…and on the eighth day God sat to watch Season 4 of Battlestar and God saw that it was good!

I can’t help but feel a little uneasy about where everything is, or more so where everything isn’t! It gets frustrating when you take one step forward then take thirteen steps back, fall into a puddle, pick yourself up only to walk into a wall you didn’t notice was there!

In the 15 years since slaying the Cancer Giant there hasn’t been a day I had lived without the anxiety of a return to that “place”. Sure this isn’t a recurrence and the “C” word (cancer) has been struck from the list of usual suspects (for which I am eternally grateful) but I still can’t help but feel a little disappointed and find myself asking “why”? Why now? Why me? Why couldn’t I just catch a cold like everyone else? Why?! Why?!! WHY?!!!

God has certainly surrounded me with the right people to face this and I am never short of good GREAT counsel. Honestly, one can run a small country with people of this calibre but it would be all for nought if one’s mind is at a place where good advice might as well be a recipe for chicken soup! Not that it would be a terrible idea…I love chicken (corn) soup…

I can remember visiting my dad in hospital when I was a child. He was there for much longer than all my stints put together! I can remember this one night we left hospital and we (my mother, sister, brother and I) were on a tram heading home. I can still see the yellowish tinge the lights had on everything on the old wooden trams that we used to have in the 80′s. This particular night it was quiet and we were all looking out of separate windows. As it was quite late, I remember we had spread ourselves out and sat apart. I can’t remember what was running through my mind at that time but in hindsight I can only imagine what was going through my mother’s. Maybe the fear of uncertainty was overpowered by the need to be strong for her children. Or was it the other way around? Either way I look back and think I should’ve given her a hug and not have sat so far away from her…I should’ve said something other than saying nothing at all. I don’t want my children to have that same memory.

“Growing up” Christmas would usher in every ounce of anticipation and happiness a kid could summon and it all started with the tree. Waking up to see the tree up at my Mum’s house was always a ”wow” moment but “Grown up” Christmas is altogether different. I regret not having, no scratch that…making the time to put up the tree. (Sorry kids…) The gloss and shine of things are all but gone. As a parent I see the excitement and the glow on the faces of the children and I quietly envy them. I would love to feel that again…

2006 was a 7-ish out of 10, 2007 would’ve been a high 8 but I predict 08 will be…”interesting”…so stay tuned!

…It’s been a while since my last post and of all the things that had inspired me on this Friday: (the run through the rain at lunch, my sudden case of Mac-Envy or the time I had spent at tonight’s “Youth Night: Culture” with Alex) a Will Ferrell movie made me stop and awaken my mistress from her sleep.

I KNOW! Will Ferrell!! Had I known I was to come out and post my first “movie” blog I would have thought it would be for the countless war movies that I had watched, the horrors I never got to finish or the comedies I could recite line for line. But Will Ferrell?! But this movie (I think) tugged on a rather sensitive chord with me, one I will explain later.

For the last week I have been telling myself: “It’s been a while since your last blog…I think it’s time you post a little sumthin’-sumthin’…but what? The traffic? The fact that it’s been so cold lately that even I have said “Damn, it’s cold! I can’t be cold…I’m fat!”? Or about the stormtroopers (of the Imperial kind) that I had recently welcomed into my collection? WHAT dammit?!

This morning I woke up with the intent to, by the night’s end, post something, ANYTHING! With that thought I also made the point to stop by the local Blockbuster and rent a dvd…or six. Good to my word (to myself) I went after Youth Night with Alex. She rented what any just-turned-seven would borrow: “When Dinosaurs Roamed”. Hottie asked for “Anchorman”, I got “Dune”, “Fly Boys”, some Korean movie and of course “Stranger than Fiction”. A movie which I thought would be like all the other Ferrell movies! What is with the comedians playing “serious” roles? Jim Carey, Will Ferrell…hell, even Adam “Little Nicky” Sandler has belted out one or two! No, but this was far from Anchorman! When Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thomson entered the frame I knew the laughs would be more and more scarce…Without giving too much of the story away it is about an IRS (Ferrell) agent who is pre-warned of his own eminent death by a voice (that only he can hear) which turns out to be a novelist’s (Thomson) narration of a character in her yet unfinished book. He tries to stop the ending of the book, and his life, by finding her in the hope of talking her out of it.

I could go on with the (surprisingly) great acting by Ferrell, or the sheer presence of Hoffman and not forgetting Emma Thomson’s performance, the writing, twists, blah, blah blah…but I won’t. Instead I wanted to draw upon the question that was asked in the movie “What would you do if you knew you were going to die..?” And no, you don’t have superpowers. How would you change your life? Would you change your life? Here’s that chord I had spoken about earlier: Have you ever had a dream (Neo?) so real that you woke up from it carrying the feelings you had had it been real? (This is the time when I tell you that I love my dreams. I love trying to remember the dreams I had the night before and especially love the dreams I wake from while still dreaming them, taking control of them and changing the dream to my own will.) Of all the dreams that I can recall I have one I will never forget. I once dreamt that I spoken to, whom I believe to be, the “Devil” and he had told me when I was to die. The year, the month, the day, the hour, the second the very moment I was to live no more…he also said that when I would wake I would not remember. I remember walking away from him, looking back to see him just looking at me. Not cackling or anything just watching me walk away. I woke up trying sooooooo hard to remember the date or any other detail about the chance encounter. Was he the Devil? An Angel or purely a “dream”…no matter what or who he was, since then I had never been quite the same…

I knew I should’ve watched Dune first…

…’nuff said.

…for all of us who have ever walked into a macstore…

…the madness!

There was a time when a “day off” meant a movie, shopping or even an afternoon of “hello, good thanks and yourself?” with your girlfriend…but nowadays, as a father of two and a husband, those days are well and truly gone! That stage of my life died a long time ago (and I accept that). My family is my life now and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I just wish I could find the “sleep” button on my kids…I’ll get ‘em back though…when they get older, their “sick” days can be spent with me...at work! MWAHAHAHA!!

 …At least they’re still looking!

Anyway, the morning continues…Alex is already up and has been for a little while (judging by how far into her Lion King DVD she is at). She has made herself breakfast and is finishing as I serve Senior Isaiahs bowl of cereal.

I get Alex to jump into the shower and prep for church and I go into my room to check on a few things…then the deafening sound of silence from Ike…the usual creciendo to a disaster! And it wasn’t long after my unanswered calls to him did I discover the reason for the silence…He had managed to get not one but three different coloured markers from Alex’s unattended case-o-markers and had proceeded to draw on my cream coloured ottaman and one of six dining chairs! And it is a good time to bring up the point that “water based” doesn’t always mean that water is suffice to remove said stains from furniture! I wouldn’t have minded if he managed to pull off a Renoir but it looked more like the slashings of a drunken amateur than the articulate strokes of a genius…great contrasting colours though…

“It could have been a lot worse” I usually tell myself and it always (always) makes it all go away…Kids will be kids and I should’ve known that when I singled out lightly coloured furniture. I know for certain that there are parents out there who, if asked, could shoot off stories far worse than this…but trust me on the “silence”!