Category: Random Thoughts

Women: Persons under the law

Last week my middle daughter was given a project for school. She was given a year, 1929, and was told to research a court decision which was passed that year in Canada. History was far from my favourite subject and therefore not one I’m strong in, so when she first told me about it I didn’t know what decision they meant and had to look it up.

The decision in question was the Persons Case. It was 89 years ago today, October 18, 1929, that the Privy Council of England reversed a previous Supreme Court decision and officially said that Women are Persons under the law. I realize this isn’t news, but let that sink in a bit. Less than a life time ago Women were not considered persons, and a Supreme Court ruling upheld that before being overturned. 

Here is a Heritage Minute on Emily Murphy one of the women who fought for years to have this take place.

It’s hard for me to even fathom a time where that seemed acceptable. All the strong women in my life all they have and will accomplish, and they would have been considered less than a person. Yet here we are, while the law may say they are persons, can vote, own property and hold any political position, there are still so many instances and examples that prove things are still not equal.

While things have come far in the last 89 years it’s still far to slow. Women like Emily Murphy are still fighting everyday to overcome barriers put in front of them, standards which are set higher for them then male counterparts, even things as basic as equal pay. Although I like to consider myself above this mistreatment I still have far to go. If I’m honest I still leave my wife more than her share of the household or family responsibilities, things which would be seen as traditional women’s work. That is unfair, complacent, and lazy on my part. I need to do better in this and many ways.

While my daughter was going over her presentation with me that she prepared for this project I couldn’t help but think, thank goodness she isn’t growing up in that time. Then immediately my thoughts shifted to how, although she won’t have those exact struggles, she and ever other woman will still have struggles to overcome that I didn’t have to think about or even know existed.

At times the conversations around this topic are difficult and uncomfortable, but that is minor. There is still so much more I need to educate myself on and change, I encourage everyone to do the same. 

More articles and information about the Persons Case

Ed Sheeran Concert

Ed Sheeran Concert

This weekend trip has been in the plans for almost a year. Last Christmas when we found out about the concert and decided we would use it as one of our big memory presents for the kids. It was a long wait, it cost a fair bit of money, and we were all excited to get there.

The night didn’t start off the best. As it was something we were looking forward to for so long I wanted it to be perfect. When things started going wrong in my mind I may have overreacted just a bit and let things get to me. Tweeting out things like:

I might have been further ahead if I had of went to the bank, withdrawn ten, one hundred dollar bills, and then lit them on fire. Likely better spent then this train wreck I’m experiencing right now at this concert.

It started by us being a bit late, not too late, but we missed almost all of opener Anne Marie. We did hear some as we were walking to our seats. That took a while. For any of you who haven’t been to a football stadium like the Gillette Stadium, let me just tell you they are big and high, and our seats were as high as they possibly could be. Literally, the very top row and right at the corner of the stage so we could barely see anything. Only about a handful of seats in the whole stadium that would be worse than ours. They were so high and steep that once we got up there a couple kids were pretty much terrified, so we had to abandon our seats and head down. Thankfully Jen found a decent spot for us to stand and watch from. I’m obviously getting old as I would have much preferred to have a place to sit for at least some of the concert and by the end Noah was wishing for a place to rest for a bit too. But we even though we were still high up and far away, we had a good view of the stage and the screen.

You can see the arrows in the picture below that show where our original seats were, and where we ended up watching from.

You can see what our view was like from where we watched and then an arrow showing where we were from the perspective of the stage.

Luckily my mood started to change after the music started. Snow Patrol put on a good opening show even though I didn’t really expect that I’d like them very much, but my face and body language likely didn’t show my mood changing.

Ed Sheeran is a fantastic performer. The fact that he can come out on stage in front of all those people with just his guitar, a mic, and loop pedals. He’d record little bits and then loop them back over the song. He interacted with the crowd really well for having such a huge group. He seems to have a few set of comedy bits that he throws in though, but they work really well.

In one bit he talked about how there are two types of people that don’t really get into his show. One is the boyfriend who is just tagging along with his girlfriend and the second group is the super dads. He said all the super dads are doing the same thing, standing there with their arms folded saying his music isn’t really my thing, but I’m here for my family. This seemed to nail me pretty good as even some of the people standing around us started pointing at me and patting me on the back. It felt like I got called out by Ed Sheeran in front of thousands. That’s when I really clued in that I needed to snap myself out of the mood I was in and enjoy the experience.

If you want to hear the full bit, here is a video someone took at a different concert, but it’s basically the same thing.

If you listen to the video as he talks about super dads he talks about them talking about complaining about traffic getting there, the cost of beer being too high and asking if they can leave before the encore to avoid traffic leaving. I did complain about the cost of water and beer, and we did leave before the encore, but that wasn’t my idea. I didn’t mind the traffic.

All in all the concert was a fun experience and the kids really enjoyed themselves and we have some good memories and stories to keep with us. Well worth the time, money, and a little bit of frustration.

Here are a couple pictures from Instagram from the concert itself as well.

View this post on Instagram

New England night #2 ! 📸 @zakarywalters

A post shared by Ed Sheeran (@teddysphotos) on

Big Milestone Memory: House Construction

Big Milestone Memory: House Construction

This morning I had a fun memory show up in my Facebook reminders. Time goes by so quickly it doesn’t seem like it was six years ago that this was taking place.

This was a pretty huge milestone in our lives. When I was young and into my teenage years I’m not sure I would have believed you if you told me some day I’d be able to have our own house built.

More office art changes

Over the past few years, I’ve been enjoying and adding new art to my office walls. If you’ve been around my blog for a while you’ve likely seen a few posts about it. There is the Automattic Creed, a frame of Automattic logos, Happiness patches, my Son of Krypton print, and most recently my big old map of New Orleans.

When I added the big map it meant I had to take down my WordPress wall as that was really the only wall in my office which would fit it. This caused me to rethink the other walls. The map sits on the wall directly behind me when I’m sitting at my desk, on the wall right behind my desk I’ve had a print of a photo I’d taken of the look off area of the Annapolis Valley where I live for the longest time. I’ve not been happy with it for a while though as the color in the print never really turned out right. It’s also a spliced together panorama from three individual pictures and I didn’t notice until after three copies were printed, framed, and two given out as gifts, that in the splicing there was a little bush in the foreground that was duplicated.

With that picture in the middle, there were a couple of small plaques with pictures of Apple Blossoms I had received years ago from being a Sponsor of our local Apple Blossom Festival on one side, and my diploma from University on the other. During the reorganization, I tossed the plaques, but I’m certainly keeping the diploma up on a different wall though, it’s the most expensive piece of paper I own.

Here’s what the wall above my desk looks like now.

It has my three previous frames from my WordPress wall up in the middle with two smaller items on either side. The far one is a print I picked up at the French Market in New Orleans. The artist is Tesfaye Nequsse and I really liked his work. It sat on my desk for a while but with the adjustment, I bought a frame for it and put it up.

The print closest I’ve had for a while. It was a gift from my mother to Noah, but it has ended up in my office for a while now. It is a print of a painting by Liz Lemon Swindle. It was in a different frame but it didn’t really match the other black frames on the wall so I bought a matching frame to the print above. I should have measured first though as it didn’t fit the new frame. Luckily my sister came to my rescue and made me a new mat for the frame and now it looks great.

I’m pretty pleased with how it all turned out in the end even though it meant a bit of work moving it all around. I’m running out of wall space now though so I might have to start choosing what stays and what goes as I add more in the future.

Here’s a gallery showing most of the items on my wall now including some better images of the prints themselves.

New Office Art

New Office Art

This is something I came across a few years ago and have thought about it off and on ever since. After coming back from our big trip I began thinking about it again and finally decided to get to it. It’s a big old map printed in a rough home made frame.

As it had been a while since I thought about it I couldn’t find the old bookmark I had made, but found the tutorial online again pretty easily to follow along with. There were a couple adjustments, but followed this pretty close. It really was pretty straight forward to do and I’m so happy with the results. The map came from the site the tutorial suggested, Big Map Blog, and I found a birds eye view of New Orleans from 1885. We spent a week in New Orleans during the trip and it holds a special place in my heart, so it seemed like a perfect fit.

One of the adjustments I made from the tutorial is where I had the image printed. It cost a bit more than what they described but Acadia University has a print shop who has printed some large format images for me in the past and done a good job so I had them print this too. It came out really nice and was only $40 for a 3′ x 2′ colored print.

The other adjustment I made was the wood and finish I added to it. From Home Depot I picked up a couple knotty pine 1″ x 4″ x 8′ boards and cut them to size. The tutorial called for pickets and the only ones I could find when I looked close were pressure treated and seemed heavier than the pine boards. I wanted it to be as light as it could be. For the finish I used a technique my sister let me know about called the baby wipe method. It’s really easy. You put any color toll paint you want to use on a baby wipe and essentially use it to paint the wood. It’s really quick to do, and it dries quick as well. I tested on a piece of the left over wood with a couple of colors but settled on black as it better matched the picture and the other frames in my office.

It’s hardly a complex project, but I’m really happy with how it turned out!

A trip almost 15 years in the making

A trip almost 15 years in the making

Coming up on 15 years ago Jen and I for completely random reasons ended up choosing New Orleans for our wedding destination. Neither of us had a burning desire to get married in New Orleans or even visit but I’m ever so glad we did.

We were planning our wedding and we knew we wanted to keep it simple. Neither of us had any desire for a big wedding. One of Jen’s longtime friends had been working on cruise ships and she offered us a free cruise as a wedding present for when we did get married, we just had to pay for the travel to and from the port city. We briefly thought about getting married on one of the stops the cruise made, or even on the boat itself. After pricing these options out they still seemed pretty expensive. Luckily one of the port options for the cruise we were taking was New Orleans.

Jen did a bunch of research and she found the perfect idea for our wedding. Simple, small, and cheap. We were married on a river paddlewheel boat called the Creole Queen on the Mississippi River. The Captain of the boat married us, the wedding planner and the photographer were our witnesses, and that was it. After the ceremony, we took a cruise down the river on their historical tour. Even if nothing else this would have made New Orleans have a very special spot in my heart and our families start.

The day after we hopped on the cruise ship which docks just down the river a short ways from the Creole Queen and headed out on a week-long Caribbean cruise. The cruise was lovely, but this story is about New Orleans. After the cruise was over we stayed a week in the city. We had a hotel right in the French Quarter and we explored all over. Walking up and down the streets of the Quarter, into the Garden District, and riding the St. Charles Ave. street car.

We were pushing our finances pretty hard just to make it to the city, get married and stay afterward so there were a lot of things that I would have liked to do that we didn’t get a chance to. We had something like a budget of $30 per day for food, so we kept things pretty simple. But some of the local food I did get to have was amazing. The people in the city were all so friendly and helpful. Just the laid-back nature is really fun. No wonder they call it the Big Easy. Even though we didn’t pay to hear any live music, you could still hear it all over as we walked. The balconies and the buildings are so unique, unlike anything I had seen to that point.

Over the years we’ve talked about going back to New Orleans. Bring the kids and explore, show them where we got married and all the touristy things. There was always something that got in the way, usually the cost of taking a family of six on an adventure like that. This year though was finally the year. Everything aligned in our lives and we were able to plan the trip and have a week-long stay in New Orleans.

As I write this it’s our last day in the city, but we’ve had a wonderful visit. We’ve walked the French Quarter, rode the streetcar, gone to the Aquarium, taken a swamp tour, eaten pastries, I could eat the beignets every day, and one of the best things we were able to take the kids on the boat we were married on and the same historical cruise. It’s still a fun city to visit, and the kids enjoyed our stay as well. We again didn’t get to catch a music performance but there was music in the French Market while we were there.

We haven’t even left yet and we’re already talking about when we might be able to come back again. Maybe just Jen and I for our 20 year anniversary?