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!
Maggie’s winter tires were 5 or 6 years old, too old to take into another winter and with her summers 4 years old too we decided to replace both sets with Michelin’s CrossClimate 2 all weather tires. Unlike all season, these are new and designed to be used in wintery weather too.
I’m sure that means it doesn’t perform well in any one aspect of driving but let’s be frank, Maggie has a Lexus CT200h it’s not like she’s going to be doing anything spirited with that car. When it’s very snowy out, we either just stay at home or drive my car so I think we should be alright but we’ll see how things are this winter and if she doesn’t feel safe with them then I’ll buy a dedicated set of winters later.
The tires to my old Lexus NX won’t fit on the RX and I have a set of tires coming for my car this week. 🙂 Expensive but necessary for Canadian winters.
About the only thing the governing federal Liberals care about is optics, they don’t actually care if their policies do anything. Well I’m glad cops are pushing back against Trudeau’s ridiculous claims that banning legal gun owners from purchasing handguns is keeping Canadians safer.
I don’t know why that bit about ghost guns is in this piece, this is a US problem due to their high availability of parts but it’s clear that legal guns are not the problem. The system is designed to against diversion of legal guns too, if I divert some of my legal handguns to the black market when someone is caught the gun will still be show to be registered to me.
The unofficial motto of the Liberal party of Canada must be look good instead of doing good. The next election can’t come soon enough and I can’t wait for that sanctimonious ass Trudeau to get tossed. His policies have meant Canadians have had a lost decade of progress in so many metrics.
On Friday Brandon and I drove up to Beaverton Ontario to stand on their beach to try and spot Comet A3, we were successful!
It was super faint to the naked eye, barely perceptible but the cameras and our nods allowed us to see it very clearly. Comet A3 won’t be back for another 80k years so it’ll be a bit of a wait for it’s return. 😉 Saturday night we went out for a night walk as a family and while we could see the comet with the aid of our night vision devices, it was pretty hard to see with all the light pollution coming from Toronto.
That makes 3 astronomical events that I shared with Brandon this year and man, it was a good one. Our weekend was really good and I hope you had a great one too.
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.
A geomagnetic storm hit the planet last night (and tonight too, though less severe) so after Brandon’s BJJ I took Maggie out to find the auroras and we were successful!
I was running two cameras but for some reason set them up looking in the same general direction ugh what a newbie mistake. Anyway a quick timelapse that I thought turned out pretty well. 🙂
As I mentioned earlier I don’t have much motivation to post on my blog these days, not sure why but I will try to keep it more up to date (I’ve said that before). My back still hurts and I’m going to physio, there’s one central point just off to the right of my mid back that’s very painful but the physiotherapist, after doing her thing seems to show me where other aches and pains are. It’s not the end of the world but annoying, she was saying it may take 4-6 months to recover! Pretty crazy but then again I’ve never been in an accident so this is uncharted territory for me.
This weekend, Brandon went to the Cub Scout camp to assist and he had a lot of fun! My little niece Georgia went as well and from what I’m told she said it was one of the best experiences in her life which makes me so happy to hear.
With Brandon away on Saturday Maggie went to play badminton while I played Pokemon with my local group here in Oshawa, came home at 1pm then we went up north to chase the auroras. There was a large solar flare and accompanying CME earlier in the week but it ended up being nothing unfortunately. Still I got to show Maggie the stars and they were absolutely beautiful. We went to a new spot which I think I’ll make my default astro photography location moving forward as it’s much quieter than being on highway 60.
The first photo is looking North, top 3rd of the photo just off to the right you can see the Andromeda galaxy and it’s amazing that the light that we’re seeing started its journey 4 billion years ago! When you see stars like this, it really makes you feel insignificant… On the second photo I screwed up and missed focus, not sure how that happened but if you don’t zoom in to pixel peep, the photo still looks pretty good. I believe the galactic core has set and won’t be around again till the spring but it’s still fun and it’s nice to check out how the new location is.
The Lexus RX 350 is great it’s a super comfortable car to drive in, not very exciting but that’s not what I’m looking for right now. As something to soak up the KMs, it’s absolutely perfect. Pretty dirty from the dirt roads I had to drive on (especially Friday when it was wet dropping Brandon off at camp) but I think I pissed someone off because there’s a large scratch on the right side running from the front fender over the two doors and onto the rear fender. Sigh that’s why we can’t have nice things… It’s not too deep and I’ll try some wax to see if I can buff it out.
Overall a good weekend, had a lot of fun but pretty tired so I’m going to bed early tonight. 🙂
Last week I went to my first physio session and during the examination the lady was massaging my back and she must have unlocked something because I’ve had backpain for a week now. What makes it worse is I somehow caught covid19 again! Both Maggie and I are sick, so far Brandon is alright. We’re both getting better but just to be safe I pulled out of going to the London airshow with some of the guys. This makes it two years in a row that covid caused me to miss that, must be a sign.
Ahh well slowly getting better, back still hurts but hopefully will be alright soon.
This morning I dropped Brandon off at his new high school and I can’t help but be a bit sad… I’m not ready for my boy to be all grown up and soon he’ll leave our home for good! Sigh, that’s life and I can’t fight it but while I’m excited, it also sucks because I have so much “dadding” to do with him still.
I was telling Maggie, I totally get why the Lexus RX series of SUVs are among the most popular and compared to my old NX, the RX does everything better, albeit it’s a bigger vehicle. I have the Lexus RX 350 F-Sport 3 model which means it’s fully loaded with a HUD, panoramic sunroof, adaptive suspension, etc and it’s so damn comfortable to drive in. When put in Sport + mode, it doesn’t really feel any different though the accelerator is slightly more responsive but meh I’m not looking for a sports car.
I don’t like black but when all clean it does look pretty damn good. Fits just fine in the garage though it is much tighter and yeah it totally dwarfs Maggie’s car. Overall very happy with the car but the TD insurance process was a pain in the ass and I’m debating if I should complain about it or not…
