That’s right, I’m a virgin no more. Friday night I took Alex to a London Knights hockey game at the JLC. It was Scouts night for the OHL team and apparently there were 800 scouts (and family) in attendance. For some reason, Alex’s troop was selected to present the colour guard so he was down on the ice during the national anthem and everything. At least I’m assuming he was on the ice. There were little people, presumably kids, on the ice and they were holding flags, but from the seats we had at the opposite end of the arena they were sadly no more than colourful little blobs.

Those who know me know that I’m not a fan of professional hockey. To be more specific, I’m not a fan of the fighting in professional hockey. It’s a polarizing issue where everyone seems to be strongly on one side or the other. I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind it’s just a belief I hold. I’ve always said that I could be a fan of hockey if they did something about the violence that permeates the game. Do I still feel that way? Read on!

Let’s start with the venue. As usual, the JLC is a premier facility for, well, just about everything it seems. Our seats were in section 308, Row M. For those that don’t know – that’s as high as it gets. There were no seats higher than ours. While the players did look a little small at the far end, we had a completely unobstructed view of the entire ice surface. The only time I had to shift in my seat was if the play was right down in front of us; I had to sit up a bit to see over the guy’s head in front of me. The center score board was JUST high enough that the far end of the rink was not obstructed. Something I have a feeling was carefully measured. Kudos to them. My ONLY complaint about the facility was that where we were sitting it was very difficult to hear to the announcer. It wasn’t that his words were muffled or garbled, they just weren’t loud enough. I think it may be due to the roof structure muting it. A few small speakers mounted on that structure would do wonders.

The fans. What to say about the fans? Well…they’re an energetic bunch! Indeed, their energy and involvement made the game all the better. Except for those with damned vuvuzelas. If the OHL can draft a draconian camera policy that, as written, gives them de facto control over ALL events held at the JLC (which I’ve been assured is not the case and likely not legally enforceable but who knows) then surely they can draft some sort of policy that prohibits vuvuzelas from the arena.

On to the game. Was I right? Could I be a fan of hockey? Let’s take a look. As I mentioned above, I’m not a fan of the fighting. In fact, I hesitated bringing Alex to see the game because of the fighting. Right now we’re trying to teach him that punching and hitting is wrong and I was worried how he would react to two players squaring off with 7,000 people cheering them on. Fortunately I didn’t need to worry. There was one fight early in the game and because of the colour guard he wasn’t in his seat yet so didn’t see it. As for the fight itself, it left me more disappointed and disgusted than I had been prior to watching a game. In my rainbows and unicorns world I had envisioned that as soon as a fight breaks out the referees quickly would jump in and separate the two. That simply was not the case. The gloves came off and the two faced off for a good 10-20 seconds before the first punch was thrown. The refs stood by and watched. It wasn’t until the two players ended up down on the ice that the referees interrupted the fight and sent the players off to the penalty box. There was ample opportunity to separate the players before the first punch was thrown and ample opportunity to separate them after the first punch was thrown but it wasn’t until they were down on the ice that action was taken. Okay, enough about the fight. The rest of the game was high energy and fun to watch. I was right into cheering on the team (although not quite as vocal as some). Sadly the Knights didn’t seem to playing at their best. Even what little I know about hockey was enough to see that their puck control was poor at best. The final 4-1 score in Windsor’s favour was proof of that.

So, could I be a fan? Yes. Absolutely. Without a doubt. But not until the fighting is all but eliminated. Even the one fight I saw was enough to turn me away from the game. Would it have been that way if the refs stopped it immediately? I don’t know. So until that happens I’ll just sit on the sidelines and watch our local team churn out overpaid NHL players while our education system struggles to provide for its students.

The Western Fair District has, over the past few months, completely embraced the social media that is Twitter and Facebook. As part of this endeavour they had a contest where five people would be chosen to be “Real Serious Bloggers”. In exchange for daily admission to the fair, their task would be to blog about the experience as well as tweet and hopefully be able to post videos as well. This contest was not simply a random drawing of names. To enter it was necessary to submit a sample writing and the winners would be judged based on the submitted writing. The rules stated that preference would be given to those with a twitter account but it was NOT necessary to win the contest.

Today the winners were announced (Congrats to @JayCMenard, @phronk, @evilflu! I know all three of you and know that you will do an awesome job! Also congrats to @erinflattery and @KimberBogema – I don’t know you but obviously you some writing chops!) and needless to say, there are some pretty sore losers out there. I’m not going to name names as I really don’t want to give them any more attention than is necessary but if you really want to know, a simple search should help you out.

As you can tell above, I was not one of the people that won. Am I disappointed? Sure – who wouldn’t be? It was a creative contest with a desireable reward. Sadly, it seems that two of the people who weren’t chosen have taken to Twitter to complain about their loss. It seems that these people are totally comfortable to point the fingers at other people for their loss. Both of the loudest people complaining seem to be focused in with laser-like precision on it being all about the number of twitter followers that the entrant has. At no point do they acknowledge that they simply may have sub-par writing skills. I tried reading through both feeds but it seems that most of the tweets in the their timelines are for contest entries. There seems to be some discussion with other tweeters but nothing of substance. For what it’s worth, I didn’t really notice any terribly glaring grammar errors but when you’re only retweeting contest entries it’s kind of hard to screw that up. One of the other things being brought up was that supposedly one of the winners had their tweets protected. When I went to check none of the five accounts had protected tweets. It could be that they were asked to unprotect their tweets as a condition of winning. It could be that the person was being malicious. Regardless, tweets are unprotected now. Those complaining simply need to accept the fact that their writing, along with mine, was not as good as some of the other entries that were received.

I want to thank Western Fair District (still not sure if I should be putting a ‘the’ in front of that or not) for running this contest. It was a great concept and also kickstarted my writing again. Even though I didn’t win, I’ll still be writing a blog entry (to be posted here, not on the Real Serious Bloggers blog site) and will almost certainly be tweeting from the fair.

Today was filled with so much awesome that I’m really afraid that the rest of my summer is going to suck now. No, really. As most of you likely know, my annual BBQ is tomorrow. As such, I was finishing up the shopping for it by hitting up the Fresh Co. at Trafalgar & Highbury. As I pulled in I see a fire truck parked back in the parking lot. It seemed to be likely that the firefighters were getting some groceries for their meals. However, by this point it appeared that they had already bought their groceries and two firefighters were standing outside the truck with a man and his young son – about 5-6 years old. They were taking the time, in the hot sun (okay okay, they probably experience a LOT hotter temperatures other times) to give this boy a “tour” of the fire truck pointing out all the things that someone his age would find neat and exciting. They were still sitting there as I got into the line to pay but pulled away before I had a chance to pay and get outside. I wanted to walk over to them and just tell them thank-you. I can’t imagine being a firefighter is just a job. It MUST be a calling. The two firefighters today were demonstrating that dedication and devotion. I would *guess* that they were from the Florence St. station (my apologies to the London Fire Department but I don’t remember the official name and am somewhat too lazy to be bothered looking it up). I’ve sent short emails to both the email address on the FD website and the Firefighters’ Association website just letting them know that these particular firefighters deserved to be recognized for their community interaction.

But wait! There’s more! (I told you it was a good day!)

So, getting ready for a BBQ is a lot of work. A. Lot. Of. Work. Sometimes sweaty work. Work of the kind that results in you not wanting to cook supper. You see where I’m going here don’t you? I asked the kids if they wanted Fajitas (the planned evening meal) or KFC. As neither of them are HUGE chicken eaters I’m kinda shocked that the answer didn’t come back as McDonald’s (never mind that one of them would have wanted Chicken McNuggets). So they chose KFC. Had they picked fajitas, I would have cooked but I REALLY didn’t want to. (Mental note to self: Must win at poker tomorrow night to justify buying KFC tonight) So I pack the grubby l’il monsters in the van and off we go to KFC. The closest one to us is the one on Hamilton Rd. just East of Egerton. So in we go. As soon as I walk in the door the cashier apologizes and tells me that it will be about 10 minutes for any chicken. Hey! No problem. If I could cook chicken at home in 10 minutes I wouldn’t be there. So I place my order and the cashier (REALLY wish I could remember her name) offers a free salad. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth I accept. We sit on the window ledge to wait and the cashier then offers each kid a juice box while waiting! THIS is what customer service is all about. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I was so easy going about having to wait, but I think it was just that this team of employees working knew exactly how to deliver awesome customer service. So, my hat is off to the staff that was working tonight at the KFC on Hamilton Rd. You turned a great meal into an awesome meal!

Oh, and the last bit of good news just came in not too long ago – it looks like Jen, Mike and her troop are going to make it for the BBQ tomorrow afterall! Yay!

Unfortunately all was not great that day. Near the end of the day (literally on our way out of the park) Alex went through this little kids obstacle course type thing. The last part was to climb down a chain ladder with wood rungs. It’s about a 6′ climb down. The base has some thin padding. Sadly, Alex though that the padding was softer and thicker than it really was. He sat on the edge of the ledge and dropped down instead of using the ladder. If anyone is keeping track of such things, a 6′ drop is bad for a 5-year old’s feet. At first he couldn’t put much pressure on it but he was able to move it about so we knew it wasn’t broken. He slept on the way home but could walk into the house with a bit of a limp. The next day he started off the day saying it was sore but said it felt better shortly after getting up. There’s a bruise but other than that he’s okay.

Also, the pics are posted. Just hover over the “pics” button at the bottom (don’t click it!) and then when the menu pops up choose whatever album you want to look at.

So what did we do? Well, Nikki & I struck out for Aylmer at about 11:30am. Getting there about 12:15 or so we paid our admission and just started walking. We found ourselves in line at the 100m range where a selection of shotguns and rifles were available. We chose a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 that looked pretty much exactly the picture here. I’m not sure of the exact ordinance size but the

Smith & Wesson M&P 15 - the assault rifle I shot.

S&W website tells me that it can use either 5.56mm NATO or .223 rounds. I know that it cost us 8 tickets for 20 rounds. The club member loaded the clip with five rounds and then inserted the clip. He then showed us how to get the gun ready for firing and how to turn the safety on and off. This is a semi automatic assault rifle which means that it will fire rounds as fast as you can squeeze the trigger. While it might have been fun to just rapidly fire off five rounds I didn’t really

want my money to get shot off quite so fast. I paused and aimed between each shot. Apparently I managed to hit one of the metal targets at the end once. Never having shot a real weapon before and the targets being ~100m away, I consider that to be pretty decent. What really surprised me was how little recoil there was from this gun. Below is a video of Nikki shooting the same weapon. If you look you’ll see the gun pull up a little bit after each shot. By comparison if you watch the guy to her left shoot the gun he has you’ll see that it seems to have a far more powerful recoil.

Nikki Shooting a S&W M&P 15

Unfortunately that was the only video we were able to get. After we had finished up at the 100m we got in line for the indoor range for some handgun fun. The lineup was long. We probably stood in line for about an hour. When we got inside they pulled noobs out of line and gave them a crash course on safe weapon handling and proper shooting stance. Fortunately we didn’t lose our place in line and we soon in. All first time shooters had to start with a .22 calibre. We could choose between revolver and semi-automatic. Those that know me would know that it’s pretty much a no-brainer and I wanted the semi-auto. Unfortunately I don’t know the exact brand and model of the unit I shot. Rounds for the .22 were 1 ticket for 5 rounds. I handed over 2 tickets and the instructor grabbed 10 rounds, the gun and the clip. What really surprised me about this gun were the size of the bullets. They looked like they would barely hurt if you were to actually get hit by one (not that I’m volunteering to try it). In the indoor range we were shooting at paper targets ahead of us. Unfortunately I was so caught up in the moment that I didn’t even pay attention to the approximate distance but I’m guessing about 20 feet but maybe it was more. I lined up the sight and shot off one round at a time, re-aligning my aim after each shot. There was practically no recoil on this particular gun. After my 10 rounds the instructor asked me if I wanted to switch to a different gun so I suggested a 9mm. He had selected one weapon but after conferring with another instructor put it back and picked up a CZ 9mm. Sadly I don’t have the exact model number – again, too caught up in the moment. At this point Nikki had entered the range and was a couple booths down. As he was loading up the first half of the 12 rounds I bought the guy beside her let off some rounds from some type of hand cannon that I felt through my entire body. They are NOT bullshitting when they say that hearing protection is mandatory whenever you are inside the range area. Even with full ear protection the shots were LOUD! I noticed that some of the instructors were actually wearing active noise cancelling ear protection. So the guy shows me how the 9mm works and I pick it up. Slowly drawing the trigger back the first round fires. Because of the way he had it set the draw was longer for the first shot than the remaining shots. Again I took a pause between each shot to aim. Again, I was aiming (obviously) for the bullseye. The 12 rounds went quickly and he brought the target in to the booth to hand to me. Looking at it I think that perhaps the sighting was a bit off on the .22 as I had them grouped fairly close together but up and to the left of the bullseye a couple inches. The 9mm rounds were all centered around the bullseye area and I managed to put 3 rounds in almost exactly the same place. Lesson here: if you’re coming at me and I’m holding a .22 you’re probably pretty safe (although you’re probably pretty safe if I’m packing a .22 anyway – even if I manage to pull off a direct hit), but if I’m holding a 9mm you’re better off turning around and running away.

In all, it was an absolute blast and I cannot wait to do it again. Once my schedule is something a little less hectic (read: after graduation) I am definitely considering a membership there. Shooting is addictive. Oh, and as a bonus I can cross one thing off my bucket list!

Okay, I think 1011 items is enough to actually publish this. I’ll probably add to it in the future and cross out the completed ones if, and when, they ever get completed.

NOTE: If you want to see the videos bigger you can click on the YouTube logo and watch it on YouTube directly and then you can even make it full screen from there! You’ll probably want to turn up the volume a bit as well since the volume is a little low.

Rocket Launch #1

Rocket Launch #2

So later that day we head out to AVF Hobbies and look at what they have to offer. We find a good starter kit which pretty much only requires us to buy the engines separately. We pick up a package of A and a package of B engines. The bigger the letter the higher the rocket goes. Each pack also comes with 3 engines. So we are now set.

We don’t get a chance that day to set off the rocket for a few reasons. One Alex wasn’t behaving well at school and the rocket required assembly, plus our days were filled up with other things. Then the weather gets rainy for a few days so we have to wait for better weather.

So finally, today, we aren’t too busy, Alex has been good at school and the weather is amazing. Rob puts together the rocket and we set out and head to the park behind Laurier School, thinking it will do the job well. It’s big, open, no trees and no hydro lines.

We can tell the kids are excited. Alex can’t stop talking and even Ryan is making rocket noises and swinging his arms around when he does. It doesn’t take long to set up the launch pad, get the parachute packed into the nose cone and set the rocket up and get ready for launch.

We start off using the A engine, get the kids to stand back and I hold the ignition and do the countdown. After counting down from 10, I push the button and hear the tell-tale hiss, then whoosh and the rocket shoots up into the sky. It was great, it went up about 200 feet, still withing sight, you could see the cone pop and the parachute deploy and watch it the whole way down. It lands without damage about 30 feet away from us.

With a successful first launch we have to do a second. This time we go with the bigger engine. From the package it predicts to go about 600 feet. We set up, get back, do the countdown and launch!

Hiss…whoosh….! Up it goes. It goes so high it’s almost impossible to see until the ‘chute deploys. It slowly starts heading down, as it does we realize it’s going to get much further away than the first launch did. We start chasing it down the field, going, going, going. Ohoh. Even before it lands, it becomes painfully clear it’s going to go into the subdivision behind the school. We try and keep track of where it lands as best we can and Rob takes the van to try and find it.

I think he was gone a good twenty minutes before he came back. It took so long I was sure we’d lost it. But as Rob comes out of the van I see a vibrant orange thing in his hand. It the rocket! YAY!

I can’t believe he found it. Rob tells me he was quite lucky he did. He had almost given up on finding it when someone came out of their house asking if he was looking for a rocket. It had landed in their back yard.

Since we enjoyed the first two launches we decide to do one last one with the small engine again. And the kids wanted to do another one as well, even Ryan, as when we were bringing the rocket back he would run to the ignition and try to work it. Good thing it wasn’t hooked up yet and has a safety mechanism to prevent accidental launches. For the third attempt Alex asked to set it off so we let him. We explain that he has to be very careful, wait for us to tell him to start, he has to do the countdown to give everyone notice it’s going off and only push the button when it’s time.

It’s set up and I get next to Alex to help him if needed. He counts down as told and pushes the button. Hiss…whoosh! The rocket goes up into the sky for a third time. As with the first launch we see it the whole way and it only falls about 50 feet from us. Alex asks if he can run after it and get it and we let him.

The rocket has survived intact so we pack up and head home. If you ask Alex his favourite part was getting to push the button by himself. We are planning to keep doing this hobby, although we may not have any more launches this year, I can’t see the weather continuing to hold. Alex wants a blue rocket for the next one and I’m sure we will oblige. Although, if we want to shoot off the bigger engines we may have to find a bigger field!