Click Here For More Canadian Music… do it kids, stick it to The Man.
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I’m flipping between the classic “Requiem for a Heavyweight“, starring Jackie Gleason, Anthony Quinn and Mickey Rooney on TVO, and the Weather Channel so I can watch “The Storm Of The Decade” make its way North. Right now it’s still south of the Canada-America border, but the winds are Starting To Blow in Toronto. The last snowfall guesstimate for the region I’m in (400 miles north of Toronto) is calling for 40-60cm… that’s about two feet of snow in one shot. Police and government-types are asking people to store food in case the power is out for an extended time. There are two Pacific Ocean systems which effect weather in North America, they come around once every few years. One is El Nino and the other is La Niña. El brings the heat to Canada, La brings the Snow and cold. This is a LaLa Year.
Back in 1998 a Storm of Epic Proportions hit this region… called “The Ice Storm“, over a period of eighty hours twice the normal annual amount of precipitation was dumped on Southern Quebec, Eastern Ontario (basically between Ottawa and Montreal) and bits and pieces of New England and New Brunswick. It came in waves of freezing rain, rain, sleet, ice pellets and snow. Almost 900,000 homes in Quebec and another 100,000 in Ontario lost power, and over 100,000 had to rely on shelters… while a couple of million people were without electricity for up to six weeks. Most people had power within ten days, but here in Rural Land some of us went a lot longer. A friend of mine went the full six weeks.
Twenty-five people were killed and tens of thousands of farm animals died… mostly cows which couldn’t be milked. It also left the entire electricity infrastructure of this region laying on the ground. It was a multi-billion dollar cleanup. So… I’m not entirely impressed by what the mostly Toronto-based media keep referring to as “The [most recent] Storm Of The Decade.” It seems to be mostly a media feeding frenzy fed by the amount of time it’s taking for the fucking thing to actually hit Canada… the storm has been beating the shit out of the Central United States, in fact they’ve had their own Ice Storm which has left millions out of power across four States.
But… But, there is a really good chance I will lose power for a couple of days. Or maybe not. There’s a flat roof on this very old building so maybe my ceiling will collapse… or, maybe not. Or maybe Cuba, backed by the Soviet Military, will take this opportunity to finally invade my strategically important Little Village and I, along with a few other survivalists, will be forced into the woods where we will lead an armed counterinsurgency over several years until the United Nations can finally get its shit together and allow a group of nations to come and fight with us… Wolverines!
However it goes down I might be without power for a few minutes, a few days or until a force made up of the armed forces of Norway, Guatemala and Wales — Canada’s natural allies — are able to take back what Cuba has possibly taken.
Wish us Luck. If “Requiem” is the last movie I watch before I’m forced to walk the Snowy Wastes in search of an Internet connection, it’s a great way to go out… awesome movie. Actually, due to an almost complete lack of insulation in this building I can feel the wind picking up… damn, it’s getting really cold and I’m just realizing I have, maybe, a days worth of Diet Pepsi left. If this thing goes long I may not survive… if I don’t make it back raffle off my Avatar and donate the proceeds to the Free Eastern Ontario From Cuba Fund.
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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
Back in the fall of 1993 my brother had just moved in with some ‘friends of friends’. I was desperate to get out of where I was living — my girlfriend wouldn’t come over due to roaches… she actually woke up one night with a bunch of them in her hair — so he got me in there. In the new place there were four of us in a three bedroom bungalow, plus girlfriends, so I slept on a couch in the mostly-finished basement.
At that point in Canada there was a lot of cigarette smuggling. Taxes on smokes made it a lucrative business for the Natives whose Reserve actually straddles the American-Canadian border. So, the scheme was — and some of the Big smoke companies were in on it — export cigarettes into the US, buy them in bulk at the always cheap American price, then smuggle them back across the St. Lawrence River through the Native Reserves and sell then at a higher price to Canadian smoke addicts like myself, who then enjoy discounted smokes.
Thanks to my roommates, S. and F., we always had massive boxes of smokes in our garage because they supplied students at the main College in Ottawa, and one of the Universities with cheap smokes. And hash. Which you can also smoke. We also had a Sega and the NHL Game where you could still make players bleed on the ice. So life was pretty sweet. The only problem was heat.
Heat takes money. And I had none except whatever the government was handing out. My brother was in College, so he was broke. And the street corner / local dealers never, ever have any money, so we scraped enough coins together to pay for half a tank of oil to heat the house. Thing about half a tank is it’s not a full tank. So again, two months later, we had no heat. And Canadian winters last a lot longer than Rocktober to December.
We did, however, have an ornamental fireplace. Just a little thing, not very deep, and the chimney flue would shut randomly. Thing about fires is they need fuel, and fuel we were learning, costs no matter what form. So, after a few solid pre-Al Gore winter nights, we started walking around the neighbourhood stealing wood. Thankfully several homes were still heating with wood… which actually sucked huge when I got off the bus and had to walk the three blocks home through the smoke. There was one night I can still remember clearly when I really thought I was going to suffocate to death walking home.
But I didn’t, and I actually felt pretty good when I was loading up the cigarette van with wood from the homes around us. It worked out pretty good for about a month. Then people started locking their wood up… which sounds hard to do, the wood was generally piled seven-feet high in an open garage or next to the home. And it’s not like you can just shift four cords when you notice some missing. But what they did, and they must have talked to each other, is tightly cover their piles of wood with a tarp then lock the tarp to itself or the garage.
So, again, we were without fuel. I’m not sure whose idea it was, someone had to come up with it, but we started stealing picnic tables instead. There were a couple in our neighbourhood, but after we grabbed the ones we could see, we started taking them from parks. Not many, there’s a surprising amount of wood in a picnic table, so… maybe five. But, as bad as the smoke is from Wood cut straight from the tree, a picnic table has been treated chemically and there’s that brown paint.
You also have to cut the table wood, and there are no perforations. You need a saw. Which we didn’t have, so we would store the table in the backyard and when we needed a piece we’d go out and kick the shit out of a board then toss a chunk on the fire.
Except we were lazy and mostly stoned on hash and burning chemicals, so we started putting longer chunks into the fireplace, except the fireplace was small and nearly useless. So we’d put a three-foot long chunk of wood into the fire, which meant having a piece of that piece hanging out into the living room while it burned. I came home early one morning from my girlfriends and there were five people sleeping in the living room with a the remains of a glowing piece of picnic table smoldering on the living room floor, and the entire house just fucked with smoke.
Then there were the nights the flue would close while there was a fire. I’d wake up choking on smoke in the basement. Things actually got more fucked up with that place. So I found a very nice house a few miles away with normal people who enjoyed the occasional smoke or chunk of hash, but could afford what they had and probably wouldn’t steal what they wanted. I managed to get my brother a place there as well. Which was good for him because he had just broken up with his girlfriend and she had legitimate cause to kill him.
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S. got arrested that summer and fined $50,000 for cigarette smugging. F. took his earnings and opened a fairly successful tattoo parlour in downtown Ottawa.
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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
Click Here For More Canadian Music… do it kids, stick it to The Man.
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CSN:AFU Week Twenty-Nine
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Labouring Through The Days.
I’m not sure if this is a rule or… not, but if it isn’t it probably should be. When you’re in the middle of a period of Writer’s Block start writing aboot what’s happening immediately around you and worry aboot expanding the focus later. So… it’s really fucking cold and I’m listening to Elvis Presley.
It’s officially ‘Summall’ in Canada, or halfway into the transition between Summer and Fall. Which means the temperature can swing twenty-five degrees Celsius in ten hours, then back again in four. Last night I left the windows open thinking it was still Summer. The temperature dropped to 4C while I was sleeping. It’s 8am now and it’s 15C (outside) and in four hours it will be in the really high 20’s, possibly as high as 31C according to my TV, then back down to 13C by supper-time. Try dressing for that kind of day. Just as a quick aside, Canada is the coldest country on earth. Our average temperature over a full year runs at aboot -5C to -10C (depending which website you use as a source). Which is crazy because, while most of this country is frozen tundra most of the years, we do have a large chunk that’s a rainforest… maybe not that crazy.
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The Lists From Week Twenty-Nine:
Five Strangest Search Terms Used To Find CSN:AFU
5) death scenes stabbing her tits youtube 4) stuff that has happened between 1992 and 3) YOUTUBE WAR OF 1812 FIRST INVASION 2) horseporn 1) grandmothers fucking
Five Honourable Mentions: things you need to have to be emo; handjob sex; underside closeup toilet; gordon brown convicted child molester k; brit sex canada
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Top Five CSN:AFU Posts For Week 29:
1) CSN:AFU Week 28 In Review 2) CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories — July 30/07 3) The Five Things You Need To Know Aboot The Canadian Movie Industry 4) Canadians Invented Hollywood: What You Need To KnowAboot Canada’s Movie Industry — Part Two: A New Hope 5) Six Canadian Movies You Need To See That Don’t Suck — Part Four: Ginger Snaps
Honourable Mention: Canada: Offering A Safe-Sex Environment Where Humanity Can Fuck Itself Back Together Again
Damn, Elvis is still The Man… I just downloaded his catalogue from btjunkie.com. I also downloaded a three disk “Best of Grunge” package and right now I’m getting “Bitches Brew” from Miles Davis. I’ve never done this before with my computer. My cousin and my brother are both huge download fanatics and I’ve used their computers to grab stuff, but I’ve always been paranoid aboot viruses, trojan horses and having to share files with people Idon’t know — which makes sense as I reported on those issues for the better part of seven years.
I have also had some ethical issues aboot downloading copyrighted material, but holy fuck on a stick I am so freaking bored with the songs I’ve bought legally.
The only thing I’ve done so far this week and all of last week — which is what this post is really supposed to be aboot — was write a few posts on [my other blog] and sit and stare at the screen when it came time to write a post for Cultural Snafu. I did change the header on both sites, and I had to actually learn something aboot PhotoShop to do them so I guess that was something.
And now that I’ve got Elvis and Miles Davis, I’m going back to find some Oscar Peterson.
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Photo Of My Week:
My sister and her father, the dude who married my mom; Sunday, August 29, 2007; Photo by Me.
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This Weeks New Post(s):
Nada. Mostly I’ve been staring at a blank screen or writing for [my other blog].
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Coming In Week Thirty:
Six Pixies, Some Cocaine And Maybe Some Unicorns
Apples, oranges, vitamins with whole wheat bagels and
a big glass of milk… mmm.
Click Here For More Canadian Music… do it kids, stick it to The Man.
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CSN:AFU Week Twenty-Eight
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Whoops.
I had a friend over for the weekend… and this thing totally slipped my mind until I after I had taken my sleeping aid last night. I was fading off watching Roeper from Ebert & Roeper dissect a documentary aboot people who obsess over Donkey Kong — apparently it’s Thumbs Worthy — when I took a look at my stats page and noticed someone had opened every Week In Review I’ve ever done. “That’s odd”, I thought, “I wonder if they liked this weeks… oh. Shit.”
I posted my first FTS Photo Graphic on this site. It’s something I’ll be doing here pretty often now although I’ll be keeping the Photo Graphic F.T.S. site open just to post personal photos — mostly it’ll be friends and weirdness. I also put up 26 images of flowers from local gardens on [my other blog]. The idea was people could choose which ones they wanted and I’d send them the large format version which they could print out and hang on their wall. Altogether a total of thirty-two people from Australia, Spain, Germany, England, Scotland, Canada, Chile, New Zealand and the United States asked for — and received — photos.
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The Lists From Week Twenty-Seven:
Five Strangest Search Terms Used To Find CSN:AFU
5) safe sex sucking boops 4) is it illegal to marry you third cousin 3) large nutsack 2) eddie izzard + imperialism 1) coming illegally to canada and getting m
Five Honourable Mentions: are you legally allowed to marry second, fucking ethiopian woman, safe sex in quebec, Manic Depression Owl, gay erotic stories about my stepfather
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Top Five CSN:AFU Posts For Week 28:
1) [redacted]: 2) CSN:AFU Week 21 In Review 3) CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories — August 20/07 4) Canada: Offering A Safe-Sex Environment Where Humanity Can Fuck Itself Back Together Again 5) The Five Things You Need To Know Aboot The Canadian Movie Industry
Honourable Mention: CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories — July 02/07
Yeah, so Sean was over for a couple… of days. We had a nice get-together with some friends… it was the first time Steve, Sean and I had been in the same room since 2002ish. Steve owns a brewery so the beer was plentiful, good and in jug form. Between last Sunday and Sean getting here on Saturday I did (pretty much) absolutely nothing except play with the computer.
I’ve been updating the backend of my blogs while learning new and interesting things to do with PhotoShop. I did get my haircut. But that was pretty much it…
This week I’ll be helping my step-father get the garage roof mostly done — everything but the tar paper and shingles. We’ll also be working at The Museum, we’re putting the roof on the porch. It’s the last big job before the grand opening next Spring. Everything else is finishing the painting, a few little electrical things and installing the display cases — which are being made by a local Master Carpenter. The Historical Society are getting displays ready now… hopefully they’ll have something to do with history.
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Photo Of My Week:
Sean was up for a couple of days; Sunday, August 26, 2007; Photo by Me.
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This Weeks New Post:
CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories
— August 20/07 Monday’s News Sometime Later: I’ve stopped taking this thing so seriously and it’s getting easier as a result, so it looks like the Monday News thing is a keeper. What’s making it easier is the whole “sometime later” philosophy I’ve adopted. It’s something I’ve practiced in other areas of my life, so it was probably inevitable I’d adopt it in here. Check out the thing aboot the fighter jets over my village… they were wicked cool.
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Photo Graphic: 1997 Remembrance Day In Ottawa We Barely Remembered The Promise And Totally Forgot The Struggle As well as working as a reporter, I’ve also been shooting news photography for several years. A few weeks ago I started posting my photographs on another blog, but recently I’ve decided to make it a part of CSN:AFU instead. It’s basically aboot hoping to start conversations aboot photography, and maybe aboot the issues surrounding the photos. It’s also a continuation of a memory exercise I started on my other-other blog.
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Coming In Week Twenty-Nine:
Photos, A Movie And Maybe Some Unicorns
Apples, oranges, vitamins with whole wheat bagels and
a big glass of milk… mmm.
Click Here For More Canadian Music… do it kids, stick it to The Man.
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The First Three News Stories On 08/20/07
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Monday’s News Sometime Later: I’ve stopped taking this thing so seriously and it’s getting easier as a result, so it looks like the Monday News thing is a keeper. What’s making it easier is the whole “sometime later” philosophy I’ve adopted. It’s something I’ve practiced in other areas of my life, so it was probably inevitable I’d adopt it in here. Check out the thing aboot the fighter jets over my village… they were wicked cool.
1) Second Iraqi Governor Killed: Muhammad Ali al-Hassani, Governor of the Iraqi province of Al-Muthanna, was killed when a bomb exploded near his convoy while he was on his way to work. Two of his guards were wounded in the attack. Al-Hassani was a member of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Iraq’s largest Shiite party. The Shiite governor of al-Qadisiyah province, Khalil Jamil Hamza, died in a similar bomb attack on August 11. The two southern provinces neighbour each other. Iraqi police have blamed the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Also on Monday, August 20, two bombings in Baghdad killed at least seven people. One targeted the Shiite district of Sadr City; the other hit a busy market.
2) Hurricane Dean Hits Jamaica: Hurricane Dean barely missed the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, but was headed straight for Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula on Monday. The Category 4 storm killed 12 people as it crossed the Caribbean. Most of the midsection of the United States were also recovering from deadly floods. At least 20 people were killed in separate storm systems across three states. More than a ten inches of rain fell on parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin, causing flash floods and the evacuation of entire towns. Also, up to nine inches of rain fell around Oklahoma City over the weekend. Still no word on the Pestilence, although a man on a pale horse was seen crossing into the United States from Canada.
3) America, Mexico & Canada Meet: Roughly 60% of everything Canada makes, cuts down or extracts ends up being sold to America. But, going the other way, Canada purchases more American crap than any other country. Roughly 30-35% of everything made, cut down or extracted in America ends up here. In fact Canada is the largest trading partner for most of the individual states. I know next to nada aboot Mexico — other than it’s economy is barely above third world levels, but I know Canada is one of the largest economies on earth. No shit.
With a labour force of 17.2 million Canada’s GDP is US$1.178 trillion. Germany’s GDP, with a labour force 2.5 times greater, is US$2.63 trillion while France, with 27 million potential workers, sits at US$1.891 trillion. The United States, just to finish the comparison, could buy the top eight economies, including Japan, and still have enough change lying around to buy South America and South East Asia. I’m not joking. The American GDP sits at US$13.13 trillion.
All that to say North America has been in talks for aboot twelve years to create an economic and security zone similar to what the European Union has done, except without the Gallic attitude and single currency bullshit. This was the first serious meeting between the leaders of Mexico, America and Canada to that end.
1) The Montebello Summit: The summit was held at a resort just up the road from my little village. It’s basically the Quebec version of where I live. Lots of gardens; old mountains; old, but well maintained homes and a decent economy which supports a thriving arts scene. The resort itself, where the Summit was held, is one of the most beautiful in Canada. It’s basically a huge log cabin next to the Ottawa River which, on the Quebec side, is called the Gatineau River. President Bush, new Mexican President Calderon and our Prime Minister Stephen Harper hooked up for three days of talks. The eventual and current goal is to “harmonize” certain standards, like for car parts. All three countries have large auto manufacturing sectors and right now there are three different sizes for pretty much everything.
2) Hurricane Dean Hits: There were photos taken from the Space Station which made this storm look the size of Canada. They were then put on TV where news people who should know better commented on the humoungousness of the monster killer storm. Thing is… okay, the Space Station isn’t actually “in space”. It’s in a low earth orbit. It’s only a couple hundred miles over you and barely out of Earth’s atmosphere. So what happens when you draw a dot on a beach ball, then bring the beach ball to your nose? The dot looks massive. But it’s still just a dot. Dean was large and in charge, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the size of the planet.
3) Snowbird Accident Report: Okay… check this out. The Snowbirds are the elite flying team of the Canadian Air Force, but the planes they use are older than God… the Canadian built training aircraft, the CT-114 Tutor jet, has been in service since 1971. It was used by the Canadian Forces as its basic pilot training aircraft until 2000. In 2004 two of the planes collided during a high-risk maneuver during a practice run over Saskatchewan. One pilot, Captain Miles Selby, was killed. A few weeks ago the preliminary report, which it turns out was the ‘preliminary preliminary’ report, found that Captain Selby likely died due to his inexperienced and he had never performed the stunt before that day. But whoops… hold on a minute. Ends up Captain Selby wasn’t the pilot of his own demise, turns out the plane everyone believes should be turned into a monument and firmly encased in concrete had faulty seatbelts. When Captain Shelby rolled his plane during the maneuver his seatbelt broke and he couldn’t reach the pedals, and of course the ejector seat was useless because he wasn’t attached to the freaking seat. And it was a problem people knew aboot before hand. Everyone has known for a decade the CT-114 Tutor needs to be replaced, but someone was too busy balancing a budget by cutting defence spending to notice the equipment was falling apart.
1) Hurricane Dean: This is actually Eastern Canada’s hurricane season as well. The hurricanes that skirt along the Eastern United States always blow themselves out in the Atlantic Provinces, sometimes they’ll hit the Toronto-Montreal corridor. They’re never as bad, of course. Although Nova Scotia got hit pretty hard a few years ago. The worst I’ve ever seen it was on a canoe trip a few years ago and the swells were higher than the gunnels. That was fun.
2) America Experiences Weather: Every year reporters experience rain for the first time. Then snow, then ice, then cold, then flowers blooming… yadda yadda yadda. There were floods — probably due to rain, but no one’s talking — in the American Midwest.
3) Montebello Conference: Security was very tight for the conference, of course. The protests were pretty tiny. A few hundred people, maybe a couple of thousand. The Sûreté de Quebec, basically a paramilitary force, were protecting the Chateau. The SQ are, without a doubt, some of the roughest cops in Canada. But the really, really, really cool thing was the CF-18’s. Our village fair was going on at the same time, and during the fair some of the local dudes get in their little planes and fly overhead. On Saturday morning an orange Cessna-type plane was flying over our village when there was this loud WHOOSH and suddenly there was a slow moving CF-18 behind him. It was like the military jet was hovering. And it was so low you could almost count the rivets. Then came the popPOP-POP-POPCRASH and another CF-18 came screaming in from the Montreal area and dropped right in front of the orange plane. You could actually see the wings on the orange plane wobble. It was fuck.ing.in.sane. People at the fair, at least some of them, thought it was all a show. We’re right between two international airports and three military airports, so we get a lot of air traffic. But it’s always UP THERE at 30,000 feet. These two fighter jets were, maybe, 400 feet off the ground. Stunning.
If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
Click Here For More Canadian Music… do it kids, stick it to The Man.
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CSN:AFU Week Twenty-Seven
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I Can’t Write Textbooks.
I’ve been having a crisis of blogs recently… which has manifested itself into a new avatar and “WordPress nickname”. But I’ve also started two other blogs, one for photos and commentary, the other to excercise my humour muscles. In the meantime I’ve been letting CSN:AFU slide, and it just hit me yesterday why I’ve been having such an identity crisis…
CSN:AFU has been gradually turning into a textbook. And I don’t want to write a textbook. And I certainly want to avoid becoming a “Daily Reporter.” I’ve never had the stamina, or the discipline. As a daily reporter it takes a lot of energy to write 800-1000 words every day on specific topics. Done properly it’s ten phone interviews to get three to four sources. As a blogger I generally use ten to thirty websites for my “features”, plus a couple of books or magazines and maybe a PBS special. The “Monday News” things alone are six hour posts. Writing these things involves three or four drafts and — in general — it takes twice as many words in notes to find the ones worth printing. And there’s no paycheque at the end of my week. Plus there’s all the drinking, and the groupies and the coke associated with news blogging, and really, I just don’t have the energy for blow and hooker binges anymore.
So CSN:AFU, to me, was meant to be two or three stories a week, plus my little Monday News Recap. But I haven’t got the discipline right now to be writing serious pieces aboot abortion, native rights, inventions, books, people and general poltics every week, so CSN:AFU became this weird place to write news briefs… and only news briefs. So I’m taking my New, Improved Photo Blog, and smashing it into CSN:AFU. This will give me the opportunity to write short, simple and interesting posts aboot things that are somewhat more personal to me in between writing aboot Canadian stuff.
So RIP ‘Photo Graphic F.T.S’. The posts and comments will be moved from There to Here. I’m not sure aboot “Dumb Waiter… I think I’m still going to give it a shot. I want to keep CSN:AFU totally Canadian, and Salted completely aboot my recovery, so Dumb Waiter will probably stay seperate. Hopefully this will let me post here a lot more often… basically, I need something to do here between the energy bursts which lead to the Features. C’est ca.
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The Lists From Week Twenty-Seven:
Five Strangest Search Terms Used To Find CSN:AFU
5) Africans screwing monkeys 4) “Dead Robot” AND gay 3) Muture sult fucking a donkey 2) alternative for youtube for porn 1) don’t need cock in movies
Honourable Mention: donkey fucking a sult; india neked sex free; all email address india man doctor livin; Vick is complete moron, and; movies you need to see high
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Top Five CSN:AFU Posts For Week 27:
1) The First Ten Things You Need To Know Aboot Canada 2) CSN:AFU Week 26 In Review 3) Greatest Hits: Canadian Inventions — ‘The Wonderbra’ 4) Canada: Where Abortion Is So Legal It’s Retroactive OR
Why You Never Piss Off Your Canadian Mom 5) CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories — July 30/07
Honourable Mention: CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories — July 02/07
I don’t know, this week seemed to blow by… pretty quickly. I spent so much time dicking around with my eighty-three blogs I forgot to get outside. I did start walking again, I’m going to take it slowly. I’ve been out three times for 1.5 miles each time. My knee was freaking sore. When I was 18 I dislocated my kneecap and tore my ACL almost entirely, and damaged my MCL playing midnight basketball in the playground. I walked with a cane for almost three years, and a brace for most of that as well. Surgery helped a little. Last year I was up to five miles a night, I figure by the end of the month I’ll be up there again.
I did finally get to a working scale, and it turns out I’ve lost 15 pounds since I started this new healthy diet thing. The Village Fair was this weekend, I took photos of the Parade, but didn’t go to the actual Event… and what else… of yeah, I helped my step-father get the trusses up for the roof on his new garage. He’s an architect, actually a VP with the second largest architectual firm on Earth. Right now he’s helping build a brand-spanking new city in Saudi Arabia. I’ve worked on a lot of projects around Ontario, but I’ve never seen anyone better with a hammer or with a better sense as to how things work than he does.
This garage project, and the other ones around town that he has done, are what he does on vacation. I helped — a little — but the Musuem Project was 80% entirely him… I’ll post the photos sometime this week. It’s an amazing renovation project. It took him aboot six years to get it done. The Garage Project will be done next spring. We should have the plywood done next weekend. Just to give you an idea… he put the first four trusses on himself. I’ve never seen anyone do that alone.
And that’s it. His mother, my step-granny, turns 73 tomorrow so we’re going out for brunch. I’ll probably have some of the local chedder and a bagel.
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Photo Of My Week:
I’m helping my step-father build his garage. Self-portrait on Saturday, August 18, 2007. Hello.
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This Weeks New Post:
Uhm… yeah. Well… nope. Nada. I did write three posts on Photo Graphic F.T.S., and another on Salted.
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Coming In Week Twenty-Eight:
Photos, A Movie And Maybe Something Else
Bananas in my All-Bran with a whole wheat bagel and
a big glass of orange juice… mmm.
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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
0_o
cultural sn:afu 