INTRAWEST IS GOING BROKE AND CYPRESS HAS NO SNOW

There is nothing that we can do about the weather and it looks like the Cypress folks have it all figured out with their snow makers, wood and straw piles. But  Fortress Investment Group, the mother company of Intrawest which operates Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resorts is going bankrupt? Really? The way the government pitched the Winter Olympics to the Province made it sound like we could pave the streets with gold if we wanted too. Especially the ones in Whistler. It surprises me that this could happen.

Music and Lyrics (2007)

OK we just watched this movie on TV last night. We have seen it before, it is a lot like every other Hugh Grant movie. That guy is the posterboy for type casting. I do like Drew Barrymore though. Cudos to her for reinventing herself as an A lister after being a child star. Not many childstars can pull it off. Actually the only other one that I can think of right now is Ron Howard. But the best part of this movie by a mile was this mock '80's music video that coincides with the credits. THE Best video EVER !!!!!!!!
Pop Goes My Heart

Hands Free Bluetooth®, Schizophrenia and the VPD

I don't like Bluetooth®. I am sure that I can feel the radiation goung through my bones when I activate a Bluetooth® device. I especially do not like the Bluetooth® hands free headsets. They make everyone who uses them look like they are talking to themselves. Actually If I were to aquire Schizophrenia or any other disorder that would cause audible hallucinations I think that I would wear one and maybe people would think that I was just having a business conversation when they saw me sitting in Dairy Queen chatting to myself about nothing.
 I have infact been using a wired hands free headset while driving because much of my work is done over the phone while I drive from place to place. The other day I was near West 33 and Oak Street in Vancouver at an intersection. I had my headset on and I was paying attention to the road. The  old guy approaching the crosswalk on his motorized scooter however, was talking on his cell phone and he was definately not using a hands free device or paying attention to the red light ahead of him. As he continued on infront of my car he quickly realized the danger that he had blindly rolled into and spun his machine around to get back on to the sidewalk. I wonder if BC's new law against the use of handheld devices while driving would apply in this circumstance. If so what if the fellow on the motorized scooter had Schizophrenia or another disorder that would cause audible hallucinations and he was using the cell phone as a prop so as not to draw attention to his illness. Then if he would have received a $168.00 fine for being mentally ill. What a public uproar that would cause against the VPD! Like they need anymore bad press about mishapps involving people with mental illness.

Garbage Day Part 2

I don't actually have much more to say on this subject except that waste management along with all of the public works facilities in our communities are real luxuries when compared to most of the world's infrastructure. I love Canada!

Garbage Day - Part 1

Those closest to me know that I like to make a big deal out of garbage day. Garbage day is Wednesday on our street. Every Tuesday night I say to the kids "Guess what day it is tomorrow!" and every time they get excited thinking that it is some special day like a birthday or swimming day but they always groan when I let out  whoop and proclaim "It's GARBAGE DAY!" I know I am a geek. But the thing is garbage day represents something huge that we take forgranted as Canadians.

Garbage Day represents life as we know it. It represents order and infrastructure. It represents civility and a sense of the common good. It represents unity and pride for our land. It represents stability and safety. I truly beleive that if we did not have regular garbage pick up our nation would fail.
I'll have more to say about this at a later date.

The Big One

As a Vancouverite I should be more concerned about earthquakes than I am. Truthfully I don't give it much thought until something big happens like the latest tragedy in Haiti. Here are some elementary tips on what to do in an earthquake. Earthquake Safety

All Blessings Count

Do you count your blessings? I don't just mean the obvious ones like family, freedom and health. I'm not discounting them, because they are super blessings. But I mean the ones that are unexpected, random in nature. They can happen so subtly that if we aren't looking for them they can go unnoticed. What a waste!
  They might seem trivial but even trivial blessings are blessings worth counting.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
The other night I was walking the dog around the block and I spotted a dismantled basketball hoop on the edge of a neighbor's yard with a "Free" sign posted to it. I have wanted to get the kids a basket ball hoop for a long time but it wasso far down on the priority list that it would have likely never been bought. I count this as a blessing.
Yesterday I met a financially successful man who was looking for someone to talk to. He talked my ear off for an hour and at the end of the primarily one sided conversation he offered me a discounted rate on his condo in Whistler any time I want! I did nothing to earn this. I consider it a blessing.
I want to see some posts from you.

My Grandpa

I took my son to visit my grandpa, his great grandpa yesterday. He didn't complain about it because he is not quite 2 years old. The world still revolves around him. My grandpa is cool. He is 80 years old now and he gets along just fine. Well Grandpa has had more than his share of health problems. He has worn out 3 titanium knees, he beat colin cancer, then prostate cancer and just recently he had a quadruple bypass. To say that he is healthy might be a stretch but that man can heal! He has a good sense of humour about it all too. One of his favorite sayings is "I eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning...except on the mornings that I eat ham and eggs". His son, my uncle passed away last year. It doesn't seem right that a parent should ever have to burry his child. He is making plans to deliver my uncles ashes to the grave site where my grandma is burried. It is also the site where Grandpa's parents are burried. He told me that itis where he is going to be burried too. He said that he has even bought the headstone and had his name put on it. But he didn't have the date put on yet because he didn't know when that would be!

People I meet

I meet a lot of people throughout my day and they all have stories. Today I stopped in at a Starbucks, to use the washroom, but I felt I had to buy something in case someone noticed that I was just there to pee. I met a guy at the table beside me who at one time had a trap line North of Edmonton . He saved a kid from a porcupine attack once. He used to breed golden retrievers but now he has a Bic hon. He recognized the accent of a lady at a near by table as being Polish but she corrected him , it was Russian. It was at this point that his partner piped up and said that he is deaf, he reads lips. Remarkable!
The words that he lives by: " If I didn't have a sense of humor I'd be dead."

Airline Insecurity

I am pretty sure that I have the solution to the airline security issue. Everyone flies NAKED! You can't light your clothes on fire if you don't have any. You can't hide a gun or finger nail clippers if there is no where to hide them. You won't get too hot. I always get too hot on airplanes, it drives me crazy. That little tiny air blower never blows enough air to actually reach me.

Pay it forward

We bought a piano this fall for ou oldest daughter and I have to say that it is one of the best investments that we have made. She loves to play the piano and she is absolutely thrivig at her lessons. I have to thank Gerhard Doppenberg for making it possible for us to buy the piano. He let us make payments with post dated cheques... and called ahead before depositing them. When it came time for us to make our last payment he told us that he would hold the cheque until after Christmas. I just called him to let him know to go ahead and cash it and he told me that he and his wife talked it over and decided to bless us by waive the final payment! He doesn't know me from Adam! He is truly a good, Godly man and I highly reccomend doing business with him! I have posted his web site below

http://doppenberg.ca/

I am looking forward to blessing someone else in the same way.

Traditions

I took the Christmas lights down today. It wasn't too bad really, I just have one row along the front gutter and some around the doors. I had to unplug one set and I didn't want to climb up and pull it out so I did what my parents taught me not to do and I pulled on the chord. It didn't come out so I yanked it and guess what. I ripped the plug off of the chord. Always learning things the hard way.
Do you ever wonder why we practice certain Christmas traditions like hanging Christmas lights? Every year in December I pull out the slimy slippery old wooden ladder that I store behind the shed and climb it in the rain. It always rains in December in Chilliwack and it rains even harder on the day that I install Christmas lights. I have four kids and a wife to support, but they sure like the look of those lights once they are up:)

The other weird one is the Christmas tree. You relocate your favorite chair to a place where it is virtually unusable just to bring a dead tree into your living and put stuff on it. Flammable stuff and lights. Some people even put candles on their trees AND LIGHT THEM! This is done in the coldest month of the year when you really need the warm dry house that you are adding fire hazards to. Then you have to water the dead tree so that it will last longer. "Honey don't forget to water the dead tree so that it can invade your space for as long as possible".
I like the traditions, but sometimes they just go against common sense.

D.Y.K.

Did you know that U.C. Berkley actually posts it's lectures on line? You can fully audit their courses free!

The Past Decade

I got married, had 4 kids, 2 dogs, 1 llama and 23000 chickens. I moved 6 times made 6 career changes, owned 7 different vehicles. I went to Disneyland 10 times Disney World 1 and to 5 different countries. That is a lot of stuff packed into a couple of sentences.
I never quite understood the people who have said that they have no regrets. I do. Of course I have regrets. But I also have prizes, jewels that I will have with me forever, or at least until I get dementia and forget it all. I knew a guy with dementia once. His name was George. He would go down to the basement and drink beer, smoke cigarettes and tell stories about the past as best he could recall. But he would forget how many beers he had and how many cigarettes he smoked and I would sometimes catch myself thinking "that 's not so bad".

Intro

I have occasionally mused at the idea of blogging over the years, but never got to this point. Actually creating a blog was somewhat random. It happened this morning when I was tired of viewing status updates on Face book.

I thought of the name for no other reason than that Dog rhymes with Blog. I promise I am not going to try to mimic the Marley and Me theme and pretend that I am a columnist writing witty things about my experiences with my dog. Though strangely enough just after I signed up for the blog I took the kids and the dog to Hope River Slough to run around. The first thing they did was through the dog's tennis ball into the slough and the dog promptly went in after it. On our way home the soggy dog stunk up the minivan pretty good. I think I will now reffer to the van as the Soggy Dog Rod.

I am just going to post random thoughts, for now at least and then if a theme develops that is reader worthy I'll run with it. I could say that I am doing this just for me, as a diary of sorts. But really I am hoping that somehow my blog will go viral and advertisers will pay me to do nothing but sit in Starbucks and write updates. That is my true desire. Right now I am lying on m bed. If I were getting paid to do what I am doing right now I would consider it the perfect life. Of coarse I am a total newbie, I have no formal writing skills, I am pretty sure that I have only read one blog "boing boing" and I am not about review the latest gadgets, news and pop culture events. I'll just post urls to the sites that can do that stuff. boingboing.net