What is going on? David and Daniel are doing housework around me. Perhaps they are aware that I sometimes want to throw them out of the house. In fact I sometimes want to throw all my children out of the house and all their friends too. Cathy and I bought a 35 dollar pair of herb clipping and stripping scissors and they have already disappeared , I swore that everything is appropriated by yoots who sleep all day and party all night. And they expect us to pay for them while they save money to buy their way into their own property leaving us with nothing. They drive me crazy.

Ghost train

These are experiments. I select a picture not from google earth but from the particular photographer's collection. Seems to work well.


This is above Medellin where I went so many years ago.

We stayed in a tall hotel in the centre of town and there was a pool on the roof. What impressed me was this huge slab of land, flat but at an angle to the horizontal city centre, the whole slab a huge suburb of tiled roofs.

This is after a local cargo plane crash. Recently Medellin has been the centre of the cocaine trade of course, but when we were there it was famous for knock-off textiles and records. I bought an excellent copy of "All Things Must Pass" for pennies.

Home sick with the remnants of a nasty little cold which crept up on me over the weekend. I think the sleep lab was so allergen free that I actually got better there for a while. One disasterous part of breaking the routine of work was that I forgot to check the calendar and skipped my half yearly visit to my psychiatrist and also forgot to wish Alice a happy birthday. Dr. D might give me up as his patient, which I am not ready for yet. I am quite sane and mostly happy, but I don't want to give up that anchor yet.

I just got back from the sleep apnea study. 20 hours of living in a yellow box with 24 wires attached to my head. Although I slept a lot, I feel jet lagged. I ate at MacDonald's and Tim Horton's and read Anthony Pagden's book, Worlds at War. I listenned to my MP3 player and felt very isolated, although not long enough to feel lonely.

So it's off to the sleep apnea clinic on Friday. Good news from DM and JC, phoned yesterday and today. William went out and bought expensive brandy, celebrated with his girlfriend and ended up this morning very sick and with a terrible hang-over. I hope he'll learn. M, his girl, is awfully sweet and stunningly good looking, especially all dessed up to go out as she was last night. Funny to have a day off, (to see the sleep doctor at mid day), in the middle of the week.

Cathy and I drove out to Nobleton to have my tooth fixed. Beautiful spring day. Returned here and streetcarred to work. My half day seemed longer than usual, perhaps, in part, because I did not get to sleep after lunch. The boys are all out celebrating Matthew and William's birthdays, (we went to an excellent 240 dinner at Southern Accents last night). Matthew is at last 21. Spent about two hours filling in a questionnaire for the sleep apnea clinic who interview me on Wednesday. Rather enjoyed it. Evidently I feel a lot better about myself than many of their respondents. Wish I still had spellcheck here. Apparently we do.

It is raining today and set to rain all weekend.

I drove over to work to pick up a big bag of new work clothes and then left the Himler in Tibet book on Alice's doorstep.

On the way back I thought it would be nice to park indoors and go to the Eaton Centre, which Cathy and I did.

We had a really nice time and forgot all about the rain for about three hours.

We bought fine oil and balsamic vinegar, a cutting tool, clothes for Cathy at Reitman's, two novels and Anthony Pagden' s book on war. We also looked at cameras at Blacks and Radioshack and an Ipod Nano at the new Apple store. They also had a very fine desktop for 1300.

We ate at Lettuce which had huge portions of dissapointingly dull food. We had coffee at Starbucks and drove home again again in the rain.

I am determined to go to the AMC again tomorrow morning. We will, at their request, celebrate Matthew's 21st and William's 19th at Southern Accents tomorrow night.

What more could I write? At last the week is over. Work, albeit shortenned by going to the urology ultrasound on Wednesday, has seemed very tiresome this week. I am just repeating over and over what I have devised as the best way to do each little part of my job, the human contacts are discouraging and

death always hovers in the air.

Woao, I do tend to forget why I went into this work and why I asked so persistently to work in the specific area I do.

My brother Kim asked me to download photos we had taken that were not on the notebook computer. Instead I have decided to invite him to look at this blog. It has a strange title. Basically when I started it, I wanted many people to see it and I thought that if i gave it a sexy title, people would not only try it out, but also remember it. That was in the days when blogs were advertised and when, well they still are, but not in the same way. Now people find other bloggers by clicking on interests that they share, or favorite movies or books, but if you check other people who have written 'travel" as their interest, you find there are 34000 of them.
Anyway, Kim, if you get to check our pictures, welcome.

I guess I want to write about going to see There Will be Blood. I told someone that I was always moved by the scene often seen in clips and promos where Daniel Day Lewis cries out "I have abandonned my son". This person said to me "well there a lot more than that". And there is. First there are sweeping epic scenes like the steam train arriving at the end of the line in this tiny place where nothing grows, or the oil derrick, or the fire, or the explosion that puts it out. And then larger than life acting on the sort of scale we don't see much of these days. Men struggling and crying and losing their moral compasses in order to make their marks. There are few women in the film and I was glad I saw it alone, unworried by thoughts of whether my wife was enjoying it, which she might not have. Indeed I was almost alone in the theatre. There was one other man there as we had come to one of the last public showings before the DVD release on a Sunday morning at the new AMC theatre downtown, where all the projection is digital. I could not tell any difference except that it looked the same as a completely clean print. The photography was at times magical, the score inspired, a mixture of this guy from Radiohead and Brahms and the acting was universally excellent and in Daniel Day Lewis extraordinary, unlike Wells in Citizen Kane (to which the film has rightly been compared), he created a character that was at once repulsive and comprehensible, so that I was horrified and yet anguished by his pain. I cried unrestrainable tears about five times. I laughed some and I was swept away a lot. In short, a perfect film in my book.

At last I've finnished downloading all the photographs which my brother put on the lap top. This has been a great worry as no one wanted them lost after going to so much trouble to keep them all in one place. They did not download easilly. I had to restart three times and basically they took all yesterday evenning and all night. I got up at three and again at six to check on them.