Refraining and Abstaining: A New Order for the Year

“One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.” - Sidney Howard

It finally looks like a more common winter scene that I’m familiar with, and I’m grateful for it. There’s at least 15 centimetres of new snow that arrived since the night before last. I can finally get set to go skiing soon, and it may also help stave off the conditions for drought for next summer as well as my physical sloth during this season.

But rather than looking that far ahead, I sit here doing some review of my recent past to see what to implement for this year in terms of what could be done as measures for betterment. I’ve been so tuned into what prospects I want to invite to do such things as personal resolutions, that I often fail to account for what I should or must give up to gain them. I don’t really view myself as a person loaded with any huge quantity or frequency of bad habits that I need to drop entirely or immediately, or life-crushing deficits that I at least must correct temporarily. It’s not like I’m a person fraught with things as extreme as addictions. However, after doing some introspection after writing my first two entries of this new year, I see that there is plenty of room for improvement; for proactive efforts for better self-care. I thought I would now try things from the opposite end of the spectrum and deploy a more stoic and spartan approach through some successive eliminations of things, even if they may just be temporary.

I noted that the simple word “enough” was one thing that I was going to be mindful about. The questions to follow naturally came as: “What things do I have enough of?" (as in a adequate/great abundance of), and then contrasting that with what is really lacking around here for me, and the question “What things have I had enough of?" (as in setbacks, annoyances, and inconveniences), and gauging that along side with any potential I have to change with any material or behavioural substitutions. I also noted how tired and de-energized I’ve been since the year started. Not a good place to start off from when the general mission is to be somehow happier. A lot of that is mostly due to interference from environmental and health related issues for sure. So, it would probably do me good to make some more conscious efforts to detox in some ways. I need to organize and handle stuff like this in a rigidly hard-core and structured way.

Thus, I compiled a list of things that I’m going to actively challenge myself with abstaining from throughout the course of the year. I won’t be doing them all at the same time, just periodically for a month at a time: some at specially and specifically selected months (as with during this month of January); others at placements I randomly picked for along the course of the year. There are thus twelve such things on my list as personal prohibition trials, each will be approached and committed to with a month-long duration of refrainment. It's kind of like the same exploration/learning model I used last year for my language learning modules.

Prohibition, self-denial, acts of nonparticipation, interludes of deprivations, and measures of austerity are not the only things happening though. I’ll also be including alternate substitute material and behavioural practices in lieu of the other junk to hopefully serve as stuff to fill those voids with positive reinforcements and some manner of redemption. Maybe I'll actually glean some good habits out of this process. I will do my best to record the progress, and to see if there are any actual beneficial changes throughout. At the very least, I'll try and find some humour in it all, even when the challenges get hard and demanding.

The first round of these twelve trials will be finishing soon. I'll try to get it posted soon after month's end.

Bibliography and Resource Material:  The Big Book of 30-Day Challenges, by Rosanna Casper (2017)

Winter-ruption

Some people have the habit of immersing themselves into their Sunday morning with their coffee, and leisurely reading the weekend paper. I’m noticing that since the year began that I seem to be immersing myself into my Sunday morning with my coffee in hand, and pretending as if I were writing for a newspaper.

There were unwelcome strange things going on throughout the week since last entry, mostly confined to my personal life for me to deal with beginning the moments I came home after work on more than one occasion, but thankfully these tricky things didn’t mushroom into anything more wild or intensely serious. They included: my building almost catching on fire, another threat of infestation, and my poor little pooch getting injured. Of all those, my dog’s health was/is my greatest concern. She is healing: slower than I want, of course, but at least she’s not deteriorating for the worse. I’m happy that the week ended better with new interesting experiences, and overall soothing transitions. It has been a good weekend to shake off some of the mid-winter blues, which included crawling out of my hermit hovel for a change, and being a little more social. I got myself a ticket for sporting event, which I deemed to be a kosher purchase despite some new project ambitions, which I’ll cover more about sometime in my next entry.

I checked out my first lacrosse game on Friday evening. The Sasktel Centre arena was packed. The Saskatchewan Rush played the Buffalo Bandits. Unfortunately, the Bandits earned their team name too well, first stealing away what was an initially impressive and massive lead by the Rush, coming hard and overtaking them to come to a tie, and then stealing the game away in overtime, 16-15. An epic comeback for them (uncelebrated here, of course), and an embarrassing downturn for us. It was only the Rush’s first loss of the season though - small potatoes. It was still worth the effort to go, and I’d check out at least one more game for the season. Again, I write this next part for the benefit of my non-Canadian audience. The game originated in this nation (actually long before we became a nation) centuries ago by the Iroquois tribal first nations out east. Anthropologically speaking, it was evidence that the development of such a game was an indication of less reliance on nomadic hunting and gathering, and the preference to adopt permanent settlement and the deployment of agriculture. Leisure time appears more with the fixation of working around seasons in one place, and acting out non-lethal ways to practice martial tactics through team sports also evolves*. However, despite it being our official national sport, it fell into obscurity in our cultural scene for a long while. It lost out somehow to hockey and to curling, in terms of popularity as a spectator team sport in these modern times, or at least there has never been a Lacrosse Night in Canada televised on CBC during our nation's formative sports media years. The more novel and esoteric team sport of broomball** (another rink sport invented here, because we have way too much fucking winter to deal with) even became a more popular community sport around here during my early years than Canada’s official national sport, lacrosse. Lacrosse still has been around, but it just hasn’t really been popular as a big-time league field sport until it had been recently re-hyped somehow, and has been making a grand resurgence, thankfully avoiding a sort of extinction from our identity.

I don’t know, or couldn’t guess, as to how or why lacrosse became so diminished in popularity, and a lesser meme of the field/arena/rink team sports played in this nation to begin with. Perhaps it lacked the display of brute strength of football, or the more extreme speed and sometimes pugilistic action that ice hockey has, or perhaps it wasn’t as cerebral, or loaded with enough focused and refined, single-pointed calculated target finesse that curling has in satisfying the other end of the spectrum of stimulation through spectatorship. Sadly, I believe that it wasn’t more strongly popularized throughout our history really because white guys originally from Britain or France didn’t come up with the idea first. It looks like something that Dr. Seuss may have invented. It sometimes gets tricky to follow the plays, as the ball isn’t out as much in the open as a hockey puck is, hidden in racket netting as players are trying to deek each other out, so it can be definitely harder to track. Maybe that's why it got harder to promote and sell through radio and then television, when these media forms were in their infancy: the technical issue of reporting and recording where this elusive ball was throughout a game. The extra dimensional axis along the field of play makes it as interesting, if not more so, than ice hockey. More hand-eye coordination is involved with it perhaps than hockey in that respect. Even if I were younger, I know that I’d have a real challenge playing it. I wish success not only for our team, but also to the league as a whole.

Another newly hyped outdoor game/sport for this winter-ruption season in the city that I’m checking out this weekend is Crokicurl. You can’t get much more Canadian in a game than this: taking a table game that originated in this country, something I’ve played a few times in some dingy, up-in-the-sticks barrooms (Crokinole); a game, as with darts, where one’s prowess is tested and tempered by making it even more challenging yet for one’s fine motor skills with heavy alcohol consumption, and then making an augmented version of it to play on a post-studded ice surface using curling stones for counters. What a concept! No doubt, some form of inebriation or intoxication had to be in progress as the heads came together to create this fusion of these two games. It’s so simple, and perfect! I also can’t really believe that we’ve been so stupid as to not come up with this idea a lot sooner for around these parts. Oh well, better late than never for this heroic flash of innovation. Sponsorship for this bar game come outdoor spectacle, especially from the local brewers and distilleries, i.e., those who could have some sway in allowing drinking in public, could really help it to take off in popularity during this most wretched of the yearly seasons. Hey, and why not just loosen up a bit more about drinking outside in public in the middle of bloody winter as well for special events like this? Especially considering that things are getting lax enough around here where weed is going to become legal by next summer. Hell, I bet the newly forming cannabis corporations here may also want a piece of this sponsorship action. It might be even more entertaining watching these “athletes” trying to play this while they are completely high***. It could potentially be the new stoner outdoor winter sport (not unlike snowboarding, which already holds such a distinction), that can get more involvement and appeal from the lesser-than athletic types. It will be interesting to see how this thing evolves as another one of our national wintertime leisure activities.

It's all hype folks: a sport doesn't become a sport nowadays without it. Pulling a new one out of obscurity and making it fly off the ground with popularity seems now to be impossible to do without commercial sponsorship. 

*- Non-lethal is not always the case. The Aztecs had fully adopted agriculture and civilization too, and consequently developed their own basketball-like team sport called ullamaliztli, a game that died out right along with them. Maybe it’s popularity didn’t take off so well because the losers of the game were offered as human sacrifices to their pantheon of gods. Hard to the develop teams if they are constantly being physically eliminated by getting their hearts torn out. Let's just say that their PR folks kind of didn't give this a serious think through for promotional purposes.

**- Broomball: an ice rink sport believed to have been invented right here in Saskatchewan (first official recording of it being played is in the community of Perdue). Played sort of like hockey, except with using an implement resembling a broom to whack a ball around (hence the name, like, duh!). Comparing it to hockey is like comparing (American/Canadian) football to rugby. There’s no special padding like hockey, and specially soled shoes are worn instead of skates. You need some sure footing as you run along the ice, but you may get the advantage of some added extra traction by occasionally trotting over someone's missing teeth. It can be even more pugilistic than hockey, as I’ve seen in some goonfest matches of it in the past. Maybe it's because there’s less a lot padding to punch around, and there is a decided advantage in being able to base and balance a striking posture more easily to scrap, drift, and coldcock a guy on ice while wearing shoes rather than skates. It's what makes one who is being a broomball goon even distinctively more of a lowdown dirty psycho bastard than as such in hockey in comparison. It would be great, if not miraculous, if this actually got recognized as a sport fit for the Winter Olympics, other than seen as the lowbrow hybrid spawn of hockey/rugby that it could be. 

***- I’m sure at this point of reading this composition of crazy ramblings, that some may think that I do marijuana myself. I honestly do not. My limited alcohol consumption (because of medical reasons) is enough of a vice as it is; I don’t need anything else beyond that. Personally, my life wouldn’t change when cannabis becomes legal here, except probably dealing with issues as a steward about the grey areas when it comes to interfering with work performance in others on the job. I would treat it as a medicine (one that I probably can’t take anyway due to contraindications with my other treatments), and nothing more than that. I am, however, pro-legalization; more so for the reasons that I believe a strengthened hemp-production economy and industry makes for an inroad toward more sustainable ways of environmental and ecological preservation, and will ultimately lead to less taxed and stressed healthcare, law-enforcement, and corrections systems.

Multiphasic (Blessings)

The second week of this new year is approaching its end. It is the weekend of Malanka: the Orthodox(Ukrainian) New Year according to the Julian calendar. For me, it marks the official end of all mid-winter holiday feasting, at least those days that I’m familiar with, and not too soon either. There is no crueler and more brutally honest critique about how swinishly gluttonous one has been throughout the end of December/beginning of January than the discovery of how red the skin along the waistline turns, and how crushed one’s gonads feel, after trying to slip on and sport a pair of the tighter jeans that one owns in one’s wardrobe for the first time after the holiday season. It triggered a new motivator (see further below), but I digress. It’s so early, and I’m still trying to fix my bearing. This entry writing exercise has no fixed topic, and is as erratic and multiphasic as my periods of sleep have been. Throughout this second week of the year I was handed a mixed bag of blessings and curses; more of the former than the latter, thankfully.

I won’t get too specific about the curses except that they involved trying to muddle through toxic environments, which included: being almost overcome by fumes, and bracing for what I was suspecting to be a vermin infestation. Thankfully, the latter issue didn’t actually end up manifesting itself, and I could put my paranoia to rest.

My blessings were realizing that the stuff I put effort into learning a whole year ago didn’t just simply evaporate and disappear into the ether. I’ve been daring myself to use the Swedish and German I learned to read correspondence and interact with other new contacts by text. No one has reported to me yet that I’ve been too flawed or incomprehensible (or they’ve been too kind to say so). The fact that I’ve been cogent enough to remember these languages despite the lapse of their usage (and a fume-fogged mind) amazes me. The jeans issue as mentioned above, was my personal Harajuku moment (see The 4-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss, page 38). It forced me to recollect what I did when I first primed myself to begin my journey back in the years when I became the fittest I’ve ever been. I realize that I’m actually in a better state of organization now, than when I started way back then, as I’ve been trying to reconfigure and reclaim some space in my office to set up a sensibly useful home gym. My last medical results shown that my lung tissues are now just about completely regenerated, and so I have no excuse to not get back into a regular exercise regimen. First, I must build up my core strength and joint flexibility, especially in the arm I injured back in 2016. Reclaiming and reconfiguring my space is a source of giving me some clarity of vision and purpose, nothing wrong with that, an extra motivator to reorganize other things beyond just this room.

Another bit of a blessing I guess, albeit a bewildering one for me, is for the fact that the New York Times recently listed the top 52 places in the world to visit in 2018, and strangely enough, my city, Saskatoon, was on that list. It made something like number 18 on it, and weirder still is the fact that it was the only Canadian city to appear on that list. If Saskatoon is considered to be such a gem, how bad off are the other places in Canada really? I won’t complain that it appeared in this card deck full of places on this globe that merit a visit. I guess it’s even more of an impressive accolade considering that the dominant buzzword circulating in the news for this week, to describe other places, even though it isn’t even being said outright, is “shithole” (no thanks to the grand poohbah of all idiot US presidents, Trump). Thankfully with this review, Saskatoon has managed to rise above all that. I’m just befuddled though as to the how and why it became selected. I would reckon that their research team obviously didn’t account for the winter months. They cite the Remai art gallery as an attraction; I have yet to see it myself, because I’m saving that visit for company who would genuinely appreciate it with me, so I can’t yet judge based upon that. But if I were asked now what makes Saskatoon an attractive city, I would suggest that wandering the Meewasin valley trails in the summer is the best thing you can do to figure that out for yourself, or visiting the Farmers Market, or else grabbing a coffee and enjoying it outside around the park by the Bess or by the river, or a pint in one of the pubs downtown or on Broadway. It’s quite festive during summer (to offset our all too brutal winters). It’s a bigger city that still feels like a small town, with enough people around who’ve been raised rurally, or remain connected to each other in a down-to-earth, close-knit folksy manner, who help diffuse away the pretentiousness and snobbery of something more urban and edging towards elitism, sided along with a huge multicultural blending that gets along a lot better with this sort of mix than most other places on Earth. For the most part, the people are generally approachable and friendly. The food scene is very diverse for a smaller urban centre. People from out East who come here for the first time generally express surprise at how seemingly cosmopolitan Saskatoon is, with their beliefs dashed by not finding more of a redneck culture being prominent for this place, as what is typically expected by them about Saskatchewan. One point of infamy about Saskatoon though, is its perceived high rate of crime. The city has been rated in the top ten worst Canadian cities for criminal activity for many consecutive years. I argue that Saskatoon actually isn’t that much more harsh or severe for criminal activity over most other cities in Canada. Sure, it’s higher, but not so much as to make it among the worst per capita. It’s just that with the close-knittedness of the community here, citizens here are far less likely to be complacent or dismissive when dealing with, or witnessing, suspicious activity in their neighbourhoods, and so are far more likely to report it, while people in most other larger centres tend to under report actual criminal activity. This naturally skews the crime stats on a higher rate for Saskatoon, I’d even say drastically. The shithole parts of this city (or of any city) is where people under report crime because of the sectors of the population that are intermingled in gang activity, and thus won’t squeal on each other. The police here are awesome too, both in terms of response times and availability, and dealing with most civic problems very tactfully, responsibly, and professionally no matter how trivial or severe on the spectrum. The city isn’t huge, so they can respond faster than bigger centres, and they give attention to calls that cops in larger centres wouldn’t trouble themselves to expend manpower for (and thus not recorded and accounted for in their  statistics). Naturally then, this extra availability and responsiveness of the peace officers here thus generates and facilitates more stats processed for criminal activity. In reality, I feel quite safe here in this city, as opposed to someplace like East Hastings in Vancouver. The Pareto principle also applies to crime stats where it’s figured 80% of criminal activity is done by 20% of a sector of criminals, except here in Saskatoon I’d say that it’s more like 90% of such crime is committed by 10% of the criminal population.

Throughout this week, the best blessing of all of them all was reuniting and reconnecting with someone from my past on a more soulful level. Thank you, you know who you are.

A Full 360

I’ve been up since 4:00 AM . . .  again, like five hours before sunrise. Doing upgrades and fixes to my laptop was is the only activity I could think of doing that seemed half-assed productive, and yet not loud enough to disturb any of my neighbours at this hour. While waiting for the scans and optimizations to finish, I’m filling the gap of the period used to all this with some writing to clear my head as well. My phases of insomnia have been getting progressively worse now for the past few weeks. There’s still another month yet to pass after the recent solstice until maybe things normalize themselves with the wonky sleep issues as the extra darkness recedes after then. Being exposed to fumes, dust, and debris containing noxious chemical compounds in both fresh and old deteriorating forms of adhesives (NOT WILLINGLY!) from the past three days probably hasn’t been doing me any good physically or mentally either. I’ve came home from work feeling a bit sickly and even more de-energized, and I have been falling into a cycle of collapsing on my chesterfield napping, and ruining the phases and timing of more appropriate sleep hygiene. The closest geographical place right now that suits my phases of wakefulness of normal diurnal activity where I won’t be disturbed by jet lag is probably Iceland. Also, for some reason as of late, unknown to even me, I’ve been gazing up skyward to note the positions of planets and constellations as well when I walk the dog in the early morning and mid-evening. Perhaps, it’s something that’s becoming instinctual:  to tune into and immerse myself deeper into nature’s flow of rhythms and cycles, in the middle of a winter season which never seems to budge from either coldness or lack of daylight around here. In any case, a more intensified consciousness of timelines indeed occupies my mind around this part of the year. I tend to think and process time in shapes along with numbers: another weird way my brain works.

The first five days of this year involve my usual messing about with planning and scheduling for the whole calendar year ahead, which inadvertently leads to me playing around with the trivialities of time equations*. January 6^th isn’t just where Christmas eve falls on the Julian/Orthodox Christian calendar, or Epiphany on the Gregorian calendar; it is also Day 1 of the remaining 360 days left of this year, signifying in a sense the first degree of a full circle. I’d like to suggest that making New Year’s resolutions just prior to, or after, New Year’s Day is really an exercise in futility. One should never use just a couple spontaneous (usually guilt-spurred) moments to make a full commitment that’s supposed to take you the rest of the year or beyond to achieve. I’d say avoid that impulsivity, and plan for something within the first five days (not just five minutes, or something blurted out in five seconds) of the New Year, doing such things as:

·         Setting a timeline for steps

·         Writing the goals down (I won’t be doing that here though, it’s too personal)***

·         Prioritizing the things that are important

·         Reviewing what resources and materials you have, and what you still need

·         Looking through an actual calendar to establish dates for milestones for setting reasonable goals

·         Setting a budget for this stuff

Today is the first degree of a small step on a journey of coming to full circle. Check your progress throughout. Be a real geek about it. Check the first 15 degrees of this special circle (on date January 20^th), check on Pi (π) day, a day devoted to circles (March 14, 2018), check on the first full quadrant (April 5^th), check on your birthday after this point**, check the midway point from here to year’s end (July 4^th), and three quarters of the way through (Oct 2^nd). Take time to cull out whatever isn’t working and replace it with something that does along the way.

But, what do I know . . . typing stuff like this on an insomnia-addled and chemical-fogged brain doesn’t necessarily qualify as sage advice for myself and others for movements toward betterment for the year ahead, but it’s better than no real plan of movement at all, which 95% of the time is wasted efforts by people who use impulsive and rash resolution making on New Year’s Eve or Day.

So, Happy Epiphany, and Merry Christmas to the orthodox celebrants. Do realize that three hundred and sixty days is a quicker cycle than one usually expects, try to do the best with it.

Addendum: My friend introduced me to an app that is very fitting for this endeavor: HabitBull. I'll give it an exploration and test through.

*-Like the statistical frequency or rate of goal scoring needed for how one team to tie or surpass another in some IIHF Word Junior hockey games, for example.

**- January 6^th is special to me because it is exactly a full 9 months from here until my birthday (an entire human gestation period). Thus, I would guess being conceived on Epiphany (derived from the Greek, meaning “manifestation”) is as significant as an extra holy day for me, as being born on Christmas day is for my Dad.

***- The one thing that I will note here that was a success from last year’s go around was learning some elements of other languages, with better fluency than I thought I’d have.

Ending 2017/Beginning 2018

I end 2017 a little better off than the beginning of it. I’m at least thankful for that. I guess I can also say that I’m happy that it has warmed up today. Even though it’s still only –34 in the wind outside, it’s 16 degrees warmer than it was yesterday morning (-50), which makes this jump in temperature seem almost tropical.

My favourite photo of 2017. 

I can’t say that the year 2017 has been a drastic improvement over the previous one, but through my own will and resolve, I managed to do better with it than what it had offered me. I had an interesting question come to me from a friend on year's end day who was asking me about how she should approach the thing she was resolving to do. My response was something that I myself was going to remind myself to keep in mind for my efforts at betterment for 2018. It generally amounts to one single word. It is the summary of something that the very rich don’t seem to even have. That thing is “enough”; I’ll make that my word of the year**. I am going to be more proactive in willfully reminding myself that I have enough. I will wear things out until they need to be genuinely replaced, I will make the best with what I already have, and to stop over-consuming and accumulating dross. Enough also applies to what I genuinely want to set limits on in terms of things that invade my life that don’t serve me for the better. I have to learn clear stuff like that away better. I am just generally looking for more happiness, and that might include trying to find some aspect of an advantage to use even in the worst of a bad situation.

Last Purchase of 2017:

Olives, or at least that was the final thing that was tallied on my grocery store receipt today

Last Activities of 2017:

• Driving back home from visiting with the rest of my family
• Grocery shopping
• Kitchen work/food prep
• Texting friends
• Stripping my bedroom, and using the extreme cold outside for cryonic sanitization: cold-cleansing, a safe and non-toxic preventative measure for getting rid of odours and unwelcome biologicals from fabrics and other articles (see last sentence of introductory paragraph).
• Watching the IIHF World Juniors, US vs. Finland (disappointed that Finland didn’t avenge us for the upsetting loss to the states on Friday)
• Reading news from the foreign language news services: DeutschWelle (Germany), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), Le Monde (France) by fireside

First Activities of 2018:

• Writing this entry, listening to tunes 
• Reading my past entries for the year
• Burning my old 2017 calendars in the fireplace
• My tradition of sipping and savouring a single glass of some fine Scotch (see below)

Last Meal of 2017/First Meal of 2018 (a huge deli snack platter to graze on, including):

• Rullepølse* (Icelandic style brined deli meat, from a butcher shop in Wynward, SK)
• Hummus
• Various sorts of Cherry Tomatoes, Pickles, and other raw veggies, comprised mostly of stuff around home (remember, the theme is enough). I’m not eating until after sundown, as I’m still trying to digest stuff from two days ago.
• Grolsch Radler (non-alcoholic, if I’m just going to be sitting around being reflective, I prefer to do so being lucid)

Scotch of the Year for 2018: Jura – a 10 year old single malt, mellow, not so over-powering with smokiness like some scotches can be, with a notes and hints of ripe pear and maple. Splendid stuff.

Last Project of 2017/First Project of 2018: - Discovering my own genome. Why? Because genetics is cool beans, that’s why. I recently purchased the DNA testing kit from Ancestry.com while it was on special discount. I reasoned that if I’m not going to be siring or begetting any heirs of my own to see what my own genes send forth, I would like to be knowledgeable about where and from whom I descended from within the grander perspective of the entire human race.

Last Book of 2017/First Book of 2018: - The Hypnotist, by Lars Keplar

Things I'm Looking Forward to in 2018:

The Winter Olympics in South Korea

*- Perhaps it’s appetites for things like this, plus my Mom’s choice to make Swedish meatballs and rice pudding on Christmas Eve (Scandinavian Christmas tradition) that’s making me question our true heritage. 
**- That's for the material things. I don't know yet what word I'll use for the intangible, non-material things that I really don't have enough of.

Christmas 2017 Lists

The 5 things I’m grateful for:

·      The safe return of my brother and sister-in-law from the zone in Asia getting stricken with typhoons currently

·       Another birthday for my Dad

·       That the last Monday of the year is Christmas, making the year end at least with one less dreadful form of Monday. An added bonus is that New Year's Day is on Monday, and I'll start the year off with one less bad one.

·       Taking time to visit with an old friend from my past

·       Finding sleep, and shaking off a long, bad, stretch of insomnia, even though I’m still waking up at ridiculously early hours.

The 5 gifts I gave myself:

·      To the kid/history geek in me, a game console with two games: Wolfenstein II, The New Colossus, and Call of Duty, WWII. Deck the Halls with shooting Nazis, Fa La La La La  . . . La La La . . . Blam! I’m trying not to let this become some addiction. This was bought back during a Black Friday sale. I’m still a fumbling newbie. I promised myself to make more moments for fun this coming year, so I’m loosening up a little and granting myself this little indulgence. For the anthropologically curious side of me, I have Civilization VI lined up (whenever it becomes reasonably discounted) in PC format. If I indeed have a limit as to how smart I’ll really be, then I at least must find some way to apply my current intellect for some sort of interactive entertainment. I’ve had too many bitter lessons lately as to how short and fragile life really is. Too much reading is boring me (and probably making me boring). Television, as it is now, is doing nothing but rotting my mind, given all the horrid news to watch and the banality of the influx of “reality TV”. As much as I’d like to divert myself and be more engaged with getting into playing some good old-fashioned traditional board/analogue/parlour games (cards, backgammon, darts, billiards, Scrabble®, etc.) the reality is that I have no readily available company for them in my free time. This is the next best thing.

·      To the history/science geek in me, a discounted offer for a DNA test (Ancestry.com). Why? Because genetics are cool, that's why. If I’m not going to have some sort of spawn or clone of me being left on this earth after I’m gone, I’d like to at least know how far back, and from which regions my particular genome came from, and what it is comprised of whilst I’m alive. I reason and conclude that collecting my DNA and doing a simple test like this for the sake of uncovering my heritage is far less costly than perpetuating those genes by siring a child. Maybe I'll find out through the results that I wasn't fit enough to beget one to begin with. However, it might spark stupid ideas of how I can use these kits to replicate those significant other people who I totally want to have cloned (a possible next sequel of Bladerunner happening, or something).

·      To the travel geek in me, my passport application.

·      To the booze connoisseur geek in me, my traditional bottle of Scotch for year’s end.

·      The couple hours taken to reunite with someone from my past after long lapse amounting to decades, and seeing that she’s doing OK. That satisfied all the geeks in me.

The 5 Favourite foods of this Christmas (presently having and anticipating):

·         Butter tarts

·         Oysters

·         The Swedish meatballs and rice pudding I had on Christmas eve*

·         Rullepolse* (from the largely Icelandic community of Wynyard)

·         Stuffing and gravy

Concerns and condolences (thankfully, a shorter list):

·       As I come here to celebrate the birthday of my own Dad along with Christmas, I learned of the passing of the father of one of my Union siblings just before the holidays. This person has brought me nothing but fun and cheerfulness since the time we’ve been acquainted, and it’s not fair that someone like her gets to endure this now. Thinking of you HJ.

·       The passing of the wife of my sister-in-law’s brother, again, something that doesn’t make the season better for them. Thoughts and prayers for them.

·       My dog seems to be stricken with a new health problem, hopefully it can be rectified without too much stress to her or myself.

*-This stuff is traditionally fare served at a Scandinavian table around Christmas, and seems to be stuff we as a family are adopting and enjoying. Perhaps another reason for me to question our true heritage and to do the DNA test.

Crafting Smörgåstårta

I started off this weekend quite bitter and disappointed. Given the course of how Friday closed for me at work, I was in real need of something more relaxing to do for leisure . . .  but that shit wasn’t happening. Instead of getting to check out the massive indoor flea market, or maybe the pet expo at Prairieland that I wanted to see, or skiing with my friend, or getting the chance to reunite with my brothers and sisters-in-law to finally go on a whiskey tour at Lucky Bastard distillery, I’m left being obliged to review, study, and attend workshops all bloody weekend at Saskatchewan Polytechnic* for not just one, but both weekend days. My Sunday isn’t even sacred for my quality weekend time, and I’ll be missing out on the Roughriders vs. Argonauts CFL semi-final, while I’m being fraught and tortured with test anxiety. That’s like bloody sacrilege to have such a workshop on this very day! I left SaskPoly on Saturday afternoon, too deflated and de-energized to do much of anything. I also had the aggravation of needing to do some grocery shopping for some protein afterward, by the way, a terrible idea on late Saturday afternoon if you hate crowds like I do.

I had a bear-like craving for either smoked or cured salmon, along with some other elegant form of seafood for some crazy reason (but not sushi, oddly enough . . . something more novel and different from that). If not for Saturday, then for my Sunday. I found a deal on smoked salmon and some shrimp on sale, and . . . Merry-flipping-early-Christmas to me . . . I also discovered a real rarity for these parts . . . whole crayfish! I always wanted to experiment with these little devils. I think I’m going to put them into some Spanish paella. I remembered that there was an odd inventory of eggs, veggies and other things to use up first as well in the fridge. I also reminded myself of my brewing project schedule, and reminded myself that should find something that accords with the non-wastage of the by-products of that after the first racking. Getting the crayfish reminded me of something about Sweden** (they have an annual festival there devoted to the eating of these little buggers). The thoughts of Swedish cuisine made me recollect flashes of some other inspirational things I glimpsed once on Pinterest as to what to do with my salmon and shrimp, and in this convoluted way I got an idea rolling and all these things coalesced in a lightning flash. My next culinary experiment was going to be making a Smörgåstårta: Swedish, for “sandwich cake”. I collected a couple more elementals for the project, and got the hell out of that store in a hurry.

The process went as such for innovating my version of a Smörgåstårta:

Step 1 – Crafting the “cake”: Knowing that I had to transfer (rack) my beer wort from a primary to secondary fermentation stage, I took and exploited the residual trub (mucky looking sediment residue) which is loaded full of live yeast, to serve as the leavening agent, along with some buttermilk for my “cake”. As it was loaded with more hoppy flavour, I added sweetened and aromatic caramelized onions and poppy seeds to the all-purpose flour dough to tame down some of its bitterness. I fashioned a dough and cooked it in a round, straight-sided baking dish. After baking it until done, I trimmed away the excess and the crusty surface (to be used as croutons). I don’t remember how long this took between the kneading, rising, and baking, but it was long enough for me to consume a couple of casually sipped gin and tonics. For an easier way to do this, you’d probably just buy a round bread loaf of whatever your preference is (like sourdough or pumpernickel) and trim it such that you get a wide cylindrical loaf.

Step 2 – Section the Loaf:   I made three horizontal cuts across the loaf, dividing them into four even sections.

Step 3 – Select and spread your fillings: You can use any damn filling you want, provided that it doesn’t make the bread layers too soggy. My choices for this particular experiment were: Herbed Liver pâté and chopped peppers spread evenly, add a bread section, then smearing on egg salad (flavoured with a small pinch of curry) over that, then layering with another section, then avocado and shrimp spread evenly, topped with the last layer section.

Step 4 – Making the “icing”: That was made with a 3:2:1 ratio of cream cheese, crème fraîche, and mayonnaise respectively. For this project, ¼ cup proportions were used for those ratio numbers. Sour cream might work if you don’t have access to crème fraiche, bit if you want to know how to make it, read further below. I reckon for an even more authentic icing ingredient, skyr could be used. I mentioned it briefly in another post. I may try that some day. Anyway, mix those three ingredients together to an even consistency, and chill for an hour before Icing your cake. Chill the iced cake for another hour before the next step.

Step 5 – You garnish that bastard like crazy! – Or at least this is the way that the Swedes seem to like to do it. Use whatever is edible, not just like what I have in the picture; use whatever it is that turns your crank. I used my smoked salmon, olives, cucumbers, tomatoes, capers and some dill for this one, crowned with one of my new little friends. Once that is finished, put it back in the fridge and keep it chilled before serving.

Oh yeah, for making your own crème fraîche, follow these steps:

1.       Scald a litre capacity mason jar with boiling water, filling it to the brim and emptying it. Also

immerse a sealer ring (and airlock if you have one) under boiling temperature water as well.

2.       Once the jar is emptied, pour in a litre of whipping cream, add to it 2 tablespoons of buttermilk and stir it in.

3.       Place airlock and sealer ring on the jar, and leave it at room temperature for at least 12 hours, if you don’t have an airlock like the one pictured, place a clean double folded cheese cloth across the lip of the jar and the sealer ring on it, not allowing the cheese cloth to contact the mixture. Be aware that the fermentation process will be about 4 hours faster this way. The airlock method will be slower, but purer (less contaminated) with native culture.

4.       Once the cream has a stiffened viscosity, put a clean, sterilized jar lid over it, seal it with the sealer ring, and store it in the refrigerator until ready to use it. Try to use it within a week stored this way.

The nice thing about this dish is that, like sushi, simple things can be used and made to look absolutely decadent. Like pizza, or soup, it allows for ingredient variability. I know it’s one that I’ll probably attempt again. The thing I'd do next time around would be to use my own homemade gravid lax instead of smoked salmon. The fact alone that one can take brewing slop and convert it into a classy party dish is cool trick in and of itself. As recipe concepts go, I’ll be definitely filing this one under “panty melters”. It was super delicious, and it would be nice to see an idea like this catch on. I'm glad I tried this out, as it would probably be the only way I'd get to sample some of this aside from actually going to Sweden.

*- I'm not really bitter or hateful about the workshops per se: they were useful with new tricks and techniques to learn, the instructor was good; it's just that the timing of them was bad.
**- I don’t keep it a secret, or apologize for being a bit of a Swedophile. I’ve made an effort to learn some of the basics of the language, and tune into some of the cultural aspects of that country. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps I listened to a little too much ABBA as a child to get this indoctrination happening. It turns out that I have much in common with the typical Swedish mindset, I think their women are gorgeous, and as I don’t really like tropical weather, I could easily adapt to their winters, which are a lot less severe than the ones here in Saskatchewan.