As a journalist, I regularly encourage people to be engaged citizens, and lament when people do not engage. It is hypocritical to sit on my butt, not engage, and claim being a journalist as the reason for non-engagement. Be the example is one of my mottos. I'm involved in my neighbourhood association, the Beasley Neighbourhood Association, and am pleased to serve in my current role reviewing minor planning and variance applications in the neighbourhood. Due to the nature of this role, it is position on the BNA executive. No volunteer role comes without entanglements and difficulties; there have been applications which abuse the minor variance process, and which I should be covering as a journalist but I'm sucked into due...

Meet you for coffee at 2:15pm, I tell someone. Then I don't show up until 2:22pm. This is something I've done with regularity in the past few years, and something that I'm ashamed of. I once pride myself on my punctuality, my order. In high school, one could set their watch to my walking down the hallway from my locker beside room 205 to the server room in room 232. Each day, this walk would occur at 8:12am. When I was in the military and based in garrison, I picked up breakfast from a local restaurant at 7:07am. Even my days ended with routine, during my final years of high school, I had an apartment at...

One of my greatest fears is that one day I'll decide that I've reached one challenge too far. It's an odd fear because it seems that no matter the challenge that is placed in front of me, life prepares me for it and I'm ready to overcome it. Today came a new challenge - which caught me by surprise, and one which the solution for which was foreshadowed on the weekend. Dealing with this challenge is going to require me to focus and work hard in March, but the timing may work in that many of the things I need to do to succeed are things I've prepared for independent of this unexpected circumstance. Being an entrepreneur is a seemingly...

Biting my nails is such a habit, I don't even notice when I'm doing it. In Grade 5, over 20 years ago, I first thought of stopping the habit. In September, I started a series of personal changes. I'm now at Phase III, and have succeeded for two months at not biting my nails....

This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent in my faith as a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I use Lent as an opportunity for personal reflection, and change. I've already sent my personal goals, and begun on many of them. Ash Wednesday is traditionally the only day of the year during which I wear a visible sign of my faith, the ashes on my forehead. This year, I'll only be wearing ashes for a few hours in the early afternoon. There is a meeting of the Beasley Neighbourhood Association that evening, and I am now titularly a member of the executive. My role on the executive is very limited, nonetheless, when exercising a position of public trust,...

I decided to do some email reviewing this week, basically how many emails I receive in a week, how many I spend, how many are purely work, how many are to friends. What I found was not surprising, I processed over 1000 emails in the week, about 100 of those were personal, and I sent around 350 emails. The sent emails is a harder break down between personal and work; many of those were forwards of interesting information or links that related to their work, but only sent because they are friends. This does not include messages received and sent by Twitter and Facebook messages. I didn't count those this week; nor do I have any plan to yet, mostly...

I'm sure I'll find it in the last place that I end up looking. I like buying refurbished IBM Thinkpads for my daily work laptops; they are reliable machines, I usually get three to four years out of a refurb, and they all use the same power adapter. The advantage of this, for me, is that I know have "extra" adapters. I keep one by my bedside, two at my office desk, one at City Hall, and one portable. (One of my Thinkpads primarily sits at my desk as my Linux machine). Somepoint Friday or Saturday morning, I forgot or misplaced one of the adapters. Just writing this, I realize I probably forgot it at the local cafe....

It seems only fitting that my personal blog returns to its roots as a place I explore my human experience. Tonight, I walked into the Mulberry Cafe, and there was a person sitting at the table across from the cash register who I recognized, my mind tells me I recently had a conversation with her, that it was positive, but I wasn't able to place the where or when. This is not the first time of late, just the most recent. In 2013, when at the Canadian Opera Company, I confused a university president from one institution with the president of another one. (I at least recognized they were a university president, and in my defence, I was actually taking...

"Well Orville Wright Set his sights High up in the air Him and Wilbur worked day and night He didn't seem to care Well the town folk said if you were meant to fly God would have given you wings What makes you want to spend all of your time Building that flying machine And Orville said" For some reason, I really enjoy this sets of lyrics in the song Just What I Do by the Country band Tricy Pony. It's rather pointless, I guess I enjoy the mental image of just how crazy the Wright brothers would've seemed over 100 years ago creating the first airplane....

Nothing went as I planned today, and my mind isn't shutting down. Hence, time for one of my rambling personal blog posts. I slept in, I have a flood of unexpected emails (including one that really surprised), tested my memory a bit, had some fun verifying my memory recall, and had to remind myself a few times of the importance of focusing on the long-term and not the short-term. I'm ending the day with some RSS sorting and watching Pleasantville on the side monitor. I actually saw Pleasantville in theatres when it premiered in 1998. I got some gift certificates and went to see it for some reason I can't remember. (I only went to movies regularly when I was...