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Or a singular fish, or a whole school of them, I’m not entirely sure. All I know is is that I had to locate my wife’s old tank, which the kids used last year to hatch Monarch butterflies, and then promptly discarded, and filled it with junk. So I found it yesterday evening in my inlaws basement, along with the lid and light fixture. As well as the MDF veneered stand covered in tin foil astrological stickers. Those have since come home and been brought inside. The stand at least. The glass tank has been hosed off, scrubbed, rinsed, and is now drying itself off. Then it’ll come inside, unless the threat of rain makes me bring it indoors sooner than later.

Now I have never owned fish so I am not 100% certain of the level of care they require. Feeding them daily I get, but filter maintenance, bubblers, cleaning the tanks, adding items into the water, oxygenation levels, pH level testing, is all unknown to me. I had dogs, a rat, a hamster, and later on a veiled chameleon. My family had rabbits and a brother had gerbils. So I’ve known pets, and their various modes of care. But aquatic life is beyond me at this point. I’m a noob, such as it is, with fish anyway.

I’m under the impression we can’t use tap water unless it has been left to offgas for at least 7-10 days depending on the quantity. So to fill the tank and soak all the elements and enrichment items and let that work itself out might require about two weeks of set up and processing time before we can even think about getting fish, and adding them in together in the one tank. I have a separate smaller tank made of plastic where I can house them if I have to do any major clean outs of the big tank. But again, that will need to be scrubbed and cleaned before any fresh water fish come out way.

My wife apparently has her eye on a cool tank of her own so now we might end up with two full time tanks, plus the third and much smaller holding tank in the kitchen. This is looking like it might spiral out of control quickly. We still need bubblers, filters, rocks, plants & grasses, food, nets, snails and/or shrimp, logs, caves, and whatever else they can sell us easy & eager marks. I know when I’ve got a bullseye painted on my forehead, believe you me. They’ll smell us coming from a mile away.

Oh yeah this holding tank needs a major scrubbing.

So unless I get any work e-mail this morning I am going to be otherwise engaged in cleaning these up ready for our new semi permanent house guests. Who knows how long any of them will survive in this house along with us! I see a raising fish for dummies book in my near future.

Expecting over an inch of rain this morning which means no tree work, no driving range, and definitely no golf as an option. It seems pretty windy too which will likely place our farm walk under suspension as well. This is just going to make the grass grow more than it needs to now. Where was all this rain back in July & August when we were desperate for it, you know? I realize this is good for the water table, and refilling the ponds, and streams and such around here, but… Gah! Never can get it when we want it.

I’m glad I took some time yesterday to remove a portion of the larger tree limb that required the ladder, and a chainsaw. I made three quarters of the cut before the saw gave out. Which is concerning. I suspect bad premixed gas as the culprit. Hope the saw isn’t too far gone because of it. So once the saw quit I took the rest of what I was going to cut with a hand saw. I lopped all the whispy bits off, and broke the larger bits down by hand. I still have a good portion of the remaining limb left to go, but eh? What are you going to do? Wait out the rain.

It is Thursday. I saw the Jays make a 5-0 come back from the middle of the third inning to win 13-9 in the ninth. That was initially disappointing, and turned out to be rather exciting to watch. The bleachers in Cincinnati were 90% empty, so I’m sure that didn’t help the Reds out all that much. No cheering, no fanfare. Crickets. I never did get the kids out to a Jays game this summer. Prices went up — of course. Too expensive to take all four of us and get halfway decent seats. I’m not certain that they’d sit through a full three plus hours of baseball anyway. So maybe, no harm done. Have fun on this rainy September Thursday in 2025.

Luckily I have an appointment early on this morning so I do not need to answer that question right away. I can mull it over. Let it stew. Let me feelings regarding my current level of back ache to marinate for a spell. Afterwards on the drive home I can ask myself if I am realistically well enough to spend an hour or more moving ladders, ropes, wedges, and lopping apart tree branches all while bending over, reaching to one side or the other, and kneeling in the grass.

I honestly think that by Saturday it won’t be an issue, so I should stop being so impatient, and just let the muscles heal without further aggravation. Seems simple enough to do, but I really want that particular chore done. It’s loud, and messy, and not at all safe (as far as potential calamity in yard work is concerned). It involves heights, heavy weights, a chainsaw, exhaust fumes, and ladders are rolled into one task. A smorgasbord of high risk factors. I need to actually wear steel toed boots, a helmet, ear & eye protection, and if I can find them chainsaw pants/chaps to reduce the risk of a horrific meat grinder-esque fall onto the moving blades. It’s food for thought.

I’m just killing time right this second until I have to drive into the centre of Markham for my appointment. Lots of heavy traffic left turns that will either go smoothly, or require me to sit and wait for an extra fifteen minutes. No telling how it will fall until I’m in it. Gotta love traffic and commuters.

The one appointment has become two, with a requisition form and a second location back in Stouffville. More blood work in my future, and now an ultrasound to go along with last year’s MRI. I’m just loaded with surprises as of late! The joys of growing older I guess.

I’m glad I left as early as I did, as that twenty minute drive took nearly a full hour. Delays, detours, and 9:00 am road traffic are a hell of a thing! Good thing I had that blood work done yesterday, because this update to today’s schedule is a direct result of those findings. Exciting! Could this be why my skin itches so badly all spring/fall/winter long? Probably not, but it could be.

Next steps if my current prescriptions stop working are incredibly expensive, like $15,000 – $25,000 a year expensive. Yikes! I’m not going to dwell on that right now because it hasn’t happened, and I don’t need to borrow stress that hasn’t occurred yet. And on that note I am going to sign off for now. Ciao Bella!

It was a seamless transition back into grades three and six respectively. I met my youngest daughter’s teacher (a very lovely lady we’ve had before with our older child) and I told her about what we are doing to support her learning outside of the classroom with a tutor, so we have an understanding about how to catch them up in class, and how many years it could take to do so. Hopefully encouraging for everybody involved. Covid really put a damper on both reading and writing, so we are taking steps to address that with both kids.

So far so good. I met a few other parents I haven’t seen in the last nine weeks, and we had a brief catch up session while we waited for all the kids to filter into the school. They have new classrooms, hooks/cubbies to claim, and desk order to find. Today might be a slower day, or they may just dive head first into new material with little to no time to spare. I do not know. It’s anybody’s game at this point!

Us parents have a dinner excursion planned for Saturday evening, so we can hopefully all catch up, commiserate about the hot summer, and how it feels both too short, and oh so very long all at the same time. I did see several familiar faces in my youngest child’s class. The best friend was placed elsewhere, but rosters aren’t final until the first week of October, so no need to worry too much yet. I think I saw a student returning whom left after senior kindergarten, so that might be an interesting update for my youngest, as the student was a treasured friend at the time. We will have to wait and see.

My back is a bit better, thankfully. So yesterday I trimmed a shrub out the front to make me feel like I did not waste the whole day with aches and pains. Today I have taken down one of the two limbs I want removed off of the maple. I took the smaller, lower one, because I can do it with a hand saw, loppers, and about 20 minutes of down time. I need a ladder, saw, some ropes to tie off limbs so I don’t squash our fence/gate directly below it. I don’t fancy hanging off a ladder with a heavy chainsaw while my back still hurts. So maybe I can get to it on Friday, or Saturday morning.

The maple is dying, slowly at that. So I see a bunch of dead limbs that could be a spot of bother in the future, which I want to remove. I don’t have the right gear to get too high into the tree, but my ladder can reach 20 or so feet, so I’ll do that much, and no more. I fully expect this tree will need to come down within the next 5-10 years. Easily. Its had bark coming off it for ages, and the outer reaches are dead, and much of the very top is dead too. Now don’t get me wrong it still gets a full canopy of leaves, but in amongst all that is a whole lot of dead limbs, and crumbling, flaking bark. I’m no arborist so I don’t know which pestilence it has.

I can not bring myself to wrench on the pull cord of my chainsaw for twenty minutes just to get it started either. My back is tender as it is without seventy tugs to get the old girl going. I bought the Stihl ms170 in 2006, so it can be a bit of an operation to start it for the first time in a season. That is also why I am not chomping at the bit to get going on tree work. I made myself feel ill pushing and lifting the Seadoo docking pods, and I don’t feel like going that hard for a little bit longer. Bit of a shock to the system to go from all out leisure to push till you puke sort of thing.

I really do need to work out as that feeling will persist until I can get beyond it. I look forward to getting back into doing Olympic lifts again. Not vanity lifting, but good for the bones heavy lifting. I miss it. You can listen to music and go slowly. I like that very much indeed.

Wow! Can you believe it? The first day is school is really here. All ready an hour in. Madness. Now I need to turn my attention back to working since my time is mine own again for seven hours each week day. Fare well. Until tomorrow!

And now my best laid plans are falling by the wayside because I have limited range of motion, and no longer feel like carrying & climbing a ladder with a chainsaw to prune our maple out front, nor do I wish to hunch over my table saw for hours to work on my daughter’s Taekwondo belt display (which requires a certain level of precision which my current mood of “fuck it”: doesn’t allow for.) I do not believe I can stand at my bench and measure anything important in my current state. So days one and two of my kids going back to school this week will need to be reorganized to suit my current physical state of being.

That being said I am glad I did some purging and cleaning last week so now that too would have to wait while my back goes from unpleasant to just a general middle aged ache. I can work with an ache, but not outright pain and/or limited range of motion. So no golf or driving range either. Fantastic.

Looks like I’m cleaning blinds, ceiling fans, the floors, and the laundry room to start off my short week. We have back packs found. Lunch bags found. Pencil cases found and filled. I do need to locate the email that tells me which entrance my kids will use when school is in. Could come in handy!

Closing down portions of the cottage went well, until it didn’t. The Seadoo ramps have a small hole in them so they take on water, and us shifting them by hand from off the trailer hit a snag and I was still pulling & lifting, and ‘tweak!’ back is no longer in a good place. So, yeah — that happened around two o’clock yesterday and I have been in some level of pain since. Two pain relievers and a slathering of voltaren got me to sleep in spite and spurts. Better than a kick in the teeth.

This might put a damper on going to the theme park on Sunday if it is still not right by then. We will have to wait and see. I may be on the hook for a night at the Uxbridge fair though, because my daughter made plans with her friend under my wife’s watch, while I was out doing errands, so I don’t know all the details, just that I was volunteered to take her there for several hours late this week. That means I need to text other people because my ten year old is an unreliable source. Not maliciously, just a lack of understanding on what constitutes concrete, and confirmed plans that have been vetted by adults, and aren’t just dreamed up fairy tales told by other enthusiastic children. Some folks talk a lot about doing wild things but have no follow through. It’s a hard lesson to learn. I don’t appreciate other people’s kids winding mine up to just flake out because they are all talk and no action. If we talk about doing something (as a family), we do it. So my kids think that everybody else is the same way, but sadly, they are not. Some kids spin yarns and then walk away, leaving my kids amped up for something that had a zero percent chance of ever happening. It’s not cool. So either we drop everything and try to make a version of it happen ourselves (which never lives up to the wild eyed fantasy other kids have spun) or ignore it and enjoy twenty four hours of moody, tantrum prone children mad at us for somebody else’s failings. It’s awesome! You need to figure out which type of person your friends are and adjust your expectations of them accordingly. Tough to do when you’re just a kid and take everybody at face value.

So yeah — this little back of mine is feeling kinda not right. I toyed with the idea of Robaxacet but I don’t like feeling spacey, and I’m not sure how hurt I am, versus how strong that medication is. I don’t want to overreact by going straight to chemo for a headache, you feel me? It’s not a disk, not the spine, but a muscle I hurt on one side, which has to be the better option, right!?!

Not that I haven’t devoted a considerable amount of time emptying closets, and refining wardrobes this summer, but we are now going to bring home four suitcases of clothes, and countless bags of towels, bathing suits, cover ups and such. Those closets that were tidied up will be back to overflowing by this afternoon. I foresee many loads of laundry coming my way. Drawers that could shut properly being overstuffed and left open for weeks on end. It felt like too much when I was sending old clothes out for donation, but now we will quickly realize we weren’t thorough enough!

Shorts, pants, sweaters will once again need to be stuffed into those manicured closets. It’s too much stuff back in the house again. Not to mention my closet holds all the empty luggage so my space will diminish a fair bit too. I knew this was coming so I was far more cutting with my own gear. I was not very conservative about what I kept, and what I set free. I have some cruddy old luggage I should have thrown away last garbage day to make room. But I forgot about it once the time came. Silly man.

Now the children will head back to school and I’ll be left to take care of all these returning outfits. Wash them, dry them, sort them, and find a way to put them all away. We don’t typically separate our summer gear from the other three seasons clothes. I don’t have anywhere to put bins of summer clothes for all four of us in order to thin out our closets during any one particular season. Hence the constant struggle to donate clothes or move them along as hand me downs to the next child in line. We no longer keep double digit vacuum bags worth of  extra clothes in the house, which is great. Now it’s just two large garbage bags worth. One per kid.

I bet if we audited the clothes they actually wear versus what they have access to, you’d find only 35-40% of what we are holding gets worn. God forbid they should be able to see walks or drawer bottoms when rummaging through closets though. Besides underpants and socks (which we need 100 pairs of) they don’t wear every single t-shirt, sweater, dress, pants, or outfit that they have been given. I’m in favour of having fewer items, but which are of a higher quality. But then again my youngest plays in the school yard mud puddles on her knees, so fewer pants doesn’t really work as I have to soak, rinse, pre-wash, and do stain removal constantly, and I need a heavy rotation at my finger tips to be able to do that. Hand scrubbed, spot stain removal takes time and effort. I can’t do it if she only had four pairs of pants. I need at least 14, so I can get through a week while I fix the previous week’s grass stains. It’s a process!

We have lots of fancy rocks to bring home from this summer too. The Gemboree strikes again! Not only that but our visits to the Princess Sodalite mine were eventful as well. Bags of shinny mineral goodness needs to get washed, and sorted. Potentially displayed if it looks good enough after being washed.

I brought a lot up here for the summer, but my intention is to leave 98% of it there. I wasn’t ready to donate it, but if I can have clothes here so I no longer need to pack clothes for the trip, all the better. Pants, sweaters, old boxers you name it, I have left them up north. I just don’t have many socks up north for one reason or another. Mine wear out quickly, and I don’t keep socks with holes in the heels or toes. Feels weird. Don’t like it. I’m actually looking at cheap wire closet organizers so that I can get items hung up, aired out, and arranged how I like them. I’d love to outfit my room with a chair, floor lamp, a rug, and either a simple desk, or an organizing side table/coffee table type thing. But as work is slow this year, it might be a few years before I can make that happen. But until then I like to migrate my stuff to up north rather than throw it away. I could do that with my books too! Oh. Brain wave…

Feels like a while since I was here last. That must have been at some point in 2023 or very early 2024 before I fixed an old error and had to start over from the beginning. But not until after I threw an epic tantrum and got all morose about it. Yet, here we are slowly making our way back up towards Day 831, and hopefully beyond.

This whole daily writing thing has become a bit of a habit now, for good or bad. I’m pretty much stuck with it as I have been doing it for the better part of 1,400 days give or take, with only a brief respite somewhere in the middle. On that note of making new habits I have been very steady and consistent with my grip strength trainers, those I have used in combinations every single day since June. I have moved up from struggling with the 50 lbs, to now struggling with the 175 lb weights. Feels good to see some forward momentum. I will see if it offers me any additional help once I go back to climbing next week.

I haven’t been as consistent, but I am still doing push ups to try to keep my shoulders, and arms engaged in activity with my body weight every day. I missed a few days, but have done more of it than I thought I would. One small action repeated daily, and increased a little over time, is how I begin a new habit. Though I do find it easy to just forget about this new stuff because it isn’t as deeply ingrained yet. I am pretty easy going with myself about it. I’m not going to beat myself up if I forget. So at this point if I do it more often than not in a week, that’s a good thing. I can work with that. I can build on that.

Helps if you aren’t plagued by old injuries that flare up once you get active. My knees hate getting real jumpy & runny so I limit that type of athleticism. More calisthenics and body weight movements. I can walk a fair distance still, without causing myself harm. Ride a bike, skateboard on real clean fresh asphalt. Long bike paths around town are good for that.

I have eaten two salads in two days as replacement meals. That much lettuce still feels like broken glass in my guts, followed by bloating and gas, so that may be a bit more difficult to implement as a part of my (yet again, another attempt) weight loss journey. Life style changes, or edits, as opposed to rash decisions are my go to, along with things like; Be more active, drink more water, use discretion over portion size, cut way back on snacks, and try to do away with soda. Do not eat after eight pm at night. This last one helps with my acid reflux quite a bit. I’m not a big drinker so I have no booze to give up to immediately save 5 lbs of bloated water weight. I also do not want to have to skip meals in order to move the needle on the scales. I need to be more active. Longer dog walks, more climbing, and spend some time in a gym moving heavy weights around. Good for the bones if I can keep from hurting my back or knees again. I do enjoy Olympic lifts, but that can get loud, and is frowned upon at some gyms. I’ll have to play it by ear.

But here we are, Day 500. I feel good. Feels like building something. Feels like having some sort of purpose to my day. A tad self serving and introspective at times, but what is writing if not a great way to organize your own thoughts, and come face to face with just how scattered your own train of thoughts are? A mirror held up to your own head, wielded by your own hands. Glorious. A few stars, do recommend. A little bit of introspection is good for you. Too much seems like self indulgent masturbation, for the sake of dwelling on yourself. But I digress. I’m no psychologist nor any sort of therapist.

It is Saturday today. The children start school on Tuesday morning. Everything goes back to day one then. Early wake ups. Packed school lunches. Drop offs and pick ups. Dog walks and farm runs. Drive all about town for the kids programming. It  makes for a busy week, all school year long. Lean in, or out I don’t much care, I’m not your guru I’m just a near middle aged dad. Ciao Bella!

These things are good things, you just need to know how.

One.) I have exceeded the best viewership numbers on this blog that I had previously held back in 2021. And with several months left in the year to go I should hope to surpass 3,000. Which is a nice round number. I owe this in part to about 1,800 views that randomly came out of Germany. I still do not know what spurred that drive to my blog, and a serious spike in views, but it happened, and I’m good with it.

Two.) in another two days my streak will be 500 once more. I am on my way to 831, which would tie my previous long streak before I had an editing issue which fixed a post months after it was posted, which severed my streak on WordPress. I got discouraged and took some time off during a vacation, and then decided to just start from the start and meet or beat my previous high score.

Three.) downloads of both books, and single audio chapter are still climbing upwards slowly. I might break one hundred downloads for each this year. Which is kind of amazing to me. It’s pretty cool. I like knowing my stuff got out there all over the world. It is in English which is a limiting factor I know, but still I’m good with it.

Well that was three items, but that’s life. I’m waiting on an oil change, so I have things to do. Ha. Ciao Bella!

I actually had plans to be outdoors for much of today doing the lawn, garden beds, and pruning our large maple trees, but since we are experiencing rain, and from what the radar says, a fair bit of it throughout the day, those plans now seem highly unlikely. We are in desperate need of rain to bring the water table back up to where it should be – no doubt. The grass does need to be cut for the first time in weeks. There was rain here while we were up north getting none whatsoever. So less of a tinderbox here, and the grass is actually mostly green, and from the looks of it, thriving. Can not say the same for the lake. No sir. Dry as a bone. Scorched even. It’s very sandy and rocky up there, so not conducive to growing anything too fancy.

So now I will turn my eyes inward, and tackle more decluttering in the basement. I went through my stockpile of things and found a whole slew of stuff I could toss out. I have decided to reduce the number of Gundam kits I keep on my desk. The ones I like the least will be given away or thrown out. I also went through my office closet and took a fair bit out of there too. Cables, and plus, and adapters for long gone tech. Boxes and wrappers that I no longer need.

I have this storage bin I’ve had since forever, and I went through that for the first time in about ten years. I recall going through it when our first child was born and I threw out a fair bit of adult entertainment magazines, because who wants their child to stumble upon such things when snooping around the house. Plus that stuff is all free, and on-line now. I kept the Ginger Spice one because it was from my 19th birthday, and has sentimental value. Otherwise binned it! I also got rid of all university & college papers, tests, essay, time tables, class lists, syllabuses from my time in university, and both colleges. I’m a pack rat in the process of reforming myself.

I have even gone through my books again to pull out another 41* (updated) that can go to the Care & Share. I am going to give more graphic design textbooks away because why do I need info on CS3, when that program is more than a decade out of date now.

In the shed we have children’s bicycles the Care & Share can have next spring, and some winter sports gear they can have this October.  That will pretty much empty out the garage of stuff we aren’t currently using. I am even toying with the idea of building out a tool box with essential tools for my kids to have from my current hoard of items. Hammers, screw drivers, bits, pliers, and drill bits, perhaps even my old Ryobi drill and driver pair. I have the old batteries and the appropriate charger. Good enough for hanging pictures in their first apartment(s). A handful of screws, wall anchors, and dowels should round it out nicely. Nothing fancy, but utilitarian and can get the job done. Plus I get some space on my wall and in my tool boxes, and they get a helping hand. Nice!

All to make room for more bags of clothes we get from neighbours, friends, and family. Luckily there are a lot of girls in our surrounding family, so my two kids can wear it all, plus a few cousins, and my niece too. It’s not just a straight line to the dump, or textile recycling drop off.

All summer long we would have danced in the rain had it of ever come we were so desperate for it. And now I’m kinda bummed because I had plans for outdoor work. Especially since it hasn’t been 30°C plus for a few days, I could have gotten a whole lot done, without feeling woozy, or dehydrating in the first 10 minutes. C’est la vie! Such is life. The lawn can wait until tomorrow.

Maybe I will take and bag all of the fallen apples under my two trees. Might be nice to keep the wasps away if the apples are gone from off the ground. Or maybe it’ll make them more angry? I don’t really know. I need to fetch some garbage bags, and my box cutter, and start breaking down garbage to go out. I best be about my business. Happy Thursday.

I realize it is early Wednesday morning, but the idea of my minions getting up and heading back to school on Tuesday seems strange to me. I have started to receive transmissions from the school about the first week of classes, so it must be true. We should have notifications regarding our classroom placement on Friday at 3:00 pm, so that will make the transition very real. A name and a classroom, and an entrance location for the morning drop off run. Soon I will have forms to fill out, documents to sign, and waivers to file for both kids.

Homework and packed lunches, early morning wake ups, hair brushing fights over tangles & messy bed head. The school year brings much drama with it. Who else is in their class, and did they get separated from their core friend group. Where is the best friend located. How is recess playing out. Are they eating what they asked for for lunch. How quickly do we have to leave to get across town to practice, tutoring, lessons, and such once the school day ends.

The summer is a really easy breezy time for us because we don’t typically put the children in a tonne of additional programming. Though we did do flag foot ball, and a library reading program, along side the usual daily swimming lessons, so that felt a bit more hectic than normal. Also the intense heat and dryness this year made us want to do absolutely nothing, like ever. But the kids did their things, so everybody should be happy.

We made memories! 7 Wonderland trips, farm runs, partial weeks off & on at the cottage, headed to the mines, Gemboree, town festivals, fireworks, meteor showers, Kpop demon hunter watch parties, sleep overs with friends and extended family. Family visits at the cottage. Tubing with the intent to flip and crash out. Wake boarding, paddle boarding, canoeing on the lake. Beach runs, and swamp crawls looking for frogs and toads. We tried to pack a bunch of stuff into the kids break.

I did ride my longboard on two occasions. But failed to get out on my bike. Nor did I use my roller blades for yet another summer. I swam a fair bit in both the lake, and at the inlaws pool. But, I still put 10 lbs back on because I wasn’t as active as I had been leading up to the break. Back to square one to break 200 lbs again, and get down to 194, and try to keep on going to 180/175 lbs if I can. I found my wife’s bike at the farm, and am in the process of cleaning it, and oiling the chain, and making it suitable to ride. If I want to lose weight I need to get active. Which means making time on weekends to climb, ride a bike, long board and/or roller blade until the weather turns.

The children had playdates of their own and got to see a good number of their friends this summer. It gets difficult to line up folks when everybody splits for cottage country, international travel, or become hermits in the intense heat. It was so much hotter this summer than years previous. We hit well into the 40°C’s this year for a sustained period. You might get one day there before, but we had close to two weeks in that range, with the Humidex. No rain. No major storms to disrupt the heat and humidity build up. It was like living in the tropics. I fear what will become of the crop yields this year with so little rain, and such intense heat. I’d expect food prices to go up yet again.

In July the bugs were pretty horrendous and then by the August long weekend it’s like they packed up and left town overnight. I guess the dryness killed off the larvae by removing the swampy standing pools where they breed. The lake was down nearly 2 feet, so the shaded pools in the forests must have evaporated with no rain to refill them, and the surrounding trees desperate to absorb any water nearby. One bonus of the dry summer.

We did encounter forest fires up near us in the Kawarthas, so that was a bit nerve wracking. Gladly it was wrestled under control — eventually. Did not seem to affect the overall air quality like the major fires from much further north.

From last weekends to forest fires, how do I ever keep my train of thought. I bet if you read my posts both pre & post Covid19 you’ll notice some changes in both the quality of writing, and ability to maintain a dedication to a topic. These are the last six days to really make a splash for Summer Break 2025. I wish you well. Have a safe Labour Day weekend whenever you choose to begin it! Ciao Bella!