990th Post - My Recent Absence

Hi, everyone.

Obviously, I haven't written much the last few days. I have been busy to the point where blogging just wasn't practical.

On Friday, I drove to the Valley to visit my father in the hospital. We didn't arrive back here in Halifax until late.

On Saturday, I judged a speech contest at Saint Mary's University. I judged with 2 other people whose professional accomplishments make mine pale in comparison. I kept thinking, "I have no business being with these 2 people!" But a friend had had enough confidence in my abilities to judge the speeches that day, and I didn't want to let him down, so I went through with it.

We had to judge a speech contest for university students who were vying for significant cash prizes. They were all good speeches, all 12 of them, and it was a hard choice for us. But there was one guy who was better than the others; we all agreed it should be this particular person.

I hadn't paid as much attention to the fine print as I should have. There was a celebration dinner afterward, but I didn't know about it. I was invited; I could have gone; but instead, I came back home to spend Hallowe'en with Patricia and 134 kids who dropped by.

How many kids did you have? 134 is actually less than what we had last year. I got rid of 134 comic books, too. Some kids didn't know what they were. "Mommy, magazines! What are these?" A little sad, actually.

Sunday, yesterday, we drove to the Valley to visit Dad again. We were there for a few hours before leaving and taking Mom shopping to two Frenchy's places in nearby Coldbrook. We finished the afternoon by having supper at the pub in Port Williams.

People have ragged and bitched about that pub since it opened. I was sort of one of them for a bit, but now I'm a champion of it. We have been there twice now, and we like it a lot. It overlooks the mud flats of Port Williams on one side, and the ruins of a Shurgain feed mill on the other. The surroundings could be better, but perhaps this pub will become a draw for other places down the road. There is already a new coffee shop in town, next door to a pretty decent diner/bistro. Growing up there, we would have killed to have places like that. Instead, we had to tolerate a convenience store that charged too much for stuff you didn't want in the first place, an antique store just off the bridge that contained all stuff that nobody wanted (it was a hardware store before that); a pretty decent furniture store which was a Kawasaki dealership before that; and a couple of service stations that stopped selling gas a long time ago.

Oh, yes. Let's not forget The Mad Barber of Port Williams. He was the village barber for decades. I had many a hair raising experience there until I rebelled and fought to have my hair grow longer and longer, which was a mistake. The Mad Barber of Port Williams knew only one way to cut hair: As short as possible. "A little off the top, Doug" was a direction to him to LEAVE a little on the top after he got out his pruning shears and put them to work.

But I digress.

We had a nice dinner at the Port Pub and returned to the city last night. I worked today. And I have to take Tuesday off to return to the Valley yet again.

All this gallavanting around the province has cut into my blogging time. I apologize for that. But, I will try that much hard to write more often.

I am still planning a pretty major change for post 1000. If what I need to have done isn't done by then, I may put the blog on a brief sabbatical until it is. Or maybe I won't. All depends on my mood, actually.

I added a 2gig micros sd to my mp3 player this evening. Ripping some cd's now to stuff onto the player. I am not sure why. I usually only listen to mp3's for 15 minutes or so before I give up and revert to the built-in FM tuner that the player has. I'll soon have well in excess of 2000 songs on the player, more than any one radio station has in this market. But I still listen to the radio more than I do to the songs I put on it. Isn't that a definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result? Yeah. Yeah. It is.