Nearly a year since my last post. I know, I know. Despicable and deplorable in the blogging world. I’ve lost all my faithful readers, let everyone down. The irony is that I tried to read one of my friend’s blogs the other day that I hadn’t visited in months and discovered it was gone. I was so disappointed, yet here I am doing the same thing.

There are lots of reasons for my absence. Some good, some bad, and mostly just because I never got around to it. It’s a snow ball effect. First I wanted to change the layout of the blog and switch to wordpress, so that delayed my posting. Then I became really busy with life and suddenly I had no time, then some bad stuff happened, then the good stuff (I bought a house:)) and then working all the time. I have lots of excuses for it;)

I’ve had a lot of excuses in my life lately and it’s time to find some balance. I stopped playing basketball last August because of the whole shoulder problem. I followed the Doctor’s advice and took the 6+ months to heal, but then after the time was up, I didn’t find my way back to the court. Too busy, no time I said. I stopped going to the gym, too busy, no time. Suddenly I discovered I’d become a bit of a workaholic. Definitely not a healthy place to be. I started playing basketball again a couple of weeks ago. I like to think I’m at least semi self-aware, so as part of my quest for renewing balance in my life, I’m going to start blogging again. Maybe some of my old readers will have pity on me and come back and visit again some time:) Jo, I wish I knew where you were and Andrea, you know I’ve always popped in to visit with you. I’m going to try and get the rounds to visit everyone.

I’ve got some new local friends that are blogging that I need to link up to and I’ve got loads more stuff about my work (I quit my job and I’m on to a new project). But that will have to wait for another post.

And I REALLY REALLY need to get this switched over to word press. I’m working on a design template for one and as soon as it’s done, I’ll attempt the switch over. I just need to find the time, oh wait, no more excuses. I look back at my posts from last summer and the last 2 months were mostly “I’m really busy right now” or “I’m still around, but busy” posts, sigh, the warning signs were all there;)

A bientot!

My Grandpapa died two weeks ago. He was 92 years old. Longevity seems to be something on my father’s line, on both sides as my Grandmama is still alive at 92 as well. I never knew my grandfather very well. As a child, my parents took us to visit them in Quebec, on average once a year until we hit our teens and then we seemed to less often. Probably partially because my parents split up at that time and unfortunately that often means family visits aren’t as frequent. So basically I’d met my grandfather, who also spoke only french, a handful of times. Yet I knew with complete certainty that he loved me. Everytime I saw him, he’d give me a bug hug, then while we were sitting, he’d reach over and pat me on the knee with this big grin on his face, while nodding his head. He never said much and while I could understand and speak a small portion of french, we never seemed to talk talk much. There was an unspoken affection between us. At the funeral, I spoke with Aunts and cousins, many who I had not seen since I was a child. They all relayed the same feeling of grandpapa, yet for them all francophone, language wasn’t even an issue, yet they all understood about this expression of love he had. It shows that language isn’t needed to portray the emotion of caring and love.

I took Alec with me to the funeral and we stayed with my Dad. It was wonderful seeing my sister and my nephews again after a two year period. My Dad was so grateful that we had been able to come. If only my brother in Thailand had been able to be there and then our family would have been all together, which hasn’t happened since our Mom died in 2000. 

We did a bit of site seeing while visiting with my Dad and took the kids to the biodome, an imax film, the science center and went to watch the international fireworks. I’ve done all of those a few times over the years, but I still always enjoy them and seeing this time through Alec’s eyes made it all new to me. 

Then when Alec and I got back home, Bram was so upset that he had been left behind (too long of a drive in too short of a period) that I decided to take them both camping the following weekend. So we went to Hopewell Cape and had a great time. You can see the pictures in the flicr badge. Taking 2 kids camping by myself was a bit of a challeng at times (putting up the tent) but we had a fabulous time and may go again before the summer is over. 

I had someone ask me today what happened to all the comments. All the comments from my old posts are gone. In the spam nightmare last year, they accidentally got nuked. I may have a backed up copy somewhere of the files, but I’ve yet to find them. However, I remember many of your comments and now with the new blog and using WP, everything is working fine again.

This shows that there is no end to ingenuity. The Popularity Dialer snagged from Electric Venom. Now they just need to add in some calls that are automated for birthdays/anniversary’s, etc. Give them the time and date for the automatic phone call, and hook it up with that automatic flower delivery service that you program in your partner’s birthday/ anniversary, etc. and it sends the flowers out on those days. Anyone remember the name of that service? Seems to me it was geared towards men who kept forgetting those important days.

With “The Popularity Dialer”, you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that’s one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.

Still shaking my head.

Lately Alec, who turns 10 in December, has been asking a lot of tough questions about life. He overhears items in the news, sees newspapers in the stores, etc. so he is starting to notice what is going on around him in the world. I’ve always been honest with him about things he asks, although attempted to make it age appropriate for him. Now that he’s older and he understands more, the conversations are becoming more complex. Yesterday on the way to swimming lessons, he asked about Hezbollah and about things he had heard with regards to the war. As I’m talking I mentioned Civilian Casualties. He asked what that meant and when I explained to him what it was, he said;

“Mom, I don’t think casualty is a very good word for that. It makes it sound too little, like it doesn’t matter, like it’s casual. It should be civilian deaths.”

And as he said that, I realized, he was right. It’s easy to throw around the word casualty, and if we said Civilian Deaths or Civilian Murders, would we give it more credence. Alec doesn’t understand why people would do these things to each other. It makes no sense to him. And as he asks me questions about the war, about oil, about governments, I hope that I will be able to give him information so that he can form his own opinions.