I’ve been thinking about how much we value things made for us by someone special. Two of such things are on top of the mind for me personally (probably because they are sitting on my desk right in front of me).
One is a small leather wallet made by a long-time friend, who is a wife of my shodo (Japanese calligraphy) teacher. She has always amazed me with her curiosity in learning various crafts and ability to execute them at a very high level and with tremendous attention to detail. There is also a 5 yen (go-en) coin that she put inside the wallet as a symbol of friendship, and which I always keep there.
Another special thing is a wooden caster for my coffee mug. It was made by my daughter about a year ago. She used a wood-burner to engrave a cute coded love message for me, which always makes me smile. Later, I tried to reciprocate in kind and made a desk decoration for my daughter with some of the things that were on my mind – symbols of ancient Greek cardinal virtues. Curiously, the word “cardinal” is derived from the Greek “cardo” – meaning “heart” or “hinge”. I particularly like a poetic interpretation that the practice of the cardinal virtues is the hinge on which hangs the door to the good life.
Exactly a year ago, as the first COVID wave swept through Canada, our university switched to an online teaching mode, which is still in affect. Our daughter’s school also went to remote teaching after coming back from the spring break. Summer travel plans went up in smoke and regular activities like camps were canceled. So we scrambled to find other things to do to keep active and sane during the lockdown: paddle boarding, biking, painting, playing music and taking the dog on long walks. We also decided to vlog about the things we did, as a way of keeping a diary that we might enjoy re-visiting in the future.
As it is the case with most activities, it is far from trivial to maintain the motivation and discipline to vlog regularly. But even if we failed to bring many video projects to completion, the mere exercise of looking at what we did trough the camera lens gave us a better perspective and appreciation for the things we were still capable of doing, despite the pandemic.
One thing that went well is that because of staying at home last summer, I had an opportunity to resurrect my old hobby of building plastic models. A few days ago, I looked through the video footage my daughter and I shot last July, when we started building our first Gunpla kit (she’s grown up so much since then!). Here is the glimpse into those days (better late than never!)
It is easy to distort reality with the stories we tell ourselves and the memories we form by doing so. For example, I’ve been living in Victoria sufficiently long to somehow assume that winter almost never comes here. “Six months of spring, six months of autumn,” is how I like to describe local wether to friends who don’t live here. When we went on sabbatical in 2017, we missed a heavy snowfall, and thought that it was our unique chance to see snow around our house in years. But as we were heading out to play in the snow this weekend, my nine-years-old daughter happily remarked that so far it snowed in Victoria every year of her life. That is, actually, a fact, and we even have photos to prove it. I thought that it was good to get calibrated in how I view the place I live at and generally, how we spend our lives. Not that mild winters is something to complain about to begin with, but if we look closely, we don’t even have a reason to fret about being deprived of snow days. Those are short lived, but we made most of them this year – sledding at a local hill, having a snowball fight with Bruno, our dog, and building a fortress in the front yard. Now, it looks like it will all melt away just in time for the start of school tomorrow.
Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
We haven’t been to Botanical Beach since 2013. My daughter was two years old then. We wanted to make it a fun outing, so I rode my motorbike, and my wife and daughter followed in a car. This time, the whole family rode in the car, including my parents. We stopped to stretch our legs in Jordan River at the appropriately-called Cold Shoulder Cafe (they had no bathrooms and no decaf coffee, which is the only kind my father can take.) Otherwise, it’s a perfectly located pit stop between Victoria and Port Renfrew, where Botanical Beach is.
The distance to Botanical Beach from our home in Victoria is 270 km (round trip.) It’s just long enough to make it a significant excursion, so we don’t go there too often. It is a famous destination for Southern Vancouver Island, and when we just moved to Victoria, we learned early on that timing is important for planning a visit there. The tide needs to be low enough (around 1.5 m or lower) to be able to fully enjoy the tidal pools – the main attraction of this unique place. If you arrive at the beach at high tide, you miss the magic of walking on the exposed oven floor and peeking into the pools that are full of marine flora and fauna. It would be just another beautiful West Coast beach – something that we get de-sensitized to by living in Victoria. The problem is that the lowest tides often occur at an inconvenient time – either too early in the morning or too late at night to fit into a single-day sightseeing itinerary. This time, on a weekend in mid-June, the timing was on our side – the (relatively) low tide was at the middle of the day, so we could take a leisurely drive to the beach.
Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
From the parking lot in Port Renfrew, we meant to take the easiest route to the ocean, worrying that it could be difficult for my parents to scramble across tree roots on the trail. Having not been there for seven years, we miscalculated and took a relatively more difficult trail. It was a lucky mistake, though, because the parents managed the walk well, and it took us directly to the most picturesque part of the beach.
My daughter was delighted by the extraordinary scenery. She spent all the time documenting her impressions on a GoPro. This is her camera of choice these days for recording footage for her soon-to-be-established vlog (a new hobby, spurred by the sharp increase of screen time during remote schooling during the COVID lockdown.) I also carried photo gear – a Sony a7RIV with two lenses (a 70-200 mm and a 24-70 mm) and another GoPro (stay tuned for some videos from inside the tide pools!) It is funny that every time I visit Botanical Beach, I feel compelled to go into photography mode, because the place is so uniquely beautiful. But sinse I go there sufficiently rarely, the technology develops so much that every time my photos are better simply because I have better gear. In a strange way, it feels both good and humbling at the same time.
A woman, a girl and their dog are looking at tidal pools at Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
Tidal pools at Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.
We started building GraviTrax marble runs with my daughter about six months ago and immediately thought that it would be fun to shoot videos of our creations. Today, we finally put together a clip of our first takes. Looking back at it after several months, it was nice to find some value in it beyond simply being a memory of spending time with my daughter. One thing about activities like GraviTrax, Lego and other construction sets is that the experience of playing with them is fleeting. You put a relatively large amount of time and effort into building a project, but after you take it down, it kind of ceases to exist. In theory, Lego models could be preserved if one has unlimited storage space, but with GraviTrax the pieces are supposed to be reused, so the old projects are definitely not permanent. In that sense, having a video of previous attempts turned out to be quite useful as a reference for the layout, height of the elevation platforms, etc., as we found today when breaking out our new expansion set (a video of that is coming up, hopefully sooner than in six months). In the mean time, here is a look at our first marble run projects.
This weekend, my daughter and I took our paddle boards to the ocean for the first time this year. The water was surprisingly warm (no, we didn’t fall down), and the trip itself, as short as it was, didn’t disappoint in terms of the sights one can only see from the water: sunken boats, uninhabited islands… The former was only a stone’s throw from the shore and the latter was only thirty meters or so across, but we‘ll take them. My wife and Bruno, our puppy, were keeping an eye on us from the beach, although Bruno made an honest attempt to join us in the water.
We shot some footage with two GoPro cameras, one on each paddle board. If nothing else, it gave us some good material for a movie-making project the following day, which fits nicely in the current theme of remote education (read: finding a way of entertaining a child at home and justifying it from an educational standpoint by hoping that she might learn something in the process). Seriously though, we all felt that shooting and putting together the video somehow enhanced the whole paddle boarding experience.
In the holiday busyness, we forgot that we had a gingerbread house kit that was purchased long time ago and was sitting at the bottom shelf of a cupboard. So this weekend, my daughter decided to decorate it anyway. It turns out, her timing was perfect – as soon as the house was done, snow came to Victoria for the first time this season. If Bruno, our puppy, could talk, he would say, “You should have built that gingerbread house long time ago, so I could enjoy the snow sooner!”
During the last long weekend, we finally tried a culinary experiment that was on the back of our minds for a while. A friend of ours has an industrial-grade Italian pasta-making machine, and we used it to make Russian-style dumplings called pelmeni. They are similar to Italian ravioli, but stuffed with raw ground meat that is cooked at the same time as its pasta cover.
I always thought that making dumplings by hand was a special social tradition for our family. It turns out that high-output ravioli production line is even more fun and socially engaging. The ravioli machine crunched 5 kg of ingredients into long strips of dumplings. My seven-year-old daughter enormously enjoyed peeling off the dumplings from a fast-moving band and setting them on drying trays.
The verdict is that the result of the culinary experiment was a complete success. The dumplings turned out to be quite different from both Italian ravioli and Russian pelmeni, but both Russians and Italians among us liked them.
Another success was that Bruno, our four-months-old puppy, stayed home alone for more than three hours without a bathroom accident and was completely content when we came back. Small victories are so sweet!
Bruno is a Lagotto Romagnolo puppy. We brought him home today, and he is my seven-year-old’s daughter’s first dog. In the morning, she told us: “Today is going be the most memorable day of my life!” I believe she is likely right. For me personally, the days of bringing home my first dog and, many years later, our African Grey Parrot named Zorro are right up there in my memory along with the birth day of my daughter herself. Truly, our pets become members of our family. Glad to have met you, Bruno!
I have always been interested in dogs, but I haven’t heard about this breed until earlier this year, when we firmly decided to have puppy. This is ironic, because based on the description it is a perfect intersection of what my daughter, my wife and I were had been looking for in a dog. It is still quite rare in North America, but we were lucky to find Bruno, along with an incredible support from his breeder practically in our backyard. Well, actually, it is a 2-hour drive away, which proved to be no problem whatsoever for Bruno (no, as incredible as Lagotti are, he was not driving).
Our daughter’s school is moving in the right direction, in our opinion, by introducing a “hot lunch day” in addition to a “pizza day”, which that already have. We really liked the school lunch menu that was offered in Milan, where we were on sabbatical two years ago. It was one thing we really missed when we came back to Canada. But even two days a week is better than none.
The pizza days are a big hit with the kids, but they don’t start until the third week in the school term. Last week, our daughter was looking forward to it so much that we could not wait and decided to have our own pizza night at home. Helping with cooking made it even more special.
