Posts Tagged ‘canada’

Unmistakably different animals

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

My team fell a few points short of the challengers this weekend, so our run was short-lived. It was still a fairly solid show on the whole… I don’t think I showcased my best work but I did a decent job and had a fun time doing it.

I had a moment of weakness a while ago and purchased a stick-on decal for my laptop. I’m not normally the kind of person who abides this kind of thing, but I simply couldn’t resist the idea of having Yoshi eating the apple in the middle of my Macbook Pro:

Yoshi Laptop

The construction continues on my condo; my building is now fully naked of its siding and wrapped in clear plastic. I was supposed to move my barbecue out of their way a while ago, but was unable to because I had lost the key to the cable I’ve used to secure it to the patio. They offered to cut the padlock for me and finally got around to doing so, and today I went to put the barbecue into my storage locker. I hadn’t been to my storage space in at least a year, and was shocked to discover that someone had apparently attempted to break into it. I don’t think they succeeded as the lock is still in place, but the metal hinge it’s on is all mangled from someone attempting to break it off. Unfortunately, their tampering deformed the hinge in such a way that I can no longer open the door, even after removing the lock. I tried using a couple of tools to bend it back close enough to its original shape that I might be able to open it again, but I think short of grabbing a hammer and bashing it clean off the door it’s beyond my abilities. I’ve notified the property manager, though, and I expect they’ll take responsibility for repairing it. In the meantime I’ve had to leave the barbecue in the hallway with an apologetic note for those it winds up obstructing. Oh well.

Moving to the States from Canada gives you a lot of perspective. As countries around the world go it is nearly identical to our own, but the differences are still so very striking… I think about how in the species of dogs you can have two labradors that are more alike to each other than to any of the terriers, poodles, beagles, etc. and still be completely and unmistakably different animals.

The subtler cultural and regional differences notwithstanding, I thought I had a firm grasp on the superficial differences when it came to brands and products. No Shreddies, Rowntree-brand chocolates, ketchup chips, Harveys/Swiss Chalet, Tim Hortons or President’s Choice to name just a few. Well after more than five years of living abroad in the States, I finally discovered another: frozen yogurt.

It’s not like I go out for frozen yogurt very often. The few times I’ve gone, though, I’ve been surprised that the places I’ve ended up only had soft-serve machines with pre-mixed flavours in them. The experience I’m used to and that I’ve had my entire lifetime before moving to the United States is far more robust: they have a machine that they drop a bar of plain frozen yogurt and a cup of fresh fruit into, which then proceeds to pulverize, grind and mix the two together so that what comes out is a made-to-order flavoured frozen yogurt. It’s an evolutionary leap forward in terms of quality, as not only can you have any flavour you choose instead of just picking from whatever few they already have prepared in the soft-serve machines, but the fresh fruit ground in there tastes immeasurably better than the pre-blended stuff.

At first I thought I was just having trouble finding the right chain, as they have quite a few out here. I furiously Googled, thinking that somewhere nearby must offer the genuine confection I was craving and not merely some pale shadow of it, but it turns out that in these parts, soft-serve is simply what frozen yogurt is understood to be. I even found an article about a Yogen Früz that had opened in San Francisco, and this innovative, futuristic technique they had for blending custom-flavoured frozen yogurts (which has, of course, been the status quo my entire life).

I am beside myself, apoplectic with disbelief and sadness. I mean, these cro-magnons are thumping around trying to figure out which end of the spear sticks into the animal, while everyone else is tilling soil, raising cattle and sleeping on beds instead of cave floors. There’s nothing to be done about it… but next time I go to Canada, I’m definitely paying a visit to Dutch Dreams.

Dan.

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A lifetime of memories

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Rehearsal let out early tonight, so I have time to write an update as reruns of The Office keep me amused in the background. Hooray!

My team won a second time at Theatresports last Friday, which means we’re returning again this Friday. My teammates did well, but it was a close call and I didn’t feel like I deserved to win… I let myself get psyched out again, something which hasn’t happened to me in quite a while now, and basically failed to contribute anything significant on stage. I took a class at the Seattle Festival of Improv back in February and was a bit shocked by a revelation that occurred there: the teacher had all 30 or so of us line up in order of the number of years we’ve been doing improv, and I was third from the front of the line… notwithstanding some considerable dry spells I’ve had, I’ve been improvising for about 10 years now. We’re all permitted to regress and make mistakes, especially in improv, but I’ve been doing this for so long; I’m pretty humbled by my ability to lose it all in an instant and suddenly behave as if it were my first time on stage. Hopefully this Friday will be better.

Saturday marks the five year anniversary of my arrival in the United States. I’m having a barbecue in the afternoon to celebrate, but don’t know what attendance is going to be like. If you read this blog and can make it, I’d love to have you! I’m a little nonplussed about the whole situation… it certainly doesn’t feel like I’ve been living on my own in a foreign country and doing that whole adult thing for five years now.

I was supposed to clean my condo this past weekend in preparation for it, but only got so far as cleaning the bathroom (itself by no means a small task). Gonna have to find time this week to finish the job… don’t quite know what hat I’m going to pull that rabbit out of.

In a similar vein of milestones, time passing, sunrise-sunset and the like, my parents just sold their house in Toronto. For many families this would be nothing special, but it has some significance to me… my parents spent over thirty years there… it’s the house I grew up in with them and my brother, the only home I’ve ever known in Toronto, and the place I’ve always listed as my “permanent” address. With me flown from the nest and my brother starting in assisted living, my parents are eager to move to a smaller place that’s less of a burden for them (my dad in particular has had nothing but grief maintaining it over three decades). They are far more sentimentally attached to the cottage, and from their vantage point I can hardly blame them, but it’s weird for me… I’ve always taken for granted that I have a lifetime of memories built up there (right back to the earliest I’ve got – I’m talking stuff like being held by my dad in a rocking chair while he sings “rock a bye baby” to me) that I can revisit anytime by going there, and now, well, I have only the memories. It’s not a big deal to me – it’s the memories that are important, after all, and not the place itself – but it’s another little stinging reminder of how quickly life is passing by.

It’s somewhat ironic that in getting the place ready for sale, my parents have had to overhaul the entire house to the point where it seems practically new. All of the old knob and tube wiring has been replaced, new floors installed (ancient carpets were pulled up from the upstairs only to reveal beautiful hardwood flooring underneath… who knew?), old basement rooms thick with dust and disuse now revitalized. My mom has said she actually wouldn’t mind staying, but my dad is determined to get out while the getting’s good.

Fiddler quickly approaches; I look forward to getting my evenings back when it opens. Things remain busy at work, but I’m enjoying it and I feel appreciated by them.

Life, it seems, carries on…

Dan.

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No choice but to fake it

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

The vacation was good. The more extended family came up for the last weekend, which was nice, as I get to see them even less often than my parents or brother. It was especially nice to see my grandmother, who has been in and out of the hospital these past years and is now pretty much confined to a wheelchair. My aunt also brought up Izzy, who is now 16 years old and getting a lot more bony and less active (but just as curmudgeonly as he’s always been… it’s as though his body has finally grown into his personality).

More blabbering on about Izzy… with pictures!

I got back Sunday evening. The flight was exhausting, as usual… I have a knack for somehow getting rearranged and shafted to the rear of airplanes, as both legs of my journey to Canada had already done so. When I saw the same thing on my boarding passes for the return flights, I spoke to the ticket agent and he was able to improve my seat on the shorter leg to Detroit, but was apparently unable to even access the much longer flight to Seattle on his computer. So the second leg had me at row 36 in a middle seat… the good news was that a family of four traded me the aisle so they could sit together; it should come as no surprise, though, that the bad news was that half the family was composed of a baby that wouldn’t stop crying and a little kid that wouldn’t stop talking.

So naturally much of the R&R I managed to accrue over the vacation was forfeit, and now between work and trying to catch up in the rehearsals I’ve missed for Rocky Horror I’m pretty well spent. It’s good to get back into rehearsing, but last night was my first time singing “The Time Warp” with the cast there and it was scary as pants for me, even though I’d worked on it just about every day while on vacation. Turns out most of what I’d worked on needed to be thrown out anyway, since there are a lot of nuances to the specific version we’re doing I didn’t know about (I only got the vocal score this week and have been working off of various recordings in the meantime). Everyone is very encouraging and supportive but the gap between myself and the others is dizzyingly wide… our Magenta especially has a stunning rock belt, and while I’m fortunate to have her backing me up, between that and the stellar vocals of the rest of the cast it’s all rather confidence-shaking.

Of course, my greatest dilemma is that the one thing this kind of music absolutely demands above all else is confidence, so I have no choice but to fake it and try to fool myself. Thankfully that’s an acting challenge rather than a singing challenge, so I’m better equipped to handle it.

Would that I could still fool myself in the moments between performing, though.

Dan.

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Secret plan

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I’ve spent the past couple of months bringing a secret plan to fruition, where I hoped to surprise my mother on her birthday by dropping in unexpectedly on their summer cottage vacation.

I had really hoped to kill two birds with one stone and help my dad out in his purchase of a new van by buying it for him in the States and driving it up to Canada, magically saving him about ten thousand dollars because that’s just how much more things cost north of the border. Importing should be almost trivial to do except that Toyota doesn’t want you to do it, and makes it extremely difficult to do so (with new vehicles especially). My dad compromises on some things, but the make, model and age of his minivan are not up for discussion.

In short, they won’t sell to Canadians, only Americans who are registering the vehicle to an American DMV. The hope was that we could use my residency status and address in America to buy the van, and it looked like it would work except that it takes 6 to 8 weeks to title a vehicle in Washington and without the title we’d need a manufacturer’s certificate of origin to import it, which the dealerships wouldn’t provide us with because Toyota is run by assholes.

We finally gave up on it and I settled on flying to Toronto directly instead of Buffalo. I caught the red-eye which included a stopover in Vegas, during which I played my first ever slot machine… I spent a dollar that someone had given me beforehand and lost it before I was able to even figure out how the machine worked. I failed to sleep on the plane and arrived in Toronto at 7:30 AM local time, all sweaty and bleary-eyed. My mom was nearly shocked senseless when she came downstairs and I was there, and much blubbering followed.

I’m now spending the week with them up at their cottage in Muskoka. I am sad that I’m not getting to see any of my Canadian friends this visit, but the downtime up here has been really theraputic for me. We’ve caught one of the most gorgeous weekends of the summer… it’s been sunny and warm and the lake has been quiet and calm. I’ve gone swimming and boating with my folks and working on my part in Rocky Horror but most of all I’ve just been lounging and resting, and it’s been niiiiice.

My biggest complaint is that we only have dial-up Internet access here, and I didn’t discover until I arrived that my fancy-pants laptop doesn’t actually have a modem in it, so I’m forced to use my dad’s computer for all Internet-related activity. I’m trying to goad them into getting high-speed up here, mostly because I think it’d be fantastic to lounge around on the lower deck out by the water with a wireless connection to the rest of the world. Don’t think they’ll go for it any time soon, though.

For the curious, I have some pictures of the cottage taken a couple of years back in my gallery. Pretty much everything is the same… except the baby ducks have grown big and fat now, and still like to hang around our little bay.

Dan.

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Blessed beyond measure

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

This past week was fairly exciting, as it was both Canada Day on Tuesday and America Day on Friday. I celebrated Canada Day by claiming the lunch room at work in the name of Her Majesty, the Queen:

Canada Day Flag

I sent out an e-mail to the company that detailed this conquest and included the long version of O Canada. It was well-received, except was eventually defiled by American revolutionaries. Oh well.

America Day meant a holiday from work, and I spent the afternoon in the company of some very good theatre friends who were having a barbecue. Now one of the grand American traditions of the holiday is to try and detonate some of the land you love, but it just so happens that setting off fireworks in Seattle is illegal. Such laws are a trifle to my one friend whose parents happen to own a fireworks stand, though. At personal risk I helped him unload what I was told was a payload probably in the neighbourhood of $2,000 or so.

Now the friend with the fireworks – let’s call him Vee – and the owner of the house – let’s call her Jay – have a long-standing friendship where they have performed alongside each other (both are two of the most spectacular and hard-working talents I have the privilege of knowing), but Vee is very, well, full of life and often when they get together socially at Vee’s behest the more moderate Jay will wind up with a concussion or some other form of mild trauma. I should now note that Jay is not a fan of fireworks in her home – is rather ruffled by them, in fact – and it took a lot of nudging and guarantees of safety from Vee to convince her it was a sane idea to ignite them in her back yard.

So of course what came to pass was that Vee gave the first firework – a simple smoke grenade – to a twelve-year old boy who broke it and caused it to emit a fiery plume. He dropped it and it sat in the middle of the yard, right next to the shoe of Jay’s three-year-old daughter who burst into tears at the sight of her shoe being roasted. The footwear was recovered but not before it suffered some unsightly burns, and the grenade continued to carve out a patch of soil in the grass next to it for quite some time.

Jay got all tight-lipped as she hugged her wailing child and Vee banged his head in gentle disbelief onto grass next to him. I nearly shed tears myself, I was so moved by the poetry of the spectacle before me.

My friends are fantastic.

I tried to hit up another party that night as well: one of the ensemble members at Unexpected has a houseboat moored at Lake Union, and every America Day he has a party there and people watch the (state-sanctioned) fireworks from some of the best seats in the city. I was unfortunately coming after the fireworks, but what should have been a five-minute drive became thoroughly ridiculous as cops had quarantined off that entire section of the city and made it virtually impossible to get anywhere close. There were barriers that kept me from even getting onto the street that his marina was on, and because all of the main and side streets were closed off it took me over an hour just to get back to the highway… as a result I missed partying with all of my improv friends, and caught some minor hell for it later on.

I did Theatresports last night and it went pretty well. I could have been stronger and I think our team could’ve had slightly better chemistry, but I had a good Shakespeare scene and the audience enjoyed it. After the show some girls came to me and got all excited that I reminded them of Buster from Arrested Development. They seemed to think this was some kind of badge of honour and I should be proud that I resembled whom they thought of as the funniest character on the show. I was a little perturbed that I reminded them of the awkward guy with an Oedipus complex and quite possibly some kind of genetic deficiency. It still feels good when the audience takes a personal interest in me, though, especially as I still think of myself as a somewhat unremarkable improviser.

Being in the UP ensemble is such a fantastic and unique privilege; I never stop being in awe of how incredibly lucky I am to have this weekly venue where I can get on a stage and play games with such talented and wonderful people, as though it were normal for someone of my quality to be able to do this kind of thing. I’ll be driving home usually well past 1 A.M. to my suburban condo and unexceptional life, wondering in a bit of a daze what kind of weird dimensional rift I’m coming from where I can be this celebrity to maybe a hundred people, and to know that the folks that put me in that spot will want me back next week. Not everything in my life is as perfect as I’d like, but truly I am blessed beyond measure when it comes to this.

Today I have the second of three weddings, and I’m supposed to be cleaning my condo but am procrastinating by writing this blog instead. I shanghaied my most fashion-savvy friend into helping me buy a new suit – my first new suit in over a decade (I wore the last one to prom). I wound up getting a charcoal, three-button number from Nordstrom’s… I wasn’t prepared to blow the bank or anything but I wanted to spend enough to get something nice and not merely serviceable. The one I got was on sale for $520, marked down from over $1,000, so it very much satisfied my need to feel like I was getting value on the dollar. I also got a new shirt and tie, as well as a belt and dress shoes. Shoes threatened to be a problem as I didn’t realize how ridiculously expensive they would be, but I was able to get a really nice pair from the Nordstrom “Rack” (ie. Nordstrom’s budget/value sibling store) for $100 less than they would have cost at the one I bought the suit at. At the end of the day I spent around $750 in upgrading my entire line of formal wear, which seems like a solid investment.

I will try to get some pictures of myself in the new getup soon, and then you my loyal readership can judge for yourselves. ;-)

Dan.

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