I was 8 years old at the time and living in Port Perry, Ontario. My father ran a Fina gas station there, not a brand that you hear of any more but I still remember the sign and the smell of gas. I have three elder sisters, and for the life of me I can’t recall if they all had their own bikes or not. I do recall however, that my father was adamant on the notion that I wasn’t going to get a bike unless I already knew how to ride one. This meant trial by fire on the bike owned by one of my sisters.

The learning bike was a wretched beast. It had a basket on the front, the seat was too tall for me by far and it had those silvery streamers sticking out of the handlebars. The kind of bike an 8 year old boy would be mortified to be seen riding because there was no mistaking, it was a girls bike.

For the life of me I could not get the hang of balancing on the bike. There was never a thought of training wheels. My sisters had outgrown them and since it was their bike they weren’t going to put them back on  just so their crappy little brother could get a new bike. But my eldest sister seeing my struggles came up with the brilliant notion that my problem wasn’t lack of balance, it was lack of speed.

Our house/service station was at the corner of minor highway and gravel service road. The entrance from the highway was pretty flat but part of the property on the gravel road side had a decent sized hill. There were a couple trees and bushes and a ditch at the bottom, but my sister was confident that the speed I got going down this hill would make these obstacles inconsequential. To this day, I still recall the sheer terror of that tumultuous drop. It couldn’t have lasted more than 30 seconds but dodging the trees and bushes and frantically searching for a place in the ditch that looked like I might have a chance not to crash into did in fact make me forget about my balance problems.

In the end, I did crash and cry and my sister got in trouble, but it made something click. I never had the balancing problems after that wild ride. That week I got my brand new bike. It was a thing of beauty.  A black 3 speed with a banana seat and the gear shift on the frame right in front of the seat. This was in the days before BMX bikes and ten speeds being a common thing.  You still back pedaled to brake.

I don’t have any pictures with that bike in it. I’m sort of glad I don’t though. Many years later I went on a drive around Ontario trying to find the houses we used to live in when I was growing up. Twenty five years changed that mountain of a hill into a mild slope. I’d hate to see what it would have done to the coolest bike ever.

I like our contact guy with the contracting company. He was joking with me this morning that he’s already warned his guys to leave nothing on site not even a lunchbox for fear that the locals will walk with it.

But he said when he was working on taking out the veranda yesterday, a couple of middle aged guys walk by on the street ask them why they’re doing work on a cop’s house. Our contractor replies, “Hey man I’m not prejudiced, I’ll work on a cop’s house, I’ll work on your house, hell I’ll work on anybody’s house if they got the money. But I don’t think the guys a cop, the sign on their truck says they do graphics or something.”

The guy just shakes his head and said, “Ain’t you ever heard of an undercover cop?”

I sure hope this rumor gets around to all the bad eggs in our neighborhood. I mean seriously, who breaks into a house if they think a cop lives there?

 In the split second it takes to come around the bend the running commentary in my head is a jumble of profanity and panic.

 “Fuck kid, here of all places you decide to play in the road you little shit? Left, no there’s a semi left, go right. Too fast, too close to the guardrail, gotta lay it down. Damn it, I still have $10K left to pay on this fucking bike. Oh shit my leg. Arrrrghhh my leg. Oh fuck, still too fast I’m going over. Oh man, I’m dead.”

Then nothing. For so long nothing.

 Now it’s red. And it’s pretty damn warm. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

 But strangely, I’m not hungry or in pain. There’s no one in sight. Just red everywhere and in the distance some strange looking Eye of Sauron thing, blurry from the heat.

Well isn’t this the classic horror movie dilemma? Sit on my ass perfectly safe doing nothing or go explore the scary eye where there could be demons and worse waiting to torture the humbled atheist.

 I wait.

 Well isn’t this boring?

 And wait.

 Yup, now I try to rationalize avoiding the boredom. Maybe I’m in a coma. Perhaps the scary evil symbol on the horizon is something I should explore.

 And wait.

 Is hell a choice between eternal nothingness and foolish decisions?

 And wait.

 Am I really this bored?

 And wait.

 I strike out towards the eye.

Above is my entry for the Clarity of Night flash fiction contest. Please go by and read all the great entries.

I’ve been taking guitar lessons from a new friend. A different friend from Toronto came to visit us for a week and we toured around Nova Scotia as much as we could showing her the sites.

I’ve actually started back in my quest to create a online version of Tarabish (Cape Breton’s little known and non exported best card game ever).

Finally we’ve been putting a bunch of effort into getting Dar’s artwork out there and it’s paying off. She sold 2 paintings last week.

But in other news, Jason over at the Clarity of Night is putting on one of his super awesome writing contests once again. Past entrants get a sneak peek at the photo in advance so I had a story rolling around in my head for a few weeks. I shall post it when it goes up at his site and provide a link. I always prefer it shows first on his site considering all the generosity and effort he shows putting these contests on. Please do go out and read the entries and enjoy.

I have not yet missed a day since I last posted. Oddly enough, I still managed to put on 8 pounds since I was weighed 2 months ago. I am still not giving up though.

Doing the treadmill is 2 miles a day if I do it for 45 minutes which is what I have been doing. So 26 miles since I started. Let’s see if I can get to 100 miles without missing a day.

I’ve decided I’m going to try and keep up the every day pace. I started at 2.6 speed the first 2 times at an incline of zero, then I moved up to the incline of 1 the next 2 times then I switched it to 2.8 speed at an incline of 2 for the last 3 times. Right now I feel I’m gonna keep to this level for a while because it feels like more of a workout.

It’s a start. I realize that I’m currently in a situation that if I don’t take advantage of, I’m going to be very upset with myself. There’s nothing worse than being angry at yourself. I’m working 2 days a week, my wife is able to stay off work and work on her art and the 2 days a week is paying the bills. I’ve never had such an abundance of potential than I do this year. I don’t want to waste it.

Wish me luck.

I had recently acquired Easy A so I thought I’d give a try.

It was cute, predictable, but what really made me sit up and take notice was the soundtrack. It’s really damn good.

So, from watching a movie, I’m now following a new thread looking for the soundtrack of the movie. Once I listen to the whole soundtrack, I realize I like one song a little bit more than the rest. So of course I look who the artist is that sings it.

Now I’m following another thread trying to find what albums Lenka has out there.

Turns out she has a self titled album out there that was released in 2008. I hope she comes out with a second one because this is a thread that I don’t want to end.

Plug in your user name and password along with the blog address and it gives you a nice clean interface that will upload and publish new blog posts.

I have to say, it looks nice.

Above is my wife’s new logo. (I figured I’d test inserting an image while I am testing the software.)

Tagging the posts is an easy process, it imports all your default tags. It has some nice features that the WordPress interface makes you dig for and has a nice word count feature as well, which might work well for me if I used it for entering the flash fiction contests I do on occasion.

It’s free which is always a great selling feature as well.

Highlights (apparently WordPress doesn’t handle highlighting)

In other words it knows the HTML that is allowed even if you don’t.

Strikeout

Subscript_capabilities

Superscript^capabilities

• bulleting

Block Quotes

So all in all not a horrible free program.

I don’t know how much I will use it but it did give me a good excuse to make a long neglected blog posting.

WordPress doesn’t allow external video even though the software does have the capabilities. I may test that later.

I have just discovered, that I think I could become an audio snob quite easily.

My friend Doug posted a video of a Canadian band from Montreal that was very popular in the 80′s called The Box.

He posted “Crying Out Loud For Love”. A very nice song. I let him know that my favorite The Box tune of all time though was “L’Affaire Du Moutier” and I put a copy of a high quality mp3 up on my site so that he could listen to it again after many years I am sure.

With the move to the new house and finally unpacking all of the boxes that we’ve had in storage over the years, we found quite a few boxes containing old cassette tapes.

Being technologically more advanced these days, we wanted the music on the tapes in mp3 format, since we don’t use the cassette format that much any more. So for a few days I was going through the trouble of playing many of these tapes on the old Sony Walkman with the headphone output going to the mic input on my pc and recording it all on audacity to chop up into individual mp3′s.

That lasted about 2 days, and then I thought, this is going to take way too long and the audio quality is really shit compared to the CD’s ripped at a very good sample rate.

So for the next 4-5 days I acquired better copies.

Listening to the You-Tube video that Doug posted and my copy of the mp3 of the same song is like night and day. I finally understood all the audio snobs out there that buy the really good headphones and the expensive stereo systems.

I’ll likely never go that route but at least I understand them much better now.

We went with Mike Mills Roofing and Contracting and we were very satisfied, with the entire process. The workers were polite, did a great job and Mike himself came for the estimate and was very personable and professional.

The gutters however are another matter. We got an estimate from 2 different companies, a third did not send the estimator out when promised so we were going to go with Dave Pynn of Gutters plus. He seemed really nice and professional when he came out to do the estimate. It seems that’s where the professionalism stops however in his realm.

I called him back to let him know we wanted to go with him. We wanted to get the work done before the movers got here. He said he could squeeze us in on Thursday, but that he’d be at the house really early, between 7:00am and 7:30. I dutifully showed up at 7:00am even though I have been killing myself redoing the hardwood flooring on the second floor rooms. He was a no show.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt assuming I had miscommunicated and he meant the following Thursday.  My wife got a call from him saying he’d be out on Wednesday 8:00am. She asked what happened on Thursday and he mumbled that something came up. She said ok she’d be here Wednesday at 8:00am bright and early. She got up specifically to come out to meet the workers. Three hours later she called him and he said no one would be coming.

Two no shows and when I called and asked what had happened he laughed at me and said he was on another job and it slipped his mind.

Laughing at your customer when he is pissed at you and knows how to do search engine optimization is generally a bad idea I think.

Stay away from Gutters Plus and Dave Pynn in Truro.

Once again, I read the words my Métis ancestors have carved around the edge of the stone table.

The decision to leave earth at last gnaws at me no less today than it did two hundred years ago. It has taken me too long to decide which branch of the family tree to follow.

I have been to the departure points in Paris, Yellowstone and Algonquin no less than twenty times with the proper items, each time I have stayed behind.

Today though, I go.

From my pack I take a handful of corn and place it in the depression at the center of the table then retreat to the nearby bench. Within minutes the crows arrive for their offering. The trio makes short work of the corn and flies off to the west.

It is an hour before they return with an offering of their own.

They fly off as I approach to take the gems, but they don’t go far. I take my loupe and examine the gems. Each one has a number etched within. Diamond, ruby and sapphire translate into the x, y, z of my Cartesian destination.

After polishing the stones with my shirt I leave them on table illuminated with a small penlight and head back to the bench. The crows cannot resist the glittering prizes left behind.

With the knowledge once again hidden I look to the sky and depart.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Above was my entry in the most recent Clarity of Night flash fiction contest. Unfortunately I did not make the “forties club”, but as always I love entering and hey, my sister made it so go read the entries and enjoy all of them, there are a lot of jewels in there

Due to the overwhelming number of entries that the last few entries he has received in the last few contests he has had to change from publishing all the entries, and instead is only posting the entries that make 40 or higher in his scoring system. (on a scale of 0-45).

One of my sisters has already made the cut, so the pressure is on.

I was going to sleep on the story I finished today, but I changed my mind and sent it in. I will wait until I find out if I made the cut before I post the story here. I prefer to let Jason post it first (if I get posted this time) to encourage people to visit his site first.

My sister Donna was the 41st entry to break the 40 point barrier.

Let’s hope I get in there too.

I did not feel great today, headache, a bit of an upset stomach, sort of achey… thought a bug was coming on. But I was able to sleep it off. A few hours in bed and I felt good as new in the evening. So this is good.

What I am doing while I am wide awake is running down memory lane through music. We are staying with friends at the moment returning to Canada after living in the US for about 8 years. Robin, one of our hosts, works with a person who put together a little game of name that tune with 250 music clips from the 80′s. We have been playing it over the last 2 days. It’s fantastic, I think we got stumped by about 30 or so of the tunes, but at least one of the 4 of us playing knew the rest of them. There was no score being kept, a good 5th of them all 4 of us were all talking at once saying the exact same thing.

I think we are doing the 90′s next. We started off with the 70′s but I really love 80′s music and requested we do that one first. We’ll get back to the 70′s eventually.

Right now though as I type, I am rifling through their music collection. They are truly our friends. A lot of our music has been in storage for many years. Looking at their music collection feels like going through trading cards as a kid; got it, got it, got it, need it, got it ad infinitum.

One of the great things though is while I am sitting on the computer I can set aside the need it pile and put it on the rip it pile

On a sad note though, one of my removable hard drives it seems did not survive the trip across country. While I write this I am mourning the loss of 60Gb worth of music files. I will try all the tricks I know to recover it, but I am not hopeful.

If that is the worst that happened during my trip, I consider myself insanely happy. The new music piling up on the other hard drive is helping

I play a game called World of Warcraft. In this game you control an avatar that interacts with the avatars of other people from around the world. My avatar’s name is Stratford, or Strat for short.

My wife and I have made a wonderful habit of getting to know the people we play with online on a personal level. The last post you saw us with the 3 guys from Tulsa that we play with. We have vacationed in Vegas with one of our Ohio friends for a few years running. Our Pennsylvania friend came out to California and stayed with us for a week.

All told currently we have met 15 people that we game with. (17 for Darlene since she met 2 I missed on a side trip).

Last week, our gracious West Virginian friends offered to let us stay for a few days during our massive road trip. We stayed for 3 days, and it felt like 3 hours, the time just flew by because we were having such a fun time chatting and laughing. Mike is an awesome cook and left us full of some of the best ribs ever.

I wanted to earn my keep though. I set up his wireless printer for him, and he was having trouble with the sound on one of his computers that was hooked up to the gazillion inch TV in his living room.

Behind his TV was a mass of wires leading to his too many to name accessories that surrounded his huge TV. It looked like the snake scene in the Indiana Jones movie. “Cables, why did it have to be cables?” drifted through my mind.

There was a piece of cardboard behind there as well. I did not look closely at it until too late.

It seems their cats liked the area behind the TV in the past and made some mess back there. Mike in past experimentation, had learned that cats do not like duct tape. He had placed duct tape on this cardboard sticky side out, so that the cats would not hang out back there. While dealing with the massive cable pit, tracing speaker wires and power cords, I let my left leg inadvertently rest on the large piece of cardboard.

I was wearing shorts.

My left leg currently has significantly less leg hair.

The piece of cardboard is now affectionately know as the Strat trap.

It was still worth staying with them.