in all, the city does an excellent job with this attraction.

The first day we skated 3 km down the canal, took a break with Back Bacon sandwiches, Beaver Tail treats, and hot chocolate, and then skated back to where we started. I knew that Ottawa “Maintained” the skating surface, so I had visions of teams of Zambonie drivers grooming the ice under cover of darkness every night, and discovered that this certainly wasn't the case, and the ice is well-used outdoor ice, with cracks, bumps, and rough patches, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable skate, even for me who had not been on skates since that afore mentioned dislocated shoulder incident. I went back on the canal on Sunday to experience the crowds during the first weekend of Winterlude, this time walking to the 3 km marker and skating to the beginning. Then on Monday, I waked down to the Byward Market to do some shopping , and then skated in the other direction, from the start all the way to the 4 km mark before getting off and walking back.

Now that this Retirement goal has been achieved, I will try to do it again next year. Ottawa is a lovely city to visit, and I have enjoyed seeing it in the winter this year as well as in the summer when it is all dolled up as Canada's capital city. Maybe next year I'll do the whole 7 km.

Thoughts on Retirement

Well, school went back in yesterday without me for the first time in 30 years. I retired on July 27th, but of course I was off every summer, so I didn't really consider this "Retired" yet until everyone else was in there planning and working and the students were back behind their desks. Now I'm starting to actually feel retired.

I hear that many people who retire find it hard to adapt to not working. Apparently close to 80% of males who retire end up doing something else, not because they have to but because they just couldn't get used to "not working". It is still early, but I do not anticipate having this problem. I think two things will help me deal with retirement.

The first thing is that I planned my retirement for the last five years. When I got the forms from my employer stating that I was able to retire in June (I could have actually retired in January, but wanted to finish the year), I looked into the financial implications, attended the retirement seminars, and made a decision to retire this year. The result was that I had five years to prepare and plan. I put some additional funds into RRSPs, I made arrangements to have cars paid off, and loans finished, and I started thinking about all the things I had been putting off because there was never time to do it. Each year I saw retirement as one year closer. The interesting thing was that I was not one of those downtrodden, tired employees who saw retirement as a way out of a job that was no longer enjoyable. I loved what I did. I spent 30 years working in the field of education, teaching elementary children and as an elementary school administrator. When I retired I was principal of a little elementary school with 200 students. On the last day of school in June this year, I went to work with a smile and I left just as happy. There were lots of challanges over 30 years, but for most of those almost 5000 days, I loved my job. I had planned to retire, and what better way to finish up a career. I was happy with everything I had done, and although I'll miss some of the great staff I got to work with and will most certainly miss all the students, but I'm now ready to move on and get caught up on all the things I have put on hold or haven't been able to get to because I was too busy.

The other thing that I feel made retiring easier was that I had two excellent role models. My Grandfater retired early for his generation. I don't know the whole story, but my remembrances of his never involve him actually going to work. He often did things to make a bit of money, but generally he was always retired. He lived to be almost 90, and always seemed to enjoy life so much. He travelled all over the world, especially through Europe and Australia, and had so many interesting hobbies. They never had a lot of money, but they always found enough to do what that felt was important. My father was much the same. He ran his own business, building it from a small home based operation to a major player in the field, and he says that when he got big enough "To be a problem for the big companies", they offered him more than he was worth, and he has been laughing ever since, enjoying "Spending our Inheritance". He retired before he was sixty, and now almost 80, like his father, has travelled the world, and always finds something to keep himself busy.

We shall see how I make out . . . . . I have lots of plans, and I will post some of them and follow up on how it goes. It has only been three days so far . . .