It was Jazzy's birthday in September. My brother showed up with a huge box his patio set came in wrapped as a present and presented it to my 4 year old. It was full of balloons and other presents hidden underneath. She dove in it 6 or 7 times, coming up with new loot at each turn. I wonder how he's going to top this one.
My sister-in-law built her a cake in the shape of a castle, made out of ice-cream cones.
And Daddy has a Batman fixation, so of course, we had to get her...
We headed up to Lusk caves in September. One hell of an adventure! I made the mistake of following my GPS at first which took me up some road the RCMP closes off because the Prime Minister's cottage is up there or some such thing (thanks Steve!!!) , but after 30 minutes of back-tracking around some lakes, we arrived at the parking lot.
I had heard that there was a 5 or 6 KM hike to the base of the hill the caves are set in so I had the bright idea to bring our bikes so we could make it easier on the kids. You point yourself at the water and head right, following the beaches and a small set of trails. It seemed like a great idea until we hit the first rock cliff (8 foot drop that comes up pretty quickly) , and after that portage there were a few other stops and starts. I have my 8 year old on a "come along" bike attached to my rear seat post and I have my 4 year old in a child seat in front of me, plus a back-pack or two and my camera bag. It was.... heavy... And hard to bike up hills.
Eventually we hit the base of the hill near the caves and we decided to eat lunch, but the you couldn't open your mouth and stuff in food faster than it took a big cloud of bugs to zoom down your pie hole. We packed up lunch and decided to eat it at the mouth of the cave 15 minutes later. Surprising in the middle of the forest, there were no bugs! We rolled up our pants, stowed some gear and headed in. You get your feet wet the whole time, because the cave is sharing real estate with a small river-type thing. Some of the water is still, some of it is gushing pretty fast. It was great fun!
On the way out some deer walked out into the road in front of us. This is after all, Gatineau Park and these guys love to stop traffic
I headed up to Cannington Ontario this weekend for my semi-annual fingerstyle guitar weekend at Don Ross's place. This is like my 5th event and me and this other guy, Keith, are becoming known as "the Lifers".
It's a swell time, you go up Friday night for Pizza and song circle, play guitar until 3:00am, go to sleep, get up at 9:30 for yummy breakfast, Instructional seminars from 11:00 to 12:30. More Yummy lunch food. 14:00, more lessons. 16:00pm, free time and the obligatory trip to "The Interesting Music Shoppe" (I bought a blue Mandolin! I even gave it a name. I'm going to call it, "Amanda Lynn"). 18:30 More yummy food (did I mention the food?) Then the concert from 8:00 till 11:00 or so. Then back to the pad for more guitar and drink and merriment til 3:00am, more sleep, Yummy breakfast, one last lesson, Yummy lunch, Q&A session, then on the road back to normal (awwww..)
This time around the musical guest was Antoine Dufour. He's placed at Winfield and won the Canadian guitar festival and I can see why up close for myself now. Awesome technique. he throws more technique into a bar of his stuff in such a classy way that you don't notice it until you try to reproduce it. Explosive pull-offs here, razzguato there. Every fretted and picked note carefully thought out for maximum efficiency.
I was a fan of his stuff before, now that I've seen it up close I'm an even bigger fan. And he's a funny guy too! It was neat to see how many people had come to the weekend just to see him. I always assume they come for Don and the musical guest is a plus but some of the people there were not familiar with Don's work (and they soon became fans!).
We had some international guests, a guy from Germany, the UK, a few people from the States, BC, Alberta and the rest from Ontario, mostly Toronto and Ottawa area.
I stayed at a great B&B called "The Winds of Erin"just down the road a spell from Don's. My room featured one of those beds with the posts and the drapes that close it all up. Very comfy. While it is fun to stay at Don's house, it is also fun TO SLEEP! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I left Don's place at close to 3:00am both nights and there was still music coming out of people. This is one of the comfiest places I've ever stayed at. The proprietors were extremely nice. They're initials are B and B and that is funny somehow.
I took zillions of pictures, trying to get a photo of everyone there, and their guitars. That was yet another cool thing. To see all the custom guitar jobbies. This was the first time I had one too! (that is it on the left being played by Don, made by Tony Karol). There were some builders I had heard of but never seen their work, and a few I'd not heard of at all. Each one was pretty much spectacular in it's own right. It's like a wine tasting gig, you get to try them all.
The concert was really great, we always get in early and snag seats in the front row like the guitar geeks we are. I once again practiced to be a Rolling Stones photog. I love that Don's been getting into effects 
with his Boss ME-50. The chorusing is always nice and the wha and distortion on an acoustic are a hoot!
The after concert party thing (every night's a party! Makes you want to be a finger style guitar player for real!) was fun, we sat around and played and shot the breeze some more, plus the yummy food. The food is always an interesting thing for me because at home I pretty much stick to what I know. They had this great cake-type thing, along with a little sign that said "Don't forget the walnut ice cream in the freezer!" I had to get me some of that! I cut myself a slice and man, someone had gotten some ice cream out, and put it in a pan nearby! I spooned some in, not having much experience with walnut ice-cream, took a taste and it was "YUCK!" "What the hell is THAT!".
I brought my bullwhip out on Sunday and most of us had a crack at it, actually popping the thing after 5 or 6 tries! No police showed up or anything as a result of the sonic booms! Gotta love the country! I think I brought way too much stuff this time actually (like two guitars!) but it all came in handy. On the Sunday there was no power in the back of the building we were doing the seminar in and that was were the "can-ola" (bathroom) was. I handed someone a flashlight out of my camera bag and he went away mumbling:
I found myself at odds with some of the suggested right hand picking but Antoine soon explained that some of the ones that seemed strange had to do with the actual construction of the hand and how some fingers are naturally in a better position to pick the note instead of trying to alternate. I had recently been breaking down some Andy Mckee stuff and found that Andy uses his thumb a lot (it's a very talented thumb), cripes, almost for everything in fact, where-as I like to mix in the 1st finger a bit more, Antoine's exercises had the middle in there in places I would use the 1st, just to take advantage of the way the fingers come off the hand. Very illuminating. he went over some nice "harp" type scales where you arrange the notes in such a way that the last note rings into the next, using open strings when possible. I've always liked those!
Don went over "Loaded Leather Moonroof" and some modal explanations, as well as the reasons behind some of his tunings. He seems to construct the tuning for the song while most of us pick a tuning and write a song from there. On the last day he launched into the most concise explanation of the opening chord strums in "Michael 3x (the thing everyone gets wrong)" that I'd ever seen or heard. We can all play that perfectly now(grin).
One of the guys summed up the weekend like this:
Turns out there's lots of little caves in Gatineau park, and we visited this one a couple Sundays ago to do a geocache (what's a geocache?) that happened to be right in the cave (cavers hate that). It was called "GC17Q06 Caving 101" There were actually 3 or 4 geocaches on the way there and while we were searching for one at the outset Tripper pulled that thing he does when he finds it first (which is usually the case) , opens and signs it and re-hides it so he can watch us stumble around.
The trouble is, he stands right near where he found it so we don't go search there, so of course we don't find it(grin). When we spotted that SEG on his face we realized what he'd done and he plead guilty. As it happened, I was below him and he was above me on a small cliff, but his backpack was down here. Not one to waste energy, Tripper called down.
So we found the cave and Me and Tripper piled in at once. It was a tight squeeze, not for the claustrophobic. We took a pile of pictures and at one point Tripper noticed the little bat hanging upside down on the wall after he almost squished it with his head.
How cool! A little cave with a little sleeping bat! He slept the whole time we were there, not interested n flying away or giving us rabies or anything like that!
There was a small chamber in the back and a little hole to get through to the other side but none of us went in there. It looked like you had to do a barrel roll to get through and I'm not exactly small and had no wish to get stuck upside-down in there in the dark. 
It's a model I found online at The UFO Store. It has flashing lights run by a watch battery and it's held together by a magnet that allows you access to the light switch. I painted it up in a Humbrol metallic gun-metal grey colour and polished it.
It should look real good, much better than the two metal bowls duct taped together. See pic on left. (although I still always liked how that turned out. A two minute solution and very campy!).
I didn't buy that did I?
This is my youngest. We were sitting down to supper and I noticed that after a few bites, she seemed to be chewing an awful lot.. Recalling that she had been given a hubba Bubba Glop bubble gum two hours earlier, I asked the question..
The body has been thawed and it is a costume. Gee. Didn't see that one coming. And guess what! It's the Horrordome costume! When the photo came out and it became immediately obvious that the suit was the same one on their site I dropped the company a few emails. I've bought a thing or two off there before and hell, I decided to buy this same hoaxed suit for the next Bigfoot movie because I like it so much. When I made mine it was about 3 and a half years ago, and this one's only been out for 2 years. Apparently there are only 100 made so I decided to bite the bullet and make the purchase in case people go crazy and start buying them to put in freezers.
I keep hoping that one day this will happen for real, but it ain't happening today (or tomorrow to be exact). In Atlanta Georgia some hunters say they found a dead Bigfoot in the woods and stuffed it in a freezer back at their house. A notorious hoaxer self-appointed Bigfoot expert Tom Biscardi became involved and a photo was released on his site.
The simple fact that he's involved means this this is a total fake. That and the fact that the thing in the photo up there looks like a certain Bigfoot suit available from The Horrordome website. It is a fantastic suit! I'm thinking of buying that one and the Yeti one for future film projects.
Click on the pic on the left for a closer look (here's a set on Flickr). On Sunday my wife went out to play with the kiddies and she came in and told me to come outside and see something. There on the lawn was a baby robin, just sitting there, with a small stick impaled through it's tiny body. It was pretty freaky because it did not seem to mind being impaled at all. He didn't look to be in pain or shock and darn it, the stick looked "old". Like it had been there awhile. What are you supposed to do?
Ya pull it out! Or not! Oddly enough from watching C.O.P.S. on T.V. (ooh I knew that would come in handy one day) I learned that when a human being has been stabbed, you don't pull the knife or whatever it is protruding from the body because it is actually keeping the blood in. You pull it out and the person bleeds out. So I actually contemplated leaving the stick in and just trimming it a bit but HEY! They poor bird has a stick in him, and he wasn't gonan be seeing the birdy vet anytime soon! I figured it must have been through the meat and not any organs or he wouldn't be so chipper and all that so I put on some gloves, nabbed him with a handy butterfly net and proceeded to pull Mr Stick out.
He made a big PEEP when I did it and the darned stick broke and I had to get the rest from the other side (good thing i didn't trim it). But when it was out I compared the two ends and they matched. Some of the stick looked like skin had healed over on it. I wonder how long he has been carrying that thing in his gut and out his back.
I put him in the garden and he hopped away. he actually came out and sat on top of a rock and looked at us. I think the littel bugger is going to be ok. Soon afterward he PEEPED again and a big Robin (with a full tail, must be mommy or daddy) swooped down and fed him a bug. I heard another peep and there's a bird just like him in teh tree behind me. So it must have been "leave the nest" day and the parental units feed them for a few days to get them on their way.
This photo pretty much captures the weather we were treated to at least twice a day on our vacation this year. We went to Sandbanks in July this time hoping for warmer weather than the other times we've gone in August. Instead we got rain. Buckets of it! It was still loads of fun though.
I liked the very strange Star Trek transporter you have to step through now before you go up the elevator. I saw it and groaned to myself "A metal detector? I'm full of Cameras, Ipods, PDA's and GPS units! This is gonna take forever!". Instead I stepped into this thing, it said to wait 10 seconds and then it started blasting me with air starting at my toes and working it's way up. Lots of air pressure too. It was freaky. It beeped and lit green and I asked the guy as I stepped out what it was for.
"Bombs." He said..
We had good weather about half the time, and the dark rainclouds made for some great sunsets when they finally broke. The pic on the side is the same dock in the lead off picture where my friend Jim is getting drenched.
We went to the sand dunes every day, that's what the place is best known for, and they are pretty cool!
We popped out to a few other beaches and happened across a dead racoon at one of them. dead animals are so much easier to photograph than live ones, none of that running away stuff! It was almost like he was power-tanning or something (except he wasn't breathing.. ).
On the last night of our stay we went to dinner at place called JJ's saloon in a nearby small town. Turns our I knew the night's entertainment, "Louise", local guitarist extraordinaire. We attended a Don Ross weekend seminar in Cannington Ontario a few years ago. Small world! (the guitar fingerstyle world that is). So she made me get up and play a set on her nylon string classical guitar (god but I HATE catgut strings!). Not that she didn't have to twist my arm or anything.
I put a new geocache out last month. It was called "The Crate" and it was based on the creepy short movie vignette of the same name in the movie Creepshow about the crazed monkey thing in a crate under the stairs at a university. That's Tripper photo shopped into the bunny pic of a real bunny (if you can beleive it). It was hell dragging the damned thing into the woods but it looked real creepy sitting there like that.
Originally I was going to have a mutant killer bunny spring loaded on a bungee cord which would fire the thing up out of the crate when the lid was opened, but field trials proved too dangerous and I scrapped that. I found a creepy bunny at the Salvation Army and made his mouth all bloody like he was a carnivore and stuffed him in the crate. A nod to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
He seemed to go over well. Some geocachers even dressed up like giant bunnies when they did the cache(which I found very creepy - Anyone here play BioShock? I'm gonna have nightmares!).
