Month: May 2024

I post nothing and somebody comes by and checks out twenty old posts for the day, I post regularly for three weeks and I get one view. I can’t figure this shit out. Isn’t life exciting!?! I’m glad I have no idea how to game this system. Makes a weird day more fun to see some random American run up the view counter from out of nowhere. What a rush. It’d be a whole lot cooler if instead of just “archives”, it told me what exactly was so interesting that folks were looking at. I would love it if it were my short stories, but i don’t think so. Has to be some one off totally rando post about nothing in particular. The not knowing is what makes things exciting. Can i narrow down what people want to hear/see/read from me? Nope. Just swing for the fences and do your thing my guy. A strange Saturday indeed.

A weird weekend in general with my wife and eldest daughter gone to guiding camp for two nights. The youngest was up until nearly midnight before she fell asleep. Slept in her own bed until I got her up at 8:00am, so that’s a win in my book. I stayed up until 1:00am to make sure she was asleep, and not going to wake up in tears missing her mum. Then I woke up at 5:45am to check on her, and then got up at 8:00am to start the day. My bladder also demanded I get out of bed, so it wasn’t because I wanted to be up & at ’em before nine.

We had a breezy breakfast and then I took the wee one to the lumber mill to pick up 20 board feet of Cherry. And then we went to the LTC for a visit with great grandma to celebrate Mothers Day. The woman is 96 years old after all. Can only have six or seven more of these left in her, poor lady. Not a whole lot of recognition in her eyes as of late.

Came home for a cooked lunch together, and we sat side by side on devices while the sky greyed over and it looked as though it would rain. Then we trekked down to the Markville mall to look at potential birthday gifts for all of the June birthdays coming our way. Stopped for ice cream, dinner, and all the chocolate milk I could stuff inside my child to keep her energy up. Walked around a fair bit, even looked at some video games at GameStop. It’s been a while. Ha. Can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube now. That bug has bit. Got me good.

Finally we came home, settled in for some chill out time, and now I have her in the tub with a foaming bath bomb, and I can get her ready for bed in the next 90 minutes or so. Call it a day. Bam. Saturday. A nice little one at that.

Yeah – so if anyone out there wants to drop hints regarding what you are looking for & actually reading here, I’m all ears, eyes etc etc… Ciao Bella!

I may have mentioned last week that I had to buy a new lawn mower, as my old one didn’t make it to year 18. Anyway, I went to Canadian Tire and bought one last Thursday, I want to say. I bought a striped down, bare bones version that didn’t have the self propelled gimmick. Mind you, this unit is both heavier and longer than my old one, and I could sort of see why you’d cough up the extra $200.00 for the secondary motor for just the wheels. I’m ok now, but as I get into my fifties, I’ll want to make the chore as easy as possible, and upgrade. Or, here’s a big one, hand off the lawn to both of my kids, and I’ll relax while they cut & trim the grass both front lawn, and back yard.

But what I’m driving at was that this new mower, much like my old one, has a bag for collection, an optional chute for throwing grass clumps, and a sealed off body for mulching. And that’s the TITS. No clumps, no raking afterwards, no need to overfill the compost pile with grass clippings. It’s a fantastic option. Keeps all the moisture in the grass, feeds the lawn with itself, and helps to retain rain water, and kinda acts to stop the ground from baking in the late July sun. A win all around I’d say.

While I was not too thrilled about dropping an unexpected $400.00 on lawn equipment, it has been a pretty easy swap over. Building the unit out of the box was very easy, and I had it up and running in about 15-20 minutes, after I broke down the box, and squared away all of the tags, zip ties, bags, and styrofoam packing materials.

I look forward to mulching leaves into the grass come October and very early November. I should go and buy an extra gas can just for Premium Gas to run my generator and new mower. No point running it on regular if Premium will keep it in tip top shape for longer.

Here we are again, Friday. Happy to be here, but this time with nothing to do. No ball game, no comedy show, no museum visits, and no parties or hockey to watch. A night in with my youngest while my wife and eldest go off for Guides Camp for the next two nights. Need to find something for us to do tomorrow. I can only take so much Xbox use by the little one. Not only that but I can’t stand how she acts after too much Minecraft, or related YouTube videos. Ugh. Not a good look.

Not going to do much besides sit in meetings, and activation planning sessions. Chat again later, I’m on the clock.

Have a quiet moment and thought I’d pop the disc in and see what’s what. And you know what? No external downloads required, all data is coming from off the disc at a whopping 221Mbps, so that’ll make short work of the 43Gb of data to transfer. I can wait roughly 20 minutes for that. Beats the three hours Diablo 4 took to cachunk it’s way through 83Gb of internet downloads. Yikes. I look forward to chain sawing up bad guys from the horde later on this evening while the kids are at dance & gymnastics. Buzz buzz mutha fuqqas.

If the weather holds out tomorrow perhaps we’ll take our first foray over to Wonderland to scope things out once more. Get as many gigacoaster rides in as we can while the park is at its emptiest. Walk right on the rides. Now that’s how you theme park! Forget crowds of 20-30,000 people. I want two thousand or less spread over the entire park. We can hit Behemoth, Yukon Striker, Leviathan, Dragon Fyre, The Bat, Thunder Run, Wonder mountain guardians, the whole lot of them. See if the back lot stunt track is actually running. As it was down on 3 or 4 separate occasions. Most of which were for fights and/or stabbings in the underground passage hidden from public view.

Wilde beast and Mine buster, all the greats! Including the Vortex too. I love all of these rides so much. I can’t wait to go a bunch this season. Including the Haunts and a Winterfest visit too.

**Editors note: Turns out I was wrong. Console just wasn’t connected to the internet, and I have 43Gb from the disc to download and an additional 74Gb from the Network to gather too. The single player campaign won’t launch without the Network patches, and upgrade data.Going to be a while before I can play this game. Approximately 3.5 hours to be exact. So this evening it is then.

Took a prospective client out to the range today to fire off some balls and work on my own swing. I had a personal best of 225 with a living witness, Score! Never gone that far before. And we were playing into the wind. I started with my trusted nine iron and could make 100 & 125 yards without too much fuss. Nearly made 150 yards off the nine iron, so I was pretty happy with that. I then took up my #3 driver for a spin and early on I was putting g them left, right, and up into the air, but could not get any yards on them. After I got into the second bucket of balls I was finally able to put some umph! Into my swing and get the loftiness to work for me.

Not to say I didn’t have any worm burners or plunked balls, but I had a pretty successful outing, even if I do say so myself. The sun was out, it was a balmy 18°C, with a slight cross breeze. Perfect weather to get outside and get just a tiny slice of exercise. My lats are going to be sore tomorrow.

A pretty solid Tuesday mid morning as far as I am concerned. Finally got to use my clubs again after many months, nay years of sitting idle in the corner of my bedroom. Next step would be to play a round of 9 holes at a par three course. Or I could just go back to the range again, I’d be cool with that too.

Which reminds me I have some retail mock ups to finalize, business cards to send out, and a brand standards guide to edit. Busy, busy, busy.

Got it with the internet/cable box switch over and having a blast watching Shoresy, and soon after I’ll watch all of LetterKenny too. I think Crave carries movies too. Having a good time hearing all that rapid fire chirping on the ice. It’s a worth while time.

Around this time every year a touch of hope for a Toronto Sports Team gets into your heart and you begin to feel just a smidge of excitement for their chances – and… it’s gone. Nope. Out early into over time on game seven of the first round series. It was fun while it lasted. Hell my eldest daughter and I saw our very first live NHL game this year. Sadly, probably not a repeatable occurrence unless we go to Ottawa, or catch them playing in Florida again. No way can I afford to go see them at home. Not in the same caliber of seats anyway. I’ll look into the pricing for the nose bleeds up in the 300’s. I think it’ll be close to or more for the 300 seats than I paid for both fourth row from the ice behind the net at Amalie Arena.

I will need a radio or something as I really did miss have an announcer in my ear to feed me information during all of that frenetic action. I mistook a couple of calls when I had to guess at what was going on.

I’ll look at prices for Ottawa tickets too. Lots of hotels near by, just off the high way. Can make a whole day out of it. Could be a fun lasting memory. Not the eight hours of driving to get there and back, but eating before the game, watching the game, staying up later than normal, and then staying over in a hotel before a mobile breakfast, and the trek back home again.

Or, I’ll take my kids to a Jays game for 1/3 of the price, and be there in an hour, and home in 45 minutes. Ha. Atleast we have lots of choices being just above Toronto. We could try TFC too. I used to love going to soccer games with my wife prior to us having children. Stadium has changed a fair bit since I last sat inside it.

I believe today is Sunday, so I’m going to have a lazy day. I fixed our fence, fixed the lid on the garbage box, erected a newly purchased  storage unit my wife bought, and I cut down some oddly shaped lumber into useable pieces. I did a fair bit more cleaning & sorting in the garage shop too. I have more proper lumber on hand, so I’m getting rid of the too small scraps I keep because I usually don’t have any real lumber on hand. Now I realize I have White Oak, Red Oak, Ash, Walnut, Cherry and Pine boards. I don’t need to keep scraps “just in case”, as I will likely create more from the newly acquired real hard wood boards.

Now that traveling is done, and tax season is over, I can look seriously towards finding a reasonably priced used 1.75Hp bandsaw. Or failing that, buying one new with a warranty and mobile base accessories. I also decided I want to put mobility wheels on my heavy work bench so I can move that around too, to act as an outfeed table in my small confined space. Or I’ll wind up playing Gears of War 4 whenever I have any spare time and the garage will sit quietly until I get back in there once again. Who is to say how things will shake out.

Last night’s comedy show in Orillia, at Casino-Rama was a real hit. All three acts were better than the last. The video portions prior to the show were very entertaining. The drive there and back sort of suck, due to the distance, rain and subtle fog that rolled in late yesterday evening. But made it home safe & sound. The show started about 30 minutes late to end at 11:00pm instead of  closer to ten. The seats near the back were still pretty good. No obstructions, and the audio was clear. I was worried that I would miss have subtitles present, but it turned out to not be a problem.

The youngest woke up and chose violence today, so she and I are at home practicing reading instead of doing the Girl Guides park clean up. As tired as I am after getting to bed late, I was not altogether unhappy about doing a park clean up today before the rain comes. Kids. Funny little creatures.

Trying to keep the day as low key as possible so that I can stay awake after a long drive, dinner, drinks and a night out to see a show tonight. Off to Casino Rama to catch the Tom Segura show. We’re meeting a couple friends in Orillia and grabbing dinner prior to the show. I can’t imagine the show being more than 75 minutes in length, as I don’t know if he has an opening act or not. My goal is to either grab a nap at some point today, or just not do a whole lot physically so that I’m not yawning and exhausted the whole time.

Not to mention we have Ssturday morning Girl Guide plans – again. But not down town, thankfully. We’re on the roster for a park clean up at 9:00am near by, so I don’t have to get out of bed until 8:00am or so. Our biggest issue to solve is whether or not the kids sleeps at my inlaws, or if we fetch them and bring them home at the end of our night, sometime around midnight. I guess it depends on the traffic and the drive itself.

This is our second Friday night out in a row in a very long time. This show, the tickets I mean, are a Christmas present of mine, so no way were we not going to go. It just happened that last week was the ball game we went to. Which was also a lot of fun. The group we went with were pretty rowdy, and unwieldy, but I enjoyed myself and didn’t feel too much second hand embarrassment. My wife hates cringey moments, and was less impressed. I ignored it, and left it alone. Not my monkey, not my circus.

As lovely as it is to be social, I’m also always tired and much more of a homebody than I care to admit. Out of home adventures every once in a while are enough to keep me happy. It just usually goes without fail that once we plan one, other things pop up right around that time too. Do it feels like feast or famine. Ha. Isn’t that always the way.

The mornings are still a little too crisp for my liking, but before long I’ll be out weeding garden beds, and hunched over the lawn trying to limit the spread of dandelions. I’m hoping that last springs nitrogen burns will mostly be gone this year as I didn’t add any more this year. I clogged the spreader and did the rest by hand and the pellets were clumpy and I burned a fair number of patches of earth near our trees. Not the worst thing I’ve done, but I should have tried to break down the clumps further before tossing it on the grass. Live and learn.

I want to wait another couple of days before I put our Glad bulbs and Dahlias in the ground. These late in the spring icy mornings are going to stunt their growth or kill them if we aren’t lucky.

I have a bunch of thistles and thorny weeds to pull along the side of the house too. Lots of low lying branches I should trim off the trees so that I can cut our grass easier, and stop skunks from trying to set up shop beside the deck/ac unit. Lots to do in preparation for late spring, summer and fall.