A good day.

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In case you are wondering, this is what sets my standard for a good day.

The St. Albert Yard

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When we bought the house in St Albert we got the biggest yard we could find and started from scratch. I loved it for almost seven years before my interest wained and it got away from me. This is 2003, about year three.

Simple Communications

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Simple, to the point and, hopefully, effective. As much as I am opposed to legislating people to death (helmet laws, seatbelt laws, etc.), I am wholly and completely in favour of education and spending tax dollars in teaching rather than punishing. #whowillyouhelp

This is awesome!

 Kathleen Wynne is changing the way Ontario treats sexual violence and harassment.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/ontario-releases-powerful-new-anti-sexual-violence-ad-1.2984460

The Kid in Me…

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I so want to build one of these. It would amuse me for hours and hours.

Interactive Topographic

Apparently its based on a Kinnect and Xbox. Here are the instructions to build your own!

See this one as well:

So cool!

Er?

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I had (have had, and will likely continue to have) a discussion about what makes a writer, or a singer or a photographer. An -er of some sort. While my views have refined themselves over the years I still hold (mostly) to a definition I came up with in University. An -er is someone who not only produces something, but also maintains a relationship — of a two-way sort — with an audience. There are all sorts of quibbles, exceptions, misunderstandings and outright illogic about it, especially when you talk about/add in things like ego, volume vs quality, the difference between art and craft and what makes a teacher a teacher and not just a teacher. But mostly I stick to it. As Mssr. Henderson of Chilliwack put it, “…if there’s no audience, there just-a ain’t no show. Whoa, whoa.”

By this definitions Emily Dickinson was not a poet (or poeter as I like to call them). When I repeat that, it generally makes Leslie cringe.

emily no

Banksy, on the other hand, is all sorts of -er. I don’t know what other people think about that.

banksy-yes

Tundra

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Shorts-Final

Austin stared at the vast, bleak emptiness and shuddered.

Forbidding. Paralyzing. Insurmountable. His mind churned out descriptor after descriptor like oozing blobs of meat from Mr. Zagorski’s ancient meat grinder. Ferocious, empty, indomitable, hopeless, desolate, foreboding, dire — words continued to froth forth, filling his mind with a picture and purpose but no actual solution emerged. No action sprang to the forefront. No instrument presented itself.

Time was ticking by. Precious, unrecoverable time. Time that was the one commodity that he could no longer afford, nor buy, nor sell. Time was slipping and churning down that drain like water, carrying away the vestiges of his old life, scouring it clean and revealing his true self. The emptiness. And the time. The enemies before him. And he couldn’t turn away. There was no escape. Although he wasn’t surrounded, no matter which way he turned, the bleakness was there and the time still seeped away. The only escape was forward. The only true path to follow lay ahead.

All Austin need was a moment. A moment and an action. One brief beginning and let momentum break the trail.

It was cold. And that wasn’t going to change either. One way or another he was going to have to endure. Austin closed his eyes, thrust his narrow shoulders back, dropping them slowly and stretching to his full five foot nine. Begin, he murmured to himself. Just begin.

Wrapped in his own Ki, hopeful in his energy, Austin gathered all that he was into the moment. This moment. And opened his eyes, leaned into it and… slumped.

“I’ll never get this essay done on time.”

He grabbed another hand full of Bugles.