Partially On the Wagon

If you've been reading The Brown Knowser for a while, you know that it's no secret that I love beer.

And yet, recently, I've sort of been off beer, avoiding the beer section in our friendly neighbourhood LCBO and not ordering from my favourite local craft breweries. There hasn't been any beer in my mini fridge since late May.

I still drank beer, but only occasionally. For the first couple of weeks, while attending my local karaoke venue, I gave up having my usual pint of IPA from Ottawa beer shop Overflow Brewing, opting for ginger ale to keep my vocal chords lubricated.

It threw the bartender, Kevin, who was reaching for a cold can of ale as he saw me approach. He wondered if I was okay.

I find that my overall alcohol consumption has seriously waned over the past few months. Not only have I not had the desire to drink, I also find that if I have more than one or two drinks in one sitting—depending on the beverage—I feel it the next morning.

I don't mean that I'm actually hung over: I simply feel tired, dehydrated (even though I usually drink water between drinks), and my head feels a bit heavy. Booze makes me feel weighted down.

I don't like waking up that way.

Lately, I've limited my drinking to times when I go out for a social event, like karaoke night, or meeting up with friends. And starting this month (though, we're only a couple of days into July), I'm going to limit myself to only one drink during those outings.

I asked for a G&T.
Didn't expect it to be blue.

Last night, for example, DW and I went out in celebration of our 31^st wedding anniversary. We decided to try a nice restaurant in Westboro—Brassica—which was excellent. Usually, when we dine out for our anniversary, we'll order a nice bottle of wine, which gives us three glasses, each.

At dinner, however, I didn't really want to drink, but old habits die hard and I did have a gin and tonic. But only one, and when DW suggested afterwards that we find a patio where we could watch the sun set and have a drink, I said I wasn't interested in having another drink, though I was up for finding a place to watch the sun set.

We went to the new Kìwekì Point, and it was a great venue for the sunset. More on that place in a future blog post.

On Canada Day, we had some sangria, and when we visited my folks for dinner, I was offered a pint of Innis & Gunn, which is pretty hard to say 'no' to.

Because there had been several hours between the sangria and beer, and because after the beer, I stuck to water, I felt fine the next morning (although, when we got home, that night, DW accidentally closed the rear gate of our Niro on my neck, so that was throbbing when I woke up, yesterday).

I don't need to stock my fridge with beer. For more than a month, I've filled it with flavoured sparkling water, of which the whole family goes through a lot. We prefer it to sugary drinks.

At this time of year, I would usually end my work day by grabbing a can of beer from my fridge and enjoying it on our front porch. I haven't even had the urge to do that, let alone have the beer to sip on it.

I had written all of the blog posts for this week, except for today's post, last week. Today's post was meant to be a Beer O'Clock review, that I would have gone shopping at the LCBO, brought home a new brew (new to me, that is), and tried it. But when the weekend came up and DW and I did our shopping, I didn't feel like popping into the liquor store. I had no urge to get beer.

For more than a year, I've been starting to feel my age (notice how I didn't say act my age): I have aches and pains; I'm not as strong as I used to be; and, since last year, my lungs have given me trouble. Maybe a lower tolerance for alcohol comes with the territory.

I'm not saying that I'm on the wagon. Not fully. But I can see a time where I'm no longer drinking alcohol or, at most, enjoying it rarely and sparingly.

Does this post mark the end of Beer O'Clock reviews? We'll see.

Thirty Plus One

I had to do some math.

There's no such thing as a perfect marriage but I'd say we've had a lot of fun, despite the imperfections. All of our travels, our kids, and the life we've built together.

All worth it.

We've been married for longer than I've been unmarried. I said that last year, too. We've been together for much longer than we've been without one another, and I could never imagine being without her.

Happy 31st anniversary, baby!

Canada Strong

The other weekend, when DW and I were cycling along the Thousand Islands Parkway, between Butternut Bay and Rockport, I received a notification on my phone that read "Welcome to the United States." Apparently, we were close enough to the American border to ping off a cell tower that was across the river.

"Fuck you," I said to that message. I looked across the water to the tree-lined shore and thought to myself, I'm glad I'm not over there, in that dumpster fire.

I'm glad to be Canadian. We're not a perfect country—there's no such thing—but compared to our neighbours, we're about as close as you can get.

Happy Canada Day!

Image: theflagstore.ca

Training for a Ride

In September, DW and I will be joining some friends for an adventure in the Saguenay region of Québec. And we feel that we need to be prepared.

Two other couples will spend about 10 days with us for an active vacation, where we will cycle 250 kilometres, over five days, around Lac-Saint-Jean. Each night, we'll stay in a different hotel, inn, or B&B, and will average about 50 kms each day.

When we finish this cycle route, we'll spend three days kayaking on the Saguenay River, taking in the splendid high cliffs that make up the fjord and, with any luck, spying some beluga whales in the distance (but, you know, if they swim up to us, that'd be okay, too).

We're sure that our Paddlefolk will have no issues in kayaks, and we'll be spending weekends, going out with our other friends, lending them our old kayaks, to get them used to paddling on larger bodies of water than the Rideau Canal. It'll be fun being out in so many boats.

But DW and I also want to make sure that we're in shape for the cycling part of our trip. We haven't cycled great distances in a long time and want to be sure that our legs (and butts) can handle multiple days of 50K.

The other weekend, we drove down to the St. Lawrence Seaway with our bikes in the back of our CR-V. We stopped in Prescott, for breakfast, before continuing to the Thousand Islands Parkway. We parked our vehicle at a free parking lot for the waterfront trail (there's a bathroom there, too), near Butternut Bay, and cycled westward, to Rockport.

On our handlebars, we mounted some carriers that we had purchased in 2020, when DW and I were planning a cycling trip from Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, to Bruges, Belgium, naively thinking that the pandemic would be over by autumn of that year. We've never used these carriers until this bike ride.

In our carriers, we carried swimsuits and towels, and I also threw in my drone. I plan to document our Saguenay trip and am hoping to get some aerial shots of us on our bikes.

The trail along the St. Lawrence is about as challenging as what we expect for the trek around Lac-St-Jean. It's mostly flat with a couple of gentle but long hills, and we think that the wind off the St. Lawrence could be similar to any wind we'd get off the large lake.

In Rockport, we stopped for lunch at a café that was in the harbour and had a patio that looked out into the river. The food was decent but not very expensive, and the stop gave DW a chance to rest, as it was her first time out on her bike for this season.

On our ride back, we stopped at Brown's Bay to cool off. It's a paid day-use beach that costs $21 for cars and only $5 for both bikes. The fee gives you access to a change room, with showers and toilets. We set our bikes up against some lounge chairs and we took turns going into the water, to cool off, while the other person watched our bikes.

The beach is close to the parking lot where we left our SUV, so we were still feeling refreshed when we made it back. The total distance for this round-trip ride was just shy of 40 kms, which was good for DW's first ride.

I also got a chance to use my drone, setting it in one of the automatic modes—Follow—and riding for about five minutes while it stayed behind me, despite other cyclists around me. I think it'll be a great addition to our trip and I'd like to try other modes on future rides.

Summer is our time where we get out in our kayaks almost every weekend, so we have no fear that we'll be ready for the Saguenay River in September. We hope our friends will have built up their confidence, too. And we're hoping to get more rides in, adding fully-packed paniers to the back of our bikes, to simulate what we'll be carrying as we cycle around Lac-St-Jean.

We have about two-and-a-half months. There isn't a moment to waste.

Friday Fiction: Lest I Forget

Previously, I've made all of my Friday Fiction posts about writing, when I've posted excerpts from some of my fiction. Starting today, however, my Friday Fiction posts will also be about the process of writing: my thought processes, my ideas, and the tools that I use to help with the story.

We'll see how it goes.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been reading my manuscript for Dark Water more than I've been writing. It's my first crime novel and I want to make sure it's a good one, and so I want to make sure that I have covered even the smallest of details.

And, I'm almost reluctant to say, I've been relying on AI to make sure that I don't forget anything.

Before I even wrote the Prologue, which sets up the overall arc under which the story follows, I created a spreadsheet that outlined the story, from the discovery of a body until the killer is found. And then, after getting this bare-boned story outlined, I started filling the spreadsheet with 'meat' (yes, I'm going to use this metaphor again), giving background information and adding layers to the characters and plot.

I'm finding that, unlike any other novel I've written before (hey, did you know that this is the seventh book I've written? I'll share that story another time), a crime story is incredibly complex. Even my spy stories that I had written, decades ago, weren't this complicated. (And maybe, that's why I never tried to have them published.)

Calloway & Hayes, by ChatGPT.

I have a victim. I have suspects. I have red herrings. And I have two detectives who I'm not only trying to flesh out, with background stories and depth, but I'm also trying to have them solve the murder from a perspective where they're going in, knowing little, while I try to not give too much away because I know everything.

At least I know almost everything. Every so often, I encounter a new arc in the story that I hadn't initially thought about, and I have to follow it.

The other week, I realized that I wasn't keeping track of all of the evidence, and so I had to create another spreadsheet to track it, with columns that tell me whether that evidence is actually useful for the case or it's irrelevant.

It's tough.

So, I've been writing less and reading more, checking what I've written and listing the evidence. I have a feeling that I'll have read this story dozens of times before it's done.

Because I have no background in law or in police procedures, I've been doing a lot of research. Google has been fine for a lot of fact finding, but because my story is fictitious, I need to know if it stands up to what I glean from facts of law and what might make for good reading.

And for that, I've turned to AI.

What I've started doing is giving ChatGPT breakdowns of the story, typing summaries of the plot, and asking it if it makes sense. I know that the AI programming is meant to give praise, and it's pretty good at stroking my ego. But it also does tell me if what I've written is realistic, from a legal standpoint and from a hypothetical one.

For example (and, hopefully, without giving anything away), I've provided the AI a scenario that the detectives are playing out, trying to piece together the final moments before the murder against an alibi, and coming up with a couple of plausible explanations. I then ask ChatGPT if the suppositions are realistic.

Sometimes, it says no. Legally, the scenario wouldn't hold up and I'm given parts of the Canadian Criminal Code to prove it (and yes, I'll independently confirm that section of the code through a Google search).

Because ChatGPT knows I'm writing fiction, it sometimes says no, from a legal point of view, but says for dramatic effect, in fiction, there's a way to make it believable. However, most of the time it comes up with rule-bending ideas that just don't fit with the story that I'm telling—and make no mistake, this is my story, not ChatGPT's story.

When the AI confirms that my ideas are realistic, it does provide information about what the detectives need to do to follow that line of inquiry. And it's that kind of information that I put into my spreadsheet.

Lest I forget.

Yes, Dark Water is my work of fiction. I'm the only writer. But ChatGPT is almost like an editor that reminds me to include information that will make my story more believable and interesting to a reader, and I'm glad that I have this tool to use.

Of course, like any tool, it only makes my job easier. I can focus on the storytelling and it will keep me on course for the overall arc.

And when I'm done, I will use a real person to do the important editing of the whole story. AI should help us do a job and should never do the whole job for a person.

A friend, who also writes murder mysteries, told me that I should befriend a cop to hash out the story and get factual information, and I just might do that. But for now, I'll let ChatGPT do that. I may be a novice police-procedural writer but I've been writing fiction for more than 40 years.

I'll trust my instinct. Wish me luck.