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My 5km

If you know me in person, you know that I’m not much of an athlete, but I decided to do a 5km walk this past weekend as part of the Scotiabank marathon to raise money for a friend’s pet charity, the Fort York Food Bank.

Amazingly, I walked the 5km in 48 minutes. Even more amazingly, my very generous friends donated $1850 to FYFB in sponsorship of my walk.

After I sent out a thank you note to all my sponsors, Mark Kuznicki, who biked the 660km rally from Toronto to Montreal in support of People with AIDS this year, responded:

Amazing!  At $1850/5km, you’ve now established a new effectiveness benchmark for me.  Hmmm….let’s see, that means I would have to raise $244,200 for the Bike Rally next year!  I need richer friends.

2007 10 01 health Comments (0)

Venus and Mars

Men and women communicate differently, there is no doubt. For example, Damir goes running with our friend Susan most mornings at the ungodly hour of 6:15am: she runs over from her place about 6 blocks away, then they go off for 5-8km together. Yesterday, I asked him how his run went, and he said that Susan was late (which is unusual). His story:

She was late because she stopped to talk to some firemen. She was edgy when we ran, it was some female thing.

In the evening, we met Susan and a visiting friend for drinks, and she noted that she’d had a pretty crazy day, saying that Damir probably already told me about what happened that morning. I said that he had said she was late for the run because she stopped to chat up some fireman. Her story:

She smelled smoke as she ran over to our place, went up the driveway of a house to investigate, and found their back porch on fire. She raised the occupants of the house out of bed, had the parking attendant at the lot across the road call 911, tried to keep the fire from spreading by kicking the bits of burning porch away from the house, and hung around to give her story to the police and firemen. By the time that she met Damir at the park across the road from us, she was 10 minutes late and still hyped on adrenaline, so much so that he had to tell her to slow down during the run.

Hmmm, a slightly different take on the story. :)

2007 08 22 Comments (1)

Reggae Run

My friend Susan, who has been living with rheumatoid arthritis for over 25 years, will be running another half-marathon this year to raise money for the Arthritis Society and all of the great research that they do to keep people like her running (or at least walking). I’ve written previously about her last run, the half-marathon in Amsterdam last October: the picture on the left is her crossing the finish line, still smiling after 40km.

She’s headed for the Reggae Marathon in Jamaica this November, and you can sponsor her here.

2007 03 23 health Comments (0)

Making the world smaller with Skype

I love this time of day, late afternoon, when I check my buddy list on Skype and see the early birds in Australia and the night owls in Europe all on line, plus the usual contingent of those on my own continent. Makes me feel like I can put my arms around the whole world, if that’s not too excessively gooey.

2006 11 28 Comments (0)

Our host, the zombie

Last night’s Hallowe’en soiree was great fun, especially considering that most people were in costume. I didn’t have the time or inclination to come up with ideas and wrestle Damir into a costume, so we went as ourselves, but there were a lot of great ideas there.

Our host, taking time out of his day job as a history professor, was a zombie.

2006 10 29 Comments (0)

Preparing for Hallowe’en

I don’t usually make a big deal about Hallowe’en — in fact, for years, I was one of those people who sat around in the dark at home so that no one would knock on my door. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I haven’t attended a lot of Hallowe’en parties in my adult life.

A few years ago, one couple started inviting me to their Hallowe’en parties. They have an old Victorian house, very traditionally restored and in a dense thicket of trees: very appropriate setting for a spooky night. It’s also a mutual friend’s birthday a few days before, making the celebration for her birthday as well as Hallowe’en. Many people wear costumes that are some sort of visual pun, and three years ago (the last time that the party was held), I wore a half-slip stenciled with all sorts of psychoanalysis-related words (a Freudian slip) and dressed Damir in a t-shirt with the letter “e” stenciled on it (e-male). The friend whose birthday it was happened to have been laid off a few days before, and I suggested that she wear a pink slip, which she not only did, but used it as a way to tell people at the party that she had been canned — quite therapeutic for her, I think.

A short time after that last party, the couple who held the parties split up. She stayed in the house, he moved in with his girlfriend (that’s her faerie illustration on the right), and there was a lengthy and acrimonious battle in spite of the fact that they both had been involved with other people throughout a large part of their marriage. Recently, she moved away to another city with her boyfriend, and her soon-to-be-ex-husband moved back into the house with his girlfriend. Now they’re reinstating the traditional Hallowe’en party. Okay, it might all sound a bit weird, but I quite like them both and plan to attend.

There’s always the question of what to take to someone’s house for a party, and although we’ll likely just take a bottle or wine (or two), I saw some great ideas on Boing Boing: “finger” cookies and a Jello brain (the mold for which you can buy here). They also linked to a great site for making Hallowe’en decorations from tampons — I love the little tampon ghosts, I may have to try a few of those myself.

2006 10 25 food & wine Comments (3)

Staying with friends

One of the great things about the jobs that I used to have, which required a lot of business travel, is that I now have a network of people who I know around the world. Some of them are more friends than just business acquaintances, which has the extra benefit of providing a cheap place to stay when I visit certain cities. I’ve been travelling for the past 8 days to London and southern France, and stayed with friends the whole time, which was great. In a hotel, I would have spent more time hanging out on my own, ordering crappy food from room service and watching bad TV; this way, I had family dinners, pleasant chats and managed to attend two birthday parties.

Of course, there’s always the bits that aren’t quite as convenient. My friends in London are outside the city which creates some logistical issues with the transportation to my business meetings. They also have three small kids, and the spare bedroom is the kid’s playroom; early Thursday morning, a 1-year-old crawled on in and serenaded me on a xylophone. That in turn led me to forget that I had left a pair of panties that I had washed by hand hanging on the back of the bedroom/playroom door, something that I remembered two days later when I was in France. Thong panties, to be precise. Luckily, my friend found them when she was tidying up for the 1-year-old’s birthday party on Saturday, and we had a laugh about it when I returned on Sunday.

This trip was primarily about the conference that I was speaking about in London, and the trip to France was purely to see my friends in Tourouzelle. She’s just starting to sell real estate down there, and it’s very tempting to consider a little cottage in a French village — food and wine are very inexpensive down there, property prices are still pretty reasonable, and the countryside is very pretty. On the other hand, she did hit a wild boar with her car on the way to a property showing the other day, not something that’s likely to happen in downtown Toronto. Unfortunately, she only stunned it in spite of the major damage that it did to the front corner of her car, so there was no wild boar for dinner.

It’s always interesting to stay with another couple, especially one that you don’t see very often, to see the dynamics of their particular coupledom. For example, I’m shocked that the father of three young kids whose wife works can possibly imagine that she’s going to do all the child care as well as all the cooking and housework, although there’s definitely two complicit in that arrangement. I’m also pleasantly surprised at how a couple that used to spar quite openly now seem much closer in the face of some financial setbacks.

2006 09 25 travel Comments (0)

Marathoning with Arthritis

Susan prepping for the marathonMy friend Susan has had rheumatoid arthritis for over 25 years, and a couple of years ago she ran her first marathon. I was there in Dublin in 2004 when she ran her second one, and now she’s running the half-marathon in Amsterdam on October 15th. She solicits charitable donations for the Arthritis Society as part of their Joints in Motion running team: note that usually a JIM team is made up of people who are running in support of someone who them know with arthritis, not the arthritis sufferer herself.

If you know Susan, or even if you don’t, you can sponsor her online here.

2006 09 12 health Comments (1)

Birthday lunch at Banu

Saturday, I turned 46, and had the good fortune of being surrounded by friends and family who like to feed me. After seeing a review for Banu last week and passing it on to Pat, she and Betty decided to take me out for lunch there. The restaurant bills itself as an Iranian Kebob Vodka Bar, and we were not disappointed in any of those respects.

Lunch @ BanuWe started with Nan o Paneer, an appetizer plate of sesame flat bread, a sheep’s milk cheese that I had never tasted before, fresh herbs, walnuts and watermelon slices. This was the only dish that I took time to photograph, and only then after we’d demolished most of it; the others were so good that we tucked them back before I even thought of the camera again.

At that point, we moved on to the vodka. There are several varieties on the menu, and they’re served very cold and on ice so that you can sip them with your meal. I had the Wokka Saki from the UK, which is a grain-based vodka flavoured with Japanese sake (LCBO #602573): a distinctive taste of sake, and very smooth. Betty and Pat both had the Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka from Poland, pale greenish-yellow in colour and a really lovely aroma and taste (LCBO #35840). We also had the tiny glasses of fresh juice: sour cherry for Betty and I (yum!) and pomegranate for Pat.

For the main course, I had Koobideh, which was the most delicious minced beef, formed into kebabs, grilled and rolled with herbs in lawash flatbread. All of their meats are from the Healthy Butcher, an organic butcher in my ‘hood, and I don’t know how much of the taste was from the high-quality and organic nature of the meat versus the preparation, but it had an amazing rich taste, and very lean. In addition to a side dish of diced cucumber, tomato and onions in a light herb vinegar dressing, there was a little dish of powdered sumac to sprinkle on the grilled meat. The evening before, I had been walking with Ingrid near her sailing club when the weather turned too rough to sail, and we were looking at the now-ripe sumac and I commented that it was edible but had never eaten it. Now I have, and can say that it imparts a slight citrusy flavour as well as (so I’m told) being a good source of Vitamin C.

Betty had a dish of saffron-infused grilled chicken breast chunks, which I can’t find on the Banu menu online — the lunch menu is slightly different from the dinner one shown there. Very distinctive taste of saffron, as opposed to it just being used as a colouring agent.

Pat, always a “balls to the wall” eater, had Dom Balan, the lamb testicles, which were marinated in vodka before grilling, and served with a tasty pickle side dish. The testicles themselves were reminiscent in flavour to sweetbreads, although a bit too mushy in texture for my liking.

To accompany all of this, we shared an order of Adasi (lentil salad) and Mast o Moseer (yogurt with shallots, served with more lawash flatbread).

At the end of all this, the server delivered some tiny squares of a baklava-like dessert: definitely flavoured with orange-blossom water like a middle-eastern baklava (as opposed to the Greek variety that uses honey), but it seemed to have a layer of crushed nuts in the middle rather than just layers of pastry, and sported a tiny little puffed pillow of pastry on top. Not sure if this is standard practice or because of the birthday cards on the table, but definitely a nice finish to the meal.

The decor is really lovely: all Mediterranean blues and whites, with a small waterfall fountain near our table by the front, and music that could be Iranian pop/jazz or something else entirely. Unfortunately, because of the rain, we didn’t have a chance to smoke the hookah on the patio; I remember smoking a mild, apple-flavoured tobacco through a 3-foot-high hookah in Dubai and was looking forward to repeating the experience, even though I don’t smoke.

Discovered via blogTO.

2006 09 05 food & wine
toronto Comments (3)

My abs hurt, do I have a six-pack yet?

Yesterday was the first day of lower body workout, which included about a million ab crunches. Now I pretty much hurt all over, and I stepped on the scale to discover that I’ve gained two pounds since Monday. My weight fluctuates by about five pounds normally so this is not unprecedented, but hardly bodes well for the start of the 12-week program.

Just to ensure that I don’t lose any weight at all in the next week, my birthday is on Saturday. Tomorrow afternoon, I’m sailing with my friend Ingrid and staying out at her yacht club for a BBQ, after which she’s promised me s’mores for a pre-birthday dessert. Then on Saturday, Pat and my sister Betty are taking me to Banu, an Iranian Kebob Vodka Bar (really!), for lunch; and Damir is taking me somewhere for dinner, the exact location of which is still shrouded in mystery (or not yet selected).

2006 08 31 food & wine
health Comments (0)