Introducing a new occasional feature on the Whine: T.H.E. Club.

Right off the bat, credit where credit’s due. This was Leslie’s idea, and it goes back several years – in fact, it’s already become a wink-and-nod family joke whenever we encounter a worthy example for membership.

T.H.E. Club is open to anyone who thinks with that portion of your brain in which you typically find common sense. It stands for Too High Expectations. However, institutional membership is awarded to businesses, organizations, even individuals who do exactly the opposite... in other words, who treat “common sense” as a train travelling entirely the opposite direction as the train on which the awardee is travelling.

(Photo: Clara Hughes, pedalmag.com)

Now I’m not talking about the kind of expectations that, for example, are shouldered by Canadian athletes in the Olympics – the “whole-country-is-counting-on-you-to-win-gold” type of expectations. I’m talking about simple, ordinary, day-to-day events in which one or more participants appear on a given day to have left common sense at home sitting among the cold toast crusts and half a cup of coffee left over from breakfast, rather than take it to work with them today.

I’m talking about the kind of thing that sometimes seems so opposite to common sense, it leaves you scratching your head and wondering, “What the [obscenity of your choice] were they thinking?!!”

In other words, T.H.E. Club is an absolutely perfect subject for a blog mostly about whining. So to repeat: not earth-shattering or world-changing expectations. Just plain ol’ common sense.

A recent example will illustrate what I mean. (And of course the yarn takes a few paragraphs. After all, I’m still recently ex-Government of Canada Communications. Why use a few words when a few dozen paragraphs will do?)

During a recent visit to one of Ottawa / Gloucester’s Mark’s Work Wear houses – specifically the one at 1940 Innes Road – I was drawn to a large table on which two large signs were posted advertising “All T-shirts on this table: 2 / $20”. Since T-shirts are pretty much my summer casual shirt wear of choice, I selected four and headed for the cash.

As the cashier rang them through, I noticed that each shirt was showing an individual (non-sale) price, ranging from a high of $18.99 to a low of $11.99. When I pointed it out to the cashier, he looked closely at each of the shirts, then informed me, “these are different styles”, as if that fully and satisfactorily explained it.

So I told him that all four came from the table where the special price was openly advertised in-store – and for good measure pointed to the table, which was visible from the cash and which displayed the several “different” styles. He took all four shirts over and checked them and several others on the same table. When he came back to the cash, he entered a special code on the machine and proceeded to start ringing them through again.

Then he informed me that because each of the four I had picked was “oversized”, there would be an additional cost per shirt that effectively added 10 per cent to the cost of each.

There are several things that, to me, are just plain wrong about how this sale was handled.

First, to my perhaps overly-expectant mind, the cash register should have been auto-programmed to accept each and every shirt placed on that sale table at the sale price advertised. (Every time two are checked through, the bill shows $20.)

Secondly, the shirts’ “styles” should never even have been mentioned. Regardless of style, they had all been placed on that sale table. (T-shirts, fer crapssakes – they look like the letter “T” when hanging on your clothesline – hence their name. How many style variations can you have?)

But what especially annoyed me was the added premium on an “oversized” T-shirt – an additional cost mentioned absolutely nowhere on any in-store advertising and which was drawn to my attention only verbally by the cashier.

For the record, I suppose I am “oversized” in Mark’s corporate eyes. Plus I quite deliberately choose casual wear like T-shirts so as to be loose fitting, which adds to their “breathability” and comfort on a hot day. Specifically, I buy XXL in such clothing.

However, regardless of why I choose to wear what Mark’s calls “oversized”, to me the apparently arbitrary addition of an extra cost is inappropriate at best and, at worst, smacks of a “bait and switch” model of retailing whereby a deliberately lower price is advertised to draw a customer in, only to have him find that said price does not apply to what he wished to purchase.

As I see it, if Mark’s – or anyone for that matter – is going to add a premium to “oversized” clothing on sale, then those items should be collected on a separate sales surface with a clearly worded poster or sign advertising that said items are $X.00 extra because they are “oversized”.

Now I like Mark’s products. The labels on almost all my clothing are either Denver Hayes or Wind River and, without exaggeration, this includes outer wear for all seasons, underwear, casual and “business casual” clothing, recreational, sportswear, accessories such as belts, toques, gloves / mittens, rainwear, shoes and heavy-duty winter boots, even LED flashlights and refillable water bottles. At Mark’s, despite apparently now being (who knew?) “oversized”, I still almost always find at least a measure of colour choice in their men’s wear.

At the end of the day, I bought the T-shirts. Even with the “oversized” premium, they were a reasonable price. But it bothered me that I had to argue my way into being charged the in-store advertised sale price because the cash register initially had not been programmed to accept it.

I was also borderline angry – certainly frustrated – at having to be essentially challenged by a sales representative who made me feel slightly less than honest for having claimed to have selected them from a sales table when his machine did not acknowledge the sales price.

And honestly (just to run the whine out completely), this is the first time in any Mark’s store that I have ever run up against an XXL product costing more than an advertised price. On those very few occasions where I have run into an “oversized” premium, it has never been in a Mark’s store, but it has always been advertised in-store and typically it has kicked in at an XXXXL or even XXXXXL size.

(Photo: Kreaser.co.uk)

Needless to say, this only exacerbated my disappointment with this particular transaction.

So Mark’s (or at least 1940 Innes Road, Gloucester, Mark’s) – for failing to meet the basic, but wholly reasonable, expectation of a customer’s thinking that items advertised for a certain price would actually be sold at that price, but most especially for making a long-time customer feel somehow unclean for pursuing that expectation, I am pleased to use you as the inaugural inductee into our Baby Duck all-new T.H.E. Club.

T.H.E. Club: Where did common sense go on any given day at any given time in any given place?

(And if you haven’t figured it out by now, the institutional "T.H.E. Club" label is applied with dripping sarcasm.)

So let me throw open an invitation: if anyone else out there has run up against a perfectly ordinary set of expectations that seemed to slip beyond the wholly reasonable ability of someone to deliver, vent away! The field is yours. Send me an e-mail at mdicola520@rogers.com and I’ll add it in a future whine, with due attribution. Or add a note in the comments. And if one day you see someone sporting a button that says simply “T.H.E.” or “T.H.E. Club”, you’ll know it’s catching on.

After all, we boomers really are a whiny lot, but we do come from a generation of parents who lived and breathed common sense. To our minds, it’s not an unreasonable expectation. But from the way some people / businesses act, you’d think that providing common sense demanded an effort on a par with summiting K-2.

À la prochaine.

It seems an oddly appropriate address for someone whose childhood was so tough. 17 The Bowery. That`s where my mom and her two sisters lived with their parents, until the three girls were 5, 7 and 9 and their mother deserted the family. It was at the height of the Great Depression in the late 1930s and their father was utterly unable to raise three young daughters on his own.

So the girls were parcelled out to Salvation Army foster homes in Picton and it was in one such home, under the firmly authoritarian hand of a Salvation Army Reverend, that Mom grew up. All her life, her childhood was not a subject that was ever discussed in our house.

It was only in her last couple years that she dropped nothing more than a couple of thinly veiled hints of what that life was like. In one case, it was funny – she claimed she knew where every last one of the “dirty bits” could be found in the Bible. But in another case, it was more darkly sinister as she let slip one evening that she never went to sleep without first checking to ensure her bedroom door was locked.

Whatever she experienced, or feared, it entrenched itself in her as a quiet refusal to participate in any form of organized churchgoing. As kids, my brother and I went to Sunday Mass with Dad, and always came home to a generous breakfast that Mom had prepared while we were at church.

In the photo, 17 The Bowery is the unit at the right end of the building.

My mother’s sister, Barb, whom we met at her small apartment in Belleville – a half hour from Picton – and took to lunch, was only too happy to fill in a number of details of the family breakup. She had actually gone so far as to discover only a few years ago that the girls’ mother was living in a nursing home in Kingston under the name she had taken when she remarried. Barb decided that she wanted to confront her and seek some answers as to why she left three girls in the care of a man unable to meet their needs.

But she said that when she did just that, she found an old woman who either did not or would not recall any of her daughters. She did say that she remembered leaving a man who was an “abusive” drunk. But Barb didn’t remember their father that way and, for her, that still didn’t give her the specific answer she said she had wanted when she went into the home. But she told us that when she left, the gnawing ache was gone, and ever since she has been able to put it behind her.

She also told us that she had asked Mom if she wanted to join her for the nursing home visit but that Mom had simply replied that her mother was “dead” to her.

It was hard to listen to, but it was also a fascinating window into a key part of what defined my Mom. And because of that, I’m really grateful for the time Barb was able to spend with us that day.

= = =

I’m still learning things. All my life, I’ve always assumed that the flag of the United Empire Loyalists was the British Union Jack. And with one huge variation, it is. Check out the photo. Notice anything missing?

The Union Jack – the flag of Great Britain – is made up of three elements: the (English) Cross of St George – a red cross on a white field; the (Scottish) Cross of St Andrew, a white “X” on a blue field; and the Irish Cross of St Patrick, a red “X” on a white field. So where you might well ask (I know I did), is the Irish component in the Loyalist flag – the red “X”?

While we were waiting for the Glenora ferry, I found this plaque that explained the elements that are in the Loyalist flag, but not what was NOT in it.

Actually, with a minimal amount of work with Google, the answer is surprisingly simple. The “Loyalists”, as their name implies, were those living in the 13 colonies of the United States after they won the War of Independence, when the First Continental Congress in 1777 adopted its own “Stars and Stripes” national emblem. As their name implies, the “Loyalists” remained loyal to the British Union at the time – which consisted of England and Scotland. It was under that banner that many of the Loyalists fled north, settling all over Prince Edward County. (As a footnote, the first among them landed on the shore just yards from this historic cemetery, which contains many of their graves – now largely unmarked, although a few surviving stones have been embedded in this memorial wall.)

The Cross of St Patrick was not even added to the flag we know today as the Union Jack until 1801, which is why it does not appear in the flag under which they landed in the latter quarter of the 18thC, and that is the banner that marks historical sites and festoons countless private homes throughout the County to this day.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – every day’s a school day, on the Internet at large and on Baby Duck in particular.

Random whine: Why do guys apparently never have a say in the scent of soaps that go into hotels, inns, even public washrooms? Our room at Picton’s Merrill Inn had one common scent for everything: “hand and body wash” (that would be “soap”); shampoo and conditioner, each in a liquid pump bottle. And without exception that scent was lavender.

More recently, on a visit to Perth to continue the ongoing estate settlement processes, I had lunch with my brother at a pretty damned good little restaurant on Gore Street just outside the town centre: “Michael’s Table”. And the soap in the men’s room (The men’s room, for heaven’s sake!) was “Olive”. On a previous visit to the same restaurant, the soap was “Ice Wine” scented.

Now I’m not asking for men’s soap with essence of Harley-Davidson saddle or Michelin snow tires, but surely something a little less... what shall I say – feminine... than lavender, olive or ice wine is not too much to ask, is it? Maybe Eau de fresh-cut lawn, or barley malt. Hell, I’d even settle for hickory smoke and smelling like barbecue sauce over lavender any darned day of the week!

Here endeth the random whine.

= = =

Speaking of Perth, when I prefaced my visit with my brother with a brief stop at the local Timmie’s I was delighted to see one of the extended family business staff doing likewise.

OK, so the family ain’t the Ewings of South Fork. In fact, there are other trucks in my late Uncle’s business designated for “Water Haulage”, and apparently they do a HUGE business in late Spring / early Summer when everyone opens up their swimming pools.

But it’s always a puff to see one’s name in lights, wouldn’t you agree? (Even if the “lights” in this case indicate that the driver has just stepped on the brakes.)

OK... Picton. Where was I?

This is a little jewel of a place to have lunch. It’s just outside town high up on a rise that someone long ago decided merited the label “mountain”. It has an odd geographical quirk. When you reach the top, you find a lake, named with stunning Loyalist practicality, “Lake on the Mountain”.

And this place is called (wait for it) The Inn at Lake on the Mountain. The old brewery truck is parked out front because The Inn is also home to a really fine micro-brewery. Any guesses as to what it might be called? (And if you read the text painted on the side of the truck, you already know.) The Lake on the Mountain Brewing Co.

This is where Leslie and I took mom’s sister, Barb, for a lunch we all greatly enjoyed. Leslie had the tourtière and apparently it is of some considerable local renown, as unlikely a house speciality as I can think of for a restaurant in the absolute heart of United Empire Loyalist country.

For my part, I discovered one of the best draught IPAs (India Pale Ales) I have had in a long, long time. And it’s nothing like the bland, plain stuff that Alexander Keiths says on their bottle’s label is an IPA.* The LoTM brewery’s Traditional IPA is sublime, top-loaded with hits of citrus, floral and the edgy but tastebud-friendly hops in both its aroma and its taste. It’s as perfect an ice-cold hot day’s tipple as you will find anywhere.

* I’m not alone in my thumbing down of Keiths. Here’s what one especially irate reviewer – from among dozens – had to say about Keiths “IPA” on the vast international beer rating internet site, Ratebeer.com: “Ignoring the fact that this is clearly not an IPA, this beer has other problems. Aroma and appearance are acceptable. But the taste... remember what beer (i.e., macro lagers) tasted like when you were really young? That’s what this beer tastes like now. It undoes years of ‘acquiring the taste’ for beer. Metallic and coppery. Not recommended.” (He gave it a 1 out of 10.) But I digress.

This is another example we noted of the Loyalist tradition of cutting right through the bull cookies when it comes to naming a business – in Bloomfield, in this case, just down the road from Picton, and likely named with a little bit of tongue in cheek, but certainly leaving you with no doubt whatsoever about what you can expect to find if you go through their front door.

The Merrill Inn is a fantastic place to stay if you’re looking for something really special. They offer package deals that include breakfast and one dinner in their dining room – which has a richly deserved international reputation for excellence. It’s also located on Picton Main Street, which puts it in the heart of everything in the town. And no, no one paid me to say this... although I was told both my arms would be broken if I said anything negative – you don’t mess with the powerful (but admittedly little-known) United Empire Loyalist mafia.

Given the County’s soaring reputation for small, but high quality wineries, it’s not surprising that the better restaurateurs are only too happy to suggest local wines to pair with whatever entrée you order.

This is, bar none, the best looking winery cat I’ve ever seen – with a face that registers a perfect balance between their whites and reds. She is also the friendliest darned mascot you’ll ever meet, and will happily hop right up on the tasting counter if you show even the slightest interest in her.

The winery in this case is Karlo’s and, besides their uniquely coloured cat, they have two especially outstanding claims to fame. Their first is Vanalstine’s Port – the only white port being produced at the moment in the entire country. Dense, sweet and lush, it is best served cold after dinner – with dessert. (That’s right. I wasn’t kidding by describing it as “sweet”. It echoes ice wine or sauterne which makes it a perfect companion for desserts. But it also stands alone as a superb late-night-with-a-special-someone-on-the-back-porch-sipping glass in the additional aural company of some great jazz or blues.)

Karlo’s other claim to fame isn’t a wine at all, but a signature bridge along one perimeter of their vineyard.

It’s not an antique – it was built in 2007 by an organization called “Dry Stone Walling in Canada” and like all such structures, it is held together without the use of mortar or cement... no nothing. Just careful placement of the stones, gravity and the incredible architectural strength of the arch. Here’s a bit of architectural trivia for you. When the Romans discovered the strength of the arch, someone got the bright idea of making it a 360-degree structure – and presto, the dome was born. Either that, or the Romans observed the incredible strength of Byzantine domes and made it a two dimensional structure in the arch. Kind of a chicken-and-egg thing but both have been around for a heck of a long time.

And finally... there are two things you probably don’t really expect to see on the shores of Lake Ontario – enormous sand dunes that rival some of the California coast’s Pacific Ocean-side terrain. And white swans. We encountered both during a lazy couple hours spent splashing along the shallows of Sandbanks Provincial Park. On a Monday, the place was almost deserted and it felt temptingly, addictively, almost like a private tropical paradise. (The fact that it was swelteringly hot on this particular Monday helped with the illusion.) Just without the rum and endless offers from locals to cornrow Leslie’s hair.

We both agreed we’ll be back for sure. After all, there’s another 40 or 50 wineries we didn’t get to, and Waupoos cider has been recommended by several friends.

And that Lake on the Mountain Traditional Brewing Co's IPA is worth a day trip all by itself!

Until next time.

So my “Next time...” note that ended my last update referred to my plan to revolutionize grocery shopping. To be completely honest, it’s something that has evolved from discussions that Leslie and I had recently, so for the record, it’s a shared idea.

And like any great plans, it had its birth in a couple of (for me) annoyances that arose from the grocery shopping experience as it happens now.

I have become the de facto family grocery shopper – and actually have been for some time. Please don’t make me turn in my guy credentials; I enjoy it. And over the years, I’ve noticed a couple of trends, especially in the giant grocery stores.

Trend 1: the store layout. When you first walk in the door of a giant grocery store, you typically land in the produce section. And for good reason. Few sections of a major grocery store look as inviting as that sea of colour, freshness, healthfulness and just plain CHOICE! offered by the produce section. There are 15 different kinds of apples, for heaven’s sake!

And yes to a baby boomer this is a big deal! I grew up when you actually got certain fruits or vegetables only at a specific time of year. (Nowadays, of course, the term “winter vegetable” is an anachronism that sits in the same dictionary as “telephone dial”, “clockwise direction” and “channel-changing knob”.)

I can still recall when that fuzzy little camel testicle from New Zealand, the kiwi, made its entrance into the North American grocery stores’ fresh fruit section. Unless you’d actually been to New Zealand, you’d never seen anything like that grubby brown exterior covering a white core interior encircled by a stunningly brilliant lime green donut flecked with its minuscule black seeds. And the taste! A fresh razor-sharp citrus burst that you used to get only from chugging an entire envelope of unsweetened Kool-Aid powder. Suddenly kiwi started turning up in everything from chilled soups through salads to an essential flavour and colour burst atop a glazed fruit flan.

To get REALLY ancient on you, there was a time when the only apple we ever saw an was the MacIntosh, except at Christmas when the sweet five-knobbed Red Delicious would appear in the family fruit bowl for a few miraculous weeks.

Now, you can routinely browse mountains of mangoes and mangosteens, loads of lychees, piles of passionfruit, and the one I love the most – the Cape Gooseberry or ground cherry – each succulent orange fruit wrapped in its own little paper lantern shell with an amazing taste that completely defies description. (Although some have said that it is like eating a perfumed tomato and that’s not too far off my own experience.)

Even the basics like apples, plums and pears now come in so many varieties you can select them for the best flavour matches to whatever recipe you’re preparing.

So... produce. Not too hard to figure out why its rainbow hits you like a Gaugin palette the moment you step inside the door.

And what’s next on your list – milk? But guess where the milk is. Like the Earth’s North Pole relative to its South, milk sits in a dairy section with that other staple – eggs – at the opposite end of the store from produce, forcing you to work across the entire store to get to it.

On your way to the Tru-Taste Skim, depending on the store you may pass through the sections where they are selling books, children’s clothing, snow tires, patio furniture, espresso machines, and at least 50 different varieties of school lunch boxes featuring everything from a Dora the Explorer colour scheme to a separate compartment where you insert a thin frozen gel pack to keep the kids’ cheese sandwiches chilled until lunchtime – wait, didn’t I come into a grocery store?

Trend 2: Can you guess where you’ll find it this time? I first noticed this over a period of several months and related to two specific products: horseradish and ordinary saltine crackers. They kept being moved around! Once I found horseradish in the salad section next to the little bottles of crushed garlic in oil; next time it was in the meat section, with the cold cuts (well, some of the cold cuts. There were also cold cuts to be had in abundance over in the deli section.) And once I found the horseradish nestled in the condiments beside the Maille Dijon mustard, even though it is supposed to be refrigerated.

And guess where you’ll find saltine crackers. Ah – there’s a massive overhead guide sign that includes the word “Crackers”. Hah! Tricked ya! You eat saltines with soup, don’t you? So two aisles over beside the Habitant pea soup with ham is where you’ll find the saltines – with salted or unsalted tops. “Crackers” is reserved for stuff like stoned wheat thins, bacon dippers, melba toast and the countless others in the “snack cracker” family. Beside the soup is where you’ll find the... well, the crackers.

So here’s our plan.

Someone, please, design a smartphone app with a cross-device compatibility that will make iTunes look like a retired carthorse. Its purpose will be simple. It’s for your grocery list. And make it specific. I don’t just mean “tortilla chips”. I mean “blue corn, gluten-free, lightly salted, organic, restaurant-style, bowl-shaped for ease-of-dipping tortilla chips”! And write it so it can be entered on every device you own – whether your desktop PC, your laptop, iPad, smart phone, even your damned Amazon Kindle or Indigo Kobo book reader! And enable an automatic plug-in – or wireless – synchronization that, when you connect two such devices together, will automatically update both to the most recent set of entries.

Now here’s where it gets really cool. You go to the grocery store and the first thing you do when you enter that lush paradise that is the produce section is turn on whatever device you’re carrying – and it automatically synchs to a wireless network in the store and shows you – on your device – a store floor plan. Now you just toggle back and forth from your shopping list to the floor plan – item by item. Those fancy blue corn tortilla chips? Tap it on your list and bang!, your screen shows a little indicator on the floor plan in the correct aisle and approximate position. A truly smart store will also flash up a little callout box that advises: “Old El Paso Blu-Corn Tortilla Chips, 454g special this week”.

Not only that, a truly BRILLIANT program will let you leave your device set almost exclusively on the floor plan as you simply work the aisles end-to-end through the entire store. As you pass “canned low sodium albacore tuna packed in water”, your device will light up with a callout box that says, “This item is on your list. Pick it up, dummy!” (OK, maybe not in exactly those words, but along those lines.)

Now you won’t have to get even mildly annoyed at finding one staple placed so far away from another – you’ll cover off everything on your list in one highly organized pass through the store. In the Deluxe version of this program, as I see it, as each item gets rolled into your cart, you hit a one-touch button of some kind and it is flagged on your shopping list as “Got it”. In the Super Deluxe version, this happens automatically.

So to all the grocery shoppers who, in five years, are going to be fully comfortable with using the latest version of Ubisoft’s “Pimp My Produce”. Remember, you heard it here first. You’re welcome.

= = =

Many years ago, when we as a family were touring the massive Exhibit Hall at the Toronto convention of the annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA), someone slipped my daughter – then quite young – an advocacy button that read, “Save America’s Libraries”. In short order, we had her responding to anyone who pointed it out to her by saying, “Yes, I’m trying to collect the whole set.”

(Well, I thought it was funny!)

You may recall a couple entries ago I included a photo of Mom’s McLaren’s Whiskey bottle from the long-gone Perth distillery. That is a genuine collectible and some collectors of old glass would happily give it pride of place in their own collections. It prompted me to look around at some of the odds and sods I’ve accumulated over the years with an eye not so much to their eventually acquiring any great value, but more to reflect stuff in which I’ve been interested over my lifetime (so far).

I have a First American edition of Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”. And I stole it. Although “rescued” is, to my mind, the more honest verb. Some 30-plus odd years ago, I was with a group of friends on a resort vacation and the large cabin in which we all were staying had a fireplace. Framing the fireplace was a large bookcase and on the bookcase was this book and, clearly, it had been heavily damaged when some complete moron apparently tossed it into the fire. Even then I was a huge Tolkien fan, having devoured "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" each a half dozen times while still a teenager.

Seeing one of his books so badly mistreated almost made me cry and I brought it back with me, thinking it was just an older edition that would be fun to have on my shelf. It was only several years later when, on a whim, I did some research into the particular edition I had salvaged and discovered to my shock it is a first American edition of "The Hobbit", complete with Tolkien's own artwork and maps, and several errors that make collectors weep with joy when they find the edition. (Just one example: two chapters in a row are labelled “Chapter 7”.) In pristine shape, it would be worth a significant pile of money but in the heavily damaged condition this one is, it really is worth more as a curio rather than an object with any inherent value.

At the time, I actually wrote to the Tolkien Society in Oxford, England, because I was thinking of having it rebound. However, they made it clear that they would consider that, even to repair its damage, a travesty and suggested I leave both the book – and the tale of its rescue – intact. However, I did compromise and bought a beautifully published facsimile of the dust jacket of the same edition, and that is how it sits on my bookshelf to this day – badly scorched and beaten, but a first US edition nonetheless.

I also have a wonderful and original program from les Folies Bergère from the inter-war years when Josephine Baker was a featured performer. The program was a gift from my late father-in-law and followed several conversations we’d had about his travels in Europe just before the war. (He had some astonishing colour home movies he shot of a Nazi Party rally in 1937, the main street of the town in which he and some of his friends were staying just festooned with the black, white and red swastika banners. Two years later, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and WWII engulfed Europe.) One Christmas, I gave him a Baker biography as a gift, prompting him to recall this program and, when he asked if I wanted it, I jumped at it. It clearly is pretty hot stuff for its day!

I have some other things that, to me, are “collectible” simply because I have a personal attachment to them that goes beyond an artificial label like “investment”. I’ve been a voracious reader of all things Titanic going back decades, even before The Woods Hole Institute’s Robert Ballard found the wreck. So when Canada Post this year issued several special commemoratives to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking, I bought and framed them. One is a sheet of eight overseas first-class letter stamps, and the second is a series of three first-day covers – envelopes with the stamps attached that were cancelled in Halifax exactly 100 years to the day after the ship went down. The cancellation mark is actually a silhouette of a Titanic deck chair recovered at the site of the sinking, and which sits to this day in a Halifax museum. And one of the covers is actually a mount for a special $0.25 coin with a colour image in its face, issued by the Canadian mint.

When Canada phased out the dollar bill (and I’m automatically dating myself by using the term “bill” instead of “loonie” to describe a Canadian dollar), the mint allowed members of the public to purchase actual sheets from the final pressing. I’ve had one framed in something called a “floating” mount that is transparent on both sides. At least we’ll always have at least $40 in the house. (Maybe I should hang a little red hammer beside it and a sign: “In case of emergency, break glass.” With the qualifier that not having enough cash to pay for a delivery pizza does NOT constitute a sufficient emergency!)

“Collectible”, to me, is not something you print on the packaging of a product issued in the millions. Coca Cola is notorious for this. Every month, they seem to issue another “collectible” series of cans commemorating something or other. And of course the recent observance of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee left us awash in “collectibles”, some of them of rather... uh “questionable” taste (a set of masks that casts the Royals as terrifying hollow-eyed zombies leaps to mind as an example).

(That said, you will go far to match in accidental tastelessness a President John F Kennedy commemorative salt and pepper set that was produced by a well-intentioned ceramicist before he was assassinated. The two-piece – of course – set was a representation of Kennedy sitting in his famous White House rocking chair. The pepper shook out from the top rung at the back of the rocker, and the salt – no, I am NOT making this up – from the holes in the President’s head.) Oh lord... I just Googled it. It’s still available. $29 on Amazon.com and it’s a “reproduction vintage” They left out "for sickos" in the ad, I guess.

Collectible for me is something meaningful to me that helps make up the mosaic that is my life. I have, for example, a couple of actual newspapers from July 1969 whose front pages are variations on “Man Walks on the Moon”. I have Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian issues 1, 2, and 3 from the days when I read comics voraciously. I have a Newton and Ridley beer glass from the days when I watched “Coronation Street” religiously -- every Sunday instead of going to church. (The brewery is fictitious; I bought the glass at a celebrity auction here in Ottawa when the actors who played Jack and Vera Duckworth were touring to promote the show. They were the auctioneers and it was a pleasure to emerge the successful bidder on that one.)

Whine o' da week. Home Depot: Why do you have your freight delivery right at the customer exit? The past three times in a row I’ve come out of your store (the one on Innes at the Queensway) I’ve been waved back while a forklift offloads something or other from a giant semi-transport parked right outside the exit door. Most big box stores either have their freight deliveries ‘round back or, at worst (in terms of customer inconvenience) around the side. What rocket scientist decided that a store that receives inventory in massive bundles – lumber, rider lawn mowers, pallets of paint, etc. – should be set up so as to be unloading new inventory right at the same door as customers who just want to exit to the parking lot?

Next time: Whatever. Maybe a ramble about Prince Edward County’s wines and beers – that’s where I’m heading for the next few days. Picton was also Mom’s home town, so it's also a “Roots” trip for me.

À la next time.

Retirement Report – First of a series

You know that hackneyed phrase (I’ve even used it myself recently), “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”? Well... Day 1 of retirement really walks that talk.

Thing is, I’m still not at all sure if my first response should be “YESSS!!” or “Oh my GOD!”

Before I actually reached the date, my intellectual mind was feeding me all sorts of great advice that it now turns out my emotional mind was sitting in a corner blowing off with little snickers and quiet repetitions of the Eliza Doolittle song from “My Fair Lady”, “Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait!”

Qualifier: As this is being written, the official start to my status as “retired” is barely a couple days behind me. However, I also used up three weeks of my earned holidays before reaching that date so the preliminary feelings of being in a retired state are probably about a month old.

Now I realize that by either measure, that’s ridiculously early to start pontificating about retirement but if I mean to track the process, this is as good a time as any to start, or as Glinda (photo) put it so succinctly all the way back in 1939, “It’s always best to start at the beginning.”

Several years ago, I took a three-day retirement planning seminar. Among its many worthwhile topics were three things that the RPI (Retirement Planning Institute, believe it or not) stressed were the “most important”: your financial preparation; your physical preparation; your emotional preparation.

Financial has been easy, but only because I haven’t had to work too hard at it myself. Leslie has always been the family money manager and luckily for me, not only is she incredibly good at it, she enjoys it. For the past... forever, I’ve just been signing over significant portions of my monthly paycheque to her, and she’s been building the means by which we will be able to enjoy a reasonably comfortable retirement, so long as the price of Miss Vicky’s potato chips doesn’t skyrocket. So, financial planning: check.

Physical preparation. For the past two years, I’ve been gradually clearing off all the things that might be cause for concern as a newly-minted 60-year old. Most importantly (LOUD knock on wood), despite Mom and Dad’s both having died of one or more of the “big scary things”, so far they are not in my body (or at least have not made themselves sufficiently visible to be detected). Along the way, I discovered – or re-discovered – the joys of a colonoscopy and multiple DREs (a digital rectal exam – and yes it is as revolting as its name implies) and blood pressure cuffs and needle jabs to draw off blood samples, and eye exams and new twinges that weren’t present a week ago. And so on and on.

The only doctor-ordained prescription in my life is a light blood pressure medication because my most helpful family physician decided I’ve been running at “the high side of normal” for long enough that he wanted to see it brought back to simply “normal”. So I launch every day now with a potent Americano and my new friend, Apo-Triazide.

I’ve also joined – with Leslie – a nearby very well-equipped Fitness Club and for the past five months we have been there almost without fail every other day. So... physical preparation: check.

And I won’t lie. What really helped spur my “Because I can...” thinking when it came to taking early retirement were the deaths of both Mom and Dad last year, just months apart. Both struggled in their last couple years, and seemed to spend more time in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals than at home. Their unspoken legacy was the importance of making what you want out of life while your body is still able to carry you along that path, because if you live long enough, the day eventually will come when it can’t.

Which brings me to emotional preparation and the “YESSS!!” vs “Oh my GOD!” internal debate. One of the first numbers that has come to mind is this: for the first time in 36 years, I am not working fulltime for someone.

One of the second numbers that has come to mind is assuming I take reasonable care of myself and my biology isn’t attacked by something incurable, longevity these days being what it is, it is just possible that I could still be hanging around for at least that same amount of time.

So taking those two numbers in turn, you can probably see where I come to both “YESSS!!” and “Oh my GOD!”, or in other words the intellectual vs emotional debate in my mind.

The intellectual half of my brain contains a list of all the things I’ve been thinking of – for the past few years – to park on my future retirement “To do” list, because I’ll have nothing but time. But the emotional half of my brain has taken precisely that same thought – nothing but time – but has put a big black capital “N” on “Nothing”.

Which isn’t true, of course. I don’t have nothing. I just need to take a bunch of that time to sort out what I do have.

I am not a person who has ever entirely defined either my identity or my sense of self-worth solely in terms of who I am at any particular job (most recently a Government of Canada Media Analyst). But the simple fact of my being a salaried worker with a specifically defined set of tasks and deadlines that must be fulfilled in order to receive a regular paycheque has certainly been the biggest section -- just not the only one -- of my "Who am I?" list for... well, pretty much my entire adult life.

I have several friends and former colleagues who traveled through the retirement gate before I did, and one consistent piece of advice they all offer is for the first couple months, do nothing. In fact, embrace doing nothing. Maybe even worship it!

Think, plan, plan and think some more. But don’t go out and join a bunch of groups to immediately re-fill your suddenly emptied 8:00 am to 4:00 pm daily timetable. Enjoy it as an extended holiday, my recently-retired friends have said. And to me that seems like really good advice.

Because at the moment, when I look at that list of things I’m finally able to do, I don’t have a clue where to begin.

I know that sounds like a ludicrous thing about which to be complaining, but human nature is such that a person – even a lazy person – requires a purpose.

During all the years I worked as a Media Analyst, for all my bitching and carping, my purpose was pretty plain. And boy can I give you a list of former supervisors and co-workers who will confirm that I bitched and carped with the worst of them! – about ridiculously short deadlines, about horribly-defined “BF”s (“Bring Forwards”, the collective name given to projects with fixed deadlines. Inevitably, we’d get BFs that required follow-up answers from the people who assigned the BF in the first place – usually in the Minister’s Office, who really should have known better. Can you, we’d bleat as the deadline came relentlessly closer, put more definition to the assignment than, say, “Give us an analysis of everything in the media over the past two years about Employment Insurance”?)

But one thing was always clear: no matter what the organization I was working for, and no matter what the specific project I was working on, I pretty much always knew at the end of each and every workday what I was going to be doing at the start of the following day.

When I worked in the private sector, it was for an Association governed by a Board of Directors (we called it a national Council). At one Council meeting I remember, one of our Councillors, from Nova Scotia (there’s something about the Atlantic air that makes people from that part of the country very pragmatic and wise) clearly ran out of patience and demanded that the Council get on with making a decision about something that had been debated to that point for several hours. “End the analysis paralysis”, was how he put it.

Transferring that to my present circumstance, that’s exactly where I am now, and so far my response to all this time and all those “To do” things has been so far not much better than a paralyzing, “Now what do I do?”

My brother, despite being two years younger than me, also beat me into retirement. Recently, when I had exactly this conversation with him, he said simply, “Just pick one”.

And to quote “Catch 22”’s Joseph Heller, “It makes about as much sense as anything else.”

Or maybe I should instead quote “Buckaroo Banzai” in his adventures across the Eighth Dimension (echoed in “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” and, imagine my surprise, first said by Confucius): “And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

So I’ll leave the last word for now to the intellectual half of my brain. At the end of the day, the month, the year, the decade... I’m going to be somewhere. My brother also tells me that after a few months, I’ll be wondering how in hell I ever found the time to go to work, my retirement days will be so full. I hope so; that sounds like fun!

I’ll be keeping you posted because one thing I have already discovered is that I love to write. But because my job involved copious amounts of writing, my recreational writing suffered accordingly. No more. Now you get to suffer by reading my spews!

I’m going to try to keep my future retirement ramblings to add-ons to blog posts, instead of turning the entire blog over to the subject. (That`s why it`s called a Retirement “Report” instead of a “journal” or “diary” – I want to emphasize they’ll only be occasional updates and I have no doubt you’ll all appreciate that. In fact, this is probably the longest such report you’ll read on the subject for many a month. But I wanted to use Glinda’s very good advice (above), and to start by putting a border around the roadmap.

To Oz!

A footnote: As this update was going to press, I received a birthday card from Leslie... and talk about timely! It has you, the reader, looking over a dog's shoulder as he, pencil in paw, contemplates his (wait for it) "To Do List". It reads: "1. Dig up flower beds; 2. Sit; 3. Stay; 4. Roam the neighbourhood; and 5. Sniff butts". Sounds like a pretty damned fine retirement plan to me! Just don't turn your back on me when next we meet face to... face. :-)

Until la prochaine.

Next time: If it comes with a label that says "collectible", it isn't. And my plan to revolutionize grocery shopping.