When my dad isn't baking at his Tim Hortons (48 Tenth St., Nanaimo), and maybe feels a bit sad -typically whenever orders of seasonally coloured sprinkles fail to arrive- he drives to other regional Tim Hortons. He's a minor celebrity in the Nanaimo doughnuts circle, so chooses to attend establishments incognito; he'll either dress up as a White Spot cook (so he can continue to be sad about his sprinkles) or he'll drive to Duncan (where he can be happy by way of relativism).

To save my new old dad the bus fare, I drove him to this Duncan donuts place. We mistakenly sat down in the talk-about-roofing-materials section, whereas my dad and I are talk-about-pressure-washers kind of guys. There was an obvious divide. And not only was that divide divisive (ketchup packets laid end to end in a line), but cousin Doug was there, talking up psi and nozzle velocities etc. He even had the gall to suggest that rednecks were like hipsters in that their signature move was to point out rednecks with redder necks than them.

You might imagine how my poor dad must've been feeling by now. But I watched him. Closely. He relaxed, and met some ol fella called Chaz who claimed to have been the first person to say "are you working hard, or hardly working?" Chaz also seemed to take to my dad, and said that he was there when my dad had won Silver in the '00 Nanaimo Doughlympics. Seems my dad had lost because his sprinkles were out of season. Chaz told him to buck up, because doughnuts with sprinkles tend to clog eavestrough downspouts faster than most other roof doughnuts, and that they were even worse than the dreaded Boston Creams.

Anyway, Doug heard this.. saw this tender moment (tenderer than the New Tim Hortons Turkey Club Sandwich!!) and didn't seem to care at all.

3 stars because I forgot to put the radiator cap back on earlier and dad and I both had to bus home.