My husband and I have lived in the same Calgary neighbourhood for 15 years. We intially bought a home in Inglewood because we liked the older character homes, the neighbourhood’s proximity to downtown and the funky little shopping district along Ninth Avenue S.E. While we still appreciate all of these qualities, what ties us to Inglewood now is its sense of community and what that means for our kids.
This past weekend the Inglewood Community Association staged a winter carnival for residents. The free event included a petting zoo, wagon rides, face painting and balloon animals for kids, munchies, and ice skating at the community rink. Many families showed up on the 12C afternoon and enjoyed the sunshine, catching up with friends and meeting new neighbours. The best part was seeing the next generation of Inglewood kids take to the ice.
They're so little they all fit in the net!
Most of the children attend the community school, the neighbourhood anchor through which parents get to know one another. Because of this community spirit, and perhaps because of Inglewood’s geography (bordered on three sides by the Bow River, Inglewood Bird Sanctuary and Inglewood Wildlands), there’s a sense of safety in the ‘hood. Many families let their kids play outdoors unsupervised; in fact, I wrote about this ‘free-range’ phenomenon in the context of child-safe neighbourhoods in a story for the Calgary Herald last fall.
As a parent, I think the neighbourhood my kids are growing up in is awesome — that’s a great feeling. What about you? How’s the spirit in your ‘hood? Does it influence how you parent your kids? Does it make you feel more a part of the community?
This week’s cocktail is rather tropical for February in Calgary, but I just couldn’t help myself. I attended a media tasting at a new resto-lounge called The Yellow Nectarine (a.k.a TYN Lounge) and sampled this delicious drink.
- Thanks to the brandy, this summery sipper warms you up on a cold winter’s night.
The star ingredient is the brandy, which goes nicely with the white wine and fresh fruit juices. If you’re craving a patio sipper mid-winter, this’ll do nicely.
Brandy Sangria
1 oz brandy
2 oz pineapple juice
2 oz orange juice
1 oz lime juice
2 oz white wine
Lemon and lime wedge garnish
Fill a wine glass with ice and add the ingredients in the order listed above. Garnish with a lemon and lime wedge, stir and serve.
— Recipe courtesy TYN Lounge
As its name suggests, The Yellow Nectarine specializes in food and drinks made with nectarines or nectarine syrup. Their signature cocktail is a Nectarini, which you can read about in one of my upcoming Calgary Herald Spirited Calgary cocktail columns. In the meantime, here’s a sneak preview of what it looks like. Cheers!
Sippin' on my Nectarini at TYN. As Blake said, 'It's not a drink I'll be mixing up on the guy's ski weekend."
What gal among us hasn’t had a celebrity crush? For me, it was Jameson Parker of Simon and Simon fame in Grade 7, followed by Marc Singer (Mike Donovan on V, the 1980s one), replaced by Pierce Brosnan as Remington Steele. In between I had the odd flirtation with David Hasselhoff (in his hunkiest incarnation, as Michael Knight) and Ricky Schroeder from Silver Spoons — with the Teen Beat posters on my wall to prove it — but for the most part it was these three:
The great thing about celebrity crushes in the 1980s was you knew they weren’t going anywhere. You could send fan letters for years and if you were lucky, you received a form letter back that you were smart enough to realize wasn’t from the distant object of your obsessive desire.
Dear Lisa,
Thank you for your letter. It’s fans like you that make Remington Steele the pinnacle of 1980s private eye drama that it is. Please keep watching because I worry I’ll never have a better role, like James Bond or something.
Sincerely,
Pierce Brosnan
Disappointing though this kind of canned reply was, I knew the reality was that Pierce and I would never be together (pausing to wipe tear away). A celebrity crush was a kind of fantasy love affair that prepared you for male-female interaction at the junior high dance. You thought about things you’d talk about with your crushes, agonized over what you’d wear on a date with them in Hollywood, and practiced French kissing your pillow to prepare for the evening’s finale.
The problem, 25 years later, is that the fantasy-reality line has become a bit fuzzy. In a recent story called My daughter the ‘stalker’, Julie Butler Evans talks about how her teenage daughter is an accomplished stalker of the Jonas brothers. Social media and celebrity websites have enabled her to follow their movements, know their whereabouts, and then show up to stand behind velvet ropes at events close to her home when they make an appearance. It’s a little unsettling. The upshot of this is that her daughter actually sees — in the flesh — her crushes. She could potentially meet them. Or date them. (Or become a reality TV star and meet them that way. You never know!) Could that possibility, however slim, keep her from pursuing regular guys? Because if I could have stood behind the velvet rope when Pierce arrived at the Emmys in 1985, I’m positive I’d be living in a castle in Ireland somewhere. Just sayin’.
We’re still a ways away from celebrity crushes here, but I shudder to think of Avery following Justin Bieber on Twitter, or staking out Kananaskis Country because Ryan Gosling is in town filming a Western. But what I fear even more is walking into her room every day and being forced to look at these posters:
Girly-men, all three compared with Jameson, Marc and Pierce.
Drink - Play - Love 