We are approaching yet another election, mostly because people like me can’t make up our minds on what we want.  For the last few years, we’ve been operating under a minority government which basically means that whoever is "in power" is holding onto it by merely a thread and can be turfed out at any time.

I can’t recall an election where I’ve been so much on the fence about where my vote is headed.  I’m torn between the Liberal party (they inhabit the political center) and the Conservatives (as the name would imply, on the political right).  I honestly believe that either party will lead the country in a direction that I’m happy with, so that leaves me to evaluate how each party’s platform would impact my family.

Let’s start with the Liberals…
They seem to be hanging their hat on a new tax plan called the "green shift".  I’ve read the green shift plan, and I actually think that it is a very well thought out and potentially beneficial approach to shifting our tax revenues in a way that encourages people to live in a more environmentally friendly way.  Basically, I would pay less income tax and pay more consumption tax, with consumption taxes weighted towards things that cause harm to the environment.  It’s not the plan that bothers me, but there is something about the Liberals this year that bothers me.  Probably on the top of my annoyances list is that while the environment is something that we should pay attention to, I’m leery of a party and a leader who consider that the top priority (and to listen to him perhaps even Stephane Dion’s only priority). 
I also have no reason to trust this Liberal party.  I got burned in Ontario after becoming accustomed to years of governments who said what they would do, and once elected they did what they said.  The Ontario Liberal party put forth a plan that I thought was a good one, that I voted for, and then they failed to deliver on almost every single point that was important to me.  So while the Green Shift looks good to me, I don’t know Dion and I don’t know anyone in power in the Liberal party enough to really trust that they will follow through on key promises like lowering the income tax to offset the new carbon tax.  They may very well be worthy of my trust, but at this point I just don’t have any proof that they are; so I default to the pessimistic.  As for the rest of their platform, very little of the changes that they’re discussing affect me.

And next the Conservatives…
I’m still angry about what happened in my local riding a few years ago.  Garth Turner was my locally elected representative, and I really enjoyed his transparent approach to representation using forums like his blog and town-hall meetings in person with the electorate.  The Conservative Party turfed him out of the party ostensibly because he was too transparent.  He spoke his views, tried to represent his region over the party line where it made sense, and was quite open with all of us voters.  The modus operandi of the Stephen Harper Conservatives was and is very much about tightly controlled messages and top-down policies, a direct conflict with Garth’s style, so they kicked him out of the party and made him an independent.  I took that as a slight against the will of the voters (ie me) and a concerning statement about the way that Stephen Harper’s government runs.  Add to that a local candidate who was inserted by party brass against the will of the local Conservative riding association and it is clear to me that the Harper Conservatives are actively working against the concept of local representation.
On the topic of trust, the Conservative government did keep all of the promises that were important to me even while operating under a minority government.  I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the massive flip-flop they made on income trusts, but as noted at the beginning of this post I’m focusing on issues that affect my family and at this point in time income trusts are not an issue for me.  When they say that they will for example maintain the $100 a month daycare benefit that I get for each of my kids, I believe them.  For the most part I’m okay with the Conservative platform and I believe that they will work very hard to keep promises for fear of the repercussions.

So if I look at my choices (eliminating the NDP and Green party up front), for me it’s between the following come election day:

• Strong local representation from a politician whose style I generally like, but with a national presence that is focused on what I believe to be the wrong issues, and an uncertainty as to whether I can trust the promises made at that national level (Liberal).
• Strong national leadership, a platform that I’m generally okay with and can trust will get delivered, with basically no local representation (Conservative).

Writing this all down has certainly helped me make sense of it all, but I still have no idea how I’ll be voting this year.

I’ve been out geocaching with several friends and family over the last few weeks.  Some that I didn’t get a picture of (unfortunately):

• Dad wandering into the middle of a road while reading his GPS
• Walking through a stream behind Tim’s house looking for a cache that was hidden under a tree stump
• Wandering around Gatineau post-conference with a group still wearing suits and digging through brush
• The ultimate cache surprise in Munich where two couples were, how shall we say, “practicing for parenthood” on the park bench next to the cache

Here are a few snapshots I took along the way.

Out with Laurie in Belleville

Darryl pretending to be unimpressed by the “Love Cache”

More caching with the kids in Milton
 

When your kid has a sudden and unexpected increase in size, clearly that’s called a growth spurt.  But what do you call it when your child seems to mature mentally suddenly and unexpectedly almost overnight?  Jodie and I have both noticed a major change this weekend in Jaimee’s maturity level.  She has become independent (wants and can do pretty much everything herself) and her language skills have improved immensely.

Katlyn went through a steady maturity process, so this “spurt” is completely new to us and very impressive to watch.

James came up with an interesting term the other day for the many multi-stage complex geocaches that are located around the University of Waterloo.  Here’s a sample of a “nerdcache”:

For the west, take the 7 letters that total the last name attached to the complex. Use the same formula (A=1 etc) to calculate the sum of those 7 numbers. Double it, the divide by 1000 and add it to the West co-ords. For example, if the last name is ZACHARY (Z=25, A=1, C=3, H=8, A=1, R=18, Y=25), the total would be 82, doubled to 164. The final western co-ords 80.29.852.

Of course I told Jodie about all the nercaches in Waterloo and she shot back that they’re all nerd caches.

I remember driving to work and hearing the initial breaking news on the radio of a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

I remember the horror and confusion in the announcer’s voice when the second plane hit.

I remember my heart sinking in shock as I realized that this was much more than an accident.

I remember pulling into the parking lot and running into the office to join my friends inside to figure out what was going on.

I remember hesitation as I interrupted a meeting in the conference room to tell our customers from New York that their home had just been attacked.

I remember the entire Internet slowing to a crawl as the rest of the world joined us in looking for answers online, and frustration at my inability to locate information.

I remember huddling around a coworker’s speaker phone as his wife held the phone up to the television and straining to hear what was going on.

I remember my panic upon realizing that there were other planes still in the air that could be heading for office towers in other cities.

I remember my relief as Jodie told me that she was evacuating her office tower in downtown Toronto and getting on one of the many trains that had been spontaneously scheduled to get millions of commuters out of the city.

I remember crying as I drove home that morning listening to stories of people jumping out of the World Trade Center in a desperate attempt to live.

I remember sitting on my couch in the basement, watching CNN and running multiple instant messenger conversations with friends around the world, all of us desperately trying to understand what had just happened.

I remember really paying attention for the first time as a friend from Lebanon explained to me why the United States is seen as a target by groups in the Middle East, and my realization of the hatred that I had been ignorant of for so long.

I remember my hope for justice against those who perpetrated the massacre and my fear that the United States would overreact and set about a new generation of war.

I remember my wife returning home, and our joint realization that our world was going to be very different from this point onwards.

Fast forward to today, seven short years from that attack.  Once again I was sitting in my car listening to the news on the radio, once again headed into Waterloo to start a normal day at the office.  Once again it was a sunny but crisp day and once again I have no reason to fear for the safety of myself or my family.  Today was normal, but for some reason today was different.

Every year on this day, I have re-lived the emotions that I experienced in 2001.  Not a year has gone by where tears haven’t flowed unconsciously from my eyes while recalling these events.  That is, not until today.  What struck me this morning was that I didn’t cry, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I suspect that a psychologist could explain this away, but my immediate reaction is that I’m not particularly happy to be losing that emotional attachment to September 11.  Somewhat out of fear of forgetting how I felt, I decided to document my feelings immediately before they fade any further.  I want to ensure that I remember not only the event but how it impacted me on a personal level.  I also want my children to be able to connect to the social impact of this date once they are old enough to understand, and I want my grandchildren to be able to link what will no doubt be a chapter in their history books to a very real part of their heritage.

So here it is…  this is what I remember about 9/11.

We’ve found what appears to be an excellent new daycare provider, but first we need to get her relocated.  It may take a few months for her to become accustomed to the cultural differences between her homeland and Milton, but I think she’ll catch on quickly.  English is her first language, and the kids seem to get along well with her so that’s a bonus.

So for the sake of my children, please buy this house:

It’s a lovely four bedroom in Welland, Ontario (mother-in-law not included in the purchase price).  Click here for the full listing.

My coworkers Cheryl and James recently got hooked on geocaching, and James spent most of the day on Tuesday getting me hooked as well.  On Tuesday night I got home and decided to take the kids for a treasure hunt.

So what is geocaching?  Geocaching.com defines it as:

Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS unit can then try to locate the geocache.

Put more simply and as I described it to the kids, someone hid a treasure for us to find and I use a map on my Blackberry to find the treasure.

There’s stuff hidden all over the world, below is a map of all the treasures available in Milton (click on the map to be taken to the geocaching website).

Here is what I did last night:

• Visit geocaching.com and signed up for a free account
• Typed in my postal code on the Hide & Seek page
• Clicked on the cache located in the park near us
• Plug the longitude and latitude into the GPS
• Go for a walk

Once we got close to the area via GPS, we had to rely on the hints that were published within the description to locate the cache.  It was near a standing dead tree, on the north side of a fallen tree.  Even with the hint it took a good 10 minutes to locate what looked like a tennis-ball can hidden under some loose bark.  The kids dissected the cache and signed their names into the log.  1 down and 646,632 more to go.

The types of caches get more advanced, and next time we’ll definitely bring something along to swap out of the cache (you can take something from the treasure so long as you replace it with something of equal value).  This particular one had some stickers, a keychain, and some coloured glass beads.

I’m a bit more nervous than I’d normally let on about the procedure that my father is having done today.  Okay, okay, I’m nervous about everything but I’ve been trying to hide it in this particular case.

He’s been having issues for several years with a fast heartbeat.  They diagnosed it almost two years ago, and presented a suggested course of treatment.  The “cure” is a somewhat complex procedure where they feed electrodes up an artery in the leg and try to isolate the part of the heart that is causing the electrical abnormalities.  They then zap it to basically disable that area of the heart.  After significant consideration, he decided to go ahead with the procedure which is currently under way at University Hospital in London, Ontario.

Anyways, it should be somewhat obvious after reading the description why it would cause a son to become nervous.  Best of luck Dad!

We spent the last weekend at Brenda’s family cottage in Erieau.  It’s an interesting place, built by her dad and other relatives out of materials savaged from CP (or was it CN) rail.  The wood was salvaged from boxcars, much of the furniture from a decommissioned caboose, and clothesline made from steel rails driven into the ground.  We’ve visited before, but this was really the first time at the cottage that was “kid friendly”.

Most of our time was split between fishing off the back-yard dock and swimming at the large beach on the lake side.  After three days, our tally of fish was 55 Blue Gill all caught with either a Dora the Explorer or Finding Nemo kids fishing rod.

Katlyn and Graeme had some good times playing Tetris head to head on her pink Game Boy DS, which looked surprisingly at home in Graeme’s hands.  Unfortunately I didn’t have my digital camera with me, but caught a couple of shots with the Blackberry. 

On Saturday evening we headed over to my Aunt and Uncle’s farm to say hi to everyone.  It was a quick in-and-out because they’re in the middle of tobacco harvest season and free time was at a minimum.  They treated us to the full “city slicker” tour including a walk around the main farm area, some horse rides for the girls, and a driving tour of the vast Brush empire along the lake in Blenheim.

(this post was actually from a few weeks ago)

So today is the day.  I’ve been working up to this moment for a few weeks now, and it is literally minutes away.  As you may have read earlier in the summer, I (finally) managed to procure myself a smoker for our house in Milton.  Getting the smoker was both a feat of marital manipulation and somewhat of a retail challenge to locate.  But I have it, and have been working up slowly to a “big cook”.

Dinner number one was chicken halves, which is pretty hard to screw up.  They were tasty but I found the hickory smoke a bit strong.

Dinner number two was baby back ribs, more of a challenge and a test of one’s ability to control temperature for a long time.  Temperature went smashingly, texture was great, but the grocery-store ribs were pretreated and came out tasting like ham.

Dinner number three is a personal challenge.  Invite 45 people over for the afternoon and attempt to feed them all via the smoker.  I went to the local butcher last week to order the pork butts.  They literally had no idea what I was talking about and had to pull out a diagram of a pig with various cuts labelled.  This morning I stopped in to check on them, just to make sure they were actually able to get me the cut of meat I needed.  Alas, they had arrived and were awaiting my slow-cooked smokey reinvention.  This evening I trimmed the fat cap off of the three roasts, leaving me with approximately 21 pounds of meat.  I slathered them with yellow mustard, applied a dry rub and threw them back into the refrigerator.  I had planned to set the alarm for 4:00am, but after doing some additional reading today have decided to get started at midnight instead.  At seven pounds each, the time estimate for cooking is anywhere from eleven to fourteen hours.  I’d rather they be done early, apparently they hold nicely in a cooler for several hours.

As for the rest of tomorrow, we have guests bringing side dishes.  I prepped some fresh salsa using hot peppers from the garden (tomatoes need about a week more before they’re ripe).  Jodie has prepped some “dirt cake” for the kids which is served in a flower pot.  Now if only the weather would cooperate.  Until this afternoon, the forecast had been 26 degrees and sunny.  The most recent forecast however calls for 70% chance of thunderstorms.  Oh well, if it rains it rains.

Well, it looks like it’s time to fire up the smoker!