My Little Bro

Posted on by kylar

My little brother is living in Victoria and moved out of my mom’s house last month, while we were there on vacation. The funniest thing struck me one night, I was looking for something and went into what was his room and found his ‘packing list’ for stuff to bring. It read something like this:

  • Amp
  • Guitar
  • Elec Guitar
  • Mic
  • Uke
  • CDs
  • Clothes

Clothes didn’t even make the top 5. I love that. I love that he’d be happy wherever he ended up, as long as he had his guitar and the clothes on his back. If he remembers a change of underwear, great! if not, Oh well. He’s got his music. That’s just too awesome for words.

Best Man Speech

Posted on by kylar

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Thomas Byrne and as you may have gathered, I am acting as Dale’s best man. However what you probably don’t know is that Dale was the best man at my wedding. I feel it’s only fair to warn you now, that the payback is going to be brutal.

I’d like to take a minute to welcome all the family that has no doubt travelled far to be here tonight, from such exotic locations as Scotland, England, and Ohio. I have a special greeting to Dale’s Mom and Dad, who in my youth, disabused me of the notion that Scotty from Star Trek was difficult to understand. I have had many conversations in passing with John and Granny, and to this date, I have yet to understand a single word spoken to me, although, to be fair, I don’t think Scotty ever said “Away and Bile yer head!”

As the best man, I realized that there would be a wealth of both duties and responsibilites – and thus I liken the position to making love to the queen – it’s a great honor, but no-one really wants to do it. Nonetheless, I was honored, and spent a lot of time asking questions – What would be expected? Would I have to give a speech? Was there any way I could subtly avoid any responsibilities, whilst still garnering an invitation to consume lots of free booze? In the end, the risk of spending a Saturday night sober was simply too great, and I accepted.

I spent some time thinking of different times we spent together, things we did, and of the notes that I wasn’t required to turn over to the RCMP, I found a few that I thought I would share. Now, I’m sure you realize that this is the pivotal point in the speech where I’m supposed to, in good taste, put the groom down. So, minus the good taste, here we go.

I met Dale in high school, and realizing last week that we have known each other for nearly 18 years, I had proceeded to have a panic attack. Dale was someone I met early on in Grade 9, and as our highschool years brought us closer as friends, he grew into someone that I truly admired, and wanted to be like, more and more, at least until Sheila took the initiative and kicked me out of his room, stating flatly: “Go Home, You’re Not Mine.” We had lots of good times together – he working at the House of Shalom, Working at Boblo, Working at SKD, me working at emptying his mother’s drink fridge while he was out. We had a band that was always “just about to take off”. We shared our free time, we worked together, we relaxed together, we watched TV together, and frequently, he would let me beat him at Scrabble.

My history with Dale puts me in a very unique position to state that nowhere have I met a man who is more stubborn or argumentative . In all honesty, Dale is a man with very few faults, but I have always found him willing to make the most of the ones he has. However, as Tina must have seen something in him, I am also forced to reveal that he is kind, loyal, honest, and possibly the worst joke teller on the face of the earth, and if you don’t believe me, ask him to tell you the clown joke.

I will admit that my history with the bride is somewhat shorter, consisting mainly of the rehearsal dinner and a hurried lunch spent at a seedy local pub.

Nonetheless, having spoken with her in emails and in person, I feel confident in relating the many fine qualities that Dale has kindly jotted down on the back of this cocktail napkin. In my short time with her, I have found Tina to be sweet, loving, industrious, and she clearly, loves a challenge.

Their relationship has progressed to this point over several years, and I must say that I am extremely proud to be standing up here and wishing them all the best. So right now I’d like you to raise your glasses to Dale and Tina, and join me in wishing them a long and glorious married life. May you know nothing but Happiness from this day forward.

Now as I close I have one piece of advice for each of the happy couple based on my years of married experience. Tina gets the first one: Let him have the remote control. It’s a simple thing that will make him happy. Dale: I’ll be honest here, I got nothing. I’ve been married for 6 years and I’ve yet to figure out the first thing about how women think. You got her to say yes though, so you’re doing something right!

Lastly, I found a short poem that I would like to leave you with.
May joy and peace surround you both,
Contentment latch your door,
May happiness be with you now;
God bless you evermore.

Vacation Blog #5 & 6

Posted on by kylar

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

Posted on by kylar

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

Posted on by kylar

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.