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Every February for as long as I can remember has had a mid month thaw that brought a load of rain with it, which would, in some cases, take the snow right back to the underlying grass and nearly clear the entire road from curb to curb. And just as quickly the temperatures would drop precipitously and then we’d get a massive dumping of snow followed by a lengthy cold snap that would potentially last through until the first weeks of April. This year it seems the rainy thaw has turned up late! But I see a bunch of snow and cold coming our way so I’m not fooled by this false spring. Just because it was 7°C and sunny yesterday I didn’t get carried away believing what I was seeing & feeling. I did not let the pilot light of hope catch fire. That way lies madness. Ha.

We aren’t out of the woods yet. Even by March 21st we’ll still be in the thick of it. But there have been cases where I’ve gotten a sun burn sitting outdoors enjoying the early April weather (way back in 2002 that is). But I’ve been out and about in flurries and cold snaps around April 10th, so not out of the woods by any means for a good long time.

Pushing the snow back away from the house every couple of days is about as much as I can do to try to stop our basement flooding. Besides having towels at the ready, and keeping my wet/dry shop vac & mops handy. Dehumidifiers at my beck and call too for the late stages of a clean up. That’s about all we can do.

I went through the eaves troughs twice this fall to clean them out, and to flush the down spouts. I did another clean up when I put our Christmas lights up on the house, but I didn’t pull more than ten leaves out as it was pretty bare. Now the ice dams however, those I can’t seem to stop from happening. Then the water just pours off the entire house and pools wherever it pleases. I could try to have a heated line wired in to prevent that, but of the two properties I know that utilize such a thing, it has not yet worked for a whole winter without breaking down, or not being strong enough to contend with those prolonged dips into the mi us twenty five to thirty range, and then the ice build up gets ahead of the heated line, and they are stuck with massive icicles, and pooling water just the same as I am. Weather, man it’s difficult to deal with let alone beat.

Here we are on Tuesday! Lovely Tuesday, last one for the month of February of 2025. Two months into the year, and Christmas is a distant memory. Four months left of the school year, birthdays starting all over again. Tax time is on the horizon. A whole new year really feels new once Spring starts to feel like it’s within striking distance. Still a tad too early for the spring cleaning bug to hit, but a chance to open a window around here will be much appreciated. The Honeywell air purifier has gone a long way to keeping the air in here less stale during these long winter months. Glad to have it!  Especially now with a dog around, keeping the “wet dog” smell to a minimum around here is “pretty – pretty” awesome. (A touch of Larry David for you Curb fans out there).

I need to eat and get to work on a Retail POS campaign. Food for thoughts. Ciao Bella.

Funnily enough my eyes were giving me real trouble about a month ago, but since going to Flirida for a week they haven’t bothered me all that much since. Now the eye lid under my right eye has acted up a bit, but the muscle twitch is gone, and the blurred vision is gone too. Still have difficulty with really small text though, might as well not even exist at this point, my eyes don’t register it at all any more. Had a keen eye for details once, have to pull back and do bigger picture stuff now. Ha.

Weather is warming slightly, so I went ahead and cleared the sewer grates on the street directly out front of our house. We have two of them, and I dig them out, scraped them off, and then opened up a wider path to them from the street itself. Trying to avoid a flooded lawn and driveway that will eventually freeze over every night and cause a skating rink to appear. Not so much fun. I also went around the house to widen our walking paths, and clear off more of the back patio. If we do get rain it’s going to be a disaster. Ugh. Get valuables up and off the floor then!

I have to head out soon, so have a nice Monday! Ciao Bella!

**UPDATE: I do in fact require reading glasses moving forward as my eyes are now 20/30 and nolonger 20/20. Ugh. Ok. Fine. Also the cold winter months makes my blepharitis act up and my poor eye lids pay the price from the lack of moisture. Thanks biology! Stay tuned for more information.

It took quite some doing but I managed to get the new Husky 90″ by 90″ five shelf metal rack all set up and repopulated with stuff. This doesn’t show all of the carnage left to take care of at the front of my garage space. I have cardboard boxes full of cut offs, as well as a substantial pile of garbage lumber with nails in it stacked right by the door too. Not to mention two massive pedestal table legs that need to go, and a kids kitchen play set I’d like to take to the cottage for my niece & nephew. The space still feels cramped and hemmed in because of all this poor quality lumber & cut offs.

I have an old car seat, a busted stroller, and some really old tech to toss at some point too, which will help to open up some space on the shelves. I’m not sold on the garbage can location next to my ladder (which is too big really, but it’s what I’ve got). I could probably re-sort my smaller wood pieces and get rid of a few bits there if I felt like it.

I had high hopes for getting all of my construction lumber, and my good quality furniture lumber to fit between the wall and the new rack, but I have a little too much for that to work right now. If I could get an entire truck bed load to myself to go north with, I’d toss some beams, and cruddy construction lumber away too. If I do away with all my pre-used 2×4’s and cement covered 2×6’s, I most likely could put my furniture quality lumber right at the very back. I know it should be stored lying down so as to not buckle, bulge, but I have the space I have, no more, and it can always be less. It’s not ideal right this second, but if I pick away at it, I’ll make it as optimal as I can over time. That’s progress.

So, in conclusion I still have a number of things left to do, but on the whole this is a massive step forward. The lighting is so much better back there by my bench with this upgrade too. Stay tuned to see the finer details take shape as I continue to fix the space up a bit over the coming spring. Noice!

Man oh man I miss going out dancing. It used to be so much fun, the atmosphere, the music, the drinks. So fun. Now I’m old, with little kids, and these knees and hips don’t shimmy like they used to. I have been twice in the last two years which is a better record than the seven or so years before that. When I worked in person for marketing teams our annual sales gatherings usually ended in late nights & dancing, so I miss that element too. Can’t say much for the new music, but when we got down in the late 90’s, and early aughts it was a real riot out on the dance floor. Glorious.

I don’t miss the drinking, or the after effects of drinking, but I do miss going out with a large group of friends and cutting a rug for four or five hours on a Friday or Saturday night. Eventually that morphed into pub crawl Wednesday’s, or tacking on a Thursday just because you were in the groove. Ah youth. And hip flexion flexibility.

They played some golden oldies last night which got me out on the dance floor briefly, singing my heart out. Did I mention the music was loud, so no harm of anybody hearing me either. Nice! It was exhausting but fun. Home to bed by midnight, a truly wonderful evening. My wife came for the first half too, which made the whole night even better. Finding a baby sitter has been a real godsend. Finally able to enjoy our company on outings once again. Been a long ten years.

A few weeks ago, before I went on vacation, I took the time on a Sunday to tear down some shifty looking wooden racking at the back of my garage. It was hastily erected by the previous owner/Tennant and it was making me nervous to work under. So four hours later I had the shelves emptied, and all the plywood & two by fours, and old unfastened posts disassembled and on the floor. My pile to go north to burn has grown considerably. But! The new 90″ by 90″ five shelf rack has been built and I may have miscalculated a little bit. Oops.

Mind you the space is cleaner, I did regain open floor space, and I managed to get 95% of what I needed put up and away onto it. I have several hours of fine tuning to do to it all though. I’m not certain that how I have things arranged are the best they could be. I knew going in I just had to block stuff out and then revisit to clean up, and optimize the space. The hard part is done. Fine tuning can happen over the preceding weeks or months. I’m not too concerned.

I would like to reorganize my wood selections a bit better too. That’s a heavy job with a lot of lifting, so I need to think that through first, as I don’t wish to brute force it, and wind up doing it three or four times before I get it right.

I managed to cut down all of the cardboard into manageable pieces that the recycling guys will take away. I need to fill a garbage back with dust & debris to go out next week too. So after all is said and done the shop is a little cleaner, and I need to find a way to store a few more long tools, and I’m all set. Nice.

It was a big task to undertake, and I’m glad that the bulk of the job is done. Fine tuning in a semi heated shop should be a far more pleasant experience moving forward. I have my larger heater, and fuel, and batteries now. Ready to heat the space to a more reasonable temperature. The old wreck of a rack was torn down, and is no longer an eyesore to look at every time I go into the garage. I swept the floors that hadn’t been touched in more than a decade. And I have open air space above my work bench for longer pieces of wood to not snag, and I have more open floor to walk around in too. It does come with the drawback of being different, and requiring a better storage/wood management system, but I’m good with positive changes like that. If I need to purge a little bit more, so be it! Once I get those off cuts up north to be burned it will feel like a whole new maximized space to work in! Glorious. And a long time coming too.

I thought that it would for sure take me until April to start this project, and here I am, not even March yet, and I can start the fine tuning portion. Amazing! Really — it is. I hate having a big project on my mind weighing down on my shoulders. Get into it, make some headway. It doesn’t have to be CO.pleted in a day, but if you put in the hours, you will get someplace better. And for me, that was replacing those wonky donkey wooden racks. They were so unsafe. So very unsafe. I trusted them well beyond what I should have. So unbelievably unsafe to work around, under, or on. Yikes. But not anymore! I’ll take a picture once I get things sorted out a bit more.

Ciao Bella!

So much snow to deal with, and a lot of work to go along with it. Thankfully I was only away for a weeks worth of time (roughly speaking) so I’m not entirely buried under work like we are all this snow. But don’t forget about the cold! Oh yeah , while we were acclimating to sunny weather in the low thirties, we came home to freezing temperatures close to minus twenty, that’s fifty degrees of change. Too much! That is too large a temperature variance for the human body to enjoy. One day I’m slathered in sun screen trying not to dehydrate, the next I just can’t stay warm enough to shovel sixteen plus inches of snow off my front walkway. It’s nuts.

So we will either get more snow next week as we get closer to March, and the first day of spring, or it will begin to rain, and flood the streets like crazy, then freeze each night locking us in deep-deep inches of ice. Canadian weather is not for the weak of heart. All that shoveling, and ice picking will do you in if you aren’t in half way decent shape. It’s my nightmare.

Made it to Friday morning. Even with all of our flight troubles, the delays, the push backs, the missing grounds crew, the medical emergency call, the turbulence, the extremely late landing time, we made it home safe and sound, with our plane right side up, and not engulfed in flames. I’m not a nervous flyer but this weeks deluge of fires, crashes, and flips, and major turbulence episodes made me stop & think once or twice about stepping onto an airplane ever again.

I don’t know if it’s knock on effects from Covid brain damages, or under staffing, or a lax maintenance schedule but these planes be dropping in numbers recently, and the old adage of air travel being safer than cars is starting to look, and feel, out dated. Could be that with phones we are just seeing more of the whoopsie daisies on social media, but I have seen a lot these last couple days. Like a lot, a lot. You know what I mean? Could just be people capitalizing on the algorithms by posting old plane fires, crashes, bird strikes, and open doors mid flight to make money off of it all. I don’t know. I’m just seeing a lot of it on my feeds lately. Fun times. Doom scrolling indeed.

But now we are back on Terra Firma with a few projects to complete, and various social things to do this weekend. Rock climbing, belt testing, three birthdays at one bash! And whatever else happens on Sunday.

Oh yeah , I saw the Canada vs USA hockey game last night. The Four Nations finals with the NHL. It was a doozey! We won, with an overtime goal by Connor McDavid #97 himself. It was an epic way to counter their loss to the US a game or two ago. BAM! How do you like them apples, Boston!

Snow, so much damn snow it feels claustrophobic. Piles up past my hips. Chest high banks lining the streets. Fifteen footers in the parking lots, and behind my kids school. It’s everywhere with more on the way. Yuck.

Got home just after five am with little to no traffic on the road out of the airport, big props to my brother in law for grabbing us at such an ungodly hour. Delays upon delays pushed us well back into the wee morning hours. Then the oldest smoke detector we have chose last night to have a meltdown. Lovely. I woke up around 7:30am in a panic for some reason. Oh I don’t know, lots of plane crashes lately, and a roof top landing the day before we were set to leave.

It’s cold as all balls here, and yesterday we were fighting off sun burns in 85°F weather off the coast of Key Largo in some modest waves. Made me feel rather ill. But that’s ocean side baby! We got some fishing in, along with visiting smaller keys, and drinking. Had a manatee encounter which was most excellent. Saw three dolphins in the bay, and then saw two more much smaller manatees in the canals. Yay!

I’m exhausted, and I still have alot of work to do. The kids were a mess in the airport last night/this morning so no school for them today. I have had some time to shovel the back patio, and widen our front walk path, and clear around the garage & car. Still have loads to do on that front also. I pray we get no more snow for a few weeks atleast. My back & shoulders need a reprieve from this most recent dumping.

Pretty sure it is Wednesday right now, but I might have lost a day somewhere in transit. Pretty turbulent flight last night too, though not the worst one I’ve experienced. Thankfully. Anywho, back to work after I finish my lunch.

Flight delayed nearly three hours, no gate grounds crew when we land, somebody called medical so we can not deplane until further notice. It is now ten to four am. This is fucked. Exhausted.

Nuf said.