2016 Posts

Middle Age

Love will keep us alive

Blogs didn’t exist when Elvis and John Lennon died. There was no Instagram to fill up with selfies of chance encounters with newly dead music celebrities. And there was no Facebook on which to repost eulogies and elegies and bootleg ...
Work

The name game

Yes, it’s a thing. And a very lucrative thing apparently. There is a job called being a ‘namer’. People pay people to come up with name for their idea, product, concept, movie, drug, colour, and I’m sure babies if you ...
Houses

The rites of spring

Opening up the cottage is like a cross between Halloween (the trick part, not the treat part) and April Fool’s day (the that’s a joke right? part). Even though we do our best to batten down the hatches and wrap ...
Middle Age

But wait – there’s more!

The least well known thing about Phil Kives was his name. Not a bad thing really, since back in the day it was only proper to have your name in the paper twice: once when you’re born and once when ...
Middle Age

All that’s fit to print

Let me first say, in my own defense, I actually do lots of reading on the internet. I probably read the same kinds of things that you do (or maybe I don’t read quite as much of the random content ...
Middle Age

The last goal he ever scored

I know almost as much about Gordie Howe as I do about Muhammad Ali. Which is to say, not very much about either of them. Or maybe what I really mean is I care about as little about Gordie Howe ...
Houses

Pet sounds

I think more than any season, summer comes with many sounds. Maybe that’s because we are outside more and have more opportunity to hear what’s going on. And of course, we can finally open the windows day and night and ...
Work

Trust me

I am a trusted traveler. Or at least I have a card that proves I have told the government everywhere I have ever worked or lived, which apparently somehow makes me less of a threat to the rest of the ...
Middle Age

The right stuff

When you search the word ‘declutter’ Google you get 1,130,000 hits on Google. Or at least that’s today’s result. Tomorrow it will probably be 1,140,000, because apparently Google likes round numbers and because apparently we think more is more. One ...
Travels

Viva Las Vegas

Because hotels in Las Vegas have the tendency to be torn down and replaced every 10 years, the amount of conference space has grown exponentially. No hotel is worth its salt unless it can accommodate 10,000 bums in seats for ...
Middle Age

Blowin’ in the wind

Dyson, the vacuum cleaner purveyors that will sell you a cyclonic bag-less thing of beauty as long as you can qualify for a mortgage to pay for one, is now flogging a cyclonic hair dryer for only $500. Now that ...
Middle Age

There’s gold in them hills

It may have escaped your notice that we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Yukon Gold potato this year, so I feel it is my duty to bring it to your attention. You might think the ...
Work

Shouldn’t have gotten on this flight tonight

I just finished my last business trip before I revert to civilian status, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. There is a certain badge of honour in being a road warrior because of the scars and ...

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