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Ever stood at the counter at the motor vehicle office, trying to renew your car registration with last year’s pink insurance card? Or try to explain to the pharmacy why you use your middle name as your given name, and not your first name? Welcome to the world of Leapers, or Leaplings – those born on February 29th.

Happy Birthday, by the way, something you only get to do every four years!

I can’t begin to imagine the bureaucratic nighmare of having a birthday on February 29th. It’s a date that isn’t listed on most calendars, unless it’s a leap year. Try cutting through goverment red tape, trying to explain to someone that it’s your birthday, but it’s not really your birthday.

For some reason, the pharmacy has my birthdate off by one day. About once every 6 months, they’ll punch in the presciption, and inform me that the the number on my insurance doesn’t match the one from Alberta Health Care. I’ve tried to correct it, but even Alberta Health has the correct birthday. Somewhere along the line, a keystroke error from somebody, somewhere, has made my file a mess. I eventually just gave up, and accepted the fact I was born twice.

How about using your middle name as a first name. My legal name is Gerald, the same as my dad, but they’ve called me Bruce since the day I was born. Initially, all my legal papers said Gerald, but they’ve kind of morphed to a 50/50 split over the years. My mortgage is Bruce. My license is Gerald. Even Rogers, our parent company, has me as Bruce on their payroll, but Gerald on our cell phone bill. Go figure.

But those are only minor annoyances. And they only happen every now and then. For the 4 million people around the world that have to face this stuff on a regular basis, I feel your pain.

Facebook for example, will send out a message to all your friends on February 28th, telling all your friends that tomorrow is your birthday. Then, on a non-leap year, when the calendar flips to March 1st instead, you get nuthin’. Crickets. None of your friends is informed it’s your birthday. Because February 29th doesn’t exist, until the next leap year.

I admire your patience, Leapers, or Leaplings. I think I would’ve legally changed my birthdate by now. I imagine I’d go through less hoops than you do every day of your life.

Happy Birthday!

Use “Leap” as your 1000 point bonus code until midnght tomorrow!

Captain Kirk and I emceed the Southern Alberta Brain Injury Society’s volunteer brunch this weekend, and I experienced something every politician should see, and then do. Put down the script. Forget about the party line. And just shoot from the hip.

Her name is Alana DeLong, and she’s the MLA for Calgary Bow. She was the guest speaker for this year’s brunch, and headed up to the podium to begin her speech. She talked about the government agency she worked with,  and the funding for Sabis, and a few other items from her script. Nice lady, but just what you’d expect. A very safe, “this is what my party does for you”  type speech.

Then she stopped.

She put down her speech, and said, “this speech goes on for while”, and put it to the side of the podium. Then she started to tell us about her garden, and a special chair that she and her husband kept in the back of the garden. A rusty old chair that used to belong to her dad.

Her eyes welled up with tears, but she soldiered on.

She told us about how her dad had suffered a stroke, and lost the movement on the left side of his body. She talked about how he rigged up this special chair that would allow him to shuffle along and continue to do what he loved. Work the fields. He was a farmer. And if he couldn’t work the the long hours that he used to, he was certainly going to do what he could to help out. It took him a month, but he hand-farmed an acre.

Given that most of the attendees were either brain injury survivors, or their families, it was a story that hit home. A story that came from the heart. A story that she almost never told, because she had a script to read.

I’m so glad she did. Thank you, Alana. I’ll remember that speech for a long time. I think I should probably be calling her the Honourable Alana DeLong shouldn’t I? Or is that only for Premiers? Well, yesterday she was just Alana.

I wish politicians would do that more often. I wish they would always do it. I wish that some of our aldermen, or councillors, could look us in the eye and tell us that they made a mistake on the Peace Bridge. It shouldn’t have been built. It’s too late to stop, but if I could do it over again, I’d vote differently. Except they won’t. That means political suicide – admitting your wrong.

I’ll say this. If you’re wrong, and you tell me you’re wrong, I’ll respect that immensely more than just toeing the party line, and saying what you’re supposed to say. Drop the script. Shoot from the hip. Tell the truth.

Like Alana DeLong.

Use “Alana” as your 1000 point bonus code until midnight tomorrow.

When I was a young kid, I wanted to be a chartered accountant. At least, that’s what my mom suggested. Then, later in life, I thought of opening a coffee shop, but didn’t pursue it. The following year, some company named Starbucks moved into town.

What I really should’ve done, is bought a parking lot.

I thought of this again last night, as I rolled into the Saddledome for the Hitmen game. The sign for parking said $13, and that’s a deal for the lots around the Dome. On Flames nights, I think they’re closer to $15, perhaps more.

Still, think about that for a second. Let’s say you’re in the Dome for 3 hours, give or take, so that works out to around $5 per hour. Just to park your car. They don’t wash it, or clean the windshield, or check the oil. Just let you park on their lot. That’s it. What a sweetheart deal!

Now, if you owned the property. Wow! No labour costs if you wave in the customers yourself, no overhead other than the flags you wave to attact the customers, and a couple of pilons. It’s like a license to print money. Now, granted you have to have some land to put the cars on.

That’s where my dream always falls short. The lack of a few million dollars to buy a parking lot near the Saddledome, or around the downtown area. However, it now costs to park in other areas of the city. I could be a parking speculator! Buy some land in Crossfield, and wait patiently for Calgary and Airdrie to expand north of the city. Until they were all scampering for parking in Crossfield. At my parking lot.

Sigh.

It would’ve been a great idea……50 years ago. And I’ll admit that I’m still a little sore about the coffee thing. Had I looked into franchising a coffee shop 20 years ago, rather than just dismissing dreams ’cause I didn’t have any more cash flow than the money in my pocket. I’ll always wonder what could’ve been.

Shoulda, coulda.

Use “parking” as your 1000 point bonus code, good ’till midnight tomorrow.

My friend Brad is the best dance dad I know. He attends every recital, every competition, and every open viewing night his daughter participates in. Our daughters grew up dancing together, and I’ll bet we’ve spent a thousand hours talking life in the studio parking lot, waiting for our girls to finish up. For some reason, there always seems to be one last run-through, something that requires their 10:00 pickup to stretch until 10:15.  You’d think I’d learn by now just to show up at 10:15, but then I’d miss out on my 15 minute yaks with Brad.

This weekend, I got a chance to up my status to the second best dance dad of all time. My daughter’s applying to the U of C Fine Arts program in the fall, with a major in dance. Their live auditions just happen to fall on the same weekend she’ll be competing up in Edmonton. So, just in case she can’t make it back down to Calgary between dances, she’s putting together a DVD audition.

Yesterday, we went to the empty studio and filmed the raw footage for her audition. It was a special feeling – just me and my baby girl, and a hand held video camera. There really was no set plan on what she was going to do, so we just threw ideas back and forth, and recorded everything. There were a few times I’m pretty sure she was happy the studio was empty. Like the times I’d try to explain camera angles to her, and do a few of my patented imitations of her choreography. If anybody had walked in at that moment, she’d never have been able to show her face around that studio again. Although, I think I can pull off a fairly mean plie.

There was a brief moment where I thought I was about to be fired as cameraman. One of her solos runs about 3 minutes, and involves a lot of bruises, floor burns, and a heavy cardio workout. We filmed one angle, and decided to film it a second time from a different angle. It was perfect! She nailed it.

I forgot to hit “record”.

And that is way I’m still trying to catch up to Brad as best dance dad ever.

Still, it was an afternoon I’ll remember forever.

You can use “dancer” as your 1000 point bonus code until midnight Wednesday!

Almost 6 weeks ago, 39 days to be precise, we lost one of the coolest dogs on the planet. Our shih tzu, Ryder, entered our lives back on the 2009 May long weekend. We were out camping that weekend. Went out to get firewood, and came back with firewood and a puppy.

Over the next 2 years and 8 months, he became a huge part of our lives. Then, out of nowhere, he got sick, very sick, in the second week of January. He had congenital liver disease, and had likely been dying for a long time. We just didn’t notice. Apparently liver issues are like that. Just days before he’d been out racing around the yard, talking to the bunnies through the fence.

We were devastated.

In the days that followed, the family that we adopted Ryder from contacted us to make an offer that truly can only come from extremely loving and caring people. Ryder’s parents had just had their final litter, and she offered to give us one of the puppies. Keep in mind that this is a family we just met while we were loading firewood. They’ve since become good friends. We talked about it, but decided it wasn’t fair to our kids, or to the new puppy, to take on another member of the family so quickly. It would be looking at a Ryder twin, and the memories were just to raw. We gratefully declined.

Fast forward a month or so, and we get another call. All of the puppies had been spoken for, but one of the new owners had to back out. There was one puppy left. A little girl. They wanted to know if we’d reconsider. We talked about it for a long time. Our kids were a big factor. Especially our youngest son. He took Ryder’s loss exceptionally hard. He missed having a dog lick his chain in the morning, or snuggle up to him when they were watching TV. The pitter patter of feet running to the door to say hello when he came home from school. And a million other things.

It was Ryder’s parents last litter. The last chance to have another puppy from the same bloodlines as Ryder.

We said yes.

Normally, I’m a big believer in waiting until the dog’s part of the family before we name it. They have to suit their name.  It took us about 3 or 4 days to name Ryder. This time, however, it only took about 5 minutes. My son suggested “Rylee”, given that she’s Ryder’s baby sister, kind of a tribute to her older brother. It just seemed perfect.

Rylee comes home this afternoon.

Somehow the fact that it’s the “Family Day” long weekend just seems fitting.

In honour of our family’s newest addition, use “rylee” as a 1000 point bonus code. And have a great long weekend!

I wonder how many times I’ve heard those three words in the past couple of months. Just when I think I’ve got my youngest son busted for playing X-Box at midnight on a school night, he tosses out the “no school today, Dad” line.

Starting today, the kids are all off for a five day long weekend, minimum. In Calgary, the Teachers Convention runs tomorrow and Friday, plus the weekend, and Family Day on Monday. Out in the Rockyview school district, they’re off for 10 days!  Oh, to be a kid again.

It seems like my youngest son, who’s 15, just went back to school. He got out for Christmas holidays on about the 18th of December, give or take. Those lasted until January 9th. Then it was back to school for three or four days, and final exams got underway in the highs schools. Now, technically, these aren’t really “days off”, because they should be studying. But he had two exams over a period of almost three weeks. There was a whole lot of “road hockey studying” going on around our neighbourhood.

Just as they get settled in for second semester, BAM, they’re out for a five day long weekend. And, to top it off, spring break is only about a month away.

Now, I guarantee that they’re just as smart as we are, so apparently they’re either getting better education in a shorter period of time, or we actually used to have as many days off when we were kids, and just don’t remember. I know we used to get a huge summer vacation when I was a kid. I recall getting out in mid-June sometimes, and not even thinking about going back until at least the Labour Day weekend was over. Sometimes even later. These days, the kids don’t usually break for summer until the last couple days of June, and it’s not completely unheard of to go back to class in August.

So, I guess if you broke it all down, we probably had as many days off as they did, just at different times of the year. And I really used to love those long summer vacations.

I wonder if it’s too late to become a teacher.

Have a great long weekend with the family!

And use “family” as your 1000 point bonus code!

I was just flipping through our Lite 95.9 Facebook page, when I saw that Mookie had posted the question, “Where were you when you heard the news about Whitney?”. That got me to thinking about all the “where were you” moments in my life. And, strangely enough, they were all sad occasions.

I can tell you exactly what I was doing when Michael Jackson passed away. I was on the air here at Lite 95.9, sorting through all the stories on the internet, trying to seperate fact from fiction. Was he really dead, or was this a hoax? I vividly remember where I was when I first saw the destruction of September 11th, 2001. I know exactly where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his apartment in New York.

Why can’t I remember where I was when I heard that my niece was first getting married? Or when I heard about the Royal Wedding? Or when I first found out that my Dad was retiring after 35 years as a teacher?

I guess, in reality, it’s because TMZ and Fox News didn’t cover my Dad’s retirement with a dozen reporters and half a dozen cameras. The death of celebrities is big business in the entertainment business, as sad as that is to say. The fact of the matter is that people are talking about two things at work today. Adele’s 6 Grammy awards last night, and Whitney’s death on Saturday. Those moments get burned into your brain a little deeper than a phone call from your sister about their daugher getting married.

I will forever remember sitting at the computer, digging through some WHL stats for the Hitmen game that night, when my wife said, “Hey, Whitney Houston died”. It was on the TMZ.com website, which is generally reliable, but we went to a few other sites like 660 News and CNN to confirm it. It was another one of those surreal moments where it just doesn’t seem real. Much like Michael Jackson, or John Lennon.

Maybe it’s because we expect the happy things in life. We don’t know when they’re going to happen, but we anticipate them enough that it’s not a shock when do. The “where were you” moments always catch you by surprise. Always unexpected.

I just hope that we don’t have to experience many more of them.

Use “Whitney” as your 1000 point bonus code. May she rest in eternal peace.

I’m a hopeless romantic. Not in the traditional sense of the word. I really am hopeless at being romantic, at least on Valentines Day. Did anybody watch this week’s episode of “The Middle”, where Frankie and Mike Heck decide that the ultimate Valentine’s Day is a bucket of chicken, a pair of sweatpants, watching TV in seperate room? My laughted out loud while we watched it, because that’s so “us”.

Year ago, we decided Valentine’s  Day was more of a Hallmark holiday than a real one. So, we don’t do a special weekend like some couples. I’ll usually buckle and buy some flowers, but that’s about it. Not that the romantics are wrong. Heh, if that’s your thing, have at it. There’s nothing like a weekend in the Rockies, with the kids at Grandma and Grandpa’s. It’s just not us.

I guess, more specifically, it’s me. How my wife and I ended up together, and staying together for 25 years, is a mystery. She loves parties, loves surprises, love birthdays, Christmas, and every other major holiday. I, on the other hand, am not as much of a social butterly. I really don’t like surprises. I prefer to treat my birthday like any other day, and I shake my head every time she drags out 20 boxes worth of decorations at Christmas time. (Secretly, I love all the decorations, though. Everything except the singing Frosty!)

I think it’s something your born with. I don’t ever recall counting the days for my birthday to arrive, but I do remember the feeling in my stomach both time I walked into a suprise party held for me. My stomach churned, I turned bright red, and tried to do my best not to throw up. Really, I dislike attention that much. How strange is that for a guy that works on the radio? I know. I’ve never figured it out either.

For all the other women that have to endure husbands and boyfriends like me, I apologize. We love you, we really do. We’re just not good at showing it in a grandeur fashion.

I’ll try harder this year. If nothing else, I’ll try to buy her flower earlier than I normally do. There’s not much left to pick through come noon on Valentines Day. Fortunately, my wife likes carnations more than roses.

I’m just not sure a bucket of chicken is a good pairing with carnations.

Use “romantic” as your 1000 point bonus code before midnight on Sunday. And have a great weekend!

When we first moved to Calgary, and were in the process of buying our new home, I remember asking our realtor if we’d ever lose that beautiful view of the bluff to the west of us. He assured us that nobody could build on those lots, and we’d always be able to sit on our front porch and admire it. Just a big empty bluff with big honkin’ boulders on top. It was breathtaking.

That big empty bluff is now called the community of Panorama.

The view’s still there, but it now shares it’s space on the hill with a few hundred houses, and several thousand people. Such are the growing pains of living in the fastest growing city in Canada.

Statscan released their 2011 census figures today. Calgary has grown by over 100,000 in the past five years, and now sits at about 1.1 million people, and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, it’s not just Calgary. Places like Airdrie, Chestermere and Okotoks all cracked the top 10 of the fastest growing communities in our country. Apparently, all those stories we heard about people leaving Alberta during the recession weren’t all that accurate.

So is all this rapid growth a good thing?

Generally, it breaks down this way. If you were born and raised in Calgary, you’d prefer it slowed down a bit. You remember the days when it didn’t take almost an hour to get from one end to the other. When the Deerfoot wasn’t stuffed with 4 lanes of traffic that doesn’t move during rush hour. When Calgary was more of a big community than a small city. For those that just moved here, and have never known different, it’s all good. We have all the advantages of  Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, and you don’t have to take our a 40 year mortgage to buy a house.

For people like us, who brought the family here 16 years ago, it’s kind of a mixed blessing. I’m proud that Calgarians  no longer have to put up with the image of being all of the big cities kid brother. Major stores are knocking on our door to put their stores in our malls. Honestly, when I say I live in Calgary, I say it with pride. I really do think it’s the best city in Canada. Maybe the best in the world.

On the flip side, I really do miss my empty bluff.

Use “bluff” as your bonus code. Only 1000 points this time. We’re on a budget.

It’s one of those moments you wait a lifetime for.

I was on the way to drop my son off at his high school around noon today, heading WB up the hill on 16th ave, after coming off the Deerfoot. Home of the most prolific radar trap in the city of Calgary. Anybody that’s lived here for more than a couple of months has likely seen where Calgary Police Services sets up shop, right beside the Midfield mobile home park on the north side of 16th ave.

Every time I drive the kids to school, and exit off the Deerfoot onto 16th ave, I make a point of keeping it to no more than about 65 kph. Maybe they’re up there, maybe they’re not, but it’s not worth taking a chance. I’ll get a honk every now and then from the guy behind me, who’d prefer to keep up the same 100 kph he was using on the Deerfoot. Have at ‘er fella.  Secretly, I hope that the police are at work that day.

It never happens.

Until today.

The black truck on my tail blew past me and ripped up the hill at about 90 or 100 kph. I got to the crest of the hill just in time to see the officer jump out onto the street and signal the truck over to the side of the road.  Finally! After more than 15 years of trudging up the hill at 60 or 65, it finally paid off!

The satisfaction didn’t last long. As I drove by the truck, I noticed the lady at the wheel. She was now a couple hundred dollars poorer, and a few demerits to go with it. That’s a lot of money. Probably more than a day’s pay.

It really is a weak location for a speed trap. Once you get to the top of the hill, you run into a whole whack of traffic lights on 16th ave. You’ll be  lucky if you get past 50 kph  again until you hit 14th St, on the other side of town. Unless the people that live in the mobile home park are complaining, the only logicial explanation for a speed trap there so often is that it’s a fishin’ hole for the police.

So, while I’m glad that it wasn’t me, and it was fun to finally see somebody get nabbed, I’d prefer they set up somewhere that really made a difference.

Use “gotcha” as your 2000 bonus code before midnight tomorrow!