Well I think it's funny...

I'm on Facebook but only to play Mafia Wars, an embarrassing addiction, and I was just reading the news feed and someone in my mafia (this makes sense if you play the game, lol) posted a link to a page called "WHAT CELEBRITIES WOULD LOOK LIKE IF THEY LIVED IN BARRIE, ONTARIO."

I just about peed myself...

Johnny Depp


Sharon Stone


Posh & Becks


Click on the above link for more. It's brilliant! :D

Sweaty Sunday: No Sweat.

Yesterday was the local 10K race, the TC10K, the Times-Colonist 10K... the Times-Colonist is the local rag. It's the second largest road race in Canada with over 13,000 participants. Not bad for a wee city on an island, eh?

Photograph by Adrian Lam, Times Colonist

Last January, I signed up to 'run' the event but last week I decided that I wasn't going to participate. My knee is finally feeling good again and I simply do not want to rescrew it up.




I thought about walking the race but I know myself too well. I know I would have gotten caught up in the energy of it all and start running ('running' being running and walking). Plus, my decision to take up running was to run for it's own sake; I just want to do it. Getting my fitness back and shedding some lard are secondary (and necessary!) motivations. Participating in races is a tertiary objective. I don't think I've ever used the phrase 'tertiary objective' before, lol. So, the decision not to participate was dead easy and without any regret.

I did go pick up my t-shirt, bib and shoe timer thingy though! haha!





Next year I will enter again and hopefully I will not only participate but actually run the bugger!

Aside: the winner of the mens was a dude named Kip Kangogo. What a great name!

Earth Day, Shmearth Day

After many years of carlessness, organic gardening, hugging trees and various 'green living' lifestyle choices...



I find it very hard to disagree him.

Would write more but I've got to go out and participate in consumer capitalism. I may even not use my reusable canvas shopping bag. ;-)

Sweaty Sunday: A Convert to Chips

Gawd Allmitey! Praize da Lawd! Sweet Jeebus! I have converted to chips.

No, no, no... not these kind:



I'm already a dedicated and faithful follower of the above and these too:



Too faithful really.

And depending upon where I am on the globe, spiritual nourishment can be found here (hi Neil):



Or here:



Or, depending on your interests, it can be found here (hi Jayne):



I've never been faithful to these chips:



But, at one time in my life, I was a worshiper of these chips:



Sinful, I know... but I was only 12!

I have no idea what this sign means but obviously some forms of chips are of Satan and not to be done (in that area):




But these chips are from Heaven! I have seen the Light! Halleluja!!!



Salvation is a six inch deep, 2 mile long spongy trail of freshly laid wood chips.

Amen!

More seriously, both Neil and Jayne had been bitching at me suggesting to me ;-) that finding a wood chip trail to run on would be good. "Yeah, yeah, yeah... but the view is so inspiring!" ... where I used to run, before a second round of knee pain knocked some sense into me.

Now, I 'run' here; on a chip trail around a golf course. It's a very beautiful, though hilly, trail that looks mostly like this:



Though from the top of the brutal 'Big Hill' I can still see my inspiring view:

The trail is on the far right... see the ant-people? Killer hill.

Weather permitting, the Olympic Mountains cheer me on. And they're a great excuse too. I can stand there and appear like I'm admiring them, when really... I'm just standing there cos I feel like my lungs are going to explode after hauling my ass up that fucking hill! ;-)

Pilipina's Got Talent?

Or a one trick pony?

The Holy Gospel of the Easter Bunny

Happy Hareatic Day!

;-)

Where's I 'longs to, b'y?

A couple of weeks ago, I got back into researching my family tree. I initially became interested in genealogy many years ago when I had to dig up various 'long' birth certificates for a 'UK Ancestry' visa. That required my mom digging through a few boxes of stuff; old documents, letters, postcards, etc that belonged to her parents who had migrated from Scotland to Canada in the early 1900s.

What captured my imagination was a small notebook that belonged to my granddad. In it was addresses of people to contact for work and housing once they arrived in Canada, various 'to do' lists and, most interesting to me, a list of the possessions they had brought with them.

The list was so detailed and so short: various cooking pots, some dishes, 4 pairs of wool socks, some shirts, some coats and a baby cot. Essentially, not very much at all.

It made me wonder. Why would two people put themselves, three of their children (my mom was born in Canada) and a few bundles of possessions on a boat, in cattle class, to a different part of the world? Was it a push from or a pull to? Both? I've since learned a lot more about their likely motivations but my curiosity about my ancestry has not dwindled.

On my dad's side, when I first started my research, all anyone knew about his mom, my grandma, was that she was a Newfoundlander, born in St John's, Newfoundland and the names of her father and mother. Nothing else! She had died by the time I got interested in genealogy and because of Newfoundland's very unusual history, according to inquiries I made with their Vital Stats office, she didn't even exist!

Just a tree; visual appeal. ;-)

I had long since accepted that that branch of my family tree would be one big question mark. Where did my grandma's ancestors come from? Ireland? Scotland? England? Portugal? The Basque Country? Were they First Nations? All possible based on Newfoundland's history and my dad's 'look' (he could pass as First Nations). But then, a few days ago, I had a major breakthrough! I plunked my grandma's name into the Ancestry.ca site, like I do every now and then, and voila! I found her name on someone else's family tree and kinda creepily her progeny; of them, my dad and his children, especially lovely is the youngest daughter, ;-) though anonymously (living female).

I haven't verified the information from this other person's family tree yet (I'm a stickler for proper research), but if it does turn out to be accurate, my great, great, great, great grandfather arrived in Newfoundland, from a village in Dorset, England, in about 1750! You can't really get more Newfoundlander than that! Incredible!

Doing a brief search about the area they settled in, I found out that it is also the area of Newfoundland where The Shipping News and a Canadian mini-series called 'Random Passage' (which, to me, sounds more like a title of a cottaging flic, lol) were filmed. And even cooler, there is a site - a re-creation of what life was like in the early 1800's. It was used as the set for the mini-series and it's now a park or site or something. The website's not too clear: Random Passage Site.

And neither was the weather in this youtube video I found of it! But it has its charm.



I feel compelled to go for a screeching. Someday soon...

So much research to do now!