Month: August 2012

Saturday night in the basement

It was a wonderfully gloomy, stormy day today. Nice background for a wedding, although the principals might not agree. Regardless of weather, it’s a happy thing to watch two people who so clearly should be married actually doing so. Congrats to Carroll and Lex.

Saturday was much better than Friday, which pretty thoroughly sucked in many most ways for me. Many thanks to Duncan for helping to temper the suckage for a while on Friday afternoon; you maybe don’t know quite how much I needed that. And my apologies to anyone else who came in contact with me in any way whatsoever, especially my parents and the poor folks at the Harris Teeter on Cloverdale. Enough said. I’m not joking when I say it was a pretty shitty day.

But now I’m contentedly in the basement, listening to Capitale Rock and working on Groceteria databases and (hooray!) on the last of the analog home video. I should be done with that by tomorrow. The digital stuff requires much less babysitting and I’ll finally have my home video archived to…um…archival standards very soon. That will make me very happy. Then I can start making MP4 access copies so I can easily watch it all on the Apple TV. Or not…

Not just me

Restoring her pride in Canada

Last night I emailed a friend half-way across the world that I was becoming increasingly embarrassed to be a Canadian. I ranted a bit about the federal government and then went on about some of the antics of our mayor.

Tonight I read Nabeel Khan’s description of his “proudly Canadian” Chick-Felays restaurant where “We welcome everyone, customers and employees, with our arms open and our hearts open.”

Then, I read in another section of the paper that Canadian Tire has gifted Himy Syed with a new bicycle so that he can continue his “30 Majids” project for the month of Ramadan.

Thank you for reminding me why I am proud to be a Canadian.

Christine Gebel, Toronto

Funny thing: I was also struck by these same two articles this week in The Star and almost posted about them a few days ago.

For the past few years, I’ve taken to referring to Canada as “America without the bullshit.” I’m not naive enough to believe that our neighbor to the north is perfect. I do, however, believe that it’s a far better place than the US in many ways. Not all ways, maybe, but many…