No, not mine! I’m absolutely straight…sorry to my gay friends!

Through a source, I found out that a couple from Washington D.C. needed witnesses for their wedding on the 23rd in Toronto. Down in the U.S., gay weddings are not recognized so many couples are flocking up to Canada to do the deed. Here, in Toronto, there is a requirement that there have to be two witnesses.

Since I am currently unemployed, I figured that I’d help these two out on their special day and I am so glad that I did. I think that I got more out of it than they did because it allowed me to participate in something that I believe is right and it reminded me that love and happiness can still be found.

So, that Friday morning, I found myself sitting in the wedding office of Toronto’s City Hall waiting for comparative strangers. There were a couple of wedding parties before our’s and one of them was gay also. David and Keith (my couple, I guess) were not exactly how I pictured them but they were extremely likeable. Ohhh…they were so nervous and flustered! hehehe

I took quite a few photos of them with their camera and tried to get the more tender moments. These were two lovebirds all right!

Afterwards, we went on over to The Senator Cafe for brunch and chatted a while. There is some talk of them moving up to Canada but I don’t know how serious they are about that. There must be serious stuff going on down in the US if people like David and Keith feel that they have to move up here.

In any case, it was a great moment for all of us and I am very happy for them. I hope they send pics over soon!!!

Bookmark to:

I’m on a bit of a cycling book kick at the moment as you can tell. This is a good book for beginners but it didn’t do a lot for me.

Bookmark to:

This is an excellent book that gives an overview of long-distance bicycling. While I’m relatively familiar with most aspects of long-distance cycling it never hurts to refresh some points and to learn new ones. I was most interested in the nutrition and randonneuring aspects in this book.

Bookmark to:

The following is the review that I wrote about this book on the Amazon websites. It’s a book that I feel could have been written in about fifty pages. Seriously.

An interesting but implausible tale to say the least. The author writes about the existence of stone “platforms” on Cape Breton Island (CBI) that he stumbled across a few years back. Curious, he tries to track down the builders of said platforms with the usual suspects being the French and the English. Going through the existing historical record reveals nothing about who the builders could be.

He then makes the jump to the idea that it must have been Chinese explorers/settlers who did the work during the heyday of Ming China’s voyages of discovery. (I suspect that those voyages were more about tribute gathering and trade than about discovery.) Anyone familiar with Menzies’ book 1421 will know his theory of how the Chinese sent expeditions circling around the globe yet mysteriously somehow missing Europe(!).

I’m extremely skeptical about Chiasson’s theory that it was the Chinese who built the platforms for a couple of reasons. First of all, there is very little reason that I could see as to why anyone would want to build a settlement on Cape Breton Island unless there was something very valuable there. As Chiasson says, there is coal and there is gold. Unfortunately for the theory, China has lots of coal so it would not be economically viable to transport it all the way back to China from CBI and the gold deposits were not enough to sustain later European ventures. Again, China has closer sources of gold at hand and, even if they were to send out fleets of gold miners, there are closer sources along the way to CBI such as South Africa, West Africa, and Central America.

Second, Chiasson’s talk of the Chinese using the Gulf Stream to mosey on up the Eastern Seaboard sounds plausible but he also fails to mention that this same current will eventually land you in Ireland and Scotland too!

There are also a couple of other bothersome points I’d like to bring up. First, Breton does not refer to the English but to the region of Brittany in France. And, second, the pictures of the Minority Peoples of China that he uses to posit a possible link between China and the local Micmac (sp) tribe is laughable. It’s implausible to suppose that such people would be on board important Han Chinese voyages in sufficient numbers to make a cultural difference in a tribe thousands of miles away!

Like I said, interesting but implausible. I suspect that only actual archaeological digs will dispel the mystery of the platforms, if any.

Bookmark to:

No, not mine but my youngest brother’s. He moved out of a small basement apartment that could charitably be termed a “rathole”. Actually, that was what my Mother called it when she first saw it.

He moved into a co-op apartment that he purchased..well, he didn’t purchase the apartment but purchased a share in the co-op. I was not very impressed with it, not at all. It’s supposed to be a one-bedroom but it’s a one-bedroom only by virtue of a room divider put up by a former tenant.

Moving is one of those really stressful times when tempers flare and the stress levels simply go through the roof. Remarkably enough, in retrospect, we seemed to have handled it a lot better than I would have expected. Yes, we did have problems with parking the truck, and yes, my brother didn’t pack everything up properly. But, we managed to fit everything into the truck despite naysayers and returned the vehicle ahead of time. Yay!

And, I managed to do that ride the next day.

Bookmark to:

I’ve been doing some major distances over the past two weeks. Last Sunday, I managed to do a ride of 105.6 km which is my longest ride in a long time. It was such a gorgeous day with little wind and a very comfortable temperature. I simply kept on going despite telling myself that I only wanted to do about 90 km or so. I was fueled by three Chips Ahoy! cookies and a banana so that really helped.

I am planning on a 200 km ride tomorrow. I don’t know if I will be able to do it or not but I will give it my best shot. I should put together a list of items to bring along such as some soap in case I am stuck eating at a picnic area, my camera, and other items. Of course, at the rate I’m going I’m in real danger of getting weighed down enough that I won’t be able to make it back! hehehe

For the month of June I have ridden 1,403.79 km so that makes the total for this year 2,410.72 km. If I can do the 200 km ride tomorrow then it will be a great start to July. Fingers crossed and no flat tires!

Bookmark to:

I’m sorry for the lack of updates and for the downtime on this blog but my machine encountered some difficulties on the 16th of this month. That day, I decided to do a backup using a great program called SuperDuper! but it encountered a number of errors that ranged from simply not being able to do a backup to hanging the entire machine. At one point, it seemed that the main hard drive had died. Scary stuff seeing as how, in preparation to doing the backup, SuperDuper! erases the backup drive.

SuperDuper! has super tech support with the developer himself answering your emails, often within a matter of minutes. Amazing! He thought that the machine’s memory might be bad or that, worst case, the source HD was dying. Great! That would make this the third HD that this machine has killed.

On Sunday (the 18th), I spent over four hours testing each stick of memory using Rember and it reported that every one of those sticks was bad. That couldn’t really be the case so I was beginning to suspect something else. I went on over to the Apple Store in the Eaton Centre to see an Apple Genius and ask their opinion as to what was wrong. I encountered a fellow ehMacer there named “thegreenapple” who was one of those who stayed overnight attending the store’s opening with me. Between the two of them, they decided that my HD was about to die. They were helped in this diagnosis by the description of the problem that I had posted on various message boards in an attempt to solve my problem.

So, I didn’t do much blogging because I had expected to pull everything off onto a new HD. But, on the ehMac board, my description of the problem tweaked the interest of “MacDoc” who said it didn’t sound like a dying HD. He’s an Apple reseller and he offered to give the machine a look-over to see what the problem was. One of his team picked up the machine on Wednesday (the 21st) and, due to some confusion, didn’t look at it until this Wednesday. The first thing that they noticed was that they CPU fan wasn’t working! They replaced it and ran it for a few hours and returned it yesterday.

I immediately ran SuperDuper! and it backed up fine! Yay!!! It’s amazing how I seemed to be in limbo over not having this machine and how much of my life is contained within it. If I had lost all of the data it would have been catastrophic. So, kudos to MacDoc for the astute call and assist! If, by any chance, anyone buys anythng from MacDoc due to this post..please say so…I owe him big-time.

Bookmark to:

After over a week of straight riding, I am standing down today. I’ve always planned to stand down during days with rain but the weather has been gorgeous the past week and a half so I never really felt the need to stand down. Unfortunately, my right knee is hurting a bit so I figure that standing down after all of this time might be a good idea. At the very least, it allows me to catch up on a couple of things around here.

Still, it feels a bit weird not to be on the road today. Just feeling restless or “twitchy”. No worries, will be back on the road again tomorrow for what I call my deep-strike or long-range rides.

Bookmark to:

This is the second in the series “A Medieval West Country Mystery” written by a former computer salesman(?). I read the first book in the series a few years ago and was not too impressed but I kept coming across good reviews for Jecks and decided to give it another shot. I’m glad that I did which sort of validates my theory that most series improve upon the first book. I do wonder at which point some series simply start losing steam? Tom Clancy comes to mind…he should have put away the Mac years ago!

The Merchant’s Partner is one of those “popcorn” type of books that I can devour in about three days. It doesn’t stress the mind very much and is great for passing time with. I really should work at some of my more “serious” books. *sigh*

Bookmark to:

As some of you may know, I sometimes ride down to Port Credit on Lake Ontario during my training rides which makes for a good 50-odd kilometres round trip. Along the way, there is a coal-fired generating station called the Lakeview Generating Station with four huge smokestacks collectively called the “Four Sisters”.

Along with myself, hundreds/thousands of people (primarily boaters actually) use the Four Sisters as a navigational aide. It shows me where my ride target is for that day.

The Four Sisters also hold a bit of sentimentality for me because they represent the first significant training ride that my ex and I ever took. They discovered the Martin Goodman Trail and rode out there and I eventually went along. It was a long distance for us back in 1998 or 1999.

This morning at 7 am, I was watching the news and they announced that the Four Sisters were going to be demolished because the province of Ontario is shutting down its coal-fired power plants. The demolition was slated for 7:30 am. I knew that I had to see this and decided to quickly change back into my bicycling gear (I had returned almost an hour earlier after a short ride.) and grab a pair of binoculars. There was no way that I would be able to make it to Port Credit in time to watch the demolition but I would be able to see it from Ontario Place which is on the waterfront.

I raced down (running at least one red light and a stop sign) to Lakeshore..across the downtown core and through Ontario Place until I could make out the smokestacks across the lake. I quickly took out my binoculars and focused on the Four Sisters with about a minute to spare!

They went down very quickly with the first one looking slightly off-kilter before I realized that she was falling. As she fell, it looked like she might just topple into the lake but that didn’t happen. The second one started to go too and then the rest. There was no sound at all, no bang and no rumble. There was a huge cloud of dust that soon spread all over the area and covered up the scene.

A couple of other bicyclists rode up near me after it was all over and they said that they had also rushed down to see the Four Sisters fall but, evidently, didn’t make it in time.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a sad moment which, in a way, symbolizes the demise of my relationship. I may go into that later on or I may not.

Bookmark to: