Well I'm off to Calgary for the weekend to write the FE exam. It will be the first time the Liddy's have been reunited in over a year. Que raro! 

HEXAPUS

Oh so scary.

EL GORDO

Carving the Gord.

QUANDO QUANDO QUANDO

Trev and Amy bought me some records from an antique shop last week. Very nice of them. I think Engelbert Humperdinck is the clear front runner.

I'M IN!

CLASS OF 2007!

IN THE REINS

This is the album from Calexico and Iron and Wine I talked about a while ago. The concert last night was amazing. Calexico was amazing live, such amazing musicians. Iron and Wine was, I can't think of another word except, beautiful. The two bands together were great. Ten people on stage including two drummers and they all worked really well together. It was like the Arcade Fire a couple weeks ago, your eyes just keep moving from person to person.

The concert was well worth the journey to a foreign country. American border guard: “Is this your car?”, yes, “How long have you had it?”, a year, “Who did you buy it from?”, my grandma, “Have a good night”.

SHOUT OUTS!

Thanks to Stefanie and Lauren. for the shout outs recently. Visit Lauren's for tips on being a good Chapters customer and more recently her London adventures. Visit Stefanie to delve deep into her psyche (and learn a lot about things in general).

KICK THE HABIT

Leah Mclaren writes for the Globe and Mail of which I now have a Saturday subsciption. Since it's only women that read this site and since many of you have talked about "He's Just Not That Into You" I thought I'd post this.

My downstairs neighbour has a house guest. Let's call her Breakup Girl. For the past couple of weeks, Breakup Girl has been sleeping on the sectional. She is a sweet girl, always up for a chat and a glass of wine on the porch. I like her, or I like what I know of her, as I recognize she's probably not herself at the moment. She has that raw, wide-eyed quality of the recently broken up, as if she has recently undergone an internal chemical peel.
Most of us understand what Breakup Girl is going through. You meet a person. You have a relationship. Problems arise. You hope for the best long after the best times have passed. Finally, one or both of you admits the truth: It isn't working. You go your separate ways. You cry your guts out for a week. You call each other and get together on the grounds of "finding closure." Maybe you have breakup sex. You cry. You call each other and get together. Maybe more breakup sex. Definitely more crying. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It doesn't sound like an enviable situation, and it isn't. And yet, in a strange way I envy Breakup Girl. Not her depression, but what's on the other side.
Breaking up is a painful, traumatic necessity. But a new beginning, even an unwanted one, is still a new beginning. Change, if you'll pardon the cliché, is good. Beyond the minefield of failure and rejection is the promised land of possibility. Most happily in-love people will tell you the story of all the lousy, demented relationships they had to get through in order to find The One. What they don't tell you, of course, is that they are secretly jealous of those who have yet to meet that person. (Apparently you only get to meet The One once.)
If you don't believe me, take it from an expert. Greg Behrendt is one of the co-authors of the international bestseller He's Just Not That into You. He and his wife, Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt, have recently published a follow-up entitled It's Called a Breakup Because it's Broken.
Behrendt, a recovered alcoholic, draws parallels between the breakup of a bad relationship and the kicking of a substance addiction. The analogy is hardly new, granted, except when it comes to breakup envy.
"I know exactly what you mean," he says when I tell him about my wistful empathy for Breakup Girl. "I feel the same way when I see young alcoholics coming into the program. I look at them and think, 'You don't know it yet, but you're going to have this really shitty time and then you're going to go through a long, incredible journey at the end of which is an amazing experience that will change your life forever. You'll be able to do all kinds of things you were never able to do before.' "
Behrendt even goes so far as to say he feels a strange kind of gratitude toward one particular woman who dumped him. Without the tequila-fuelled spiral that ensued, he never would have bottomed out, never would have sought help, never would have sobered up, never would have met his wife, and so on. Just as illness teaches you to value your health, heartbreak teaches you to be grateful for love when you find it.
"I never had any gratitude back then," he acknowledges. "Even when things were good, I was kind of a bitch about it."
Once you've been through a couple of breakups, the strange thing you realize is that they are really all the same -- and it's nothing you can't handle. While people are complex and individual, our problems are shockingly similar. This is why the hard-nosed advice in It's Called a Breakup is so valuable. It advises women to, among other things, cut off all contact with the ex (they call it the 60-day He-Tox), stop obsessing over voice mail and concentrate on work, exercise and friendships.
As simple as this sounds, it's amazing how many people will do exactly the opposite (contact the ex continually, take time off work, isolate themselves etc). "Everyone wants to think that they are the exception, that the rules of a breakup don't apply to their situation," Ruotola-Behrendt says. "All we're saying is, for the time being at least, pretend you're the rule. Maybe you are the exception and in the end you'll get back together, but why not just be on the safe side and act like you're the rule?"
As for Breakup Girl, she's doing okay. Now that I'm finished writing this column, I can lend her the book. At this rate, she'll be in such good shape by Christmas I'll have to find someone else to envy.

JOEY DEACON

If you needed one more way to mock me ...
http://www.spleen.dsl.pipex.com/joey.html

Oktoberfest! 

I spent almost 20 hours on the 401 alone this week. It blows, I never want to have to commute that far ever again. 

Would you admit this man to Canada's top business school? 

Ontario in the Fall. 

Hiking with the relatives. 

High Falls Near Lakefield 

2ND LARGEST OKTOBERFEST

I'm in Waterloo Ontario right now and I'll be attending the second largest October Festival in the world tonight (4,000 people)!

The unfortunate part is that I've got to do the 1 hour drive back to Oakville tonight. So that means more bratwurst than beers probably. I love bratwurst so that shouldn't be a problem. Mhhhhhh mustard.

When I get back I’ll put up some pictures of these drunken citizens of Kitchener (formerly Berlin changed to Kitchener after the start of WWI).

FLOAT PLANE

I take the float plane over to Nanaimo every month for a day and this time I took pictures on the way back. I sit shotgun with the pilot most of the time with the headset on and everything. It's pretty fun. Today was especially good as it was raining and really windy, the plane was getting tossed around a lot. Usually they circle around and land in the middle of the straight but because of the winds today we landed right over the harbour, it was a very short landing. Sequence below:

Stanley park below.

Lost Lagoon and the West End. 

Over the harbour. 

Final approach! 

DEATH CAB

I saw Death Cab for Cutie tonight. Their new album is very good. That being said I'm not familiar with any other albums so it may just be them.

I was almost contaminated by a crowd puker tonight, luckily I saw the persons first gag and bolted. It felt like a night on the set of the OC to begin with and then indie boys started puking to confirm it.

How great is Vancouver though when you can choose between Death Cab/Youth Patrol and Franz Ferdinand/TV on the Radio. Franz was $50 so I didn't go but I would have loved to have seen TV on the Radio, they have a very unique sound.

http://www.tgrec.com/songs_videos/index.php# (go down to TV on the Radio and watch Staring at the Sun. Blonde Redhead is on this Site too!)

Feist tomorrow night and Arcade Fire on Friday! Deac's indie week is only just beginning.



PS - I'm 99% certain I've been admitted to school starting in May. Now I must decide whether to be good and continue working or quit and travel for six months. You can't bring it with you, and really how valuable is 6 months of potential travelling time in your mid twenties. I think the 30 year old Deacon would forgive me.

VANCOUVER

Most of you who read this don't live here anymore. It's been raining lately, the cool solid rain that will probably continue for quiet a while. It was clear on the way home today and the mountains tops have just a dusting of snow. When the solid rain clears it always feels a lot fresher. I haven't been out much during the day lately. Most my activities seem to take place during the twilight hours. When you're having breakfast at 5pm Sunday afternoon the work week catches up to you very quickly. Life happens when you let it though and watching the sun rise on a clear weekend sky brings a brightness to my tired eyes.

I still can't see my breath yet and I think it will be awhile before I need to scrape the car. That being said me thoughts are quickly turning to snowboarding. This time of the year always gets me a little anxious, only two more months.

BLACK KEYS - THE LENGTHS

Although posting these lyrics may make me seem like a tormented soul, I'm far from it these days. It's just that the best songs out there are still sad songs about heartbreak, and this one is most poignant.

tell me where you're goin or
what is going wrong
I felt you leavin before
you'd even gone
and hold me now
or never ever hold me again
no more talk
can take me away from this pain I'm in

see the moonlight shinin on
your window pane
see it leave you as
faithful as it came
please yourself so you
don't have to be afraid
make amends
or carry on another way

tell me what you were thinkin
to treat somebody so
the care he took the
lengths to which he'd go
coals are hot to walk
across without your shoes
but in the end
know that you got nothin to lose

http://media-server.amazon.com:80/media/B0002O06N0001007/Black%20Keys-The%20Lengths.mp3