Random Thoughts-77
March 21, 2010
Maybe it’s because I have more days behind me than I probably do in front of me that causes me to spend a fair amount of time reminiscing. For some reason my memories of moments in the late 60’s and early 70’s seem sharper than my memory of what I had for breakfast today. Maybe it’s simply human nature to continually review what we have done in our past so we can gauge how well our life has been lived. I don’t know, but whatever the reason, I started thinking back to the Springtimes of my youth
I looked back to my childhood when we all looked forward to the ditches and sloughs filling with melting snow runoff so we could enjoy one of our favourite seasons of the year…rafting season.
In the late 60’s, when our family lived in the little hamlet of Marquis, Saskatchewan, we had a great rafting spot near the elevators where the ditches were deep and stretched the whole length of town. We’d spend hours making our rafts out of fence boards and scrap wood that we’d find near the elevators. Then we’d spend many more hours sailing the rafts, being pirates or our own version of the Kon Tiki Expedition.
The Kon Tiki expedition was when, in 1947, a Norwegian named Thor Heyerdahl sailed a raft from South America to the Polynesian Islands just to prove that the South Americans could have populated the islands in pre-Columbian times; however, I digress, that’s a story for another time.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, the rafting spots here in Kipling were at the “willows”, where Rudyard Manor now stands, and there was a little pond along the railroad tracks, just north of the highway across from the liquor store and Joe Kovach’s Garage, that was pretty good, too.
But the big enchilada was when “The Marsh” would fill up. Some of you will remember “The Marsh”. “The Marsh” was located just north of town and in the 70’s it was huge! You could raft for hours and never cross the same spot.
There were always hazards while you were rafting, though. The water was never too deep that there was a serious danger to drowning but the rubber bootfulls of icy cold water or the chance of hypothermia, if you ever fell in, were always present.
I don’t know why getting a boot full of water seemed like the biggest crime of the century to our mothers, though. Maybe it’s because it just made more laundry for her to do or something. Maybe it was because you did something that she forbade you to do. Because you know that the last thing she would have said to you as you were going out the door was, “Be careful, and try not to get your boots full of water again!”
In recent years it seems that there hasn’t really been enough runoff for good ol’ rafting. How many current parents would even allow their 10, 11 or 12 year olds to go rafting if they could anyway? I’m not sure, but I know they’re missing one of the great adventures of their lives if they don’t.
“Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush,”-Doug Larson.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Random Thoughts-76
March 8, 2010
I read a quote from Buzz Aldrin the other day. You may remember Buzz as the second man to set foot on the moon. Buzz says there’s nothing wrong with being second. He says the world is obsessed with being number one. Okay. Easy for him to say. He was the second man on the MOON! Not the first runner up at a beauty pageant! Who are you going to remember?
But he does make a point, doesn’t he? I was reading an old People magazine that was declaring Johnny Depp as the sexiest man alive in 2009. Really? Who said? Where was the voting station? If they are going to pick one man out of 6.8 BILLION people I think we are all entitled to a vote, don’t you? Not that I don’t like Johnny Depp, or anything, but it seems a little presumptuous for the editors of a magazine to just pick someone as our sexiest male human.
It does catch your eye at the check-out counter at the grocery store, though, doesn’t it? It makes for interesting reading and it obviously sells magazines.
Sexiest Man, Best Actress, Most Valuable Player… Humans do like to crown their kings and queens, don’t they? It seems a shame, at times, that it creates so few winners and so many losers.
But that’s human nature. We’re competitive. We want to be better than others. Thank God we are or we’d probably still be living in caves or something.
However, maybe it’s because I have never won a Gold Medal or an MVP or even came remotely close to being nominated for the Sexiest Man Alive competition but there really is something to be said for those who don’t finish first. Something to be said for pursuing excellence even if one falls short of the grand prize. That’s what I think Buzz Aldrin is really saying. You don’t always have to be first to accomplish something.
Pierre Fedy, Baron de Coubertin, the creator of the modern Olympic Games stated, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle," he would later say. "The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well."
March 8, 2010
I read a quote from Buzz Aldrin the other day. You may remember Buzz as the second man to set foot on the moon. Buzz says there’s nothing wrong with being second. He says the world is obsessed with being number one. Okay. Easy for him to say. He was the second man on the MOON! Not the first runner up at a beauty pageant! Who are you going to remember?
But he does make a point, doesn’t he? I was reading an old People magazine that was declaring Johnny Depp as the sexiest man alive in 2009. Really? Who said? Where was the voting station? If they are going to pick one man out of 6.8 BILLION people I think we are all entitled to a vote, don’t you? Not that I don’t like Johnny Depp, or anything, but it seems a little presumptuous for the editors of a magazine to just pick someone as our sexiest male human.
It does catch your eye at the check-out counter at the grocery store, though, doesn’t it? It makes for interesting reading and it obviously sells magazines.
Sexiest Man, Best Actress, Most Valuable Player… Humans do like to crown their kings and queens, don’t they? It seems a shame, at times, that it creates so few winners and so many losers.
But that’s human nature. We’re competitive. We want to be better than others. Thank God we are or we’d probably still be living in caves or something.
However, maybe it’s because I have never won a Gold Medal or an MVP or even came remotely close to being nominated for the Sexiest Man Alive competition but there really is something to be said for those who don’t finish first. Something to be said for pursuing excellence even if one falls short of the grand prize. That’s what I think Buzz Aldrin is really saying. You don’t always have to be first to accomplish something.
Pierre Fedy, Baron de Coubertin, the creator of the modern Olympic Games stated, “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle," he would later say. "The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well."
Random Thoughts-75
February 21, 2010
Shortly after the ghost, or whatever it was, brought down the bookcase in our office, the cleanup began. We uncovered some treasures and some junk. What really slowed down the whole cleaning process was going through that huge box of photographs that we had accumulated throughout our families’ lifetimes.
You know what I mean. All of those snapshots that have been filed into a box that just never seem to find their way into a photo album. Well, we were going to change all that and sort through the piles and put them into some semblance of order.
Easier said than done. It’s impossible to just look at them and categorize them. Set this one here and that one there. Oh, no. They all have to be examined. So many memories caught in time. Perhaps this was the reason for putting the chore off. We knew that once we got into it, it was going to take a lot of time.
Deb and I went through the pictures of our childhoods. Then our children’s. Baby pictures, school pictures, family event pictures; a half century of visual evidence. Two things stood out while we were sorting them. One: how quickly life goes flying by and two: did we really think that we looked good wearing that!?
Clothing styles, hair styles, facial hair styles. Remember those glasses from the late ‘80s and early 90’s? Some of the styles were so big you could have removed the lenses and used them as dinner plates or signaled aircraft flying overhead or something.
And seriously, nobody called it a “mullet” back then. No, really! It was just a cool hairstyle that everybody was sporting. Wrong now, but groovy then. Don’t ask me why that is, it just is.
You know what they say about hindsight being 20/20 and all that, but you really do have to wonder what we were thinking looking at some of the choices we made so long ago. We obviously thought that we were looking pretty good in some of those styles or we wouldn’t have been wearing them. And, as stated earlier, hindsight is 20/20.
It’s never a bad thing to have a walk down memory lane. We left the sorted piles of pictures on the dining room table so the kids could go through them while they were home visiting during the Family Day long weekend. Our family shed tears of laughter, at those old styles, and tears of sadness as memories of lost friends and family members were uncovered through the pictures.
Now all that’s left to do is get the Kleenexes ready and go through them all over again as we put them into the photo albums. I can hardly wait.
“We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were. We don’t know these lost people but if you look around, you’ll find someone just like them.”-Gene McSweeny, Grey Water Photography, 06-04-2006.
February 21, 2010
Shortly after the ghost, or whatever it was, brought down the bookcase in our office, the cleanup began. We uncovered some treasures and some junk. What really slowed down the whole cleaning process was going through that huge box of photographs that we had accumulated throughout our families’ lifetimes.
You know what I mean. All of those snapshots that have been filed into a box that just never seem to find their way into a photo album. Well, we were going to change all that and sort through the piles and put them into some semblance of order.
Easier said than done. It’s impossible to just look at them and categorize them. Set this one here and that one there. Oh, no. They all have to be examined. So many memories caught in time. Perhaps this was the reason for putting the chore off. We knew that once we got into it, it was going to take a lot of time.
Deb and I went through the pictures of our childhoods. Then our children’s. Baby pictures, school pictures, family event pictures; a half century of visual evidence. Two things stood out while we were sorting them. One: how quickly life goes flying by and two: did we really think that we looked good wearing that!?
Clothing styles, hair styles, facial hair styles. Remember those glasses from the late ‘80s and early 90’s? Some of the styles were so big you could have removed the lenses and used them as dinner plates or signaled aircraft flying overhead or something.
And seriously, nobody called it a “mullet” back then. No, really! It was just a cool hairstyle that everybody was sporting. Wrong now, but groovy then. Don’t ask me why that is, it just is.
You know what they say about hindsight being 20/20 and all that, but you really do have to wonder what we were thinking looking at some of the choices we made so long ago. We obviously thought that we were looking pretty good in some of those styles or we wouldn’t have been wearing them. And, as stated earlier, hindsight is 20/20.
It’s never a bad thing to have a walk down memory lane. We left the sorted piles of pictures on the dining room table so the kids could go through them while they were home visiting during the Family Day long weekend. Our family shed tears of laughter, at those old styles, and tears of sadness as memories of lost friends and family members were uncovered through the pictures.
Now all that’s left to do is get the Kleenexes ready and go through them all over again as we put them into the photo albums. I can hardly wait.
“We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were. We don’t know these lost people but if you look around, you’ll find someone just like them.”-Gene McSweeny, Grey Water Photography, 06-04-2006.
Starting anew
Once again, I have let this blog-site lapse, which doesn't matter at all because I do believe that I am the only one reading it anyway. I have, however, continued to write my articles and I will post all of my old stuff on here and attempt to keep a regular update on my musings and published editorials.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Random Thoughts-74
February 7, 2010
Was it Karma? Was it physics? Was it a paranormal experience? Whatever it was, it scared the living crap out of me! Figuratively speaking, of course.
It was about a week before Christmas, when, for some reason, the bookcase in our office decided it was time to crash down off of the wall spilling all of its contents onto the floor, desk and office chair in the room.
Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, would it have made any noise if nobody had been around to hear it? Say, at, like, 10:00 AM while we were both at work? That philosophical question required no answer, in this instance, because I was the lone occupant of the house, (Deb being at an overnight training seminar), at the precise time of 3:55AM, when said bookcase decided to do its crashing and I was very well aware of the noise that it made.
The resounding boom made me literally jump out of bed and put me in a state of shock. There were so many things running through my mind all at once. One of the first things, that I was aware of, was that the shock hadn’t stopped my heart because the only thing that I could hear, after the kaboom, was the banging heartbeat in my ears!
Then, as I slowly came to my senses, I started to wonder what could have made that big of a bang in the middle of the night. Was it a car hitting the house? A small meteor? Did the wood stove blow up or did that massive Christmas tree, we had just put up, take a nose dive? I was reluctant to go look.
Having no one else to send, I had to go investigate for myself. I checked the stove. Nope. I checked the tree. Nope. I checked the front and back of the house. Nothing. Had Santa Claus landed too hard and too early? I didn’t think so. There was no way that I could have imagined this, was there? Unfortunately no. Much to my chagrin, I finally came upon the disaster in the office.
“What the deuce (or words to that effect) happened here?!” I said to myself and the spirit that had possibly wreaked the havoc.
I quickly checked the damage and after finding that nothing significant or important had been destroyed I turned off the office light and closed the door happy that I hadn’t found a steaming vehicle lodged in the front porch after all.
The next day, when I returned to view the damage more closely in the daylight, I was surprised to find our huge community Bible, which we had received after our wedding, wedged with a few other books neatly on the office chair as if they had been carefully placed there. The newspaper clippings and family papers, that were stashed inside the front cover, still perfectly intact. I know! Spooky!
That, and the fact that a vase filled with scented oil that had been on the top shelf was sitting upright on the floor without a drop of the oil missing, gave the hairs on the back of my neck another reason to stand up.
In the category of “every cloud has a silver lining” the crash, bang, boom episode provided us with the opportunity to give that massive office cleaning project a new starting date. It also reaffirmed that both my heart and my sphincter are still quite healthy because, Lord knows, I was happy to only have to clean up one mess after the big bang!.
“Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.”-Harold Wilson (1916-1995).
February 7, 2010
Was it Karma? Was it physics? Was it a paranormal experience? Whatever it was, it scared the living crap out of me! Figuratively speaking, of course.
It was about a week before Christmas, when, for some reason, the bookcase in our office decided it was time to crash down off of the wall spilling all of its contents onto the floor, desk and office chair in the room.
Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, would it have made any noise if nobody had been around to hear it? Say, at, like, 10:00 AM while we were both at work? That philosophical question required no answer, in this instance, because I was the lone occupant of the house, (Deb being at an overnight training seminar), at the precise time of 3:55AM, when said bookcase decided to do its crashing and I was very well aware of the noise that it made.
The resounding boom made me literally jump out of bed and put me in a state of shock. There were so many things running through my mind all at once. One of the first things, that I was aware of, was that the shock hadn’t stopped my heart because the only thing that I could hear, after the kaboom, was the banging heartbeat in my ears!
Then, as I slowly came to my senses, I started to wonder what could have made that big of a bang in the middle of the night. Was it a car hitting the house? A small meteor? Did the wood stove blow up or did that massive Christmas tree, we had just put up, take a nose dive? I was reluctant to go look.
Having no one else to send, I had to go investigate for myself. I checked the stove. Nope. I checked the tree. Nope. I checked the front and back of the house. Nothing. Had Santa Claus landed too hard and too early? I didn’t think so. There was no way that I could have imagined this, was there? Unfortunately no. Much to my chagrin, I finally came upon the disaster in the office.
“What the deuce (or words to that effect) happened here?!” I said to myself and the spirit that had possibly wreaked the havoc.
I quickly checked the damage and after finding that nothing significant or important had been destroyed I turned off the office light and closed the door happy that I hadn’t found a steaming vehicle lodged in the front porch after all.
The next day, when I returned to view the damage more closely in the daylight, I was surprised to find our huge community Bible, which we had received after our wedding, wedged with a few other books neatly on the office chair as if they had been carefully placed there. The newspaper clippings and family papers, that were stashed inside the front cover, still perfectly intact. I know! Spooky!
That, and the fact that a vase filled with scented oil that had been on the top shelf was sitting upright on the floor without a drop of the oil missing, gave the hairs on the back of my neck another reason to stand up.
In the category of “every cloud has a silver lining” the crash, bang, boom episode provided us with the opportunity to give that massive office cleaning project a new starting date. It also reaffirmed that both my heart and my sphincter are still quite healthy because, Lord knows, I was happy to only have to clean up one mess after the big bang!.
“Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.”-Harold Wilson (1916-1995).
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Random Thoughts-72
January 3, 2010
Wow! Two-thousand-ten, twenty-ten, or two-oh-one-oh, or whatever we’re going to call it, is here…already! Where did the last year go? Where did that last decade go!? Have we made any progress? What is progress anyway? So many questions…so few answers.
There were a lot of huge news stories out there for us to review from the past year and from the last decade. From international and Canadian news to regional and local stories as well. From 9/11 and Canada’s role in Afghanistan, to the making of the movie “Rust” in Kipling; with many, many other significant stories in between.
Because of the restrictions of time and space, in a newspaper column, I will only be able to touch on a few of the highlights and lowlights, for me, from the past decade.
The following events are not in any particular order of importance but are just memories that randomly come into my brain.
Deb and I became first-time Grandparents! Okay, that one is very important, thus first on the list, but the rest are all random.
The Yankees won the first World Series of the decade…and the last of the decade!
The Maple Leafs didn’t win anything. At all. Again.
The ‘Riders won their third Grey Cup.
All three of our children graduated high school in the first decade of this century.
The 9/11 attacks were mentioned on the front page of the New York Times for 19 days in a row, a new record. Tiger Woods’ infidelity was mentioned on the front page of the New York Times for 20, that’s right, 20 days in a row, setting a new record for the paper and a new low for priorities in news coverage.
There were billionaire sports figures (see the above mentioned Tiger Woods) and trillion dollar bailouts leaving our heads spinning, again, about the world’s priorities.
Canada didn’t have a federal election this past year. I will leave it to you, Dear Reader, to determine if that was good or bad.
Deb and I celebrated our 25th Wedding Anniversary on the same night that our son won a role in a Hollywood movie! Wow!
Saskatchewan became a “have” province and surpassed its highest population in history!
A total of 138 Canadian Forces personnel have been killed since the Afghanistan mission began in 2002, the largest number for any single Canadian military mission since the Korean War.
An African American was elected President of the United States, yet, racism, around the world and in Canada, does not seem to be abating at all. Still confounding us are “Religious Wars” and ”Ethnic Clensing”.
Red Paper Clips and 100-year celebrations, lost grain elevators and lost citizens, a New York Times’ best selling author and a Hollywood star are people and events that defined Kipling from 2000-2009.
What will the next ten years bring? I cannot say. Is it too much to ask for more peace in the world, or a little better distribution of wealth, or a cure for cancer, or a few more grandchildren? Only time will tell.
“WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD WILL KNOW PEACE.”- Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970).
January 3, 2010
Wow! Two-thousand-ten, twenty-ten, or two-oh-one-oh, or whatever we’re going to call it, is here…already! Where did the last year go? Where did that last decade go!? Have we made any progress? What is progress anyway? So many questions…so few answers.
There were a lot of huge news stories out there for us to review from the past year and from the last decade. From international and Canadian news to regional and local stories as well. From 9/11 and Canada’s role in Afghanistan, to the making of the movie “Rust” in Kipling; with many, many other significant stories in between.
Because of the restrictions of time and space, in a newspaper column, I will only be able to touch on a few of the highlights and lowlights, for me, from the past decade.
The following events are not in any particular order of importance but are just memories that randomly come into my brain.
Deb and I became first-time Grandparents! Okay, that one is very important, thus first on the list, but the rest are all random.
The Yankees won the first World Series of the decade…and the last of the decade!
The Maple Leafs didn’t win anything. At all. Again.
The ‘Riders won their third Grey Cup.
All three of our children graduated high school in the first decade of this century.
The 9/11 attacks were mentioned on the front page of the New York Times for 19 days in a row, a new record. Tiger Woods’ infidelity was mentioned on the front page of the New York Times for 20, that’s right, 20 days in a row, setting a new record for the paper and a new low for priorities in news coverage.
There were billionaire sports figures (see the above mentioned Tiger Woods) and trillion dollar bailouts leaving our heads spinning, again, about the world’s priorities.
Canada didn’t have a federal election this past year. I will leave it to you, Dear Reader, to determine if that was good or bad.
Deb and I celebrated our 25th Wedding Anniversary on the same night that our son won a role in a Hollywood movie! Wow!
Saskatchewan became a “have” province and surpassed its highest population in history!
A total of 138 Canadian Forces personnel have been killed since the Afghanistan mission began in 2002, the largest number for any single Canadian military mission since the Korean War.
An African American was elected President of the United States, yet, racism, around the world and in Canada, does not seem to be abating at all. Still confounding us are “Religious Wars” and ”Ethnic Clensing”.
Red Paper Clips and 100-year celebrations, lost grain elevators and lost citizens, a New York Times’ best selling author and a Hollywood star are people and events that defined Kipling from 2000-2009.
What will the next ten years bring? I cannot say. Is it too much to ask for more peace in the world, or a little better distribution of wealth, or a cure for cancer, or a few more grandchildren? Only time will tell.
“WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD WILL KNOW PEACE.”- Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970).
Thursday, December 31, 2009
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
Well, here we are. The last day of 2009. I'm not too sure what to make of the significance of this fact, but it's a Blue (Full) Moon today. There will be a lot of revellers out bringing in the New Year so be careful out there.
I think 2009 was a pretty good year. We became first-time grandparents on the 21st of April and couldn't be more proud of our grandson and his parents.
As a family, we have survived the recession and avoided the H1N1 virus. On top of that, the New York Yankees won the World Series, the 'Riders were this close to winning the Grey Cup and a movie was shot in our home town as "Rust" was shot in Kipling early in 2009. Yeah, I'd say it was an above average year, for me anyway.
I think 2009 was a pretty good year. We became first-time grandparents on the 21st of April and couldn't be more proud of our grandson and his parents.
As a family, we have survived the recession and avoided the H1N1 virus. On top of that, the New York Yankees won the World Series, the 'Riders were this close to winning the Grey Cup and a movie was shot in our home town as "Rust" was shot in Kipling early in 2009. Yeah, I'd say it was an above average year, for me anyway.
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