Making Pizza

Food, and the making of it, has always been an important part of my daily life. Cooking is an act of creativity and a gesture of love for the people that I care about. It is also work, especially at the end of a long, exasperating day, when I am hungry and haven't given a thought to what's for supper until the minute that I walk in the door.

It is also work in a satisfying way. With the work of my hands and creative mind, I use the bounty of the earth to fashion something to please the appetite and all the senses. Together, we sit down and share food, talk, and tell the stories of each of our days.

I have always believed that it is important for a family to sit down and eat together. I also believe in cooking from scratch (although I am not dogmatic about this; yes, I do use canned tomato sauce). I like to use food that I have grown or gathered. But winters are long here.

So it is pleasing to me that each of my children has grown up appreciating food. Each of them enjoys cooking and is, or is becoming a good cook.


These pictures that I have included here show a pizza that my son made when he was fourteen. He made the pizza dough, spread the sauce, found various things in the fridge to use as toppings, grated cheese, and added herbs.

(Cheese, of course, is one of the fundamental food groups for teenagers.)

He baked it and served it to us for supper. What a satisfying meal, and what a great way to be a family together! It also was a wonderful lesson for him about the value and rewards of daily work.

Urban Sketchers

The images above, titled Bounty Hunters, were created by Cathy Gatland from South Africa. This art is posted on Urban Sketchers, a cool art blog that includes artists from all over the world. Participation on Urban Sketchers (USk) is by invitation. All of the images are sketched on location and must have an urban theme. There is also a Flickr group that is open to all, and a Google discussion group.

The Canadian Rocky Mountains

This is a photo of the Rocky Mountains near Banff/Lake Louise. I drove through this area in October and took this picture.


I love mountains, and am fortunate to live in a mountainous area. Sometimes after sitting in an office all day at my computer solving problems, I come away grumpy and full of worries. But it only takes a long look out the window at the mountains to put things back in perspective again. On a sunny day, I can see mountains from my office window.


Even better, I can do more than look out the window. I can and do spend lots of time outdoors. In the winter, I ski, both downhill and cross-country. Recently I have started back-country touring, and also I am learning how to do telemark turns. The photo above is a view from our local ski hill -- spectacular!

Landscapes often inspire my photography and also my painting. In fact, quite a few of my poems include landscape imagery as well. Place, and the natural landscapes that surround me, are very important to me and influence the choices I make about where to live, work, and play.

The Realist Dreamer

This is a painting by Erica, published on her blog, The Realist Dreamer. The title is Colourful Nudes. I like the feeling of movement in this painting.

Crossing the Unknown Sea

In his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, David Whyte writes:

Work is where we can make ourselves; work is where we can break ourselves. It is a making and an unmaking that can ultimately never be measured by money alone. In work we can indeed, and in a moment, build or ruin our fiscal fortunes, or we can slowly and imperceptibly, over long years, destroy the inner complexion of our character. Sometimes to our despair, we know instinctively that work is never done. At its worst we are Sisyphus, pushing the boulder over the last incline only to see it fall back and away, out of our grasp, to the very bottom of the slope, to be pushed back up with the same despairing effort the following Monday morning.
At its best, work seems never-ending only because, like life, it is a pilgrimage, a journey in which we progress not only through the world but through stages of understanding (2001, p. 12).

This quotation speaks to me. I find myself suddenly at this stage of life going through a transition -- a midlife crisis of sorts -- in which I am asking if the work that I am doing is the right work for me, or if it is "a sleep and a forgetting" that is distracting me from the true purpose of my life.

character sketch

Holy wow, time has passed and I have had a horrible two months of excessive unpleasant overwhelming work. No time for life. Stress and all that.

I finally made it to my writing group tonight. We did a writing exercise in which we wrote a character sketch with the aim of portraying a sense of who the character was primarily through sensory description. This what I wrote:

Kevin stood in the doorway, poised with his weight on one leg, uncommitted to enter, already, one imagines, on his way down the hall. This was as much as could be hoped for -- a moment of pause, a dry observation intoned nasally, delivered with a wicked hook disguised as humour. Then down the hall he'd go, as quiet as a big cat, taut as a bicep, moving as if he were invisible, as if his steroid-built body was hidden by the Indian cotton shirt, as if there was not an electric four inches of impenetrable air space between him and anyone else passing down the hallway.

Okay -- one paragraph. That's a start.

HO HO OH NO

Well, it's December, and there's no doubt about it; Christmas is on its way. I hate the consumer frenzy of Christmas -- the running around town desperately trying to buy presents for everyone (many, many, many) on my shopping list, spending way too much money, wrapping up and mailing parcels, and negotiating with the extended family about where we are going to spend Christmas this year. Most years involve packing up and travelling to somewhere else to spend Christmas trapped in someone else's house for too many days. And all this preparation always happens at a time that is really busy for me at work, too.

It sounds like I'm a total grinch, doesn't it? But I'm not. There are some parts of Christmas that I love. I love to cook a big Christmas dinner and to sit down to it with lots of family and friends. I like trekking out into the woods to select and chop down a Christmas tree, and then bringing it home and decorating it. I love to choose special gifts for my children and partner, and a few close friends, and wrap them and deliver them. I like to go skiing at Christmas time, and to sit around drinking special hot chocolate afterwards and playing board games with the kids. I like Christmas lights, and this year I invested in the new low energy outdoor LED lights so I can be energy-conscious but still enjoy the lights. I get misty-eyed when I'm cuddled up with my partner in front of the Christmas tree listening jazzy Christmas music on a snowy night. I also like to make donations to several favourite charities at Christmas time. I'm very firm about taking time off from work for Christmas week and spending the time with family and friends.

So, I guess the part that I don't like involves the sense of being obliged to spend a lot of money buying stuff for people, knowing that even though I have tried to choose things they will like, in fact, they neither want nor will enjoy most of the stuff. As much as I spend, I still feel as though I did not spend enough to get them something "really good" -- I was too "cheap." Then afterwards, there is the worry about having become overstretched financially. The time pressure of trying to orchestrate it all, while also being so busy at work, is stressful.

Just as the media portrays the perfect body, the perfect family, and the perfect home, it holds up models of Christmas that are impossible to attain (consistently). For me (and many others, I think) Christmas is associated with feelings of guilt -- guilt about those I didn't buy for or didn't buy enough for; guilt about not showing up at, not or being invited to, or not hosting Christmas do's; guilt about substandard decorating or Christmas dinner efforts; and guilt about those who have so little while I/we have so much (and seem to endlessly want more). This sense of guilt, I believe, is manufactured quite intentionally by marketers to ensure we keep on shopping and spending so that they can keep on selling and profiting. (And the landfills keep getting more and more full, and the raw materials of the world become more and more depleted).

Spending money shopping is not a moral good. Spending time doing things with people that you love, however, is good. This year year I am simplifying Christmas.

Gideon Sockpuppet