Monthly Archives: September 2013

New Look, New Directions

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Hopefully you’ve noticed the new look. It’s fall here, which is my favourite time for change. It’s also a time to start thinking about harvesting from the hard work of winter and spring, and the steady growth of summer. The design is a major step towards that harvest. While I enjoyed the clean and stripped down look of the previous blog, it worked best to present a post a day, in a steady stream. Looking at the traffic patterns on the blog, that’s what was happening. People showed up to read the days post, and that was it. That’s all well and good, but when an odd post got people talking, I’d get a big influx of new readers. I’d see a small spike in recent posts as people wandered around to see what else had been written,  but not much. It was hard to work through the other material,…

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Espresso Love

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Mark Knopfler used to write some pretty bad lyrics that still managed to make for some really awesome songs. Or my teenage hormones are still dictating my adult tastes. Hard to say. Don’t care, really…”Making Movies” is still one of my top albums. I used an analogy the other day of running a school being like running a coffee shop. Mr Norling made a comment about the analogy, saying we really weren’t making espresso. I disagree with that, and as usual I find that when I am inspired to respond to something I have read, it’s a good sign that I should use that inspiration to instead write a blog post. I do love my espresso. I like coffee in general. It wasn’t easy for me to like. I hated the taste right up until my thirties. Much like my taste for wine, tobacco and whisky, though, it wasn’t a…

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One Thing Leads To Another

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Deeper and deeper. Kind of a Fixx sort of morning. It’s coming up on nine months since we started up Valkyrie. I think the biggest change can be seen in my morning coffee. I’ve somehow become the kind of person who adds creatine to his coffee. I also enjoy taking a sixteen hour fast three days a week, and I break that fast with a berry and protein smoothie. My body is changing slowly…glacially slowly, but also changing with glacial power. I took a vacation last week, both from work and from working out. My six day a week, sometimes twice a day workout schedule was starting to show up in pain in my partially-regrown (I can hope, can’t I?) knee, so I’d stopped running the previous week. And I started to relax my eating. Chips and cookies, restaurant food, beer and wine. Expensive chocolates. We walked a fair bit,…

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Kings, Queens and Giants

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Once in a while you just run across people who have all the natural gifts. The one bar I was bouncing at seemed to only attract giants, as an example. More than one night saw me yelling at two fellas to sit down and shut up, all the while trying not to stare at a bicep that was at my face level, and larger than my head. Giants exist. I’m a martial artist, and to me that has always meant being able to slay giants. When someone is bigger and stronger than you, you learn to not just be fast, but to be fast and precise. You learn the vulnerable places and how to use them. Most importantly, you learn to be indomitable in will. I learned all of this because when I grew up, I learned that giants weren’t friendly. I learned that they were demons in human form,…

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