Blog Post No. 592
My main mode of transportation is a little pickup truck. It’s a bit older, but it’s in pretty good shape. The previous owner took extremely good care of it and I’ve tried to keep up on it. This year seems to be the year that maintenance needs to be done, thought. It’s at the mileage and age that those things aren’t a surprise and over the years that I’ve had it, it’s been mostly problem free, so I’m not terribly frustrated with it. This latest repair was a bit of a dozy, though.
I’m sitting in the office where I work while a large group of people are setting up their 11 day event in the building. Everything is hectic and I’m trying to stay on top of it while getting my own work done. People are excited and angry (at me for giving them answers they don’t like) and I’m tired. At this time last year, the same event was happening, but I wasn’t in my current position. I was at a different desk being hands on with their setup, training new staff, and trying to prepare for the job I currently have. I was tired then, too.
There is an intersection of an old highway and a concession road not too far from where I live. If you drive down the highway heading north-east, as you approach the intersection, there are a few houses a little farther apart than in a suburb. Next to one of them is an old cemetery and there are a fair number of trees on both sides as well as a creek. I used to pass the area often when I spent a year going to school in another city.
Last year the only convention I went to was The 
I’m back with another reflection on a post that I wrote many years ago. In this case, we’re looking at close to 10 years ago (minus a few weeks). I’ve had the idea for a few years now of a post about some of the advice that’s come my way, but I wasn’t sure how I would approach writing it. I was always a little intimidated with trying to get the right feeling across. Well, I looked back and found a mention of one of the pieces of strange advice in a post from May 13th, 2013. Blog Post No. 28 
Last year I went to my first event since 2019. It was the
This is the first of whatever that thing was I posted about 
I had an idea and from the title of this post, I think you can figure out what it is. I haven’t gone back to look at any of my older posts in quite a while. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, so not only am I intimidated, I don’t really have time to review every old post and manage to write new ones. When I only had a hundred or so posts, I would sometimes go back to make sure the links still worked and occasionally, that would lead me to want to update something I’d said years earlier.
Last week I was looking for something to watch for while I do mundane things. I enjoy having a show on or listening to a podcast when I’m doing the laundry or making dinner. I save the shows I really want to watch for when I can sit down and pay attention (while trying to not be distracted by my phone). I ended up stumbling across a show I had forgotten about.
Many years ago, when I was in high school, I went to the mall with my buddy Matt. We had a usual route we took that led through the music stores and while browsing, I bought the (then) new album by the band Limblifter, Balaclava. I’d loved the first album and as soon as we got to Matt’s house, I put it on his stereo and was immediately disappointed.
Ben Van Dongen 