A quick trip by pic (lots of pics)

We spent the first nine days of this month south of the border, in Washington and Oregon, where we got to experience our first U.S. 4th of July. Never saw so many flags as in some of the small towns we drove through.

Here are some pics:










Leaving Victoria on a beautiful morning on the Coho ferry to Port Angeles

















View of downtown Seattle from the Space Needle
Then, on to a boat tour of Elliot Bay with various Seattle landmarks pointed out:


























The very first Starbucks:




















We found snow on Mount Rainier, but it was still warm--about 70 degrees.

















Fireworks at Fort Dent on the 4th














Glass art at Tacoma














It was cloudy in Portland











Lincoln City on the Oregon coast--also where we found a decent outlet mall, to my daughter's delight. (no sales tax in Oregon)













Looking down on the Columbia River













The State Senate in Olympia, Washington. I was surprised to discover we could walk in and wander, even look into the Senate chamber, or go up into the viewing gallery in the Senate or the House--nobody even checked us for bombs or weapons...








Vietnam memorial at the State Capitol--they had something for each war, but I found this one somehow more... powerful than the others.





There were lots of other things, and I've posted a ton of pics on facebook if you're on it you can check. I may post some on my photobucket eventually--there's info elsewhere in past blog posts as to how you can access that.

One annoyance is the exchange rate--it was about 85 1/2 cents when we got home and now, a bit over two weeks later, our dollar has jumped to 92 1/2 against the U.S. buck.

Stupid fluctuations.

The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Bouncer

Hi kid--just slide that table over and there should be room, oh, watch for that lamp. Sorry, it's a bit of a small office.

So what's in your future plans? Bouncer? As in the guy at the bar? Oh, clubs, right. Okay, I think it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

First of all, how many hours you figure you spend in the gym? Per week? Oh, per day--well, that should be fine. You'll keep up that bodybuilding regime, and of course, resist the urge to use steroids... What? Oh, no, I didn't laugh. I just had a sneeze that didn't come out right. Oh, and you might want to get a little Oxy or something for that acne outbreak--it helps for bouncers to look their best, at least at the trendier nightspots.

You'll probably wait until after you graduate high school to get started; after all, you're underage and it's also tough to fit in late nights when the football coach has you guys on the field most mornings by 6:30.

You may not wait until you make drinking age to try out the gig--there are other places you can be the intimidating hulk. For instance, there are those weekend all-ages concerts and shows, plus there's a couple of fast food places downtown who need people to glower at the street kids who tarry too long over their small coffee.

Tarry? Oh, it means to wait, hang around.

You'll try to get hired with fake ID but the types of nightclubs you want are pretty careful; most have had jerky but connected patrons threaten legal action from time to time, and they cover their backsides by taking care of small details. Once you are of age, though, you'll be more than physically up to the challenge; the endless days of weight training will see to that.

You'll be taken under the wing of some guy whose nose looks like it's been broken a few times, and likes to occasionally pull out his fake front teeth and drop them into your beer when you're not looking. He kind of reminds you of a taller version of that bounty hunter guy on t.v.

You make a few mistakes as you learn the tricks of the bouncer game. For starters, like most, you're too eager to prove yourself, whereas a more seasoned bouncer remembers the goal is always to defuse the situation, rather than "laying the smack down".

Eventually you're proficient enough... pardon? Oh, it means "good". Anyway, you get good enough to be left in charge of the line out front. You do the regular door security shtick--let in the guys who've got the cash to buy lots of drinks, and the cute girls they'll want to buy drinks for, even if it means you don't examine some questionable ID's very well. Meanwhile, block every young guy who doesn't look like he can afford to buy a round, or like he'll be jealous and make trouble when his girlfriend gets a little wasted and starts grinding with her coke dealer on the dance floor.

You'll develop a sort of crude charm that goes with your bouncer persona, letting the prettier girls snort lines off your biceps, or making your tattoos dance as you flex before a giggling audience.

The downside is that you always have to maintain. Got the flu? Still got to get to the gym. Want to take a holiday--make sure the hotel has a fitness studio so you can put your hours in. If you don't you'll lose the main tool of your trade--your intimidating physique.

In time, you become more and more aware of the social hierarchy of the club, and you're lower on the ladder than you'd expected to be. No doubt the regular club girls will be more than happy to take you home once in a while, but anyone who's got enough going for her to be worth considering as relationship material, only sees you as... something less. You'll be surprised how hurt you get when they don't call after, or you realize the number they gave you is fake.

The guys with the Porsches and the Rolex watches are the ones who the girls really want to go home with, and you begin getting to know them better; soon you're getting extra jobs providing security for their private parties. Then, one night you're asked to go along as muscle by one of the drug dealers who frequents your club; he hands you a gun to stick in the waistband of your pants before you get in his car and he drives you to some seedy warehouse.

You look suitably menacing, and everything goes down without a problem. You go home with a week's worth of pay in your pocket, and the order to forget everything you saw, if you know what's good for you.

The next weekend, the same dealer comes up to you and says you can earn twice as much if you're interested. Thinking it's a repeat of your earlier duties you agree, but instead he drives you to an abandoned farmhouse where several other dealers are waiting--each with his own "champion". Seems these criminals have grown bored of dogfights, and have graduated to people--you don't want to back down so you end up in a free-for-all.

Adrenalin and the many hours of physical training come to your rescue; soon it's down to just you and Greg, your old mentor. As you go in to grab him in a choke hold, he steps aside and brings his right fist up against your temple--you're knocked down and nearly unconscious. You glance up and your blurry vision still spots the roll of quarters in his hand--cheating, in your mind.

As you pull yourself up on the open BMW trunk--the dealers had a bar set up in it--you hear his taunts, mocking you, calling you his "bitch". In a blind rage, you reach into the trunk and grab the tire iron, and swing it wildly, and manage to connect. Greg goes down in a heap, and one of the dealers checks him and announces he's dead.

Your "sponsor" gets into a heated discussion with the dealer who brought Greg to the fight, but it's over who won the pot of money, not about the fact that a man is lying dead at their feet. They agree to split the cash and they all head for their cars. When you try to join your dealer friend, he pulls a gun and motions you away. Seems as a murderer, you're too much of a liability to help now.

Fortunately, as you watch them all vanish in a cloud of dust, you realize Greg's beat up Toyota is still waiting nearby, and after you fish the keys from his pocket, you struggle to stuff him in the trunk.

You drive the car to the edge of a cliff, stuff Greg in the driver's seat, empty a couple of beer cans you found in the trunk on him, and push him and the car over the embankment--there's a loud crash but no explosion.

It only takes them a couple of days to charge you; you were in such a panic you didn't even think to wipe your fingerprints off the car.

On the bright side, you'll have lots of time to pump iron in prison.

Testing, testing

Is this thing on?

Last post: June 25. last post the "other place": May 24. Blogger is becoming a ghost town. And yet somehow Twitter thrives?

Blogging, which can actually require some thought, perhaps a basic understanding of how to form a sentence, versus "I so haate my new nail polish, omg" and twenty other lines of equal import.

What's wrong with everyone?

another year older, don't know about the wiser, though

Not writing much on the 'net any more. Was out for a drink with a colleague last week and discovered she'd had a piece of writing she entered in a CBC contest get her past the first round and into the semi finals or something.

I read it; it was pretty good--they had to make them very short. We talked about writing, and why it is that we might keep something like an interest in writing rather secret.

Perhaps it's a little because of another colleague we watched inflict her creativity on every event in our building and every gathering and to celebrate every milestone. It's a bit like someone who thinks you like their baking because you once complimented something and now they constantly offer it, though you don't really want it.

We don't want to become that person.

It's my birthday today. Nothing major planned; we did our family dinner out last night, our larger family stuff on father's day last weekend. Tonight we're off to son's award ceremony--don't know what he's getting, though.

Got a nice t-shirt, some cards and a nice birthday cake from my four main booth kids today. I will miss them; they're all made it clear they want to stay in touch and come by lots. It's a nice sentiment.

Sadly, we all move along and we don't keep up with those who once were important. I realize that when I go back to my home town for the occasional visit, or look back sadly on those I once thought close friends who've drifted away.

Fortunately, life seems to bring new and interesting people along all the time.

Grad 09 - From Friday evening

There's a tradition at our school that during the graduation ceremony the grad class sings a song. For many years it was a lame but somewhat cute butchering of something like "Stand By Me" or the theme from Cheers.

Last year the grads had a small musical ensemble who played instruments and actually prepared a song--theirs was a cut above what came before.

This year's grad class, while maybe not the stellar crew we said goodbye to in '08, probably can claim an even better song; it was a nice moment in a rather ordinary ceremony (apologies for the video quality--it was just my digitial "still" camera):





If you want to see some photos from Friday--the ceremony--or the dinner/dance last night, you can to photobucket:
http://s11.photobucket.com/albums/a152/jpurple/22-Grad%202009/
The two albums can be accessed on the left. The password is my first name and my last name all spelled as one word.

For those who need a little motivation right now...

...40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes. Brilliant!

not dead yet

...but still haven't been posting much.

My wife and I were watching something this evening on a Detroit station; along the bottom of the screen was scrolling a list of schools closed for the next week--one or two even longer. It's all because of the swine flu scare. Many of these schools don't have a single case of the flu, but are closing for precautionary reasons or precautionary cleaning.

It's getting ridiculous. Last I heard the only fatality in Canada or the U.S. was a boy who'd come to the U.S. from Mexico for treatment. While that's a tragic event, it pales in comparison to thousands killed by "regular" flu each year and by other diseases.

The media is having a field day with this and I wonder if they've crossed the line into irresponsible and perhaps dangerous behaviour.

My student teacher finished her practicum last week, so tomorrow I have all my classes back. Wouldn't you know it; my dad's doctor's office calls and it's tomorrow morning they need him in to get hooked up to the 24-hour heart monitor thing and my wife's working so she can't take him (it would be probably a 50+ dollar cab ride each way and last time he ordered a cab for an appointment he booked it the night before and it never showed up) so I've got to try to get him there and hope he can get a cab home.

My son badly sprained his ankle yesterday so I have to drop him at school an hour early on my way to get my dad.

If this stuff had happened at ANY TIME IN THE LAST 12 WEEKS my student teacher could have covered things and I could've helped make it all work.

Figures.

Now a few pics from this afternoon:















I liked the flags blowing in this one; interesting that there are two of each--Canada, U.S & British Columbia. It was taken down by the cruise ship terminal

















These two are what got us there--we were out taking my in-laws for a Sunday drive and saw the submarine strapped onto the freighter.
















I have some pics of my student teacher taken with some of the students on her last day I might post elsewhere. Sorry I've sucked at posting lately, for any who might have been checking at all.

What's eating up my time right now? Playoff hockey. As a Canucks fan it's been a couple of years since I've had the pleasure of seeing my team in the postseason. As of this afternoon, Vancouver's up 2-0 in the series, but in about 2 and a half hours they play game 3 in front of the St. Louis home crowd so it should be tougher for them to get a win today.

Here's a couple of commercials from the Boston Bruins--I like both the clips and the fact that the Bruins have won the first two games of their series with Montreal:

The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Plumber (version 2)

Hi kid--what line of work you see in your future? Plumbing? I guess I can tap into a few ideas on that one. Get it? Tap? Meh, I guess if you don't have a sense of humor working by yourself all the time is probably a good plan.

You'll need to go work at one of those plumbing supply places--you could even start now if they're hiring--so you can learn the names of all the various connectors and tools you'll be using when you start your career. Best thing is to chat up the customers; it's how you'll eventually find somebody to take you on as an apprentice.

You'll do fine on the apprenticeship, but the down side will be driving around all day in a stinky van with a your boss who has moved into the vehicle while he and his wife sort out their divorce. Once you have your journeyman papers you'll take your meager savings and buy the tools you need to go into business for yourself.

Your first few months will be slow, but your willingness to take on any job, no matter how small, and your readiness to go out to calls at all hours of the night soon has people passing your business cards along to friends. Word of mouth is augmented by cheap ads in neighborhood newsletters and paying kids to slip flyers into mailboxes.

Eventually you get your van paid off and when you find out your girlfriend is pregnant, you figure you've got enough to make the down payment on a decent house and the two of you move in together. Two years later you're married and your second child is on the way. You've come to realize that you need to work longer and later to pay the bills for your growing family.

The moment that everything changes seems so innocuous at first. You advertise your "call any time--day or night" in bold type in your yellow pages ad, so you're used to calls coming after midnight. This one is from a worried housewife who explains she needs you to come fix a backed-up toilet, and an hour later you're at her home.

She explains that her child is beside herself since the little girl's favorite stuffed animal was accidentally flushed down the toilet. She knows the toy may be a little damaged, but pleads with you to be as careful as you can as you try to retrieve the lost treasure.

You explain the difficult of her request, but you also take great pride in your skill in this sort of situation, and soon you're pulling the offending item from the commode--but it's not a child's toy at all. As you turn to question the harried mom, she's gone and a burly biker type is standing in the doorway, brandishing a tire iron. You look more closely at the package in your hand and realize you've just retrieved a drug stash that must have been flushed.

You nervously surrender the package, which is inspected by the biker, who then favors you with a gold-toothed grin and slaps five hundred dollars into your hand. "Just forget you ever came here" he warns, and you're happy to do just that, but it seems he forgets his own advice.

Three months later you get another late call, but this time you're just told an address and there's a different biker who explains he's heard you're good with this particular problem. You again are successful, and this time you get seven hundred bucks for your trouble.

It's a more common situation than you'd ever have guessed. When drug dealers see cops pulling up outside, there aren't many options available to them, so the toilet flush is a clichéd but often successful act of desperation.

Some of the bigger players eventually start calling you for more legitimate plumbing assignments--they want a new wing on their luxury drug-bought home and you're already trusted so you get the job. You wake up one day and realize that more than half your income is coming from felons, and it worries you.

You become paranoid; you think your home is being watched, or you're being tailed when you drive around town. Your wife gets annoyed as you refuse to go out and spend your ill-gotten gains, preferring instead to hide away in your home with the curtains all drawn.

A month or so after your wife leaves you, taking your two kids with her, one of your worst fears comes true. One of the drug lords you've worked for had an undercover cop infiltrated into his inner circle, and the narc passed your name along to the investigation team. They take you downtown and leave you to sweat in an interrogation room for an hour before they come in and confront you with enough evidence to put you away for a couple years.

You're easily intimidated into agreeing to wear a wire and being part of a large scale drug offensive. You help the team by first suggesting a new protocol that includes shutting off the water to homes before they are raided, which makes it tougher to flush evidence--one tank just doesn't do it, you explain--and your wire records the evidence of those who do manage to successfully get rid of their stash only to call you for your retrieval expertise afterwards.

When the arrests are made and the indictments handed out, you're put under protective surveillance. It's not as simple as your police handlers had suggested; some of the major drug players have powerful connections in various levels of government, and these forces begin working behind the scenes to create problems for you.

They're unable to do anything to break your agreement with the cops--your testimony for immunity on the drug charges--but in an ironic twist, the powerful allies of the crime lords use the same trick the feds used decades ago on Al Capone; they go after you for back taxes.

Seems you weren't very accurate in reporting your extra income from your criminal friends, and a forensic audit easily uncovers several years of tax cheating. Your immunity from drug prosecution doesn't protect you from the tax rap and a few months after your former friends begin serving their sentences, you too find yourself behind bars--not a great situation for a known "rat".

Bad career memories won't be the only reason you avoid the communal bathrooms as you try to live out your sentence.


(I realized shortly after I began this that I'd already done a plumbing CCC post a long time ago, but I like this one better, so I think I'll replace that one.)

Schools Without Failure

Type this into google and you'll get several thousand hits. I went to an all-day workshop, or more accurately, a presentation yesterday about this topic.

It was a guy probably ten years younger than me explaining his school's approach to improving passing/graduation rates. It reminded me of the optimistic innovations I was involved with back in the early 90s. Ultimately, the lack of seniority of myself and some other teachers in our team destroyed a program as we were bumped by senior teachers who didn't care about the program.

I moved on and focused on theatre/drama and later turned down an opportunity to go back to a program I'd spent three years and $25 thousand in grant money helping to build. I never really looked back or regretted it; the program was dead a year or two later. The folks who'd built it were mostly gone and the others didn't want to put in the extra work needed to really establish it.

It was fun at the time, though. The kids in our pilot classes loved our integrated studies program. We started with two classes of grade 8s, and kept them together for English, Socials, Science, Math and Computer studies. The following year we added a Drama/P.E block as well. We took kids of all types, not just high achievers like some programs, or "at risk" ones like others. Our test and satisfaction survey results with parents, students and staff were better than both the "regular" program and the french immersion program.

I went to other districts to give workshops about our program, about using Drama to teach Social Studies, and how to adapt time tables to improve learning. We had groups from as far as Arizona come to visit and see our program. We were videotaped for a ministry of education production (it's weird to be wandering over to help a kid in a computer class while a bright spotlight, camera and boom microphone follows you) which I still have a copy of somewhere--I should post a clip of a much younger me with moustache and one of those narrow, square-bottomed wool ties that scream 80s now, just for a laugh.

I got to go to conferences in places like Phoenix and Tahoe to meet some of the big names in educational innovation and get their advice on what we should do next.

Then it ended. After I got bumped to a different school I joined a district working group on innovation, and later did some contract work and gave workshops on curriculum and such, but I found that I was losing interest in trying to push against the intertia of the whole system and instead I wanted to do the best things I could for my own students in my own classroom.

Meanwhile, the province moved more and more to the right, ditching most of the initiatives of the early 90s and instead focusing more and more on standardized testing and returning to the "basics" as they are fondly (but often inaccurately) remembered by rednecks everywhere.

So I was reluctant to go to this workshop yesterday. Been there, tried it, I thought. That said, I was pleasantly surprised. This was not some egotistical prophet trying to sell his book, but rather a very committed, sincere teacher working at a school that's trying to do things differently.

No "zeros", don't mark homework, no penalizing for late work. It felt like my teacher's soul rebelled at the very idea of such things, but when you worked through what he means by that, and how they are actually making kids be more accountable, there are many very good points that made me pause.

Perhaps we older dogs should stop and glance at the tricks a little more before we dismiss them. Maybe I'll try to explain it more at some point if anyone's interested.

Is this appropriate?

Cause I'm wondering:

I'm used to the little survey cards we all have seen at restaurants--the kind that ask you how the service was. Some places go further; they have a web link and maybe an ID number on the receipt and ask you to go to their site and answer a few questions to be entered online for a draw to win something, or maybe you get a coupon for a free appetizer next time...

A few days ago I get a survey in the mail from JD Power & associates; they're one of those survey companies like Ipsos Reid and others. It's a rather in-depth survey of my customer satisfaction with the funeral home we dealt with last month when my mom died.

Really? This is appropriate now? All that was missing was "all those who fill this out will be entered in a draw for a free headstone!"

Am I right in thinking this is kind of off base?

The Common Touch

I was driving home listening to the radio a few days ago and heard an open line host tossing out the question "Should Obama have appeared on the Leno show?" I hadn't even known he was going on, which isn't surprising considering how little we watch t.v. around here.

Apparently, the only thing sort of controversial that transpired was a gaffe when he self-deprecatingly compared his bowling scores to what someone from the Special Olympics might achieve.

I thought about it--I don't see anything terribly wrong with him being on the show, and I'd suggest that the previous administration's avoidance of such situations probably stemmed more from their fear of Bush's potential to misspeak when unscripted rather than from any greater respect for the dignity of the office.

In Canada, there's less of a mystique about our top office--probably because of the televised mayhem that is parliament. All three of at least the last three prime ministers have appeared--I think--on a sketch comedy show "This Hour Has 22 Minutes". The title is a spoof on an old television newsmagazine from back in the early 60s called "This Hour Has Seven Days". The fact that most of their target audience would have no memory of the original doesn't matter; they try to keep it geared, though, to those who are at least somewhat politically aware.

Opposition leaders have also appeared on the show as well. Usually it's in a rather harmless, self-deprecating cameo role.

Some have pointed out that Obama's not the first president to appear on this type of show--both Kennedy and Nixon appeared on the Jack Paar show in 1960. There was a difference, though. They both appeared during the campaign; neither was in office at the time.

Also, while Johnny Carson was the successor to Jack Paar's time slot, it's wrong to assume the shows are two flavours of the same thing. Paar's show was more like Dick Cavett than Carson's. He tended to have on newsmakers as much if not more than entertainers, and there was a willingness to spend longer on one interview and get into depth, rather than simply have people making the rounds to plug their latest book or movie.

To get a rather silly illustration of the difference, try to find the spoof of Jack Paar in the "Classic Krusty" reruns on the Simpsons when they showed a black & white program with Krusty smoking and interviewing the head of a major union.

One of the great things about Youtube is that people can access the old Paar and Cavett shows. Looking at those interviews makes the current crop of vaccuous shills just that much harder to take.

Sorry no posts for a long time, but I don't think many read this any more anyway. Now life's a little less busy, I hope to get back to writing more.

The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Motivational Speaker

Hi kid--nice job on that assembly last month. You guys must be pretty popular blowing the money that was supposed to pay for a Valentine's dance on some washed up football player telling kids to stay in school and off drugs. Too bad you couldn't have known he'd get busted the next day for that coke stash.

Really? I thought you'd have been put off the whole motivational speaker thing after that. From what I've seen you up to around the school, I doubt you'll be some druggie hypocrite; no, you'll be much more sincere, and it will go something like this:

You'll join Toastmasters or some other public speaking organization to hone your oratorical skills. You'll watch hours of real motivational speakers on youtube, paying particular attention to the most successful ones like Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra and especially the tragic, poignant yet heartwarming messages of that professor who knew he was terminal with cancer.

You'll start off small--speaking to boy scout troops and 4-H clubs. You won't get paid, but you'll feel you're making a difference. Some suggest maybe you should consider some sort of religious affiliation--churches are one of the few places that people actually will voluntarily sit and listen to someone tell them how to live their lives--but you are clear in your desire to get people to look within themselves for inspiration.

Your career stagnates fairly quickly, and you take a few jobs you don't enjoy just to make ends meet. One of these brings you into contact with an older fellow employee who shares his frustration with you as he plans his wife's funeral. He is an atheist, as was his wife, and he wants to organize some sort of inspiring celebration of her life, but there aren't many agencies offering that alternative.

You sit down and craft your best speech and share it with him at work the next day. His eyes tear up and he breaks down a little as he thanks you and begs you to deliver your talk at his wife's ceremony.

It goes well, and some of the man's friends from his atheist society ask for your card; fortunately you have some left from a more optimistic time in your budding speaking career. It's not long before you're asked to come and participate in another funeral, and after that a wedding. A Jewish couple who've abandoned their faith then call you to help with their daughter's secular alternative to a Bat Mitzvah, and the contacts you make there soon allow you to quit your crappy job and begin your motivational speaking career in earnest.

After a few months you realize you need to take the next step; you want to move from small local events to a broader audience, and to do this you need to go beyond simply being a piece of special celebrations in people's lives. You need to be perceived as having a message that is of such worth that people will want to listen to that message for it's own sake.

The problem is finding an angle. So many of the catch phrases you type into google keep coming up under some already successful speaker's name. So many of the insights and approaches you think of have already been attached to someone else's publications or television programs.

Then it happens. You are approached by a terminally-ill man who wants you to help him prepare his own funeral, and as he helps you prepare this speech which means so much, he gives you some powerful insights about the nature of life and death. The crux of the message you create together is that one should be living life prepared for death--having said the right things to those you love, not leaving those important plans until too late, and seeing the final end of this life as not something to be feared, but as the "next great adventure".

That last phrase irks your atheistic sensibilities a little, but the man explains that while he doesn't embrace any faith group's particular approach to what lies beyond this world, he believes there is too much positive energy in a life well-lived for him to think that some spark, in some way, does not go on afterwards.

You get the chance to deliver this powerful message only a few weeks later, and the effect is immediate. A couple of dozen mourners stay afterward to gush about your profound words, and one of them hands you a card and asks you to drop by her office the next week. She has already made some phone calls by the time you meet with her and she's booked you as workshop speaker at a conference for school counselors. (Not that I'll be anywhere near that kind of snoozefest, you can be sure.)

It goes well, and after a few more such events, your name is out there and it's no surprise when a large high school invites you to come and address their student body. Seems there was a tragic accident when a bus carrying one of their sports teams went off the road and three students were killed.

You come and give your best variation of the message you helped create for your terminally-ill friend. The students are in the right place, emotionally, to listen to you, and you see tears throughout the gymnasium as you scan the crowd to judge the impact of your words. After your talk is over, dozens of emotional kids stay behind to meet you and talk about how your speech touched them. It's a weird feeling for one such as yourself, whose earnestness has put you at odds with so many of your peers here in high school--not to mention the hostility about the whole Valentine's dance fiasco.

There were news cameras at the school assembly, and they stick around to catch footage of tear-streaked faces crowded around you afterwards; it's a powerful image, and it solidifies your status as an up-and-coming motivational speaker. The woman who who booked your first engagements after seeing you at the funeral quietly steps aside as your agent--not without getting a decent "finder's fee"--and a more established talent representative adds you to her stable of speakers.

Soon you're featured at nationwide conferences, but you also make time for high school visits, which pay surprisingly well. Additionally, you're brought in to speak at several colleges, and you cautiously accept a few phone numbers after those speeches from coeds who were deeply impacted by your words. You realize that for your message of balance and wellness to be seen as authentic, you must live a life that avoids excess or scandal.

Things keep going well, for several months, and you're pleased when your agent calls with news that you've been invited to speak on the Oprah show--by this time she's older but after a few "retirements" she keeps coming back to earn larger and larger television contracts.

The bad news, when it comes, is delivered by your agent. She calls you into her office and shows you letters from three different high schools where students who were significantly impacted by your words have committed suicide. More letters and phone calls follow; within two months there are eight deaths which may be linked to your "inspiration".

Oprah's people call and cancel, citing a "scheduling conflict", but by that time the writing is on the wall. News crews begin shadowing you, and more and more engagements are being cancelled. Clips of your speeches are edited together, and out of context your words seem to almost encourage embracing of death as seas of eager high school faces look on.

Emo kids all rush to your defence, which doesn't help your case at all. Not since "pro-ana" sites has the internet created such a youth-oriented controversy. Dark, troubled youth post videos of you speaking on youtube and their myspace pages. Some are featured on sites of kids who then go on to take their own lives.

You become a nationwide target of angry and hurt parents. One tabloid dubs you "Dr. Bye-Bye", in spite of your not having any kind of doctorate or medical training. A late-night talk host jokes that you're as welcome at most schools as Salman Rushdie at the Al-Queda company picnic.

It's an ironic joke, because the next day the FBI comes to you with their concerns about the number of mailed and emailed death threats you've received. They suggest you go into hiding, and they're willing to place you in the witness protection program, but because you're not actually a witness, you'll have to pay for the privilege of disappearing.

You resist, but after two firebombs and several shots through your living room window you agree. You aren't married or even seriously involved with anyone, so your relocation is relatively simple. Because you need a job for your cover story, and you have few other marketable skills, the FBI place you in a job similar to what you hated prior to your speaking career. It doesn't pay well, and you start burning through the savings from your speaking career, at least until they are frozen by the courts as part of the proceedings of a large class action lawsuit by a group of parents of kids who killed themselves. You and the school districts who booked you to speak are named as co-respondents in these very publicized cases, and the media follows with interest, since it is hoped you will surface to face the charges.

Through your lawyer you buy your way out of having to testify by sacrificing what is left of your savings. At that point your financial position becomes almost untenable. The Bureau is still charging you to help keep you safe from those who would gladly go to prison in return for seeing you dead.

When the money pressure becomes almost too much to bear, they approach you with a suggestion: The sad and lonely inmates of the witness protection program need something to give their pathetic fake lives some sort of meaning. You pay for your spot in the program by giving motivational workshops for ex-paramilitary white supremacists and gang snitches.

You wonder how your words impact these isolated souls, but the only hint comes when a semi-sober field agent investigating a break-in at your home mentions cynically that a few suicides in the program just saves the feds a bit of money and trouble.

I guess I won't be seeing you at the reunion--good luck.

next of kin in a facebook age

I won't go into details here; check the other place if you're part of that club.

Just a weird thing that's probably only come up in the last couple of years that happened yesterday. I ended up having to inform a number of people of a death in the family, and had to warn them "don't put anything on facebook" to avoid someone finding out about it that way before we'd had a chance to contact them.

Unfortunately, my son wasn't up yet when I left the house and my daughter didn't pass the message along to him... Luckily by the time he did post something we'd gotten to most of the ones who I was worried about.

Poetry By Dythandra

My Secret Superpower

Despite my revulsion for the corporate,
In a weak moment I acquiesced
To fulfill a parental dream.

My father's office--
Valued only for the hours
It kept him from
Our humble abode.

Now, piercings reduced, makeup subdued
And wardrobe... I can't even describe,
I play the role
Of dutiful office peon.

Apparently one of the perks of Great Central Insurance,
They "take care of their own"--the orientation day mantra
I hurt myself trying to suppress the giggles.

Placement is always a challenge,
Especially when the neophyte gofer
Has so little motivation.

First there was the coffee cart.
Going from one floor to the next
Doling out stale pastries and cheap java.

It was here I first showed my surprising entrepreneurial skill
When a few with finer tastes signed up for my "bonus" service--
(I'd walk across the street and buy them the good espresso.)

That went fine, aside from a few important documents
My clumsiness soaked beyond repair.
Apparently important clients don't like being asked
To sign things twice.

Next came answering phones--that was short-lived.
It seems the CEO's wife doesn't quite agree
That Marilyn Manson makes good on-hold music.

My assumption that freedom would be my next assignment
Was sadly off the mark.

What a collection of screw-ups and sociopaths must have preceded me
To make this nepotistic staffing program
So very tolerant.

Third time proved strangely lucky.
Mail room--I start my day in the basement,
And no one minds if I wear my headphones
While dropping missives on their desks.

My job seemed an archaic throwback
To pre-email days, but it seems
Some companies still like a paper trail.

Then, one fateful day, I forgot to charge my player,
So I am fully alert as I drift between the cubicles, almost invisible.

A claims manager is chatting with an older couple,
The woman quiet, the man demanding his immediate due.
I overhear enough, and pause until they leave.

"Yes?" the manager looks impatient.
Perhaps he was one of my earlier coffee victims.

"Fire claim?" I ask. He nods.
"I bet she started it--did you smell her breath?"

Two things I learned from my father--the smell of booze
And what voids a policy.
The latter only from waiting impatiently for his calls to end
Back when we were saddled with dialup internet.

"Yeah--it was a fire claim. Why do you think she started it?"
I didn't answer right away, but grabbed the policy from his desk.

"Right here," I pointed. "Non-smokers' discount."

"So?"

"Get them back up here and look at the cigarette burns on her jacket yourself.
She drinks, she passes out, her smokes burn things."

His eyes light up. He calls the investigators, gives them the info, and is thrilled,
When they call back to validate my theory.

I have no quarrel with anyone, but I also don't listen to what people say--
Everyone lies.
I observe; the truth is usually right there, easy to see.

I spend two more months there, arriving when my pager calls me,
Observing what isn't said,
Revealing the truth.

Two frauds, one embezzlement and three affairs
Revealed without much work.

Today I was back where I'd vowed to not return,
Flipping burgers. I shrug when anyone asks.

Truth is, I heard a little more about my first 'catch'.
At least now if I overcook the onions,
Nobody wraps their mouth around the barrel of a gun.

I am Nostradamus

My wife and I went on a rare movie date last Friday and saw Gran Torino--if your ears don't tune out too quickly when you hear racial slurs and profanity, I'd definitely recommend it.

I can see a potential tragedy ahead.  Imagine the not-to-distant future--maybe ten years from now.  Video rental stores are all but history; a few folks still order blue ray disks from netflix or something similar.  A couple is glancing over some potential choices:

He: I remember someone at work said there was this movie that was great--named after some old school car.

Her: Hmm, let me see.  Is this it?

He: Yeah, I remember my grandpa had one of those years ago.  Let's order it.

Let's hope the resultant evening doesn't end up in some horrible suicide pact.

After a crappy day

...this was posted by someone and I watched it. It helped make the stress go away.

alas...

Grissom's gone, as of tonight. CSI is one of the few shows my wife and I actually watch with some faithfulness, but with three regulars gone within the past year, that may not be the case much longer.

(And the way my favorite hockey team's been playing lately, I won't be turning to that channel much longer, either.)

In the real world, not much to talk about here--just hanging in until some of the many stress-builders are done with, hopefully soon. The weekend can't come too soon.

The Kid Who Sits Behind You Explains

The Audacity of Hope

So Barack Obama wrote this book and I didn't exactly read it too closely but I figure it's about some chick named "Hope" and I guess she's kind of "audacious" or somethin'--I think that's maybe like "bodacious" which of course means she's probably smokin' hot.

Thing is, it's kind of one of those "symbolic" names and so it must have two meanings. He says some stuff about when he lived in Chicago, so maybe he means that "Chicago Hope" show as well. That was some stupid show my parents used to watch about a hospital so I couldn't watch South Park on the cartoon channel at the same time so I asked to get a t.v. for my birthday but my parents said I should get a job but I have all this work to do reading stupid books like this for school.

So I figure this Hope chick maybe works in a hospital in Chicago--so she's probably some hot nurse that maybe Obama was all makkin' on before he met his wife, or maybe he meant his wife 'cause I've seen her on the t.v. (when my parents aren't watching stupid hospital shows) and she's kind of audacious herself.

Happy New Year!

The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future in

Recycling
Hi there--here, let me slide the wastebasket over... What? Oh, you're here for career ideas? I just figured you were looking for juice boxes in the garbage again. Recycling? I guess I could jot a few ideas down for... Oh, right--you go ahead and record it. No point putting ink on sacred flattened pulp if we don't have to.

So the first thing to remember is that there's no money in the recycling business--not if you are sincere about actually recycling, anyway. There are opportunities to, uhm, exploit the issue but I somehow figure that's not what you're about.

You'll keep volunteering every weekend down at the recycling depot until you graduate, then you'll find a college with an associate's degree in resource management or something similar which gives you a semblance of credibility when you expound your theories, but won't force you to waste a whole four years in school when you could be out making a real difference.

You'll keep volunteering at recycling operations at whatever city your college is in, and eventually you'll come back here--it's cheaper to mooch off your parents and like I said, you ain't getting rich off this gig. The folks here at the depot will welcome you back, and you'll try to be enthusiastic rather than jealous when you meet the new fresh-faced high schoolers who have replaced you as the eager disciples of the movement.

You'll commit 100% of your energy to making the depot an effective, efficient operation. You'll notice which organizations and businesses seem to generate the most waste and inundate them with emails and phone calls offering to provide free workshops to show them alternative choices to reduce the use of paper and other materials.

The few who relent and let you share your message only half-heartedly promote your visits, and you're saddened by how few show up to hear your lunch hour message of hope. You have, by this time, convinced the recycling depot to put you on a small salary, but your workshops are done entirely on your own time.

After almost a year of helping sort and carry bags and boxes of all manner of recyclables, you begin to get a little bored, and start to wonder about the next phase of the process. You see, you only deal with the "drop off" stage of things, so you decide one day to jump on your mo-ped and follow one of the large trucks which picks up the paper and cardboard from the depot. You've seen these large green trucks many times, and always been impressed by their bright clean paint, proclaiming the message: "Recycling--Local Action for Global Survival". As you follow the truck you're surprised by how little exhaust it produces--the hybrid engines run on a combination of electricity and biodiesel.

It's a longer journey than you expected, but eventually you arrive at a large property surrounded by trees--and a barbed-wire fence. The truck proceeds through the front gate, but a security guard stops you from following and asks you your business at the plant. You explain that you work at the recycling depot and just wanted to see where things went. The guard makes a quick phone call, summarizes your reason for the visit, then hangs up. He tells you to wait; the owner of the recycling plant is on site and has decided to come give you a tour.

You park your mo-ped and wait a few minutes; you're surprised when the owner actually arrives--he looks only a few years older than you. He explains as he walks you into the plant that he was at college working on his masters degree in environmental studies when his father, a rich industrialist, was killed in an accident and left his entire empire to his son. The son, Richard, sold off most of the corporate assets, and concentrated his efforts on this plant.

You are quickly impressed--it doesn't help that he's not bad looking--until the moment when you spot the large incinerators and see the trucks backing up to unload your "recycling".

You turn on him with the anger and vitriol of one who has seen the tenets of her faith defiled, and he merely nods and listens while you unload your venom. When you finally pause to catch your breath, he quietly responds.

"Most of what is sent to recycling depots is simply burned and/or dumped in landfills" he explains. "It's too dirty, it's contaminated or simply mis-sorted and can't be used. Even if it's perfectly clean and in order, it's ridiculously expensive to de-ink paper and repulp the various grades into something that turns out well enough for commercial use. The best we can do is contribute 10% of recycled filler to paper made of new fiber." You are shocked, but you'd heard similar cynical rumblings during your two years at college. You'd always dismissed such talk, but now Richard tells you it's true, but then he goes on to justify his actions.

It seems he's as passionate about alternative cleaner energy as you are about recycling. He explains that he created the plant when he heard of plans to build a coal-fired electricity production facility in the area. His plant incinerates waste, using technology he financed to produce electricity while creating very low emissions. He believes strongly that the future of the world is dependent on the reduction and eventual elimination of fossil fuels, and his newest research project involves partnering with the local sewage treatment plant to create methane for use as auto fuel.

You counter by pointing out that his trucks' use of biodiesel may be redirecting the use of valuable farmland away from food production in order to produce politically-correct but environmentally-unsound auto fuel. He sighs and admits he has the same concerns, then looks into your eyes and asks you to join him for dinner at a new vegetarian restaurant that he has recently invested in.

You agree, and after you've both cleaned up you find yourselves arguing by candlelight while enjoying a delicious meal. You both agree you feel passionately about saving the environment--you just have different approaches. You also discover you share some viewpoints--you almost choke with laughter as he does his impression of a sincere but misguided proponent of compact fluorescent light bulbs--you both smugly agree that such bulbs produce far more environmental damage in both their manufacture and ultimate disposal than they are worth in energy savings--particularly when any sensible person knows that LED lights are the green choice of the near future.

You end the night making out in front of your porch, then reluctantly agreeing to keep his secret about the recycling--he would lose his supply of fuel as well as the subsidy he gets for "recycling" the city's wastes. Plus his arguments about the foolishness of burning gas to ferry waste paper all over the continent to the few repulpers that can process such material made sense.

Still, your work at the depot now feels rather pointless. People ask you questions about sorting and you just sigh and shrug your shoulders.

Escape comes when your newfound boyfriend recommends you for a job at the local television station. Seems they've decided to create a new job in the newsroom--environmental reporter--and he convinces them that you're perfect for the job.

You're thrilled--you get to preach to the station's large prime-time evening news audience, and soon you're showing up all over town to salute those helping the environment, or to demonize those who disregard mother nature. You receive several awards for your work, and the better salary helps you save enough money to finally move out of your parents' home.

You and Richard are by this time officially a couple, and his wealth allows the two of you the chance to enjoy an exciting and environmentally-responsible lifestyle. Still, the luxury makes you feel guilty, and you become more and more inflexible in your work at the station, and in your personal life. Your feature is put on hiatus for a couple of weeks after one particularly controversial episode--the folks eating dinner while watching your story about the ancient alternative to toilet paper weren't very happy, it seems.

While on hiatus you continue researching new stories, and also notice more and more things which offend your sensibilities in the station itself. You nag everyone to eliminate the use of paper in all office communications, and start a movement to ban Christmas cards. Eventually, management decides to fire you, but a last-minute threat by your boyfriend to pull his company's advertising from the station gets you a reprieve.

The end of this career comes rather quickly. Seems Richard can't keep the secret of his recycling fraud forever; a network reporter gets wind of what's going on, and when you admit knowing the truth but keeping quiet to protect your lover, it's the end of your job in television.

You get a severance package and move back into your parents' basement. You send off a few half-hearted resumés, but you can't find many people willing to give you a decent reference--simply because most bosses and fellow employees find you and your fanaticism irritating. Meanwhile, a new company takes over the city's recycling contract and promises they won't be burning material which meets standard recycling criteria. You, however, know how unreasonable these criteria are and become more and more hysterical about it. Soon you're using a pass-key you kept after being fired from the station to sneak in at night and wash all the disposable coffee cup and pop cans in the recycling bins. You begin stealing all the staples from the staplers and posting notes reminding people of ways to fold pages to make them stick together instead of using staples for paper clips.

Your manic behaviour takes its toll; you collapse on the street and are rushed to the hospital where you are admitted for observation. You end up in the psyche ward, but manage to convince your watchers that you're fine--nobody catches you sneaking out to the biohazard disposal bins in the middle of the night where you retrieve all manner of used syringes, tongue depressors and even wound dressings, bringing them in and washing them down in the basement laundry room--abandoned when the hospital decided it was cheaper to farm out such duties.

You aren't careful enough, and after half a dozen needle sticks you're eventually diagosed with a variety of medical conditions which render you compostable within a year.

this beats the heck out of bungee jumping

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.



Click on it to see it larger (I think). There's a recent new post on the "other" blog and I've got a new cynical career post about ready to go on this one, so check back again soon.

Gaaah! (inarticulate scream as snow drops from trees on head)

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Canada+whitest+Christmas+Victoria/1109796/story.html

This morning the radio said we had one centimetre of snow than the north pole at the moment...

At least I'm not stranded on the runway at Vancouver Airport.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow... Enough Already

Where have I been, oh faithful reader? (should I pluralize that?). Well, maybe there's a few of you. Sorry. I've been shoveling snow. And them shoveling more snow.

You may not know this, but we don't get much snow in this part of the world. Apparently we had a white Christmas in 1971--I was just a kid--but I can't actually remember a white Christmas. We never get them.

Except probably this year, barring some miraculous disappearance of the two feet of snow outside.

It started about 10 days ago--a Saturday night. It snowed. Then more, and more. We didn't get any days off school, although my kids did--their district cancelled.

As I write this, about 1:15 a.m., it's snowing quite heavily. Great. I'm supposed to go pick up my dad, my sister and then my mom and bring them all out here for lunch and our gift exchange, etc.

We have a strange conglomeration of 13 municipalities here, and to get to my various destinations tomorrow, I have to drive through six of them. The majority of those don't have much of a policy regarding snow clearing beyond "We ain't got no snow plows" so it's tricky, to say the least.

The police are kind enough to call the radio station after each new dump of snow to advise people to "stay off the roads if possible". Great--after how many weeks do you think we'll surface for the bare essentials? Oh, and it is Christmas.

I will say, it is very pretty, and all those songs--White Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Let it Snow--they seem somehow more appropriate. It IS beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and as we sit by the fire, the lights on the tree, the snow outside and the seasonal songs playing softly in the background, it's actually very nice.

Here are a few pics:
























































And I got a little more artsy for this last one; I liked the icicle in the tree--I should probably crop the photo, though.

perspective

When my wife and I were first married, she was a home care nurse whose case load often included palliative care. My job was to deal with the challenge of junior high classes and to try to put together a big musical production.

I would come home with my stresses and whine and vent and then pause to ask how her day went. Some days she wouldn't say much more than "one of my aids patients died today". It kind of put things in perspective.

A former student dropped by a few days ago to visit and get a ticket for our shows last week, and we got to talking. I'll admit that while my stress level and general crankiness were kind of elevated, listening to her describe her experiences of the past year kind of helped me realize what little I had to complain about.

She had tried to get out of the army, but enlister's remorse isn't a valid reason, I guess, so she ended up doing a six-month stint in Afghanistan. While on patrol one day, she went around the corner of a building and was shot--a bullet exploded into many pieces in her thigh.

She's now officially out of the service--I guess maybe she'd fulfilled her obligation. She told me that she's completely cynical about the whole situation there, largely because all sides treat woman like crap. She didn't see how the lot of half the population would improve no matter who eventually wins.

Plus she felt that as a female in the service she wasn't respected, especially by those she encountered from our neighbor to the south. Perhaps her orientation also made some uncomfortable, I don't know.

It was shortly after that I went online and read Camila's recent post about the lot of women in much of the world. It's enough to depress one, but I guess it's more about trying to make things better where we are than giving into despair for the magnitude of the problem.

It's kind of Christmassy now...

There's about 6 inches of snow outside, and it's still falling pretty hard. We got our (real) tree up and decorated yesterday, and we're just having a peaceful Sunday inside with a fire in the fireplace and enjoying watching the weather outside.

I'm finished with the mini-musicals--two sold out shows--and have time to catch my breath, relax a bit and even post to my blog(s) again. After the holidays, of course, it gets nuts, but that's three weeks away.

So for my first offering, I quite enjoyed this (the result of enough free time to play on the internet and wander through blogs):

Got the magic power of the music in me...

Saturday's a good day to go to the care home. If you're there in the morning, they have tea and something to eat down in the first floor dining area.

My dad and I got there a little later than usual, went up to get mom from the 3rd floor (there are five floors; it's a fairly big place) and then came down to see the main area was full. We took her over to a quiet fireplace area in the empty meeting room and one of the staff saw us and offered to help me get them some of the cinnamon buns that smelled so good. I followed her to the kitchen and happened to hear one of the residents telling a staffer she wanted to sing.

They sometimes have a musician or someone lead them in some songs on Saturday mornings while they have their tea. There was nobody that day, so I offered--I know some Christmas stuff, if they liked. In a moment they were making space for my parents at a table and I was at the piano, playing a bunch of Christmas music I'd known since I was a kid.

I didn't see too much but I heard the old voices singing the songs they knew well; my dad told me later most were tapping out rhythm and a couple got up and began to dance--one old dear with her walker supporting her.

Last week's This American Life focused on the topic of music. All of the segments are certainly worth the time it takes to download the podcast--although it may not be available now the new one's up, but if you want it I can email it to you. David Sedaris's story of his dad's failed attempt to inspire his children to become jazz musicians, another regular's tales of her life as a high school band geek, and finally a powerful tale of music and faith in a church where traditional views had to be pushed aside by music to let love win out.

As someone who hears music around me all day long, and is watching my kids become more and more immersed in music in their own lives, it was great to listen to, and I think it's hooked my son on the show as well.

Turkey and Rumours

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends. It seems later than usual this year to me, although I don't keep careful track of the U.S. dates of the holiday.

I got home a little earlier for once yesterday, and my wife called me at the end of her workday, concerned about the situation at our son's school. One of her coworkers had told her his school was apparently in "lockdown" mode after a shooting.

I'd heard the story on the way home while listening to my car radio, fortunately. It wasn't our son's school, but rather one a few miles from my workplace that was in lockdown. Eventually it was revealed that someone had seen a toy gun someone had brought into school and this triggered the response that led to the police doing a thorough search and investigation.

Weird how that translated into a "shooting" at a school eight miles away. Probably because some people believe it's a more likely site for such things.

I'm frustrated with this blog right now; I've tinkered a lot with the settings, pasting in code and such, but still can't make the posts show whether there are comments posted. For instance, there are a couple on the entry below about the things I envy about the U.S., but you only see them if you click "post a comment" yourself. Otherwise you don't know they're there.

To respond to those comments--I was surprised to learn that PA is as strict about liquor sales as Jen explained. Is it because of the Quaker heritage? Odd how different it can be from one state to the next.

Must go prep my day now; at some point I'll post something more interesting, I hope.

Us and Them

It's the name of a short play one of my classes has been working on for a while, but thought it might be a good title for this post.

I've read a few blogs and facebook comments from friends south of the border about what they prefer about Canada (or when the outcome of the election was in doubt, why they might move here afterward) so I thought I'd write a bit today about some things I might envy a little bit about their side of the line.

I suppose weather might be something I'd envy those in Southern Cal. I wouldn't want the blizzards of the midwest or the hurricanes of the gulf coast, nor do I covet the yearly tornado watch in states like Kansas, but it would be nice to have a little less rain in the winter. (Of course Seattle's in the same situation.)

Gas prices--we are a net petroleum exporter yet somehow our gas is more expensive at the pump. It's mostly taxes that are to blame, and my city has additional taxes on gas you won't find an hour north of here which support the transit system.

Just for fun (how sad) I did a little conversion work of figuring out our gas price in early September adjusted to the US dollar and the US gallon, and then compared it to now. It's valid, since our government let the big oil companies close most of our refineries a few years ago and now the vagaries of U.S. hurricanes and the fluctuations of the exchange rate do impact what we pay at the pump. Like most places, it's been dropping--price per U.S. gallon was $5.36 in September, and yesterday it converted out to $2.70 per gallon when I filled my tank.

Prices for a case of beer or bottle of wine are also more here. "Sin taxes" are high--both for alcohol and for cigarettes, but at least we can buy it on Sundays now, which changed back in '86 when Expo in Vancouver made the politicians examine some rather archaic rules. Before that, all bars, pubs and liquor stores had to close on Sundays. We still can't buy a bottle of wine in a grocery store, though.

I'm just fine with the high price of smokes here.

Now I'd also have to add your country's leader seems a lot more charismatic than ours--we'll see in the next few months how he handles the responsibilities of the job.

There are other things as well--I could do without our provincial monopoly for basic auto insurance, the fluctuations of our dollar (although I guess that happens on both sides) and I like some of the retail choices/chains that we don't have on this side of the border. (H&M, Century 21, Target, Best Buy...)

I'm sure there's more, but I'm off to go see a play up island with my wife this afternoon. Have a good weekend--if anyone actually reads this.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the... oh, wait

Yes, it's about time another foot washed ashore.

There's got to be a movie or CSI episode coming about all this.

Finally

It's about time. I had this dull apprehension that somehow the GOP would be able to manipulate things (like in 2000) to steal this election too. Then it would be a matter of time before the pressure of the job finished off the septuagenarian who already has health problems and put the easiest puppet into the oval office that the dark forces of Cheneyism could ever hope to manipulate.

Thankfully, it didn't happen.

I was watching the Vancouver-Nashville hockey game (and flipping to election coverage from time to time) and when they announced that Obama had been declared the winner, it got a standing ovation in the arena in Vancouver.

We're mostly very happy about this here, although we know that democrats will be more protectionist due to their deep union support than republicans, and that equals potentially hostile trade legislation and practices--but it's worth that risk to see a quicker end to Iraq and less likelihood of other military escapades to help fatten the wallets of arms manufacturers.

How much health care could that war have bought had it never happened?

Off to Nanaimo to see Macbeth at the college tomorrow. The forces of evil are defeated in that story, too.

(You may have noticed I've switched back to a more traditional blog look, but the comments still don't show under the posts as a link--anybody know how to fix this?)