20 x 2: What's the difference?

Found this while browsing the web... It depicts quite nicely that despite our differences, fundamentally we are all the same. It is the work of Rannie Turingan a Canadian photographer. A really nice piece of work.


20 x 2 : What's The Difference? from photojunkie on Vimeo.

Top o' the day to you!

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all. Have yourself a nice pint o' Guinness (my favourite alcoholic beverage) and forget all your woes. Mrs. BB and I loved visiting Ireland. It really is a bit of paradise, with 10000 shades of green. Of all the countries we have visited it is probably the one that I wouldn't mind moving to. (Mind you I'm very partial to Guinness and their Guinness is even better than ours.) In fact we have just bought our tickets to return there on vacation this summer... There are still some places that we haven't seen and we want to return to Achill Island, County Mayo, a bit of paradise on Earth, to relax.
Did you know that almost half of all Québecers have Irish blood flowing in their veins, must be why we are almost as fun loving as they are.

So let us try to forget the tons of snow that are still around, raise up our pint of Guinness and all yell "Slainte" before downing the pint.

Achill Island, Co. Mayo, Ireland

Buried under snow

We are in the month of March and we should be seeing the first signs of spring. Instead we are seeing the start of a new ice age... In the last week we have had two major snow storms. On Wednesday we got 25 cm of snow and yesterday over 30 cm and it isn't finished yet since the weather man is predicting another snow fall on Tuesday and four more days of snow before Easter. Right now we are officially at 350 cm of snow, that's 3.5 meters, or for our American friends 11.5 feet of snow that has fallen since the start of winter. The record is 385 cm in 1971-72 which will surely be broken soon. Will we hit 400 cm? Most probably since in the last week we accumulated 55 cm of snow and there is now sign of it slowing down.
The cities and towns have busted their snow removal budgets for 2008, which means there is no more money for snow removal till the end of winter (if ever it comes) and also no more money for snow removal in November and December 2008. They'll surely continue their snow removal but I think that we are probably either going to lose other services or our taxes are going to go up. Many companies that clear driveways will also be going belly-up since they charge a fixed rate and with the snow that has fallen most of them are working at a loss.
Here are a couple of pictures I took to illustrate just how much snow we've had...

New Status

Comes a time in ones life when something happens that changes all the parameters. As of late last Tuesday, there are two new members of our family, Zoé and Allison... These two bits of human fluff, weighing in at less than 10 pounds for the both of them, have changed the parameters.

Yes I'm a grandfather. My son has two brand new twin daughters. It has taken me a bit of time for it to sink in, I don't feel old enough to be a grandfather but there we are. It's hard to describe the feeling. In my heart I'm still too young to have grandkids, but the evidence is there. The girls have already taken up a place in our hearts and even tiny as they are, it is a very big place. So I guess I'll have to get used to being "Papi" and submitting to the whims of my two little granddaughters.