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.

Vacation Blog #2

Posted on by kylar

It’s been a wild up and down couple of days. I found out my uncle has cancer in both his lungs, and that doesn’t bode well. I don’t actually know how bad it is or what the prognoses are, so I’m not making any preliminary judgements, but I do know that eventually I’ll make peace with it. He’s probably my ‘favorite’ uncle, if such a thing exists, and this is not something that I have been looking forward too. This has also brought back a bunch of memories about my Dad, and that hasn’t been easy. I still don’t think i’ve ever really been able to grieve properly, and It hangs over me really heavily sometimes. While I’m out here I need to go visit his tree and talk to him for a while. Yesterday Kelly and I took the kids fishing at her uncle’s pond and i kept thinking about how much he would have wanted to do that stuff with them, take them fishing, take them walking, watch them grow up. It just tears me up sometimes, thinking of all the stuff he missed. And sometimes I feel like it’s something that I’ve been pushing aside, and that it might all just snap back on me at any minute, and then other times I feel like everything is going how it’s supposed to and that there will always be minutes that it hits me harder than others. When my sister got married (we all come from a catholic church), there’s a part in the ceremony where they say a few things that they’re praying for, and they named my dad (they did it at my sister Michelle’s wedding too) and I didn’t even flinch or anything. Kelly’s going through the same stuff right now with her grandmas. One was just in the hospital for fluid in her feet and legs, and the other is in dialysis ever other day. Neither is doing particularly well, and we both seem to think that we’re in for a shitty fall. Again, it’s the inevitablity of things that sometimes press on me even heavier than the actual occurances. Most days I’m able to forget it or not dwell on these times and things and enjoy my vacation, enjoy my wife and kids, but those few moments where it seems to crack in really really bother me. Some moments this week, it’s been all I could do not to just break down weeping and sobbing in my wife’s arms.

Vacation Blog 1

Posted on by kylar

I’m taking a few minutes this morning (Thursday the 10th) to write a few things down. I’m starting week 2 of my vacation, and it was pretty good. My sister got married on saturday and that was good. We drove to Ohio on tuesday and stopped at COSI in toledo, and that was pretty awesome. We’re planning to go to the one in columbus on Friday and then hit the zoo on Saturday. Also Friday night, we have planned a nice dinner with some other d0rks that we know from this area. If you’re one of them, or one of my other two loyal readers, you might remember my description of DF Seattle. The drive to Ohio was lovely and I love driving around washington county, having Kelly show me all the notable things from her childhood. Houses her uncles built, house her dad built, where she went to school, little anecdotes about things, places and people. It’s like sharing her childhood with her. It’s a wonderful insight into some of the things that shaped her into the woman I love. The country itself is really amazing. Hills not big enough to be mountains, but vastly different from the flatland that I grew up in.

Up and running

Posted on by kylar

OK I’m switched over to wordpress. I had to write a program to parse out my whole blog from b2evolution’s atom feed and write it out into a movable type format that I could import into WordPress. This causes some issues.. you’ll notice that any previous comments now appear as part of the post, and that nothing is categorized. I’ll try to see to the categories, but as to the comments, they’ll probably always stay as they are. Tooooo bad.

Also I’m leaving for vacation today, and things are whirlwind. I got my truck back after being without it for a week and it’s covered in dust and sand and mud. It looks pretty sweet actually. We’re going to canada and ohio for a couple weeks, I have 2 weddings and we want to spend some relax time with our families.

Until the next time, adios, gentle readers.