We’re so screwed

The UN came out and said global CO2 emissions need to peak in 2025 and then go to net zero by 2050.

“I think the report tells us that we’ve reached the now-or-never point of limiting warming to 1.5C,” said IPCC lead author Heleen De Coninck, who’s Professor of Socio-Technical Innovation and Climate Change at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Speaking to BBC News she said: “We have to peak our greenhouse gas emissions before 2025 and after that, reduce them very rapidly.

“And we will have to do negative emissions or carbon dioxide removal in the second half of the century, shortly after 2050, in order to limit warming to 1.5C.”

Source: BBC

There’s absolutely no way we’ll reach those goals, we as a species on this planet is doomed and I worry so much for Brandon and future generations.

Poor kid

On Friday when Brandon came home from school, I broke the news that we bought a house and he burst into tears. 🙁  Sigh I understand it’s really the only world he knows, it’s changing, it can be scary and frankly if I were him I’d be upset about it too.  I try to treat him like an adult so I explained why we’re doing it and how it’s good for our family overall and while he says that he understands I doubt he really does.  The house doesn’t close till June 30th so he’ll finish off the school year at his current school at least.  Also promised to make it as painless as possible and that we could continue to do the activities he does in Toronto right now.

Over the weekend he started to accept it though is still quite sad in the mornings.  I also mentioned to him, now that he knows he’ll be moving to enjoy the time he has with his friends while he can, yes he’ll make new friends but they’ll be different than the ones he has now.

Saturday Maggie and I took a car load of stuff to the cottage in Belleville and while Maggie was organizing some of the dishware, I was outside and spoke to a couple of retired neighbors.  They told me what a great neighborhood it was, that the Moira river is only about 4′ deep and that there’s tons of fish so that’s pretty darn awesome.  We took the Lexus IS 350 AWD, on Thursday I swapped on my summer tires and with the Michelin Pilot Sport AS4s on the car man does it have grip.  On the way home I took some of the backroads back and cornered pretty hard, hard enough that Maggie was complaining I gave her a headache lol.  I can’t wait for the warmer weathers, I’m going to find some fun roads to drive on and I bet the IS will be great.  Will leave the winters on Maggie’s Lexus CT 200h on for a bit longer in case it snows, at least we’ll have one car equipped for that.

Initially we were suppose to celebrate Maggie’s birthday last weekend but Georgia caught a runny nose so we delayed it a week and everyone came over to our house for a change.  Hehe the little kids are so cute, really makes me miss when Brandon was that size, sigh he’s such a big boy.

Frank & Imran were unavailable but that’s ok we still had a good time.  Simone warmed up a bit later and let me tickle her, lol that toddler laugh is the best, Brandon still sometimes laughs like that.

A good weekend overall and it’s back to the grind tomorrow but that’s alright, I enjoy my job. 🙂

Done and done

This morning I went over to the new house for a home inspection and it went really well.  The biggest issue is the fence, it’s leaning in certain areas and the fence door needs to be reset otherwise pretty much everything looks good!  The home inspector showed me all the energy upgrades that the current owner made and man I have a feeling I’d really like these guys, they’ve done everything I dreamed to do except having a whole house battery backup.

Maggie and I are pretty excited about the house but I know Brandon will be devastated. 🙁  We still haven’t told him, I’ll break the news to him tomorrow after he gets back from school.  I bought him a new Gigabyte AORUS 15P gaming laptop today (he needed a new rig anyway) and I’m hoping that it’ll soften the blow.  It’s understandable, he doesn’t want to leave his friends and the familiarity of things here but making the move will put us a few years ahead and Maggie may even retire altogether.

Poor kid he makes friends pretty easily but still he’ll have to start over which does suck very much.

Such a big boy!

Yesterday was Brandon’s “graduation” from his school (K-6) and man he’s such a big boy now.

LOL he always stands upright like a stick but I guess that’s how kids are…  I’m so not ready for him to be all grown up, I have so much fathering to do still.

I guess we’re moving

Last weekend, we looked at like 10-12 houses out in Durham region for ourselves and there were a few that we liked.  We bid on one in the morning, lost that and decided to bid on another in the afternoon and well we won!

This house is located in North East Oshawa so it’s close to some of our other properties, the current owners are environmentalists and I absolutely love what they’ve done with the house.  First there’s a 9.52MW roof top solar installation, in comparison the one on my house is rated at 5.8MW as well as a heat pump heating & cooling system!  They are a lot more efficient than traditional AC or furnaces, I don’t know what type it is yet but i’m going over on Thursday and will find out.

Maggie & Brandon love swimming so we’ll get some good use out of that, the house is double the size of our current home (though that’s not a huge deal, there are only 3 of us) and an important feature for me, it has a double car garage.  I can’t wait to be able to store both my cars in a garage and not have to worry about theft…  The house closes on June 30th so we get a good amount of time, important because we haven’t sold our home yet.  There are still a few things that need to be done and I suspect we’ll list it in about a month’s time.

Sigh moving sucks, Brandon is really upset about it because he’ll lose his friends but this makes too much sense financially for us so we pulled the trigger on it.

Stolen Cars

So last night I watched this CBC piece on stolen cars in Canada, where they end up and I found it rather entertaining.

In the show it showed the Jiji.ng website (a Nigerian site for people to sell used items) so I went there and found this Lexus NX with Ontario plates still on it…

There’s a picture showing the VIN number so I looked it up and yeah it was stolen.  Sigh very aggravating and I don’t understand why manufacturers don’t add security measures to protect cars further, they surely know it’s a problem…

.

Love the birds

A bit of a late post but over the weekend, Brandon and I went to the Canadian Raptor Conservancy to take some photos of the birds and as usual it was great.  It rained on and off and quite hard at times but we were dressed for the weather so it was ok, I also gave Brandon a weather cover for his camera as his lens is not weather sealed.  I used one too just in case. 🙂

James also did something fun and flew the great horned owl over Brandon and he loved it.

Hehe I also made an animated gif from the series of photos and I thought it turned out pretty well.  It’s 100MB in size so it’ll take a while to load but is worth it if you ask me. 😉

Anyway that’s the late weekend update.

 

Spring time weather

Not sure if spring has arrived but today was really nice and according to The Weather Network it got to a high of 15c!  It was fun to drive the Lexus IS with the sunroof open and windows down, mmm with the sun on you it’s really nice. 🙂

Some random photos I took, Slinky is always cute when he’s napping, the birds are out and after dinner we went for a walk in the park.  We had a wet winter so ugh the bugs will be pretty bad but that’s how it goes.

Furniture shopping

Yesterday we went to the Belleville’s JYST store to pic up some furniture, the quality is IKEA’ish so not great but they had a lot of stuff in stock which was the most important factor for us.  Bought two complete bedroom sets, a dining room table, chairs & bench as well as a TV stand.  We didn’t pull the trigger on a sofa yet as we’re debating if we should get a sofa bed so more people can sleep over if necessary but we have some time.  Ugh I hate building stuff and looks like I’ll have a lot to tackle in the near future but that’s ok it’ll be worth it.  Ideally we’d love to get the cottage there ready for say end of April, that’d really be ideal.

For lunch we went to the local Swiss Chalet, Brandon likes it and it’s pretty easy so why not.  On the way back, I detoured around Rice lake to see if the Osprey have returned, they’re not back yet but should be around very soon and I can’t wait!

Today we didn’t do too much other than our usual activities which is fine with me as I love being lazy. 🙂

More incompetence

The Halifax Examiner has been on the Nova Scotia shooting since the beginning and this again goes to show how god damn incompetent the RCMP was that night.  While I can definitely empathize with the commander’s fear of losing an officer, it also bothers me.  When you sign up as a cop, your job is to protect the public, to make sure they get home.  It’s like a firefighter refusing to save civilians because they’re afraid for their own life, if that’s the case get another job.  Oh and the comms guy working from home who drank so much that he didn’t want to go out because others would smell alcohol on his breath…

The worst though was this revelation…

According to a court affidavit from Superintendent Darren Campbell, the photo of the car “was provided to RCMP Critical Incident Command at about 722am.” The RCMP issued a tweet at 8:54am naming the killer and giving his description, but the tweet provided no information about a fake police car. It wasn’t until 10:17am that another tweet was issued containing a photo of the car and the warning that the killer “may be driving what appears to be an RCMP vehicle and may be wearing an RCMP uniform.”

In the nearly three hours between the RCMP being in possession of the photo of the fake car and the photo being tweeted out to the public, four* people were killed by the man driving that fake police car.

Source: Halifax Examiner

This is simply unacceptable and frankly I feel that all officers involved should be fired at a minimum.  Could those 4 people be alive today had the police acted faster?  Who knows but by that time it was already in the news that there was a shooting incident so yeah maybe.  There are some jobs where you cannot have such failures and policing is one of them, yet the Liberals use gun owners as their scape goat, as if any gun laws in place (again the guy acquired his guns illegally) would have done anything to stop this from happening…

This is why I’m so upset at the gun ban, it was done under false pretenses with absolutely no data to justify the confiscation of private property from hundreds of thousands of people.  I don’t need money, I don’t want their money what I want is to keep my stuff because what the Liberals are doing is based on a lie that they continually perpetrate.  Like the issue of gun violence, the Liberal party is full of easy answers that sound good but do nothing and that should not be rewarded.