I did have the chance to look over my year in review thanks to WordPress. I wrote 390 posts over the last year, and didn’t do too shabby in the word count either. Not the 200,000 of my most successful year ever, but not a sorry state of affairs either. Nice!
Now we look forward into the new year, and I still have to take down the tree, and potentially the outside lights too. Though, January can be pretty blah, so maybe a few lights would be welcome? Depends on the weather and my coming schedule.
I know I’ve written more than 1,000 posts here on this blog in the last several years, 750 of them in one long block in fact. But, I am always amazed at what a random selection get traction way after the fact. I don’t know if there are bot swarms that get flagged to certain posts once it reaches a certain threshold for likes or views, but every so often a couple will take off and those counters wind up by a hundred or so over night. Rather odd if you ask me. I can’t control it, nor harness it to wield ad dollars so I typically don’t much care about it.
I also don’t recognize some posts because I have written so many, I can’t keep track. Not saying I’m bipolar or schizophrenic but… I don’t recall putting pen to paper for some of these posts from years ago. Even once I read them they don’t ring any bells. I write posts like I write tests & exams I guess, get it all out and then promptly forget all about it.
Today is my dad’s 75th birthday. It is Wednesday January 3rd, 2024. Yesterday was my wife’s grandmother’s birthday and she turned 96. Wow. What an age to reach. It’s a terrible shame that the Covid she caught accelerated her dementia to the point of requiring round the clock care at an LTC. Fire cracker of a woman.
The winter break is winding down, and soon I’ll need to take the tree down, and also take down some of the exterior lights too. Oh that’s going to be cold! Yuck. Have a great day. Ciao Bella!
It isn’t Christmas break until we hit up the Go Kart race track for a mini Grand Prix. 5 minutes of time trials to warm up on the track, which determines our position in the race itself. I won Pol position with the tightest lap, and then I proceeded to maintain the lead, and lap just about everyone during the 20 minutes of our race. I took the training I had with Karbon during our race day at the outdoor track ten years ago, and applied those skills here to do some serious damage. Though I did not ultimately wind up with THE best lap time, I was consistently fast and never gave up my #1 position. A holiday tradition we’ve had for nearly a decade now. Mind you the Covid shut down kept us away in 2020 & 2021, and a timing schedule conflict interrupted 2022, it’s been a great family outing. I think my being heavier helped with traction. Also racing smarter, and judicious use of the breaks on the hair pins and maintaining a decent line through the track helped me out this time. I am by no means an expert, nor much of a racer, but I pulled out the WIN this time around. Yeah – buddy!
Pre race photo op.Immediately after taking the win!Proof of my win.One brother & one nephew.
Though she waits inside the Parkview LTC in Whitchurch-Stouffville slowly succumbing to dementia, some days when she is lucid and pain free you can tell what an extraordinary life she has led. From pet bears, bookie murder/suicides, forest fires up in the Sault Ste. Marie where they paddled their belonging out on a canoe into the centre of the lake to weather the fire storm as a family, and an education in a train car, to nursing at U of T, and farming as a part of the Reesor clan in Markham. The woman has done lots and deserves a well cared for rest. Happy 96th Birthday.
And now I’m up and about just after 8:00am and the house is very, very quiet. Didn’t drink anything yesterday other than water, Gatorade, and a Coke. Decided against getting blotto for the big year end finale. Thought it would serve me better to be bright eyed and bushy tailed for the morning. Sorted laundry and cleaned up a bit around here. My jacket stinks to high heaven of smoke & ash. That should be fun to wear for the next few days as we wind down the Christmas break. In true fashion I had an upset stomach while the family did fireworks, so that’s the same as always.
Welcome to 2024. Today is Monday. This is the last week of winter break, so time to make the best of whatever you have going on at the moment. We ended the year by clearing out junk that had been sat going mouldy and rotten. Having an enormous fire that I’m certain you could have tanned beside, as it put out so much light & heat. Flames don’t put out UV light though, as far as I know. I’d have to look that up. I know welding arcs are so bright and hot they can tan/burn skin from exposure. I’m getting off track. We cleaned up, and did some much needed juggling of resources/space to make our lives better. It’s worth the time and effort is all I’m saying. I’m sore in the shoulders and back. My coat smells like smoke, and I burned a hole in the sleeve of my jacket. But it’s all worth the hassle. I cleaned the burn pit, and the shop, and the laneway of debris and leaves. I feel better about it all.
Do I have any words of wisdom for 2024? No, not really. Try not to be too hard on yourself, but do take responsibility for your words/actions. Plan ahead even just the tiniest bit and you might save yourself some trouble. It’s not masculine to forget your wife on holidays and birthdays. That’s just a dick move, don’t do that shit. If they forget about yours then perhaps it’s time to move on – yeah? Common sense stuff like that should get brought up every four to six months so that we can all realign and get right with ourselves. It’s easy to drift off the line and get out into the weeds a bit. Shake it loose and adjust yourselves accordingly.
But I’m not a prophet or guru, I don’t have any answers that you couldn’t find without a quick google search or an encyclopedia. I remember Encarta, the cd rom disc, it used to have audio clips of composers I would listen too because we didn’t have the internet in my youth and actual CD’s were rare and very expensive, and I could hear 20-30 seconds of In The Hall of the Mountain King whenever I wanted thanks to that CD rom disc of Encarta. Memories.
**Answer to my question, a bon fire foes not emit enough UV light as it is primarily in the visible light spectrum. A welding arc however does emit high levels of UV light radiation and will tan you to leather, burns, and/or skin cancer if you don’t wear appropriate PPE when welding.**
It gets addictive. Old mouldy floor boards, trim, tongue & groove pine wainscoting, ash logs, bed frames and whatever else needed to go. A couple rotten roof trusses even made it into the mix. Once I got the fire really going, and there was a healthy bed of coals we were able to incinerate just about anything. I had the fire running for two days straight. Several busted up pallets got sent to their doom in the fire pit too. I went scouring through the trees for downed limbs, and brush to clear the ground around the fire pit. It’s a shame the leaves are so water logged as we could have lit up the heavens by burning those too. Whoosh! As it was much of the burnable stuff was wet and/or damp and pretty smoky. Glad we don’t have particularly close neighbours. November and December are great months for long burns as there are no bugs to contend with.
If I had my way we’d have made it a full blaze and cleared up ALL of the cut off wood bits, and building junk on the property, but as it was I cleaned up the burn pit pretty well myself by rolling various logs into the flames and coals for a long slow burn. I should take a shovel over there to flatten out the ash/sand pile so that you can stack piles in the centre once again. Right now the centre is a massive mound of old ash, sand and soil. It stands about four feet high, and probably 10 or twelve feet wide in diameter. Not that I want to shovel all that by hand, but it should get knocked down at some point. Preferably when there are no bugs down in that low rock lined pit by the tree line. Come summer it gets brutal down there for all kinds of creepy crawlers.
It is Sunday December 31st, 2023. Last day of the current year. No big plans to do much of anything today. Except laundry. Always have to do laundry. Can never escape it. I imagine we will find some fireworks to watch on tv from the comfort of our own home. No walking, no driving, or finding parking spots in a crowded lot loaded with children. Tantrums and rain, delays and late starts, aching legs, and sore feet. We’ll give all that a miss this year.
No resolutions for the coming year. Other than I intend to make exercise a stronger personal habit and a part of every week. I haven’t thought much about doing a new reading challenge this coming year. I think I’ll read whatever takes my fancy as I find it. No pressure to read a set number. I’d like to find the time to sculpt more, and/or do some wood working. I was working on a pine bed, so I didn’t totally slack off in the shop this year!
Well, the 24 hour burn, became a 48 hour burn, is now close to a 72 hour burn. Roof trusses, old beds, and all manner of other junk was fed into the belly of the beast. It ain’t pretty, but she sure is a roaster. Burned a hole in my coat while I was at it.
About forgetting where your locker is, what’s the combination to the lock? Where is the classroom for my next class? What course am I taking? Is it a test today? Argh. Twenty years it’s been since i was last in any sort of school and i still have these anxiety dreams. Fun, fun, fun.
Had a slight dusting of snow, and now the temperatures are dropping down to mi us ten. Brr. Chilly.
Wasn’t that a Guns n’ Roses power ballad? Or maybe I have that title wrong. All I do know is, we are mere hours from January, it’s 6°C, and raining with no hint of snow or ice on the ground. It’s weird. It’s not right at all. It used to be we’d hit the Winter Solstice and the cool temperatures would drop to cold, colder, coldest I’d ever felt. Now we’ll get two weeks into a mild hear wave in January before it kicks over with a punch, and nearly 18 inches of snow at once. It’s not right.
Pretty sure today is Friday. The first week of winter holidays is drawing to a close. Most of the family gatherings are done. And now we have one full week to chill out and get the kids school work done. Book reports are a thing once more! I have not yet found the time to watch any of the three films I was gifted for Christmas. Mind you, TMNT Mutant Mayhem is one I saw in theaters, so I’m ok if I wait longer on that particular one. But I would like to see Oppenheimer and The Creator at some point soon-ish. Although I did recently find the time to watch Ricky Gervais’ new offering on Netflix, Armageddon. It was ok. A big like Super Nature, and Humanity. I find him less and less funny, but I did enjoy After Life and Derek quite a bit. Aging, tastes and all that. I’m a complex creature.
Enjoy your weekend, it is fast approaching. Ciao Bella!
Apparently I forgot which direction the winter tires rotate, so had to spend an hour swapping them all left for right. Took me about 55 minutes, so not all bad. Had to torque them all back down again, but luckily in the short time since I put them on, one: we haven’t driven very far, and two: the lug nuts hadn’t had a chance to seize with ice, salt & rust build up on the threads. Lucky me! I’ll need to double check the van too. I thought a tire was a tire, I didn’t pay any attention to the tread pattern. Idiot move apparently. Ha. Live and learn. Atleast it was 6°C, and only drizzling, otherwise it could have been way worse.
Going to start putting the skating rink together tomorrow with my inlaws. It’ll either be 90 minutes, or an all day affair. There is no inbetween. From what I can tell we need to remove all leaves, stake out the boards, and unfurl the plastic tarp. Mind you we’ll need the bobcat to carry down all the boards, stakes and the tarp itself. A 1/3 size hockey rink tarp isn’t all that light. I think it’s a 2mm or 3mm plastic. That adds up over that kind of square footage. I expect a whole lot of leaning over, bending, swinging of hammers, and dragging things around. I also don’t know if the pile of sand has been graded yet in preparation for the winter season. So that could add more time to the project.
I for one will spend several hours soaking in the hot tub to ease my back. Today’s tires shenanigans were poorly timed on my part. But the car needed an oil change, and that’s when it came to my attention. Thank the lord for my 3 ton jack, and axle stands. One more use of my impact wrench. 1150 foot pounds of torque to the rescue! That and a 24 inch breaker bar.
Not that it feels that way, but yes, yes it is. Some companies are back to work for three days as of today, and some companies just shut down entirely until January, and it can feel alot like a lottery when it comes to discovering which is which if you’re a subcontracted freelancer. I’m (usually) never far from my office incase a surprise brief comes my way looking for a quote or to start some new retail signage. I work blind for massive portions of the year. By that I mean I don’t always get a notification of what is coming down the line in the coming weeks or months, and just work on what I’ve got, when I get it. One of my clients has research projects booked months in advance, so through them I get a rough idea of what’s coming, and I can plan for those projects. Other clients hit me up as they need me, whenever that may be. I’m fine with both. I usually expect Jan/Feb to be slower anyway. This time last year was an anomaly, I think. We will have to wait & see.
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 
You must be logged in to post a comment.