Life : Sheryl Kirby

Category : Life

The Places We Inhabit

June 4th 2011 - Posted in home decor, Life, memories
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Something happened last week that has weirded me out and I can’t seem to shake it. Greg and I ran into an acquaintance on the streetcar who happens to live in the basement apartment of the house we lived in for 12 years, up until 2006 when, due to the negligence of the landlord, I fell in the front walkway and broke my arm.

Despite eventually moving to a smaller place in a highrise building and no longer having a big old Edwardian mansion (with a huge back yard) to call home, we ended up much happier, if only because we no longer had to deal with said landlord and his utter refusal to fix anything unless absolutely necessary. While the house was cosmetically beautiful, there were rotten joists, no insulation, century-old single-pane windows, squirrels in the attic, and because the landlord converted a cellar to a basement apartment illegally (as in, he never got a building permit, and paid a bunch of illegal immigrants less than minimum wage to do the work that wasn’t up to code… not to mention that he’s never paid property tax on the basement unit), some serious issues with black mold that had spread through the crumbling walls.

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Digging My New Digs

May 15th 2011 - Posted in administrative, Food, Life, The World at Large
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Welcome to the new home of SherylKirby.com, Saveyourfork.com and LeavesandPetals.com

Actually, while the place is new and snazzy and hopefully pretty like a pastry shop, I’m not quite done moving older content from my other two blogs. Once I do, they’ll be shut down, and the domain for Save Your Fork will point here while Leaves and Petals will disappear (there’s actually a garden shop in Georgia called Leaves and Petals who I’m betting would love to have the domain name).

I decided to pull everything together because, while I like things nice and compartmentalized, keeping track of, and updating 3 blogs (besides TasteTO and my gig at Toronto.com) was a bit overwhelming. Instead, I found a nifty template where I can divide my posts into 3 main categories that loosely align with the theme of each of my 3 blogs. So people just here for the food stuff can just read the food stuff. Friends and family can just look at the Life stuff. And probably nobody will read the ranty World At Large section, but I’ll sneak some nice pictures in there occasionally just for fun.

I think we’ve got all the bugs and issues cleaned up (and big thanks to my hubby Greg Clow for all his work) but I’m still sorting through all of the old content to see what’s worth saving – I’m considering starting up the newsy Food For Thought posts again, but the old ones are mostly dead links now so I’m not dragging a year’s worth of them over here – it really is like moving and packing up an actual house.

In any case, there’s still a few small things to do, but please have a look around, read, enjoy, and stay for a visit, I’ll put the kettle on…

Adjusting

February 24th 2011 - Posted in family, Life, pets
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Wow. Time flies.

I’m not sure how two and a half months passed since I’ve updated this blog. Yes, I’ve had a lot going on, but not THAT much.

I have a theory, though. I’ve seen a lot of people abandon their blogs after dealing with a loss and subsequent grief. There are plenty of reasons for this – changes of habit, depression, or just not wanting to return to the place where you’ve poured your heart out and exposed your wounds.

I think it might also include, at least with blogs, not wanting the memories to scroll off the main page. You keep updating, eventually the story of your loss won’t be as visible. It’s like you’re somehow no longer honouring those you lost and miss. By not having it out there, right in front, it’s as if you’ve forgotten or moved on.

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Cupcakes For Daniel

January 10th 2011 - Posted in baking, cake, Food, Life, products
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I can’t remember the last time I baked anything from a mix. Greg had a passing fancy with a disappointing Boston Cream Pie mix at one point when I had a broken arm and he was attempting to do some of the cooking, but it was a sad affair that we agreed never to repeat. Besides usually being not very good, cake mixes have the uncanny ability to suck absolutely all the fun out of baking. Dump powder, add water or milk. Stir. Meh. I get that this is exactly the amount of effort that is desired by people who do not like to bake but for some reason want to “make a cake”, as opposed to going out to a nice bakery and buying something. But for those of us that dig the process, it’s not a lot of fun.

Which is why this particular box of cake mix is such a conundrum.

When Greg’s uncle Daniel passed away at the end of November, he left an apartment full of stuff that needed to be dealt with. Daniel wasn’t a hoarder, but he definitely had some packrat tendencies, and his tiny little apartment often felt like a delicate dollhouse to my lumbering built-like-a-brick-shithouse frame, exacerbated by the fact that there was so much stuff everywhere.

As Daniel spent most of his adult life working as a chef, much of what he collected was food-related. Every time I saw him, he gifted me with cookbooks, or baking pans or little gadgets and utensils. Many of these he’d pick up at thrift shops and yard sales, treasures that he couldn’t pass up but likely knew he’d never need.

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Hell Is Other People

December 14th 2010 - Posted in Life, pets, spirituality, wtf?
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So we seem to mostly be dealing with the chaos that life has handed us these past couple of months. I think we’re actually over the hump. I can look at a picture of Bowie without crying; that’s something at least.

And in trying to make some sense out of it all, to accept all that has happened, I keep playing various scenarios over in my mind. Particularly ones with other people. That is, remembering who stepped up and who got in the way. None of the “getting in the way” folks did so intentionally, I don’t think, but there’s a real social cluelessness that seems amplified when it comes to death. I don’t know if it’s simply that I am/was more sensitive to it, or if it’s because people are just uncomfortable dealing with grief in general.

But some of the things people said or did with regards to our situation are just mind-boggling.

The worst had to be the questions. Bowie was a neighbourhood fixture. And when he was gone, people noticed. Some people noticed and said nothing, aware that the answer to what they were thinking was none of their business, and using their brains to conclude that if the lady with two dogs is now seen with only one dog, that it might not be the best time to ask her where he had gone.

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Goodbye Daniel

December 6th 2010 - Posted in celebrations, family, Life, pets, spirituality
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It is said that funerals are not for the dead but are an event wholly for the living – a way to mourn, celebrate and accept the passing of a loved one. And the people who attended the funeral of Greg’s uncle Daniel most definitely did all of the above.

If I had to come up with one word to describe the event, I’d have to say “Toronto”. Not that Daniel, or the event to celebrate his life, was all about civic pride, but rather that the event and the people who attended it represented everything that is good and wonderful about this city. Daniel was the hub for people from so many different cultures and walks of life to come together. Coming from a family who are Catholic and having lived for some years as a monk, Daniel moved to Toronto in the late 70s when he accepted that he was gay. I’m not a religious person, so I can’t speak to what compels a religious type of spirituality, but his dissatisfaction with the Catholic church and their stance on homosexuality provoked Daniel to explore other religions and methods of spirituality, and with that, other cultures.

He planned the service himself before he passed. Held in a United church and encompassing prayers from the Dominican friars from the University of Toronto (he worked as their personal chef for many years), it also included passages from the Koran, the Torah, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead as well as meditation and other prayers and hymns. One of the Dominicans sang the most beautiful a capella version of Ava Maria I’ve ever heard. After the service the reception included Indian sweets like jalebi and burfi – Daniel had always dreamed of going to India so Indian sweets were a perfect fit.

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Stress Cooking

November 22nd 2010 - Posted in Food, Life, memories
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If there is one phrase, one turn of words that is guaranteed to drive me insane, it is the well-intentioned but patronizing assurance that “there’s nothing you can do about it, so there’s no point in worrying”. Again, I know that this is meant with good intentions, as a way to help the person in question stop worrying and calm down. But in a genuinely dire or horrific situation, who among us is able to quiet our minds and turn our attention to something else? It’s possible, but not easy, and if you’re a type A control freak, damned near impossible. Situations where there is nothing I can do are exactly when I worry the most, because I am helpless to create a positive outcome. It’s why people are sent off to boil water when a woman goes into labour – gives them something to do to keep them from being underfoot and lets them think they’re helping in some way.

In the stressful situations where there is nothing I can do to achieve a positive outcome (which, by the above theory, makes me even more stressed), I cook. Lots. Mass quantities of things – restaurant quantities – just to keep my hands and mind busy, so that I might, for a short while, stop worrying. It seldom does stop the worrying completely, the issue is still there at the back of my head, throbbing like a migraine dulled by pain medicine but not completely cured. But at least I’m not just sitting there fussing. At least there’s something to show for my nervous energy.

Back in my concert production days, I’d manage my way through the lead-up to shows by cooking. In 1998, when we presented Convergence and had 500 people from all over the world coming in to Toronto for the weekend, Greg and I threw a BBQ in our backyard as a pre-festival party for the bands and selected guests. This was less of a huge gesture of hospitality and more of a way to find people to eat the mass quantities of food that I was churning out in the days before the event as I waited to see who cleared customs, whether the venues were able to meet our technical specs or if I was going to have to find a legal pyrotechnic set-up at the 11th hour (and does our insurance even cover pyrotechnics??)?

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Routine Changes

November 16th 2010 - Posted in Life, pets, spirituality
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One of the prerequisites of living with dogs is that you have to like routine. Dogs are creatures of habit; they like the important events of their lives (walks, dinner) to take place at the same time every day, and can get easily stressed if the schedule deviates. Losing a dog can mean that a human’s schedule, previously based around the dog’s schedule, can go a bit loopy.

Tula is still with us, of course, and we’re working hard to keep things as normal as we can for her, because she’s still very stressed at Bowie being gone. Keeping our lives as similar as they were before helps us too. We need that 7am walk every day to wake us up and prepare ourselves for the day. We need the system and the regularity of having to be home to feed or walk Tula at a certain time, just because it helps us to organize our days better.

There are little things that are missing, though, little scenarios we’d play out with Bowie that Tula doesn’t do. For instance, after the morning walk, Bowie would wait impatiently while I removed my coat and shoes, washed my hands, put my hair back and put on house shoes before feeding him. Every single morning he’d bark at me to hurry up, follow me into the bedroom while I put my shoes on, stomp around, bark at me some more, and then finally herd me out into the hallway and through the dining room to the kitchen to dish up his breakfast. We’d see the border collie in him at this time – he’d have nipped at my heels to get me to move faster if he thought he’d have been able to get away with it.

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Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes

November 6th 2010 - Posted in Life, pets
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Greg went and picked up Bowie’s ashes on Thursday night. I didn’t want to go do it because I was sure that I would break down, but when he brought everything home, and we looked at all the stuff, we were oddly cheerful. Not because we were happy he was gone, far from it, but that there were parts of the process that were amusing, and that brought back wonderful memories. The pet cremation company, Gateway, makes every effort to be as classy and inoffensive as possible in dealing with people’s beloved companions. We opted for the cedar box as opposed to an urn, and it comes packed in a gorgeous blue box. If not for logo on the front, you’d swear it was something from Tiffany’s. 100 pounds of dog is still pretty heavy when it’s converted to a bag of dust, and the cedar box inside weighed about 8 pounds.

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The End of the Dude

October 25th 2010 - Posted in Life, pets
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It was a regular Sunday. I was in the kitchen making lasagna. Greg took the dogs out for a walk around 4pm. Bowie got up, stood to have his haltie put on, and walked out the door, just like he has a thousand times before; nothing out of the ordinary.

At 4:15, Greg was back. “Something’s wrong with Bowie.” He explained that while walking along the hallway on the 1st floor to go to the lobby, Bowie’s bladder had let go, something that had never happened since he was a puppy, except for the one time when we had just brought him home from having knee surgery and he was stoned on painkillers. Greg got the dogs outside and Bowie wouldn’t move, just stood there looking freaked out.

So Greg brought the dogs back upstairs. He went back out with Tula, and Bowie went to lie down in the dining room in one of his usual spots. He refused treats which is really odd, but at that point, we just thought he had a stomach-ache. I looked up his symptoms online and in a couple of books we have, but couldn’t find anything that seemed to match. Greg returned and we brushed it off as him having eaten something weird. Tula once didn’t eat for two and a half days until she barfed up a big chunk of pineapple. It was one of those situations where if it was still bad in the morning, we’d call the vet.

At 5pm, I filled the dogs’ food bowls. Tula came running but Bowie didn’t and when I took the bowl of food to him, he refused it. He was still alert and responsive, though, and would shake a paw and respond to an ear scratch.

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