G&G XIV.IX - Fellowship Delayed But Never Denied

Gaming & Guinness, an annual gathering that my good friends and I have been doing since 2006, is not really a mini-convention. I mean, a lot of the trappings are there - the preparations, the scheduling, the swag, the games the socializing, et cetera - but there are typically only eight or nine of us in attendance, and we are not really interested in any sort of expansion (nothing personal! it is just hard enough to find tabletop games that accommodate nine players).

But whatever G&G is, it isn't anything we are willing to give up on, even in the face of a global pandemic. When we held G&G XIV.V last year at this time, we thought for certain we would be playing in person again by now. But late in 2020 we came to a grim acceptance of how unlikely this was to happen, so we postponed G&G XVI until September of 2021 and elected to try yet another weekend of virtual gaming in May to tide us over.

But I can't lie - it was hard to get excited about it.

The event had been on the books since January, but I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for it until maybe three or four days before. But then we got the schedule figured out and knew who would be running which game, and my eagerness returned as I had hoped. 

Unlike a proper convocation where everyone is in for every game, other commitments bobbed up so we only had all nine of us scheduled for two slots, and then an illness took us back down to eight. But Pete cooked up a pot of the amazing chili verde he usually does in-person and then delivered it to the Edmonton contingent. This inspired Jeff to buy a brisket on Friday, get up early to smoke it and (with a little help -cheers Earl!) deliver generous portions of meat across the city.

We did most of our gaming on Steam's Tabletop Simulator while chatting each other up in Google Meets. Pete and I got a game of Space Hulk in before five of us got together to play The Captain is Dead (and a first-time win for us in TTS - after getting wiped out super-quickly in our first game. In the evening we swung into Roll20 and Colin ran us through a brilliant D&D one-shot where we played goblins avenging ourselves on a village full of adventurers.

Wits & Wagers on Saturday afternoon, Circus Maximus that evening, a few games of Trivia Murder Party to fill in the gaps, and then Fortune & Glory to wrap things up Sunday afternoon.

And yeah, it is awkward remembering how to manipulate cards and dice in TTS, and there are always issues with sound or video or some sort of lag, and no, it isn't even a shadow of what we experience in person.

But it was a damn sight better than nothing, which was the only real alternative. 

We still got to roll some dice, just virtual ones. We still got to drink some Guinness Bombs together, just at a distance. But seeing the smiles, hearing the laughs, getting a good jibe in on someone or rolling a natural 20 in a clutch situation and hearing the exultation from friends you have had for decades?

That is a helluva decent way to spend any weekend, whatever you want to call it.

See you in September my brothers!

Back Out at the Outback

The parents of a dear friend of ours have a small sheep farm out east of Innisfail, and last June, they invited us to join them out there for a (physically distanced) weekend. Shari and Dave and their family stayed in their trailer, but Bonar and Sandra put us up in a lovely cabin he built close to their house. They call it The Outback (on account of it being, you know, out back) and it is one of the coziest and most delightful places I have ever stayed in. As we drove away, I regretted not having taken more pictures of it. 

So when they invited us back again for a similarly distanced Victoria Day weekend, I leapt at the opportunity to both get out of the city and to try to document this wonderful place.

The Outback is just behind the house at the Far Side, Bonar and Sandra's farm. The Far Side name came around because many of the structures built by the original owners were neither level nor square, causing Bonar to observe the place was "as crooked as a Far Side cartoon." 

He built the Outback as a place to house guests, and a significant portion of it was built with salvaged, scrounged, recovered or recycled materials. For instance, the siding was simply left over from an enormous 'holiday home' built in Canmore, and Bonar was asked if he might have any use for it as it was going to be thrown out otherwise.

The stones used around the door and fireplace backing were leftover from another building on a property adjacent to their own, and the flooring came from a high school gymnasium that was scheduled to be demolished.

The beds are homemade as well, using trees that were felled for utility access but never cleaned up. The step on the ladder going to the upper bunk is actually made from the rib-bone of a cow, and the rawhide lashings were likewise made by Bonar himself.

Although there is electricity in the Outback (necessary for CPAP users such as myself), there is no plumbing. There is a portable toilet on a raised platform for nighttime business (not shown, but similar to this), and a basin for washing up, using water dipped from a 5-gallon pail. There is also a kettle for warming the water on wintry days. The view from the bathroom window is delightfully pastoral, no matter which angle you approach it from.

For heat, there is a tidy wood-burning stove in the corner, but they have also added a radiant electric heater which does a marvellous job of warming the space in no time whatsoever. (Which is almost a pity as a wood fire would have made the Outback even cozier during Sunday night's rain!)

Callbacks to agricultural heritage can be found throughout the cabin, from the Calgary Stampede posters on the wall to the recreation of the family brand in the floorboards. 

My favourite farmland element though is probably the hinges made from horseshoes on the Dutch door.

As cool as the Outback is, however, the very best thing about it is not its rusticated charm, nor its secure coziness, nor its recycled moxie; it is the quality of the people in its immediate vicinity, and the privilege of spending a cool but pleasant weekend with them.

Pop Shopping Curiosities

Last Friday, when Glory and I drove out to Leduc, I saw an interesting store pop up on Google Maps - YEG Exotic Pop.

There was no time to go there that night, but on Saturday morning, Audrey, Glory and I tracked down this store after looking in wonder at the array of imported sodas on their website. Having just written about rock & rye a few weeks back, it seemed a natural enough thing to do.

We had a wonderful time but if you want to give them a visit yourself, you should be aware of a few things.

1) It is not a stand-alone store, it exists at the front end of a hemp shop. The store is clean, well lit, and the friendly staff person stayed masked at all times, but don't be surprised (e.g. like we were) at the fact that the majority of Smoking J's Hemp Shop is occupied with bongs, stash boxes and all the things that go with and in them. 

2) Importing sodas is expensive, so most of the single-serve bottles and cans rang up between $3-$4. It makes sense - after all, liquids are heavy, need to be shipped in a pressurized environment, and the majority of products are actually in glass bottles.

3) They don't just sell sodas - they have a decent assortment of exotic junk food as well, such as KFC flavoured potato chips from the U.K. and grilled ham and cheese Cheetos from - you know what, doesn't matter where. We grabbed some Arizona Green Tea fruit chews and a bag of popcorn with Butterfinger drizzle, and both were quite good. I could see this being a dangerous place for an attack of the munchies but perhaps that is just clever planning on their part?

Shopping there was a pretty good time, and there is a tremendous variety of flavours and styles, some common and others -  well, exotic.

We are pacing ourselves on the sodas having drunk only a Key Lime soda with our name on it as well as a Philippines-style coconut mint pop, and both were delicious.

The strangest flavour we procured is undoubtedly this charmingly named Rocket Piss: "bitter butterscotch soda that glows in the dark"! I am both curious and incredibly apprehensive about sampling this one but hold out hopes it might make a good mixer - not too good, because, you know, $4 a bottle... I am also unsure how to achieve the glow-in-the-dark effect before consuming without having the pop become tepid in the process. A flashlight in the icebox perhaps?

There is a strong nostalgia vibe with a lot of the packaging on display, such as this Grape Nehi. I am only familiar with this brand due to it being name-dropped by Radar O'Reilly on M*A*S*H, but they have been around since 1924 like it says on the bottle.

Best labelling goes to the Real Soda Co.'s Leninade though - they grab onto their theme with a tenacity that is stupefying to behold, and pack the bottle with all manner of jokes:

Best of all, every one of our sodas was made with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

Paying more for sodas than I usually do for beer was a neat experience, but probably not one I will repeat very often. Still, it is kind of cool to know there is a funky shop on 156 street that can sort me out if I want to try an old-fashioned cream soda from Brooklyn Bottling or a White Peach Fanta from Japan.

Fireplace Replaces Space

After a lot of indecision, supply problems and scheduling issues, we finally recalibrated our basement's coziness index last month by installing a replacement iron stove - this time a gas one.

We had started looking at this Berkshire model from Lopi in Washington state back in September, even before the old wood-burning stove had left the premises. Unfortunately, stoves and fireplaces rank right up there with new dogs on the "what my household needs to endure the pandemic" list, so it took months for Fireplaces by Weiss-Johnson to get one sorted out for us. 

Once they did though, booking the appointment was no big deal, and the cheerful crew figured out how to use the existing chimney as both the exhaust and fresh air intake for the new stove, and they had the whole shebang carted in and installed in under five hours. And I have to say, we are all very happy with how it looks.

Now, I am not going to say that this digitally-controlled, gas-burning mechanism is superior to a wood fire, because the pride of a successful ignition, the crackling of burning logs, the necessity of taking a poker to the flames periodically - these are all things I was loath to give up, and look forward to doing them all the next time I am in a campground. 

But having said that, the speed, convenience, efficiency and especially the cleanliness of a gas stove all have their own charms as well. Not having to endure a cold room because it is not worth the time and effort to put a wood fire together is now a distant memory because we can ignite this one with a literal push of a button. 

It even has a built-in thermostat you can set to maintain a specific room temperature as opposed to careening between too hot and too cold like the rumpus room equivalent of Goldilock's porridge. As a means of heating a basement that tends to be on the cool side, it is vastly superior to both the previous stove and the similarly shaped electric space heater we purchased and over-used last winter while I was working from home (which I will be continuing to do until at least January 2022).

The flames don't really have that almost hypnotic quality that wood fires seem to possess, but they are soothing nonetheless, and we have had many occasions to use the Berkshire as Edmonton slowly muscles its way through multiple false springs.

Most fascinatingly to me, the fireplace came with replacement embers - synthetic rock-looking accessories that add a convincing level of detail to the illusion of a wood fire. 

They even maintain their glow for a few moments after the flames are extinguished. Clearly, some sort of sorcery is at work here.

The worst part of all this though is that the pandemic means that this remote-controlled hearth can bring no succour to our friends or relatives since protective measures are increasing and the third-wave gets a toehold that seems ever stronger.

But sunnier times are coming anyways, and when the all-clear is finally sounded, and temperatures are no doubt lower than they are now, it is a comfort to know that our eventual visitors will find our basement cozier than it has been in years.

Spirit of K-9 Radio

As I prepared our dinner yesterday afternoon and chanced to look out the kitchen window, I saw our dog Canéla standing outside. 

It was windy, and she stood stock-still in the breeze, her fur rippling, her head turned slightly into the wind and her nose held high, actively sniffing the air. From time to time though, with no other apparent influence beyond what she perceived in the air, she would wag her tail briefly, then stop. Three or four languid wags from an upraised tail fluttering in the breeze like a flag, and then slowly stopping, perhaps resuming a few moments later. 

I wondered what sort of scents might be carried to her from the north that made her smile the way they did - there was no movement of her mouth, but her intermittent circular wagging made me think so much of a whimsical smile gracing a human face that I couldn't shake the image.

I imagined someone might be barbecuing down the road, or perhaps she caught the scent of one of our neighbours' dogs. Or with most of the snow finally gone from our neighbourhood, perhaps she was simply smelling earth or grass or even freshly uncovered deadfall from a park.

For two minutes or more I watched her, this dog who is probably less than two years old and seems perpetually restless while on her feet, as she smelled, and wagged, occasionally shifting the angle of her head but never moving her feet from where she stood. It amused me to no end, but it also reminded me of something I could not put my finger to.

Last night in bed it occurred to me: memories from my later teens, of sitting in the driveway in my battered 1974 Maverick, dialling the needle of my car stereo from one end of the AM frequency range to the other with painstaking slowness. I had discovered that during the day, my car radio in Leduc could pick up transmissions from as far away as Calgary on occasion, but at night, if the atmospherics were favourable a the ionosphere cooperative, I could listen to broadcasts from as far away as the United States.

I had mentioned this to my father at some point and he nodded sagely, relating similar tales of ships at sea picking up signals from distant shores but only at night. He explained how this was due to the radio waves literally bouncing off the upper atmosphere, often repeatedly, in a phenomenon known as "skywave propagation." But despite this reasonable explanation, the notion of sounds from faraway places being carried to me invisibly over the air, far beyond their expected range, still felt like magic to me.

And so I would slowly, slowly turn the right-hand dial of my car's radio, listening intently for any shifts in the static or the occasional scrap of conversation or even a hint of music - in the '80s, some AM stations still played music, whereas the few existing stations are generally an all-talk format.

One time I picked up an instrumental from the 1940s, an Artie Shaw and His Orchestra sort of thing, and for a moment - the briefest of moments - thought perhaps I had picked up a signal from out of time, perhaps returning to Earth after having been reflected off some object in space. Had I picked up an episode of The Shadow or Little Orphan Annie or The Inner Sanctum or any of the other radio dramas my parents had listened to in their own youth, I might believe it still. But the radio announcer that came on afterwards sounded all too modern, reading the temperature in Celsius from wherever he was.

I would often turn off the radio while leaving the dial tuned to the phantom station, but would never be able to pick up the same one the following day, even if I waited until after sunset to attempt it. Every reception felt like an interception, a lucky grab out of the ether that would never come again.

And I know full well that our dog does not comprehend random scents on the wind in the same way, but I still can't stop the linkage in my mind between the dog on my patio and the teenager in that car three decades ago - her wagging and my smiling, both grateful for a random signal from somewhere beyond.