So We Got a Dog

For those who know me, it probably comes as something of a shock that I would count myself as the owner of any pet larger or less disposable than a goldfish. I, myself, am still sort of surprised. About a month ago, I finally caved to years of pressure from my wife and kids, who all seemed to want nothing more out of life than a canine companion.

I had been quite vocal of my general dislike of the idea of pets in general. People often mistook this for some sort of anti-animal sentiment. This was a strange sort of conclusion to draw as, for me anyway, there was always a clear distinction; I love animals, but was less keen on owning one and having it live in my house with me.

And honestly, I was pretty dead set against getting a dog, which seemed to be the top choice of my family unit in terms of companion creatures. Owning a pet always seemed to me to be an unnecessary extra expense. It felt like a counter-intuitive waste of resources. It also provided another fairly large point of entry for dirt and all manner of bacterial intruders to lay siege to my already besieged homestead. Going on a trip out of town would have an extra level of logistics as we would have to either make arrangements for someone to look after the thing, or make room in the car to take them with us.

Winter is Coming and Spring is Just Kind of Hanging Out

This past weekend, we got a got a heaping helping of Southern Ontario's hospitality. Snow, that is. White cold. Très froid, oui. The older I get, the less winter I can feel I can bear. Honestly, I don't know how the hell I survived living further north where I'd have to endure temperatures that actually qualify as true Canadian winter, regularly hitting the minus thirties and even into the minus forties. In recent years, my mind seems to recoil at the very thought of snow or cold, and I end up trying to fight my way through a haze of seasonal depression.

It wasn't always this way. I remember entire days spent outside in the freezing cold as a child, building snow forts or snow men or sliding or just wandering through bear-infested bush unsupervised. That spirit seems to be alive in well in my own children, who are basically the only ones who are still able to drag me out into the crisp, winter air for reasons other than walking to the car to drive to work or the mall.

This time it was my son. We're definitively and officially into spring at this point, so this latest dumping of snow was like a belated gift to him from some frozen deity. It was the best kind of snow from his eight-year-old point of view: packing snow. He felt that same call of the wild that I'd bred out of me, both intentionally and unintentionally. He wanted to build a snow fort and have a snowball fight. It was more than a prerogative; it was his childhood duty, a calling which he couldn't yet articulate and which would dissipate like a cloud of frozen water vapour if he could.

So of course at my son's urging I girded my loins and various other body parts with the typical winter gear and went outside to build up a frozen fortress and then pelt him mercilessly with snowballs. His enthusiasm was contagious and my aim was unseasonably true. This was a mug of hot chocolate well and truly earned for all parties involved.

Hungry like the Great Wolf

A couple weekends before Christmas, my wife surprised the family with a trip to Great Wolf Lodge. I use the word "surprise" lightly, because my wife is the worst at keeping secrets. The weekend before the trip, my wife told me she had a surprise for the family and asked me to guess, and I immediately guessed Great Wolf Lodge, because we hadn't been able to go on our yearly pilgrimage the previous year and we were due, she had said she had a surprise for the whole family the next weekend, and I do occasionally display Sherlock Holmes levels of deductive brilliance. Also, my wife is the worst at keeping secrets.

For those not in the know, Great Wolf Lodge is a chain of indoor water parks. On their website, they bill themselves as a "water park and resort," though I think it's a rather loose definition of the word "resort." It basically means that it's like a giant hotel with a water park inside of it. When I think of "resorts," I think of beach-side hotels, giant urban atrocities situated close by the ocean in places that have only ever heard of snow in legends passed down from their ancestors, where the liquor flows freely and the kids and elderly are locked away in a carefully guarded, segregated area for the day or not allowed on the premises at all. This is not a knock against Great Wolf Lodge. And maybe "resort" is technically the correct term (or the closest barring a better alternative), it's just not the word I would have chosen had I worked in their marketing department.

'Tis the Season

Christmas is just one of those things. It's hard not to get excited. For most of the rest of the year, we're wound up so tightly in our own little part of whatever usually mundane part of the processes on which our society functions, that any reprieve or reminder that we're not simply a cog in a machine is a more than welcome one. A break in the old (sub)routine is always a good way to remember that there's still a beating heart buried beneath the apparatus. It's not about the gifts and materialism (although I am a consumer whore at heart), but more about that electric current that underlies the holiday season. For a few days a year at least, we are free to breathe a sigh of relief, feel that cold air fill our lungs and that peppermint schnapps warm our bellies and know that we are still alive and that some part of those lives are still our own.

The kids, especially, pick up on this undercurrent of the abnormal. Christmastime is the aberration. The variance. The freak. And they love it not in spite of its difference, but because of it. Decorating. Presents. Staying up late. A plethora of sugary treats that might otherwise have been denied to them, especially at breakfast (!) time. Christmas is a celebration of the very best and very worst of all of our impulses towards excess, and it's hard not to get caught up in that great Cosmic Wave.

Halloween 2018

A little late, but I thought it was something worth documenting for the old family archives. The kids are still young enough to enjoy every holiday to its fullest, and Halloween is no exception. Halloween is still great for me as well because of the candy tax that is owed to me as a parent. Which is to say, I loot the kids' bags after trick-or-treating for all of the good stuff, starting with anything that contains both peanut butter and chocolate, and working my way down the hierarchy from there.