I was to be in NYC yesterday, but due to complancy on my part the direct flight was full so I was going to go through Toronto through to NYC…. always a combination ripe for disaster. My flight out of Calgary was going to be delayed, which meant a missed connection in Toronto, and having been through this before I knew that I should deal with as much as I could in Calgary, as opposed to leaving it for Toronto where I was sure to get worse service due to the number of people also looking for resolution to their missed flights. Once I got Air Canada to book me on a flight the next day and mark my file so that they knew in Toronto that they were to put me up in hotel I just had to sit and bear it… Things went okay, we landed 3+ hours late and once I got to the right place the hotel was taken care of and this morning I jumped on the airport shuttle at 6:30am.

While in the Air Canada lounge waiting for my flight I was grabbing some cereal when I heard someone yell into the kitchen from the lounge ‘HEY, HEY, HEY, there is a fire here’. A bit alarmed but tired and disinterested I ignored them and went about getting my cereal ready. I heard more commotion next to me asking the kitchen if they could shut it off, and general tense energy, being curious, frustrated and a bit tired I asked someone what was wrong and they pointed me to the DANGER!!!! A large bulb was smoking, more than a cigarette, less than a 4 alarm fire.

You would think that people that travel lots might be mostly competent as they are likely being paid by a company to do business on the road, leading me to believe they have some cerebral capacity. Well this smoking light bulb was quite a complex problem for these folks (let’s say 10-20 people are all looking and very very worried about this grave danger). I grabbed a couple napkins and did a very very brave thing. I unscrewed the light bulb and gave it to someone in the kitchen. I know this will shock most of you, the smoking STOPPED!!! Crazy I know.

Good things we don’t have to fend for ourselves in the wild anymore, we might not last very long.

We went to the Big Apple Circus, which was just one of the many activities for the weekend and had a blast. It is a classic one ring circus in a big tent.

I’M GOING TO THE CIRCUS!

I’m gonna swing the hammer and win you a prize.

With a fat ass like that, it was no problem.

My prize.

No circus is complete without, popcorn, cotton candy and some drinks.

Inside the circus tent.

The show was awesome, but of course it was - who doesn’t like the circus.

Trust me she’s having fun! (I was in the backyard building a little roof/house for Mr. Lawnmower in anticipation of the coming winter. (If you’re thinking the lawnmower is hard to pick out, could the grass be that long… unfortunately yes.)

Julie and I took advantage of a nice September day and did a short hike up to the Prarie View fire lookout. It was one of the few times that I have been up there where it was clear enough to see Calgary’s skyline which is about 75 km away.

Calgary in the far distance.

Enjoying the sun.

The self portrait.

Mt. Baldy over looking Barrier lake.

For the Thanksgiving weekend we had the whole family out to Victoria - which was booked when we were supposed to run the marathon… we failed at that but we did have a great weekend. Including Eljah getting his first big boat ride on the ferry to Salt Spring.

One of us fits better here than the other…

“Hey Dad, nice outfit, we match. Does mommy dress you too? I’d say we both look pretty good - she’s got good taste.”

“Hey Dad, I’m cold but this boat ride is neat… how about you pick me up, wrap me in a blanket and put my touque on my head for me?”

“Mom the reason I like ‘Lito’ so much, is that he’s willing to damn near hang me completely over the fence so I can pet the nice donkey. Here donkey, donkey, donkey.”

“Oh ya and the other reason I like ‘Lito’ so much is that when we’re cruising down the street hanging out, and my little legs get tired…”

“… he just picks me and gallops down the road with me… you should try it sometime mom. It’s fun.”

“hmmm… so here I am in a pumpkin patch. Cool! But I’m pretty small and mom dressed me up like a pumpkin, I better go pick one before someone picks me…”

“Hey DAD and JULIE! This one here it’s PERFECT! I’ll pick up for you.”

“I’ll use my elbow to give you a hand. I picked a pretty good one eh!”

Here are some shots of the sunny day at the Guggenheim in Bilbao:

Front of the museum:

You keep them around when they’re fun…
and this one, she’s fun.

Julie doing her Spain pose for me:

The back of the Guggenheim:

Just a bit down the path from the museum;
Julie finds a strange friend:

Bridging the old architecture with the new:

This building was amazing and I don’t think I have every been in a structure quite as interesting. The story behind the Guggenheim family, how this museum ended up here and impact it has had to the region is pretty neat!

My favorite piece was from the Russian collection. It was a fairly large piece 4-5 feet across and about 3+ feet tall. The piece was of men pulling a boat up the river and was done to depict a time after the Revolution in Russia where it was cheaper to use human labor to pull boats up the river than to hire horses or mules. The picture on its own was awesome but after finding that out it was even more intense.

More to come on my summer travels with Julie.

I won’t post all the pics (or even many) tonight but I will try and get pictures and short stories relating to the pics out at a regular pace over the next couple weeks. I’ll start with a landscape shot of NYC with hopefully more panoramic shots to come if I can stitch them together properly.

I’m not very good at taking panoramic shots or stitching them together, which means they will be a bit rough but I’m interested in getting better so hopefully over the next few months I’ll achieve that.

Here is a shot from Roosevelt Island looking back on mid-town Manhattan, with the United Nations on the left side of the shot and the 59th street bridge (Queen-borough Bridge) of the far right side of the pic. The Empire State is hiding behind the tall Trump building, which is to the left of the Chrysler building… can you pick them out and more… a fun game to play with the Manhattan skyline.

(You’ll want to click on the pic and look at it in a bigger size to get a better feel for it)

This picture was taken on the 4th of July, which was supposed to be a great fireworks show. Unfortunately I blew the perfect viewing location and Julie who loves fireworks and was excited to enjoy the 4th of July show in NYC had to watch it from behind a bunch of trees and a chain link fence… good thing I made up for it in Spain (more to come on that later - but here is a one shot from one of the nights in Spain). Julie was also treated that memorable 4th of July night with being stuck on Roosevelt Island with the thousands of other people that were trying to take the subway back into the City, so we went for an ‘adventure’ into Queens at midnight to try walk back to the Bridge or catch a cab.

Fireworks on the beach with the waves rolling up over your feet - priceless!

It won’t surprise most folks that know me and know the basic tenets of Ayn Rands writings that I would enjoy her books. The were bought for me by a mentor of mine and being quite lengthy in volume and content I wanted to get to them when I had time and was ready. I started with the Fountainhead which is her book on the ideal man in Howard Roark. (Remember she was writing in the 40’s and grew up in communist Russia, it was still very much a man’s world - in her next book she creates the perfect woman - carrying much of the same traits.) I simply loved the Fountainhead and the courtroom scene was more than a brilliant piece of writing it was inspirational after a bad day at the office. If you can’t read anything by Ms. Rand - at least read the courtroom scene, it is awesome. A movie was made on the book and Ayn was involved and there is a story that goes something along the lines of the director wanting to shorten the courtroom scene, they then did it behind her back, she freaked and threatened to sabotage the film, its release and promotion so she got her way and the full unedited scene was put in. I haven’t had a chance to watch the movie yet as Netflix doesn’t have it and Amazon says that the studio is not currently distributing the film (originally released in 1949) . I may have to get a VHS copy off eBay.

I read the Fountainhead a few years ago and I was ready to move on to her opus - Atlas Shrugged. If the Fountainhead was a bit preachy, this was over the top. The writing was done very well, the ability to get her philosophy across so vividly and clearly using a fiction novel as a vehicle was done very well. I found the book to be long and the summary part of the book, John Galt’s radio address, I suspect would have pass a PhD thesis on the philosophy of Objectivism (course she created that branch of Philosophy). She took 10 years to write the book and if you read it you can see why - it is amazingly intricate, articulate, the plot works and she takes the greatest care to ensure that she is consistent throughout, while peppering you with her thoughts and ideas.

While I think like all extremists she misses the boat a bit by going to far; I do believe her general ideas on society, people and what actually makes the nations that create the lifestyles and opportunities that I admire, are correct. I love the tenet in the book that it is not the labors that go on strike and affect society but the ‘creators’, the industrialist and the people that are sticking their necks to create jobs and things of value that go on strike and allow the unions to grow stronger and more powerful. Allowing the unions to live by the rules that the set and forcing them to understand the repercussions of that, there is no reward for working harder or contributing more, in fact in cases it leads to punishment and those that need more are rewarded more. The industrialists leave general society to fall its own sword while they go off and create their own secluded community where nothing is free, altruistic, and everything has a value. People are not defined by their job but rather what they can contribute and then receive fair remuneration for it. It is fiction so some of it gets out there, and even her romance between characters in the book is ‘Randian’ with immense passion but always brutal rationality.

Completing the book will include you in a conversations with folks that will want to talk about the book, her views, what you thought on the book etc., regardless if the read they book last week, or 20 years ago - I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten just a “Its a good book, I also read it”. Some people seem offended when they catch you reading it, but most often folks that have read it will start to espouse its virtues, or will have hated it and let you know it. There are lots of statements of people saying it changed their view of how they approach the world and I can see how that is possible, although a bit far fetch; and there are plenty of people who can’t believe that she actually believed what she was writing and hate the thought of the book. I think her clarity and strength of ideas is awesome (right or wrong - she gets her point across).

I did find The Fountainhead an easier read and probably liked it a bit better, but I am in scare company as Atlas Shrugged is often the book folks will tell you to read if you are only going to read one. The book is an endeavor but well worth it!

I found this phrase from the book in wikiquote; it gives a good example of her writing style and a section of the book where she gets a bit preachy; there are many items in the book just like it (some much longer.. in fact the radio address is 75 pages!):

“So you think that money is the root of all evil, have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange which can not exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is not the product of moochers that claim your product by tears, or of the looters who take it from you by force, money is made possible only by the men that produce, is this what you consider evil, when you accept money in payment for your effort you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange if for the product of the effort of others. To trade by the means of money is the code of the men of good will. .money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort but money is only a tool, it will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires but it will not provide you with desires. Money will not purchase happiness for the man that has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. Let me give you a tip a clue to means characters, the man who damns money has attained it dishonorably, the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil, that sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another their only substitute if they abandon money is the muzzle of a gun. Do you wish to know whether another that day is coming, watch money, money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. when you see that trading is done not by consent but by compulsion, when you see in order to produce you need to obtain permission from men that produce nothing, when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods but in favors, when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull then by work, when you see corruption and being rewarded and honesty becoming a self sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed. when you have made evil the means of survival do not expect men to remain good, do not expect them to stay moral and loose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral, do not expect them to produce when production is punished and looting is rewarded do not ask who is destroying the world, you are. If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans I would choose the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money” no other language or nation had used these words before. Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words to make money hold the essence of human morality, yet now the looters credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievement as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt. Your greatest men the industrialists as braggarts and your magnificent factories as the products and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip driven slaves, the draughter???? Who simpers when he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip ought to learn the difference on his own hide. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one and other then men become the tools of men. Blood whips and guns or dollars take your choice, there is no other and your time is running out”

My aside - lightening the load:
The book is quite long, the format I had was 1070 pages, plus introductions, forewords, discussions at the end and such. I took the book with me on the Haute Route and as I didn’t want to lug the whole book around I lopped off the first 400 pages I had already read and just kept the tail end, I continued to trim the book down in size which increased the velocity at which I was able to read, as it soon fit more comfortable in my bag and then in my back pocket and kept getting smaller and smaller… this does now mean that I need to buy another copy as I want to have this book on my shelf.

——————–

So when I was done a long serious and deep book like Atlas Shrugged - I took it upon myself to try a fluff or brain dead novel. I don’t think I have every read a truly fluff novel and as I had just donate a copy of The Effective Executive, a Peter Druker classic, to Air Canada I was now without a book. (By now Air Canada must have quite a library of my books I hope they are enjoying them.) Without a book I went to an airport kiosk that only had about 15 different books and I decided to buy the lightest fluffiest novel I could find… I purchased Skinny Dip - a comedy/fluff novel on a botched murder of a wife by a crooked biologist - he throws her off the side of a crusie ship on their second honeymoon; with the wife ending up saved by a guy who lives on his own little island while floating on a bail of Jamaican weed in the ocean; he has had 6 ex wives and the book goes through the torment and tribulation they put this dork husband that tried to kill her through….. guess what.. I actually enjoyed it.. I took me 1 week to read - Atlas Shrugged took months I’ll remember more of the details of Atlas Shrugged and look forward to flipping through it again.. Skinny Dip could disappear and I would never miss it.. but I still managed to enjoy it quite a bit.

——————–

Next I am on to a book which possibly has one of the worst covers on a book I have seen in a long time. It has received great reviews on amazon, and it was recommended by a friend as something I would enjoy - it seems quite light and doesn’t appear to be something that is going to take a long time to get through.

Here is a site that I use to see how pathetic my training for my marathons is… course I usually get lazy and forget to log my runs.. but so far I have been better this year… it has great reports and stuff once you get your data in there…. anyway, let me know if you like it.

WinningStats.com

The other little tid bit, I almost feel bad sharing it as I don’t want them to take it away, is viewing stories online that require a paid registration or login. The one site that it happens to me the most on is the Globe and Mail when I want to read one of the opinion columns. There is a very easy way around it.

Step 1) Go to the article and copy the title of the article
Step 2) Go to news.google.com
Step 3) Paste in the title
Step 4) The first link should be the Globe article with all of the text, for free!

With that I will leave you with a blurb from Margaret Wente, one of my favorite columnists.

From her article in the Saturday Globe and Mail:

“I couldn’t have known it at the time, but I was blessed to be a youth during those fleeting years when nothing was forbidden and all things were permitted. We smoked. We drank. We had unprotected sex with strangers. We ingested illicit substances, and when we got the munchies, we gorged ourselves on jelly doughnuts. We even seduced our professors, and vice versa. The dark cloud of AIDS was not yet on the horizon. We never gave a thought to secondhand smoke, sexual harassment, or our cholesterol.

‘Twas bliss to be alive back then, and I pity all of you who weren’t. My favourite line in poetry came from Blake: “Damn braces, bless relaxes.”
”
ah… to turn back the clock…. what we missed.

- Signed up for the Victoria marathon - running it with Julie!! It will be her first marathon so it should be a tonne of fun! (as much fun as running for 42 km can be)

- Ran home from work yesterday - here is the running route that I took. Have some fun and zoom right in, the detail is amazing - find the Empire State - they have it in 3D; super cool (you need to view it in satellite to see the 3D). Click here for a link to the run.

- I have put my pics up from the Haute Route - I will make a Flickr slide show, but I have the photo’s up here. The site also has photo’s from a bunch of other folks on the trip as well.

… one pic from the trip:

my big adventure for the trip was that I broke both of my skis on day 3, pulled both toe pieces out of both skis… we jimmy rigged them to get me down and thankfully that day we went through Verbier which allowed me to get new skis… course that was a bunch of money I should not have had to spend.. but had it happened any other day it would have been a helicopter out or a LONG walk to the valley if it was safe and not a crevasse ridden ice field… either way it worked out… I will post a longer story with lots of pics in the near future.. first I need to get back to Canada and then figure out where I can put 1.5 to 2 GB of pictures!

So Hi from Switzerland and we’ll be home soon!

The pictures from the walk Julie and I went on did not turn out, guess she will have to make the 13K pilgrimage with me next time or another time when I remember to bring a real camera and not buy some disposable that didn’t work.. grrrr.. that pissed me off!

Instead here she is from a trip in November mounting the famous bull by Wall Street. My subways stop is a couple hundred feet from this bull, and on the way out from work everyday I get to look out on the Statue of Liberty. Pretty neat and it doesn’t seem to get old, sorta like trying to find the Empire State Building when I walk around Manhattan - it’s my own little light house that helps me find my way.

Julie and I are going to spend a coupe of weeks in August in Spain and spend sometime relaxing and enjoying not being 2000 miles apart. Here is a picture from one of my favorite places in Spain - Peña Furada, the town where my dad grew up. I am not sure Julie and I will get to make it there as it is in the middle of no-where in the mountains. I sure would like to see it again, Dad’s old house would not be considered a suitable cabin for weekend visits by many today (although I am sure he would still be able to live there.. the mice might bug mom a bit though - oh and now Julie won’t want to stay there either.. too bad it is too far away from anything, if we make it there she will have to stay the night).

Time has stood as still there as anywhere I have been to in Spain. Either way Julie and I will have a good time as it is fiesta season when we are there! Time for the ‘Peña Mobile’ and waking up the town at sunrise again with the Charanga… who knows? (Maybe I’ll explain that later.. right now only my family will get a chuckle from that)

Here is a picture that reminds me that time doesn’t stand still and we’re getting older…. After graduation Kobe and I went on a month long climbing trip, it doesn’t seem that long ago, but this May will make it 7 years since we went on that awesome trip… Plus doesn’t Kobe look cute . (I suspect we had not showered for 4 or 5 days by the time this picture was taken.. that is good old fashion hair grease holding that mop in that most stylish of forms.. I hear that Doo is all the rage in Milan this spring.)

Well that is all for now.. Kobe might make me take that pic down, but I have editorial privilege here, so for now it stays.