Stouffville, Ontario Canada (647) 962-1997 gwstudios@rogers.com M-F 8:30am - 2:30pm & 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Month: August 2022

I’m going to do it, I think I’m going to do it, I want to do it, I think I will do it, I feel like I should do it. I’m… not gonna do it. But, I want to do it. I think I’m going to do it… damn.

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Ah, the endless loop of thinking about making a slightly larger than usual purchase on something for myself. I have been thinking, dreaming, wondering, hoping to learn to play the bass guitar, and now that I have a line on a good used bass amp, and a decently priced slightly above beginner guitar, I feel like I should go and pick them up to make this years long dream a reality. But I’m stressing out about it for some reason.

Probably because it’s a selfish purchase, but on the off chance one of my kids wants to learn an instrument in their teens I have guitars and a bass for them to choose from. Alongside my wife’s clarinet, and our violin, and our keyboard. I hope they decide to pick up an instrument. Hours and hours of fun, and a great way to appreciate personal time, and learn something new. The intrinsic value of picking up new songs is really something special. Playing in a group with like minded friends is also a fantastic experience. I played the trombone in the middle school band, and the orchestra in junior high and it was amazing. Jamming with buddies in high school was wicked as well. Ten stars, do reccomend.

The thing is, I find that when I hit a plateau with guitar playing, I need to shift the focus to a different instrument, and that new way of thinking/executing music teaches me something helpful with my guitar playing, in a round about method. I love to noodle about on my guitar. I love to tickle the ivories on our keyboard, and it all seems to pay off in the end. Plus, ahem. Halfway decent instruments that have been looked after tend to have a 60-70% of retail resale value, if that brand hasn’t exploded in popular culture and doubled, or nearly tripled in price, a la Gibson Les Paul’s, and my random Fender that’s now worth three times what I paid for it. Could also plummet in price too, so don’t take any of this as investment advice ok? Great.

Heading into day three of camp, and so far we’re all smiles and excitement. I have a feeling it’s probably a bit more free wheeling than we might have expected. But last week or summer, we have zero expectations for it, other than our kids remain safe and looked after during the hours of their stay each day. I care not if they choose to focus more on dance, than singing or acting, or if the youngest gets an extra hour to slap paint around with a brush. Like I said, no expectations of new dance routines or a recital of cumulatively learned dance steps. It’s for the best.

In other news the kids gymnastics will start in mid September, so that should be an absolute riot! I think they are gonna love that! Or, conversely hate itvwith every single fiber of their being. Or, third option, my favourite. One will fall in love, and the other will hate it, and we’ll fight every time I have to take them both with me so that one of them can keep doing it, and the other just has to sit for an hour watching the very thing they hated so much. It’s going to be spectacular – for me. I think they have Tae Kwondo to look forward to as well. I wanted jujitsu for the full body usage, grappling and striking. But Tae Kwondo isn’t awful. That’ll help them defend themselves as they get older. Anywho… Ciao Bella !

The ninth and final week of summer vacation is upon us.

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You knew it was coming, we all did, and it’s happening, right – now. Woah. All those weeks ago this felt miles away, and now that it’s here, we’re already on Tuesday. The youngest had transitional night terror episodes about doing something new, and last night was no different. The camp was full of smiling kids faces, so I knew that they’d have fun, dancing around to music, doing crafts and acting like pretend animals all day long. They even get outdoor time in the a.m. before it gets to swelteringly hot in the late August sunshine and humidity. They practically bolted from the car when they saw a field full of kids their own age, and hula hoops, and kids doing cartwheels and… yeah, they had a lot of fun on day one. Four more days to go until another long weekend. Then a random Tuesday at home, then school.

For as long as that lasts while York Region does nothing preventative about Covid or Monkey Pox. Could be a short lived return. But, this is all next weeks worry. I want the kids to enjoy camp right now, then focus on having one last great summer long weekend before we have to tackle the gods honest truth about the state of our school, school board and all the inherent bs contained within thanks to our MOE. Ugh.

Spirits up, smile on, keep this train a rollin’. The last vestiges of summer are shining that late day amber coloured glow. Trees are starting to turn, or just shed crumpled leaves due to the lack of rain in July & August. The sun sets earlier and earlier, and the evenings have grown rather chilled. You’ve got only four or five more weeks of comfortable sweater wearing evening patio drinking weather ahead of us, before coats will become a necessity. That was a mouthful.

I spent much of last night dreaming about the shelving unit I’m going to build for the front room. Asymmetrical to fit the space, yet maximize the utility. It has to be short to fit under the windowsills, but have playable surfaces for the kids toys. Stained dark and polished to a gloss, even though the kids will most likely scratch the surface immediately. Oh well. I’m using pine, so it’s not like $2000.00 worth of Walnut lumber. I have the pine here. It was to make HP Trunks, but I’d rather use the resources on the family room at the moment. I’ll still have all of the hinges, handles and coloured felt if I go back to making them again. I need to make a 2ft long trunk for my youngest. She only has a novelty box I made that’s 12x6x6″h. Looks the same, but significantly smaller.

I’m going to use lap joints, butt joints and dowels for the utility shelf unit. No dovetails or box joints or mitered corners of the boxes portion. Any kind of panache can be shown on the legs/base portion of the unit. The top box will be pretty straight forward. No funky angles, or design touches. Plain Jane! I need to check and see if my planer still runs, as that might be the defining factor for using my stock of pine, or buying pre laminated boards in a paint grade state. Will look into it later on this morning. Ciao Bella!

Transitions : The split Tantrum & Nightmare episodes.

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Some of y’all with kids know how hard it can be to transition out of one activity to another with smallish kids in tow. Gets worse if the shift in question is a whole season or fundamental shift, like, say from free wheeling summer time into the schedules and rigors of school. We’re not quite there, but we are shifting gears from eight weeks of family fun time, into a week of camp, then into school. So I get to do this twice! Shift into camp followed by hard shift into early mornings and school. Going to be a tense two weeks if it turns out not to be as much fun as we’re all hoping for at camp.

So starts the pre-event nightmares, sleepless nights and cranky sullen days. With any luck they’ll play games and get to act & dance like animals and they’ll be all smiles when I get them later on today. But I hold out little hope. The youngest is a real bear when sleep is interrupted. Going to be somebodies problem today. Mine eventually, but… some one else’s sooner. Ha.

Dropped them off, and felt sorta sad about it. Can’t believe they are back to school next Wednesday. Summer has flown by. Every tantrum, every bad dream, every scratch and ding they’ve put on their bodies has flown by, even when it felt like it was lasting forever. Bitter sweet. I need to eat breakfast, I’m getting delirious. Low blood sugar or something. Signing off. Ciao Bella!

Sunday, in my neck of the woods.

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I was the first to come home, so I decided to get a jump start on domestic duties Monday, by leading with my own laundry yesterday, stacking and running the dishwasher and then emptying it too. Wow, go me eh? So what’s on the docket for me today? Family gets home around 4-5:00pm or so. So I’ll mow the lawn, fix the fence where it’s come loose in the wind storms, brace one post, and pin another one in place with two more longer, this time; using four inch long screws. Do all of the kids laundry, baskets, suitcases and floors too. Get my wife’s stuff mixed in there too. Collect the mail. Do a small grocery shop in preparation for a return to work, and a week of camp for the kids. Run all their sheets through the wash too. Vacuum the floors and do a general tidy up. I’m expecting a new report to come in Monday morning, or perhaps Tuesday, so if I have this out of the way I can dive right in, after dropping the kids off at camp for the day.

There is no shortage of things to do around the house. This week or next (reports arrival depending) will be spent on cleaning and purging last school years clutter. A tonne of paper recycling will go out this week and next. Then I’ll tackle the kids rooms. I did the clothes in the closets, thankfully. So one less thing to bother myself with.

Now don’t you go worrying about me, I’m not exactly a put upon stay at home dad. I found the time to play two hours of guitar last night, watch two of my favourite films back to back, play some piano, and putter about in my shop to build a brace for the fence. Made myself a meat lover’s pizza and didn’t have to share any of it at all! Not a single slice. I can eat the rest for lunch today! Yahoo. I can do some reading later today after I get the grocery shopping done in the next hour or so. A very generous, and quiet me day! Or most of a day. Well, like 28 hours to myself since I left yesterday at twenty after one. Glorious. So things for me are going pretty swell. I’m in a good spot.

How’s your lazy Sunday-Funday going? This being the last Sunday in August of 2022. I believe that tomorrow is my mother’s birthday. I don’t think I even have their new address out west. We went in on some expensive wedding anniversary gifts only a week or so ago. It’s not the same, but… kinda is!?! Sentiment wise anyway. Ciao Bella!

256 Mb of RAM. How did we live like this.

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I remember one winter holiday inbetween Christmas and New Year’s where my whole family went out to buy computers. I was soon to go off to University, and my parents needed one for the house. And the one I bought was refurbished (less expensive) and was rocking out with 256 mb of RAM. It came with a tower, various cords and a keyboard. I had a monitor at home, a hold over from an even older computer I’d inherited from my oldest brother. We all thought it was the bees knees but by today’s standards I think my smart phone could outpace it consistently in just about every task. And that’s just in my pocket. All I did was use word, ms paint and run the Encarta encyclopedia on it. It didn’t have any games, other than a brick breaker that I was ever so slightly addicted to. I didn’t even have a desk for it. I sat on the floor and kept the unit up on a coffee table. Just the thought of writing term papers and essays while sitting cross legged on the floor for a year or more makes my hips go numb now. Times have changed. Life was kinda ghetto in my late teens and early twenties. When I took over the financial responsibility for myself that level of comfort and expectations fell through the floor rapidly. Reality was not kind. Mattress on the floor, no bed frame. Getting a job after university was when I bought a bed frame, and that was a futon, with an “extra firm” futon mattress which I paid extra for, because it was thicker and offered more resistance than a regular futon mattress, which is like a slightly overstuffed duvet. Not much to write home about. But I was off the floor. Still have that futon frame in my garage, all these decades later. If my kids go off to post secondary education, I’ll buy them a bed frame and a mattress and a desk. Don’t start off like a near homeless bum like I did. Or I’ll make them desks, who knows. Got a while to go yet before either one is in a position to leave the nest briefly for school, trades or an apprenticeship.

One fine Saturday morning round these parts today. Sun is shining, and the air is fresh and warm. We were lucky enough that my eldest was able to pick up wake boarding this summer. Did us all proud. Gets up no problem from water starts, carves about in the wake when she wants to, and can run for several minutes before the old forearms and quads start to give out. Very impressed! Next year she can start to learn tricks and stunts! Or even tackle wake surfing behind her uncles faster boat. The youngest was too intimidated to really give it a go. Cried and let go of the tow rope immediately. Maybe next year.

Engineered Hardwood: or plywood as I like to call it.

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Plywood tongue and groove boards with a one ply hardwood face that is slightly thicker and can have that “hand scraped” texture. Not really hardwood, more of a fancy veneer on your laminate board flooring. People look down on laminate floors in favour of the exact same thing, but with a slightly nicer (and a whole lot more expensive) veneered top face. Ludicrous. Pure malarkey. The best con perpetrated by the flooring industry upon us all. Here have the same thing, but more expensive, just use a nicer more posh sounding moniker for it. Insanity. You want to know how I know that engineered hardwood isn’t real, nobody reclaims it to build furniture with it. We’ll scavenge pallet wood, boxes, other old furniture, rotten trees and old building materials like barn boards. But there’s no craze for building furniture with engineered hardwood, and that should tell you something. As us cheap wood workers will build out of just about anything we can get our hands on. Even 2×4’s. So, yeah. Think on that for a second or two.

So Friday, yeah? Yes it is. Week eight closing out with some loud cracks of thunder in the early a.m. Summer is most definitely drawing to a close. Sad to see it go, but bring on autumn and Halloween ! Decorations, costume building, lights, smoke machines, music and scary movies! It really is a whole thing if you lean into it hard enough, and have the funds to do so. I see how privileged it is to be able to go all out during any season or holiday that you really love. I hope to one day help my kids make elaborate costumes, like ring wraiths, or Master Chief, or Ironman or something like a Transformer or Gundam Robot. A chance to build all summer long, paint and fabricate parts in foam, cloth and cardboard. It could be awesome! I choose to believe it would be awesome.

Still a few weeks away from pumpkin carving. Can’t start too early or else they rot before the big night! Gotta time it just right, so you’re not rushed, but it doesn’t turn to mush with rounded soggy edges! Carving shows will be on tv very soon! I for one am very excited. Ciao Bella!

Dreaming about giving a group seminar on a topic I know nothing about.

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Still having those same dreams I had in university. Like walking into a new class only to realize you were supposed to have read the whole textbook prior to day one of classes. Or walking into a test you didn’t know was coming. A wild sense of panic, followed by furiously scribbled notes on what I know, or can recall, if anything at all about the random subject I have mistakenly been put in charge of presenting. My plan is to then put all of our heads together to find out what the others know, then leaning into the emcee role and introducing the topic, with a vague introduction to the audience, gathered from information gathered from a quick chat with the assembled group. Encouraging the other folks in the team to speak up, because as it turns out, I was just walking by at an inopportune time and was mistakenly corralled in with a group of people that knows alot about the subject in my dream. My worst nightmare! Among other possible horrible things. So my solution is to get them to all talk about their individual areas of expertise, rather than trying to bs my way out. It’s a weird dream to have, and one I’ve had many times over the years. Not sure why, but there we are. A fun little lead in to a random Thursday during week eight of summer holidays. August ends next week, so we’re deep in the weeds of summer time in Canada. The dog days of summer. We could potentially still see a heat wave or two pass through making summer last into November. Remember the year of el niño? I ended up cutting grass in shorts and a t-shirt until mid December. Then one day it snows, and the whole plot changed over night. It was weird! Very random experience. Strange even.

Hey look, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe is back on tv. I thought he had managed to do every single dirty job in north America, and then some. I’ll have to read up, as to why he stopped the show in the first place. I hope it’s not due to scandal, but you never do know these days.

Today is the 37th anniversary of my immediate family moving to Canada from England. Always sneaks up on me. To think, we could have gone to Australia instead. Or moved to the US. What a strange life that would have been. Funny how things work out.

Building Markham Fair Entries.

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This is the best time to get that stuff done. We’ve been saving up household items for construction materials, and the fair book was officially released a week or so ago. Now the kids can sit at the table and build for as long as the materials, and their attention spans can hold out. Painting, building, drawing and crafting all manner of imaginative things. Good times. From what I recall the Markham Fair runs at the end of September and the first few days of October. I will need to double check those dates. But usually the weekend before Canadian Thanksgiving is a safe bet for planning your fair visit. Food trucks, agricultural exhibits, midway with rides, beer tent, tutorials, and vendors selling just about everything. Blooming onions, Tiny Tom donuts and cotton candy smells wafting on the fall breeze. Hard to beat, free parking and nightly fireworks.

It’s Wednesday my dudes! You know what that means. Hump day! Half way through the week, and getting ever closer to the weekend. Funny how each individual day can be broken down into having time both standing still, and making mammoth leaps forward in the blink of an eye. The days are long, but the weeks and months fly by somehow.

Also the town programming schedule got released the other day at 6:00pm, so we had to scramble to get the kids into something they would like. I’m still not sold on indoor programs being back full swing. Seems like we should show Covid/Monkey Pox a bit more caution. Did you know that with Mnkypx you need to isolate for 3 to 4 weeks, WEEKS!, Good God man. Fomites, aerosols, contact with sores, exchange of fluids… going to get everywhere in the next six to twelve months. Especially if people treat isolation with as little respect as they do Covid. Yikes. Man I hope this stays out of schools. But we’ve seen what that type of sheltered view about schools can do. That York Region high water mark for Covid related absences was from our kids school. April was a Ghost town. Somewhere over 40% absenteeism due to illness. Top of the charts for us. Not a real solid morale boost.

Reading old American Classics…

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And I could tell within a sentence or two that the me in my youth made the correct call in high school to read the Ancient Classics like Homer, the Iliad and The Oddessy, and 1984, and Animal Farm, plus a few others, rather than tackle the American Classics in Lit. That’s not to say that I’m not enjoying it now, but sixteen, seventeen year old me would have HATED every single apostrophied guttural spliced second word in The Grapes of Wrath, and it’s timely ilk. I hated eubonics, pigeon english, and phonetically written spoken dialogue (that was a mouthful). I know it adds authenticity to the speaker, and the times, but what a puddle mouthed bunch of folks they were huh, makes for disjointed reading. Doesn’t bother me much now, I get where Boomhauer was coming from, but as a hearing impaired youth, it had to come to my head clear as a bell or else I would just nod and smile and carry on regardless of what was said. Probably why people thought I was aloof, and kind of an asshole. Sorry love, just couldn’t hear you or make heads nor tails of what you were jabbering on about. Thank god for texting and e-mail. What a godsend that all is. Woah! Yeah buddy.

Once I make it through GoW, I think I’ll give Moby Dick or War & Peace a try. I don’t typically read anything that depressing, but I’ve written a number of sad, depressed short stories in my time. Maybe now I will have the life experiences to be able to appreciate the depth of the work. Or I’ll hate it, and that’s $30 in the toilet. Oh well. Not every piece of literature is for everyone. Know what I mean. Given the times, maybe I should read A Hand Maids Tale. Seems to be on point for the state of the US currently. Or I could try Gone With The Wind? I’m sure there are plenty of semi current literary classics that I’ve missed to choose from.

Today is Tuesday, if I have any sense of time left. Next week we really need to shift our sleeping patterns back to the day shift so we can all wake up and eat before school starts. These first two weeks of school are bad for early mornings. We either have happy kids, or get to school on time. Rarely do I get both in early September. Dressed, eaten, hair done, and teeth brushed. Tall order after nine weeks of zero expectations of that happening before 8:00am. I guess if the kids did day camp the whole summer then they’d maintain that schedule and wouldn’t (potentially) fight it come the first days of the new school year.

Week Eight: The week we attempt to do all the things…

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And have no such luck with any of it! Ha. Ain’t that a bitch. No matter. I think doing a fair amount of relaxing and unwinding counts as a thing in and of itself. But it being Monday, I am very aware of just how much house work I have to get done as soon as the kids go back to school again. I have a massive broken toy purge planned, and I plan to recycle 95% of all the school work that came home last year. Valentine’s Day cards can be sorted or jettisoned as well. Dolls and toys will get separated by child and stored away accordingly. Cabinets need a once over. We gently gave the closets and wardrobes a once over, so clothes wise we are set for September. Even after pulling out tonnes of clothes they still have more than enough to wear something new every day for nearly a month. Yeesh.

Given the weather we’ve had I’ll be out picking up leaves before you know it. And I’ll need to rewash the windows and drive way and get back in to weeding all of the neglected garden beds. Pruning hedges and shrubs prior to winter and first frosts. Lots to do, and that doesn’t even cover paid work. Last years newly refinished deck will need a washing to keep up the fresh colour of the stain I used last September.

Will need to have a think about projects for the house. I know we want some storage shelves beside the fireplace for the girls to keep toys, and be a playable surface, so I’ll sketch up some drawings after I take some measurements. I have lots of pine, 12 x 1 x 16ft in length. So that’s not going to be an issue. Utility, and function will play heavily into its design. I will paint it white, and can leave it at that as far as finishing it is concerned. I’ll need to come in under the window sills, and not cover any outlets either. Perhaps a cord pass through will be required for the upper most portion. A single two inch hole, or half hole against the wall for plugs to still be useable. Not a fan of holes in solid wood surfaces, but I also don’t want to render the socket useless as it’s closest to the tv, and we need it when charging the kids Chromebook and/or tablet for e-learning sessions and homework.

Anyway, if you can’t tell, I’m excited for the Fall, and I have lots planned, and lots to do. May the last two weeks of summer holidays be sunny and bright, or bring the rains you so desperately need, and you get to make some lasting pleasant memories with friends and family. Ciao Bella!