It's like this....

  You go to a racetrack, and there's a 50:1 Horse named Ditto.  Maybe not so promising.  But I show up and tell you that He hasn't raced in a year.  No one has seen him race, and his training times are amazing.  And his owner has placed a substantial wager for him to win out.  DO YOU PLACE THE BET?  DO YOU TRUST ME?

  2024 Certainly is coming to an EPIC end.  So are other things.  I read the earlierbloogs I have made sporatically, and I wonder who that person is.  My last 4 months have been a whirlwind, of growth. Plain old personal growth in so many ways.  Trying to resolve past trauma from my Parents separation 38 years ago has been one.  These things DO NO GO AWAY WITHOUT WORK!  And they can creep into your life.  They can make you seek validation, from whatever source is willing to give it.  This is a dangerous place to be with your heart and your life on the line.  Fix the problems early on.  Help your kids understand its not their fault.  Teach them it will be okay, and that different is okay and probably good and potentially even GREAT!  If you are unhappy, do the things that make yourself happy.  If you are being manipulated, do whatever it takes to get free from the bonds that are taking your power away.  Get help, Therapists have an obsession with the mind and helping people find peace.  Their techniques are varied and proven.  And it took me a long time to even make a call.

  We don't stop growing! Physically or mentally.  But we can be stagnated.  Don't ever accept you are your best self.  Instead, be working on your best self.  Learn and KNOW your self worth to your core.  This needs to be your Northstar and will never steer you wrong.  Let it guide your relationships with family and friends.  Use it to gauge whether to let someone into your life or remove them from it.  Be kind to yourself.  Speak and think to  yourself with compassion and kindness.  Life is challenging for everyone, at the very least you should be able to count on yourself for kind thoughts and words.  Read a book, go for a walk, run, heal, Love, FUCK! and don't forget to sleep!  I am so ready for 2025.  It cannot come fast enough.  There will be the biggest challenges of my life.  With the biggest rewards possibly!  I know my worth, and it is high!  

  Where was my confidence?  I thought I had it, but it was buried beneath the surface.  Hidden behind the scars of insults and arguements and failures perceived or invented.  Insecurities that were not there before; teased out with Cognitive Dissonance.  But against the odds, I found a little.  Enough to start to believe in it.  I can do hard things! I've always wanted to play hockey, but I can't skate well.  So I make excuses every year.  "Not this year, I'll practice and try next season" I would meekly say to myself.  Not this year, I said "FUCK IT!" I can fall and get back up!  And I can get better, and stronger, SO I DID! I talked nice to myself and my confidence grew! I love Hockey!  I love the people in my league with similar stories to my own.  We are competitive, we aren't elite athletes, but we are getting better.  I scored my first goal, I learned to play and communicate as a team.  We won the league Championship!!!  This BOLD decision to do what I strongly desired validated me beyond my comprehension at the time!  So I signed up for the winter season.  It is still a non-nergotiable weekly outlet for me.  And I grew stronger and faster, everything improved.  I am so proud of myself for starting, and I don't ever want to stop.  

  What a contrast that initial personal success has with the tone of your life!  It did with mine.  The growth is addictive.  I have read and listened to books, talked with a Therapist, her name is Gena and I feel she is a helper!  From our brief time I feel she has had many jobs helping and healing people; and she has wonderful experience and insight.  I have seen where I am not happy.  I have acknowledged the tough road I have to walk to get on the path of happiness.  It is another non-negotiable!  For me and my family.  I can  do hard things! I can be vulnerable, I can be strong and bold!  Scary things are still scary, but my Self Worth needs to evict the negative, and strengthen the positive.  And I can do hard things!

  There is a PERFECT path that I can see, just past this barren valley, over that craggy cliff, and on the other side of that Swamp of Sadness (see what I did there? ARTAX!!!!!!).  It's paved and clean, it gently meanders through soft rolling hills and sparkling lakes.  All my people are there.  And they want me to be there too.  It's always been there.  But the Craggy Cliffs blocked it for a long time.  I've caught glimpses and wandered toward its warmth.  The swamp sucked at my feet and scared me into remaining, feeling like I was not strong enough.  But now I am armed with knowledge, and confidence, and driven by people that need me.  So I will push through the swamp.  I will walk the paved paths, and lay in the meadows and fish the lakes, and do it with my people.

  Its been a great year, Torrey Pines, LA with Mindy, Brent, Lisa and Luke.  Denver for CPCI with the usual suspects from Endicott and the Scotts.  Mexico with the best sister and family anyone could ask for. Its been the OAA show, Declans LAX wins and losses. Steve Miller Band with Rustar and finding the landlocked lake with Wes! There have been friends made and reaquainted.  Lifetime connections for real!  Hockey played, cottage fun with the family.  Hockey tournaments with wins and losses, Kids starting highscool, and kids finishing highschool.  And personal growth for everyone. Almost.  More hockey, more growth, more relationships. Life is abundant, life is good, 2024 was a blessing.  2025 will continue to be better.  More life experiences.  More fears faced and challenged, and life made better.  More workouts completed, more challenges met, more boundaries explored! MORE LIFE LIVED!!  DITTO

Declan and Jack Boyd after winning their first LAX tourney

Huskies Winning CANAM Lake Placid Tourney

The Keenans of 2024

Decs Gr8 Grad with the Grandparents

THE PUCK! My first goal!

My kids go to my old highschool and got me this Jersey!

Torrey Pines GC, La Jolla California

Steve Miller band with Rustar

Renting a Convertible Mustang and Driving from San Diego to LA to see Mindy and Brent

Dinner with Luke, Lisa, Mindy and Brent! Highlight of the year. I hope everyone has family this amazing!

Discovering the land-locked lake with Wes

The kids chillin in Mexico

Dec holding our Lawn Bunny

 March 2024!

  What a crazy year it has been! First thing as it is fresh to mind.  Hockey season has wrapped up, lost in the first round to Woodstock. UGH.  Poor Declan was suspended for the last game of the season and first game of the playoffs for a crappy call by Hamilton Refs.  Anyways, Coach Fio and the boys are moving on and Bryson Sheriff will be the U15AA coach next year.  Declan is excited about having Bryson as coach for Hockey.  We can tie that in talking about Lacrosse.  Box Lacrosse tryouts for Rep are in a couple weeks.  I never thought Declan would be so into it.  Last year was a great first Lacrosse experience for Declan, he loves the contact and the battle of it! Bryson wont be coaching Lacrosse this season, so that is a dissappointment.  But Lacrosse tryouts at the beginning of April and Hockey tryouts at the End of April.

  Addison has had an interesting year! She is a very picky young woman, and has had a boyfriend for nearly a year.  His name is Caleb, and he is a great young man.  She is 16 and Caleb is 17.  He is a great student, and a kind and smart human.  They are great together and definitely best friends.  It is so nice to see them together!  school is going well, and she has been asked to participate in a program for girls looking to go into the law profession.  She is excited for it.  She is still working at Fortinos, and says she hates it, but I think she really enjoys it, she definitely enjoys having money.  She has her G2 license and has been driving to and from work.  Shes a work in progress, but doing well.

  Work is a combination of challenging and annoying right now.  Dealing with Precasters and thin brick is a pain in the butt.  Always a problem, and always a difficult solution.  I have learned so much this year with my experiences.  Adam has done a good job allowing me to learn the ups and downs on my own with some sage advice and guidance.  He often ends up correct in his predictions of how a company will behave, its uncanny.  We are doing really well and have years worth of orders.

  The government of Canada are on the top of everyones mind currently.  PM Justin Trudeau feels like a bad tennant at this point.  He is devastated in the polls.  Taxes on taxes on taxes.  We make great money between Tara and I $250k+, but we have never been so broke.  Its crazy.  average number of people that leave Canada/year is around 90k.  Last year was 450k.  Government is awful, but what are the options? NONE in Canada.  No one can call an election except for the PM, Governor general or King of England.  No one can stop this dictator clown from financially destroying Canada for years.

  Thats about it for now.  Maybe I'll post again this year.....who knows?

Almost the middle of 2023

 2023! 

I don't know why it takes me so long to open this tab and reread my old entries; because I love it everytime!  I just read my entry from 2022 and along the same trajectory so many events have happened.  Let me recap the last year since.  Tara and I went to Jamaica and I mentioned, followed by me assisting in a OAA presentation with John Stafford from Endicott brick.  It was a packed room, and John did well, I handled question and answer period which went over well.  Basically I went from that that show to Cuba with Tara and the Kids, Kristy and Jax and their kids and Nadine and her kids, mom, sister and cousin Kasey who was really interesting to get to meet.  She lives in the arctic!  NOT FOR ME! But interesting.  Cuba was pretty good, the hotel was a bit tired, and the food was the food, but the weather was great and it was fun to be with the kids in that setting.

  Spring Hockey for Declan was mostly crap!  His NiceStix team was basically all Blythe Prep kids and they were 90% not good.  But he wanted to play with Owen Galvin, and Johnny Dyal and Ben Havers were on that team.  They made some friends, lost a pile of games, the Blythe coaches really tell their kids parents that they are playing AAA equivilant, wow! thats a monsterous stretch.  Maybe A with a stutter.  Or maybe I am mishearing them and they said "PAYING" like AAA...lol!  The day we got back from Cuba Dec showed up mid-tournament in London and was asked to play forward with Owen, it took him a game or two to get into the swing of it again, but at least the boys ended up winning the consulation bracket gold.

 January 27th 2022...Massive snowstorm in Hamilton.

after about an hour of snowblowing I felt my phone buzz in my pocket.  It was Ellen from Thamesvalley brick asking if I would be willing to talk to Adam Brooke the owner.  Well of course I was!  After some interviews and video meetings on zoom, we knew enough about each other and the business that a deal was made and now3 1/2 months later, I am mostly settled in, with great and supportive coworkers, a business model that works for us and 50tons of stress off back.  

 March 21st, Tara and I went to Jamaica with Kris and Jax and Nadine and Greg Pavey.  We stayed at he Bahia Principe Luxury Runaway Bay.  The hotel and grounds were beautiful!  It was the most relaxing vacation ever.  No stress, no trips, just sand, water and beverages.  Oh and the 40+ doobs I rolled with some great Greens and some Hash Greg bought from the guy selling at the lagoon named Smokey (theyre all named Smokey)  Great trip!

 Declan starts spring hockey this weekend.  Back with Nice Stix, and he changed his number for the first time.  #63 instead of #14,  Its weird seeing him in anything else.  SO tomorrow him and I are off to Toronto for a couple games.  I'll take him downtown after the first game.  I will have a customer to drop some samples off to.

  Life is Good, almost great, big things to come.

Wowsa!

So....after years of:

-talking over people to get in my thoughts on a conversation or correlating idea

-Cutting off people(mostly my wife and family)

-Hyperfocusing on a topic, art project, wood working project

-Losing motivation on renovation projects when 98% done

-Not being able to go to bed before 1am

-Spacing out when being talked to

-Not starting anything unless I have every step worked out in my brain

-Leaving a task to start another that I just thought of or was reminded of

-Having 5-12 trains of thought going, along with the melody of some song or other at once

-Losing keys, wallet, phone, charger at least 3 times a week.

-Having conversations in my head with friends, family and customers over possible situations in preparation of that conversation actually happening.  Which most of the time it doesn't manifest.

-Not doing jobs at work unless there is definitive timelines attached

-Avoiding jobs requiring more time and focus, and instead doing less important jobs that can be completed quicker.

-Being sucked into something on my phone and saying, okay 5 more minutes, okay just 5 more minutes, stop playing this game, stop scrolling, put the phone down.  WHY WONT YOU STOP! JUST STOP! TURN IT OFF....and then realizing its been 2 hours.

I realize that I have ADHD.

I was told a million times as a kid that I probably had ADD. I was never diagnosed.  My focus issues were masked by excellent test marks because I remember almost photographically.  Although I didn't follow through on homework often.  I was hyperactive.  But also had a hyperactive mind.  I did feel focus.  Usually doing art or playing LEGO.  OMG creating with LEGO saved my life so many times.

But now, It is stopping my  personal growth, now I see the connection between the symptoms.  IT IS LIKE A NEON SIGN TURNED ON ABOVE MY HEAD! Get help with this....NOW.  I've made an appointment with my family doctor, for next wednesday March 24th.  I will write again after that.  I can't even imagine feeling normal, because I always felt normal and dealt with my personal challenges or ignored them.  But as I get older I realize...MY Brain is not normal.

FINGERS CROSSED!

Oddly enough, when I expressed this to my parents, they made a million excuses why they never tested me as a kid.  And told me I just have to learn to manage my time better......WTF?! I know how to manage time better, I just CAN'T!!!

when I expressed this to my friends, to a person they all said...You're not shocked by this are you?  We've just always assumed it.  My friends are the best.

So Here we go again. Its 2020! Almost the end actually.  What an absolute shit show this year has been.  It started out amazing...Trip to StLucia with Kris and Jax, Rob and Amber and the Guders! Amazing everything about that trip.  But in the background was the world news of COVID19! There was one confirmed case in Canada at that point,  The virus has started off in Wuhan China, And was thought to be a species crossover virus from eating bats or something (no one knows really still)

But by the time we got back from St Lucia the second confirmed case was here.  

Declan was playing AAA Hockey for the Huskies and our team just couldn't score to save their lives.  But Declan was stuck playing Defense and was really unhappy about it. I only just realized how unappy he was in October when he asked to play for Coach Jamie and the AA's so he could play forward.  

So...the end of March, April, May and into June the COVID19 numbers were growing Daily, and we were starting to learn some things about the virus.  Grocery stores and big box stores were open,  Ferrell has stayed open since day 1 of the mess and people visit just to get out of their houses.  Most of the province was in lockdown except for essential workers.  Ferrell somehow fell into that category.  Eventually numbers dwindled and we got to have something of a summer. We didn't really take advantage of the trailer and just used the pool.  It was scorching hot at the end of June and that was kinda nice.

In July we got to use Wes's cottage.  It was fun as hell.  Us and the Kennedys were fishing and enjoying the lake and the cottage.  I really do love it up there.  We decided to spend some money in the backyard.  So we drew up a plan that incorporated a new 16x9 storage shed to keep the backyard tidy.  We had Reg Slotuik and PPM do the work to put in a drainage system to get rid of all the water.  They did 1000sqft of pavers and also put in new sod in the front and back yard.  It looks great!!!!! About the same time we had our first hot tub delivered...what a treat thats been.  Addison is in it the most, but I'm a close second with my late-nite tubs!

So The second term of the hockey training started,  Declan was happily with Jamie and then......wave fucking two of COVID19 kicks in.  Hamilton was put into Red status.  Rinks could only have 10 people in them so training has gotten expensive and hard to come by.  Until this week...the week before Christmas...Premier Ford has put us into Grey LOCKDOWN MODE!  Essential only work and play, no gatherings of more than one household.  LIFE SUCKS...the vaccine is starting to be shipped to Canada.  I dont feel good about it, but I might have to take it just to get some resemblence of normalcy.  2020 wasn't that bad. But 2021 better be an improvement!

 

HOLD UP......WAAAAIIIITTT!

WTF!!!
So, we think we have it all figured out...cabinets, colours, door styles, functionality things, and little details that will make this look BOSS!  
Then Gino comes over to measure, and we get another price

EEEEEEEEEERREEEEREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKK!!(my version of a car braking)

And it is like $$5000 more than the inital price.  So I dont need to elaborate to much, but I had to go in and make Tara proud.  We ended up getting everything we origianlly wanted for within our budget number.  But we have changed door styles.  THANK GOD!

I was started to look at the door style and wonder why we were doing this, it was sooo similar to whats there now.  We originally liked the Shaker style, its classic and contemporaryish all in one awesome package.  So here are our two choices in Maple still.  White for the main cabinets and dark for the island still.

This isnt the Dark we chose....or the white

So then we go down to LOWEs, Tara scouted out some flooring at Lowes onsale!  I love onsale, especially if it means I can get Maple for the same price as OAK or ASH (*making face like Im sick and throwing up)

Its a lightish Brown Colour, and it is beautiful!  And the price was killer.  SO we say, we're here lets just pick a tile.  LOL  WHat do we get?  Fricking 6"x24" tile that looks like hardwood.  Should look cool, funny thing is because maple isnt grainy, the tile looks more like Hardwood than the hardwood. LOL

Anyways.....so you know whats going on, I ripped out the upper Cabinets and the bulkheads.  I borrowed Bills purple truck to take the trailer to the dump, and sure enough I blow the brake lines on it.  SORRY BILL!

This weekend is going to be rewire certain areas weekend and on Monday drywall is getting delivered for the ceiling and wall repairs.  Fred and his buddy Joe can get it done all next week and then floor and lower cabinet demo the weekend following.  Hopefully I can have the flooring in before we go to Florida on the 3rd, but if not.......whateva!  Cabinets are 5 weeks away anyhow!  WTF