Month: November 2015
The monkey hath returned!
The monkey hath returned! Coleman is home again after a month long stay at club Urquhart. (I hear it’s like club med… Except with 4 children, 3 bunnies, 2 cats, and a grandpa. Oh the tales he will tell…) He needs a good bath and a few holes patched up in him before he can play with us again. Right now he is quietly waiting has bath in the laundry hamper… Good Monkey!
Jasmine and I went to my favorite Princess store today to get a couple things for the Toad Trailer. I found a new windshield mount for my phone as well as a couple tripod with bendy legs! I got two of them . One for Jasmine and one for my camera bag. Great score! I haven’t been able to find this stuff anywhere in the city.
We made meatballs and chicken wings for dinner and watched the Grey Cup tonight.
Here is today’s video: https://youtu.be/rd-UGTzZ9yc
Santa Cannon!
It’s working better today. Link to today’s Vlog: https://youtu.be/SfGjkhNLV18
Here is yesterdays that I finally got uploaded around 4pm today… There was one bad scene. The audio was messed up some how. Too bad. It was a really cute scene. Heidi and Jasmine had wandered off into the masses and left me behind…. Not planned…. So I tried to call Heidi’s cell… It was at home. So I wandered around and finally came upon them. Heidi hugged me and told me that she had thought she had lost me for ever… So Cute…. Here is the link to yesterday’s Vlog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PylrLYTlY4
My phone has been acting up lately. It is chewing through the battery in about 4- 5 hours of non use! Crazy. So I did a little research and found out that it is an app that is doing it… Exchange (By Microsoft…) is using tones of power connecting all the time…. For what I don’t know…? I even did a factory reset to try to fix it… Nope! Not working.
So tomorrow I will need to call Rogers technical help and see what they suggest. With all the different things I have tried I’m starting to think I need a new phone now…
We’ll see.
Silly program.
I’m fighting with my Video editing software today…. It won’t let me upload…. And after I spent 2 hours editing a video… Ahhh!
EDIT: Here it is… Finally figured out that one clip was corrupted… It was a cute scene when I found Heidi and Jasmine after loosing them… Link: https://youtu.be/6PylrLYTlY4
Heidi had a yoga retreat thing tonight after work so Jasmin and I went out for dinner. After that we picked Heidi up and went downtown to see the lighting of the lights. The Christmas lights in the park. It was nice.
Both Jasmine and I brought our cameras to document it. I had 50 min of footage… Jasmine took stills.
I’ll put a link in tomorrows blog to today’s Vlog.
Haussmann drill kit
Just a link to the video today. I’m too tired to write and edit.
Video: https://youtu.be/R8jo4n34Wyk
New Drill and Driver set.
In advance of the Black ….. sales I went out tonight and got a new 18V cordless drill and driver set. It’s a Ridgid set. It matches the Ridgid drill I got a couple weeks back.
It’s nice. It will allow me to get rid of the Hausman set I have now. It’s a part set anyway…
I picked up a used battery for my truck today as well.
Here is the video if I can get it uploaded before Bell’s poor excuse for an internet connection cuts me off again….
White dust!
I went over to my buddy Ryan’s place to make a mess today. And what a mess I made!
A royal mess almost.
I had to sand down the drywall mud I applied last week. That is messy!
White dust goes all through the house! It gets everywhere! Really!
This is the part that I used to warn clients about. The white dust. I would usually change the clients furnace filter the day after we finished sanding. It would have a lot of white dust in it. I would also change the filter once we finished the job. It too would have a lot of white dust in it.
Well… Ryan is in for the same.
I’ve been having a really hard time with the Bell internet tonight… It keeps kicking off and it seems to take longer to hook up again…. I’ve had to unplug it three times in the last two hours to get it to go… I hope Bell gets their stuff together soon. If not we will have to switch providers.
That will be more of a pain in the butt! There isn’t any cable coming to the house… So one will need to be dug in.
Here is today’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJv7GV5FlCo
Last Cancer Clinic Visit!
Today was the last clinic day for Jasmine. It has been 5 years of clinic. Now it is over. She now is in what is considered after care. Shew still goes to the hospital for a check up but only once a year now. The after care program is just to check in on everything. Not just the cancer thing but overall physical and mental health. They also want to follow her through puberty to make sure their isn’t any complications. (They don’t expect any because of her age at diagnosis.) Yea!
I to her to clinic today. Heidi doesn’t like to go to clinic. It’s tough on her to see the other kids that aren’t as lucky as Jasmine.
After Jasmine’s check up she was allowed to ring the gong. It’s a gong that all the kids get to ring when they finish treatment. I’ve only heard it rang once before. Today was different. There was another little girl that finished treatment today too! She rang it about 10 minutes before Jasmine.
Besides the gong the kids are given a star. It’s a glass trophy thing in the shape of a star.
It’s a great relief to be done with clinic and the cancer thing. Not that it has been the worst time. We did have a very uneventful treatment compared with most families. We know another family that was in the hospital every month except 3 out of 3 years treatment! Admitted type of in the hospital. If you are admitted you’re there for at least 72 hours after a fever brakes. That’s 3 days at least for a fever! That only happened twice with us. Both times were only 3 day stays.
I did a video of Jasmine ringing the gong. It’s here: https://youtu.be/SnahNdgFaQI
A surprise that makes us change the layout of the living room…
Here is today’s video link: It’s a good one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKwvtvEdEc0
I figured out that I don’t have to read to Jasmine as much anymore. I can video tape it and just have her watch the video… Hows that for efficiency!
Jasmine had a birthday party to go to today. Charley’s 7th. She was at our place yesterday for Jasmine’s party.
The party was at a rock climbing gym. I didn’t know that we had one in London. Seems we do.
I recall one from years ago but I recall it closing. This one was hopping when we arrived at 10:50. It had kids on every rope on every bit of wall in the place. It was loud too! Loud like happy children loud. Not my type of sound so I left quickly. (Right after signing the waiver so Jasmine could climb the walls too.
I went out to do some comparison shopping. Black Friday is coming this week and I want to be prepared ahead of time. Prepared like knowing the regular price of stuff before it goes on sale on Thursday…
I’m looking for a flat screen TV/ monitor. A big one. Well bigger than the 21” we have now.
Tomorrow we have some furniture changes that are going to happen in the living room and it opens up a wall for a big flat screen. (Go look at my videos and get a feel for how big our house is. You may figure out where I plan to put it.)
But you don’t know about the surprise that will happen tomorrow! It’s a surprise so I can’t say until tomorrow.
A surprise that makes us change the layout of the living room…? Yes.
The girls will be very happy.
So Vlogging… Why that?
Here is today’s Vlog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7O9kczFJXs
I’m torn between the idea of Vlogging or Blogging.
I know I can’t do both all the time. I just don’t have that much time. I do want to document the stuff I and my family do. Why? Well. Why not?
The idea of blogging came about to get myself back into writing. I found that after year of not writing that I had almost lost the ability. (Look at my early Blogs.) I remember being more articulate in my writing and speaking… What happened…? How does one lose skills. In my case I just didn’t use them. I worked jobs that didn’t require those skills for years and… Well I know what happened. (Use it or lose it… True.)
So Vlogging… Why that?
I like the idea of a visual record. It’s nice to be able to go back and look at what you were doing back then. A while back I was looking at some of the photos and video that I had taken when Jasmine had cancer. The time that she didn’t have hair and would play with the crazy wigs that we had for her. (They weren’t for wearing out in public. Just for playing princess.) They were hilarious! Fun too. (Says the bald guy.)
Thinking of this now is making me smile.
That’s the point I think. Showing that you can be a happy family through adversity. And we’ve been through some adversity. But were better for it. Who knew that would happen.
On Monday Jasmine has clinic for the last time. She will go for yearly checkups but probably just with our family doctor. Just a quick blood test once a year. That’s a long way from She has cancer and a broken back.
Who knew what the words, “It looks like cancer. We’re sanding you to Vic. Pack a bag.” would bring. That’s exactly what the doctor said to us when we took her to St Joe’s to have her back looked at because she wouldn’t walk. We didn’t find out about the 3 broken vertebrae until the next day.
I didn’t Blog or Vlog about that then. I didn’t think to. I just went into some kind of autopilot and tried to accept our new reality.
Now here we are 3 years off treatment. Jasmine turned 8 last Monday. Tomorrow the house will be full of little girls here to celebrate her birthday. They won’t understand what she went through or why. As far as they know she just was sick and now is better.
I’m going to tape tomorrow’s party.
Just so I can look back years from now and see a happy little girl and her happy family.
Day two of Happy Birthday…
I just uploaded a new video. Kind of like every day…
It’s low resolution… My editing software wants to upload in the lowest quality each time and I forgot to change it to HD… Oh Well here is the bad one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSxm1FRDR48
The crazy Happy Birthday thing is still going two days in. I’m surprised at how long it has lasted. If only I could get AA batteries to last like whatever is in that thing. I’ll add the HD video link as soon as it’s up.
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAzeJsmbkr4
Let me know what the instrument is and which video you like better.
fpsailingcharters 