My cousin, AJ, offers this story and although I don’t remember it, it was classically my dad. He would barter in the shops on Bloor St (Dad, these are not the beaches of Mexico), verbally wrestle a waiter who he felt was overcharging, he practically invented carrot on the stick parenting and all of it was for sport not necessarily outcome.

The lake started to get overrun with “seaweed”, especially off the dock in front of boat house and Unk decided that it needed to be cleaned out (or more likely – the 2 US Macdonald terrors needed something to occupy their time instead of bothering Unk while he smoked his cigar). So he offered/demanded that we pull the seaweed out and deposit it in buckets for $0.10 per bucket. I recall him saying he would pay us in aw-mer-i-cun currency, but I can’t recall if we were ever paid at all! It didn’t matter to us as we had a wonderful time diving underwater and seeing how much we could wrap around our bodies before surfacing and then collecting it on our homemade raft. Wonderful memories of Unk sitting on the end of the dock giving us pointers on how to collect the seaweed and he made sure to scold us if any escaped our grasp and started to head in his direction.