Canada's Wonderland

spent the day at Wonderland went on the roller coasters. i'm not as young as i used to be and my stomach finally said "that's enough" by the end of the day. it was all well worth it because i was there with those that i love.



i'm there in the middle, my dear one is next to me on the left, on the far left is our sis-in-law Jenn, on the far right is Jackie and Barry (Wendy's sis and bro-in-law) and then there's Katie and Emmy (our neices). not pictured is Wendy's brother Terry because somebody had to take the pic.

so little Emmy (she's 9) absolutely schooled me on staying power for the roller coasters. she went on 12 trips or so while i stopped after 6. i really hope that i'm not a stick in the mud when Wendy and i return there next week. my breaking point was after The Behemoth where they start you off with a drop that i thought was supposed to stop 10 seconds before it finally did stop (ok, that's an exaggeration). still it scares the snot out of you ... and little Emmy's response? "that was AMAZING, let's go do that again!" wow, uh no, i think i'm done.

lots o' fun.



i don't think my goatee looks as scraggly as theses pics seem to make it look, but there ya go.

i'm almost on vacation

only a day and a half before i get some significant time off. i'll be visiting and going to a couple ballgames and we have Jackie's wedding to go do ... so i'm pretty stoked about it.

before i leave i have a LOT of stuff to do though.

don't know how much i'll be hanging out in shallowfrozenwater over the next while.

what i did for fun as a kid

milk carton crate forts and tennis ball wars - so it was my elder brother and i against my eldest brother and little sister in a game of war. we set milk crates up as forts about 5 feet apart and then try to pelt each other with tennis balls. the danger came when a ball got caught in no-man's land and someone had to go get it. the rule was that there was a truce until the person had 1 foot on the ground on their side of their fort, then it was open season. we developed a tactic of diving back behind our fort ... that's how we broke the dog's leg, my brother landed on him. great memory of a lot of fun and the occasional welt.

neighbourhood baseball - we had loads of guys in our neighbourhood and we had this big open field behind my house. i was always a small kid so i got used to the fastballs of all the bigger guys just by getting out there and taking some cuts. baseball is now my favourite game.

Home Run Derby - the public school where my dad taught had these grates over boarded up windows on their basement floors in one section of the school. those grates were PERFECT for a strike zone when you're less than 5 feet tall. that way 2 guys could play baseball and there'd be no need for an umpire and no arguments, if you hit metal that was a strike. you could even add an outfielder and play a full game. if your hit landed on the pavement it was a single, if you reached the dirt or the grass you get a double and if you can hit the tree in center field you'd have yourself a homer. i'd still be willing to play this game as an adult if anyone's interested.

neighbourhood street hockey - what Canadian doesn't play street hockey. you don't know anything until you learn how to play a bounce off a curb and break to the inside for your well deserved rebound.

X games bicycle behaviour - this was well before there was such a thing as the X games ... and there was no way that i'd be able to anything close to the insanely stupid things i see them doing nowadays. we'd build little ramps and go over them on our bikes. we really weren't more than a few inches off the ground so aren't i just the little daredevil eh?

watch tv - when there are 4 kids in a house sometimes you had to fight for control of the tube. i was into Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island, Gunsmoke and MASH at various times over the years.

wrestle - my younger sister, my older brother and i would all try to take on our eldest brother. we'd lose. he'd pin the 2 small ones under a leg each and then he'd have both arms to deal with my older brother. after we were defeated he'd force us to make him peanut butter and jam sandwiches. good times.

Trivial Pursuit - my wife now thinks its the height of geekdom but i used to play Trivial Pursuit by myself. i'd play all 6 pieces and i'd look to see what colour would come out on top over the course of a couple hours. yeah, i guess i was a bit of a lonely kid sometimes.

odds and evens - we used to flip hockey cards as the form of grade 4 gambling. never risk your best cards though, only ones you already had a double of. i suppose it was just as easy to trade cards but this was a lot more fun. a few years later i developed a game for when i had nothing to do where i would flip a coin to play out an entire 7 game series for 16 teams for the hockey playoffs. of course i was trying my best to get my Toronto Maple Leafs a Stanley Cup.

flipping quarters off your elbow - i remember stacking 40 quarters on an extended elbow and then snapping your arm down so that you caught all the quarters in your hand. i DEFY you to do better than 40, if you can then you must have catcher mitt hands.

if i think of more maybe i'll throw down a Part II

isn't that completely NOT the point?

well, that was good for a chuckle anyway

h/t sacred sandwich

it's the weirdest thing or maybe its not so weird after all

do you ever get little prompts to pray for particular people? i do. i find it curious the scene that i'm in when those promptings come along.

i've been led to pray for a particular couple in my community a handful of times over the last 24 hours. that's not the weird part. it's more weird because it has happened several times while i stood in front of the kitchen sink. sometimes i was doing the dishes, sometimes i was washing my hands, sometimes i was just getting a drink of water but each time the prompting has come to pray for S and D as i've stood in the same spot on my kitchen floor.

S and D got married this past Saturday, we weren't even invited to the wedding but that's not germaine. they're a beautiful couple and i genuinely like them. D is a Toronto Maple Leafs fan like me and that's always good to have around when you're lost in the tundra of a hockey wasteland like Winnipeg. S bikes to work and she blows past me on a semi-regular basis with a chipper "Hi Ian" and a whoosh ... and who wouldn't respect something like that? it's not like i travel really slowly on my bike but she goes by like i'm standing still so you just know that i respect the skills.

maybe i'm bringing some of my own baggage into the scene. maybe i'm just worried for them. some of the biggest household "fights" that have happened for me and Wendy have happened in the kitchen. they've been about household stuff like who does the dishes and who cooks and who cleans up and why that is important and should be negotiated. an old joke that's told in marriage groups is "don't pick up your husband's socks as they lay on the floor or you'll be picking them up for the rest of his life" and i may've just been projecting some of my own marital fights on a young couple who are just starting out. i hate doing the dishes ... but that's my job ... and i do it because it needs to be done and i love my wife ... so as i stand there washing plates and praying i think of a couple who have yet to negotiate the details of their life together. they'll pray through it, they may yell a little, they may cry a little or they may have no trouble whatsoever with the negotiations and come to an easy agreement that both of them like.

nevertheless, i pray for them. it can't hurt to pray for a young married couple right?

blessings on your life together S and D. may you know grace as you extend it to one another; may you know peace as you learn to rest in God together; and may you know hope as you dream together for a future filled with the love of God and each other.

White Flour

via Chad Holtz

the bet that never was

i was 15 and "good looking" (at least she thought so) ... but incredibly naive. i wanted to be liked so much so that when a girl was saying she was into me then i actually believed her. if i was into her in return then i'd reciprocate and if i wasn't into her then i was nice about it by remaining polite and cordial whenever i dealt with her.

i don't blame my little sister at all for what her friend did, not in the least. in fact i have hesitated to tell this story because i do not want my sister to feel responsible for how it affected me after the fact. my sister's closest friend at the time was Kim. she was a pretty young thing who later went on to do a little bit of modelling with her shock of red hair and her tall, slim stature. Kim liked me and i had no real feelings for Kim in any way. she was young and the feelings just weren't there for her. i suspect that the fact that i didn't reciprocate in her feelings of infatuation injured her in some way. i was cordial and polite but the heart wants what it wants ... and she wanted me while i didn't want her.

along came Roxy. she was Kim's cousin and she lived out of town but she came visiting her cousin for a couple of weeks in the height of the summer before my grade 11 year. i was bursting with pubescant hormones and i wanted to be liked. Kim had declared her love for me and i had done nothing about that except to be polite and keep my distance. Roxy was a different story. i liked Roxy and i wanted to get to know her better. we spent most of a week and a half dancing and flirting around the possibility of being more than just friends. i was giddy with the idea that she was pretty and she very much wanted to hang around with me. we talked and talked and we flirted shamelessly together as we sunned ourselves in the park alongside the St Lawrence River. the park was beautiful, the weather was beautiful and she was beautiful. i would have done all that i could to remain in those moments, to stay there in the park and lay our towels next to each other so that we could sun ourselves and talk about life.

but i was 15. and shy. and i was slow to make my move.

finally the time came that i wanted to express my desires for her. oh, to kiss her and to hold her hand as we lay in the sun. i wanted to invite her roller skating with me on the coming Friday evening, because that's what you do when you're 15 and it's the early 80's.

i think i've repressed the experience because i honestly don't remember the exact nature of how she crushed my soul. seriously, i don't remember. i do remember that i took her hand as we walked home from the park and by the end of that evening she had made it clear that all the flirting and her obvious ploys from the past week had meant something other than what she was saying and doing over that time. i do remember that by the next morning she was "into" my buddy Paul and i don't for a moment blame Paul for being an innocent bystander in the least.

she left town within days of her crushing my life and all i ever heard from or about her was in a letter that she sent Paul about a month later. she never expressed any "bet" that she had with Kim about whether or not she could get me to fall for her and Kim never mentioned it to me either, but i knew. i was still naive and i didn't figure it out until much, much later but eventually, i knew.

it's only a broken heart. it's only a scar now. i learned that you can't trust everyone and someone who is scorned can inflict their own little damage amidst their hurt so that they want you to hurt too. Kim moved away from town and i didn't hear much about her over the coming few years. she dated Brian for a bit before she left and they seemed very happy together. Roxy sent a couple letters to Paul and he showed me the papers but not close enough to actually read them. we were buddies so he played it cool with me, he knew my pain and we never really discussed what she had to say much. i'm very glad that nothing came together between them since i had come to the conclusion that she was very much bad news in general for guys like me and Paul is most definitely a guy like me. eventually Paul would stand up with me at my wedding and i was an usher at his. eventually we both found women who could hold our hearts gently and lovingly. he's a good man and a good friend.

i fight the urge to have ill will for Roxy to this day, simply because nobody wants to be used like that. i have no proof that Roxy tried to prove to Kim that i could be had, that i was not so untouchable and above it all. i don't think i ever was so untouchable and i didn't realize that i had hurt Kim so much so that i in turn needed to be hurt too. we were all just kids and we didn't realize that all the hormones rushing through our bodies should include a dose of pain too. rejection is painful, even when you're nice about it. i caused pain and in my own turn i felt it too.

i was the object of a bet gone bad. a bet i can never prove existed.