The administrators of the Newfoundland and Labrador Blog Roll have decided to implement a Blogger’s Choice Award. Any blog chosen by the site as the Blog of the Month is automatically nominated for this prestigious honour. Since my humble corner of the interwebs was once the Blog of the Month, I’m one of the nominees… (See my superior deductive reasoning skills at work?)

So… please, PLEASE hurry over there and vote for me. There are two ways to vote. You can leave a comment at the site (counts as two votes), or you can respond to the poll in the far right column of the site. What the heck, why don’t you do both?

Just about a year ago I posted about my Sopranos addiction replacement – Dexter. When Dexter Season 3 ended I terminated my subscription to The Movie Network. Without Dexter, the movie reruns were like chicken soup without the noodles.

Last week I saw an ad that the noodle was coming back and the season 4 premiere was going to air at 11:00 pm Atlantic last night, Sunday September 27. I planned to call my satellite TV provider on Friday to add TMN back so I wouldn’t miss a minute of the show. Well, Friday was busy and I didn’t get to it. No problem, though, my satellite provider has a self-service page on their website that allows subscribers to upgrade their service with the click of a mouse. So, on Saturday I fired up the laptop and went online. Click click click. Double check…. my new channels weren’t showing up on my profile. Hmmm… well, the site does say that it may take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours for the changes to register.

We were invited out to dinner so I figured I’d check when we got back.

We returned about 4 hours later and I ran to the TV. Nope… the channels weren’t there. No, problem. I’ll just phone the provider and update the service there. Ring ring ring. Shit… an automated attendant telling me that their hours are Monday to Friday 8 am to 10 pm, Saturday 8 am to 6 pm, and closed on Sunday. Current time: Saturday 10 pm. Damn, damn, damn. Wait… the nice automated attendant also says that I can use the phone for self service. Super! Press 1 for English, press 2 for technical support, listen to all the options, synchronize the programming. Presto! Done. All I have to do is wait 15 minutes to 2 hours for the changes to register.

Sunday morning. Run to the TV. Damn! No channel updates. Oh well. I’ll have to call on Monday and have the updates done then. I’ll miss the premiere, but maybe I’ll catch an encore presentation (that’s fancy talk for rerun) later in the week. Fast forward to Sunday evening 10:45 pm. If I had the channels, in 15 minutes I’d be watching my favourite show. Wait! WAIT! I have an idea! Maybe there’s an option on my satellite receiver to update channels. Click click click. This time on my remote control, not my mouse. Choose TMN. You currently do not subscribe to TMN. To add the channels select OK now. Woo HOO! I got it. All I have to do is select OK. Click click click. Thank you for choosing TMN. Your subscription update will take up to 24 hours to complete. What?!? Freakin’ WHAT?!? 10:54 pm. T minus 6 minutes to Dexter. And I missed it.

Dejected, I checked the channels anyway. It was there. It was really there! Dexter, dude, here we go. It’s gonna be a cool, blood-soaked winter.

Incidentally, the show was pretty good. However, it felt a little contrived. The time had shifted ahead several months and the plot of the premiere seemed focused on setting up all the new relationships and premises that will set up the rest of the season. Dexter has been married for several months, he has a new baby that won’t let him sleep, there are office romances going on that weren’t there before, there’s a new serial killer in town, and some old characters have resurfaced. I know, you are saying that’s what it is supposed to do, but it seemed a little forced. Hopefully next week gets us back into the Dexter groove.

More than 400 posts in just over 4 years… my first post was August 21, 2005. I started out on a public blogging site and eventually purchased my own domain here at www.ohmenerves.com and the rest is history!

If you wanna check them out, click on the Random Posts link in the sidebar and travel in my blog time machine. Have fun!

What a weekend! Today (Monday) was a provincial holiday (New Brunswick Day) and as such a day off work. I decided to take last Friday off as a vacation day giving me a long, loooong weekend.

Friday was a day for chores. I had been putting off staining the deck boards out back all summer. I got up early to beat the sun and stay in the shade as I worked around the deck with the stain. Friday afternoon: Grocery shopping.

But Saturday is when the fun started. Up early and off to Petitcodiac for a run on the four-wheelers. It was a run organized by a local ATV club. Roughly 65 machines hit the 115 km ride, weaving through the trees and tearing up the mud. We always enjoy four-wheeling regardless of the weather or the location. We got back and cleaned up by about 7:30 at night. Donna was passed out on the couch and I was passed out in the chair when my phone rang with an invitation to go playing pool with a couple of buddies. Up and out the door to play pool, returning just before 1 am.

Sunday morning we got a call from some other friends asking if we were interested in going for a drive, a hike and a picnic down around St. Martins. We hadn’t been to St. Martins in several years. What used to be an interesting beach with shorelines eroded by millenniums of the world’s highest tides is now a beautiful groomed hiking park on the Bay of Fundy coast. It was mostly driving, a fair amount of eating, and just a little bit of hiking, but a wonderful day. We topped it off with a fattening meal at the Irving Big Stop Restaurant in Salisbury, an over-sized ice cream cone from Kings Cones and a cold drink of rum in the screened gazebo on our back deck. Another day full from start to finish.

Monday… totally vegged out and did nothing. I think I’ll sleep well tonight.

That’s it. Our weekend in a nutshell. Click the picture for more photos of our hike in St. Martins.

P.S. Happy Birthday Sharon. Happy Birthday Uncle Pat.

For more than twenty five years I’ve carted around boxes of old LPs. It’s been at least 12 years since I’ve listened to the crackle and hiss of a tune played on a turntable. Yet, I continued to move boxes of this dead weight around from province to province, city to city, house to house.

I learned to appreciate this music format more than 30 years ago. My older brother, Gary, went to Alberta to work in the oilfields and brought back several albums… Aldo Nova, Meatloaf, Supertramp, Greg Kihn, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller. He took good care of his albums and I adopted his approach. The more carefully you handled the vinyl the purer the sound remained. Somehow when my brother moved on again I inherited his record collection. Soon, I began to add to that collection with my own additions. Eventually, my collection grew to more than 300 albums. I skipped the cassette format altogether and vowed not to purchase CDs until you could record onto them. When it became clear that you would never be able to record onto CDs, I caved and started collecting CDs instead of LPs. Even though I duplicated much of my collection, I still kept the old faithful LPs. My turntable became orphaned from my stereo and started gathering dust on a shelf. Eventually, my CD collection fell out of date and fell in preference behind MP3s. Assorted tapes and CDs (yes… news flash. You can record onto CDs now!!!) have taken second place to MP3 players and FM transmitters.

Still, I kept my record collection. I didn’t know exactly why though. I never had any grand illusions that my Prince albums would fund my retirement. I mean, Raspberry Beret is a pretty good song, but… Then this past weekend I answered an ad from someone looking to buy old LPs. They guy came out to my house and quickly looked through my collection. Of the 300 albums he said he was only interested in 30 of them and he’d give me $60 whether or not I gave him just the 30 or all 300. Apparently Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister are marketable, but Randy Travis and Roy Clarke are not. I talked him up to 75 bucks and then realized that I had this sick feeling in my stomach. My music collection was a very personal thing… it had sentimental value. If the guy had given me $500 I would have felt the same way. Yet… I purged the vinyl out of my basement and pocketed the 75 smackers and swallowed the feeling that I had somehow let an important part of my youth disappear into the back of a minivan headed for the nearest flea market.

There’s no real point to this post other than to blab about how much these LPs meant to me. I hadn’t even realized it, but they were mementos of my musical past, a chronicle of my youth and transition into adulthood. And I pawned it off for 75 bucks!

Don’t worry Mom. I kept the Elvis picture disk along with the other Elvis albums and Nan’s Slim Whitman and Liberace albums. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

Several weeks ago my wife and I joined several other couples on an ATV ride in Springhill, Nova Scotia. It was early spring and the leaves were just starting to come out on the trees. The area we went riding in was interwoven with all kinds of trails; some technical and slow, others wide open and fast. It was supposed to rain that day, but the weather gods showed some mercy and only sprinkled on us for a few minutes. Check out the pics below. They don’t do the day justice, but you’ll get the idea that it was a pile of fun.

This post flags the conclusion of my alphabet series. For the past two months I’ve been publishing posts with subjects starting with the letters of the alphabet in reverse order. This exercise proved to be more challenging than I thought it might. I had actually intended to have it complete in a month. Oh well…

Here’s that photo slideshow I mentioned earlier. Click the stack of photos to flip to the next picture. Enjoy!