Mostly harmless

You know that shiver you get through your shoulder blades and down your back when you feel cold. Maybe you’ve just left the restaurant and you’re heading to the car, and after about fifteen paces it hits you… and you shiver.

If it’s a lot colder out… like Ottawa, February cold… you felt it full on, the second you stepped out of the restaurant. If it’s any warmer… well, you don’t get cold. So there’s a “shiver sweet spot”. And it’s not just a winter thing. The cool night air in early July… shiver!

Maybe you can relate, maybe not. Either way, it’s a real-thing in my universe. In point of fact, it’s sometimes a whole lot worse.

Sometimes, … on very rare occasions, maybe when other variables in my state-of-being are lined up just so… Sometimes the shiver is a whole shit load different than … just a shiver. My arms lock up, my shoulders pin forward, and I… can't… breath. A wave of terror splashes over me. It’s a detached thing… there is no “thing” about which I am afraid. I’m not actually afraid. It’s just the raw sensation of fear. I know it for what it is the very moment it starts to happen. Knowing has no bearing on the situation. I have to freeze. I have to stop dead and wait for the shiver to move through me. It takes a few seconds. When it’s done with me… if I’m still half way to where I’m going… it seems to take a seat nearby waiting to come again. If I go back indoors, get just a little warmer, something… it stops and fades to black.

In my head, I’ve been calling it a ‘panic attack’ since it first happened… about 12 years ago. (I remember it vividly). But I may very well be doing a disservice to people who suffer from actual panic attacks, so I hesitate to call it that in my outdoor voice. Never-the-less, I am not a fan.

as I read and read and read about "Selfies"...

I quietly say to myself... "um... yeah, tell me again how selfies are a new thing." lol.

:)

Hiya. :)

Today was one of those “oh look… LJ is still there” days.

Oh how I miss the old days when LJ was pretty much a playground filled with my best friends.

FB and all that other stuff is fine… but it’s just not the same. :)

Quick update on life: I’m about to turn 52 and I’m in better health and shape today than I have ever been in the last 52 years. :D George is in college, in love, driving a car and working. Ed is in the middle of high-school, full of opinions, wants to work in the film industry, qualified for his karate black-belt test and then quit … because he’s just-that-awesome. And Suz, my darling wife, is looking and doing better today than at any other time in her life. The company I started a couple of years ago is doing great… profitable and busy. So in a nutshell? Life is grand.

Alas (earwax)… there is always a fly somewhere trying to land in the soup-of-life. I go back under the knife in mid-March for another (this will be the fourth) hernia operation. My main hobby has been “Fitness” in all its glory for the last few years and having an operation on your gut… really screws with that.

/
In as much as you’re your here,
They’re their there.

//
Never before has an “Olympics” been so effectively presented on the Web. I freaking love CBC.CA’s presentation. I can selectively watch full events any time I want. I have been soaking up all the extreme events with gusto. Some of the wipe-outs… have put my heart in my throat, but fortunately nobody has died … yet.

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It continues to confound me that my country will struggle over funding social programs that help the obviously-in-desperate-need citizens … yet can commit 35 billion dollars to buy fighter jets that will never EVER be used to defend this country. Do you have any idea what 35 billion dollars (let alone a fraction of it) would do to the state of education, homelessness, and health care in Canada? It’s freaking insane. The whole concept of military spending is so completely screwed up … that I fear nothing will ever be able to correct the problem.

Ps. I will never get tired of loving recklessly, quickly and with all my heart. Friendship and the love that binds it… is the best part of this short life.

Peace :)

Bullying used to be something you could point at.

“Those kids are being mean to that kid.”
It usually manifested in “mob psychology” with a couple of kids picking on a kid that was different and others joining in until it got out of hand.

I remember – dramatic painful memory – this girl… Marlene, in grade 10, literally being chased by 20 kids down the hall… all calling her names and cornering her in a locker bay and just pounding her with insults.

I was (always will be) a small guy… not tough… not feared. But I remember being enraged at this event and pushing through the kids to collect Marlene and shame the kids that were taunting her.

Horrible as that was… it was still something you could “point at”.
“Those kids… “ doing “those things” to “that person”.
They all had to “own” what they were doing.

Many adults today… pull images like this to mind when they hear “Bullying is an issue” and they try to evaluate the current government and social response to bullying with those parameters in mind.

These adults… have no fucking clue.

Bullying today … bears little if any resemblance to the bullying of yester-year.
Marlene… could be rescued from the locker bay. She could go home with her best friend and lock herself in her room, cry and sleep and get up to watch tv and … start facing her tormentors again the next day.

Harsh as that may have been… today Marlene has none of these options.
Today, the twenty kids in the locker bay… is more like “several hundred nameless, faceless kids on social media” (let alone sick, whack-job adults that join in the fun because they are damaged, deranged shit heads that want to play “mean”). The taunting, insults and derision follows her through the halls of the school… into the library, the bathroom and … all the way home.

Locking herself in her room is of no use … as phones and computers tweet away with over-the-top criticism across the landscape of her peer group and back-up on her blackberry until she dares to power it up again and then BOOM… out floods the ill conceived words of merciless immature kids who have not got enough life experience to really understand the harm they are doing.

The answer to this problem… remains illusive.
I want to quote McLuhan and point to the technology as culprits … but that is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The medium is NOT the message.
Thicker skins may help… but what are we left with?
Legislation is a fools pursuit. It’s against the law to drink and drive… need I say more?

I don’t have answers… but I do know this:
The generation that is currently tasking itself with worrying out solutions to this problem… is ill equipped for the job. They do not comprehend the depth of the problem or the implications of the issue.
Our children are in an unconventional war zone with offensive tools at every turn and very little defensive assets.

Again, I say that I do not have answers but I think there must be value in the following ideas:
1. Ask the kids … no matter how immature their perceptions, they know more about this issue than a stadium full of lawyers, politicians and clinical psychiatrists.
2. Look to the lack of defensive assets… we have rainbow-power fueling the call for safe zones for the LGBT community… and I think there’s a greater need for safe zones in general.
3. We have been far too intrigued by the open-source, crowd-sourced, multi-pathed anonymous nature of the internet. Everything that is wonderful about the internet will not go away if we spend more time building accountability. “Less anonymous” is better than “more anonymous”. If you are afraid to “own” what you do… then you know you are doing something mildly (or more) wrong. Young people do not understand this … only because they lack the human experience to understand the implications – but that is no reason to allow them to drown in anonymous behavior.

If the youth of today had to “own” their words and actions… we would be better off.
Remember that locker bay? Every one of the “taunters”… had a face and a name, and I think that is exactly why Marlene could grow through those hard times. Not so for Amanda Todd.

☹

Nascar:
Proof positive that we have far too narrow a definition of prostitution.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
Lol


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The public school teachers union and the government have been going at it again around these parts. The government and the Union wait till the last frigging second before they get all pissy about the contract running out of time… then both sides start the “posture war” with grand pronouncements about what a drag each other is at the bargaining table… and then, when it looks like the teachers are going to go on strike, after their summer vacation, the government passes pre-emptive back-to-work legislation that has the net effect of … SCREWING UP KIDS SCHOOL YEARS.
I fucking hate the way the Teachers Union and the Government refuse to play ball until they can turn the kids into their pawns.
Teachers… are pretty much super heroes in my books. Their unions, on the other hand, can collectively (pun intended) jump off a tall cliff any ol’day of the week. The union says “spit” and the teachers have to say “how hard, and do you want a luggie?” because anything less gets you blacklisted. Result: all extra curricular activities are screwed over. And by “extra curricular” we mean… a lot more than coaching the damn football team. Lunch time help sessions, clubs and all manner of social activities… all in the pooper.
If you don’t think all that stuff is important… you have no clue, and I can’t teach you. But the fact remains that High School is the last stage of baking the adolescents that will become the doctors, lawyers, tradespeople, politicians, etc. etc etc etc etc that will be running the world. We do the world a disservice – in the extreme – by ignoring their social development.
I’ve lived through teacher strikes, work-to-rules, etc. and I am absolutely sick of this bullshit. I wish there was another way.
We can afford to buy 35 billion dollars worth of fighter jets to protect other countries interests in far off lands and put our own sons and daughters in harms way … but we can’t afford to provide glue sticks to kids in grade 4.
Dear Everyone: This is just wrong.

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Homeland – because Claire Danes makes other actresses look like wanna-bes.
Archer – because everybody should get to laugh this hard. :D

/
A friend at work has a new iPhone5. Up until I laid my hands on it… I was all thinking “I just want to upgrade to a 4s and I’ll be happy.”
Yeah… well that’s over.
☺

Ps. Hi caranya. :D

Life is full of win. ☺

It’s Friday… that means I’m pre-occupied with the weather and wondering if there will be dry concrete at the skatepark in the morning. Alas, (earwax) it does not look good in these parts for the weekend weather. Those pics above were from last weekend. :D

Things are kinda non-stop in the land of me. I’m still all about going to the gym at lunch and trying to stay motivated to do the intense-interval cardio thing at night. Suzy and I finished the two-month “Insanity” program two weeks ago and I’m tell’en ya, I have never ever ever done anything that made me work that hard… laying on the floor in the tv room for 10 minutes wondering if I’ll ever be able to stand up again… We’re about to start it again, having tried a few other programs and just not liking them as much. :D

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Work is … great. No really. I started my company in January, spent some time getting things organized and became my own full time employee on March first (suzy is a part time employee doing the “books” and her-best-to-keep-me-organized. :D). Things have been going at top speed ever since. I’m still billing full time hours with a federal agency in Canada… and I just finished a contract in sunny West Virginia. I was doing a “tactical risk assessment” for the state gov “department of environmental protection” and it was an oversized package of awesome. As usual, I learned so much by doing that contract I almost feel like I should have been paying them… but, fortunately, they were paying me.

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Both of my boys are in High School now. Geo is in his last year and Ed is in his first. I am in awe. I work hard at not spending an inordinate amount of time telling them how well I can remember holding them as wee babies. :D lol. They are definitely not wee babies any more.

/
As I watch the US head into their next election, I remain amazed that the actual problems facing Americans seem to be so much “back ground” noise, while the talking heads blather on about things with a vigor that I utterly and completely fail to comprehend. I would love to be all judgmental about the big R versus D thing but I don’t really care. What I care about is how long it will take before women across America mobilize, march into DC and freak’en lynch every last one of the bastards that are working so hard to take control of woman’s lives and bodies when they should be trying to build better health care, invest in job creation, and PILE money into education. I remember something about a “Million Man March” (but I truly couldn’t tell you anything about it besides the name)… and I’m hoping that someday soon there will be a Ten Million Woman March that overruns Washington and scares the absolute shit out of the powers that are so misguided.

Ps. Hi :D I will always and forever love Lj and everything it stands for. Everything else is an “also ran”. Just say’en. :D

Ola lj. :)

Today was a good day. I’m sore all over… but that’s ok.

My darl’en Zee is doing great. We found our way out of the confused darkness and we’re living the life. Seriously… if I could give the world a gift… I would figure out how to give away what ever it was we did to become so happy, passionate and comfortable together. My little boys… are not so little any more – and they’re great too. Ed (aka grasshopper) continues to go to three karate SLASH stick fight’en classes a week and he’s doing great in school. (go figure). Geo is pushing grade 11 to turn into grade 12 and then ohmyfreakinggod… but I try not to think about that. :) He’s doing great and imagining life as a computer programmer.

Suz and I have pretty much turned “working out” into our primary hobby and pastime. ☺ In fact, I look back over my FB account and feel a bit silly when it starts to look like it’s just a “record of check-ins” at the gym. :D
This means I’m at the gym with coworkers every day at lunch… following a five day track of weight-training… repeating for four weeks and then it’s switched for a new one. But it’s always “legs, arms, back, shoulders, abs”. Suz and I go to cardio sessions while Grasshopper has his stick’fight’en class… so that’s three nights a week… and we’ve got the “insanity 60 day workout” videos for getting a crazy intense workout at home.
This all started from very reasonable plans… suz was into “training” as we got ready for a big family vacay on a cruise ship two years ago… and I’ve been trying to heal my damaged, broken body. Well suz is looking like a rock-star and I’m enjoying the first years of my adult life that are not “in pain” from all the damage I did when I was a kid. :D :D
If you are into any of this “work out” stuff… don’t you just love how it feels on “arm day” when you get the shower and absently reach up to wash your hair… and you can barely get your arms up past shoulder height? LOL… la la la…

I turned 50 this year… and fuck it. I’m just not feeling anything like what I imagined 50 to feel like. :D I still chase the admiral into the garage at night, dream of skateparks (and totally dig all the skateboarding I can bear over the summer) and I’ll be glad to stop all that and settle down… when I’m dead. TYVM. :)

I cashed in all my chips this year with “employment” and decided to start my own company. This has worked out wonderfully. I’m not sure how well it would have worked out if I had done it years ago… but the time NOW was (is) definitely right. I’ve got lots and lots of work… contracts that will keep me busy for the next two years without even trying. (and I intend to “try”, so there will be loads more). And in those two years I will bank at least twice as much as I would have as an employee… so that equals “big fat raise” in my books. :D

So bottom line: life is freaking great. Things go up and down… but there are wwwwway more great days than there are “average days” and I hardly ever have bad days. If I can keep this up for a few more years… well… anything is possible.

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We only have so many coins,
I ought to be generous and caring,
But not at the expense of your family.
That is to say,
I appreciate that Canada is part of a global community,
But we’ve no business sorting out problems half a world away,
When we have so many social and economic problems here… in the big-pink-blob.*

*When I was 14 I visited a grade school class in Texas. The giant “school map” that hung at the front of the class displayed the details of the glorious 50 states. And Canada was an indistinct big pink blob with giant “Canada” letters through it at the top of the map. Meanwhile, my classmates and I back home in Ottawa were busy learning every state and state capital. Lol.

//
I will push myself to be stronger… to be better.
I will hurt.
Not because you think I should.
I will do it because I can.
… and I will be awesome.

/
If I told you that I missed you,
You would only hear the words.
If I had the chance to hold you,
You would understand.

Peace! (like a boss). :D

Ola! :)

Good times and fast times.
Made a bit of a choice last month…
I’d been having a very good time with my employer,
But the company has been changing and not in a way I felt was good for my career.
So suz and I decided to take matters into our own hands.

We now work for Cortitto Ltd., Canada.
Cortitto is he, as we are he, we are me, and we are all together!

My very (very) simple company web page is here. :D

As soon as I explained all this to my current clients (my fav clients, btw), they sorted out about two years worth of contracts and contract extensions, trying to make sure I didn’t get hired away.

Bottom line: fireworks.
My last day as an employee was yesterday.
Now it’s all about building relationships for myself instead of someone else’s company… and continuing to build my brand.

Oh, and my company… has a way better Group Medical Plan than the last company I worked for.

A little more from the …
“The old rules don’t apply. Stop using them as excuses.”
… file.

It’s not that the 1% keep getting phenomenally richer… there has been an elite class getting indescribably rich for as long as there has been a western society. As long as there’s a market operating in the economy, there will always be some form of an elite class.

No, the big deal is that we are no longer consuming information that has been fermented by big media. We can bitch about rich bastards now like never before in history.

So when the giant mega-corps and banks were all facing a potential tits-up situation in the crashing economy, your governments used your money to bail those bad-boys out. Somehow it was perceived that we needed to preserve this old-world-order operated by and at the whim of these elite mega corps. And because they are so bad at operating in a socially-conscious, let alone “connected” media… we are screaming “I can see you” at these guys as their salaries and bonuses go insane.

They’re already reminding us that they are market driven businesses operating in the private sector and they can do what ever the hell they want to do with their money (as long as the shareholders don’t lynch them). Example: Caterpillar plant lock-out. And this is true… this is no less true just because the government gave them a boat-load of your money to rescue their companies.

Like a music executive, thinking he can keep making money in the cd business like he used to if he only sues enough pesky downloaders, the Automotive and Banking elite (for example) are continuing to behave like they have a business model that can survive the coming information apocalypse.

We really should have let the car companies crumble. We’d long since have bounced back with some stumbling new model that would have been a grand first step into the coming new world order for “consumerism in a socially-conscious, globally connected economy”. (that would be a great book title).

Hi. :)

S’bin a while.
Happy new year and all that good stuff. :D

My resolution this year is to make a good “go” of my recent decision to start a company instead of working for one. Zee is going to be an employee. I haven’t told her yet, but I was thinking of using mostly-ridiculous titles for our roles in the new company (suz would be “Supreme Commander”, and “El Magnifico” for me. :D) Personally, I think these would look fracking awesome on proper business cards.
Company name, btw, is “Cortitto Ltd.” :)
Ps. I’m an employee of my current overlords until the end of January. Gave ‘em lots of notice and it appears to be a peaceful transition.

It’s the 5th and so far the new year has brought me three migraine nights.
a) thank the goddess for Maxalt 10 mg tabs of glory and b) I’m going with “I’m getting them out of the way…”

My christmas prezzi this year was… that little helicopter. I can charge it from a battery pack, or I can charge it on my laptop usb port. I charge it on the port… always. :) This little guy is just totally totally totally fun. It’s one of those things that you constantly get “a little better at”… so there’s a cool kinda narcotic reward system built into playing with it… I mean… It’s a HELICOPTER and it FLIES AROUND IN THE HOUSE!!!! I’m not sure how it can get any better than this?

Oh, and I’m not sure if I mentioned it before but I totally quit client #2. The gig was driving me nuts… and, AND, I’ve got a new gig with client #1 (the client I’m crazy about ) for three days a week and a second gig with client #1 (but in another directorate) for the other two days per week – all in the same building… a building that is about 20 minutes away from home… in traffic. La la la … :D

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Dear Everyone in America:
If you freaking elect San-a-torium to office, you frigg’en deserve the insanity you will suffer at that whack-job’s hands.

//
After many months with my mac air, I absolutely continue to think it’s the greatest thing since toast. The only thing better would be the new mac air with the backlit keyboard and the thunderbolt port. This thing just so seriously rocks-it as a lap top (let alone as a “business laptop”) that I remain in awe. :D

/
Geo went snowboarding on Wednesday. He got out of the clinic with steri strips holding the cut on his face closed and x-rays were all done by about 3.
Yup yup…
k… see ya soon. :)