I have good reason to feel grateful and blessed to be a father and to have two wonderful, healthy children, and I do. Then every year around this time my family (children and wife) remind me again just how very fortunate I really am.
The day started out with a delicious breakfast of waffles, fresh fruit, whip cream and mint, maple breakfast sausage and some Kick Ass Kicking Horse 454 HP brew, in my favourite TORONTO Starbucks mug. All made by my 8-year old daughter. She loves to cook.
That was followed up by a little gardening, one of my favourite things to do. You can find me in the garden pretty much every morning. We have a couple of vegetable gardens, a herb garden and lots of other stuff. I move plants around like people move furniture inside the house. I keep moving stuff around until I find a spot that they like and it looks good.
As a family we aspire to grow as much of what we eat as possible with the property and time we have spend on it. This beauty here we bought at the Langford Farmer’s market 2-weeks ago, ate most of it, stuck the roots in the ground, e voila, almost another full head of lettuce already.
Then it was off to James Bay for H’s summer violin recital. She was playing Vivaldi’s Concerto #5 First Movement. I just love watching her play. Sorry, no pics of the kids, Maki’s rules - I have to abide.
After the concert we went exploring. Someone mentioned ice cream so off we went. We ended up down at fisherman’s wharf. As we were getting out of the car the scent of deep fried haddock wafted over the bridge and suddenly we all got very hungry.
After a short wait in line we got our pager (yeah it was that busy) and took the opportunity to tour the neighborhood houseboats. Some pretty interesting and well-decorated houses floating around down there. This one is the home of Fortune Teller Bella Sera.
The pager paged and back to Barb’s we scurried to get our four 1-piece dinners; 1 piece of haddock, fries and coleslaw. We huddled into a warm corner of the tent out of the wind and tucked into our dinners. The batter was just light enough to keep the fish fresh and warm - not thick as an orange peel like you get at some places. Even the coleslaw was good which was completely unexpected. N ate all his coleslaw first. I’ve never known a kid that likes salad (any kind of salad) as much as he does. Hence all the lettuce we planted.
We finished up with the fish and headed over to the ice cream joint for some soft creams, even though we were all pretty much stuffed to the gills. Heading home on the TCH everyone, including the driver, was feeling a tad drowsy. After putting around the house a while I decided to take advantage of the longest day of the year to go for a 9:00 run. The wind was howling and the sky was a spectacular mix of blue and pinkish/red. It was 7 KMs of bliss. I had the runners high from beginning to end. And now I’m up far too late trying to finish this post before going to bed. I didn’t take any running pics so I’ll finish with this one I took of a letter taped to the inside of a window on one of the houseboats.
It’s called “A Village of 100 People”. I don’t know how accurate it is but it was just one more in a day of reminders, of how blessed and fortunate we all are. So I think I’ll have a good sleep, wake up tomorrow and do what I can to pay it back/forward/onward.
Tags: Fisherman's Wharf
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