close to my heart

downtown leth.

a new look for bruce

been messing around here a bit, but i think i've settled on this blogskin for a while.. what do you think??

all i can say is that when i saw that little guy up top with his big eyes, stitched mouth and dejected posture i forgot all about my bad day at work, my black and blue frisbee-accident nose and the hours of studying i have ahead of me... because clearly he's having a harder time of it than i am. poor little guy, i will call him bruce and he will be bruciful and brucient.

May so far...

I had pizza for breakfast

The palm of my right hand is on fire, I just pulled about 9 slivers out of it. There are still quite a few left; I lost count around 52... so gross.

I've been busy lately. Working as always, summer classes started last week, taking astronomy and a biochem. nutrition class, so far it is going well. Went to the Galt museum opening and the Lethbridge centennial fireworks where I saw the most adorable older gentleman ever, is it ok to ask a random stranger to be your grandpa?? I spent an evening in Calgary with Brit at the track. I'd forgotten how much the whole "horse culture" used to be a part of my life when I lived with her. It was much better than the work we used to do though, prettier work... a lot less shoveling. The bad boy we groomed got second place, so that was cool. It was good to see Brit's new home, or van... Strangest thing I saw there was in the testing barn, there is definitely something weird and voyeuristic about people lined up peering through tiny holes into a stall watching their horses urinate...
On my way up to Calgary I stopped in Vulcan to visit one of my main dealers (from work, not drugs), it was awkward... which I of course loved. I talk to this guy probably 3 or 4 times a day and he's perfectly capable on the phone, but kind of fell apart in person. It was great. I guess that's what you get when you build a relationship that revolves around the rules of phone etiquette... you ruin it all with eye contact.
Mother's Day weekend was good; Saturday was the Day of Beautiful Things. I've decided that I need more theme days in my life. It started off with coffee with Chryslyn on our cement pad, then a walk and french toast that we ate again on our cement pad. It really was beautiful. I definitely beat up Mark, though he won't admit it... secretly he's impressed, ate good food, sat by a pond in the sun, and met a hundred people who's names I'll never remember.
It's definitely a Monday out here at work, the boss is angry and the farmers are frustrated, but the sun is shinning and that's enough for me.

Thanks to my good friend Nicole for the picture of Mark being dished out massive portions of pain.

While we were sleeping

*For 19 years, while we've been growing up safely in North America, the children of Northern Uganda have been fleeing for their lives to escape the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

*As many as 30,000 children have been abducted by the LRA and forced to serve as soldiers, laborers and sex slaves.

*To escape LRA abduction, every night as many as 40,000 children walk for several hours away from their homes just to sleep in larger centres.

*Approximately 139 people die every day in this region.

*1.7 million people in the region have been forcibly displaced, living in refugee camps in deplorable conditions.

As for me, I've never been afraid to sleep in my own home, never feared abduction, never known that crying will lead to certain death, never been forced to kill. For me, what these children are going through is completely incomprehensible.

Lets do something about it.







www.invisiblechildren.com






https://www.worldvision.org/Worldvision/guest.nsf/nochild_soldiers?OpenForm






President Yoweri Museveni
President's Office
Parliament Building
P. O. Box 7168
Kampala, Uganda






Rick Casson (MP)
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Casson.R@parl.gc.ca
casson@rickcasson.com






Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2
pm@pm.gc.ca






Joyce Fairbairn
The Senate of Canada
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A4






Peter Mackay
Minister of Foreign Affairs
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Mackay.P@parl.gc.ca

Oh Leroy...

Our parts guy out here at the shop is well into his seventies. His name is Leroy and he's probably my favorite. A funny thing about Leroy is that he has a little bit of a stutter, and when he gets worked up about something he can sometimes have trouble spitting things out. I think it's cute. But anyway, he was just in the office picking up some orders. He shuffled his feet, flipped through the pages and muttered under his breath a little. Suddenly he threw the whole stack of papers onto my counter and shouted clear as day "Holy Christopher Columbus!!". That made me smile.