BACK TO BLOGGING

My hibernation is almost over. I’m fully recharged and ready to ge back to action after this long weekend ( Civic Holiday). The entire week had been over 30 degC which prompted the government to issue a extreme heat alert. This weekend will be a lot nicer though – in the high twenties, good enough for the annual Caribana ( Caribbean carnival celebration), where more than a million people trek to Toronto to celebrate the Caribbean culture. This is the 40th annual event, the biggest of its kind in North America. True to my plan, I avoided anything that required thinking 🙂 No blogging, no books, nothing about work 🙂


COMMUNING WITH NATURE

I’m not quite sure why I prefer to spend my short vacations in mountain areas and not beaches as most people from this part of the world crave to do. Other than my wife dreading the tan ( they say it’s easy to spot Pinays in Disneyworld; they wear long sleeves in the dead of summer), I might have been a reincarnated hunter 🙂 The peace and quiet of mountain areas are quite calming and reinvigorating for me.

The Poconos Mountains in Pennsylvania was my choice and boy was I gratified. Here’s shots of deer I took just about 50 yards one early morning from the window of our cottage. I was shooting through the glass window hence the poor resolution of the shots. With the lush vegetation of the area, we were literally living with deers that seemed unperturbed with the presence of humans. Any hunter would say this distance would have been a perfect, spot on shot but of course, this wasn’t a hunting area and I wasn’t on a hunting trip.

The Buskhill Falls is a great place for nature lovers. It’s one place where you can walk through the series of falls via the wooden pathways. If you click on the picture notice the pathways creep through the trees and cliffs to give a better view of the falls.

Here’s a close up of the wooded walkways. The entire falls system will take about 2.5 hours to negotiate. That’s quite a brisk walk, a prefect way to break a sweat, considering the climbing that one needs to do.

In the heat of summer, the mist from the rushing falls is always there to cool you off. We had fun on this trip as my sister’s place in Connecticut is only about 2 hours away. They dropped their two daughters, ages 13 and 7 to be with us for the week and they came back the next weekend and we all went to their place for a couple of days. My daughter had an excellent time bonding with her cousins. We hopped through water parks every day to bask in the sun to the chagrin of my wife. The much dreaded tan was simply unavoidable 🙂

FIL-CAN’S IDOL RUN ENDS

I didn’t realize this good looking lass was half Pinoy until I saw a “support Martha Joy” posters in Pinoy stores many weeks ago . The poster urged Pinoys to support Martha Joy Lim ( her mother’s surname) in her Canadian Idol bid. Her father is Portuguese. With her youthful and beautiful looks, Martha Joy looked like a runaway winner, if she could pull the singing part together. She’s only 16 but her singing skills are fundamentally solid. She made it to the top 10 and my only concern was her penchant for singing Celine Dion songs which I thought was rather risky. It wasn’t hard to figure out she was trying to showcase her wide vocal range which could be shrieky at times. The judges’ consistent comments about her lack of emotion was one thing that her supporters were hoping for her to seriously work on because an Idol requires the complete package – technical skills and showmanship. One judge also commented that she may have difficulty in singing faster songs.

The ax finally fell at the top 8 segment when she was booted out from the show. I thought it was rather premature for her to go. I was expecting her to reach the top 3 but I guess the judges’ comments were a foreboding of things to come. The top 8 segment theme was “unplugged” with Enrique Iglesias as guest and mentor for the contestants. The reason why she was booted out as due to poor song choice and mediocre performance. Her selection of True Colors ( originally sang by Cindy Lauper and recently popularized by Phil Collins) , a slow, boring and lifeless song and I don’t care if it is a Lea Salonga interpretation , was recipe for disaster. Let me don the proverbial Simon Cowell cap now.The other reason was her rather tacky choice of sartorial garb. Martha Joy looks like a smart dresser but geez, clothes are supplied free – could she have chosen something a bit more classy and sophisticated? Anyways, here’s a clip of the segment 8 debacle. Ye be judge. On the bright side, she’s only 16 years old. Darn, she could have waited for a couple more years.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DRzBdeA8I8o

THE BEST DONUT SHOP JOB EVER

Ever imagined making $4,500 a month, free board and lodging for a job at a donut shop ? Well, it does exist – a 6 month tenure at Tim Horton’s donut shop within the shelter and confines of the Canadian Forces Base in Kandahar, Afghanistan ! Apparently there’s no shortage of risk takers. When the ad was published by the government, 100 applications were received the day after. Come to think of it – would you need a cash register at the base? Me thinks no soldier in a war zone would bother to shell out loonies and quarters for a donut and coffee. Well there you go – the tab is on the government so no math skills required for this job !