“Pint of Guinness, please”.

I love saying those words. ;-) and for 4 years every Tuesday after work they were spoken as my bum hit the stool.

When I was living in the city one of my regular haunts was a great little Irish Pub on the banks of the southern Great Lakes. After work I would join the usual suspects at the bar for a pint or 2.  There was Sailor Bill, and Director Dave, Racer John & his mechanic/wench Mel and of course I can’t forget  Slick Nick.

It wasn’t a formal club, but we all showed up every Tuesday for a few years. The name came later.

Our conversations ranged from the miraculous to the mundane. One of my favourite sparing matches was once with John over the CBC’s coverage of a story on Healthcare in Cuba. John and I rarely agreed on anything, but of course THAT (and the Guinness) was why I was there to begin with.

Those debates were my life line to sanity at the time. John was convinced everything out of the CBC talking heads was ‘blarney’, of course. Government run “media” to John is at odds with truth in  journalism. Although I suspect John perhaps loved a good debate too, and often played the “devils advocate” just to get his blood pressure up. I guess its sort of like exercise for us bar stool intellectuals.

I arrived in the ‘burbs of the “Big Smoke” (Toronto) as a refugee a year after the death of my Mom and a failed attempt at doing the web design thing full-time back in ‘Dodge’. After 9/11 the US tourist industry in the Haliburton/Muskoka region (aka Cottage Country) dried  up significantly and since the Web firm I was freelancing for worked from there, so did my commissions. So being one always up for a challenge I packed all my things, grabbed Fred the Ficus and my felines and headed down the 401.

I had never seen myself as a “burbinite” before, but I was attracted to this quaint little oasis in the midst of ‘suburba-HEdoublehockey-sticks’ for its small town charm.

Ah, charm and a good pub – a recipe for Paula’s downfall…but all that was still a couple of years off – after hitting the big-time at the Fortune 500 Corp I was sloughing my soul for.

But I digress. One night after work, there we all are seated at our assigned stools watching the “boob tube”.  A story comes on concerning a documentary that’s going to air that evening on Global Warming.  John of course takes his stance at the ‘anti-global warming’ podium,  and I stand behind the ‘stereotypical green-liberal’ side, and so we’re off.  About an hour in we dried up all our points and it was getting late (him and Mel had to be home to watch Jeopardy). So John takes his last swig of beer, clears his throat and says,  “When Baffin Island gets a yacht club, than I’ll believe in Global Warming”.

So there you have it, how an after work pub club was christened …and I’ll have another please  :)