Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

If there is one thing I take seriously, it is recycling. When you've been brought up in a household of nine people, you are taught from early on that nothing gets wasted and almost everything gets reused.
Food scraps go into the compost for the vegetable garden, old cardboard boxes become toy castles, and old clothes make great cleaning rags.
When I moved to the big city, it seemed as though all that had changed. People threw out perfectly good appliances and furniture just because they were redecorating and the old stuff was taking up room. Fortunately, in the last few years, going green has become the latest rage. Everyone recycles to some extent, whether it's newspapers or just bottles. Blue boxes have sprouted up in every neighbourhood, even the ritzier ones, and suddenly urban gardening is in (to use up all that lovely compost!)
Since Hubby and I are doing some renovations to our house, I of course had to look for used articles that could be reused for our purposes. Why buy something brand-new, with built-in obsolescence, when a gently-used item will work?
That being said, living in an older building creates a few challenges. For instance, the bathroom medicine cabinet, which is mirrored, is an odd size that none of the stores seemed to carry. Then there was the matter of having to renovate the entire bathroom in order to install a larger (or smaller) cabinet because ceramic tiles needed to be cut or replaced.
After much hunting, I found a ready-to-assemble cabinet without mirrors which could be made to fit on the adjoining wall. The problem lay in finding a mirror which then could cover the area where the former cabinet was, so that no major retiling needed to be done. Well, again after much hunting, I tracked down a mirror at Ikea that would do if we framed it.
In the meantime, however, ever since I moved into the house, I've had my eye on the neighbourhood curbsides for materials thrown out after renovations. Since most of the townhouses are identical, it stands to reason that what fits in one would fit in another. Needless to say, after six years, nary a medicine cabinet had been discarded.
The day before I planned to buy the new mirror, I happened to spy what looked suspiciously like a medicine cabinet propped up against a neighbour's wall. What to do? Should I knock on their door and ask if they were planning to throw it out?
I decided that might be a bit bold, and the best plan would be to wait until the night before the trash was collected, nip down to the neighbour's curb, and check if the cabinet was there. So...just after dark, I slunk there, looked around carefully, and spied....a perfectly good medicine cabinet. Hefting its weight in my arms, I trotted off back to my house.
Now came the most important part---were the dimensions right?! Sure enough, with a bit of ingenious carpentry, it would fit exactly where the old cabinet was recessed into the wall.
After it was installed (by Hubby), I felt very proud of myself; not only had I saved myself some money, I had prevented another item going into a landfill, and to top it off, would be able to recycle some of the materials from the old cabinet!
It's all in a day's work for a veteran recycler!

You Know You're Dutch When...

There is a saying that goes, "If you're not Dutch, you're not much!" Of course, it is only said by the Dutch...
With a nod to my own heritage, here is a list of what constitutes being truly Dutch (even if you were born outside the country!):

The temperature is so low in your house that two sweaters is a bare minimum if you want to be remotely warm.
You open the freezer and are excited to find a container of ice cream, only to open it and discover it's full of homemade soup or 'stamppot'.
You were green long before it was popular.
You love sauerkraut, especially when it is mixed with mashed potatoes and sliced Oktoberfest sausages.
You get a chocolate letter every year for Christmas.
You know that Gouda is the best cheese ever.
You have cousins who are over 6'4" and wear size 13 shoes.
You love the colour orange.
Your Oma had a calendar with everyone's birthdays and wedding anniversaries spelled out in capital letters. Bonus points if it hangs in the bathroom!
Sometimes you forget the English names for such things as living room, sugar, grandfather, and grandmother.
You have soup and open-faced sandwiches for Sunday lunch.
You have never met half the relatives at your family reunion.
Why recycle when you can just re-use!
You have at least one pair of wooden shoes in your house.
You make the bed in your hotel room.
When looking in the fridge, you never trust that the yogurt or margarine containers contain what the label says.
You have trouble shopping for hats... There should be at least two sizes: "One size fits all" and "Dutch".
All your aunties are bigger (and often tougher) than your uncles.

In The Eye of the Beholder

Earlier this week Hubby and I set off on a mission for used kitchen cabinets, little knowing that the ultimate reward would not be the cabinets, but something else entirely different.

We had made an appointment to view the items at an address in one of the most beautiful and old parts of the city. When I checked the coordinates of the address, I realized that it was a church, or rather its presbytery!
The church itself from the outside was very typical of the ecclesiastical architecture of the early 20th century--in this case, of the year 1901. The exterior was massive, built of stone with a barrel vault structure, and had numerous stained glass windows. But the real surprise lay within... Exquisitely carved Honduran walnut and Carrera marble, inlaid coloured marble scenes, as well as the largest intact fresco in North America, dazzled the eye and amazed beyond belief. Thirty years of labour by many artisans from Florence, Italy were needed to finish the interior restoration which was originally the dream of the local parish priest who, upon visiting Florence, admired the churches there so much that his dream was to recreate a little something of that in his own church.


The caretaker/historian/tour guide was only too happy to give us a private viewing and tell part of the story. It intrigued us so much that we have decided to take the official tour some time in the future.

Take a look at this small glimpse of what we saw...

frescoed ceiling and carved marble (Photo: Thierry Marcoux)

pipe organ and carved railings (Photo: Thierry Marcoux)

pipe organ (Photo: Thierry Marcoux)

streetside view of Eglise St-Leon (Photo:Fondation du patrimoine religieux du Québec - 2003)

McGee's Inn, Ottawa, Ontario

                                                 

                             memorabilia on second floor landing

                                                

                               third floor hallway next to our room

                                

                       a very private screened porch just for our use

                                                   

                                 soothing and comfortable room

                                         

                                a writing desk tucked into a corner

                                              

                                      view onto screened porch

                                                       

                                          stepping back in time

                  another view of the porch - even room for the kiddies!

                                     
                            Commonwealth and other memorabilia

History and Nostalgia

With all that has been going on in our family within the last few months, my mind has increasingly turned to thoughts of family history. On my mother's side, a cousin has spent many years compiling an exhaustive genealogy, complete with old photos and stories. It has been a labour of love for him and we have all benefited from it.
On my father's side, a family tree has been created dating all the way back to the time of no surnames. Like so many others, people were named after their fathers, or where they lived, or what their occupations were. Being of Dutch ancestry, my ancestors go by names like deBoer (the farmer) and  Bosch (from the bush).
Reading the family genealogies is a litany of recurring names that sound strange to North American ears--Auke, Sippe, Gretje, Trientje.
With all of that information available, you'd think I would know all that there was to know about my grandparents and great-grandparents. Not at all. While leafing through family papers in search of dog registration papers, I discovered a folder with newspaper clippings and letters from the World War II years and beyond.
One of my aunts had written a very moving letter on the occasion of my grandfather's funeral, which I had never seen or read. Feeling a bit like a voyeur, I could not help but peek.
I had always been told that my maternal grandfather had sheltered people from the cities in Holland that had been bombed during the war, such as Amsterdam. There were even two paintings of the ancestral home made by a grateful artist who had stayed with him and his family.
But what I discovered made me see my grandfather in a whole new light. The people he sheltered were not just city dwellers, they were Jewish... While everyone knows how dangerous that was during the war years, and while there were many such brave people in Europe who did exactly the same, I had never known this about my Pake. He was a gentle, unassuming, modest man who never trumpeted what he had done.
With tears streaming down my face, I mentally thanked him for the extremely brave and courageous feat of helping to save those who were hunted down and killed during the Holocaust. How many other families may not know how brave their parents and grandparents were?