Checkered Lounge Pants

"The Royal Canadian Mint said Monday that $15.3 million worth of gold missing from its vaults could have been stolen. The gold was reported missing last fall, but officials at the mint said they had hoped they would find that an accounting error was responsible. A review conducted by auditors Deloitte and Touche, however, recently concluded that the gold wasn't simply forgotten during inventory. "The unaccounted for difference in gold does not appear to relate to an accounting error in the reconciliation process, an accounting error in the physical stock count schedules or an accounting error in the record keeping of transactions during the year," the company concluded in a report released Monday. Christine Aquino, director of communications with the mint, said that many possible scenarios are being considered. "We're not going to speculate on the cause just yet," said Aquino. 'We're not giving up on this. We're going to pursue this rather v

"A smile is a sign of joy. A hug is a sign of love. A laugh is a sign of happiness. And a friend like me…? Shit, that's just a sign of good taste! " LOL LOL LOL....that is a copy of an email I got from my good buddy, Union brother and colleague, and fellow retiree, Dennis Wray. I just impulsively howled a gut laugh until my mending ribs hurt, when I opened the email. A week earlier I was text messaging with Denny when he sent me the website for the Golf and Country Club, he and his wife Bubba belong to. The Pine Ridge members were conducting a golf competition heralded the Ridger Cup. It is formatted, I presume, on the same principles as the Ryder Cup and the daily reports posted on the Club's website were priceless. I won't post the pictures without permission but, I will post the website of the club and the home page includes Denny's team that played in the tourney http://www.prthegroup.ca/ . Email me if you cant pick Denny out and I will ID him for any ema

I got home from my first examination with my shoulder physician since my arrival to the ER after grounding my bike and the whole hood was in a black out. The sky was full of black thunderheads and lightening bolts, on the drive from Windsor to my lake shore home. Shortly after leaving the clinic, the neighbour called to say his kids were home alone in town and needed a visit. My beloved Val dropped me off at home and proceeded to Kingsville to check on them. Several hours later I was sitting in darkness with candles and flashlights on standby. When it was evident the black out was going to last all night, we decided to rent a motel a nd spend the night. Val stopped and booked a room on her way back from Kingsville and we stuffed a bag with a change of clothes and tooth brushes and bolted from the darkness of our home. We were welcomed to the motel room with the TV blaring the news of twisters in the county and the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Micheal Jackson. The "Angel and the Po

Hey... today is a very fruitful day for choosing one of a number of rhetorical symbolistic features to explore in my blog. Today is Father's Day. Today is the longest day of the year. Today is the first day of summer. Today is a gorgeous day weather wise. Today is Sunday. Today is the first Sunday Val is unemployed. Today is the final day of Denny's ritualistic Ridger Cup. Today is supposed to be the final day of the US Open. Today is the best I have felt since my wreck on May 06. Take your pick. Which symbolic feature should I explore in our CLP blog. You know what? I won't explore any of those features. Father's Day would be the most valuable to chew on for a paragraph or two, or, summer's first/longest day, but I think we should venture somewhere else. Do you feel adventourous for this post? How about if I don't even explore our fruitful Sunday? Let us go to another day. How about Friday? O Ya, Friday. Windy Friday!! I woke up to gale force winds, in the midd

Point Pelee National Park. Drove up to the entry gate last summer on the Hawg and was planning to do a cruise through the park when the ranger implied the drive thru was not worth the entry fee. Humm....flash forward to the weekend and I am back at the gate with John and Val and we were not to be denied. Point Pelee is located on a foundation of glacial sand, silt and gravel that bites into lake Erie, this spit of land is slightly more than seven kilometers long by 3.5 kilometers wide at its northern base. The Point was a thriving bee-hive in the 60s when developers pitched the location to Michigan middle class families as an idyllic location for summer cottages. The watershed shoreline of Lake Erie throughout the Point Pelee parkland was inundated with bustling summertime vacationers that put their liquidity towards cottages and beach property for the family. Today many birdwatchers from abroad visit the park in spring. One attraction, apart from the sheer numbers and variety of bird

Can anyone coach me on using a scanner with the computer? I have about a zillion medical receipts to copy before I send the originals to the insurance guy for refunds. The computer and the scanner have my prescribed meds to thank, for me keeping patience in the hours of attempting to work the technology, but I QUIT. At $80 a printer cartridge, I really didn't want to photo copy all the stuff but as of today, I'm scanner illiterate, and I concede. Unrelated, last night my friend Joe called and asked me to ride into town in the morning with him. He planned to watch the Red Bull air races on the Detroit River. My beloved Val made alternative arrangements for my gimpy chores and I was free to bolt. Joe and Simon and I slipped into downtown Windsor and settled in to the riverside park sojourned for the race day events. Joe had prepared to avoid the race day admissions and vendors by attending the pre-race practice rounds and the plan was a complete success. We were rewarded with fro

Sup? How r u? How is the weather in your neck of the woods? I watch for the sun peeking out every morning to have my coffee on the patio before I start my physio routine. I send out a text message every weekday reporting on the daily forecast in our lake shore home. Through the course of the day, I get text replies that cover the continent and the consensus seems to conclude an abundance of weather anomalies that disgust the majority of my morning contacts. Sup with that? I had my last session with my home therapist and got her passing grade today. My test challenge was covering 10 feet of floor space from the sit down position at my kitchen table and returning to the same position and "its not a race" she said before sounding the start indicator. I covered it in 11 seconds and the norm for an able bodied student(?) is 10 seconds, all the while thinking this was far from my image of new millennium medicine AND IT WAS A RACE. With that test completed in the positive conclusion

I just got off the phone after chatting with my Mom and she signed off by saying, "Have a good Father's Day!!" "Whens that?" I responded, with my mind reeling on this years unusually sneaky approach of my "Dad's special day". "Tomorrow," she answered without hesitation. The first thing I did, after hanging up the phone, was check the calendar for the June Sunday expropriated for the Pop honour. I have two weeks to get Pop's card. Speaking of special day s, today was a spontaneously special day. Do you have those? Those days that start out with an inherently good sunrise and seem to present you with one unsolicited good fortune after another. I had two of those this week. One was last Thursday. The day John Moore-Gough (pictured left) decided he was going to pick me up and drive over to Kingsville and hop the ferry and treat me to a tour of Pelee Island. The Island is heralded as "Canada's Best Kept Secret". It is the sou

What a great week!! Val and her sister spent the week touring the county and smiling and laughing and gabbing the way only sisters will do. Val's sister flew home today and I miss the company already. I know Val will be sad too when she gets home from the drive to London airport. Add that Val goes back to work tomorrow, and, I miss all the attention too. I was double mother henned 24/7 and now its all gone :( Back to reality eh? My physio-therapist berated me this morning for regressing on my breathing exercises this week and I have to spend the day gaining back the healing ground I lost. Failing to do so will stall the prescribed efforts to lose some accumulating fluids and ultimately conclude with a procedure to drain the fluid, that, I cannot bring myself, nor want, to describe. Nonetheless, the yard looks really good. The Palmer sisters trimmed, mowed, raked, bagged, planted and landscaped the yard along with the flowers and planters from Seacliffe greenhouses, and a few post l