Rubber Side Down

Hangin on a Frosty Nose Hill

Skipped out on chores around the house this afternoon to spend some quality dog and bike time here in town. Nose hill was engulfed in a thick ice fog that coated the grass and the trees with a layer of prickly hoar frost.

Joy of the K9 Variety

Pure unadulterated joy.
Not the kind that can come from a purchase or a good investment.
The kind that can only come from watching something do what it was meant to do.
In this case, a 10-year old border collie mutt running his ass off.

From good weeks, bad weeks will follow.
This was one of those bad weeks.
No amount of alcohol could shake the anxiety and it definetly couldn't turn the sadness into happiness.
Its for times like these we're happy we rescued a dog.
Its times like these we're really happy we rescued two dogs.

Blue Bird Day

Saturday morning I woke up and was supposed to drag myself off to a cyclocross race, but my head wasn't into it due to employment uncertaintly, so I decided on something low-stress instead. There's nothing like a hike in the mountains with the wife and the mutts to remind me what's worth stressing over and what's not.
Our plan was to head up to the Cascade Amphitheatre, but we screwed up and took the wrong trail. It was all good in the end, as you really can't go wrong in the rockies, unless of course you stumble across a mama grizzly and her cubs.
As usual, Rawley and Yoho were in heaven, every five minutes they'd bolt into the trees and the sound of a very pissed off squirrel would follow. Rawley ran himself so hard that he puked and Yoho learned that she's not as agile as Rawley and that its a good idea not to follow him off cliffs (think pancake).

Here's a couple of fotos:

Finally, The Inconvenient Truth Screening

Last night the company finally screened An Inconvenient Truth down at the Plaza theatre in Kensington. I think most people in the company walked away with a greater awareness of why its so important to come up with ways to reduce our CO2 emmissions. Unfortunately, the screening pretty much came at the worse time. Four hours earlier, the CEO broke some bad news as to the fate of the company, which left most of us fairly stunned and really in no mood to thoroughly discuss the movie afterward (lets just say we were more inclined to plant ourselves in front to the beer taps.)

Here are some observations/opinions about the movie.

1) Al Gore is a great speaker, I mean where the hell was that Al Gore during the 2000 election?!

2) Gore brought too much of his own personal politics into the video. He didn't need to mention 9/11 and the photo of him, all decked out in a hospital suit, next to his son's hospital bed, felt very staged to me to the point where I felt like I was watching a campaign commercial (for Al Gore, not climate change).

3) While the movie probably does a good job in getting the message out to the lay masses, it will not change the minds of hardcore skeptics. He made no mention of some the evidence that climate change skeptics use. (i.e. non-anthropogenic CO2 sources are at least an order of magnitude higher than anthropogenic sources so we couldn't have an effect, which can be rebutted through 13C and 14C isopotic measurements, or that changes in the solar cycle may be having an effect, which may have some merit, but so far no link has been proven, at least from what I've researched/read)

4) Gore lied when he said there are no published peer-reviewed articles questioning the existence of anthropogenic caused climate change. This paper is currently sitting on my desk at work right now:

de Freitas, C.R., 2002: Are observed changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really dangerous? Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, 50 (2), 297-327.

While this guy may not be right, his paper questions whether human-caused climate change exists and it appeared in a peer-reviewed journal (yes, its a journal for Petroleum Geologists, but we're scientists too). I'm sure there are many more out there.

5) The smoking-cancer analogy in the movie was kinda weak, I think he should've focussed on something more relevant, like CFC's and the ozone layer.

After the flick, our environmental group detailed a pilot project they plan on starting to curb our CO2 emmissions, needless to say, its a different idea than what is being talked about in industry right now.

WTF

I'm sorry, I don't normally blog about politics. I think that gives politicians more time on the internet than they actually deserve. More importantly, I think political parties and politicians exist only to serve themselves and are for the most part, as relevant to me as what the stock market does on an hourly basis (meaning, absolutely irrelevant). That being said, this blows me away. I mean seriously, people believe Bob Rae is the best choice for the Liberals to beat the Conservatives? This means either, Stephen Harper is really bad or Canadians are really stupid. In my experience, things are not normally black and white, but some shade of gray. This means of course, Stephen Harper is  kinda bad and Canadians are kinda dumb.

Habla Espanol? y Ian Wright

I haven't had much time for this lately, between getting stranded in the open ocean due to a fuel line disconnect, work and spanish classes, most of my time has been taken.

I met Ian Wright today. I strolled down to MEC for a new set of lights (almost got flattened on my commute in, I suspect due to the fact that the driver couldn't see me, or at least thats what I choose to believe) and there Ian Wright was, sitting at a table signing prints of water colours he had done. Real cool guy, we chatted about my new light and I imparted wisdom about Vegas, his next trip. Basically I told him to always  double down on eleven, the best places to gamble are the casinos where there's cigarette burns in the felt and to never hit on 17 when the guy next to you has an ace (muy importanto).

Maria and I spent Thanksgiving (and her 30th b-day) on Quadra Island. We ate too much, drank too much and swear we saw El Chupacabra.

Its been snowing in Calgary the past two days. The commute in is still suprisingly busy, I think high parking costs are forcing more and more people to think about other ways to get to work which means riding in the winter. I'm in the early winter dressing phase, where I way over dress every time before I ride in, only to figure out halfway through the ride, that I really didn't need the base layer. By December, I'll have it figured out again, just in time for the real winter.

Oh those crazy Chinese

The other day, while I was riding around doing "bicycle acrobatics", I started to think that maybe I could make some money off of it. Turns out this lady from China beat me to it.

I guess if I'm going to have to compete with the likes of her, I better expand my trick repetoire beyond riding with no hands.