Willow always knows where the comfortable chair is. 

We're coming to Alberta!!

It's official! We have purchased tickets to Calgary. We're coming to visit from Friday, August 12 through Saturday, August 20. WOOOHOOOO!

Posting Photos with Picasa

Who would like to learn how to post digital photos on the blog using Hello?

Welcome to Mook

I'm so excited for Jessica and Steve to have gotten a dog. She's very cute, and will love you guys in no time. I have two words of advice for you - Pig Ears!! Dog's love em and she'll love you for getting them for her. Spike gets more excited over a pig ear than he does a plain mcdonalds hamburger. Mook will probably take about 2 weeks to get used to you. That is about how long it took Spike to finally get use to the house and the situation. Enjoy your new Poochie.

Crap in the Mail

Jess and Steve, your new hard drive will be in the post tomorrow. Please call me when you get it and I'll walk you through the install. Keep working on pulling any of your important files off the computer you have, burning to disk is a good plan.

Jenn, did you get the music?

If anyone needs any assistance with software installs or problems we can probably help you out. Call! Our operators are almost always standing by.

A Useful Firefox Extension

For those of you who have made the switch to Firefox (see the link down there on the right?) you might find this extension useful. It's called Forecastfox and will allow you to set your location and get up to nine days of weather forecasts displayed in a nice clean manner on your browser. All you have to do to install this is click on the link and then click on the Install Now button on the extension page. You'll see a dialog box open showing it's install progress and once it's done restart your browser. You'll be prompted to pick your location and away you go!

From an idea posted on MHAFM: My Home Away From Home.

Liar, Liar

1. I have held the door for a member of the British Royal family, twice.
2. A doctor once found a wood tick on a particularly hidden part of my anatomy.
3. I was tossed out of a party for biting a girl on the bum.
4. I have paid more than $200 CDN to have my laundry done.
5. I have watched the Star Wars Trilogy more than 100 times.
6. I have eaten muskrat, wallaby, and camel.
7. I once directed airplanes at an airport in Canada.
8. I have worked under the influence of a controlled substance.
9. I once fired an automatic weapon (a sub-machine gun!).
10. I lived on nothing but Cherry 7-Up and chicken noodle soup for more than a month.

Ok, your turn. Which three of the above statements are false? :)

The Answers

1. I held the door for Princess Anne when she visited McKenzie Seeds when I was in Air Cadets. Once on the way in and once on the way out.
2. After take a trek through the fields around Oo-Za-We-Kwun (did I spell that correctly?) with friends we strolled through some chest high bushes and picked up a boatload of the wee red tick devils. The next day or day after that a "hanger on" was discovered by the doc. Let's just say he was trying to go in through the out door.
3. Ok, so I drank a lot in my early years. I accompanied Lyall and Jyoti to a party where in a mad fit of intoxicated playfulness I did bite, more a nibble, a young lady on the bum. She didn't mind. They guy she was there with seemed perturbed. We left quickly. Ah, the good old days, if only I could remember them through the alcohol induced haze.
4. Rebeca and I paid more than $200 CDN to have our tshirts and underpants scrubbed and wrapped in plastic at the Hyatt(?) in Taipei.
5. I have NOT watched the Star Wars trilogy 100 times. Not even close. Despite the large quantity of hardened petro-chemical Star Wars toys I possess I have not seem the movies that many times. I prefer to let them age, enjoyed on select occasions, like to celebrate a divorce, the birth of a child, a GST rebate...special times!
6. I have eaten muskrat and wallaby, the latter much tastier than the former. I have NOT eaten camel. I would not consider eating camel having rode on the back of the gentle beast it would seem so very wrong.
7. Indeed I did direct aircraft at the Brandon Airport as part of an Air Cadet fundraiser. It was colder than it should have been and I was dressed in a very thin, not very warm flight suit and a pair of totally inadequate gloves out on the windy tarmac using hand signals to marshal the planes into position to take on more passengers. It was a load of fun!
8. Again, recall this was done in my much sillier days but I did on a few occassions appear at work under the influence of controlled substances. Be thankful I was a cook and never did become a brain surgeon or airline pilot or carny. Looking back I think I baked some of my most delicious cakes while stoned.
9. Of the many firearms I have fired, numerous and varied in type and design, not once have I fired anything automatic. We had the chance in '81 in Victoria but some dude from an Army Cadet unit misbehaved and we ended up doing cleaning duties around the camp while the others went to the ranges and fired smg's. Bummer.
10. Not one of my more glorious memories but for a spell I did live on cheap cherry 7-UP and cases of chicken noodle soup. If you drink enough of it the stuff will actually help stave off the expected scurvy. ;)

So, for those keeping score the answers are: 5, 6 and 9.

Birthdays

Thanks Mitch for adding the birthdays to the site.

The Great Ottawa Thaw

Yesterday we had the first of what happens every year at this time in Ottawa, the pre-spring thaw. This one was a bit early by a few weeks. Usually it arrives in time for Ottawa's annual Winterlude winter festival. Just in time to melt the Rideau Canal, making it un-skatable (is that a word?), damage or destroy the ice sculptures, and make the cold winter feel more like March or April. At one point yesterday there was a 46 degree temperature difference between Ottawa and Wolseley. Brrrrrrrr!!!!

The Christmas Cactus is in bloom.

What are you Reading right now?

I'm just curious about what everyone is reading. I'm currently reading one of Shelly's library books - written by a 15 year old French girl - The Prophecy of the Stones - Flavia Bujor. It's got some faults, but overall is a good read for the 12-15 year olds. Shelly asked me to read it, so I am. After this I plan on reading the last installment of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

Look at what the folks in California are missing. 

Winter in Ottawa....at least how it looks today. 

When I donated to the Red Cross last week the webpage was a bit overwhelmed so my transaction didn't go through properly. I sent them an email with the intention of making another donation if they couldn't confirm the first. I'm glad I waited. My company, we'll call them CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet, has decided to match all donations to the big charities in support of the tsunami relief efforts. They're not a thoughtless global behemoth, like everyone thought, after all.

Birthdates Please?

I know I ask this once a year but could someone, everyone, please post birthdates up here so I can confirm what I have on my calendar? Maybe with ages as well? Hey, maybe you'll all get birthday cards this year!!!

Happy 2005

Hi All,
Well, what a lazy first day of the year! We meant to get outside, but the chill kept us in. It's around -22 today with the Beast from the East blowing in. Ugh.

We rang in the new year with some Hillcrest friends. They live up on a hill right at the foot of Turtle Mountain, (supposed to be the next slide zone) on the back side of the Frank Slide. We watched all kinds of fireworks go off all over town out the window. Nothing like drinking and shooting off fireworks! Yeehaw.

I spent a fun filled day proofing 64 pages of guidebook. Fun stuff! Tedious with mistakes throughout. The designer does not appear to be any kind of perfectionist or have an eye for detail. Great, how much are we paying her again? We'll just have to keep on her case. We meet with her on Tuesday to go over photo and ad placement, so it will feel good to get a big chunk of that done. She is worried about our deadlines though. One month from today we should have the books in our hot little hands, if all goes well! Can't wait.

I guess I'll sign off for now! I hope everyone is well and not as frozen as we are out west! Brrr, where's the chinook already?

Something interesting I found online while I was looking at Canada's ability, or lack thereof, to move DART to South Asia:

Canada is stuck on the ground

Colin Kenny
National Post


November 6, 2004



Canadian troops have two options when they want to move quickly to emergencies. They can hitch-hike. Or they can hail a cab. Sometimes they can't do either.

This isn't just embarrassing. It's stupid.

Developing a first-rate strategic lift capacity for our Armed Forces would allow Canadian troops to move rapidly and safely to where they need to be. It would also have the valuable side effect of restoring Canada to the list of international players -- a list that any country needs to be on if it expects to advance its own interests at international bargaining tables.

Begging rides isn't the way to exert influence. Most recently, Canada couldn't even manage to get its Disaster Assistance Response Team to Haiti in the wake of the devastating tropical storm Jeanne. In 1992, we relied on the U.S. Air Force to transport armoured vehicles to Somalia. In 2002, we had to depend upon a combination of civilian rentals and U.S. military aircraft to deploy infantry to Afghanistan.

It gets more humiliating closer to home. During the devastating 1998 ice storm in eastern Canada, we had to rent planes and turn to the Americans to move our troops and equipment across our own country. Poor, bedraggled Canada.

Yes, we do have some planes that can carry troops. Little planes. Little antique planes. The Canadian military has between 16 to 24 Hercules tactical lift transport planes (out of a fleet of 32) available on any given day.

Admittedly, the C-130 Hercules tactical lift transport plane isn't tiny, the way an executive jet is tiny. But it is tiny in the context of carrying troops and equipment. It takes 26 separate Hercules lifts to move the Disaster Assistance Response team, compared to the six lifts it would require if Canada operated the Boeing C-17s used by the United States and Britain. It has been estimated that hundreds of pieces of Canadian military equipment cannot be fitted into a Herc without being dismantled.

The most elderly of our Hercs, which first flew for us in the 1960s, have the dubious distinction of being the oldest operating Hercules used for military purposes anywhere in the world. Canadian military people shudder to recall the deployment of Canada's peacekeeping force from Canada to East Timor several years ago -- the plane was forced to return to base three times because of faulty equipment before finally lumbering to its destination.

Moreover, Hercs don't have the range to get our troops to far-off places quickly. So, if they can't hitch a ride, the Canadian Armed Forces rent transport planes -- often old, rickety planes from suppliers in Russia and the Ukraine. The planes we rent -- mostly Antonovs -- have uncomfortable similarities to the Yakovlev-42 that crashed in Turkey last year, carrying 62 Spanish peacekeepers to their death.

It would only take one crash like that one to wipe out more of our troops than have been killed on a single deployment since the Korean War. It is one thing to put our troops in harm's way in a theatre of conflict. It is another to do so on aircraft past their prime.

Canada requires large, new, military transport planes. We don't need to fiddle around endlessly trying to decide which model to buy: the two options are the Boeing C-17 and the incipient European Airbus A400M, but the Airbus won't be ready until 2010 at the earliest, and by the time Canada's turn on the waiting list comes around -- given inevitable production delays -- it will probably be 2015.

The C-17 is in production, and it's good. Ten C-17s would cost us $340-million annually, including all costs associated with 800 flying hours a year on a rent-to-lease agreement. The U.S. Air Force would likely be willing to give up some of its own priority spots on the order line so we could have these planes flying for us in two years. They did so for the British recently.

Meanwhile, we could retire our entire fleet of Hercs, saving about $265-million a year and we would not have to rent commercial strategic lift, saving about $50-million a year. Bottom line: the net annual cost to the Department of National Defence would be around $30-million a year. This amounts to peanuts in terms of the kind of money Canada should be spending to modernize its military.

Very few countries have a strong airlift capacity. Many need to get their troops from place to place to perform UN missions. They, like Canada, are forced to rent. With our own C-17s, we could rent them out to other countries when we do not need them and make a little money, while offering a safer option than the ageing Antonovs and Yakovlevs.

Having a formidable airlift capacity would mean that Canada, whether it was sitting around the NATO table, the UN table or just conferring with allies, would feel less pressure to come up with ground troops when crises arise. When we chose to, we would be able to help -- and help quickly, which we cannot do today.

The Senate committee on national security and defence is conducting a review of Canada's defence policy. It will complete hearings by June and report by the end of the summer.

There are some initiatives that need to be taken now to reinvigorate our Armed Forces that are so obvious that they don't need to wait for a review. This is one of them.

Let's get our thumbs out of the air, put our hands in our pockets and come up with a modest sum of money to help restore Canadian military respectability, help ensure our troops' safety and help the world deal with its emergencies. We need strategic airlift - and the sooner, the better.

© National Post 2004

Something we should think about the next time the military asks for a few bucks for new gear.

Happy New Year everyone!