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A few weeks ago I read something about how the brain is constantly connected to something.  Even when taking walks, we listen to podcasts.

I’ve always listened to music while walking.  I have done that since I was 15 years old.  It was a way of escaping the world for a bit.

But I thought this thing I read was intriguing so for the past week, I have not been listening to my podcasts or music while I took a walk.

This past week I have been waking up earlier and earlier, preparing my body for the jet lag I will experience when going to Europe.  At the moment of typing this, I am getting up at 4:30am.

Taking a walk these past few days, I really notice the birds chirping, the crows ca-cawing.

I noticed a small family of crows on top of someone’s house.  Hopping around, making noise.  There were a dozen of them.  Was that a mother crow teaching the baby crows how to terrorize the neighbourhood?

I noticed the hum from the highway.  The constant hum of traffic going by.  I don’t even really notice it unless I sit and listen for it.  It’s constantly there.  Imagine if I lived further away from the highway, how quiet life would be?

I noticed these small little worm type things crawling around the roads.  They were everywhere.  They looked black and no longer than an inch.

I had time to think about things.  I wasn’t listening to a podcast and learning about How I Met Your Mother or Star Wars.  I was alone in my own thoughts.

The creative mind requires a spark.  Maybe there’s something to this thing I read.

In an effort to track my comic book sales, over time, here’s something I sold.

I bought Spider-Man Noir 1-4 when they came out.  $4USD each.

I sold them for $350 (Issue #1 is basically the one that is worth that, the others are just bonus.)

Things I learned from the sale:

• I listed it for $350.  First person from Montreal offered $220, maybe $250.  They didn’t go through with the sale after seeing photos.
• The next person offered $300 and backed out at the last minute.
• Someone contacted me and said “No problem for the $350”.  That was after a month of being posted online.
• The person who bought it said that while asking for cash isn’t usual, it’s not the end of the world.  But e-transfer should be safe enough if I have auto deposit set up and if I meet in a public place like a police station.

Chocolate salami

Let’s start with the funniest thing of the day.

As a parent, I sometimes wonder if I’m doing the right thing…”Should I let my kids watch YouTube Kids all Saturday morning?”.  I equate it to my experience with Saturday morning cartoons.

This morning I walked into the kitchen and all I hear from Ezra is “CHOCOLATE SALAMI?  WOW!”

And that’s when I thought “Chocolate salami DOES sound cool.”.  All my fears about what they watch on a Saturday morning evaporated in that moment!

Larose Forest

On a typical weekend, the kids tend to watch YouTube Kids and Vero sleeps in.  At 47 years old, I feel that I have a hard time sleeping in and for the past few weekends I’ve been sitting there thinking “Why am I waiting for my family to be ready in the morning to go and do something?”.  That’s how I ended up taking a walk in Larose Forest on a crisp sunny morning.  No one was in the forest with me, I was all alone.  Visions of bears attacking me came, but I did not encounter anything out of the ordinary.

Scanning Nanny’s Photos

This past winter I managed to scan all of Lynn and Sue’s slides which was a fun project.  I also managed to tag a bunch of dates to Mom and Dad’s film negatives.  I had one photo album of theirs to use as a cross reference guide which was a Godsend.

But once I finished the one photo album, I realized that I should just wait for more and so I embarked back into the quest to scan all of Nanny Sybil’s photo albums.  I encountered an interesting scenario where I’m scanning an album taken from 1981 and it has photos that are from my parents film negative collection.  I’ve seen them before.  But then I stumble upon a random photo that looks like it’s from the same time period, but I can’t find it in my parents film negatives.  Did the negatives go missing?  Possible.

I then realized that the random photos must have actually been from Nanny’s camera!  The prints are a slightly different size than the ones from my parents.  It’s neat to find a few extra photos from an already documented moment in time.

Audio of Sierra’s speech

Audio of the hilarious moment where the mic stand wouldn’t adjust and two teachers were having trouble adjusting it.

I don’t remember having to do speeches in school until Grade 7 but it seems like they start things young in the year 2026.  Sierra had to write and deliver a speech to her class.  The theme was ‘petits gestes qui change la monde’.  Speeches that were REALLY GOOD would be selected to go ahead to a competition in front of the school hosted by the Vars Optimist Club.

She never usually has any homework to do at home (other than studying multiplication tables which she has been great at!), so when the speech arrived in the house, we had to motivate her to get working on it.  I asked her what her plan was.  “I have six days left…I will write section 1, 2 and 3 over three days and that will leave me three days to memorize the speech.”

She found it was hard work and after she was done memorizing the speech I asked her if she would have changed her plan a bit.  “I probably could have used 2-3 days more to work on it.”

I guess she learned through experience!

Leading up to her presentation on a Wednesday, she said the speeches from the rest of the class were SUPER GOOD.  When I heard that, I prepared myself to not get too excited about the prospect of her doing a speech in front of the school.

But Wednesday afternoon we received an email from her teacher saying that she was selected to do her speech again in front of the school the next day!

Vero and I went to the school at 1PM and sat in the front row hoping we could film it.  Turns out no recording/photos were allowed but I did manage to record the audio.  We enjoyed all the speeches that the other kids from the school presented.

She did a great job and we were super proud of her.

Highlights:

• After each speech, someone was helping adjust the microphone stand but it was stuck which led to a comical moment that could have made it onto America’s Funniest Videos.  I still remember the image of the poor kid stuck in front of the microphone, nervous to do his speech and there are two people trying to fix a microphone stand!
• After the speech, I saw a gang of girls rush to Sierra and hug her and tell her how amazing her speech was.  It was heartwarming.  They also made her a #1 medal in the class afterwards even though she did not win #1.

Kids: “Dad, you are wearing a tie today!”

Me: “Yes, I have a presentation today.  I wanted to dress up.”

Sierra: “Is your presentation with the mayor?”

Last year I started scanning old slides of Lynn and Sue’s but I stopped once I realized I didn’t have all the slides and it would be best to have them all in order.

I finally got a hold of all of them.  It took a few hours to organize them into piles according to their datestamp.

I don’t know much about slides but I can only imagine that the datestamp on them is the date they were actually printed.

For example, you can see that in the top right corner there is Sep 78T3.  I have to assume that this means the batch of slides were created in September 1978.  I’m not entirely sure what the T3 means.  There are other batches that have T1, T2…some others don’t have any mention of a T.  I’ll have to contact some folks who might know the answer.

Putting them in order is an interesting puzzle.  For example, I’m organizing everything by datestamp, but in some cases I have doubles of datestamps.  There might be two slides that say 81-March001.  Now…what happened there?  Did they drop off two rolls of film and because they were processed on the same date, they come out saying it was done in March 1981 and they have the same sequence?  I’m not sure about that one yet…this just adds a bit more puzzle to decipher because now I have to figure out which photos go with which sequence.  If there is a wedding starting out on one of the slides marked Slide 1, then it stands to reason that the second slide should be a wedding photo as well.  So that will be an interesting adventure when it comes to it.

I really enjoy digitizing old media…slides, photo albums, home movies…it gives me a glimpse into the past and I’m sure it makes folks happy that they can see photos they forgot about in the past.

Ezra’s acro class

Sierra’s hip hop class

Sierra’s acro class

This fall, both kids wanted to try out dance classes.  Sierra even managed to convince us to sign her up for TWO classes which took place back to back.

The studio was deep in Orleans so it was definitely a quick ‘get ready, get eating supper, get on the road’ Tuesday night for us during the fall.

We typically brought Mia along for the ride which was fun.  We would always take turns requesting fun songs to play during the ride.  I do remember a particularly fun ride listening to the songs of Parry Gripp.

All these lessons culminated in the Christmas recital at the Shenkman Arts Centre in Orleans.  What an honour to grace their stage!  We even got to see what it’s like backstage.  I’ve always wondered after seeing a lot of concerts there.

I wonder what the story of these kisses on the backstage wall is all about?

Ezra’s changing room!  Complete with a mirror!

And a shower!

Backstage

 

The concert was super fun and while I don’t fully understand the world of dance, I do know that the kids worked really hard on learning all the moves.  They did really great.

Even though they did great, they both decided to pursue other activities in the new year.  I have to admit that we are a bit relieved.  The world of dance is…interesting.

We knew there would be a recital at the end, but they never bothered telling us up front that there were multiple recitals and you had to pay $30 a seat to go to each one.  Ezra was really not wanting to go to any of them…when we managed to convince him to go do it, then revised the schedule and was proposing he do two of them.  Forget about that!  It was hard enough convincing him to do one!

Costumes cost $100 each.  As far as I know, that wasn’t advertised when signing them up.  I could be wrong.  But all that to say, parents should know what they are getting into when they sign up for things.  A lot of parents don’t have the ‘inside scoop’ to all the costs associated with an activity.

At the end of the day, the kids know a dance routine and they did pretty good on stage for the Christmas recital.  Super proud of them!

 

It’s not often in life that you get asked to grace a stage a second time in your life, but it happened for me!  I would like to think that they really, truly wanted me to sing some Christmas songs for them again but I’m pretty sure they were just really desperate.  ;-). Haha!

Last year I had the honour of playing for the Optimist Club Christmas event in the village.  I was on the hook for a lot of work…an hour and a half worth of songs!  Both in English and French…some that I had never played or heard before in my life!  It was a large undertaking and I think I did pretty good.

Fast forward a year and they needed someone to play again but the gig was a bit more reasonable this time around…20-30 minutes and I would have another guitarist and drummer playing with me.  Brilliant!

Considering I had a few ideas bouncing around in my head of songs to play, I quickly assembled a setlist, shared it with the guys and we had a practice the week before and it was sounding pretty good.  It’s fun to play with other people who are pretty great musicians.

I have to rewind a bit and tell the story of going a bit overboard as soon as I got the gig.  I was excited to give something to the kids…I decided upon little egg shakers used for percussion.  On Amazon, you could get a bag of sixty.  I sat and thought about it and thought “What if more than sixty kids show up?!  I don’t want anyone to be upset!”  I ended up ordering 120 egg shakers for the event.  Vero had a good laugh at this.  Turns out that 35 kids took a shaker.  Ah bein.

Everything went great and it’s always a pure joy in my heart to make kids smile and laugh.  In another life, I wish I was on a show like Mr. Dressup or the Friendly Giant.  But this is the next best thing.  I didn’t mess up too much on the french songs and I was very proud that Sierra and Ezra joined in throughout the concert.

Here is a video of the concert.  Vero was nice enough to videotape it.  There are sections where it’s audio only so I put in a few photos here and there.  Enjoy!

 

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