Palmer's World

The hill at the neighbours house always reminds me of the giant hill we had in front our house back home for a few years.

 

A little snapshot of what’s involved with producing a song.

It was around -25 outside on Sunday so we decided to stay inside for the day.  Around the end of January I get fed up with the cold weather and think “Nope.  The day inside will be much more fun.”

The kids played with a science kit for a bit.  Ezra managed to spill some vegetable oil all over the place and I lost it on him.  I had to tell him that he was not careful enough to play with the science kit and had to watch from now on which breaks my heart but hey, what we were playing with combustible materials here folks?!

The photo above is them playing with silcon which would eventually become a rubber thermometer thing that changes to blue colour when its near cold things like the fridge or a window.  Neat!

Later on in the day Ezra and I took turns colouring this unicorn drawing.

We also played a round of Wide World which I won.  I was quite excited.

Last year I was sitting in a church for a funeral thinking “If I died today, I would have so many unfinished songs.  What a waste!”

So I made a point to get to finish a bunch of songs up in the near future.

Saturday afternoon brought me to Marty’s house to record some lead guitar over a song called Drive Me Crazy.  I probably wrote and recorded most of this song 15 years ago but have been sitting on it since then.

After a bit of set up and noodling around, we got into a great rhythm and managed to finish all the lead guitar work in a couple of hours.  I would say 70% of the time was spent recording, 20% was on figuring out technical things like how to get Garageband audio files into Logic Pro and 10% of the afternoon was spent listening to some riffs that Marty has recorded over the years which was a fun time.

It was a productive afternoon and I’m hoping to wrap up the recording of that song this winter.

I have to say that I’m always in awe of musicians who are masters of their craft.  I can’t play a scale for the life of me but years of hard work puts Marty at the top of the class.

I think I’m going to need a bigger vehicle.

It’s been over a decade that I travelled to Ogdensburg, NY to pick up some packages.  But when the Super7 Cat’s Lair went on sale, I noticed that shipping cost $100USD if mailed to an American address and $350USD if mailed to Canada.

I also checked with my ‘toy guy’ and he said he could get the Cat’s Lair to me for $1,250+tax.  I decided to go the Ogdensburg route.

A year and half later I finally get an email saying that the Cat’s Lair had shipped!  But I have to admit that after a year and half of waiting I realized that I just didn’t have the room to display such a thing.

Got this photo off of Reddit.  Look at the size of this thing!

It was a crisp February morning when I went down to Ogdensburg.  Crossing the border was easy peasy at 9:30am on a Saturday morning and there was no lineup at the UPS store.

The boxes were huge.  I knew it would be large but I thought it would have fit in the trunk!  But it didn’t.  Luckily I didn’t have any kids with me so I could move the car seat out of the way and put the box in.

The best part of my day was arriving at the Canadian border.  They asked me to go in and pay duty…or it is taxes on the item.  I told them the value was $810USD (which was actually a mistake…it was $650USD but I told them the total which included taxes and shipping.  Woops!

But the toy collecting gods shined on me when the following conversation happened.

Agent: “So…this thing is like…a playset for action figures?”

Me: “Yes.”

Agent: “All plastic?”

Me: “Yes.”

Agent: “Well…you don’t need to pay HST right now because of that HST break the Government of Canada put in place for things like gifts for kids.”

I had a smile as large at the Cheshire cat walking out of the place!  What a score.  I couldn’t believe my luck.

As it stands, I made out pretty good with my purchase.

Price if I would have bought it in Canada from my toy guy

$1,250CDN+tax = $1,412.50.

Although I do see on his website that he’s selling it for $1,499+tax.  Maybe the price went up or maybe he was giving me a good deal for being a good customer.

Price I ended up paying

$850USD

Toll booth there and toll booth back = $6.50USD or $8.50CDN

Price to pick up two packages at UPS store (one was over 30 pounds so they had to charge a bit more) = $16USD

Gas = 1/4 tank so let’s say $20CDN.

Let’s call that $1,228.50CDN.

That’s a difference of $184.

I have to say that I’m not entirely sure what I calculated a year and a half ago.  I probably would have been better to go ahead and order it in Canada if I actually did have to pay HST on the item when coming across the border.

But that didn’t happen and here I am with some money in my pocket.

 

Ezra has had a fever for the past week, poor guy.

Fevers in children suck.  You call the doctor and they suggest waiting a couple of days to see if it fixes itself and to comfort him with medicine.  As a parent you’re helpless to just hope for the best.

Before Christmas he was having fevers around 103 if he didn’t have any medicine in him and that was consistent.  Turns out he had pneumonia.

This time around, it was a bit more manageable…his fever would come in waves.  On Wednesday we even reduced the medicine during the day because his temperature was around 99.  But by Thursday, the fever came back with a vengeance.

To the doctor we went and they found blood in his ear which was a sign that there was an infection and something burst to relieve pressure.  Five days later he’s now on antibiotics.  Hopefully he bounces back soon enough!

Typical sight of Ezra just hanging out in his underwear for the past week, trying to keep cool.  This was him trying to get yogurt off his chest.  Haha!

Have I mentioned I’m a sucker for oral histories before?  Well, Vero knows this and she finds the greatest oral histories involving topics I enjoy.

This was another one of those books that were hanging around the house and I would read a page here and there when I could.  But no more!  2025 is clearly the year to stop doomscrolling and start reading books.

I thought this book had a slow burn of a start.  Things started getting interesting for me when they started playing proper gigs in Seattle.  It was also really interesting to understand how mindboggling it was to be the number one musical celebrity on the planet when you weren’t even thinking of that outcome.

I did find the end of the book a bit weak.  An entire year is fit into two chapters.  HOWEVER, perhaps that is sometimes how oral histories go…you get a lot more information about the time someone spent with a band, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lof of interaction with the band and others once they became huge and were surrounded by security or had to run off to do TV interviews and sign autographs.

For mega-fans of Nirvana, it’s a great read.

 

Last night I was watching Sierra at gynmastics.  A typical gymnastics class for her lasts 1.5 hours and goes like this:

• Warm up (running around, doing pushups, etc.)
• Move onto different sections of the gym…balance beams, trampoline, tumble track, etc.

Around an hour into the class I notice Sierra’s class come back to the exercise area and doing running drills and pushups and burpees and you name it, they did it.

I’m watching girls collapsing, girls yelling “I’m having a heart attack!” and I was thinking “What is going on here?”.  Sierra looked winded but she kept doing what she was being asked to do.

Turns out the entire class was being punished because most of the girls weren’t listening to the instructor.

Sierra couldn’t believe how she was punished along with the others because she was staying quiet and doing what the instructor asked her to do.

I remember this being a classic form of punishment when I was a kid.  It never made any sense…usually the good people in class aren’t the ones that are going to stand up to the troublemakers and make them follow the rules!  So the good guys get punished for no reason whatsoever.

I was hoping that in the year 2025 we would have more targeted forms of punishment but as Sierra’s body can attest the day after, I guess not!

 

The past couple of weeks have been quite cold around Ottawa.  When it’s -20 outside, the last thing I’m thinking about is “Oh boy, let’s go outside and have some fun!”

But when I noticed it was sitting around -1 outside on a Sunday morning, I declared to the family “Family!  Today is the day we go to the Castor River for some fun.”

Fun we had.  There weren’t a lot of folks on the trails so we had a couple of good spots to do some great sliding.  I also got to try out the cinematic mode on my phone.  We spent an hour sliding and walking around the trails.

 

“Ryan!  I’m at the hockey arena with my son this weekend.  You should drop by, we’re right next door to you!”

After getting this text message from Shannon and not recognizing the arena name he sent me, I realized he mixed up Kars with Vars.

I packed the kids in the car Saturday morning and we drove 30 minutes to Osgoode to watch his son’s team play some hockey.

I haven’t seen Shannon in a few years so it was good to see him.  I have to admit a hockey arena isn’t the greatest spot to catch up because our attention was split between the game and the kids!  Haha.  But it was good to see him for an hour.

Sierra trying to choose which toy she wanted.  Those things cost $2 nowadays!