My personal system is “most used apps on the first page with roughly themed rows”, “other commonly used apps on the second page” and then everything else sorted into folders on the following pages by category but as a librarian, I feel like I should switch to one of these creative classification systems.
We’ve had a lot of snow this year and one big advantage of our new house is having an attached garage so we don’t have to shovel/scrape/dig out like at our old house (which had a detached garage but which we rarely used since it was:
a) full of junk
b) behind the house and any heavy snow made it hard to get out of the driveway
c) Shea and I left at different times so it was hard to coordinate coming and going
d) all of the above.)
Anyhow, Pace was shoveling our new driveway recently and said he actually remembered “helping” me dig out my stuck car, parked in front of our old house, when he was three years old which reminded me of this photo of my car stuck in snow after being parked in the street overnight after a heavy snowfall.
I saw this in the context of someone dealing with cancer but I can think of lots of other situations – workplaces, volunteer organizations, schools, families, life during Covid in general – where everyone is encouraged to act as if everything is good and positive and happy instead of acknowledging that things might be less than great.
It’s not a perfect analogy but it sort of reminds me of an anecdote I remember Shea telling me.
One of her former coworkers said she hated to go downtown with her kids because they might see a homeless person. <gasp>
So instead of having a (yes, possibly tough) conversation with their children about addictions, economics or why there are might even homeless people, this person wanted to shield them from reality that things aren’t always good or positive or happy.
Same mindset, still wrong.
…I find myself downloading apps to test my hearing at midnight, suddenly worried that a lifetime of listening to loud music and going to concerts that left my ears ringing is catching up to me.
(Luckily, at least according to a free iPhone app, I have nothing to worry about…yet.)
Shea and I are hooked on “Yellowstone” right now and a big part of that is realising how many songs on the soundtrack are already part of the “Camping Faves” playlist we listen to non-stop every summer (including a few by Ryan Bingham who also stars in the show as a singing cowboy.)
“Southside of Heaven” – Ryan Bingham
This is pretty cool (even though the tone sounds like an auto-tuned hockey organ!)
When I was in high school and later, in university, the neighbours across the street hosted a Boxing Day road hockey tournament every year.
This was followed by an airing of the latest Don Cherry “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em” VHS tape that one of their two boys got from Christmas, finger foods, basement beers and ping pong.
The mom of the family recently posted some photos from albums she created over the years – in the 1995 picture below, I’m the guy in the bright blue parka (that memorable jacket having literally just gotten home from a semester exchange to England about four days earlier! And that’s our double garage in the background of various pics since she was taking shots from her own driveway. There were *a lot* of sports played on that driveway and against those garage doors growing up – basketball, baseball, tennis, hockey, even pro wrestling!)
Anyhow, I thought this was fitting to post as I was talking to a colleague about growing up playing hockey.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t very good” he said.
“Me either,” I replied. “Come to think of it, I was about as good as you’d expect a guy who grows up to be a librarian to be at the game!” 😉
Well, the dominant narrative of this story is “large group of Internet-enabled Reddit underdogs figure out strategy to bankrupt billion dollar hedge fund” but the reality, as usual, is probably a lot more complicated and also consequential.
Not a fan of his politics but the man is the best hockey player of all-time and probably the most accomplished athlete out of any major sport ever!
Hard to believe he’s 60…
We've got 60 facts for Wayne Gretzky's 60th birthday ??
Think you know everything about The Great One? @robpizzo begs to differ ? pic.twitter.com/FDWGLCtu5v
— Hockey Night in Canada (@hockeynight) January 26, 2021
