paulnet

Life’s been good lately.  Keeping busy, I turn 30 in a month.  Moose hunting in a couple of weekends.  Trying to eat healthier, or just eat less.  I have leftover steak in the fridge for a cheesesteak sandwich tomorrow for lunch.  You might not be as excited as me that my favourite radio personality left a comment on my last post.  He found it by doing a google blog search – last 7 days, on his own name.  Hooray!

I enjoy watching the football games.  I will be able to watch the homecoming game coming up this friday.

This is what I spend a lot of time doing lately – coaching volleyball.  I really enjoy the games.  I stand the entire time – Always have.  It’s just my style. I stand and encourage.  This past weekend was our first tournament, we did well but didn’t win the championship. I normally have a clipboard in my left hand, but as you can see, I didn’t bring one this weekend.  I kept a rolled up stack of papers with lineups, rotations and scores in my left hand. 

I’m the assistant to a very knowledgable coach, who in most cases will take the role of head coach.  For this tournament though, we split the team in to two squads and I got to be head coach of one of them. One thing I’m pretty good at is calling time-outs.  I use the opportunity to emphasize what they’re doing right, and give suggestions on what they need to do to win the set.  Would you take advice from this face?  At first, people found my sideburns quite humourous.  Now, they just wonder why they’re so much darker than the hair on my head. 

Photo taken from the lawn of the Super 8 motel in Kenora.  This is Lake of the Woods, a world-famous freshwater fishery.  I would love to fish the lake some day.  This day though, I was up early to go coach a 9:00 game.

 A suspension bridge has been built here.  I plan on going to the grand opening next Sunday, just to see what its all about. 

I grew up in Niagara, so I therefore took the Great lakes and the Niagara river for granted.  I focused on the urban landscape, the factories, the subdivisions as being the defining characteristics.  Despite growing up on a small farm, I never characterized it as being an agricultural area.  Even when I milk tested, I always felt that the agriculture existed in contrast to the neighbouring urban areas.  I would travel to my cottage and daydream about what it might be like to live in such a place, to live so close to the cottage.  I spent a lot of time there so therefore the cottage became everything I knew about the natural world.

Now, I live in the far north, a place I’d never dreamed of living.  In a town that was founded because of its agricultural potential, even though there’s not a whole lot going on any more. The natural world is everywhere and there’s more lakes than I might ever be able to explore.  Hopefully I will.  What limits me right now is my access to lakes.  I don’t have a boat so I can only fish from shore.  I hope to get a boat or at least get access to a boat by next year.  It’s a different life, it’s a good life.  Agriculture here would certainly be a tough go, with the short growing season and the wicked winter. 

After our summer of rain and cool weather, we’ve experienced the hot sticky heat I’ve been waiting for for 3 months, over the last 4 or 5 days.  Just in time for fall.  I think I just saw mother nature give me one of those snakey “gotcha” winks.

It’s labour day and all weekend I’ve been singing the first line of “Morning Moon” to myself.   The reactor’s down, I guess for labour day today

The Tragically Hip – Morning Moon

Through reading my home newspaper online, I’ve learned that episode 4 of this season’s The Office was taped (at least partially) in Niagara Falls, New York.  Apparently they went on the Maid of the Mist.  I wonder if they were inspired by the Alexisonfire video.  Either way, I’ll have to TiVo that episode for sure.  Who am I kidding, we TiVo every episode.

Alexisonfire – Young Cardinals - Strange things happen in nighttime hours

I’m trying to organize my life better through my google account.  I’ve been using gmail for months now and I do like it better than hotmail.  I played a little with google documents last year and now I’m trying to implement google calendars to organize my working life and google reader to streamline my rss feed based web browsing.  So far I subscribe to the Vinyl Cafe and Prime Time Sports with Bob McCown.  It’s really quite handy.  I plan to add the handful of friend’s blogs that I follow to the list. I reccomend giving it a try. I also recommend listening to some Waylon Jennings.  I heard this first at a small stakes poker game on friday night.

Waylon Jennings – Lonesome, On’ry and Mean - Been driving these highways,  Been doing things my way,  It’s been making me lonesome on’ry and mean

Back in the swing of things, I took a pile of photos this week and here are some to share.  Man I love my little camera.

The walk to school.  Once I turn this corner and can see the students mulling about the front of the building, things get pretty real for the day.

The only pre-season football game of the season.  We played our closest equivalent of a cross-town rival (2 hours away) and won 12-7.  Beautiful weather for a game.

Went fishing 3 times this weekend.  I caught 1 fish.

Here is the fish I caught.  A sauger, maybe 10 inches long.  Barely twice the length of the spoon I was throwing.  Just one of those days.

The water calmed down and the sunset was beautiful on Friday.

It was a full moon on Friday. After consulting an online full moon calendar, I found out that New Years Eve is a full moon and blue moon (the second full moon of a month.) Watch out!

Visited my friends undeveloped shorefront property on Saturday.  Beautiful place.

Fished the shore, had to avoid many overhead tree obstacles to get my casts out.

Campfire was great, along with a bottle of Peller Estates French Cross merlot.  Out of a plastic beer cup.

Flat rock on Sunday night.  The lake was active and I could hear Jetskis and boats enjoying their last kick at summer.

Once again, didn’t catch anything but still had a good hour on the shore.