I have decided, albeit on a whim, that I want to visit every province and territory in Canada.

I’ve already got a few crossed off the list, but there are still great swaths of the country in whose borders I have never touched foot. I’ve only ever visited one of our three coasts (the west). I have only visited one of our three northern territories (which, admittedly, is more than most people can claim).

I want to travel across my country. Ideally, I’d like to make it a road trip, but that would probably take a good three weeks, not including the territories.

I mean, sure, you can drive across Canada in less than a week if you don’t stop to actually experience the country. But that’s not what I want to do. I don’t just want to say, “I’ve driven across Manitoba.” I want to be able to say that I spent some time in Manitoba, even if all I did was spend 24 hours in Winnipeg.

Realistically, travelling across this country and visiting all 10 provinces and 3 territories would not be a single trip. At least not for me, in my current financial and employment situation. And that’s OK.

But, I want to set a goal. I want to say that I’ll visit all of these places in the next, say, 5 years. But I don’t know if that’s a realistic timeline. 10 years? That seems too long, but is probably more likely.

I’ll work on figuring out a timeline for myself.

In the meantime, here’s a list of the provinces and territories of Canada. The ones that are struck out are the ones that I have visited.

• British Columbia
• Alberta
• Saskatchewan
• Manitoba
• Ontario**
• Quebec***
• New Brunswick
• Nova Scotia
• Prince Edward Island
• Newfoundland and Labrador
• Yukon
• Northwest Territories
• Nunavut

– — – — –

* Not an actual McMuffin; McDonald’s has sure managed to make their name synonymous with the English muffin breakfast sandwich though, hey?

** Technically, I have been to Ontario. I’ve even spent a few days in Ottawa. But I was so young that I don’t remember. The only time spent in Ontario that I do remember are brief trips from the Ottawa airport and into Quebec to visit my grandparents in Wakefield, QC. As a result, I consider Ontario to be a province that I haven’t experienced in the sense that I hope to experience those parts of Canada that I have not yet visited.

*** Similarly, my time in Quebec has been spent almost exclusively in the small town of Wakefield, just outside of Ottawa-Hull. And, technically, I don’t think I was even in Wakefield. My grandfather’s home is in a cottage community a few minutes outside of town. It’s also an anglophone community, so it’s not necessarily representative of Quebec as a whole.

Only in Canada have expertise and ideas been so brutally cast aside. On the level of principle, this is appalling. A society that holds education and expertise in contempt, no less than one that disdains commerce or entrepreneurship, is dying. To whip up popular hostility to intellectuals is to invite the public to jump on its own funeral pyre.

Read the full article: A know-nothing strain of conservatism – Andrew Coyne – Macleans.ca.

This sounded like a very interesting concept. Then we noticed that the theatre company putting it on is called: “CAMI – Christian Actors and Musicians International.” Also, the venue is a bapist church (or an evangelical church, depending on which day of the week, since it’s playing at two different venues).

We realized this before we paid for our tickets, but decided to risk it. It sounds like it could still be interesting, as long as it isn’t just an excuse for the churches in question to try and convince people that God is real. I’ll actually be OK with it being at least partially an excuse for that, as long as it is still a well-written and thought-provoking piece.

Are we going to be evangelized to for 90 minutes, or will it actually be an interesting play? Only time will tell, but I’m obviously hoping for the latter.

When I was younger, I thought that being a writer meant writing novels. I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to be an author; I wanted to be an authority.

I can recall an incident in elementary school—I must have been in Grade 5 or 6—when an author of young adult fantasy novels visited the school to talk about his books and about being a writer. It must have been a reward for a certain group of students, or something, because I remember that only a few students were in the room when he gave his talk. It wasn’t a big assembly. It was held in the detention room, of all places.

At one point in his talk, that author talked about royalties and noted that he gets something like $0.25 per copy sold. Who still wants to be a writer? Ha ha ha…

Then he discussed the fact that the illustrator who designed the cover of his latest novel receives something like $10,000 per cover design. Who wants to be an illustrator? Ha ha ha…

While many hands were raised in response to this question, I was sitting there resigning myself to being poor. Writers are poor, I figured. And, frankly, this is often true (at least if writing is their only source of income).

These days, I still want to be a writer, but I’m not so sure what that means. I no longer think that it necessarily means being a novelist. And I hope that it doesn’t have to mean being poor.

For me, it probably means being a poet, since that’s mostly what I write now. But, then, maybe it means being a blogger. I probably blog more than I write poems.

Can I call myself a writer if I don’t get paid for most of my writing? Do you have to be paid for something to call yourself that thing (with regard to vocations)? I don’t think so. I mean, a volunteer firefighter is a firefighter just the same.

But, without pay, I am technically not a professional. Am I then, at best, an amateur writer? If so, is that a bad thing? I mean, Olympic athletes are amateurs (at least on paper…unless they’re hockey players, for some reason). They’re certainly not lesser than athletes who are paid for their sport.

Perhaps it’s enough to say that I’m a writer because I write.

• I was fairly productive a work.
• I got a haircut.
• I had pizza and Caesar salad for dinner, and a good beer to wash it down.
• And California’s Proposition 8 (banning same-sex marriage) was overturned.

That last one obviously doesn’t directly affect me, but it’s still very nice to see. Preventing people from getting married just because they’re gay is ridiculous. There’s no reason for it, so I’m glad to see that Prop 8 has been deemed unconstitutional.

I’ve been talking smack about how much email sucks. About how email doesn’t really fit into the modern communications model. And about how absolutely terrible email is for doing any sort of collaborative work (wikis and waves are much better in that regard).

My hate-on for email has got to the point where I basically only check my work email. Work email is pretty much unavoidable, especially since I work for a distance organization.

Personal email, though, is something I rarely check. Rather, I check it fairly often, but I don’t bother to actually read most of what shows up in my inbox.

But, lately, email has proved to be a boon.

Email has allowed me to get advice from friends, it has allowed me to plan parties and events (though, Facebook does a better job of this if everyone involved is on it), and it’s allowed me to chat about football with a minister. These are all small things, and all of them could have happened without email, but email expedited the process of each.

So maybe email isn’t so bad. We’ve just got to remember what it does well, and try to avoid using it for what it does poorly.

UPDATE: You’ll notice that “and waves” have been struck through. This is because, shortly after writing this post, I got word that Google will no longer be developing Wave and will ultimately kill the site by the end of the year. It’s too bad, because I was really starting to like the tool.

I had booked the day off, on the assumption that my friend Chris would be in town. As it turns out, he wasn’t. While he was here for the weekend, he’s visiting Calgary and Vancouver this week, and will be back in Edmonton next week.

What did this mean for me? Well, it meant having a day off with more or less nothing to do. And it was nice.

I lounged around for most of the morning, then went out and did some shopping in the afternoon. Frankly, none of it was of particular interest. All men’s shorts are on sale at Zellers for $10 a pair. It was discount Tuesday at the grocery store, which meant waiting in line for 20 minutes or so (and after all of that, I think that the cashier forgot to give me the discount).

And then I did laundry.

So, I suppose it wasn’t necessarily a lazy Tuesday. It was fairly productive, but certainly not one for the books. And yet, here I am, writing a blog post about it.

There was nothing particularly notable about this father and son, except that they were dressed in a pretty matchy-matchy way (both had on a plaid shirt and jeans, though the son’s jeans were board shorts, rather than pants).

Oh, and they were black.

This would not normally be worth noting but, as this kid was being particularly precocious and adorable, I found myself thinking: how could anyone possibly be racist? Say what you will about adults, but kids are cute and amusing no matter what their race. (And when they’re annoying, they’re annoying no matter what their race.)

Kids are kids. People are people. Racism is dumb.

Fancy coffee system makes fancy coffee!

As I was catching up on my blog reading, I came across an entry on Allie’s blog where she discusses the process by which her husband makes coffee on Sunday mornings. I had neither seen nor heard of an AeroPress until I read the post.

After checking out the Wikipedia article about AeroPress, I totally want one. It sounds like it makes an even better cup of coffee than a French press. It’d probably also kick the crap out of my moka pot.

The one thing that I don’t like about the AeroPress is that it uses disposable paper filters.

The lack of any disposable filters in a French press and a moka pot is one of the big selling features of those two coffee-making methods, for me. That, and I honestly think that they make better coffee than your standard drip machine (which can also be used without disposable filters, if you buy one of those reusable metal-mesh filters).

Plus, I’m supposed to be simplifying my life and reducing the amount of stuff that I own, not increasing it.

So, despite the fact that I think the AeroPress is a really cool coffeemaker, I probably won’t end up buying one. Having said that, if anyone who knows me in real life owns an AeroPress, I would love to try a cup of coffee made from one.

And, since we’re on the subject, something for the comments section: what is your preferred method for brewing coffee at home?

In an effort to blog more regularly, I’m going to start a lot more personal writing. Not necessarily, “Here are my dirty secrets,” or, “I had sex in public today,” type of stuff. Just day-to-day diary entry type stuff.

Since many of the people who read this blog know me personally and read this as a way of keeping in touch with me, I don’t think that switching to a more personal approach will be a bad thing. It’ll get me to write more often and it’ll give you more info about what’s happening in my life.