I just spent the last week in New York on vacation and it was fantastic! Since I generally don’t like to blog about when I’m on vacation live, I thought it would be a good idea to take some notes so that I’d have some material when I got back. I had a bit of downtime so I was actually able to do a lot of writing. What I’ve done is set all the posts to auto-publish over the next week, one day at a time. Each day corresponds to the same day of the week, one week earlier.

Anyone who gets a chance to go, has to go. It’s unlike anything you’ll see anywhere. I hope you enjoy reading about my personal experience in New York over the next week.

So in the H1N1 drama that’s sweeping the nation, we’re finding that those sick with respiratory illnesses and weakened immune systems are unable to get the H1N1 vaccine. Why is that? That’s because hockey teams have stepped up to the plate and proudly said, “Me First!”

The first ones to get busted doing this were the Calgary Flames. Someone in the Alberta health department ended up getting canned for this, though they won’t release any details so it’s hard to tell whether the right person got canned or not. Most Albertans have their blame sights set on their health minister as opposed to any employee of the system. The one thing lost in this story though is Alberta’s other hockey team, the Edmonton Oilers. Either they’re doing a top notch job of keeping their vaccinations quiet or they are massively pissed off right now. I mean seriously, what would it be like if all the NY Giants got shots but none of the NY Jets did? It’s pretty much the same comparison here.

I’ll admit it takes a lot more than a handful of healthy hockey players to screw things up for everyone. Thankfully there have been enough jerks to go around. I’ve already heard lots of first hand accounts of doctors bringing home vaccinations for their family and a bunch of friends and there’s the all too common jerks who went out early, lied about their medical conditions to pretend they had real health issues. That way those healthy individuals were able to get a vaccine way before those suckers with actual health problems who couldn’t go out and wait for four hours in a line outdoors.

I figure at this rate, another 4 or 5 days and we’ll have reached rampant cannibalism.

We always have a decent turnout for Halloween, somewhere around 150 trick-or-treaters. Last year, we decided to make a change though. We had always given out the regular stuff that most people give, small chocolates, cheezees (sp?), chips, etc… Some new health issues came to light for us and we started shifting how we eat and thought that we could do better for the kids at Halloween as well. Here’s the hard part. Kids don’t want to get fruit on Haloween. That’s a good way to get your house egged. I don’t know how easy it is to get egg off of brick, but I don’t ever want to find out. Besides, with the rampant paranoia that goes around this time of year, what parent would let their kid eat an apple or other unpackaged food. It’s just easier/safer to toss that stuff out since there’s so much in the kid’s bag anyways. So my wife found a great idea online; give them hot chocolate.

Now hot chocolate isn’t exactly on your traditional list of recommended foods for young people, but it’s a whole heck of a lot less bad for them than the chocolates we were handing out the year before. Since the boxes of hot chocolate come with 10 small packs in them, you can hand them out in individual sizes readily in a sealed, safe package. Last year we thought we’d give it a try and overall the kids seemed to like it a lot. We went for it again this year and I think the kids convinced us to stick with it from here on out. There were lots of kids who got it and turned excitedly to their parents to scream, “Mom/Dad, hot chocolate!” but one kid stood out. He arrived on our stairs with half a can of pop in one hand, clearly riding the sugar rush through his last bunch of houses. We gave him some hot chocolate, he looked up with great big saucer-sized eyes and half-shouted, “Best House!” and promptly ran off to ask his mother if they could have the hot chocolate tonight.

Halloween’s great fun in our neighbourhood. It’s nice and brief (about a 2 hour window), the kids are mostly young and their costumes are always great.

I finally watched it. I bought the DVD a while ago as a buy 3 for $20 thing but never got around to actually watching it. I found it to be a decent movie, quite good for a superhero movie, but overall was just decent. What I absolutely loved though, was the mad scientist aspect of it all. I love, love, love to tinker/build. As soon as the movie ended, my wife turned to me and said, “You do know you can’t do that right?” I had to agree, but I mentioned that the power source is really the only major barrier to building most of that suit. She groaned.

Iron man 2 is coming next year. I can hardly wait : )

Well it would seem that at some point in the past, my tags were blown away and my database backups are a little sketchy. The ones I have are all post-tag-destruction. I was using Ultimate Tag Warrior and was getting set to make a move to the integrated tags in Wordpress when I noticed the issue.

Left with no real recourse, I’ve started adding tags to posts by hand. It’s going to take some time so the tag cloud isn’t going to be perfect for a while still. It’s a great reminder though to make sure that things are in order on your blog. It matters.