Sofa Shopping with the In Laws

janelle and i had the night off yesterday, so we called up her parents and decided to go sofa shopping.

so, after a wonderful meal with janelle's parents (baked potatoes, cheesy broccoli (how do you spell that anyway??), and roast beef (i think), with delicious carrots--i think she baked them with honey and orange juice--yum) i was full and sleepy. perfect for sofa shopping.

the first place we went to was ashley furniture in bayer's lake. it's a fantastic store with a huge sales floor full of sofas, mostly, tastefully arranged and set up to sell. also, the sales staff is really helpful and not pushy at all.

sofa shopping, especially when i'm not doing the purchasing, is probably one of the most relaxing things there is. i just sat on all the different couches and recliners while we discussed the pros and cons of different couches. we found one sofa that we all really liked, that would look excellent in janelle's parent's apartment but we were still wondering what else there was out there, so we went to sears.

sears is a ridiculous store. they just put everything they got on the floor with no arrangement or design to it so you have to go looking for what you want. anyways, we just sat in one couch and talked about the one we liked from ashley's, then we went back to ashley's and janelle and i waited in the car while mister and misses went inside to buy the sofa.

afterwards, we all went over to our apartment and played apples to apples and banagrams while we feasted on whole grain tortilla chips and cheesies and some caramel brule and wine. it was an altogether fantastic evening.

after they left, i was in a hurry to get out of my pants because they were getting painfully tight.

Bamboo Tablet Thing

so, janelle bought me a writing / drawing thing, like one of those tablets that come with a pen and you write on the tablet with the pen and it shows up on the computer screen. well, she bought me one of those.

so i started playing with it and at first i found it really hard to work with, but i've now figured it out (i think) and produced my first painting:


ok, so it's not that great--it's just a tree with a sky and a sun. but it's start, you know. maybe eventually i'll be able to paint all sorts of things. what i really want is to see janelle develop her stick figure art. :)

on the darker side... i've gone back over to windows :( well, at least 25% of the way there. we're now running windows exclusively on janelle's computer because i couldn't use the tablet thing on mine while it's running ubuntu. so here's to many more forays into piracy...

Che -- A Revolutionary Life

So, I recently finished reading "Che -- A Revolutionary Life," the biography of Ernesto Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson.

It's a good book because Ernesto Guevara is a fascinating and exciting character. He adopts the name "Che" (which means something like "Hey You!") around the same time he becomes a solid communist. Interestingly, though, he never joins the Soviet sponsored international Communist Party. After studying to become a doctor specializing in asthma and allergies, he spends the rest of his life trying to spread the proletarian revolution in South America. The book records his early life, his struggle to bring the revolution to the world by guerrila warfare first in Cuba and later in Africa and finally in Bolivia and finally his death by execution in the Bolivian Andes.

The detail provided in the book is amazing; it was obviously very well researched. What I liked most about the book was its honesty about Che's character. It wasn't romantic or glorified but it showed him as a regular human being. It's true that he was an outstanding man who did some very remarkable things, he also had some very admirable qualities--his determination, his hard work, his passion, and his quirky and kind of weird sense of humour--but the book also records his flaws and presents him as a deeply flawed individual (just like the rest of us).

For example, Che continues to believe unquestioningly that people are basically good and that they will put their self interest aside and work for the good of the group even when he is faced by the complete self-centeredness of some of his closest comrades who, after they have commited their lives to the revolution and are told by Che to count themselves as already dead, lose faith in the struggle and abandon both their comrades and the revolution.

When he goes to the Congo, the great Congolese revolutionary fighters won't fight, they run away dropping their weapons and baggage as soon as anyone fires at them; they won't carry anything but their weapons--when asked to they say, "what do I look like? a truck?" or "what do I look like? a woman?" or "what do I look like? a cuban?" (Because Che and his soldiers ended up having to do all the heavy carrying because the Congolese wouldn't). Anyways, the Congolese revolution ended in failure because of the simplicity and self-interestedness of its fighters.

In Bolivia, Che himself is betrayed by the people he came to help. His goal in Bolivia and in all of South America was to improve the conditions of the common people and give them a stake in their government because they were being oppressed by North American backed capitalist military dictatorships. It was the common people of Bolivia who, many times over, reported his whereabouts to the Bolivian army. It was the Bolivian army that tracked down and executed Che in the Bolivian Andes as he was trying to escape the country after the failure of his short-lived guerrilla campaign.

It's a book worth reading. It shows the flaws of the communist-socialist system through the eyes of a communist. Che drew much opposition and disapproval from the officials of the Soviet Union for his methods and practices, and also his militant anti-North American stance. But his stance is justified, to a certain degree; the book shows North American adventurism and imperialism and their effects in South America resulting in the poverty of the common people and the dependence of the state on North American industry for import/export and economic aid and how this dependence was fostered by American imperialism. It also showed how the North American anti-communist campaign saw many fascist dictatorships installed in South America: Augusto Pinochet's North American backed government in Chile; Batista's regime in pre-communist Cuba; the CIA sponsored coup of the Arbenz government in Guatamala when the US government thought he was getting to be a little too socialist; and the US supported dictatorship of Rene Barrientos in Bolivia. Nevertheless, it also demonstrates the imperialism of the Soviet Union as it tried to gain exclusive control over its sattelite states.

It's a book that can change your world-view of the events of the Cold War.

Bongo Drum

So the other day, Vince inspired me to buy a bongo drum for my wife.

Okay, well, he didn't exactly intentionally inspire me to buy a bongo drum for my wife, what he did was send me a book in the mail. Of course, I wasn't at home when the mail came it, so when I got off work I had a notice saying that I had a package at the post office.

Meanwhile, I've been wanting to buy Janelle a bongo drum ever since she bought me a guitar. That way I can play the guitar and she can beat the drum and we can be kind of like band. If only we could find someone to play bass.

Anyways, it just so happens that the music store is right across the street from the post office, so while I was at the post office getting my book from Vince I thought, hey, I'm gonna go look at how much those bongo drums cost. So I went. And they weren't as expensive as I thought they'd be. So I bought one and brought it home, and played with it, and left it in the livingroom.

So when Janelle got home from work, I surprised her with it and she was thrilled :) Now we read psalms to each other: one person reads and the other beats the drum.

And We're Back

So, after a long silence, we've returned. And, as you've probably noticed, we've also updated the website.

Maybe the reason I haven't written anything in so long is that noting really interesting has happened. We've had a long and mostly uneventful summer. The furthest from home we've gone is to Sydney to visit Dan and Katie and for Andrew and Emma Joy's wedding in Margaree. All on the same weekend. And we spent a week and a half in Ontario in June to see cute, dear little Jelena Joy Labelle. And her parents and grandparents, of course.

While we were in Ontario we also got to see my old room mate and great friend Jason and we found out that our automobile needs a new transmission. So we decided that we're going to sell it. Living without a car is going to be interesting...

There's a lot of things we intended to do but never did, like white water rafting, hiking, more travelling. But, all in all, we had a pretty good, quiet summer.

Now Janelle is back in school and very busy. I'm now working out of the office instead of doing all the cleaning, which is a nice break; also, I'm learning a lot of new things so that's pretty exciting. I'm sure it's temporary, though.

Also, Janelle and I are teaching ESL one night a week and we've made some great friends through that. It helps that a lot of our students live in our building.

We've kind of decided that we're going to try to go abroad to teach English with our friend Luke. We're thinking Egypt right now, but that could change. So I'm looking into taking a TESL course to get certified for teaching English. Janelle and Luke will both have it because they'll have graduated from the B.Ed. program at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Anyways, that's the boring plot of our uneventful lives.