The Trans-Canada Highwaymen is another Canadian supergroup made up of members of Sloan, Barenaked Ladies, The Odds, and Pursuit of Happiness with a conceit that they’ll play hits from their own bands but only songs that each member wrote for their other groups (which is why it’s ironic that they stick a bit of “Poets” by the Tragically Hip in the clip below!)
Shea and I rarely take three weeks’ vacation at a time – we usually spread our holiday allotment out through the year –Â some in the winter (especially in years when we can afford a hot holiday), a week or two in summer (sometimes together and sometimes not) and then a few days around Christmas and/or assorted other days here and there throughout the year.
But I realised the other day that we had a funny coincidence with our holidays this year – we took a three week long summer holiday when Pace was three years old and we did it again this year now that Sasha’s three.
It’s been a great holiday that unintentionally became a walk down memory lane in many ways…
Camping in Greenwater with my kids after that was one of the main places I camped with my parents when I was a kid
Pace had a buddy his age camping in Greenwater and I often had a friend with me too (this year, Pace’s friend’s entire family was there whereas when I was a kid, M&D often let me bring a friend along.)
Camping at Nickel Lake in Weyburn is a place I’ve been camping ever since I’ve known Shea and is closely linked to my memories of her and her family as well as my own family (my grandfather and grandmother apparently used to go there in the earliest days of the park)
Unfortunately, we lost one of my nine aunts & uncles on my dad’s side during this holiday but I was able to get out to Indian Head the day after the funeral to reminisce with the many family members who had gathered there.
During one trip to Indian Head, we stopped at the Dairy Mart which was a main summer hangout spot for me growing up. Â We also went swimming in the Indian Head pool where I spent so many years as a teenager (not as a lifeguard but I was there enough to probably be made an honourary one!)
We also stopped for some snacks and a potty break at the IH Esso on our way through to Katepwa Lake and that reminded me of my first summer job there.
Yesterday, I ended up attending a mini-reunion for a handful of people who attended Luther College at the U of R. Â We got to visit the dorm rooms (which are currently under renovation but the unrenovated ones look the same as twenty years ago!), look at old yearbooks and photos, swap stories of college hijinx, and even eat in our old cafeteria!
Late last night, sitting by the fire in our yard, I ended up reading through one of my journals from my 1995 exchange to England and that brought back such a rush of memories. Â Not foreseeing Facebook, I didn’t always do a great job of keeping people’s last names and people’s full names are long gone in my memory for the most part – but the faces, voices, and personalities of Cath and Eric and Ed and Al and Brenda and Lyndey and “Guitar Pete” and Liz and numerous other people I met – were as vivid reading my journal last night as they were twenty years ago.
I’m sure there are numerous other throwbacks that I’m not including here (and admittedly, some of these flashbacks are inevitable when you holiday in and around places you’ve spent your whole life rather than going somewhere you’d never been before.)
But as I said, it just struck me that so many of the events of this particular holiday ended up with a mist of nostalgia on them!
A friend who was in Luther dorms at the same time I was back in the early 1990’s was going to be passing through Regina from her home in Ottawa during her summer holidays.
She reached out to a few people to see if there’d be any interest in having a mini-reunion at Luther College, one thing led to another, and today, a handful of former students, spouses and their kids gathered to see our old residence, some of the rooms that are currently undergoing renovations, grab a meal in the old cafeteria and catch up generally.
The Luther Alumni Association got involved as well and it turned into a very fun day for everyone!
As a 43-year old white male, I feel duty-bound to post this funny piece that came out last week and which shows how silly many web articles about an entire generation sound when applied to a very specific slice of demography…
Some examples…
How Tumblr Plans To Pay 43-Year-Old White Men To Blog ?—?Inc.
Is The Future Of Your Church Doomed Without 43-Year-Old White Men? — Christian Post
Why Employers Need To Empathize With ‘Entitled’ 43-Year-Old White Men — Fortune
Soon after Shea came to join me in London when I started my Masters degree in January 2006, we rented a car and like the good tourists we were, headed for Niagara Falls.
Going to the falls in mid-winter seems strange but someone (a classmate?) had tipped us off that they’re actually really beautiful in the winter and that proved to be true. Â (Contrary to the photo below, they’re also very safe. Â The mist of the falls freezes on the rails and barriers but the walkways are fairly clean – I think they may even be heated?)
And actually, come to think of it – Niagara Falls wasn’t even our initial destination that day.  We had rented a car for the weekend and were heading somewhere else closer but less well-known.  So, on a spur-of-the-moment as we drove the opposite way of the Falls out of London, we decided to drive to the Falls which was something like a 2.5 hour drive, even if you were pointed in the right direction to begin with!
I still remember a lot of Ontario-based classmates being surprised that we’d do such a long drive but I explained that in Saskatchewan, where the nearest major city to Regina is 2.5 hours away, that’s not a big deal!
(We did end up having to buy toques at the Niagara Falls gift shop which I thought was pretty funny in terms of souvenirs!)Â to join
There are numerous ongoing issues with Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from when she was Secretary of State including everything from how a number of Clinton e-mails had been deleted but then restored via a cloud backup that Clinton’s team wasn’t even aware of to questions of how many of these e-mails were meant to be classified to whether a foreign power had hacked her private server
Not technically “cyber-security” in the purest sense but the Clinton campaign has been slammed for virtual “astro-turfing” by paying people/companies/bots to post positive comments and stories about their campaign on sites across the web rather than relying on organic user-generated content (to be fair, all campaigns try to direct online conversations to different degrees – Clinton is just the most blatant.)
Even after controlling for other factors that may mean some people are more likely to read than others (education, gender, age, etc.), a recent study shows that people who read more are more likely to live longer…
Compared with those who did not read books, those who read for up to three and a half hours a week were 17 percent less likely to die over 12 years of follow-up, and those who read more than that were 23 percent less likely to die. Book readers lived an average of almost two years longer than those who did not read at all.
