Posts Tagged ‘Canada’

Benefits of Walking… :) Or how to buy a Porsche!

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

While there are many well known benefits to walking on a regular basis, I’d like to open your eyes to some you may be less familiar with.

Lately, in the last few years actually, I’ve been moving around more than normal. Ok, I think Gypsies would think I’m a drifter. Anyway, I’ve not had much for roots lately. Then with the secret missions, I’m really getting bounced around.

For example, I was in 2 different hotels over a 3 month stretch. I thought that was inconvienient. Then the next mission, I found myself in my 4th room, in a total of 3 hotels in the last 5 weeks! And they were in different neighborhoods!

Anyway, since I didn’t have a car, I did a lot of walking. Which is good, I like walking, really I do. Except when it comes to getting groceries, in the rain. That’s not so good. Been doing that a few times lately!

One good thing I do realize, is you get a way better appreciation for a neighborhood as you walk through it. You see all the little shops, for example. I now know where to do laundry in 3 or 4 different places, in a few time zones! That’s valuable intelligence! I know which fast food places to avoid. I know where to find a washroom.

Or for example a couple weeks ago, I was walking… probably on the way from the hotel to the nearest hamburger place, and I see this cool gray car. Think it might have been a Porsche. Cool, mental note. Keep walking. On the way back, yup, its a 928, sweet! Ok keep walking.

From My 928

Next day, its kind parked facing out, you know, how cars get parked when someone is trying to sell them right? So I walk over a bit closer, think hey it looks kind of… hmm something not quite right, but it was getting dark, so I didn’t think much of it. Next day… how many cheese burgers is that now anyway? Finally decide to walk over and really look at it. Better light today, hey, it looks actually pretty good. Some parts missing, trim, wipers, etc.

Then I see the price. Oh, hmmm about 1/10th of what the car was when it was new. Interesting. But I live in a hotel, so not like I can really be fixing up a car, in the parking lot, right? So I walk around it again, go for a hamburger :)

A few days later, I say screw it, go back, look at it again, write down the price and the guys phone number. Wait a few more days, now its almost payday. I’ll actually have enough to buy the car, which is dangerous right? No more excuses! So I call the guy. No answer. I almost throw up. Next day, call the guy, leave a message. 3 Days before payday, he calls me back, we set up a time to view the car. I walk there, its about a 45 minute walk. See, it had been just down the block when I first saw it, but we moved to a new hotel, of course!

I get there, another guy is looking at the car. Oh oh, trouble. But I had a secret plan. I’d stopped by the ATM and got cash, just in case, you know, I liked the car :)

Other guy gives me the stink eye, gets in his minivan, and leaves. Not sure if I had more street cred, walking, or him in the soccer van :)

So, Finally I get my chance, the guy gives me the tour, and its funny, he’s showing me all the bad stuff. All I wanted to know know was did it run. So finally, he puts in the key, VROOOM. It fires right up, and ohhhh it was pretty… Like a thousand angels having orgasms maybe. I might not even edit that out! He said he’d not really topped off the fluids and they hadn’t really checked out the mechanicals, he was just the body shop guy, but he did put the car in gear and it moved, no weird noises, he blips the throttle… more orgasms… I walk around it a few more times, just trying not to drool mostly, and finally we get quiet, look at each other, and I handed him $500 in twenties, straight from the ATM. “I’ll see you on Friday”. That would be Friday the 13th, a pretty lucky day I’d have to say!

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Tracks in the Darkness

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Wow, holy cow, how long has it been since I blogged? There’s digital dust and cobwebs here! eeek!

Well, lets see. I could tell you all how busy I’ve been. But I’m really not that good of a fiction writer, yet!

So I’ll just do my best to catch you up on things.

You may have noticed I gave up on selling stuff. If you didn’t notice, I used to try to sell stuff. Not that much of it sold :) So mostly now my blogs are just random meanderings of what I’m not doing or what ever. If you get tired of that, feel free to go buy stuff. A book is always good! There’s a link somewhere.

Quick recap then.

November 2009 I moved from California to Alberta, Canada. That after a very brief stint of being a pool boy. Nice pool, it was!

So then, here I am in Canada. Note to readers out there, moving to Alberta, from pretty much anywhere, in November is not recommended. But it did get me here ahead of the snow and the REALLY COLD weather.

December… it was REALLY COLD, water froze up, nothing much happened. It was dark a lot.

January 2010. My mom left the farm for a while, she went on a cruise in the Caribean. Saw that canal thing, learned about bananas and coffee. My brother had a birthday. We ate food. Still pretty dark outside. And cold. I interviewed for some jobs, started having fancy dreams about actually having money, not a lot of money, but money. It could happen!

February 2010. Did some training for a job. Its one of those “on call” situations. I waited for the call. So far no call. Its still dark, and cold. Watched the Olympics on TV. Go Canada! Canadians look good wearing Gold. We all sang, and smiled a lot. Its good to sing when its still dark and cold outside.

March 2010. Having been inspired after watching the Olympics on TV, and singing in the dark in the cold, I decided to get off the couch. I started going for walks. We are surrounded by snow drifts, barb wire fences, horse pastures, and hay fields. So I decided to go for a walk one day. The snow was deep. Over my boots. Over my knees, not quite to my waist. I had bought some “gaitors” at a second hand store a while ago, thought I should try them out. Gaitors are a fabric, in this case nylon, that attach over your boots, and then wrap around your leg. They go up higher, hopefully higher than the snow goes. If it works, there is no snow in your boots when you get back from your walk in the field through the snow drifts. So far so good! So I’ve been walking. It hasn’t snowed yet since I started, so if Google should ever fly over the farm and take a picture of the field, you’d see lots of tracks in the field. I doubt they will, but if they did, you’d see them! I did take some video, but its mostly just panting and weezing, so I doubt I’ll post it. Walking through deep snow is hard work. But it is getting warmer, so the snow isn’t as deep. So that just means I have to go farther to feel like I’m getting anywhere. I almost miss the deep snow.

I am planning to get some cross country skis. I felt that is the one area that Canada really didn’t do so well, so I’ll do my part. If nothing else, I’ll shame someone else into going faster next time :) But seriously, its a big field, I should be able to make some good tracks out there. Of course, by the time I get that call, and get the big fat paychecks, and buy the skis, the sun will shine, and the snow will melt.

It could happen.

Oh yeah, I’ve been writing a lot lately, the Mars book is coming along nicely. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime. Funny how that works. This was supposed to be a short book, kind of a prequel to the big Mars book that I would write later. Well, crap. This one is big, and I’m not even sure I’ve gotten a good start on it yet. Might have to edit it later!

But then I had an idea, since a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe I’ll just turn it into a graphic novel instead. Fun right?

It could happen, too!

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Welcome to 2010… a few days late!

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Wow, how did this happen? I haven’t posted anything here for a whole month!

That might mean I’m incredibly lazy, or very busy! Take your pick :)

The good news, since the last post, our water here on the “Comm-Pound” hasn’t frozen again. In fact, its been a lot warmer, some days even slightly above freezing, and there’s been no new snow for a few weeks now.

Wow, so much time has past… Guess I can talk about the New Year at least.

I’m not going to talk about Resolutions, because frankly, I’m just about perfect anyway. (we need a different font for sarcasm, don’t you agree??)

Really, Goals and Resolutions get so much bad press. We start off the year going to change the world, and by the 3rd week of January (that would be about now) we can’t even get excited about cleaning out the cat box anymore. I heard on the radio that the 3rd Monday of January is the most depressing day of the year.I had to look that up… hmmm that was yesterday! Well, I guess if I don’t know its Monday, I don’t have too much to worry about!

A good friend of mine has a To Do list for the year, kind of like that movie, “The Bucket List”. I like that idea, and think I’ll be working on one myself. Maybe I’ll even post it here when I do it. Then in the comments you all can add what items you’d like to do this year, and we can nag each other if we forget. Good, yes?

For anyone who’s been aware of my last couple years, this may either be an obvious next step, or a shock… but either way, I’m actually trying to find one of those JOB things that everyone else is always complaning about. I mean really, those of you who have jobs sure don’t seem very happy with them. But this last year I really have to admit to myself, that the last 10 years of shooting video and photos for people hasn’t really set my world on fire. Sure, I paid my rent most months with it, and bought some Raman noodles now and then, but I am nearly exactly as broke this year, as I was the year I got out of the Navy. Only then I was in San Diego, and I had a pretty good tan. Now I’m in Alberta, and sometimes I can see my breath. In my trailer. But then the furnace kicks on, and blows fire at me, and I’m all happy again. Life is good :)

So, That Job thing. Kind of an interesting job market in Alberta this year, and this time of year. First off, Alberta has been THE place in Canada for finding jobs, for so many years. Half of Canada moved here it seems, to get jobs in the Oil industry, or supporting the Oil industry, or to take jobs that were vacant because those people worked in the oil industry. Then with the recent “market correction”, oil kind of slowed down. Like a lot. Suddenly oil guys were taking other jobs, anything they could get into. Leaving a lot of other people now wondering where else they should go.

So I’ve been kind of “flinging mud on the walls, to see where it might stick”, a phrase I learned many years ago. I’m sure it wasn’t from an interior decorator type person. Oh, and for the record, I don’t recommend you decorate your home by flinging mud. Just saying.

Again, I’ve been self employed since just after the Y2K computer thingy… back in 2000. Thats when I started getting paid to go to weddings and bring my cameras along. It was a sweet gig. WAS!

So now I have to dig out my resume. Can’t find a resume. Darn. Ok, go write a resume. Hmmmm. Amazingly, I actually have an incredible breadth and width of experiences to draw from. Much of it is actually real even, not like some resumes you read or hear of, where flipping burgers reads like the head chef for the Queen or something. As I wrote the resume, I actually started splitting it out into specialized resumes. I have experience as a computer tech. I’ve wired networks in buildings. I was a security guard. Actually, 2 or 3 kinds of guard… I was patrol, I was armed in a casino, and I was in the military security force, too. Then there is my time in the Navy. I was an aircraft mechanic, a tech publication librarian, a work center supervisor, a painter, a janitor / custodian, hazardous waste officer, safety officer, aircraft tow tractor driver, I have experience working on jets and helicopters, I have experience working on ships, I’ve worked as a cargo mate.

Suddenly I realized I had TOO Much experience! I mean really, who would believe me? Or worse, it looks like I’m flaky, I jumped around too much. But that’s not how it was. Sure, I did all those jobs, but some of them were at the same time. Everyone in the Navy has at least 14 jobs it seems.

In the last month or so, I’ve applied for probably 50 or 60 jobs. If I even remotely thought I was qualified, or I liked the job, or it was within 50 miles of where I live, I applied. I’ve even had some people contact me back! So we’ll see, right?

Irony, to me at least, is I really don’t want a career, exactly. Well, maybe I do. I’m still trying to get my head around that. Put it this way. The whole time I was a photographer, I never had a steady gig. I had a small group of repeat customers, but for the weddings, every week I started over. New client, new location, new problems it seemed. And I had to be everything. I had to be customer relations, marketing, management, flunkie, I made runs to the store, the post office, the bank, you name it. For that one day of “work” I ended up working a week or two.

So now, I’m a bit excited about showing up to work, doing my job, and going home, and not thinking about it, much, when I’m home. I’ll let someone else decide what I’m supposed to do next.

But here’s the cool part, to my way of thinking. I’m still thinking like a business owner at heart. While I’m working for someone else, I can still come up with some projects on my own if I want to. And with any luck now I’ll finally have some seed money. So it might not be so bad :)

I have other stuff to tell ya, but I think I’ll write that as a separate post, otherwise it just gets too confusing :)

Thanks for reading, it felt good to get that out of my head!

Carlin, eh?

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Yay! We have water!

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

6:39 PM 12/18/2009

Hey all, sorry, I’ve not posted in quite a while.

Quick recap, incase you are still catching up.

I was living in Tacoma, Washington, for about a year. Then I moved down to Lemoore, California. That didn’t work out so well, so I stayed a couple days with my Dad and Step Mom in Wenatchee, Washington. And now I’m living near Ryley, Alberta, Canada. Ryley is south east of Edmonton. I just realized I’ve been in Canada for a month already,, so this post is a bit over due!

It gets cold here. Really cold. Like for the last week, it was about -30C. That means it has to warm up a lot before water is water again. Things freeze up pretty quick when it gets that cold. So that takes some adjusting, right?

My Mom used to raise Pom dogs here, those little fuzzy cute dogs. She still has a few here, but isn’t raising them to sell anymore. When she was in full swing, she had them living in one of those portable construction site office trailers, the ATCO trailers you always see. Well, the remaining dogs are living in another building now, so the trailer was just being used for storage.

So, when you hear me mention living in the dog house, this is it! I’m just about set up now, mostly I’m living in half of the trailer, so my area is about 9 feet wide by 14 feet long. The trailer has a natural gas furnace in it, and I put styrofoam insulation on the inside of the walls and ceiling, and under the floor, so I’m pretty much set here. I don’t have plumbing in this trailer, so I still do showers and stuff in my Mom’s trailer. We’re calling this trailer my temporary home until I figure out what I’m doing. No sense getting it too fancy just yet!

Ok, I mentioned that its been getting pretty cold here. Well, last weekend, the water froze up. Like, you turn on the tap, and nothing comes out. No showers, no flushing toilet, no washing your hands, nothing. Its bad enough that we have to carry our drinking water, the well here isn’t really fit for drinking from, but at least its water, except now when its frozen!

We messed around with it a few times, putting heaters under the trailer, checking the pump house, etc. Everytime we’d think we found the problem, we’d stop and wait, to see if it started working. Plus we knew the weather was supposed to warm up yesterday and today, so we kind of were going to wait it out. We were heating snow up on the coal stove for washing hands and dishes, so it wasn’t too bad.

Well, today we finally got water running here on the Comm-Pound. The highlight of the day was when I peed, in the toilet, flushed the toilet, and then washed my hands with hot water from the tap. I know, that doesn’t sound like much, but we’ve not had that kind of luxery for the last week or so. Later on, I even took a hot shower… first one in almost a week. I know… gross right? .. ewwww! Felt good to get all that grime and coal dust out of my hair…

I also finally got my van started for the first time since I got here. Well, I actually did drive it around the yard the first week or so I was here, when I was unloading some of the storage bins. But from then on it just sat, patiently, waiting. Then it got cold. REALLY COLD, like -30C and stayed there. Remember that our water in the trailer froze. Well, so did the van. And the battery got pretty cold too. Cold batteries put out way less power, and when the oil gets cold it gets stiff. So, it just sat there. I was pretty concerned that the engine could freeze, that’s bad. Like, if the water in the engine block freezes, it can split the block. Most people think that’s an old wives tale, but up here it happens. Mostly to people from other places. My van is from other places!

So today I put a battery charger on it, plus it was only -5C, which is a lot warmer than -30C, and a few minutes later it started right up. So I left it running for a while, but then remembered I was almost out of gas. Like, when I was driving here, on my big move, I really wasn’t sure if I had enough gas to make it. And I was pretty much broke. Nothing new there I guess!

So I had my Mom follow me to the nearest gas station. Next town over. Guess it was about 10 miles or something like that. Really got to plan things like that out before hand! Anyway, now its all full of gas, and the battery has a bit of a charge on it, and I dumped a bunch of anti freeze in it, so hopefully the drive to get gas was enough to circulate it and I’ll be good now. Sooner or later I’ll be getting some kind of engine heater for it, and then I’ll be cool like everyone else up here. That’s the first sign of a “native” car up here, all cars here have engine block heaters, and you’ll see all the cars with short extension cords sticking out of the grill. At night, you plug in the car, and the heater runs all night, and in the morning the engine is much easier to start.

Then for more entertainment, since I’d done so good at starting my van, I decided to start the snow plow truck. Last time I’d tried, it was also frozen solid and wouldn’t even crank over. Today, being much warmer, I fired it up on the first or second try. As it was warming up, I walked back to my van and got my ice scraper, so I could see out better. Once all warmed up, I headed out into the field to get a bale of hay for the horses. These bales are the big round ones that are about the size of a small car. Rather than trying to pick up the bale, you just kind of push it with the snow plow. Took a few tries to get it to go straight, but by the second bale I had it nailed!

Ok, so push the bale across the field, through the yard, and up to the horse pasture gate. Look around, ok, there are the horses… and the llama. Or is it spelled lama? you know, the extra tall sheep looking fuzz ball. Yeah, we have one of those, too. Not sure why, but there it is! So, get the gate open, push the bale through the gate, and look behind me just in time to see the llama make its escape. DAMN! Jump out of truck and close the gate, to keep the remaining horses in. But that creates a bit of a dilema. If I can get the lama turned around, I’ll have to get the gate open again. Creative problem solving right?

First things first, find the lama. Oh, good, its over eating the other hay bale. At least its not running for the open field right? So for the next few minutes I chased the lama around the bale. Honest, the stupid thing just kept turning left. Must be a NASCAR fan or something. Finally I got it away from the bale, and about the same time it realized that I had pushed a new bale into the pasture, so then it was pretty easy to convince it to go back in through the gate, once I got it open again. Whew, that could have been much more difficult!

Just a quick push of the bale across the pasture, and I had the whole herd following me. Pick a spot, park the bale, back the truck up a few yards, and jump out. With my trusty knife, I cut the strings off and pulled some hay loose for the eagerly, but not patiently, waiting horses… and the lama. Getting the truck out of the pasture was much easier, with the new bale now opened up, you couldn’t chase the hungry critters out if you tried!

We’re almost out of coal, so while I had the snow plow running, I pushed the snow drift away from the coal bin, and also cleared some snow so we can bring in some water to refill the tanks on the other trailers.

Its amazing how many things you take for granted, until you have to do them all yourself. When I rented an apartment, if the water quit, I called someone. Someone else shoveled the snow from the sidewalk. Except when I was the manager, I was the one who got the call. But streets were plowed by someone else. Here, we have essentially a trailer park, with streets, a zoo, our own water system, sewers, the whole deal.

Its about an hours drive to town, and with winter full on, we don’t always know if we’ll be able to get to town. That means stocking up on groceries.

We burn coal for heat, in addition to the natural gas furnace. Coal is cheaper, only about $30 per pick up load. Its handy having a coal mine just down the road from us! Natural gas is cleaner of course. I’m really not a fan of coal, its dirty, there is a thin, or sometimes not so thin, layer of black dust on everything. But it sure burns nice and hot!

Having coal and natural gas is nice for a back up too. If the power goes off, the goal still burns. Some of our heaters will burn even if the power goes off, but the big furnaces wont. I guess if the gas ever stopped flowing, we could do coal and electric heaters. And we also have a pretty good pile of wood too, so we’ll be nice and toasty.

— New Update —
Ok, I wrote all that yesterday. Today we took a truck, with a big water tank, into the nearest town, and hauled some drinking water. Think we got a couple hundred gallons. Cost us $3, so that’s not such a bad deal right?

Then, after topping off water tanks for half the trailer park (haha) we dropped the water tank, and went to the local coal mine. We got a very full load on the truck this time, about 1200 KG of coal for $56 and change. Then I spent the next hour shoveling said coal into our coal bin. Yeah, I’m gonna probably feel that tomorrow! But I had a good groove on, and I sure didn’t want my Mom to show me up, so I chased her away before she took my shovel away.

Then it was break time, so I did online job applications for about 20 places that wanted people who could speak, write and read English. Guess that’s a big deal, with all the immigrant labor here now!

So way I figure it, I should be rolling in loonies in no time. Creditors, please stand by!

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Cold Water is NOT My Friend!

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Growing up in Canada, I’m pretty good about dealing with cold weather. I can adapt to a pretty wide range of temperatures actually. Some winters in northern Alberta we’d see temperatures below -40 F… there’s a bit of trivia you’ll hardly ever see unless you’re from far north… -40 F = -40 C! That’s right, just so happens that -40 is the same. Either way, its freakin’ cold right?

Ok, none of that really has much to do with today’s post… Yesterday, I was startled back to reality by the door bell. We hardly ever have visitors… bounce down the stairs, expecting it to be my Publishers Clearing House peeps with the big check, they’re way over due, so I’m thinking with interest and all, it might be a good day after all!

Nope, 2 guys with hard hats, day glow vests, clip boards, and a wrench. I’m having a flash back to all the bad mob movies where they’re gonna whack we with the wrench or somethin’, but why the clip board?  

Oh, I see now, they work for the Gas Company. Something about we didn’t pay for all the hot water we’ve been enjoying lately. Now, as a guy, who used to be in the Navy, where they stricktly enforce VERY short showers, I can tell you that we’ve not been wasting hot water here. In fact, after about 4 minutes, I usually get bored in the shower  and go back to work. But that’s just me right?

So, for the low down price of about $157, they say they can leave my gas turned on, with the promise of hot showers in the future. I look at the guy, and consider telling him he’s on the wrong block, but I doubted he’d fall for that one, again! He says he’d take a check. Dude, I’m so broke this year I burned my checks trying to stay warm this winter! I rolled pennies yesterday to buy a loaf of bread (butter top, thought I’d splurge right?)

Anyway, I got my hot shower yesterday, thought I might as well enjoy it, just in case no new jobs come in for a while. And the whole time I’m in the shower, I’m thinking how glad I was they didn’t turn off the power or the internet, or gravity right? 

We have about 150 feet of garden hose. Not sure why we have so much, the lot isn’t that big. In fact, I think I could go around the house and still hit all points with 40 feet to spare. Anyway, we have a lot of hose. 

Flash back, to a few years back, just after I got out of the Navy…  I lived in San Diego, during another of my brushes with poverty and really bad luck… well, when you’re that unlucky, that many times, its really not even fair to blame the fates is it?  SO I’m pretty sure some of it was my fault.. anyway, I had been evicted from a pretty decent apartment, but a girl I worked with said she had this cute little 20 foot RV trailer that her and her boyfriend had lived in, that she could sell me. Just needed a little bit of work, and a bit of cleaning. 

Ok, cool, I go rent a UHaul truck to tow the trailer with ( had a VW Jetta then, not a great car to pull a trailer with! ) go find her parents house, and hook up the trailer. Her Dad was very helpful, mostly I think he wanted it gone as soon as possible. In fact he had me hooked up and was trying to direct me out into traffic, when it occured to me I hadn’t even looked in side. Should have pondered that a bit more, right?

Quick look in side, and oh, wow… I used to work with chemicals and hazardous waste in the Navy. I went through Shell Back Initiation in the Navy. I’ve done things, been places, in 3rd world countries. None of it prepared me for the inside of that trailer. Her Dad smiles at me… I give him the money, we close the door on the trailer, and he blocks traffic for me so I can pull out. This is going to be… interesting!

The first 3 or 4 nights, I slept in my car! The girl and her boyfriend had just gotten tired of the trailer, and rented an apartment. Her Dad, knowing they had moved out, just unplugged the extension cord, thinking no sense in keeping the fridge running since its empty right? Did I mention this was in San Diego… in the summer, in a little 20 foot trailer? The aroma of 2 month old “food” in the fridge, plus a bit of smell from the bathroom, plus… I never did figure out what some of that was, it was slimy and seemed to be as afraid of me as I was of it!

Well, one of the issues with the trailer, once I got it smelling a bit better, was the bathroom had so much water damage, I was afraid I’d fall through the floor. So for the first week or so I just used the parks bathroom and shower. And I was too cheap to buy propane. Then I had the idea to make a temporary outside shower, behind the trailer. I really wish I had taken some pictures, but lets see if you can follow along. I had found a hula hoop and for some reason hung onto it. Perfect for hanging a shower curtain on right? Not wanting to drill any holes into the trailer to attach it (not that it could have hurt much right? ) I found a board, layed the board on the roof, grabbed the trailers spare tire to hold the board down, bent a coat hanger to tie the hula hoop to the board. I had saved the shower curtain and rings from my last apartment, so I was nearly set. I had a good length of garden hose and a nozzle, so I just dropped the hose over the board, and I was set! 

A word of warning here. Dark garden hose, in San Diego, laying on asphalt, can give you water that’s TOO hot. But you don’t want to waste it, because it takes a while to heat up again. So I grabbed my car wash bucket and filled it first with the super hot water, then got down to the slightly scalding water for my shower, and by the end as the water cooled off, I used the bucket for my final rinse. Not too bad at all!

Anyway, I had told Brian about my garden house shower experiments. Brian is my good buddy who’s name is on the lease for this house that I’m  living in, while I’m waiting for the Publishers Clearing House party van to arrive. Brian mentions that we’ll have to improvise, its another week until his next pay day. And my book sales are slowing down. So later yesterday, I see Brian out in the back yard, with the garden hose, looking up at the sky, and at his phone to get the time, or maybe he was looking at the NASA website for sunset times? Anyway, now in the back yard, I see about 150 feet of garden house arranged in a very fine “Solar Thermal Entrapment Device”… we’ll refer to it as our STED for now. I wonder how many people at NASA are on their Naming and Acronym Task Force … NATF… I’ll bet it takes more than a few to come up with a few of their zingers!

This morning, I’m suddenly faced with the reality, that Brian was setting the STED to give HIM a hot shower, for when he gets home from that job thing he keeps telling me about. Oddly, he seems to hate his job, but sometimes still thinks I should have one. Not a natural sales person!

So, STED is currently in the shade, but I can see it will be fully in the sun in a couple hours. Ok, but I kind of needed a shower this morning. I briefly considered cleaning out my coffee maker (30 cups, can make very hot water pretty quickly) but figured, hey, its not really cold out side, how cold could the water in the shower really be? Realizing that just positive thinking might not be enough, I came up with a plan. Its a hand held shower, so I could do parts at a time, and hopefully avoid full on hypothermia. 

Being really a wuss when it comes to cold water, I decided to commit myself and not leave myself an option to back out. Once I got briefly wet, I lathered up with LOTS of soap. Knowing I now HAD to rinse, it was easier to just get it over with. And by the end, the blissful numbness was setting in, and I almost was enjoying it. 

Wonder how tomorrow will be? 

Stay Tuned :)

In the mean time, go follow me on Twitter, today is #FollowFriday !
http://twitter.com/carlincomm

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Nothing is ever Completely Bad

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

“I guess that one of the most important things I’ve learned is that nothing is ever completely bad. Even cancer. It has made me a better person. It has given me courage and a sense of purpose I never had before. But you don’t have to do like I did…wait until you lose a leg or get some awful disease, before you take the time to find out what kind of stuff you’re really made of. You can start now. Anybody can.”

Terry Fox
1958-1981, Canadian man (with an artificial right leg) who ran across Canada to raise money for cancer research.

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The essence of being Canadian

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

British newspaper article which captures the essence of being Canadian. 

Remembrance Day is less than a month away, but I thought I’d share this e-mail with virtually everyone in my contacts list because it’s very much worth reading. It made me proud to be Canadian, although quietly so … maybe a little more pride would do this country well.

Lest we forget!
British newspaper article – re Canada

British news paper salutes Canada . It is funny how it took someone in England to put it into words… Sunday Telegraph Article From today’s UK wires:Salute to a brave and modest nation – Kevin Myers, ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ LONDON:

Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops are deployed in the region.
And as always, Canada will bury its dead, just as the rest of the world, as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.. It seems that Canada’s historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored.

Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts.

For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved. Yet it’s purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada ’s entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle. Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, it’s unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the ‘British.’

The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world. The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time.

Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated – a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity. So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality – unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves – and are unheard by anyone else – that 1% of the world’s population has provided 10% of the world’s peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth – in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia. Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace – a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan?
Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honorable things for honorable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honor comes at a high cost. This past year more grieving Canadian families know that cost all to tragically well.
Lest we forget 
Please send this to anyone who is proud to be a Canadian. It is a wonderful tribute to those who choose to serve their country and the world in our quiet Canadian way.

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