The phone call

I was in Vancouver for the last little while.  I went to have dinner with my mom, and on the way back, I noticed that I had missed a call...with a 902 area code (the area code for Halifax).  There was a voicemail which confirmed my suspicion...it was my dad.  This was the first I had heard from my father in almost 2 years.  It was hard to tell on the message, but I'm pretty sure he had a couple beers down range when he called.  The message went something like this,

"Hey kid, It's Rick...your dad.  I'm calling to say hi and that I'd like to hear your voice.  I have some good news and some not so good news.  Please give me a call back at this number...it's...hold on a f#cking second, it's around here somewhere...well you probably see it on your phone...f#ck...here it is....902-xxx-xxxx.  So give me a call; love you kiddo" *click*

Now my mom, being the insidiously curious type, insists that I tell her what he said in the message.  So I do and then I start the mental process of steeling myself for calling my dad back.  As I previously mentioned in another post, one of my 101 goals was to tell my dad why I don't talk to him anymore.  I called him back.  He was happy to hear from me and very apologetic about the lack of communication over the last couple years.  He was very emotional and when he started to redirect some of the blame, I stayed strong and shut that down, making sure he understood that there was nobody to blame but himself.  Then I said that if he wants a relationship that he MUST phone at least once a month and he MUST be sober for those calls and if he can't commit to that, then I will no longer entertain a relationship with him.  He agreed...then he told me the bad news.  My uncle is on his deathbed with only a couple months to live.  That's horrible news since I really liked my uncle.  He was always good to me, as was his wife and my cousin.  So already in a state of shock and emotional upheaval from learning that, my dad tells me that he's been diagnosed with cancer in his left eye, and it's at the back of the eye...now I really feel like shit.  Luckily it's treatable, but he'll lose the vision in that eye, if not the whole eye altogether.  He starts a 5 day radiation treatment on Monday...my fingers are crossed that he makes it out ok.

After he tells me all that, then he goes into more promises about coming out to visit, etc. etc....rhetoric that he's been spewing for the last 30 years that just never sees fruition and that took me from emotionally distraught right back to pissed off again.  Cancer or no, I let him have it with both barrels.  I told him that I want to NEVER hear another empty promise from him again.  He can say he's coming out when he has a ticket in hand and NO SOONER!  We ended the conversation there with him promising to call on Tuesday after a consult with the Oncologist...and to my surprise, he actually did call.  Maybe my relationship with my dad isn't so bleak after all.  Only time will tell, but I think I may give him one...last...chance.

The next blog post will be funny, I swear!

You want what now?

So my sister is with my parents vacationing in Hawaii.  Before she left, her dad (we have different fathers, but the same mom) asked her to get him some cheap, duty free cigarette's.  Seeing as how he's kind of a deadbeat who let's his relationship with my sister deteriorate and only calls her when he needs/wants something, she refused.  This is where the story should have ended...but it's not.  He then has the pretentiousness to ask her again AND to ask her to ask our mother to get him cheap smokes too.  She sends back a quick message saying, "As I said earlier I will not support your smoking habit!  I'm pretty sure I speak for my mom as well!"  Well the story really, really needed to end there...but wait, there's more!  He wrote back...well, I'm just going to copy and paste it:

CB,

Dr.'s orders..."do not try & quit smoking when you are under stress as you will not be successful and it adds to your stress." Ask ANY Dr.

How about dropping the self-righteous crap for once and doing me a favour? BTW your Mom was also a smoker when I met her. The one time I quit was when you were born!

Thanks!!

Dad

 

 

Well just based on this message alone I've decided to unfriend him on facebook and to no longer have contact with him in any regard...my sister should probably do the same.  I just cannot even fathom why he would send a message like this.  Someone please comment and explain it to me!

Vancouver

I'm in Vancouver right now, staying at my parents place while they're in Hawaii and I wanted to share some rules I've discovered while I'm here.

1.  Regardless of outside temperature, if there's any sun out, my parents place is overly warm.
2.  There's no road that isn't under some form of construction.
3.  Cyclists here aren't nearly as pretentious as cyclists in Victoria.
4.  Everybody in Victoria drives slow...everyone who's been pissed off about it and wants to drive super fast now lives in Vancouver.
5.  If there is a crazy person out there, they will be immediately drawn to, and talk to, my mom.
6.  The International Village Theatre is one of the most comfortable I've ever been in.
7.  The International Village Theatre mostly shows movies I don't want to see, but it also shows all the movies I do want to see that a Silvercity won't show.
8.  There's no rhyme or reason to what's being played on Jack FM.
9.  X-Box 360 Kinect voice control is fun, but a little creepy.
10.  Always be polite to your X-Box 360...you never know when it's going to gain sentience.
11.  Even though Metrotown (with over 500 stores) is only 3 blocks away, the only times I've needed things, they're for items that Metrotown doesn't have.
12.  Metropolis comics (across from Metrotown) sucks.  They're all about the money and it shows.  Stores like that piss me off.
13.  At the movie theatre, if you stand 30ft back from the concession counter to decide what you're going to get, someone will still ask you if you "need help with a combo".
14.  There are regular people who ride the bus/skytrain...then there are "bus people".  You have to learn how to spot them and how to avoid them.
15.  There are parts of this city where my farts will improve the odour.
16.  Regardless of time of day or night, Kingsway is a loud road.
17.  Regardless of #16, I can sleep like the dead.
18.  My farts do not improve anything at my parents place.
19.  When I'm in my car with the windows down on a nice day, I like my music loud...my mom likes my music to be off.
20.  Metrotown is a crowded mess and should be avoided if at all possible.

Update:  I had a visit recently from my step-sister.  It was a great visit and now only things East of Montreal are dead to me.

Goals

A little under a year ago, I signed up with the Day Zero Project.  For those of you who don't know what that is (and I'm sure that's probably going to be all of you) it's a site where you list 101 goals to do in 1001 days.  I'm currently 32% complete, and have 682 days left.  The biggest challenge for me so far was thinking up 101 things to do...without any repeats.  I know you're saying to yourself, "That's easy...I can do that no problem!", well it gets tougher to think of things around the 70 or 80 mark.  These goals don't have to be lofty either.  Some of my easier goals are to donate blood, or go horseback riding.  I don't think I've ever been horseback riding in my life.  I think my son has been on more horses than I have.  I have donated blood though.  Some of the more difficult to achieve goals I have are: dont' complain about anything for a week, go skydiving, don't swear for a week, go to a movie alone, get a SCUBA diving certificate, fly a plane.  Think not swearing for a week is easy?  When was the last time you went a week without cursing?  Going to see a movie alone is a really tough one for me too.  I did it when I was in high school once...and never have since.  In fact, I've missed out on a lot of movies because everyone will have seen them and I haven't and couldn't go alone.  I'm just glad that when the latest Star Trek movie came out, I had good enough friends that waited a week while I was at sea before seeing it so I wouldn't have to go alone.  2 of my goals are to dye my hair and shave my head...these might go hand in hand.
I think the hardest goal on my list is telling my dad why I don't talk to him anymore.  I'm pretty sure that's going to be done in 681 days, unless he actually phones me...but after 1 year, 8 months, 19 days, 10 hours, and 5 minutes, I'm not holding my breath waiting for that call.  I really should prepare for that call though, but how do you tell someone, especially your father, that unless he makes radical changes (which he's not likely to make) that you want nothing more to do with him?  Do you emphasize his alcoholism and say you don't want your son influenced by it?  Or do you mention his absence from your son's life and yours for the past 3 years?  At any rate, I'll be skydiving out of a plane I flew up myself and then landing in water to scuba dive before that happens.
This website has really taught me the importance of having small, easily accomplished goals and how they fit into a larger goal.  The large goal is to do 101 things in 1001 days...that's a big goal, but when I look at it, I see 1 or 2 things I can do this coming weekend (like flying a kite).

On a different note, today is the last day to vote for my mom, Christine, here.  I've run a daily facebook campaign about this.  She's the only one from BC to be nominated.  Win or lose, I'm pretty proud of what she's accomplished with a few words done up in rhyme.  I really hope she wins though, it's the best one there.

For those of you who want to see my full list, you can check it out here.

Process This

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had seen a few episodes of Hell's Kitchen.  Well lately I've been taken to watching it's younger and kinder sibling, Kitchen Nightmares.  For those who are not familiar with the premise, Chef Gordon Ramsay goes to restaurants that are struggling and on the verge of collapse, finds out what's wrong, and fixes the place up.  After watching 2 seasons of it, I started noticing a few common threads in every episode: every one of these restaurants has bad food and every one of these restaurants use processed and/or frozen food.  Sometimes the restaurants get fresh food in and then freeze it.  That's when I thought to myself, "Geez...I think I might be eating too much processed foods, and maybe the portions I use are too large.  Maybe I should just start eating fresh foods and cutting back on the portions."
Committed to this idea, I went to the bookstore and bought a couple healthy eating cookbooks.  This was a stroke of genius.  I now have a few hundred recipes that have all kinds of foods I've never tried.  I even made an attempt at baking bread.  It turned out a little denser than I was hoping for, but it was delicious.  Not being overly adventurous, I've just been sticking to simple things that I was familiar with, until last night.  JR's mom and her fiancé were in town visiting and I thought that this would be a good idea to try one of the more complex dishes.  It was a stuffed chicken breast wrapped in prosciutto with a side of mashed potato and steamed carrot medallions.  I prepared it perfectly, using only fresh ingredients (even the herbs had to be fresh, not dried).  It was probably one of the tastiest things I've cooked...ever.  Everyone at the table was impressed as well.  I used to have more of a passion for cooking.  Working with these fresh ingredients and tasting things that I've never tasted before has been so rewarding that it has reignited my love of cooking.

The only challenge with eating like this is that I have to go to the grocery store every couple of days for fresh ingredients, so some minor planning is a must.  But let the results speak for themselves.  Look at the salad in this picture.

I made that for lunch...it took 5 minutes to prepare and was very delicious.  I've fully hopped on the fresh food bandwagon...anybody want to join me?

Bits and Bobs

Here are a handful of things I've learned:

Watching an episode of Hoarders is an excellent way to motivate yourself to clean up you house and throw away most of the crap you don't need.

Cooking isn't hard if you have fresh ingredients, as long as you don't overcook them or make strange combinations.  (Chocolate sauce and fish rarely go together)

Everyone should have at least one uncle named Bob.  I'm lucky enough to have 2.

Gentleman, regardless of how good your body looks, Speedo's are illegal.

Don't put your name on s#it work.

I don't care how old you are, how much money you make, or how disgusted you pretend to be, when silence is broken with a fart, it's always funny.

Never spend a Christmas alone...it sucks.

If you think "roughing it" means "without room service" then camping is not for you and you shouldn't even try.

Games are fun, never stop playing them...except Monopoly...that game can go straight to hell.

Always listen to the advice of your mom.

Hindsight is usually better than 20/20...it's more like 60/20.

Clothes have an expiry date...if you haven't worn it in over a year, it's expired.

Never find out what goes into a hot dog; it'll only ruin it for you.

When you travel, always try some local cuisine.

Going to a movie alone is not as enjoyable as you might think.

Doing your own maintenance and minor repairs to your car can save you money and be rewarding at the same time.

Don't be the creepy guy.

Did I mention to always listen to the advice of your mom?

Reality Schadenfreude and other Television

A couple weeks ago, I was angry at something, or maybe I was sad at something...I can't remember; what I do remember is thinking "I want to watch someone yell at someone", so I watched a show where I could be guaranteed to see that...Hell's Kitchen.  Now the show itself is just ok, but I realized something; Most reality television is designed around fullfilling our deep and dark desire for schadenfreude.  For those of you who don't know, schadenfreude [shahd-n-froi-duh] is a word of German origin and it means "satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune".  We've all felt it, and reality tv is designed for it.  Think about one of the first reality shows in the late 80's/early 90's, COPS, and you'll see that it feels very satisfying to watch someone get dragged away, shirtless of course.  Criminals can never seem to find a shirt.  Now while delving into various pages on the internet while writing this blog, I came to realize that the reality TV that I'm talking about here, is really only a thin portion of reality TV as a whole.  Most of our schadenfreude is relegated to competiton/elimination type shows like Survivor, Big Brother, The Bachelorette or Hell's Kitchen.  There's a wider range of shows that fall under reality TV that are quality shows.  Here's a few that I've enjoyed: Holmes on Homes, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Mythbusters (yeah, that's reality TV), Crocodile Hunter, Monster Garage, and 30 Days, just to name a few.  Notice how none of those shows feed into our sense of Schadenfreude, and most of them aren't making new episodes anymore.
Based on all this, I'm ready to make the following decree's; any reality show where contestants are voted off by the other contestants is now dead to me.  Any reality show that let's America decide who wins is also dead to me.  Any reality show that is centered around finding love is dead to me twice.  I have a hard enough time finding a girlfriend, I don't need to watch some other bachelor have his pick of 10 women fawning all over him...that guy can go straight to hell.  Any reality show on the Discovery Channel gets my automatic approval.  Thanks to the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, I know everything there is to know about Sharks and Hitler.  Any reality show that helps people in a jam (Holmes on Homes, Hoarders, etc.) gets my automatic approval....that should just about do it for my decree's today...I may add more later.
Now you may be wondering, "Jon, if you don't like reality TV that much, what TV do you like?"  That's an excellent question reader who I assumed asked that question.  I watch quite a bit of TV over the run of a year.  Well thanks to the advent of the internet, I can watch TV around my schedule.  Here's a list of the shows (in no particular order) I'm watching and who else should be watching it.  These are all proven shows in their second season or later.  No new shows from this past year are part of the list.
True Blood - For those who like Vampires and hate Twilight.
Leverage - For those who enjoy a heist show...think Ocean's 11 on TV.
Entourage - For those who enjoy good acting and celebrity cameo's.
Warehouse 13 - For those who enjoy geeky treasure hunting with a splash of comedy.
Eureka - For science minded folks who love to see inventions go awry.
White Collar - For those who wanted to see more of Catch Me If You Can.
Rookie Blue - For those who liked Grey's Anatomy and wished it was about Toronto Cops.
Burn Notice - For those who like spy action
Real Time with Bill Maher - For those who like political comedy and active debate
Doctor Who - For those who like time travelling adventures
Torchwood - For those who like X-files and wish it were British and edgier.
Secret Diaries of a Call Girl - For those who enjoy good acting and writing on a touchy subject.
Venture Brothers - For those who like the animated and ridiculous.
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia - For those who like the live action and ridiculous.
Merlin - For those who like Arthurian legend, but don't mind it getting screwed with a little.
Californication - For those who love sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Justified - For Timothy Olyphant fans.
Ricky Gervais Show - For those who love to laugh at someone else's idiocy.
Archer - For everyone who likes animated antics of a disfunctional spy agency.
Chuck - For those who like nerdy spy action.
Castle - For those who enjoy their mystery with a splash of comedy and a whole lot of Nathan Fillion
Big Ban Theory - For those of us that are smarty pants or approaching genius intellect.
The Amazing Race (Reality) - For those who like travel shows combined with racing.
Fringe - For those who know what psuedo-science is.
Community - For those who like experimentation in TV
The Office - For reality fans who like their reality scripted
How I Met Your Mother - For those who want to watch a blog on TV
Supernatural - For those who are fans of horror movies
House - For those who like Sherlock Holmes but in a hospital.
Glee - For those who like musicals they can sing along with.  Remember, it's not just for gays anymore.
Game of Thrones - For those who like low fantasy and politics.  With 13 emmy nominations, you need to watch this.
Republic of Doyle - For those who like Newfie's and mystery
Mythbusters - For those who like it when things go boom.


That's all I'm going to list for now.  Yes there are other shows I watch, and if you want a recommendation, you'll have to send me an e-mail.  Otherwise, Happy Viewing!