In addition to my publishing duties, I coached teams of volunteer journalists, affording me the opportunity to write all kinds of copy. I learned along the way, on the job, mentored by journalsists and writers I’d met, mostly online. I also got to shoot a lot of photos and learn to process and print them, in the darkroom at work.

I found myself, in the mid-90s, with a timely skillset, and what I thought were great opportunities in the community, so I wrapped up my job and launched a home-based information services company called Infomaniacs. It was a perfect opportunity, since I had three children, all in school, to look after them and still serve a small stable of clients. One of those clients offered me a chance to move to Rimbey and start a community newspaper. Not knowing any better, I agreed.

That decision lead to writing several thousand stories and publishing a similar number of photos. I learned from a list of errors, which occurred it seemed, with the same frequency as the newspaper. I learned that failure can be a great teacher and that often the most beneficial answer to the question is, “I don’t know.”

At the end of eight years, I moved into management and although I recognized that I could benefit from what I’d learn there, my heart wasn’t in scribbling on invoices and fiddling with spreadsheets. I decided to pause for a few months and look more inward than out, before I charged off in some new direction. Six months of breathing room was what I needed to assess what I was good at and what I truly enjoyed, not just what I could do, to generate a paycheque.

Community relations was a common denominator throughout much of the preceding thirty years. I like talking to people. And I like listening. Conversation is music to my ears. I’m very pleased that someone is now going to pay me to do that. I’m even more pleased and optimistic that, like writing and photography, with each new meeting the dialogue will just keep getting better and those conversations are going to engage and connect.

One of them didn’t survive and the other, as I understood it, was clinging to life in an Edmonton hospital. I had already filed the story, with the details provided by a helpful RCMP constable who had attended the scene. At lunch that day, my debit card was declined. So, I stopped at the bank on my way back to the office to discover that my pay cheque had bounced. My boss assured me a new one was on the way, but just when wasn’t determinable. As I walked back to the office, I met a fellow whose name escapes me at the moment. He asked if I’d heard about the surviving crash victim. When I said I hadn’t, he said he’d heard the young man had passed away.

I spent much of the afternoon on the phone, trying to get confirmation, one way or the other. At the hospital, of course, they weren’t permitted to even acknowledge that such a person existed, but did offer to pass my number on to any family members that might pass by. I called every person with the same last name in our book. No answer – which made sense, if he’d indeed died, they’d be up supporting their relatives or be en route, somewhere. I continued to call into the evening. I was sittimg on a story that had him alive and in critical but stable condition. If, when the paper came out the next day, he was dead and we were claiming he was alive, it would be devastating for the family, not to mention troubling for the newspaper’s reputation.

As I sat at the desk, typing up other stories and wondering just how to handle the fatality story, I absently tore the cellophane off a fresh package of Players Light. Discarding the little foil cover, I lit up a cigarette, drawing in the first ‘puff’ deeply. My chest reacted by tightening up, something, after decades of smoking, I was quite used to. Probably addicted to, actually, since I think it’s the itching pain of filling your lungs with hot smoke that smokers find attractive in the habit. This time, however, the tightness didn’t stop. It spread through my whole chest and just sat there, like a severe case of peanut buttered white bread that’s most of the way down, but threatening to never relinquish your lower esophagus.

It got stronger and more painful and more, well, vise-like. I knew exactly what it was. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘So this is how it ends. This is how this wonderful life draws to its inevitable, although terribly premature close.’ (Well, maybe not those exact words, although the first phrase is verbatum.) And I thought about my kids and was immediately overwhelmed by sadness. They were way too young to be losing their father. I put out the cigarette, after a couple trial puffs to see if that would help. It didn’t.

I decided to go to the kitchen and see if a glass of water would calm things down. It didn’t. In fact, walking to the kitchen made the pain worse. I realized I was sweating profusely and my hands felt clammy and cold. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I was gray. I remember thinking ‘This is what ashen looks like.’ I continued down the hall to the bedroom and woke Desiree. “I need your help,” I said.” I think I’m having a heart attack.” “Okay,” she said and rolled over. I woke her again, and explained that I needed an ambulance. “Like, phone 9-1-1?” she asked, innocently. I confirmed that, indeed, a call to 9-1-1 was the most appropriate action. (I had recently written a feature in the paper about people driving themsleves to the hospital after heart attacks or strokes. At the behest of the first responders, I was urging readers to call the ambulance and let them assist in saving threatened lives.)

I made my way back to the living room and sat down on the couch and felt some measure of relief. The ambulance was on its way, Desiree reported. I remember looking across at my desk and seeing the open pack of Players by the keyboard. I wondered if I coud get another one down before the EMTs arrived, since I was pretty sure they’d be offended if I tried to smoke in the ambulance. Hated to waste a brand new pack, like that.

Soon, there was a vehicle with flashing red lights at the end of the driveway and a knock at the door. Ronnie Coulthard and Lorie Lewis came in, with their stretcher already deployed. Ronnie asked me some questions while Lorie prepared a nitro patch for my chest. I offered to walk to the ambulance, since the snow was deep and my path was very narrow. They declined and helped me on to the stretcher. Desiree saw me to the door and said she’d see me at the hospital shortly.

The pain had mostly subsided as we headed up the street, but returned before we got to the emergency entrance. I was carted in, prepped and laid out in the emergency ward. Dr. Mike Boorman, who I knew well, came in to attend to me. He hooked me up to an ECG machine and, through good fortune, I had another ‘event’. Mike hit me up with morphine and told me to relax, that we were on our way to Red Deer.

He also said, in an effort to encourage me, “I want to see you out playing hockey with the Zen boys this fall.” I’d been trying for five years to be allowed to skate with this select group of Rimbey hockey players, mostly teachers, doctors, and others who understood the fine distinction between civilized sport and community-sanctioned violence. “So, that’s what it takes to make this fucking team?”, I asked. Mike nodded and smiled and we went for a seven minute ambulance ride to Red Deer. Well, the morphine made it seem like seven minutes.

So – that was Tuesday night. Thursday at Foothills, they installed a stent in one of my arteries (which I enjoyed far too much, being awake and watching on a monitor over my head). Friday, Desiree picked me up and we headed home. And I started life over, as a non-smoking wannabe hockey player. Ten years later, that situation hasn’t changed. In fact I weigh the same today as I did January 8, 2002.

What has changed is a new-found vitality I wrote about in yesterday’s post. I feel great. And I feel grateful, for a life that’s been interesting, fun and rewarding. I look forward to writing another update on Saturday, January 8, 2022.

p.s. As it often is, the information I got on the street about the crash victim was incorrect. Not that it mattered, since none of the stories prepared for that edition actually made it to press. Readers got a collection of canned copy about nothing in particular, instead.

In October, Desiree and I embarked on a new adventure together. We knew we both had issues with weight that would start to impact us more in the coming years. We had a good diet – generally ate a lot of good, well prepared food and made a conscious effort to avoid processed foods.

But, she had Type II diabetes, I had a big gut and was starting to feel some issues in my knees. It seemed to take a few minutes at hockey before my left knee felt like it was properly in its socket and ready to skate. I weighed 244, on a 175 cm body with a BMI (which I think is totally irrelevant) on the morbid side of obese.

One day, while visiting her chiropractor, Desiree noticed Ideal Protein foods and engaged in a chat with one of the folks there about it. When she got home, she explained it to me and we went together, to sign up for the diet. The Ideal Protein foods are okay – they’re palatable, but far from delicious, but they do carry you through the day, supplemented by normal, but selected, groceries.

Pretty much off the hop, I had issues with the company, however. You buy their products by the carton, each one containing individual foil packs of the food. Meal planning is a challenge, unless you lay in a pretty good variety of the cartons, at about $27 apiece. Of course, Ideal Protein would be quite happy if you bought $1000 worth of their stuff; (it wouldn’t go bad) if you dropped the diet, they still get their dollars.

I could deal with that part. But I was scoring my intake, and while the nutiritional info is on the carton, it’s not printed on the individual packages. If you go to the Ideal Protein web site to get the info, they tell you to visit your diet rep. Turns out people that retail Ideal Protein can only sell you small quantities of the products (outside of cartons), a requirement of the company. I think you can see where this was headed.

Fortunately, Desiree is the consumate researcher and re-discovered the Atkins Diet; in fact, the New Atkins Diet. So, we branched off into a hybrid Ideal Protein/New Atkins nutritional plan. Then she read Wheat Belly. We shifted gears again, and banished a whole bunch more foodstuffs from the pantry.

But, first things first: two days after we changed our eating, my head cleared of the chronic fog I’ve been fighting for what seems like ages. I felt much better all around. I had renewed energy and actually did stuff in the evenings instead of sinking into inertia. Little projects around the house started getting crossed off the to-do list.

Two weeks in, I’d dropped nine pounds and I noticed a significant change at hockey. I gained about a step and half, and as my Zen buddies (pricks, we call each other) will attest, I really needed to. Actually I need to gain another four, but that’s for another completely different blog update.

I can now report that Desiree is down more than 20 pounds, looks and feels fantastic. She doesn’t have any diabetes symptoms. She’s a happy little gal.

I’m half way to my goal, so I’m down 30 pounds (212 this morning, the same as I weighed ten years ago) and on pace to be 185 about the third week of April. In addition to limiting my calories and carbs, I’m more active – I ski when I can and I really enjoy the Tuesday night skate and I’m no longer crippled when I wake up Wednesday morning.

Last week, I walked home from Jim’s, a 25 minute brisk walk. No tightness in my chest, not even a suggestion. No stopping to catch my breath; three months ago, I wouldn’t make a block without stopping. Every block. And I enjoyed the walk, whereas I would have loathed it on the 20th of October.

So, tomorrow, I’m celebtrating. It will be ten years to the day that I had a heart attack and made the first significant lifestyle change. I quit smoking and took six months away from my high-stress job. I started putting on weight, but my doctor told me not to worry about it, just don’t start smoking again.

I’m enjoying the Atkins plan – it offers a huge variety of really fine, nutritious meals and we both feel like we’re eating better than ever.

If you’re reading this and feeling a little tubby and want to change – just Google New Atkins Diet, read Wheat Belly, and let that be your guide. Soon, you, too, will be saying, but weight! There’s less!

On my way out for a ski this afternoon, catastrophe struck. As I crossed the almost bare sidewalk, my right ski shot out from under me and I went down hard on the frozen pavement. Although I thought I’d injured myself, when I got to my feet and dusted myself off, I realized I was fine and continued on up the short incline to the flat spot where I ski. I spent the next hour and a quarter skiing around a 1.6 km circuit of pretty much perfectly flat snow. It was when I returned to the spot where I’d fallen that I saw the little pieces of wood scattered on the pavement. My eye was immediately drawn to a small painted piece with USSR emblazened in large white letters. On the sidewalk in several pieces, was the final four inches of my right ski.

I looked down over my shoulder, and sure enough, shards of bare splinters stuck out the back of my ski. I thought it odd that I’d skiied 6.4 km without noticing. I picked the chunks of dry wood up carefully and scoured the sidewalk for other pieces, managing to find a couple more quarter inch splinters. I carefully reassembled and glued the pieces in place tonight and the ski is clamped down until morning. I’ll assess what kind of filler I need to add when I look at the repair tomorrow.

It’s a special pair of skis – XC 3000, Made in the USSR. they were given to me after a seniors dropin rummage sale, where they’d attracted no interest. They’re very slim wooden skis and I’m thinking pretty old. Hard to say, it being the Soviet Union, but the graphics look early ’70s. The skis were pretty much unused when I got them so I put new bindings on them, cleaned the bottoms up and pine-tarred them and tried them out first chance I got. I really like these skis. They’re technically a little long for me, but I find them very maneuvrable, incredibly light with a nice long glide. I prefer them to my Fischer glass skis, which I reserve mostly for wet conditions. If it’s dry and cold, the Soviet skis are my preferred livery.

So – I’m hopeful, even optimistic, that once the repairs are complete I’ll be able to continue to ride the track with them, with the rough repairs the only reminder of landing on my ass today. Actually, I landed on my ass and my elbow – and I know the difference.

I think we had 436 happy exhibitors when the show wrapped up its Saturday night. The optimism we felt that Agri-Trade last year was even more pronounced at this year’s show. Generally, exhibitors were very pleased with the results of their participation.

It was great to see so many of my friends from Rimbey at the fair. Even though it makes complete sense, most of them being farmers, that they would attend Agri-Trade, it’s always a pleasant surprise to see them.

I’d like to get credit for my Vimeo activity on Empire Ave. I’ve started putting my vids up there, rather than YouTube because I did one that was 54 minutes long. So, I pulled out the credit card and bought a year’s worth of premium vid hosting.
So far, Empire Ave shows a preference for YouTube. I’m not going to post everything to both, but I’ll link the vids here and then, maybe, get a little EA boost from the blog update.

I see it’s been a while. Sorry for the lapse – but it’s been a busy time. I’m pleased to share that I’ve had a pretty productive quarter, even though I haven’t accomplished nearly what I’d hoped to. As you can plainly see, I haven’t been wasting my time with meaningless blog posts. On to the matter at hand…

I came home for work the other day, to find a voicemail wating on the phone. It was Danielle Smith, leader of the Wildrose Party of Alberta, encouraging my attendance at an upcoming rally on July 20. Ms. Smith wasn’t actually leaving the message. It was an auto-generated message, placed in my voicemail by an auto-dialing computer. And she was yelling. Maybe she thinks her natural base is old folks that are hard of hearing.
The experience annoyed me enough to cause me to vent a little on Facebook.

A couple days later, I’m working in the garage and I hear the phone ring. I have to ditch my dirty shoes and run in to answer. Running through the house, I get there just before it goes to voicemail and pick up the receiver. It’s Bill Harvey, leadership hopeful for the Liberal Party of Alberta. He wants my support in his bid to become leader of the opposition in our provincial legislature. Except, it’s a recording of Bill Harvey. Not impressed, I go back to work in the garage. 20 minutes later, the phone rings again. You guessed it: Bill Harvey’s recording has hit our second phone number.

Now, these two people want to lead our province. Alberta is the de facto economic engine of the country. We need people that are smart, thoughtful and completely engaged. I’m guessing the Danielle Smith and Bill Harvey haven’t yet figured out that telemarketers are the most reviled enemy of privacy anywhere. Telemarketers are the bottomfeeders. They are synonymous with shysters. Many of our most popular scams are foisted on us using telemarketers. Anyone who hasn’t figured that out shouldn’t be coming to me for support, using telemarketing.

But wait! There’s more! Perhaps Danielle Smith and Bill Harvey just don’t care what happens inside my house as long as they get to tell me what they want to say. Maybe they’re just not skilled enough to make that critical judgement when their marketing people say, “Nah, people LOVE telemarketing messages”. Maybe they don’t listen very well. There was no option for them to listen to me when they were ‘communicating’ via telemarketing. Is this a reflection of the respect they’ll have for me should they get elected to the positions they aspire to?

If either Danielle or Bill are reading this – (or if you’re somehow related to the aspirations of these to people, please pass this on) – I’d like to have the private phone number of your marketing people. Probably called Vice President, Communications and Marketing, or some other fatuous title. I’d like to phone them.

At home.

About supper time.

My normal routine is to take my vitamins, grab a coffee (from the programmed coffee maker) and check my email. The first one I open is Dilbert. There’s about a 95% chance, therefore, that my day starts with a smile, a chuckle and occasionally a belly laugh in the first five minutes. A quick check of Facebook, a round of Lexulous, if my partner’s been by. Then I move on, checking out some light reading, generally, on Macintouch, then Cult of Mac, then Engadget. Finally, I have a look at the news which is seldom as satisfying as the others and often a complete antidote to Dilbert.

Today, I instituted a change in my routine, one that, based on this morning’s experience, will settle in very quickly and nicely. I’m going to start my mornings, hereafter, with a cup of coffee and and an episode of TED. I’ve watched quite a few (although rarely first thing in the morning) and they have a lowest common denominator: they’re positive, uplifting, interesting and smile-inducing.

So, I have to ask. Why would you, given the choice, start your day with the news with all its negativity, tribalism and pessimism, when you can look into the future with the rest of the world’s optimists? Hmmm? Answer me that.

This was today’s starter.

June Goodlad Gilgan, circa 1945

Thinking about my mother today, this being Mothers Day. My mother was a beautiful little woman with a big heart, a big smile and big love for her four kids. I carry her gifts to me everywhere I go, carefully wrapped and tucked away in the friendliest part of my brain.

This week has been another of those where I often think about the elements of my life that have been outright given to me or shaped by my mother. Certainly sense of humour. And the big dreams. And the knowledge that I can do whatever I choose.

My mother was born in Prince Rupert in 1920, to Bill and Maggie Goodlad. They were fresh from the Shetland Islands and he fished off the north coast of B.C. while the family lived at the east end of Francois Lake. Small wonder, then, that she imbued in us all a sense of adventure and the knowledge there was a big world out there.

She married young, started the family at barely 19 and unleashed me on the world a decade later. She raised four of us under mostly primitive conditions, although my memories were always of a nice home with a happy atmosphere, and good food and a large extended family.

I remember sitting on Mom’s lap as a small child, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, drinking cold coffee with far too much sugar and Carnation milk in it. I remember Johnnie bread and matrimonial cake. And mince tarts. And Mom chasing Warwick up Eighth Avenue, swearing she’d kick his little ass up between his shoulder blades, for transgressions that are just too numerous to mention here.

When I was five, Mom went to work as a telephone operator for B.C. Telephone. She worked for that company until retirement in a variety of positions, but I remember her most from the “are you waiting or are you through” days when she worked the switchboard downtown. Crank telephones, party lines and our home phone number was 7W.

Mom died in the Spring of 1987, the result of heart disease that had its beginnings with rheumatic fever when she was a child. For years after, I’d catch myself feeling low and realize it either on or near the anniversary of her passing. I’ve had the extraordinary good fortune of having only had one such loss in my life and that’s enabled me to realize how we keep those we those people close in our thoughts. I don’t think there’s a day goes by when I don’t reflect on something that springs from my memory of Mom. She still guides my important decisions; I always ask myself what Mom would think.

So – her granite marker lays in a field in Fraser Lake, but her ethereal essence thrives still, and forever, in my heart and soul.

Happy Mothers Day, Mom.