Down the Bog

It’s turning distinctly chilly and I as I drove home this evening the local weather forecast said that we could look forward to some “flurries” tomorrow morning which I assume meant snow flurries. I know that’s nothing to worry about but it signals the approach of winter and in the three plus years that I’ve been in Canada I’ve learnt not to love the Canadian winters.

I’m not a winter sports person and perhaps I should be seeing as I’m now living in Canada although I probably need to be living near the rockies or something to ski. But I don’t have the interest to ski, skate or do anything with ice or snow. I haven’t even built a snowman since getting here.

Last year we had a mild run up to the real snowy season so in fact we didn’t see any of the angry white stuff until after the Christmas season but once it did arrive it seemed to hang around further into the year. It’s almost like we’re going to have a set amount of snow so if it arrives late then it will be leaving late. You can tell that I take it very personally, can’t you?! 

I miss our milder UK weather so that in January it’s possible to get cold weather one day and warm spring like weather the next. People say that British weather doesn’t seem to have any real change in season but it also doesn’t have minus twenty-five degrees either. So there!

I say to Nicola that maybe we’ll be snow free this year but she knows that I know that it just can’t happen. The snow will arrive for sure and when it does the best time for me will be tucked up inside on the couch with the wood stove going keeping me toasty warm and I’ll be shutting my eyes dreaming of the summer.

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The marvel of the internet for me is shopping online. It’s so great to able to sit at my computer and shop by surfing online stores on the web. Sometimes I buy and sometimes I’ll sit in front of my screen and look around creating a wish list of the things I would like to buy if I had the endless amounts of cash to get everything that I desire!

But if there is a problem with all of this (apart from not using my legs to walk and shop) then it’s knowing where to go online to get what I want and at the best price.

For example I’m in the market to replace the computer that I’m using to write this blog entry but I’m not sure where to get the best deal from. At least I wasn’t until I came across Techbargains.com which seems to be a great place to track down discount computers. It’s a web site that takes RSS feeds from all of the technology big players such as Best Buy or Tiger Direct and is able to bring together all of the best deals in one place to view.

It’s not just computers though because they have all the latest prices, information and reviews on HDTV’s, Cell Phones, Digital Camera’s, Scanners and a lot more.

It seems to me that the best thing to do along with browsing around the website is to sign up for the email alerts so that you can be notified of the latest deals and these can be configured to suit each individual customer’s needs. There’s also the option to have these alerts sent to wireless devices for those on the move.

I also like the fact that there’s a coupon page which may provide an extra opportunity to save cash on top of looking for the best price.

This is a website that’s updated continually so it’s well worth visiting to see about saving money and importantly finding what we are looking for and I always get a warm cosy feeling when I’m able to buy exactly what I want and at the price I wanted to pay.

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In the UK tomorrow (5th November) it’s Guy Fawkes night or bonfire night and I kind of miss not being there.

A lot of people will have celebrated the event already this past weekend and people will continue to maybe have their own firework parties during the coming week or next weekend. That’s the big problem really. No one keeps to just one night and there can be heard bangs and whistles from fireworks for the last two weeks of October and the first two of November.

Personally I don’t think fireworks should be sold to the general public for nuisance and safety reasons and that everyone should just attend public organised displays. We used to do that by going to a local display operated by a leisure centre in our home town of Brentwood in England. It was a great event to go to and I really enjoyed it.

The display was set to music and would be themed lasting about 30 minutes. There’d be live music from some local bands prior to and after the main event along with a funfair and food stalls. A good evening out! 

My daughter Hannah mentioned the firework display in her blog as she attended it this Saturday just gone. She was able to video a part of it so I was able to enjoy a little bit of the show. It made me homesick.  

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Since moving to Canada I’ve not really been an avid newspaper reader and I wrote a bit about this in an earlier blog entry.

But I still try to keep up to date online with what the newspapers are saying and in particular the UK publications. So I read with interest a story about the collision of two planes last week at Heathrow Airport in England. They were both on the ground at the time but as a SriLankan Airlines Airbus 340 passed by a stationary British Airways Boeing 747 it sliced off the winglet of the plane. No one was hurt but likewise both planes would certainly not be flying that day.

The Daily Mail now reports that on the following day the SriLankan aircraft was due to take off but seven passengers refused to travel once they realised it was the same plane and insisted on getting off.

Now if you read this story the curious thing is that the report talks at length about how passengers refused to fly with the winglet sliced off even though the airline insisted that it was safe but this account doesn’t ring true because it was the British Airways 747 that lost it’s winglet. The picture clearly shows that. So why was there any discussion about the winglet on the Airbus? It was still intact.

I think this is a good example of a newspaper being a little “creative” in it’s reporting and trying to make the story a little more shocking. I certainly don’t have trouble in understanding that passengers might not want to travel on an aircraft that twenty-four hours previously had been involved in a collision but the story sounds much better if it’s suggested that a chunk of it’s wing is missing. So as I say it’s all a bit confusing to read and make sense of unless you allow for the fact that the newspaper might be garnishing the story just a bit.

It’s a bit like the Madeleine McCann story. Apparently the tabloid press in the UK have had an absolute field day with this tragic event and goodness knows what they’ve found to talk about each day and how much of it is not just a bit of creativity on the part of the press. We need to be selective in our reading me thinks.

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Following on from my previous post about Abby walking and making the house child proof it got me thinking about what I’d like to do with our home decor when the kiddies are a little older and we can start having nice things again.

Nicola will tell you that I’ve a passion for clocks and that I don’t need an excuse to buy one but the ultimate clock to own would be a grandfather clock. It’s not really fair to describe such a beautiful thing as simply as a clock because it’s so much more than that. In my eyes a grandfather clock is a very fine piece of furniture that I imagine almost becomes a part of the family and creates a presence of it’s own.

As I say I’m not sure whether we’re quite ready to get one now because of our young children but before they grow up too much it would be really nice to have one in our home (I imagine in our hallway) and I have a picture in my mind of it looking over our children’s activities in a-not-quite-approving way and in return them looking up at it with a kind of awe filled respect. My imagination is running away with me!

When looking for such an item grandfather clocks are not the the kind of thing that might be typically found in a local furniture store and certainly not a range of them so a very good place to start is 1-800-4clocks.com. It’s a website dedicated to clocks with a large and wonderful selection to browse through.

I really, really like this Howard Miller Harper Grandfather Clock although there are so many to choose from. I like this one in particular for it’s dark windsor cherry finish which favours my liking for a traditional look. It’s also such a visual treat with it’s crystal cut glass and brass finished weights with pendulum in an illuminated case. A real treat to my eyes. If it seems like I’m waxing too lyrically here it’s just that I do see these things as items of real beauty!

How about listening to it’s chime? If you follow the link for this clock you can hear it’s westminster chime by clicking on the chime buttons near the description. The westminster chime is a big part of the personality of the clock.

I’m pretty certain that this is the grandfather clock that I want but there is a big selection and sometimes whatever it is that we are buying it’s not always easy to make up our minds and choose. Even now as I write this I’m not completely sure. So maybe we just need a little help? Take a look at this interesting blog entry that might just be useful. It talks of how prospective buyers can take a survey to build up a personality profile that can help identify just what kind of clock will be right for the kind of personality that we have.

So that’s got me thinking and I find that idea an enticing one. I’m not sure I’ve ever done such a thing before but the way I see it is a grandfather clock is an important purchase and will be a valued addition to the family. A personality profile would ensure that we’d all get along!

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Watching children grow from birth all the way to adulthood is a series of milestones. Some big and and some small but all of them significant and we reached another milestone yesterday with Abby taking her first tentative steps.

This is the kind of achievement that every Mum and Dad gets very excited about and then the significance starts to dawn as to how much more trouble this walking thing is going to cause for everyone. Just like crawling does. The new freedom of movement that leaves in it’s wake a trail of destruction!

Abby’s been standing against things and moving around holding on for quite a while and she’s also been able to just stand and balance. But now with Mummy’s encouragement she can take a few stuttering steps. If she feels like it of course!

So soon as she masters this next stage we’re going to be evaluating the house for yet further hazards as gradually her crawling is superceded by her walking.

One day we’ll be able to have our home back to how it used to be with nice ornaments and stuff but it won’t be anytime soon.

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You’d think that with all of the bad things going on in the world today that there’s nothing left to shock us. But there is.

Christine Lakinski, a fifty year old woman making her way a long a street in Hartlepool, England collapsed to the ground and proceeded to die there. A man called Anthony Anderson, aged twenty-seven thought it would be an idea to throw water over her, urinate over her and then cover her face with shaving foam.

Having smoked a cannabis joint and also under the influence of alcohol this guy became the lowest of the low by not only acting in such an inhuman way but being so proud of his antics that he encouraged his mates to film the incident on their cell phone for Youtube.

It’s not Youtube’s fault of course or the cell phone manufacturer or anybody really. It’s just the fault of Anthony Anderson who apparently has not the slightest degree of human decency in his body and leaves me struggling to find the words to describe what kind of person he must be.

I know that there are many, many bad people out there but this kind of account just brings it home to me as to the hardness of the human heart at times. I hope he’s made to feel “comfortable” in his prison surroundings for the next little while.

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I was listening to an interesting debate on the radio a couple of days ago regarding supermarket plastic bags. I know that over in the UK aswell as here in Canada that there are efforts being made to do away with the one-use bag and encourage shoppers to utilise more robust and reusable bags to carry home their shopping.

Where we normally do our grocery shopping the supermarket charges 5 cents per bag but we’re quite bad for remembering to take any bags with us so rather shamefully we normally end up paying out for half a dozen. We have in fact bought a couple of the strong reusable bags but as I say we’ve yet to discipline ourselves into remembering to taken them with us and two is not enough anyway. Reusable bags do make sense though because for one thing the handles don’t break and you can actually get your shopping home in them and they’re good for the environment.

Supermarket plastic bags are not biodegradable so they normally end up on landfill sites for a long, long time so it makes sense to find a better way. However just as some people refuse to recycle their rubbish by sorting out the plastic and the cardboard for collection (where local authorities have such collections) so supermarkets dare not take a first step of not having plastic bags available for fear of losing customers who can’t see the bigger picture and just want endless plastic bags for their shopping.

Still, it was a very interesting discussion on the radio and it got turned slightly on it’s head by a guy coming on the line to say that if we really want to sort out global warming (By the way I’m not completely convinced of global warming but I do believe in looking after the world we live in) then we should all become vegan because cows are one of the largest producers of methane gas through their burping and…ahem…farting. Get rid of all the cows and you’ll drastically reduce the amount of methane gas in the atmosphere which will reduce the greenhouse effect of warming up the earth.

Well, it’s a thought isn’t it. I read earlier today that the amount of cows on the earth has doubled over the last forty years so perhaps the cow population is playing it’s part in causing global warming. Sheep also have a responsibility in this and would probably have to go too.

So what would we prefer? A cutback in cars, industry, airplane travel and free supermarket bags or maybe just give up eating meat and start to eat lots of veggie burgers and drink soya milk shakes.

I don’t know what to make of all of this you know. But as far as the cow thing is concerned here you’ll find a clearer explanation about the farting, burping animals that need to fart and burp a little less.

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One of my all time favourite movies to watch is There’s something about Mary. I find that it’s a film that can keep me chuckling throughout and actually leaves me feeling quite cheerful afterwards. Shouldn’t a movie do that? Be able to change our mood or maybe even our outlook? Ah well perhaps I’m forgetting that we’re just talking about a movie and not therapy.

Still, it’s a great movie and if I’m pushed to say I think my favourite part of the film is the early scene of Ben Stiller’s character with his mouth full of steel catching his private parts in the fly of his trousers. Definitely an eye watering scenario.

Actually whats really caused me to write this entry in my blog is to draw attention to the closing credits where the cast lip synch to a song called Build Me Up Buttercup by The Foundations. It’s a great song by probably a little known group from the sixties.

Whenever I hear that song to me it has the sound of a group like The Temptations. I see in my head typically four or five black singers in garish 70’s matching suits, each behind a microphone. While one sings the lead the others dance and twirl in unison doing the backing vocals. It really sounds like that kind of presentation. But no. Check out the Youtube video of The Foundations singing Build Me Up Buttercup. The video is black and white and poor quality at the start (although it gets better) but it reveals all and The Foundations are not how I imagined them at all.

It’s probably just me but it’s funny how we can picture something in our minds and how it can then be so different when we see the reality.

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It was a bad weekend for UK sport. As far as England were concerned they lost to South Africa in the Rugby World Cup Final and in terms of British motor sport Lewis Hamilton failed to win the Formula One World Championship.

Living in Canada I’m far away from the intensity that seems to exist in Britain as far as certain sports are concerned. Football (soccer) is of course the real big thing and has massive support. Rugby and cricket follow on and whatever the sport is if we Brits think there’s a chance of us actually winning something we all get very excited. If we then lose (which is normally the case) there’s always a big debate after about why did we lose? Are we taking it seriously enough? Are we investing enough? What’s wrong with us?

I think people from other countries look on and think that we are expecting to win and that we are in some way looking down on everyone else as if our nation should be the only winners. That’s such nonsense but is probably some kind of throwback to British Empire days which was a long time ago but understandably causes resentment. No brit seriously thinks that we are still some centre point of a mighty empire. Britain is just a small country with a large and big hearted population who’d really like to win something sometime.

Here in Canada where it’s a big country with a relatively small population ice hockey rules which unfortunately leaves me cold (excuse the pun). Canadians clearly have a passion for it and are also very good at it which means that in an international competition Canadians want their team to do well. But I don’t pick up on any real passion here just an excitable interest. When Canada was recently represented in the Cricket World Cup and Rugby World Cup I’m not sure just how many Canadians even knew about it.

It’s this kind of feeling that conveys to me a sense of being isolated over here. Sometimes I feel that all the big parties are taking place over in the rest of the world.

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