My family and I went camping last weekend and even in a place with no electricity, cell reception, running water or bathrooms, we managed to get in a little Wii gaming.
Analog Wii. It’s the next revolution.
And the pixel count was off the scale.
State Of The Union Address
So, lots of things going on.. I’ve been seduced by facebook. A bit surprising, given that I’m not so into social networking. It’s actually been really neat, I get to really keep in touch with relatives that I usually wouldn’t, and I’ve rediscovered some old friends!
Also, we went camping (we = my family) and it was awesome. Kelly has up here. I love going camping, especially up there. It’s amazingly relaxing, and getting to spend quality time with Kelly & the kids is fantastic.
What else is new… I got Kelly an iPhone, and she loves it. Still waiting for mine, however. I’m working on some stuff at work and it seems to be dragging on forevah. Summer is always a disjoint time, when things are chopped up.. so many activities that go on, and trying to coordinate is usually a pain.
Anyways, we’re coming up on the beginning of the new ‘year’ at church, and we’re supposed to have auditions. I’m not so hip into this. In fact, I’m *really* not into these. The thought of going and playing in front of a bunch of people that I don’t know.. and having them judge me… not so much for this hard core introvert. I have like a little panic attack whenever I think about it.. I’m trying to steel myself for it, but I still find myself on the fence, thinking.. maybe I don’t need to play this year.. What if I just take the year off… So, maybe. We’ll see. God might have something in store for me that’s not worship related.
Also a dream last night, but it will be a whole other entry.
Vacation Blog #5 & 6
More cottage stuff – This cottage has a septic tank and a holding tank and something is wrong with the float that triggers the pump that pumps the holding tank out to the septic tank, so when the holding tank fills up (about 1-2 times a day) then we have to go out and plug it in manually to drain it down. There are some foul things in life, but that ranks right up there. My sister Anna came up with the water-saving bathroom ditty that we were supposed to use:
“If it’s yellow, let it mellow,
If it’s brown, flush it down!”
Within the first hour this was mutated to:
“If it’s yellow, flush that fellow,
But Mr Brown can stick around!”
Potty humour has *not* lost it’s appeal.
More: tuesday 12:05pm, en route to home (about 2 hrs left in the flight).
My friend Dale had his wedding on Saturday and I was the best man. I’ll include my speech in another post. It went pretty well, It was not too hat (around 75) but it was immensely humid, rained on and off that morning and was like a second skin under the tux. I wanted to jump in the river with all my clothes on before we had even started the service. It went well and then there were the endless pictures (ENDLESS I TELL YOU). The reception went OK, except for the maid of honor forgetting part of her speech and having to run out and print a new copy off. I saw a few people that I didn’t know, and was only awkward on the dance floor once, during the dreaded ‘wedding party dance’. I’m not a good dancer, despite my ‘good rhythm’, and about all I can manage is to not step on someone’s feet whilst shuffling randomly around and bumping into people. The maid of honor was very nice, however and didn’t let me fall or feel too out of place. My wife danced with me though, and somehow I always feel like I’m dancing on air when we dance together :). My wife, mother and I fled early (around 9:30) after the speeches and the like were done, as it had been a long couple days.
The kids have been good though, for the most part, and I hope that when they grow up they’ll have fond memories of our travels, of seeing their cousins and aunts and uncles.
Vacation Blog #4
It’s monday night and I just came up to the fire – some of us are down on the dock, just star-watching. Jeff and Anna are at the fire. I am just thinking of making a little mini-site that contains pictures and a short bio of our family members. I had planed on coming up and reading a few comics but instead I got a little sidetracked and decided that I was going to type up a few notes on my comics that I have read and gotten this summer. While I was in canada the first day I went back across to detroit with my brother in law Jeff – he had some stuff put away there and I found a copy of Daredevil 168 – I have been trying to collect a full Frank Miller run on DD (158-181 and some stuff in the 220’s) – and the two big issues that are hard to find are 158 (first Miller) and 168 (First appearance of Elektra).
I found a decent 158 at WonderCon this year, and they had two copies of 168 – one was $64.95, one $70. The 64.95 one was in a bit worse condition than $5 would normally indicate, but I took that well – I used it to bargain him down to $40. I also bought a few other things, the Spiderman/Black Cat mini by Kevin Smith, Captain America, blah blah. A couple days later, Jeff and I had a few hours to kill so we sat around and were going to do some comics related stuff – He was going to clean the 3 new Batman Black & White statues he had bought and I was going to read some stuff. I start with DD 168 and when I get to near the end, there’s a big chunk ripped out of a page. At first I’m in shock, then I’m mad. Then I’m way worse. I hold it up and Jeff can’t believe it. “No…” Basically I have him call the store since I’m so mad. They however are very sorry and will make it up to me in any way they can. I, however am leaving the next day for Ohio and can’t make it back to the store for a couple weeks. No problem, they say. They’d be happy to put away the other issue of 168 and save it for me. When I got back I went in and exchanged it and everyone is happy. I ended up with the one in much better shape and all it cost me was $8CDN in bridge tolls and an ulcer.
Also while I was in Marietta, Kelly was insistent that I go and visit the new comic book/video store that had apparently opened up there. I go in and it’s mostly videos, with one wall of new comics, one rack of graphic novels and maybe 6 long boxes of back issues. (As a comparison, my personal collection is around 9-10 long boxes). I’m looking through and leafing past mostly junk and then I hit JLA, and they have issue #1 for $10. I’m like ‘cool’ – since I got turned onto Grant Morrison a couple years ago and he wrote the first 3 or 4 years of JLA. I flip past and see issue #2. then 3. All the way up to where Mark Waid starts (around 43). So I go to the counter and talk to the guy a bit and see if he’ll make a deal. He goes over to the box, flips through them and does some mental arithmetic and we make a deal for $75 for the first 40 issues. That’s less than cover price, for stuff that I want and was unlikely to find. That made my day. Thanks hun :).
Vacation Blog #3 – Tobermory
We headed out from Ohio after dinner last wednesday (the 16th) and got back to A’burg around 1:30 am. This is to give us a day between when we arrived and the day that we were planning to go up to Tobermory. Tobermory is a small village at the tip of a penninsula in semi-northern ontario, and is the gateway to Manitoulin Island, where I spent a week or two every summer in cabins on Elizabeth Bay. Two of my uncles have cabins on the water there and we were planning to spend a week of relatively down time in the between times of family and weddings and the like, although most of my immediate family came up – two of my sisters (and their husbands) and one brother (and his girlfriend) came up with kelly and I and the kids, and my mom. We got up early friday and drove from around 6AM till after lunchish. The drive was pretty good, the kids didn’t freak out too much :) I have really been looking forward to this trip, hoping for some real down time. It’s monday afternoon and we’ve been here for 3 days and I wish I could stay here forever. we’ve got 3 more days and it already seems like too short a time. Things have been really good so far, very low key. My uncle Kerry is a professor or department head at the U of Guelph and is also up here (at his cabin across the road) for 2 weeks and is staying one more, so I’ve been out fishing with him and my distant relative Jigger (Third cousin once removed, I think.) I’ve also had some great time with the kids, swimming and fishing and stuff, just kicking it, as well as time to read a few comic books. Jeff my brother in law is also a comic collector and we have both brought stuff to read and discuss. We keep planning to have a discussion of Watchmen vs Dark Knight returns and who is better, Alan Moore or Frank Miller.
I’ll detour quickly into what comics I’ve read this summer:
Uncanny X-Men 199-248
Daredevil 168 (whole story about this – tangent)
Black Cat/Spiderman Kevin Smith arc (The Evil That Men Do.)
JLA 1-8 (more on this too.)
Secret Identity (this was great).
Captain America 1-8 (Winter Soldier)
back to the cottage! It’s very quiet here, despite living with 11 people and 2 dogs in the same hizzouse. It’s on the water and we can canoe and kind of swim (the bay is very shallow and there are rocks instead of sand, so you basically have to go off the dock instead of the shore because they’re quite sharp and covered in very slippery algae. It’s also a bit cold, getting up to perhaps 66 on a good day. The first morning I went in early for a bit of a polar bear dip and it was quite refreshing. Then that evening, the Byrne Men Polar Bear club went in during a wind and rainstorm with the water temperature hovering right around 62 and the air temperature a bit below that. Another notable thing that happened was that we found that we had bats. They had apparently decided to exploit a small hole in the chimney and fly down and roost in the woodstove and it’s attached pipe. We decided to deal with that, so we got a fishing net to put over the pipe hole (so nothing could fly out into the cabin) and a pair of salad tongs (Cause those things bite, and my sister once got rabies from a bat bite. yes, really.) We removed 3 that night, then 3 the next morning and checked the pipe with a mirror and it was all clear. By that evening there was a whole frickin family back in there. I also got the chance to take a quick day trip down and visit my college roommate Rob, and that was awesome, a blast from the past. Vince, my brother in law got to see pre-marriage and kids Tom.