So did you have a good year? I did, though it wasn't too eventful, really. Not like last year when Michelle and I bought a house or the year before when we got married. The only real drama was at work- earlier in the year there was a pretty strong possibility we'd be going on strike, but we didn't. And there was that time I almost killed that guy. But I didn't. So I guess it all worked out at work.
I ran a few 5 km races this year- hence the bright red shirts and red sweaty faces in the above photo. I had to take a break from running when I hurt my ankles (from chasing grizzly bears! Sort of.) but hopefully this coming year will see me run in some 10 km races. But I think the highlight of the year were the two roadtrips Michelle and I took- to Southern Alberta and to Western British Columbia. Oh yeah and hiking the Tonquin Valley with my buddy Robin.



So, what was the highlight of your year? Got any goals or plans for 2008?

Usually around this time of year I talk about my favorite movies, CDs and books. Except I don't know if I saw a single good movie this year- not to say there weren't any, just that I didn't get out to see them- Bourne Ultimatum being one exception. There was lots of good music this year- but if you look at my top 7 track plays on iTunes (admittedly it's skewed since I only got the iMac in August) it shows only one song from 2007:

The Park, Feist
Ghettochip Malfuntion (Hell Yes Remix), Beck
Black Eyed Dog, Nick Drake
Sabotage, Beastie Boys
-Human, Metallica
Biko, Peter Gabriel
Resident Evil Theme, Marilyn Manson

I do recommend these 7 albums from this past year, though:

White Stripes, Icky Thump
Loreena McKennitt, Nights From Alhambra
Marilyn Manson, Eat Me Drink Me
KoRn, Untitled
Feist, The Reminder
Corb Lund, Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier
Radiohead, In Rainbows

As far as books go, I read over a hundred this year so I have lots to choose from. Again, only a few were from 2007 but that hardly matters with books. My favorite 7 books I read this year were:

1. Boy and Going Solo, Roald Dahl. Alright so that's two books but they are basically part 1 and 2 of his autobiography. They have just as much whimsy and adventure as any of his fictional works, but they are true. The more amazing because of it. Did you know he was a fighter pilot in WWII?
2. The Silverwing Saga, Kenneth Oppel. Cheating again by including an entire trilogy. Books about bats and bat gods by a Canadian author. What's not to love? In fact his airship books, Airborn and Skybreaker are also fantastic.
3. River Town, Peter Hessler. He went to China with the Peace Corps, and then wrote about it. If you ever do that you are guaranteed I will love your book.
4. Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, Julian Rubinstein. I love true stories of larger-than-life people. Especially when they are goalies in Budapest who take up bank robbing as a day job.
5. Calculating God, Robert J Sawyer. Gotta represent the Canadian writers! This one is a sci-fi book set mostly in the Royal Ontario Museum. An alien comes to Earth to investigate mass extinctions.
6. A Feast For Crows, George RR Martin. I don't usually go in for multi-volume fantasy sagas but GRR is not a JRR wannabe but a separate and unique voice. Bring on the next one already!
7. The Secret Life of Lobsters, Trevor Corson. I think marine invertebrates are about the coolest form of life ever (if I had a top 7 lifeforms-other-than-bears list of 2007 marine invertebrates would probably take 5 of the spots) so a whole book about lobsters really should've won the Pulitzer. But I grant it and all the books on this list a Poolitzer! Cheers.

So I almost got a Wii for Christmas- I told my buddies at work who already own one that they had been recalled. They were very dismayed to learn this, especially only two days from Christmas. I told them I would gladly take their Wiis into Edmonton for them to sort out the problem, and that's when they told me to go play with my wiiner.
But that's alright since I got some great stuff anyways. Like Chris Jericho's new book- A Lion's Tale- Around the World in Spandex. "But Homie Bear," you say, "in five years of blogging you have never once mentioned any sort of interest in professional wrestling!" It's true, but a few weeks ago Michellle and I were listening to CBC's Q and Jian Ghomeshi was interviewing Jericho. If you listen to Q you know it is a fairly highbrow pop culture show- he's always featuring ballet dancers and French film directors and transgendered indie rockstars, so we were surprised he would have a rassler on. But Chris was very engaging, funny and personable and we agreed it was one of the best Q spots we'd heard. He was promoting his book so Michelle got it for me. I love it- it's hilarious. He's really self-deprecating and shows himself to be just a regular Canadian kid who got to do what he loved for a living.
Also, I got a beautiful Emmylou Harris boxset- nearly five hours of her angelic singing. It has duets with everyone from Johnny Cash to Beck to Chris Jericho.

It was almost disappointing when my foreman let us go home early this morning. Don't get me wrong- I gladly jump at any opportunity to escape the pit. It's just that I was so ready to scheme and plot and destroy to get out early. I wore an old pair of shoes to work that I could leave in my locker for the next few weeks if necessary. I wore my old pair of steel toes so if I had to bring them home it wouldn't matter. I even brought my pants with me to the shovel. But then Steve just let us all go at 3:00. He even gave me and Jason a work truck to use to get to the parking lot on the other end. No rhyming and stealing involved! Not like last year's epic Christmas escape in which we hid our hardhats in a supposedly-derelict kaltire truck which we then got accused of siphoning gas from.
Oh well, there's always next year.

"Although it is not in the nature of flowers to leave monuments, the music of Nick Drake is the hippie vision made permanent . . . Listening to music so beautiful you are shamed by the ugliness of the world."
-Arthur Lubow, in the liner notes to fruit tree, the collected works of Nick Drake.

For proof just listen to Fly, Cello Song and Black Eyed Dog,which is also slightly harrowing. Reading the rest of the notes which serve as a biography of Drake, I kind of wonder if he was on the autistic spectrum?
Speaking of which, a few weeks ago I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake, a brilliant off the wall book which I think might have got left behind in the wake of 9/11, and I wondered the same about Vonnegut. That in turn reminded me of a Peter Gzowski interview I had heard years ago on CBC with an autistic woman who had written an autobiography. Some quick googling came up with the name Donna Williams, who wrote Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere. I read the first and found it, well, beautiful and more than slightly harrowing. And in fact she now keeps a blog.

It's here! Frog Tribe! You know how I love frogs! About two years ago I started the process of purchasing some original artwork by one of my favorite artists- and surely one of the most unique, inventive and fun artists around- Ursula Vernon. You might recall I did an interview with her around the time I first contacted her. Anyways it feels great to have such a vibrant piece in the living room- you can see the Deviation of it here.
I also got some artwork of the tattooine variety on my leg this weekend but it is still too bloody and scabby to show you yet. It is not of a frog, though maybe next time, eh? Lucky for me one of my buddies at work is a tattooist when he's not a coal miner. If you like you can check out one of my older tattoos which I got in New Zealand to commemorate that most kickass of trips. Once this new one heals I'll put up some pics. Maybe even of all my tats which now number five.

I would just like to be the first to write a poem dedicated to the newly discovered species of glyptodont.

O Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis . . .

never mind.

We Need a Name For This Genre
This morning Michelle and I were having our morning coffee and reading on the couch. She says, "You would like this book, it starts with a bear possessed by demons attacking people."
"Nice. That's how this book starts, too."
Technically, the bear in my book is possessed not by a demon but by the astral spirit of an evil man, but let's not split hairs here.
Michelle is reading Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, and I am reading Stormrider by David Gemmell.
The only time anything similar happened to me was when I was attacked by the dread Zombear.

I imagine it's pretty rare to have the occasion of your car breaking down be the catalyst to a pretty great day. Especially when your car breaks down after you get off nightshift and you're heading back home in -25 degree weather. But that was the case for me today. Luckily I recognized that LGJ was feeling sick before I headed out onto the highway. So I pulled over just in time- my little car's alternator decided to retire after 352,000 kms. Fair enough- I would be tired too. So I called my buddy Robin who lives nearby and also just got off nightshift. No answer. But Tim is home and has not yet jumped in the shower to wash off the night's coal dust, so he comes and tries to give me a boost. No go so he drives me back to my Hinton home where I make arrangements with a repair shop and towtruck. But then Robin calls and says he saw my car and knew I was in trouble, and would I like a ride to Edmonton? Hell yeah!
Turns out he and his wife and little baby were going to Onoway for the day, so Robin comes gets me, hooks up a spare battery so we can get to the shop, and off we go! So I spent the day hanging out with my good friends.
Even though Edmonton is hardly a big city it is still a different world than Hinton, and there's nothing like hanging out with some Hinton folks in Edmonton to remind you of how different. Robin and I overheard the following snippet of a conversation: "And then it was so cold I had to warm my hands with a venti macchiatto when all I really wanted was a grande somethingorotheratti."
Anyways, if you are reading this and you are married to me, you must stop reading now. Everyone else can continue by highlighting the invisible text.
So, Michelle told me what book she wanted me to get her for Christmas so we went to the bookstore to get it for her. Robin bought some books too and he was telling me what they were about. Then he asks me what the one I bought was about, and since I had no idea either I
flipped it over to read the back cover. "It says here it's about this woman who had everything a modern woman could want- a great husband, a beautiful home and a fulfilling career. But she still wasn't happy . . . and . . . uh . . . "
I trail off and look at Robin.
"Uh oh," he says.
Anyways, these are the things I love this weekend:
1. Friends like Robin and Tim
2. Firefly and Serenity. Actually Michelle and I had a huge Firefly marathon last weekend. What a great show and why did no one ever tell me about it before?
3. The Park by Feist and Fly by Nick Drake
4. NOT shovel 5!

You might have heard about the new Yeti prints that have turned up in the Himalaya.
I've been reading The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, which is a travelogue of a trek in Nepal that the author undertook in 1973. Mainly he wanted to catch a glimpse of a snow leopard, as the title implies, but of course he pondered the mystery of the yeti since he was there. Here are some brief excerpts:

The yeti is described most often as a hairy, reddish-brown creature with a ridged crown that gives it a pointed-head appearance; in size . . . it has been likened to an adolescent boy, though much larger individuals have been reported.

The Nepal government takes yeti seriously, and there is a strict law against killing them.

. . . on this brushy slope, a dark shape jumps behind a boulder. The slope is in bright morning sun, but I glimpse the creature only for an instant. It is much too big for a red panda, too covert for a musk deer, too dark for a wolf or leopard, and much quicker than a bear. . . All day I wonder about that quick dark shape . . . though I shall assume it was a musk deer it is hard to put away thoughts of yeti.

Anyways, in a serendiptious amalgamation of snow leopards and yetis, my friend Phil is done the third page he's made for me of my yeti story which some of you have heard me read.

The Snow Snake
"Grandpa was there ever any dangerous animals around when you were growing up?"
"Of course. You had your tyrannosaurs and brontosaurs . . . "
"Grandpa, dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago."
"Right. Well, we DID have snow snakes."
"Snow snakes?"
"Yeah. They were hard to see since they were pure white and blended into the snow real well. But you had to keep your eyes out for them because if they bit you you would be paralyzed. Then you would freeze and the snake could munch on you all winter. You would be like a popsicle."
"Eeew! Did you ever see one?"
"All the time! There was one that lived in a snow tunnel outside. It would follow me to school every day, but it knew better than to try and bite me."
"Why?"
"I always had my special anti-snow snake device with me."
"What's an anti-snow snake device?"
"A polar bear."