Winter ride

I was seriously remiss.

I borrowed camping equipment for my July trek to the Adirondacks, and hadn't yet returned it to Marlene.

The weather gods are holding off the snow, at least for the time being. So today I made good.

Comfort food: Heirloom spaghetti and meatballs

Do you know why humans achieved so much more, in the course of evolution, than any other animal on the planet?

The proximate cause, of course, is that we are the smartest.

Life and death at the crossroads

Events continue to cascade in my life. It's been unremitting since May. The pace of change is something to behold.

Most recently I lost my Dad, on the twelfth of November. Out of the blue.

It's not a sad story, it truly isn't. Denis led a very happy full life. For the last six or seven years he was afflicted with progressive memory loss. He was in remarkably good spirits for the most part. That much hadn't changed. I believe his failing memory served to insulate him, to a degree, from his growing frailty and the ever-shrinking sphere of his existence. Then, in a matter of minutes or hours, a stroke took his life. He was eighty-six.

I've had this post on the subject of happiness simmering gently on the back burner for a little over a month. It's high time to publish it before something else happens, like the barbaric,

Remembering

On November 11th I went to the Last Post military cemetery in Pointe Claire.

I have written about this place once or twice before. Here time stands still. Twenty thousand servicewomen and servicemen have been laid to rest in the cemetery. My grandfather Georges Terroux, who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I, is one of them.

It was a privilege to be here on Remembrance Day. The cemetery was well attended.

Been fiddlin'

Today I managed to implement about ninety percent of the changes to this journal that have been rattling around in my brain for many, many, months.

I have to say that translating the thoughts in my head into reasonably well-behaved pixels on the screen has been as painful as I thought it would be.

Authoring any digital media, whether it's software programming, graphic content like photos, or the look and feel of a blog, is fairly obsessive work. Trial and error, error and trial, trial and error. That, and the occasional epiphany when, on the very cusp of total frustration, something finally works. There are far too many moving parts between what this blog looked like for the past five years, and where it is now. I won't bore you with the details.

Runnin' errands

I haven't posted much lately. We bloggers come, and we go.

Some of the going is voluntary, some is imposed.

I have come to the end of some roads. Other roads beckon.

If I was a commuter, now I run errands. Like a run to Costco last week, to buy new cordless phones.

2015 Blogger to Blogger Tour - Epilogue, and lessons learned

It's been a long time between posts. The main reason is that the past two months have been, by some measures, the best and busiest of our lives. There was the annual conference of the national organization I chair that was, for the first time ever, held in Montreal. As soon as that ended we celebrated the marriage of our eldest son. Sonja and Roland came to visit, then Susan and I went on an amazing trip that took us to Edmonton, Jasper Park, Vancouver, and Maui. Phew.

Along the way, I worked on this post, mostly during our flights. I hope you will find it was worth the long wait. 

I'm getting slightly more experienced with touring. That means I still have a lot to learn.