Cod chowder

Talking about food, it's interesting to find out what others have NOT tried. Claudette and I talked recently about the importance of eating more fish. But it is so hard to find fish you can trust. For reasons I have written here before, I don't trust fish from China. So we were at the fish counter on the weekend and bought some fresh (Well, as fresh as you can get in Timmins!) Atlantic cod. Picked up some cream, red potatoes, corn on the cob, green onions, celery and more. A few hours later, we were enjoying a very tasty and filling cod chowder along with some homemade biscuits. Claudette had not ever had a chowder before, but she said she liked it!

Amazing Ernest Hemingway stories...

So I saw this online with the Toronto Star, telling about Hemingway's time at The Star. I was going to post just the link, but I decided it was important enough to run the whole story. Credit: The Toronto Star.  

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http://ehto.thestar.com/marks/how-hemingway-came-of-age-at-the-toronto-star

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BILL SCHILLER
FEATURE WRITER

“I may be going to Russia for the Star,” Ernest Hemingway wrote his mother in a 1922 letter from Paris, “. . . am awaiting orders from them now.”

As it turned out, Hemingway never went to Russia for the Toronto Star for reasons that remain unclear.

But what is clear, in new letters just published or about to be published, is how dependent he was on the Star for money, mobility and access to places and events that he eventually shaped into stories and novels.

In four years of writing for the Star, from 1920 to 1924, in Toronto and in Paris, he travelled extensively — “10,000 miles” in one year, he wrote to his family, some on the Orient Express.

The details are contained in some 6,000 letters, 85 per cent of them never before published, to be issued in the coming decades under an ambitious program called the Hemingway Letters Project.

“Being a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star allowed Hemingway to get out and see contemporary postwar Europe in a way he wouldn’t have had he simply been traveling as a tourist,” says Prof. Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway authority at Penn State University and lead editor of the project.

“And he wrote things up for the Star that he later worked into fiction.”

Scott Donaldson, one of America’s leading literary biographers, says the Star gave Hemingway a chance — and great latitude to choose subjects and style.

“He was very, very lucky to get that kind of freedom,” he says. “Their recognizing his ability to do it and giving him that chance is what made that experience so valuable.”

Hemingway the reporter was competitive from the get-go.

In one letter, pencilled from the Star newsroom in 1920, Hemingway told his parents that he had scooped the competing Globe on an important story. The competition was forced to follow him the next day with a lead editorial.

“Mr. Atkinson who owns the Star complimented me on it,” Hemingway wrote.

In 1922, returning to his base in Paris from a conference in Italy, Hemingway boasted to his mother, “Got back here last night after skimming the cream from Genoa.”

And to his father he scribbled on a postcard of the Italian port, “If you’ve read the Daily Star you know all about this town.”

In 1923 his mother wrote asking where he was heading next.

“I don’t know,” Hemingway responded. “It depends what I hear from the Star.”

The first volume of Hemingway letters, dating from 1907 to 1922, was published by Cambridge University Press last fall. Volume two, from 1923 to 1925, will appear next year.

Originally, the project planned to publish 12 volumes. Now it expects 16, as more letters continue to surface.

With detailed annotations to the letters, the project aims to deepen readers’ understanding of Hemingway’s development as a writer from childhood to his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.

The Hemingway who emerges from the early letters is filled with youthful exuberance, thrilled to be traveling through Europe and proud of his journalism.

He kept his Star clippings — neatly trimmed and blemish-free — all his life.

And he sent a stream back to his parents in Chicago, whom he had persuaded to subscribe to the Star.

Hemingway arrived at the paper in January 1920 hoping to freelance. He was an unknown 20-year-old with dreams of becoming a novelist.

His timing was fortuitous. Founder Joe Atkinson was trying to build a world-class paper based on great writing and scoops, with a showcase weekend edition known as the Star Weekly.

The freewheeling Weekly, in particular, demanded colour and human drama.

Hemingway delivered both in spades.

By 22, he was the paper’s European correspondent.

But by 24, following a clash with a senior editor bent on breaking him, he was gone.

He left the paper in anger, going on to become one of the world’s most famous authors and winning a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

But he always carried with him the memory of being a foreign correspondent for the Star. It was the highlight of his journalistic career.

Managing Editor John Bone and Star Weekly Editor J. Herbert Cranston trumpeted his work, playing it big and promoting it with in-house ads touting Hemingway’s achievements and worldliness, sometimes promising readers that their roving correspondent would deliver the news “through Canadian eyes.”

Hemingway had an obvious incentive to travel: it paid more. For stories from Paris Hemingway earned only modest per-word rates. But for out-of-town assignments he made $75 a week plus expenses.

At the time, it was cheap to live in Paris. Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, were paying $20 per month for a small, cold-water flat near the Pantheon and could live on as little as $1 a day.

In one article Hemingway told of how Canadians could live in Paris “very comfortably” on $1,000 a year.

Still, Hemingway wasn’t above double-dealing. On at least two trips he filed regular dispatches to the Hearst newspaper chain, much to his wife’s chagrin, under a secret arrangement that paid him well, though not as well as the Star.

Managing editor Bone caught him at it — but forgave him.

Hemingway would later wax nostalgic about those years in his posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast.

But while the story of Hemingway’s journey to Toronto begins in 1920, he nearly came earlier — for military training.

Another newly published letter reveals that an 18-year-old Hemingway, desperate to get into World War I, approached Canadian army recruiters in Kansas City in 1917.

American forces had rejected Hemingway because of his poor eyesight.

At the time he was working as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star.

In a letter first published last fall, Hemingway told his sister Marcelline, “I intend to enlist in the Canadian Army soon,” calling the Canadians “the greatest fighters in the world,” and adding, “our troops are not to be mentioned in the same breath.”

In the end, however, the Kansas City Star sponsored a Red Cross Ambulance unit and he set off for Italy. There he suffered serious wounds, was decorated by the Italians and returned to America in January 1919.

While speaking of those experiences later that year to a women’s group in Petoskey, Mich., where his family kept a cottage, he captivated Harriet Connable of Toronto, whose husband, Ralph, ran the Canadian arm of F.W. Woolworth’s department stores.

The Connables needed a companion and mentor for their disabled teenaged son who could stay with him in Toronto while they vacationed in Palm Beach, Fla.

Hemingway would be paid $50 per month, have the run of the Connable mansion at 153 Lyndhurst Ave. — near present-day St. Clair Ave. W. and Bathurst St. — and be able to dedicate time to his writing.

Arriving in Toronto before Connable headed south, Hemingway persuaded Connable to get him an introduction at the Toronto Star.

Connable did, and Hemingway did the rest.

He befriended writer-editor Greg Clark, who introduced him to Star Weekly chief Cranston, and soon Hemingway had four unsigned pieces in the paper, then his first bylined story ever — about getting a free shave at a local barber school.

In seven months at the Kansas City Star, Hemingway had never earned a byline.

In Toronto at the Star Weekly, he started at a half a cent a word, earning $5 for a 1,000-word piece. In time, his rate doubled.

Memorably, he wrote a scathing satire on Mayor Tommy Church mooching for votes at a boxing match at Massey Hall.

“We’re out to get the mayor,” Hemingway wrote to his father, “. . . and I’ve been riding him.”

On winter evenings, Hemingway tried skating on the Connables’ rink and played pickup hockey with a small group of friends that included the Connables’ daughter Dorothy, the chauffeur’s son, college student Ernest Smith and others.

Hemingway befriended writer-editor Greg Clark, pictured above, who introduced him to Star Weekly Editor J. Herbert Cranston. The rest is history. TORONTO STAR

In warm weather, he played tennis and rode the Connables’ horses along Bathurst.

Hemingway found Toronto expensive and complained that “the Doggone Star” paid him only once a month.

But he was having “fun,” he wrote his parents, and getting published.

When trout season opened, Hemingway, who was religious about fishing, thanked the family and set off in mid-May for Petoskey and the streams of northern Michigan.

Still, he continued to file regular pieces to the Weekly, including one on how Canadians were getting rich running liquor from Windsor into prohibition-era Detroit.

After a spell of boring writing for an in-house magazine for a shady Chicago financial institution, he wrote Star managing editor Bone in October 1921, asking to come back.

He was now married and unemployed, and his creative writing was going nowhere. He dreamt of returning to Europe, which he had seen only briefly in WWI.

Bone was keen to have Hemingway back.

So they struck a deal, and by December 1921 Hemingway and Hadley — the model for the immensely popular novel The Paris Wife — set off for France with the promise of bylines in the Star from across Europe.

The Hemingways were immediately smitten by the City of Light.

In a just-published letter, dated Feb. 15, 1922, Hemingway wrote to his mother, “Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”

Fifty years later, in a rare set of tape recordings kept today in the Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Hadley told a biographer that Hemingway had been her guide.

“He opened up the world,” she recalled. “He was very tender and sweet.”

He was also hard-working. When he wasn’t assigned by the Star, he was weaving the threads of his journalism and his life into prose and poetry in a small room down the hall in their apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine.

And he was ambitious. There was an artistic “happening” in Paris in the 1920s — celebrated in the recent film Midnight in Paris — and Hemingway was determined to be part of it.

Originally, he had planned to go to Italy, where he had been during the war. But Hemingway had met the American writer Sherwood Anderson in Chicago.

“Anderson told him that the place for a young writer isn’t Italy right now, it’s Paris,” says Penn State’s Prof. Spanier. “‘That’s where things are happening.’”

While the Star provided him the means to support himself, Spanier says, Anderson provided him letters of introduction.

Within weeks, Hemingway was dining with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound and James Joyce.

Soon, Pound was shopping Hemingway’s poems.

In the years since, Paris has become part of the Hemingway legend.

So has bullfighting — a Hemingway passion that first saw print in a front-page piece in the Star Weekly.

Hemingway had visited Madrid and Pamplona in the summer of 1923 and participated in the famous running of the bulls. Cranston gave it all the play he could.

“Bullfighting Is Not a Sport — It Is a Tragedy,” the headline read.

“That piece in the Toronto Star was his first working out in print of that material which would show up in his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926,” says Spanier.

Today that article, and many of the nearly 200 Hemingway wrote for the Star, can be viewed — not touched — in a securely locked room, under constant supervision by a senior archivist, on the fifth floor of the JFK Presidential Library. The clippings are kept under protective plastic.

In the literary world, they are precious documents.

So in early 1923, when Hadley announced she was pregnant and preferred not to give birth in Paris, Hemingway’s return to Toronto was natural.

He had enjoyed his earlier stay there. He was highly regarded at the paper, where he had friends, and could provide his family a steady income.

Assignments from the Star had always “brought in good money,” he wrote his friend Bill Horne. But now he had to provide stability during what he called, “The First Year of the Baby.”

A steady income of $75 a week would help.

But he also confided to Gertrude Stein that he was uneasy about being a father. He was too young, he said, and did not want to leave Paris.

Hemingway decided they would live in Toronto for one year, and he lined up a Paris apartment for their return in October 1924.

The Hemingways arrived in Toronto in September 1923 and put up at the Selby Hotel on Sherbourne St.

What Hemingway did not know was that he was landing into the middle of a vicious intra-office feud between managing editor John Bone and city editor Harry Hindmarsh.

Hemingway would be caught in the crossfire.

As he explained later to a biographer in an unpublished 1952 letter, Hindmarsh “hated Bone and hated me because I was a project of John. R. Bone.”

Although Hindmarsh was technically Bone’s assistant, he had enormous clout: he was owner Joe Atkinson’s son-in-law.

Hadley’s first letter from the Selby Hotel, dated Sept. 14, 1923, was filled with optimism — and news. She told Hemingway’s parents that a “small new Hemingway” was on the way. They were sure it was a boy and due in late October or early November.

“The Star people are so keen about your son,” she wrote reassuringly. Friends at the paper couldn’t do enough. Greg Clark and his wife had arranged for their own doctor to look after her. And Greg and Ernest were heading out fishing on Saturday.

“I think we shall love many things about Toronto,” Hadley wrote.

But she also noted that Hemingway had “rushed” into work and on his very first day, Sept. 10, 1923, was sent to Kingston to cover a sensational prison break.

Hemingway’s next-day account was gripping, fast-paced and filled with compelling detail and colour, a first-class piece of journalism under pressure.

It was splashed across the front page. But Hemingway was denied a byline.

Then, things worsened.

Three weeks later, he was sent to New York to cover the arrival of former British prime minister David Lloyd George. He was reluctant to leave Hadley in their new apartment at 1599 Bathurst. She was, after all, in her last weeks of pregnancy.

Those fears were well-grounded.

As Hemingway was returning to Toronto by train on Oct. 10, 1923, from his New York assignment, Hadley gave birth to their first son, John Hadley Nicanor, at Wellesley Hospital.

“I was fine,” Hadley recalled years later. “And Bumby (John) was quite something. And then Ernest came in, in tears and sobbing because he hadn’t been there.

“That’s the kind of a guy he was . . . frightfully sensitive. It was a misty, misty occasion.”

Then, things got even worse. While in New York, Hemingway had missed a story that Hindmarsh and Atkinson thought important: the deputy mayor of New York had belittled Britain, and the Star’s readership was largely of British stock.

Hindmarsh hauled Hemingway in and dressed him down, and a shouting match erupted during which Hemingway said any work he would do for Hindmarsh would be with “the most utter contempt and hatred.”

He was on shaky ground now, he wrote Ezra Pound.

Soon Hemingway was reassigned to the Star Weekly and began plotting his return to Paris.

He had complained of staid, conservative Toronto from the day he returned.

But the legendary “Hindmarsh treatment,” as Star staffers called it, put him over the top.

Hemingway blamed Hindmarsh for working him relentlessly, for “spiking” (killing) his stories, and most pointedly, for assigning him out of town when his wife was about to give birth.

Now, he was furious at Hindmarsh, the Star, Toronto and Canada as a whole.

The country whose uniform he once wanted to wear was now “the fistulated asshole of the father of seven among Nations,” Hemingway wrote Pound.

“It is a dreadful country,” he wrote Sylvia Beach, friend and owner of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company.

To Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas he wrote, “It was a bad move to come back.”

Hadley recalled later that Hemingway had told her, “If I have to stay with him (Hindmarsh), I’ll go crazy.”

Hadley replied, “Let’s leave.”

Hemingway submitted his resignation, effective Jan. 1, 1924.

They would have to break their six-month lease on the Bathurst St. apartment, for which Hemingway said in a letter to Pound they were paying $125 per month.

In a final, generous gesture, the Hemingways hosted the wedding of fellow Star writer Jimmy Cowan and his bride-to-be, Grace Williams, in the Hemingways’ apartment on Jan. 12, 1924. Hemingway was not only best man but he supplied the liquor from a local bootlegger. A Star announcement whimsically reported that the wedding had been celebrated “very quietly.”

The next day the Hemingways left from Union Station for New York, boarding the Cunard liner Antonia for France on Jan. 19.

There was, however, one more concern. The Antonia would stop at Halifax, and the Hemingways worried that police might board looking for them. They still owed between $250 and $375 in rent.

“We skipped out,” Hadley said later. “The boat did stop at Halifax, but no police came on.”

The Hemingways divorced in 1927.

A year later, John Bone died of a heart attack in the Star newsroom.

Harry Hindmarsh went on to become the most powerful man in Canadian newspapers, elected president of the Toronto Star in 1948.

Years later, Hindmarsh was reported to have said that he had “made a mistake” in the way he had dealt with Hemingway.

But Hemingway never forgave him.

“I would like to propose that Harry Hindmarsh should burn in hell,” he wrote in an unpublished letter in 1952.

The author never set foot in Toronto again.

This too shall pass ...

So if you read any Canadian newspapers at all, you’re aware of the cultural appropriation arguments going on, with certain persons claiming that white writers, especially those in mainstream media,  cannot be sensitive enough to write about issues involving indigenous people. The suggestion from some is that unless you’re part of the oppressed group, you just don’t have enough understanding and empathy to really appreciate what it means to be oppressed. Or to truly understand the problem. The claim is that cultural appropriation is happening so much and so often that as long as we tolerate it, we encourage it.

Hmmm. I disagree. This is Canada. People are still allowed to think their own thoughts and form their own opinions.  William Shakespeare wrote about Jews living in Venice and witches in Scotland. So maybe we should ban Shakespeare too. 
These people with their faux outrage are just talk, talk, talk. They have no credibility. You don't survive in this world by sitting around pointing fingers and blaming everyone else.

Totally nuts and without reason...

Well I have to say I believe that this is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump. His decision to fire FBI Director James Comey appears to be totally without reason. Okay, so here's the problem. This guy Trump is so bizarre and out-to-lunch that he is making stupid become the new normal. So with anything he does he seems to be able to escape the scrutiny that should kick him out of office. Those poor people in the States, at least the reasonable ones, are at a loss because so many other people are putting up with this orange-tinted wacko and actually supporting him. Truly, the inmates are running the asylum.

Yum!

I think I am becoming a foodie! You know, one of those people who likes and learns so much about foods and different things. Maybe it's because spring is here and I am feeling ...better. Anyway, this week I remembered something my Dad did for me many years ago. He made a toasted sandwich with sliced apples, butter and cheddar cheese. OMG, it was so good back then and so I tried it again. It was great, only I put it on an onion bagel. I had it for breakfast with tea. Sooooo soooo goood! Try it!

Just because it is in fashion, doesn't mean it is stylish...

This is fashion? Really? Just read today about Nordstrom, a high-end retailer that is selling muddy jeans for more than $400. OMG. I have to say it. People are stupid. I am fond of mentioning to Claudette that just because something is “in fashion” doesn’t mean it has style.  
People mix those words up too much. A lot of the stuff we see in the fashion industry has no style at all. 
I was in court this morning and I noticed a lawyer wearing a nice navy blue suit. That was okay. Except he had light brown shoes with blue and white striped socks - Horizontal stripes! Okay, I blame his parents. He was a young lawyer. This poor guy might think this is fashionable, but he has shit-for-brains in the style department. 
Okay guys, here’s the rule. Navy suit goes with black shoes and dark socks. Socks must never, ever draw attention. Brown suit, khaki beige and lighter suits and you can wear brown shoes, but only if you shine them. Yes, buy a shoe brush. It falls under the category of well groomed. Lesson over. 

Ugh. Keeping mum ...

Every now and then I will joke with somebody about the things we hear in the news business. Can you keep a secret, I will ask. People's eyes will gleam and they will whisper back, Yes! Yes, I can keep a secret. Well, so can I, I tell them smugly. And then I get the nasty look LOL.
Well we came across some information today in the newsroom today that I cannot release right now. It's a news story, of course, but not an earth shattering expose or scandal. It is a very good news story for Timmins and when it is revealed ... soon, I hope ... a lot of people will be pleased.  We have to wait until the deal is done.  It's just that I like to tell people good news, but right now, I have to wait.

Westree weekend tradition ...

Was so pleased to spend time with my grandsons on the weekend helping them hone the fine art of shooting warm cans of  pop. Shake ‘em before you shoot ‘em. They explode so nicely! Even Jennifer joined the fun. I know we made quite the mess, but once the shooting was over, we cleaned up all the cans. It was nice to have some family time, watching the Leafs win, enjoying great food and fabulous company. As usual Don and Denise were perfect hosts.

I wished Claudette could have made the visit but she’s enjoying some holiday family time in Orlando, Florida. She went off with her family and grandkids to Disneyworld for 12 days! From the notes I get she seems to be having a wonderful time. I keep thinking how many times Debra has told me about that place. Who knows, maybe someday J

I blame the police...

 I am usually a staunch supporter of the police, but not in the case of the United Airlines flight where a person was forcibly removed from an airplane this week. I don’t think police, even so-called airport police,  should be used to enforce a corporate policy. The airport police who were called to the scene should have asked, what criminal act is taking place. Is there an actual crime underway? Is there a danger to the public? A person who disagrees with United Airlines corporate policy and who bought a ticket in good faith and was allowed to board the plane is not a criminal. He or she may have a civil complaint with United. If they refuse to leave the plane, United may seek a lawsuit against them. I think our lawmakers should re-think the idea of using police unless there is a criminal action or a danger to the public. Refusing to give up the seat you paid for is neither of those. 

News doesn't take holidays ...

I have often been embarrassed when friends and family members catch me for not knowing that a holiday is happening. I usually need to be reminded that this coming Friday or Monday is a holiday of some sort. I saw it happen today to a colleague working on a special news project. He had been preparing to line up some phone interviews for Friday morning. Sure enough I was close by to hear his phone call this morning to the first interview, saying “Oh what? Friday? A holiday? Ohhhh… yesss. Okay then, …”

This all goes back to journalism school where you learn several things that stay true over the years; one of them being: News never takes a holiday. 

History is overwhelming...

This weekend is one I have thought about for some time. I was pleased to watch television Sunday to see the network coverage of the 100^th anniversary of attack on Vimy Ridge and the Canadian victory there.  I have to say I was pleased with CBC coverage over CTV. This is something I had been thinking about in the past few years and I actually considered travelling to France to take part in the commemoration.I think I just wanted to return to France for a visit as well.  Like most people I am certain I would have been overwhelmed with the sense of history, but I was happy at how well the event was covered on television. I read the book by Pierre Burton last year and was both shocked and overcome with the level of incompetence of the military brass in the First World War. But then again that is looking at the event through modern eyes. I must say I was amazed at the scope of the Canadian victory, but given that the German officers were as prone to the same level of bad judgement by some British and Canadian officers it might not be surprising that common sense won the day. History is such a cruel judge, but a judge just the same.

Regardless, I was so pleased to see the thousands of young Canadians , as in high school students, who took part in the Vimy commemoration this weekend. Like the poem said, the torch has been passed. “Be yours to hold it high…”

Image Credit: Library and Archives Canada: German officers surrendered to Canadians after the battle at Vimy Ridge. 

It's over!

What is wrong with me? I woke up this morning thinking of a life where people are open, honest, good, decent and interesting. That’s what happens when you watch too many episodes of Downton Abbey. Yes, I have been binge watching all week. It was Friday that Claudette got an e-mail from Netflix revealing that the final season was now available. Well, we could hardly wait to finish supper. So for the past few days, we plonked down on the couch, put the tea on and watched the entire final season. Of course we had love/hate relationships with all the characters, even to the point of shouting that Lady Mary is a bitch. And of course dowager Lady Violet is a saint with a sense of humour.  Last night it was the final episode. What a fabulous story. What a great television show. Claudette said she will now feel like she is missing something. As the final episode came to an end, she said “Well, they can’t leave us like that. We have to have more!” I cannot disagree.

Well done VIA!

I know it was a marketing thing, but I think VIA Rail made a brilliant move this week when it announced it was offering up youth rail passes for July for only $150 for unlimited travel in July. As most of my friends are aware, I am a huge rail fan and so I am glad VIA is making this option available for more people. I think it should be done more often and my hope is it will revive passenger rail travel. The other good thing is that it will help younger Canadians get to know their country better. I can't think of a better way to spend July than riding the rails through Canada. 

It’s funny but just last night I was out for some beers with a guy from the Globe and Mail. He is travelling to Moosonee to work on a story.  I assumed he was flying. I was pleased he decided to take the train. He said it would give him more time to meet people and talk to people. Exactly. That’s how you get good stories.

Change is good ...

I know there are people who are worried about the idea of letting refugees into Canada. One hopes they can learn to accept a little change. I believe it is a good thing to bring new people to our country. After all, our country was built by immigrants. I was pleased this week to see that a refugee family from Syria has arrived in Timmins. I wish them well.  I have very little idea of what their lives were like on the other side of the world. Let’s hope they find good lives and happiness in our country.

Hard choices

 In other news, as they say, a lot of people like myself are shaking their heads at the antics of Mr. Trump. I said Mister, because this fellow certainly is not presidential. But he has been elected, and that is the price of democracy. People can collectively make poor choices.  It is interesting because Canada is in the midst of selecting new leaders for both the Conservative and New Democratic parties. My concern is whether they are looking for a truly good leader, or merely somebody that can unseat Justin Trudeau. The idealists will say the answer is both, but I have my doubts. Our local guy is Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus who is running to head the NDP. I like Charlie. He has integrity. He’s a good guy. Tough days ahead for him, for sure. I wish him the best. 

Keeping up to date ...

Jennifer sent me a text on Friday. “Question … u still alive?!” Ha ha, funny girl. But I can’t say I blame her because I was definitely out of touch for about four weeks. So I finally chatted with her Saturday night, after assuring her I responded to her text. She said she never got it. I insisted that I sent the reply, but then last night I realized that while I created a message, I never actually sent it. So much for thinking I was tech savvy enough to know how to use my phone. I wonder now why I never got answers for other texts that I figured I had sent out.

She also reminded me that I hadn’t been updating the blog. So I will stay on top of that.

Anyway, good news. Jennifer has passed her provincial exam and is indeed a Registered Nurse. They say pride is a sin, but I cannot help but be proud of what she has done. I am blessed to say at this point in my life my children give me happiness.

I am proud of myself too. Claudette and I were out shopping for dinner. I convinced her she would like pan fried pork chops. I wasn’t sure because she can be as fussy as I am with food. But happily the chops turned out just fine and she enjoyed the mango chutney that gave them a nice flavour.

For dessert we had something we both remember from out childhood … baked apples. Oh my goodness, they turned out nice and soft, but not mushy. We had them with a stuffing of brown sugar, butter, flour and granola. It was great! And the vanilla ice cream was fabulous. 

An amazing football game.

Well a lot of friends think it is strange that I rarely watch NFL football but I make a point of watching the Superbowl. It was even a funnier a few years back when I showed up at my favourite roadhouse, only to have some friends laughing and pointing at me for showing up on game day. They hadn’t seen me in ages. The best part was when I scratched a beer ticket and won a gas barbecue! Ha ha. I watched the Superbowl game on Sunday from start to finish and was amazed. Claudette and I cooked up a bunch of game day snacks and really got into the game. A couple of times she even hollered at the Patriots defence for allowing so many wide open passes. So yes, I was cheering for the Patriots, but it sure got quiet at halftime. I kept thinking Brady was holding onto the ball too long. That’s when I said to Claudette “sometimes you will be amazed at how crazy things happen in the closing minutes of the game.” And that’s why it was fun to watch the final minutes of Sunday’s game. I could barely believe what I was seeing. And then in overtime, it was all Brady. No wonder the guy has won Superbowl five times now.

Way to go Jennifer!

So pleased to get the most amazing news from daughter Jennifer this morning. People close to me know that Jenn is a cancer survivor. She endured a harrowing and horrible time in 2009 and 2010 when it discovered she had a rare form of leukemia. Jenn was confined to hospital for months. She could not walk. She endured chemo-therapy, radiation, spinal surgery. But she fought back. She survived. She learned to walk again, going from a wheelchair, to a walker to a cane and finally back on her own two feet. Four years ago, Jenn set out on another journey. She was so impressed with the loving care she got at the Sudbury cancer centre that Jenn decided to become a nurse. 

In December, we celebrated the fact that Jenn graduated with honours for her B.Sc. Nursing degree. This morning Jenn called to let me know she has been hired to work at the Sudbury hospital, Health Sciences North. Yep, she is going back to work in Oncology, helping the people the way she was helped. 

I am so, so proud of this amazing young woman! I am also more that pleased with the incredible love and support Jenn got from her husband Scott and her boys Tyler and Nathan. 

Such good news ...

I have to say I am pleased to hear that 2016 was a special year for mining safety in Ontario. I am working on a story today about the fact that 2016 was the first year in many, many years that no one died in an underground mining accident in Ontario.

That is such good news. Over the years, I have done too many stories of men dying in the mines. And just a couple of years ago, I had to do the story of the first ever woman to be killed on the job underground. As a reporter, as a former miner and mine rescue man, I hope we are in a new era and the trend continues.

Life is good

New Year’s was great this year because Claudette and I were back together. We first met just before new year's several years ago. Time passes, things change and we are together again. It’s all good. I think the best part is that she knows me better than I know myself in most cases and doesn’t put up with my usual bullsh*t. So I have to say 2017 is going to be a good year.