Friday 3 October 2014

By the numbers

It's official - I am failing in my blogging duties. But never fear, help has appeared! Today's guest blogger is D Magnuson-Ford, the Dad of Julia (AKA the Crew). By day he masquerades as fundraiser, a fly fisherman, a motorcycle gang leader and a sometimes blogger. He lives with Chef Heidi in Port Moody BC. Pictures are courtesy of Digital Echo, unless otherwise noted.



When the Captain and Crew arrived in Vancouver on August 28 on flight AC 105, the party started. They met the first wave of relatives while bottling 453 bottles of beer in preparation for the wedding. (One hundred guests consumed all but 6 bottles over the course of the 4 day event – roughly 1.1 bottles per guest per day.) 

The next wave of relatives was encountered at the Magnuson family BBQ. It was also a celebration of birthdays; Julia’s Opa - Dick Magnuson who turned 83 and Julia’s sister - Erika Magnuson-Ford, at twenty something, just to be polite. It was an opportunity to connect Julia to cousins she had not seen in years and introduce Captain Phil to more family. 

The party continued with motorcycle rides, cooking competitions between Captain Phil and Chef Heidi and then drifted to Galiano Island on September 5th for Karen and Pat’s wedding on September 6th. Read on, Mac Duff...

Karen and Patrick

Wedding rings from three generations
It was the Magnuson-Ford/Gordon wedding of the century. Some came early and stayed late. Some fell in love with the island and got a realtor to show them houses before they left. Some sojourned from Vancouver the morning of the wedding and were piped off the early ferry by a Scottish Bag Piper named Daniel Cameron. 

He led the merry band of wedding guests up the street to a wonderful breakfast of "salmon benedict” hosted by Peter and Jackie Gordon, Pat’s parents. One third of the guests were Karen’s relatives, 1/3 were Pat’s relatives and 1/3 were their friends. People came from Germany, Spain, and the United States. They traveled from far and wide including New York, Toronto, Fairbanks, Alaska and Parowan, Utah. 

Erika, Karen, Julia and Heidi (Photo credit to Steph.)

All admired the beautiful scenery and marveled at the logistics of gathering and feeding the multitude. Chef Heidi grabbed the limelight cooking the post-wedding brunch on Sunday for 75 early morning risers. There were 8 dozen sausages and 10 dozen eggs, scrambled and wrapped up in tortillas with cheese, salsa and fresh onions. There were 73 pieces of smoked salmon – caught and smoked by this blogger. Plus each hungry guest got to sample a huge apple-slaw, 5 kinds of homemade muffins, again made by Chef Heidi, and trays of dainties made by the aunties.

'Boss Julia' emerged at the very end, dropping her 'guest' persona to organize the cleaning of the kitchen. She ordered the Chef out of the kitchen and commandeered Aunt Betsy and Uncle Jeff to wash some nasty pans. She brow-beat her sister into cleaning one pan that had foiled “Mr. Clean” himself. Thankfully, 'Bossy Julia' disappeared after her work was done and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

Readers please note, the kitchen did get cleaned and no friends or family were harmed in the process.

Stay tuned for another installment of the world according to my dad.