Happy Father’s Day to all the father’s out there! I, for one, had a great Father’s Day; actually, it was a great Father’s Day weekend. On Saturday, I took Nicky to his soccer game in the morning, while Gail did some basement cleanup with Ryan. After soccer, we did some more cleanup while the boys entertained themselves with the Wii for a while and playing outside for a while. After lunch, Gail and I decided to “divide and conquer”, so Nicky and I went to do something fun and Gail and Ryan went to do something fun. Nicky’s choice was bowling, so we went to a 5-pin place in Waterdown and played a couple of games. After that, we met Ryan and Gail at a bookstore in Burlington, and swapped kids. Ryan decided that he wanted to go bowling as well, but he wanted 10-pin, so we went to a 10-pin place in Burlington. When using the ramp, Ryan did pretty well — at one point, he hit two strikes in a row and then knocked 9 out of 10 down on the next shot. My second game was easily the best game of my life — I bowled a 183, and left a grand total of 2 pins standing the whole game. I shot 5 spares in a row, then a strike, then 9, then two more spares, then a strike, and I got 9 on the last two throws. Could be that Wii bowling has improved my real bowling game! Guess I should be playing Wii baseball more often, considering how I’m hitting in my baseball league this year…

Anyway, on Sunday, we went to see Shrek the Third, which I enjoyed, as did the boys. After, we went for dinner to a place in Burlington called Tony Roma’s, where I enjoyed some very fine back ribs. Tomorrow I’m home with Nicky, since his babysitter is on vacation, then I have baseball tomorrow night, Ryan is getting a special award at an assembly Tuesday afternoon, my parents are coming on Wednesday for Grandparent’s Day in Nicky’s kindergarten class, then they’re staying to babysit Nicky on Thursday, and I’m going to a Jays game with my dad next Saturday. Oh, and Ryan has soccer on Monday and Wednesday nights. And Gail’s going to the grade 8 graduation on Thursday night to present an award to some graduating students (she’s chair of the school council). And the cable guy is coming on Thursday to fix our cable which has been flaky for a couple of days. And I have another baseball game on Wednesday which I can’t make it to, and I’ll have to cancel my guitar lesson on Thursday night too. All in all, not far from a fairly normal week at our house.

I read an article from MSNBC today about a proposed “gas boycott” on May 15. The organizers want people to refrain from buying gas on that day to “stick it to Big Oil” — they think that if enough people don’t buy gas that day, the oil companies will lose millions and will be forced to reduce gas prices. Yeah, right.

The article explains why a “gas boycott” will will have exactly no impact on long-term gas prices. I’ve been saying this for years; I even had a letter to the editor published in the local paper a few years ago when one of their columnists suggested it. I didn’t do all the math that the author of the article did, but it seemed obvious to me that it was hogwash. First off, if you didn’t need gas on the 15th anyway, then your refusal to buy gas that day is meaningless, so only the participation of those who would have filled up that day will have any effect. For those who do need gas on the 15th, refusing to buy gas that day just means that you’d fill up on the 14th or the 16th instead, so the total revenue of the gas companies would be even over that three day period. Gas prices would fall on the 15th, but would come back up again on the 16th as demand returned to normal — they might even go higher.

The only way to permanently reduce gas prices is to permanently reduce demand for gas, which means permanently reducing consumption. Making gas guzzlers more expensive and hybrids cheaper would be a good step — when I bought my Sunfire a couple of years ago, I would love to have bought a hybrid, but even given the lower gas costs over the life of the car, I couldn’t afford the initial cost. My Sunfire was about $21,000 including all taxes and fees and such; hybrids started around $32-35,000 (they might be a little cheaper now, but I don’t think they’ve come down all that much). If you assume that the car uses $40 of gas per week, and the hybrid uses half, or $20 a week, then it would take eleven years before the cheaper gas offsets the $11,000 extra cost. Now, I don’t know exactly what kind of mileage a hybrid gets compared to a standard car (is it half? More? Less?), but until the prices come down significantly, or I get a big bonus at work, I won’t be looking hybrid.

Aside: I know this is an unfair comparison because my car is pretty cheap, and they don’t make hybrid Sunfires, so I’d have to upgrade to a Camry or something like that, which is more expensive to begin with. I’m comparing apples to oranges, but the fact remains that I would like to have bought a hybrid but couldn’t afford one.

Here are a few things to ponder over your first glass of frozen concentrated substitute for artificial morning breakfast beverage (with or without pulp-like substances added):

Why is is that people will not shut off a car’s engine if the windshield wipers are part-way through a cycle? I do it myself, and I’ve seen others do it as well — they either turn off the wipers first, or if they are on an intermittent setting, simply wait until the wipers have stopped before shutting the car off. Why do we do this?

Why do Americans talk about ice hockey? As opposed to what? Sure, there’s field hockey, but very few people play it or talk about it. If I just say “hockey”, what are the odds that I’m actually talking about field hockey? Couldn’t you just assume I mean ice hockey? If I talk about “bowling” and I don’t specifically say the word “lawn”, you can assume I mean “standard” bowling — I don’t need to add an adjective.

And why do they talk about hot tea? If I wanted iced tea, I’d have said iced tea, but if I didn’t say “iced”, can you not assume I meant hot? This even penetrated the American-made show Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Captain Picard’s favourite drink order was “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot”. I’ve never heard of iced Earl Grey tea, so it should be obvious he meant hot. They did address this in the final episode “All Good Things…”, where an elderly Picard (in the future) was asked by a British woman if he wanted tea, and he answered “Tea? Earl Grey. Hot”, to which she replied “Of course it’s ‘ot!”

Why do smokers (many of which wouldn’t otherwise think of tossing garbage out the window of their car) not think twice about tossing cigarette butts out the window? Why not use the ashtray in the car?

Why do North American cars with power windows have an “express-down” feature (i.e. press the down button once and release it, and the window goes all the way down) on the driver’s window but not the others? European and Japanese cars have it on all the windows. And why isn’t there an “express-up” feature?

One year ago today, I started my weight loss program (blogged about it last year). I’m basically following the Weight Watchers program, without actually joining Weight Watchers. So far, it’s been a big success. When I started (April 19, 2006), I weighed 175.5 pounds, and by August 9, I was down to 160 even. Since then, I’ve hovered between 160 and 165 (maxing out at 165.5 twice) &mdash this morning I weighed in (for the third consecutive week) at 163.5.

I’m still following the program, but I’ve upped my points to 28 per day, and I don’t count points on weekends, though I try not to go too crazy. I’ve been doing that for about six months, and I’ve been maintaining pretty well.

I was never concerned about my weight until about 10 years ago. We were looking at some pictures of a recent trip to Collingwood with some friends. One of the friends was quite pregnant with her second child, and she joked about how her first child kept running up to her, pointing to her expanding tummy, and saying “baby”. While looking at the pictures, we came across one of me in a particularly unflattering pose. Gail jokingly pointed at my tummy and said “baby”. Now that I think about it, it would be really unlike Gail to say something like that, so perhaps it was someone else. Might even have been me. In any case, that’s when I resolved (it was December at the time) to get into better shape. Shortly after Christmas that year, we bought a treadmill, and I started cutting out snacks and stuff. I went from my high of 188 pounds down to 163 in four months. In the next few months I went up to around 170, and then stayed around there for a few years, though it kept slowly creeping up until I hit 175 again, and then Easter happened last year.

My ultimate goal is to never hit 180 pounds again. Right now, I would consider even getting to 170 as failure. I realize that I am almost for… for… f… well, I’m in my late thirties, and things will likely change, but for now I’m still eating pretty well most of the time, working out two or three times a week, and playing baseball again this summer. I think I look OK, and I feel great, so my short-term goal is not to hit 170 pounds before I turn for… for… f… oh, you know.

Every now and again, you hear stories about people that give you a good feeling about people in general. You can call it faith in the goodness of mankind. My wife calls it a “warm fuzzy”. You know, the people who find a bag full of money and find out where it came from and return it untouched, or donate a kidney to someone they barely know. Last Christmas, my wife went through the Tim Horton’s drive-thru one morning and when she got to the window, she told the cashier that she wanted to pay for the person behind her (who she didn’t know). It only cost her a couple of bucks, but she felt great for days.

And then there are these losers.

There’s a guy in the office whose teenage son has cerebal palsy, and is confined to a wheelchair. As a way for his son, who cannot hold a regular job, to make a little bit of money, his father has a snack tray in the kitchen, with chocolate bars and chips and such for a buck each, and a little tin to collect the money. The snack tray has been there for a number of years. In the last week or so, he’s had to move the tray to a table outside his office, because things are being stolen from the tray. He’s now got a sign in the kitchen where the tray used to be saying “If you want to steal from me, come to my office and pick my pocket, and leave my son alone.” I was hoping that it was someone who wanted a snack but didn’t have the money at the time, and they figured they’d pay for it the next day — I have done this in the past (though I always leave a little signed IOU note), but apparently this was not an isolated incident, it’s happened a number of times.

I put a case of chocolate bars and boxes of chocolate pieces in the kitchen the other day as part of a fundraiser for my kids’ school, along with an envelope for the money. I dropped by the kitchen just a couple of hours later, and found that a box has been opened. What kind of person would just help themself? (Note: I also found at the end of the day that there was one dollar more in the envelope than I was expecting based on what was sold. Could be that the guilty party figured that they ate 1/3 of the box, so they left 1/3 of the cost. However, I did not list that as an option on the envelope — a box is $3, either you buy it or you don’t.)

My kids’ school held a silent auction in February to raise money for the science programs in the school. Local businesses donated items, gift certificates, etc. that were then auctioned off, and all the money raised went to the school. The minimum bid for each item was 1/3 of the item’s value, and obviously the highest bid at the end of the night won the item. My wife is the chair of the school council, which ran the event, and she told me about some of the goings-on:

• Several people scratched out the minimum bid and bid something less. In at least one case, nobody else bid on the item, and the bidder expected to get the item for less than the minimum. When told she’d have to pay the minimum, she refused (though her father was standing right there and he offered to pay the minimum).
• One person (might have been the same person as in the first point) bid on a bunch of things and won several of them. When told what items she had won, she said that she didn’t expect to win that many, and that she didn’t want them all.
• One item wasn’t being bid on, so the principal of the school announced over the PA that she was lowering the minimum bid. I might add here that the school is benefitting from the event, but it was being run by the school council, and so the principal had no authority to do this.
• There were two people (I’ll call them A and B) bidding for one item, and they almost came to blows. Each accused the other of “cheating” – A said that B essentially hip-checked her out of the way to get to the bid sheet, and B said that she couldn’t get to the bid sheet because A’s husband physically blocked her. This did not get solved until several days after the event. Person B left us a very long voicemail message describing her view, and threatened to not attend anymore school fundraisers (effectively punishing the school) unless she got the item. Person A, who had ended up with the item after the auction, decided that it wasn’t worth the fight and gave it to B. Strangely, the item was a gift certificate for the place where person A worked.

Mean people suck.