http://www.rock1053.ca

Wayne dropped me a line and sent me some pics of his bikes which got me thinking about mine. So after some digging, I came across this musical slide show of some of the places I’ve been fortunate enough to check out on ‘Elvis’.

Click Here

I was so traumatized the other day concerning the loss of my ‘Renegade D’ model rocket that I failed to unload all gear out of the back of my ride, which included Dr. Jake’s dog leash.

Imagine my chagrin when I couldn’t find said dog leash in the house and I didn’t think to look in the ride and I knew I couldn’t renege on Dr. Jake, especially after getting him all riled up.

Fast forward to the walk itself when I was approached by a fellow dog lover asking ‘where oh where did I find such a colorful dog leash?’

It would turn out that I had pulled a MacGyver and used the Lawdy Mama’s skipping rope for a makeshift leash. To quote my father, ‘It’s all about using the right tool for the job, my boy’.

If you’re going to delegate half of your vacation days towards the first two weeks of the year, you had better come away with some peace of mind or in this case, a belly bigger than it was before the start of a new decade and more importantly, a thought bordering on lunacy or genius as the two go hand in hand. So aside from spiders the size of a small muskrat, a run in with the policia and a healthy intake of cheap beer, a couple of weeks in a land not built for the hairy or girthy has allowed me an opportunity to sever ties with a piece of machinery that in retrospect I should have never hung onto for this long in the first place – the cellular telephone.

I’ve missed my dog, I’ve missed my work and I even missed the bite of old man winter but I have not missed the ringing, vibrating or texting of the cell phone. I won’t miss the standard 25 minute search and rescue operation as friends, family and even the occasional stranger track down this important gadget that apparently makes one’s life easier. I won’t miss having dinner interrupted while the company you invited over feels obliged to ignore you because their attention to detail revolves around text conversations. I won’t miss abbreviated words like ‘ttfn’ or ‘bff’. Like you, I attended school when words still required vowels and if you don’t believe me, just ask Pat Sajak, he makes a great living talking about words.

Now I can remember Dad using a monkey wrench as a hammer muttering something about using ‘the right tool for the job’ and there was loads of wisdom in that nugget of a life lesson. A radio should be used for music, a camera for snapping photos, a watch for gauging the time, a computer for typing and a phone should be used for talking, not all of the above. If today’s cell phones were people, they’d all suffer from multiple personality disorder or whatever the current term the kids are using which could explain why most owners of these high falutin’ gizmos almost always suffer from some sort of attention deficit disorder.

The technology train will keep on rolling down the tracks of invention and I don’t plan on renewing my transit pass. And while I have enough restraint to not trade the DVD player for the betamax machine, I am reverting to an old form of communication, the land line. I may even delve further back and find me a rotary version, complete with a bell for a ringer and an actual handset that reaches to both the mouth and the ear. I could go even one step further and start sending letters out in the mail but we’ll tackle that next decade.

Okay, what’s late for me is probably the bed time for most 8 year olds but regardless, I have no regrets on missing out on some sleep after the sold out gig at the Esplanade last night, featuring an institution of blues; Colin James.

I have to admit that despite using half of my vacation days in the first two weeks of 2010, you might as well use them during the coldest month of the year.

And I can say through ungritted teeth that I’ve been chomping at the bit to get back in the saddle of the Rock 105.3 World Headquarters.

Over the course of this week and next, I thought I’d share some of my journal entries that I accumulated while on holidays, something that I started to do years ago. As the mind fails, the pen will always be there to remind me.

The following picture is how I spent my first 36 hours;