Author: greatwallstudios

Was in the orchard picking up busted and discarded sapling covers. The white mesh wraps used to stop deer and whatnot from peeling off the bark, and/or eating the little trees and all of their early leaves & buds. Luckily there are only nine rows of apple trees, and we didn’t have to look at the peach trees, so about an hours work. Grandpa came by with the side by side to gather up our piles, he did that with the kids, so they had some fun atleast. I however have a nice quarter sized burn on the top of my right foot, and at the back of my left leg, on a dollar bill sized patch of skin. So not great. No ticks though, which is nice.

The town had their opening long weekend holiday firework show last night. It was a blast. Both literally and figuratively. Got a tad smokey with no breeze present, but then again we lucked out as the rains stopped before, and a hefty portion of the town showed up. I’d make a few suggestions, if I could. One; invite two or three times as many food trucks, those lines are a real damper on the festivities. Two; station an icecream truck at all four corners of the event so that there are more treat options, shorter lines, and those frozen treats stay frozen. Otherwise the music was good, plenty of seating. The play structures are always a hit with our kids, and nearby parking isn’t too long of a walk away. Event parking is a nightmare to get out of, so we parked a block or two away, and walked the rest of the way in. Got there and home without incident. I’d call that a success.

As I get older, the worst impediment I have from a good lie in is a full bladder. No matter how well depleted I feel as I head to bed, by morning I am full to bursting. Now I do have the capacity to fall back to sleep after a brief visit to the facilities, but that sleep is never as good as the overnight kind.

But first I had to pull up several hundred weeds that have popped up during early spring. My legs and back are going to complain to me about it tomorrow. Thorns, thistles, grasses, dandelions, and all manner of other weeds have landed a foot hold in our front, side and back garden beds. I cleared the front and side, but haven’t the desire, or drive, to also tackle the back yard beds. My wife was out planting six more Dahlias in the back garden. I thought they should go out front, but we focus so much attention there as is, that all the other facets of our property look pretty bare in comparison. And I’m fine with it. Loads of curb appeal when you see the front of the house, and everything else is secondary. I don’t devote that much time to our plants & trees once we get into July & August, so I’m ok with limiting my attention to just the front that is visible to everyone on the street.

Also I haven’t done much fruit wise either. I trimmed back the dead portions of the raspberries and that’s about it. I don’t fuss with the cherry tree or the apple trees beyond making it so that I can cut the grass around them without getting stabbed in the face by low lying limbs. My blueberries died ages ago, killed by freezing over. My grape vine has taken off with a life of it’s own, which I’m fine with. I run it along the fence top when I can train it to do so, but otherwise I’m not doing much of anything with it. The strawberries have claimed one whole bed for themselves amongst the ferns and a now deceased ivy shrub. I wish it got more light or water as we rarely get more than just a quart tub of berries all season from that patch of ground. Mind you I don’t feed them, or water at all

I’d love a couple peach trees, and some pears, or plums too. I like the idea of having our own fruit growing here. Nice to have some food that I’m not paying grocery store prices for. May have difficulty getting my wife on board with us having even more trees on the property. I tried to get a Black Walnut to grow over by my shed, but the neighbours lawn guy cut it down and killed it, even though it was on my property by several feet. Was not impressed. But after saving several other trees very early on in the spring I was less concerned about it. C’est la vie.

I think the farm will be planting new raspberries and blueberries shortly, so maybe I don’t need more here anyway. Very lucky to have access to the land at the farm for doing that sort of thing. Any way, happy friday. Enjoy the long weekend if you get one. Ciao Bella!

Had a nice meet up with fellow parents of our school aged children to watch the kids run their respective races. My eldest placed second in her 200m heat, and finished in first for the 200m finals. Off to the area trials in two weeks time. Nice.

She opted not to run either of the 100m, 400m or 800m races. Instead will do more sand pit jumping events, plus shot put, or “ball throw” as they now call it, since having all that weight as a little kick is too dangerous on their elbow joints. Since kids (apparently) were trying to fast ball pitch it, rather than the up on the shoulder/neck area technique to push it out as far as they can, and thus hurting themselves grievously in the process. So no more of that until high school.

I don’t think she’s taking on high jump or hurdles at this point either. Not problem there. Far more work, and potential for injury. I’m good with that choice. I’m not able to be there all day, but I did witness both races, and could cheer on my girl’s other friends. Yay!

Didn’t take any photos as it’s a school event, and I don’t want to deal with parents getting angry.

Now I don’t know if that qualifies as a good score or not. I have yet to pass level 14, and most times I play it I crap out between levels 11 and 13. I have had the luck of doing a handful perfect clears, which is nice. But I can’t seem to find a solid plan of attack that wields great results. Planning my moves doesn’t go any better than just randomly finding the first groups of three that catch my eye all across the screen. I wish I knew of a way to eliminate the black rocks in a more efficient manner than just hoping they get caught in a flashing jewels explosion. I have limited myself to playing once per day. I get bonus points for doing so. Maybe twice if I have a long empty part of my day. I know it’ll kill 20-30 minutes if I let it.

I was off the gaming fixation for roughly nine years until my lovely wife reintroduced next gen gaming consoles back into our lives. Bought one, borrowed another. Now it’s nearly inescapable. I am not too involved in any one game. Trying my hand at some Star Wars content, as well as Gears of War, Diablo 4, and a DreamWorks racing go kart game. I leave the goat simulator and Dreamlight valley to the kids. They seem to have fun in the non linear open world mayhem.

Best be off to drop the kids at school. Breakfast upon my return then lawn Duties and blood work appointment go follow. Should be a day. Oh, Dune Part Two showed up last night, so I may tuck into that this evening while the kids are out doing their extracurriculars. Score!

Now don’t mind me, I am appreciative that no droughts have kicked up here just yet. We’ve had years where the water table gets real low real early into June, and all summer long until September rolls around. This year is a bit more wet than that one, as far as I recall. Green grass and very leafy trees all say thank you! Sir. As always I need to wait for the Lilacs to bloom with their patented aroma before I can go trimming them back. I’m prone to cutting away the low lying branches to try and stop skunks from hiding in them. And to dissuade other things like rodents and rabbits from taking up residence on the property. I did however triple check that I could trim back our hedge row earlier in the season to allow more light to make it down into the garden beds below. That seems to have gone ok. Last year I did the top 6-8 ft, but cutting them off, as the heavy snow & ice caused them to bend over, and lean down significantly. Now I’m just trying to contain the width a bit more. Next year, or the year after, I’ll go back and line up the tops once more. I like to alternate so I don’t cut too much off any one tree at any one time.

Tuesday is here. The rains are plentiful. Thunderstorms have started to make themselves known. I mean we had a weird one in February. A thunder and lightening with heavy rain fall storm in February. It was odd. Very, very strange. Not a usual occurrence around these parts during the winter atleast. We will soon come up on the anniversary of the Djericho storm, leading edge tornado that whisked through from Windsor to Montreal. 800 kilometers of savage winds and blown down trees, rooves, sheds, and barns. It was wild. Followed by a 26 hour long power outage.

Reminded me of that summer long ago, like 2001/2002 where that New York power grid went down and a huge portion of Ontario went full black out because of it. I remember waiting for my one brother whom was down town to drive back to the shop in his DZ water truck. Took him hours. Every intersection a four way stop. Our drive home took forever aswell. Into the black with no street lights, no traffic lights, no nothing. The skies that night must have been something else with no light pollution to interfere. It was hot too, so no AC. Fun times.

I best get these kids off to school. No lunch boxes forgotten on the counter today! Ciao Bella!

Seems my mind was off wandering this morning while packing my kids lunches into their back packs. I made two lunches, and two drinks, signed their agendas and I thought, I thought I put all the drinks, lunch boxes and agendas into their bags. Turns out I did five of the six items. So a quick call from the school to let me know I forgot my youngest’s lunch box, I had to jet over to the school to make sure she’d have a lunch. Wee! Oops. My bad. Not sure where my head was. Atleast it’s the first time I’ve done it in a number of years. Could have been worse. I could have had to go out of town to run errands or meet potential new clients for a meet & greet.

Otherwise we’re back to a rainy, cloudy and somehow still sunny Monday. I’ve sent off a partially completed brand standards guide for review and comment. I require some written portions from the committee to finalize certain sections. Still a few days worth of work left to go on that document believe you me.

At least I assume that my random US visitor whom racks up the view counter is a dude. Could easily be a woman/lady/she/her/xhe or whatnot. But my guess would be 95%-5% Male vs female reader if I had to guess, given my tone, sense of humor, and general topics covered. But I could be misjudging things, as I don’t really know what, exactly, they were looking at under the category of Archives.

Made it through most of the weekend with just the little one and myself. Got her to bed for 10pm, which is why better than midnight, but not quite the 8:30-9:00pm I was aiming for. Did run her through the tub, so that’s a win. Couldn’t get her to eat more than a few bites of any one meal served at the appropriate times of the day. I’m sure she will be glad to see her mum & sister once they get home in the next hour or so.

Happy Sunday to you all. Suns out, sort of. Tad cloudy, but I can see sun shine on the trees outside the windows. It’s all good bruh.

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.