macblaze.ca

Well Leslie finally bullied me into buying shelves. I think it was sort of a quid pro quo. So the pile of books that have lived in our kitchen is now gone. There is an entire wall we have never seen before 🙂

A busy trip to Ikea, hundreds of hard-earned dollars and several knee wrecking hours later we had a bunch of shelves set up in the basement. We went for the deep Kallax units and angled them perpendicular to the wall so we could use both sides. 2 4 x 4 units with a 1 x 4 unit on top as well as two lower 2 x 2 units to act as a table and some spare shelves. You would have seen the Instagram image from a couple of days ago. I will likely have to make one more trip to Ikea for another unit or two but they are all down stairs now. Oh, my aching thighs…

And wow, is Leslie ever happy to see some old friends.

More book spaces in our condo:

 

Back in 1997 or 98, I wandered over to Bill Hole’s house to watch qualifying with him between the staff orientation sessions. Qualifying for those of you who haven’t met me mean F1 qualifying. I had previously been mildly interested in F1 during the McLaren Honda years, although it more of a keeping-track-to chat-around-coffee type of thing.

And then, for one reason or another, being it sucking up to the boss, a genuine interest, or just to be ‘different’ from all my hockey-following friends I started to watch the F1 races.

For the first couple of seasons it was tough as I had an old VCR and generally resorted to getting up in the middle of the night to watch the European races. Eventually I got a PVR on my computer and it became a lot easier to record and watch qualifying and races. Since then I have watched religiously and the only time I have missed more than one race in a row was when we spent three weeks in Europe. While not a passion it was most definitely a hobby. As far as I know, Bill gave up watching the races years ago but I soldiered on.

And now I’ve missed the first two races of the 2015-16 season. Huh. Change is weird.

George once said to me and I quote

He said, “Never wait or hesitate
Get in kid before it’s too late
You may never get another chance”

“‘Cause youth’s a mask but it don’t last
Live it long and live it fast”
Georgie was a friend of mine

—The Killing of Georgie, Rod Stewart (1976)

I loved that song from the first moment I heard it. It was on my brother’s album “A Night on the Town,” which incidentally was my young adult self’s favourite ‘romantic’ album (it had a fast side and a slow side and featured Tonight’s the Night…).

The song as a whole is a lovely ballad about the narrator’s gay friend and his tragic end, but I’ve always loved the sentiment of the last verses…

A 70 year-old gentleman said something similar to me yesterday. His comment was a bit regret-filled…

The hardest working horses in town! I’ve seen working horses all my life, but nothing but nothing is as a smart, graceful and powerful as a great cutting horse. Just watch his eyes, he can read a calf’s mind and move before the calf does. For those you don’t know, the rider’s job is to hold on… this is all horse.

Go to youtube and search for more and you will find tons of videos. And if you are like me you won’t be able to stop watching. I have long admired the cutting horse but am in no way ever tempted to actually get on one. One trip around the barrels on a professional barrel horse cured me of that in my 20s. You need to be a world class athlete just to stay on the damn things 🙂

As we all should know there was a total Solar eclipse on March 20th, 2015. Apparently the best place to see it was from the Faroe Islands. Apparently a local band took a chance and decided to film a live music video (see below).

It is this kind of thing I so admire as I am usually too pessimistic and risk averse to attempt anything of the sort. Yup, I am that guy. The number of things that could have gone wrong boggles. The weather could have been bad: rain, high winds, cloud, a freak tsunami! And there could have been people on their shooting location, the eclipse could have occurred at a bad camera angle, their camera could have broken, the filters could have been wrong, the timing could be messed up…I could go on for hours. It seems like a recipe for total disaster. <shudder>

Sometimes I wonder how I ever got into such a risk-filled profession like print design and production:  ink absorption, colour shifts, postscript errors, registration issues… aargh!

Anyway… enjoy!

During the total solar eclipse on March 20th, 2015, the Faroese doom metal band Hamferð took the opportunity to shoot a creative live music video for their song “Deyðir Varðar” from a mountain in the Faroe Islands. It’s a 6 minute 36 second video in which the world goes completely dark and the total eclipse can be clearly seen in the background.
—petapixel.com