Doesn’t anyone remember Trump and his words with John McCain?! This [veteran] is talking about how tough it is being in a war. He is standing on a stage with [Donald Trump] a man who ridiculed a POW for no good reason for being captured and tortured in a war. Trump’s supporters are incredibly delusional.
Shea and I have reached that point in our lives where we tend to buy most Christmas gifts for ourselves and then label them as if they were from each other.
But we do usually try to get at least one original “surprise” gift as well – for example, this year I bought her some jewelry and she bought me a one hour soak in a “serenity float pod“.
I had my one hour appointment today and it was pretty relaxing – you go into the spa, shower in your private room then climb into the nearby serenity pod which has 10 inches of body temperature water and 1000 lbs of salt which make it incredibly buoyant.
You have a variety of options – you can leave the pod door open, partially closed or closed completely. You can have music playing or not (and either listen to the the spa’s or your own if you bring your device which can be plugged into the outside of the pod via provided stereo cable.) The final option is lighting in the pod which you control as either total darkness, about six different colours or a slow multi-colour strobe of all the colours.
It was a great experience – as the staff member explained, people often use their first soak as a way to simply try all the variations – everything from different ways of floating to the various lighting options and so on – and that’s what I did. I put on one of the handful of albums I listen to when I’m relaxing/napping (I didn’t but if you fall asleep in the pod, the water prevents you from going under!) and had a moment of non-serene panic when I thought the ~45 minute album would run out then I’d be stuck with whatever popped up on Shuffle Play! Luckily my iPhone was set to stop at the conclusion of the album. So this also gave me 15 minutes to experience the pod without music.
The actual experience reminded me of our various hot holidays where I take any opportunity to go out in the ocean then float and bob in the waves, watching the sky.
Anyhow, one of the many things that crossed my mind as I floated today was an idea for a blog post about the…
10 Most Unique Experiences of My Life
We rode in a submarine off the shore of Waikiki in Oahu, Hawaii
We also rode in a helicopter over Kauai
This wasn’t something unique to me but I’ve often talked about being part of two unique moments in history – being in the UK in 1995 during the height of the “Cool Britannia” movement and being in Calgary in 2004 during the Flames improbable run to the Stanley Cup Finals. What links both of these experiences is they were times when a region rallied around a possibility with optimism and joy.
I’ve stayed up all night in Vegas gambling (quarter machines but still a pretty big thrill to start with $20, get it up to over $100 then lose it all!)
I pushed the idea of doing a “Money Bomb” fundraiser during Ryan Meili’s first run for the leadership of the Saskatchewan NDP. Then, when his team implemented it, Ryan’s “Money Bomb” because the first time this technique had been done in Canadian politics at any level (as far as we know.)
I’ve been on the Eiffel Tower at sunset which is the ultimate in romance. Unfortunately, the woman traveling with me was a platonic fellow student but it was still a pretty cool moment. 😉
It’s not unique that I was in the delivery room when Sasha was born. But it’s probably still (somewhat) unique that I videotaped the whole thing! (Then again, with the ubiquity of smartphones, that’s probably not too unique either. Okay, how about the fact that I invited my mother-in-law to be there during the entire delivery as well?) 😉
I did a bunch of “sex, drugs and rock & roll” things in college that I won’t get into details about but will say that some of them were fairly unique, at least as far as I could tell in the days before the Internet made those kinds of activities a lot less private! 😉
Definitely not a “Friday Fun Link” day today with news of a shocking shooting at a school in northern Saskatchewan which killed four people (not five as many early reports stated) with others injured.
You don’t realise how remote some northern Saskatchewan communities are – when Shea and I went to the Ness Creek Music Festival in (what felt to us like) “northern” Saskatchewan, we were still five hours south of La Loche. When we went to La Ronge houseboating when I was a kid, that was six hours from La Loche. When we went to Jan Lake fishing a couple years ago, that was ten hours from La Loche (although those last two examples are partly because you have to travel east to west as well to get between these remote centres.)
In terms of what causes someone to do this, it’s probably a number of factors. But the way that Aboriginal people are marginalized and still suffer from historic injustices is definitely a big part of it.
[Edit: I have no idea why I posted this on a Wednesday. I’ve fixed the date.]
I’m still thankful that, ten years ago this month, a couple upper year students told me during my first couple weeks of library school that it’s more important to get a photo of the people you start the program with rather than the ones you convocate with.
She said that since you spend pretty much your entire semester with these people doing required classes, they’re the ones you’ll get to know best and the ones you’ll think of as “your” class. Then, in later semesters, you’ll be in different classes with different people and because of the various ways to complete the program and co-op terms, you’ll end up convocating with a fairly random group of people that you may or may not know very well.
(Plus organizing this photo also gave me a chance to get at least half of my class looking at me like I was a complete goofus, roughly two weeks after I’d first met them!) 😉
