10:00 pm, Friday, 20 April, 2012.

As part of TVCOGECO’s Volunteer Appreciation Week, I invited Arnprior’s volunteer camera people out to dinner. With only structure gonflable a couple weeks to plan and make reservations and all that, I had two volunteers who were able to attend.

—————Jim

October 20, 2011 🙂 Mom’s Birfday!

Jim at his computer, working on his game-

This is Cathi, stretching to adjust a TVCOGECO video camera as we set up for a telethon last May

Erin, looking good before we started inflatable water park setting up for the telethon.

Part 2:

Jassper, frantically digging at the beach…. Yes we do have beaches in Canada, no we don’t have to build ourselves new igloos every winter and live in tents in the warm months…. 😉

Moe in a box. Cats love boxes. I don’t think us mere humans will ever know why.

Erin at her camera on the day of the aufblasbarer hindernisparcours telethon, with our friend ‘Rusty’ goofing around behind her. (Erin is in her Second year at the University of Western Ontario Nursing B.S. program. She put in a year at the U of Ottawa and most of what she learned was applicable…)

Part 3:

This is a shot of Cathi at her camera during the ‘Dare to Care Telethon’ last May. This telethon runs on the cable station that Jim is in aufblasbares zelt charge of here in Arnprior. Proceeds paid for a van to transport seniors and special needs people and continue to fund the local ‘Seniors at Home’ programmes.

Jim at the editing console of the TVCOGECO Mobile unit that came down to Arnprior for the Telethon. (Cathi snuck up behind him and shot this photo.)

Let’s see how this goes:

Professor Darwin Boles (He said he didn’t choose the name.) Facilitating a Seminar. or

What I did on my Spring non-Vacation.

This was on the side of the road (Hwy 7) on the way to and from the Seminar.

But I have to admit, the lizard was what really captured my interest. It was raining when I took the video that we captured these images from. (the indoor image was on an overcast day, but that didn’t matter, since we were indoors.)

—————Jim

Here’s the photo of me that Doug took.

—————Jim

So I have the photos I took of you (Jim) but I can’t figure out how to upload them into the blog here. It looks like the only way to get an image bouncy castle for sale  into this thing is to grab it from a web site (it wants the URL and doesn’t have the “browse” option I got used to.) So I’ll have to email the danged things to you and have you insert them later, how’s that sound?

———Doug

Thanks for walking me through the sign in process here. (Good thing I’m visiting because I don’t think I could have figured this out long distance. (& Next time, let me use a computer with a keyboard that doesn’t stick, huh? This is painful.) )

So Your Elections are just as crazy as ours, hey? (Different flavored craziness but still nuts.) And you guys spell it “flavoured” I get it. Maybe.

& I can rag on your candidates without losing my job. Can’t I? That sounds tempting.

First impression? I don’t trust your polls. Something inflatable water slide just doesn’t sound right (I listen to Canadian broadcasts over the internet.) I get the very strong impression that somebody is trying to control opinion poll results so tightly that he, she, or it probably controls the questions, who gets asked, and then maybe even changes the answers to get the result he, she, or it wanted in the first place.

Here, in the U.S., things are nuts. Are you guys really trying to catch up to us?

….. and another thing, gad, this really looks a hundred percent better on a Mac. Doesn’t it?

—–Doug

Yeah, it’s been a while.

The problem is, the get a new password if you lost yours routine is broken. Something does not like the ‘key’ it sends you. and it keeps bouncy castle for sale sending you the same key, and the routine keeps telling you the key is invalid.

And then again, I made the notebook notation where I wrote down the ‘new password’ intentionally cryptic (silly me)

So after much frustration, and a little bit of elation, maybe even giddyness when the last attempt actually worked-

Here we are.

Moe is complaining upstairs, “maoww maaow maaow maaaow-”

Everybody else is sleeping. “zzzzzzz zzzz zzz zzz zzzZZzz ZZZZz zzzzz”

And here I am, messing with blogs that weren’t dead, just sleeping. Mercury goes direct tomorrow.

—Jim

Saturday, September 11, 2010.

Wow- this has been tough. I mean I can stop any conversation dead in its tracks with, “My brother in law burned his house down and blew his brains out last Wednesday, how the bleep are you?”

Ouch.

I spent the first couple days feeling like he was standing here, not upset, not overjoyed, I felt like he was relieved and okay with whatever he’d been through. I could have sworn the first message from him from ‘beyond’ was “well, I understand you a lot better now.” And I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.

Did Somebody guide him through a life review and if he had gone into that with any bad feelings or unresolved issues with me or with anybody, had he been able to see the other person’s or persons’ limitations and whatever from a fresh perspective that convinced him that, for instance, I wasn’t a complete and useless idiot?

I also felt like I was in contact with somebody, if not my brother in law, then a higher power who was there with me to make sure I got through this.

And I don’t know exactly what all the insights and ramifications will turn out to be in the end, but I spent three or four days waking up inflatable water slide freezing and shaking to the point where my chest muscles ached from extreme fatigue, almost to the ‘worrisome’ degree.

When I told Cathi about the freezing and the shaking, she said that was symptomatic of a panic attack.

I really don’t think I was having panic attacks. I think I was reaching for my brother in law, searching him out in the next world, and, if I wasn’t fully remembering what we might have said to each other, I felt like I was making positive contact, that either he was okay with being wherever he was or that I’d been able to convince him that he didn’t have to punish himself.

The newspaper article said he had photos of my sister and their daughter (who’d died in a fire before her 6th birthday in 1996) clutched in his hand when they found his body.

I did come away from that feeling okay about myself and him.

But then I heard that he blamed my niece (his step daughter) in the note he’d left.

And I couldn’t get her on the phone.

Email messages back and forth to my sister, Nancy, in Connecticut kept me worried.

And a birthday card from our ‘adopted’ sister Diane in Connecticut with her phone number led to a phone call that made me feel like I have decent friends and they have a decent friend in me and we’re good for each other. And if things might not exactly be ideal on this planet at the moment, at least we’ve got each other.

But I’m still worried about my niece. I’m worried that she didn’t try to call me (I’m pretty sure she has the phone number that should be a free or at least cheap call for her.) I don’t know whether this means that she’s okay or she’s really in bad shape.

Suicide leaves survivors in a rough state. I mean, even if we feel like we were totally blameless and the person who killed himself or herself was out of touch, deluded, or whatever, we still have to deal with a deep down, “-well, maybe I should’ve realized that his or her actions were a scream for help. Could I have done anything to help? Was there anything anybody could do? Was it just his time and if he hadn’t stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, would he have been killed by a drunk driver? or a stray bolt of lightening?”

I can’t blame him for anything. I don’t feel compelled to climb up on any phony pulpit and deliver a silly sermon demonizing anybody. (This may be a large dark blot on the consciences of anybody who works for a bank or a mortgage company. This world’s ‘accepted’ ‘economics’ philosphies and/or practices hammered the nails into his coffin more effectively than the gun manufacturers or bullet manufacturers ever could. Oh, yeah, that was the final straw. They foreclosed and sold the property and told him to get out or they’d send the cops and drag him out. Should I hope the person who bought the place has an intensely painful psychological run of things? I’d never want to live any place where a previous owner had been forced to leave by some arbitrary human laws that give banks and greedy powerful ignoble immoral/amoral bastards domain over property that should never be considered theirs in the first place. But it’s not for me to judge. (I said with an impish, nearly demonic, grin).)

As far as I can tell, my brother in law really really wanted to be with his wife and daughter and would have found some excuse to get there ‘by hook or by crook’. And I don’t think any reasonable person could have expected me to be able to know the time and place when he decided he was really going to do it, and everybody pretty much knows I can’t teleport myself there and teleport all the guns and bullets and knives and pills into some other dimension- (Or teleport the brother in law into some warm and fuzzu, friendly, safe environment, this side of heaven, where a determined individual such as himself couldn’t get his hands on anything lethal.) But I am worried about my niece.

And I’m walking around with this sense of dread, like maybe in the process of contacting my dead brother in law I picked up a little bit of his state of mind and now need to work that off, and it won’t kill me, but it won’t be a snap, either.

And then again, this is earth and the vibrations out here are still pretty weird and messages from the Divine realms some times get twisted and distorted and I’m probably going to have several days if not weeks or feeling like all the fuses in my nervous system have been blown, and a cloud of ‘pins and needles’ is hanging around my head and neck and shoulders and I will be very vulnerable other’s negative states of mind. (but at least I won’t believe their depressions and delusions are ‘mine’.)

I feel like I need a lot of sleep. But I’ve got too much that I have to do, first. & In the last few days I haven’t been waking up shaking and freezing, but I’ve been waking up aching, almost severely.

—sigh,

God Bless us. We surely need it.

—————Jim