It was my 45th birthday yesterday and I certainly felt a lot of love from family & friends. 🙂  Life is never smooth but I definitely feel that I’ve had a great one so far and the future is really bright.  I have the best partner one could ask for with Maggie, an amazing son, family & friends.  Despite being grumpy all the time, I’m a very happy man and want to give my thanks to everyone that’s been in my life!

Last night Brandon stayed home and didn’t go out trick or treating because he feels he’s too old for it. 🙁  Halloween was always one of my favorite times to spend with him, making a costume, doing pumpkins and walking around the neighborhood…  I guess at least I still have the memories of years before.

I’m so not ready for my boy to be all grown up, wish time could slow down!

Well this was certainly a very busy long weekend.  We listed our property in Belleville for sale (haven’t used it much frankly) but since it wasn’t getting any traction we decided to rent it out a few weeks ago.  Well we’ve selected a tenant and needed to clear the house out of our stuff so Saturday Brandon and I went over to move a car load of the fragile stuff in my Lexus RX, then in the afternoon we went to chase Comet A3 and drove up north but it was cloudy unfortunately.  That’s alright it’ll be around for the rest of the month and with night vision, we can see it after it becomes too dark for us to see with our eyes.

Sunday I rented a 15′ U-Haul truck and packed up the rest of the house to lug back to our home.  I was initially worried it would be small but we were able to pack up everything into the truck and to tie things down I brought 10 strands of 10′ paracord which worked really well!  The drive back was an experience, the truck is super floaty and drove poorly even though it’s pretty new but I guess it’s a work truck not a luxury vehicle after all.

A funny note, the U-Haul truck was equipped with manual crank windows and on the way home I asked Brandon to open his window a bit, he didn’t really know how to operate the crank, I could see him push it down and he made an audible “OH!” after he figured it out lol.  I guess kids these days are all use to power windows and most probably haven’t seen manual cranks.

It took us about 2 hours to pack up the house which was pretty good and only an hour to unpack, I dropped the truck off then relaxed the rest of the day.

Today we moved some of the furniture out of our garage and into our house (replacing the TV & sofa in the basement) and will slowly clean up the rest of the house as the days pass.  My back hurts, moving heavy items is definitely not good for me but it was necessary and I’ll be meeting my new tenants next Saturday to give them the keys.  The cottage was nice but with a pool in our current house, we rarely feel the need to go away.

Brandon turned 14 years old on Saturday and my god where does the time go…  It feels like a split second, first he’s a baby and now he’s growing into a man.  Now that he’s older we have smaller parties and with a pool, that means it’s a default pool party so he had some friends over.

Ahh Brandon he’s always the happiest kid and I’m so lucky to have him as my son.  Thanks for being a great person Brandon, you have no idea how much joy you give mom and dad. 🙂

On Friday I took Brandon for a walk on a trail on lake Ontario and we could see Americans celebrating the July 4th (on the 5th) holiday with fireworks!

The video was shot on my cell phone through my BNVD 1431s and it was very cool to see, we would have stayed longer to watch but the mosquitoes were out in force so that cut our walk short.