So much has changed

Dear Dad,

I’ve been doing some biking this month in support of kids cancer through the Sick Kids Foundation. This is a foundation run from the Toronto Sick Kids hospital which if you remember is where Joe had his open heart surgery. This event is a month long ride where we set two goals, one is for the distance we are going to attempt to ride, the other is a donation goal. I have done this for the past two years, neither times have I hit either previous two goals. This year however, I’ve surpassed both of my goals that I’ve set for myself. I set a goal to attempt to ride 300 km’s, as of today I’m at around 330+ km’s. My donation goal I set this year was $500. Somehow as a result of having lots of caring friends, coworkers and family I’ve been able to secure $600 in donations.

In addition to this I was able to attract other participants at work, we created a team with it’s own goals and we have surpassed all of those as well. Our team was able to secure over $2500+ in donations. I am hoping that this will continue to be a yearly event not only for me but my work as well.

I have also been able to attract the attention of Paul, from the old neighborhood who also joined in, riding his bike, obtaining $600 in donations. With Paul being a lifelong smoker and having participated at all is purely amazing to me and I feel very proud to know that I have been able to inspire him enough to consider doing this. He actually surpassed his initial goal of 100 km’s, increased it to 150 and will without a doubt surpass that as well.

I have been enjoying this activity immensely. Not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to keep it up but I’m now looking for the next person to inspire.

It’s been awhile

Dear Dad,

I knew it had been awhile since I last wrote a blog entry here but to find that it’s been over 3 years was a little depressing. I used to love writing. Writing about anything, complaining as necessary. I’d been doing it for a long time, so what happened?  Work…life…change. It’s not like I’m not doing as much as I perhaps once did.  I’m just doing different things now and it’s not so much what I’m doing but perhaps how I’m doing them too. As an example, I have a PC at home. I rarely go on it. So right there just about everything I used to do on the internet, on the PC is now either gone or now different. I do most things from my cell phone now and when at home I use my tablet. All of the same things I might have previously done from my PC I now do, more or less using these other devices which present a slightly different use case. You don’t have a tactile keyboard on those other devices so the way you “write” is now different and in some ways less precise, relying on swipe keyboards and error correction that often results in incorrect words used in incorrect ways. Editing, though possible, is very difficult and so laborious that I often end up deleting entire sentences and paragraphs because it’s easier. I think that whole experience makes it less enjoyable to blog anymore, though it is my tablet that I’m using to write this, while sitting on the couch with the TV on :-|.
I do have the WordPress app on my tablet so that makes it easier but I still seem to have difficulties making the time to allow myself the time to think about and write a blog entry. One of the things you realize the older you get, is that there is never enough time to do all of the things you feel you want to do.
Youth is definitely wasted on the young. I understand that now.
Til next time…

The youngest

Dear Dad,
Today is my youngest childs bithday. He’s 22 today. How time flies. It seems like only yesterday when he was going through his open heart surgery. It was the scariest time of our lives. It is still amazing for me to think that his heart was stopped for over 6 hours while they repaired it. Its even more amazing to think that within 48 hours he was awake and squaking about being connected up to all of those hoses and wires. He was a fighter then, i know he still has it in him now.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Driving

Dear Dad,
I had a wierd sensation today while driving home from work. I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw a Chevy pickup truck changing lanes to the lane i was in. For some strange reason when i looked at this truck, i thought of a persons name. Not just anyone, a particular person. My brain somehow connected this truck to a person. Strange.

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More time

Dear Dad,

I have been feeling very fortunate lately, having the opportunity to spend as much time as i have been, with my son. On the one hand he totally pisses me of by being unemployed but on the other hand i am so enjoying his company. We have similar interests. Him and i went for a nice long walk tonight. It gives us ample opportunity to discuss our interests and the latest news.
If i hadn’t been hell-bent on traversing the country we might have had similar experiences. I guess that’s why i’ve been relishing the time i’ve been having with my son.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Letters to my Dad

I have been wondering what to do with this blog.  I’ve seen some people use such similar “extra” blogs as a place to showcase thier interests or thier expertise and/or skills. I’m not interested in following the crowds, necessarily.

I don’t know what it was on tv that i was watching when i thought of my idea but i wondered what it would be like to write my Dad some “letters”. Whats so fantastical and innovative of this plan you may ask? My Dad has been dead for 11 years. Sounds mushy i know. I was thinking i could mould it after the twitter phenom “Shit my Dad says” except it would be me talking to my Dad about shit i do or am apart of.

I’m hoping i can keep the posts brief but i can sometimes get a little long-winded. I’ll see what i can do.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Another WordPress blog…what to do…what to do

I somehow inherited a second blog.  Microsoft Spaces is being eliminated and they have partnered with WordPress so any existing MS Spaces can automatically be transferred to a new WordPress blog, so here it is.  Now I just need to figure out what to do with it!

Dogs, Nailed

Did I ever tell you that I really love my air compressor and nail gun?  I like it.  I had purchased some more trim to finish off all of the doors upstairs at our house, well I finally got around to putting them up.  I had about three door ways to complete and once I got all of the pieces measured and cut, it took less than 5 minutes to nail them in place.  Having one of those mitre saws helps in the process too.  The poor kitten, as soon as she sees me bringing the air compressor upstaires, she takes off and finds a hiding spot.  Its too loud for her.  Speaking of which, I was vacuuming the other day and as I’m putting it together in the hall just outside of my bedroom Rollie (our male dog) was sitting in the bedroom watching me, and whinning and wimpering like I was getting ready to beat him or something.  Whats funny about that is that out of all of the animals, he’s the one that isn’t afraid of the vacuum.  Cloe, the female, doesn’t like the noise and simply goes into the bedroom and hides under the bed, but Rollie usually decides that during the vacuuming is when he wants to play.  After I go around the living room and puts his toys away, he goes and digs out his stuffed toys and starts throwing them around.  He doesn’t like to bring a toy to you to throw for him, he likes to throw the toy into the air and chase after it, himself.  All you need to do in his "playing" is to encourage him and to be all excited while he is doing it.

JOKE OF THE DAY:

A mother and daughter were riding in a cab through New York City.  The daughter noticed some scantily clad women loitering on a street. "Mommy," the little girl asked, "what are all those ladies doing?"

"They’re waiting for their husbands to come home from work." the mother answered.

"C’mon lady, they’re hookers!" retorted the cab driver.

After a stunned silence, the daughter asked, "Mommy, do hookers have children?"

"Of course," the mother replied, "where do you think cabbies come from?"

goto my other blog for this entry

GOTO my other Blog for this entry
For some reason Msn Spaces has determined that there was language in this entry that it didn’t allow. It doesn’t tell you what parts of the entry are bad, but just that there is something wrong with it. I tried changing many aspects of it to no avail, so I am just providing a link to my other site where, apparently, it was just fine. Way to go Microsoft!

UPDATE: Apparently what it didn’t like about this entry is the title…

Movie Revues

I totally suck at giving movie reviews.  I’m not as critical about them as one needs to be to do a good job of revuing them.  I typically more or less like all movies I goto.  Unless they really really blow do I ever have anything nasty to say about it.  There’s been a few movies where my wife and I have sat through and by the end we look at each other say, "that really sucked".  My son was really interested in seeing the movie "Annapolis" and  since my wife isn’t around, we thought it might be a good one to see because its the type of movie she might not be interested in seeing.  Its about a recruit at the Annopolis naval academy and the things he has to struggle with in life in addition to his military life at the academy.  Its the typical macho-guy type of situation where everything anyone of them does has to be proven and in competing fashion with everyone else there.  Its got all of the expected practical jokes between people who like and dislike each other, and the same old "you fail and your whole team fails" type of stuff.  The whole movie is a lead up to a big boxing match between the main character and his superior officer with whom there was conflict with throughout the entire movie.  As you can imagine, you know who wins.  It was expected.  It was inevetible, it was kinda boring in the end.  If you’re into those kinds of movies, its ok.  There’s no suspense, there’s no great high drama or action just a thorough gritty display of what they would like everyone to think is the way it is going to be going to such a school.  Of course, who am I to suggest that it isn’t a true-life protrail of the place.  I’ve never been to such a school, nor is there anything like that here in Canada, as far as I know.

Onto another movie.  Whenever my wife isn’t around, my son and I like to watch the dumbest, cheeseyest, stuipidest movies just so we can say we saw them.  Well, last night while we were out doing our laundry (we goto a laudromat to conserve our well water) we decided to rent a movie, one that we knew for sure my wife would never want to see.  We picked out, and rented "Team America".  What is there to say about this movie. Its dumb, its crazy shit, its stuipid, yet my son and I were laughing our guts out at the stupidity of it all.  It was typical "South Park Stuff".  Offending everything and evryone as much as possible and take all of the stuipidness that could be imagined and put it in.  Unfortuneately its the low-brow humour that we enjoy, just for the stupidness of it.  I really appreciated the work involved in creating all of the models and sets that they used.  They were pretty detailed and in most cases pretty accurate in their portrayal of whom-ever, or where ever.  I would never recommend it to anyone, yet I enjoyed it.

JOKE OF THE DAY:

One day a Pirate and a bartender were talking to each other in a bar. The Bartender asked the pirate "Where did ya get that peg leg from?"

The Pirate responded "We were sailing the seas when a big ol’ shark came up to me while I was swimmin’ and bit off me leg."

Later the Bartender asked "Where did you get that hook then?"

The pirate responded "Well, me crew and I were in a battle and it got cut through the bone."

The bartender then asked "Then where did ya get the eye patch from?"

The pirate said "In a harbor I looked at a gull flying over head and it took a dump right in me eye."

The bartender was puzzled and asked the pirate, "How would that make you get an eye patch?"

The pirate responded, "First day with the hook."