Throwback Thursday – #tbt – My Favourite US Trip? (January 2012)

After last week’s post thinking back to the last time I think I traveled to the US, I thought it’d be fun to also highlight what was probably my favourite US trip ever for another “Throwback Thursday” post.

I was very fortunate to have parents who loved traveling and growing up, I got to travel widely across Canada and the US.  As well, my dad’s sister graduated from nursing, went to work in Hawaii for six months but met a Hawaiian and got married and have never left for ~50 years.  For that reason, my parents have been to Hawaii numerous times over the years and I’ve also been able to go three times in my life (so far).

One of my favourite Hawaii trips didn’t even involve my aunt and her family on Oahu – for something different, we spent a week on Kauai and a week on Maui.

But instead of posting a pic from my personal photo library, I’m going to post a video I came across from one of our personal highlights of Kauai – Anini Beach – which I think Shea would likely call her favourite beach (and possibly her favourite place) in the world to this day (okay, tied with Playa Norte on Isla Mujeres in Mexico.)

Pro Wrestling Territories in the United States: A Brief History

If you’re a pro wrestling fan like I am, you’ll appreciate this walk down memory lane…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI4rsuiK3wc

 

What Anti-Mask People Sound Like To Me…

[Inspired by every Facebook thread about masks I’ve ever seen and the beautiful rants of Brent Terhune…]

“Listen up sheeple!

Wal-Mart thinks they can make me wear pants in their store just because they have a legal right to set policies for their own store and just because the government says pants are necessary to protect the people around us and just because well-trained medical professionals say pants help prevent the spread of disease and just because society, as a whole, has decided that we have to balance the freedom of the individual with the rights of the collective?

So what if I want to strut around Wal-Mart stark naked when I’m shopping for toilet paper and baker’s yeast?  Pants don’t even work – sometimes after I pee, a bit leaks out and stains the front of my pants.  So why wear pants if they don’t work perfectly?

All of you sheep need to stop letting fear rule your life and educate yourself on YouTube and /r/conspiracy like I did – you’ll learn that the requirement to wear pants is just a conspiracy between Big Detergent, Justin Trudeau, and the blue jean companies.

When he was my age, my grandfather gave up his life when he stormed the beaches of Dieppe.  If nothing else, his brave fight against fascism gave me the freedom to not be temporarily inconvenienced by the tyranny of pants for half an hour while shopping for more beard oil.

And another thing – pants are incredibly uncomfortable and my jizz berries gotta breathe.  How the hell are they supposed to do that if they’re covered by a thin layer of fabric?  In fact, if I wear pants too long, my crotch gets itchy and that’s 100% proof that pants are dangerous to people wearing them for extended periods and not that I have bad hygiene or my habits when I’m not wearing pants put me at a higher risk of contracting STDs.

I mean, c’mon!  So what if I want to bend over to more closely inspect the hair dye boxes and I happen to blow a wet fart that sprays moist droplets all over the aisle and into the path of anyone walking by for the next ten minutes?  That’s just me expressing my constitutional rights!  And sure, I can hear them but how the hell do I even know my butt’s mighty duck calls are real if I can’t see them?  That’s some real science for you by the way – if you can’t observe it, it ain’t real!

Do your own research.

Too many people are trusting the lamestream media who have their own pro-reality bias or the scientists who’ve studied diseases like this for decades.  I went to the school of “hard knocks” which, sure, was mostly my friends knocking me hard in the head on the playground.  But how I feel about this issue, plus the memes my uncle Charlie shares on Facebook, are just as relevant as what any poindexter scientist says!

Do you even know anybody who’s gotten sick from fecal matter?  Neither do I which clearly means diseases like cholera and dysentery aren’t real. Checkmate pantaloonies – enjoy wearing your pants to protect you from something that hasn’t personally affected me which means it obviously doesn’t exist!

I refuse to live in my life in fear of what happens if I refuse to wear pants.  Sure, some grandma might die of shock when she sees my ham ‘n’ eggs swinging in the cereal aisle.  Or some lady with COPD might gag to death on her own vomit looking at my naked nethers.  But we all gotta die someday, am I right or am I right?

Finally, god forbid if any minimum wage minion comes up and tries to force me to put pants on in their store.  If that happens, I’m grabbing my junk like a monkey in the zoo and it ain’t going to just be invisible poo particles contaminating everything around me because I’d rather be pantless than a smarty pants.

Just sayin’…”

Music Monday – “Four years old/Riding that new bike/No training wheels/Holding on real tight/Oh baby/Everyone falls”

Not sure what it means when you’re getting music recommendations from your mother-in-law but that’s how I first heard of this singer who also happens to be an RN that my mother-in-law worked with prior to her retirement.

Also important to note that this video has some scenes shot at Nickle Lake Regional Park where we have our seasonal campsite!

“Hard Not To Fall” – Karissa Hoffart

Secular Sunday – 10 WTF Bible Passages

 

Saturday Snap – Sarcan Situation

I can’t remember the last time Shea and I took recycling to Sarcan but I’m pretty sure it was before Covid and possibly not since around *last* Christmas since we only take cans every few months once they build up.

Of course with Sarcan having been shut down for a few months plus our somewhat increased consumption (!) during quarantine, we have ended up with a *huge* backlog of cans to return.

Even after Sarcan reopened (June?), we waited quite a while in the hopes that lines would die down.  But when we finally braved a recycling depot the other day (not even our usual one as its not even taking Drop & Go since they’re still so overwhelmed apparently), we found it not *too* bad – about four people in front of us and a wait of about half an hour in total.

I won’t tell you where our cans stop and the person in line in front of us begins in the picture below but yeah, we’re due for a *big* cheque!

Friday Fun Link – Inside The World Trade Center (1999)

Throwback Thursday – #tbt – Minot Wal-Mart (April 2012)

With the Canada-US border closed for the foreseeable future, I was trying to figure out the last time I went to the States.

For awhile there in the early 2010’s, I’d say we ended up going about once or twice a year, either to Williston which is just over the border or Minot, which is an hour further away but has more to do in terms of shopping and a full mall (and of course, we did a big family trip to Hawaii in 2012 but otherwise, most of our vacations since then have been Mexico/Cuba/Dominican Republic instead of popular US destinations.)

Anyhow, even using the geotagging in my photos, the latest I could find was a Minot trip in December 2014 which surprised me – I would’ve thought we went *sometime* in the past six years, even for a day trip but I guess that since Shea and I quietly decided not to go to the US for any reason after Trump was elected in 2016, maybe not too surprising after all?

Anyhow, here’s a pic from a 2012 trip which included that major tourist destination for Canadians – an American Wal-Mart! 😉

Netflix CEO Writes A Book

Some irony that the head of the world’s most successful video company would write a book but there you go.

I’ve long been fascinated by how various tech companies (including Netflix) create and develop their corporate cultures and what traditional companies and organizations can learn from them.

Hastings boils down Netflix’s competitive advantage over Blockbuster — which 20 years ago rejected his $50 million asking price for the then-fledgling DVD-by-mail startup — to three things: “a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls.” Those principles, he says, are the taproot from which its “no-rules rules” have sprung.

“Mask” To School

Pretty different “back to school” photo this year – masks being the most obvious change but also missing the tree in our old front yard that was the backdrop for “first day of school” photos since Pace started kindergarten (since we still live in the neighbourhood, I suggested taking the kids there for a stealth picture but Shea thought that was a bad idea for some reason! So the small bush in the neighbour’s yard had to suffice as a new backdrop.) 😉