As Ian Sees It

      I've always found this time of year a contradiction.   The end of August being the end of summer vacation when I was a kid meant the beginning of another dreaded school year.  Now I loved all the new blank scribblers and new pens and the new outfit Mom bought me.  So much promise in the coming year.  A faint hope that the tools for school would be used properly.  That they would be filled with the words, fractions, formulas, and theories worthy of my new clothes.   Feelings that barely lasted the day.     And it was September.  My birthday month.  Warm colourful days.  Cool evenings where darkness came early.  Playing in the darkness was rare in my home and native land as summer months saw the sun set long after bed time.   In the winter,   well it was winter.   Lots to love about this time of year.   And its shortness contributed to the urgency of our enjoyment.   An urgency t...

It is hard to sit here in the dark corner of my basement when the sun is shining and the air is warm.  I just felt the need to stay in touch.   It has been a pretty incredible summer here at the lake.  We have had some smokey days,  but we missed the wild fires.   It has not been a wet summer but we have not suffered from drought like so much of our Province has.  In fact, the crops here look absolutely fantastic.   We have been lucky so far.   Huge hail storms have been all around us.  When it does rain, it is usually at night.  We have missed perhaps a single day of golf due to weather.  And that says a lot,  cause we golf what seems like all the time. Our family dynamic has changed again with the addition of two new grand children.   Our daughter and her husband have taken on two foster children aged four and two.  Once again our house adorns baby gates,  scattered toys,  tiny finger prints, and sticky ed...

 I was very fortunate in choosing a career that allowed me to retire at a fairly early age.  Of course the whole police universe is pretty much a young persons game,  and I won't lie, there are many many times it would have likely been healthier for me to have moved on to a different career fourteen or fifteen years before I did.  But I joined the police force in part because I was not much of an academic and any attempt at a University education would have meant more years of an already prolonged grade school career to (lets face it) blow a bunch of money on what would have likely been half a  semester of skipped classes, late nights, questionable hygiene, and all the things that make a great spring break movie. My mother was a war bride from Glasgow.  My dad was a farmer from Manitoba.  My dad's first experience with travel was in 1939 when global war broke out.  Dad saw it as a way to get off the farm.  So he signed up, and took his first ...

Sometimes it is just fun to belong to something.  A group, a club, a fan base.   That isn't even really a "sometimes" thing.   I am pretty much a rural kind of guy.  I as born the son of a farmer turned oil man.  I grew up in a small town.   And no offence to those I shared that experience,  but I couldn't wait to get out of there.    So I joined our national police force and said goodbye to our little town of four thousand.   Six months later I was posted to Pelly Saskatchewan,  population 300.  It wasn't until 1989 that I lived somewhere larger than my home town.  Karma? Not being a city kid sure didn't make me a farm boy.  I was a townie.  Townies, some would consider the living breathing proof that there is indeed a purgatory.   "And where is this going?" you ask.  Well why don't we get to that.......  All those years in those smaller places you discover that in order to have the things that th...

    On June 6th 1944 my dad made his first trip to France.  It wasn't very welcoming.   I have told his story before.  My dad came home from the war in better shape than many.  He was wounded on D Day which may have actually saved his life.  Those who landed on Juno beach with him that morning were eventually captured and murdered.  He was a good man all his life.  Honest, hard working, sincere but with a razor sharp sense of humour.   D Day and the war shaped his life, and had a lasting effect on all of us.   Which had an effect on the communities in which we lived.   There were lots of vets of World War II around when I was a kid.  Some of them were like my dad.  Some of them were unable to unsee and unfeel the horrors to which they were exposed.   So when on June 6th. our Premier tweets out a salute to the veterans of D Day "Which marked the beginning of World War II"  I am so offended.     ...

 I don't think I have ever denied that I have been every bit as lucky as I have been deserving in my life.   That is simply a fact.  I have eluded to my good fortune and privilege many times to you my online therapists so there is little need to detail just how good my life has been.   I live in a corner of my home and native land where we work and play and plan and dream  over top of a huge glut of oil.   Oil that has produced fuel and plastics and numerous products on which our global society relies upon heavily.   And although many locals believe differently of me,  I am very proud of the contributions our Province and my family and friends have made to modern improvements of the globe.   These people,  my people work hard.......and I am talking very hard to provide the globe with the substance that has changed the world for the better in so many ways.   My dad came out to Alberta in 1953, shortly after I was born to work for a w...

 Here it is,  the middle of April,  and our taxes are done.  Seems late, doesn't it?  It may have crossed the mind of some of you that we must really not need the refund if we waited that long.   While we could have used the refund in February and every day since,  we were out of country for a couple of months.  So there's that.  And for the first time in my adult life,  we owe the tax man what amounts to a tidy sum.  Tidy enough to strike the whine bone.   Yup.  Here I am,  a golden aged old dude on a fixed income having to pay the man.   So, here's the surprise.  I was taking my daughter to the airport in Calgary when I got the text from our family accountant who I often refer to by name:  Carol.   She needed to share her denial, frustration, anger, grief and acceptance and couldn't wait till I got home.   That was likely because she hadn't got to the acceptance thing yet.   So there I ...