The script has flipped

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It has taken a few years.

I started my fitness journey in January 2019, and it has occurred to me that over the past year, it has become a challenge to give myself a rest day. It used to be hard to find the time and the motivation to work out. The challenge was wanting to, and doing the necessary work. Now the challenge is allowing myself a rest day.

I’m realizing that while I give most of my body ample rest, (primarily doing just one muscle group in a workout when I’m working under morning time pressure at my home gym), I still work my legs daily with my cardio. My legs are not getting any rest. I need to reevaluate what I define as a workout, allowing myself to skip cardio 2-3 times a week. I also need to take a full rest day more than once every 2 weeks or so.

I’ve gone from it being hard to workout to it being hard to skip a day. And while that’s a script switch I’d like to maintain, I’d also like to ensure that I actually do skip some days. Not enough that it feels easy again, but enough that I feel the benefits of rest between working out.

Still, this is a good place to be! I’d rather be on this side rather than the flip side.

Exceptional Customer Service

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Dean Shareski asked this question on LinkedIn: “What’s your favourite story or experience with exceptional customer service?”

I shared:

Mine was in the Bahamas. I asked a waiter for pickled conch at dinner and he went into a bit of a dramatic show about how I didn’t know conch until I tasted it fresh. He asked me what I was doing the next morning and said to meet him in the lobby at 7am. So me and my sister’s boyfriend met him. He took us to a small convenience store and bought two Tupperware containers. Then we drove across the toll bridge and wound around under it to a kind of open sea market. He bought lemons and tomatoes from one vendor, peppers from another, and took them to a conch vendor who broke open conch shells in front of us and made conch salad for us, while telling stories about conch diving while high.
The waiter then took us back to the hotel, two full Tupperware containers of fresh conch salad in hand, and refused to take any money from us. “Absolutely not, you haven’t had conch until you’ve had it fresh, this was my pleasure!”
It was indeed delicious, but the experience was even better.

___

I wish I remembered his name, it’s on the back of a photo I took with him on our last day, him holding the huge bottle of rum we bought him… But this was over 30 years ago, and the photo is buried in a box in my garage. All these years later, I still remember his kindness and hospitality. What a wonderful memory he created for us!

Positive Observations

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Have you ever noticed people‘s affinity to focus on the negative?

You say what a beautiful day it is to a stranger outside a coffee shop, and the responses you get is, “I hear it’s going to rain tomorrow.”

You say what a great price for eggs, (🇨🇦), and the response is, “I can’t believe how high prices all are these days!”

At coffee with a friend this morning, he commented that my ‘observations’ recently have all been positive:

‘Workouts are going great, and I feel stronger than I ever have.’

‘Things have been running really smoothly at work, and I’m enjoying connecting with students the past few days.’

‘I’ve felt a lot more present recently than I have in the last few weeks.’

Where I used the word ‘observations’ above, very often the term tends to be ‘complaints’… things that I notice which are not going as well as they could be, or even if they are going well noting afterwards how this is fleeting.

I’m going to bask in these positive observations for a bit. Let them soak in and appreciate them… I had the funny urge to say, ‘while it lasts’ but as funny as that might be, it totally misses the point. I’m enjoying staying positive, and I look forward to this feeling continuing!

McBean and the Propaganda Machine

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I used to think that Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches was about discrimination. Either you have a star on your belly or you don’t… and the book was about learning a lesson that superficial traits really don’t matter.

I’ve come to realize that I was wrong.

The book is about being grifted. It’s not about the Sneetches, it’s about Sylvester McMonkey McBean putting Sneetches through a propaganda cycle, which in turn leads them through the machine, again and again and again until they are broke and disillusioned.

I also realize that we are all Sneetches right now.

Do we always need the flash?

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Yesterday I spoke to 6 grade 12’s taking a new Teacher Education course in our school. I had a framework built for my talk in PowerPoint, but just text on a plain white background. I had calendared an hour before the presentation to add some images and touch it up. But as I added the first couple images, I realized that I really didn’t need them.

There are only 6 students, my second and third slides were question that I wanted them to answer and I would add their answers to the slides, and the 1-3 bullets on the other slides were not as much talking points but cues for me to share experiences as examples of what I was going to speak about.

It occurred to me that the images were not going to add anything except cosmetics. I think sometimes presentations become more about the flash and imagery than about the message.

If I were to be presenting to a filled auditorium, I might have thought more about beautifying my slides, but it’s easy to see whether or not I’ve got the attention of 6 kids. It’s easy to ask them questions and feel like I’m giving everyone a chance to respond. And it’s easy to make the presentation more of a conversation.

I presented to 6 kids who could all probably make better slides than me after three and a half years at a school that has them presenting weekly, and explicitly teaches them about visual messaging…. And I shared 10 slides with black printing on a white background. Reflecting now, that’s all I really needed.

Tasked again and again

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Yesterday I got an email that The Provincial Health and Safety Taskforce is asking 2 members of our school health and safety committee to do a 30-60 minute survey. Note, this isn’t something my district is adding to our plate, it’s a provincial requirement. Just like the new mock first aid drill that was added this year.

I know health and safety are important. I know we need to care for the wellbeing of our workers and our community. I just wonder how many more of these tasks are going to be added year after year… with nothing being taken away from what we do to run a school.

Two people in every one of our province’s 1,571 public schools will now need to do a survey that will average about 45 minutes to complete. That translates to almost 100 days of work (2,356.5 hours/24 hours in a day). That’s just collecting the data, then people at the provincial level, who probably spent hundreds of ours developing the survey, now have to make sense of the data.

I’m not saying this isn’t important data, but I do question the value of having every school take the time to do this? I question how many more tasks that are not related to teaching students and leading the learning in a school are going to keep being added to our plates?

It’s death by a thousand paper cuts… despite the fact tha the paper has become digital.

I am a Canuck

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Identity

I am a Canadian, and yet I am an immigrant to this great nation. I grew up in a multicultural family, and moved to Canada, to Toronto, one of the most multicultural cities in the world. My first friends in Canada were Greek, our neighbours were Armenian, my friends in high school were a Scottish heritage Canadian, a German, a Jew with roots in India, a Shiite Muslim from Africa, and a Sunni Muslim born in Canada. If America is known as the melting pot, Canada is the stew.

Canadian pride is a pride in being able to celebrate your own and each other’s heritage. It is about being sorry for the things we got wrong in history, and actually thinking about and working on reconciliation.

Being Canadian means paying over 40% of my paycheque to taxes and benefits, complaining about it, while simultaneously wanting to see more taxes go to healthcare and education. It means we care about our neighbour’s wellbeing, and quite frankly care for our southern neighbor’s wellbeing too.

Our ‘Neighbors’ to the South

I learned the American anthem and the Canadian anthem at the same time, at hockey games.

I watched what the nation to our south watched on TV. As a result of watching American early morning cartoons, I learned from Schoolhouse Rock ‘How a Bill Becomes a Law’ in the US long before I knew anything about Canada’s legal system. I knew the rules to American football before I knew anything about the Canadian version. I was as likely to watch American news as Canadian news because the show I watched before the news was on an American channel.

I know so much more about the US than most Americans will ever knew about Canada. Not because of my interest but because of my exposure: American cartoons, sports, television, movies, and newscasts all told me about the great nation that took care of us and the entire free world.

Changing Tides

We didn’t always agree, but we have always been friends.

Today tariffs will be implemented by a misguided American leader who thinks national isolationist policies will work in a global economy. He will punish his citizens and ours as we retaliate appropriately as an independent nation. The burden of this economic fight will be a wave of high prices and lost jobs sweeping across both nations. People living on or near the poverty line will be drowning in debt. Small business will sink. We are in for some rough seas, and the consequential ripples will be felt for years to come.

A Proud Nation

Insults, like calling Canada the 51st state, do not hurt Canadians, they strengthen us. Bullying us with tariffs does not make us cower but stand up taller. Attacking us does not divide us but emboldens us. We don’t usually focus on nationalism because our identity is about celebrating our differences, but when attacked our resolve is unified. We will find other global neighbours who we will work with. We might not start a fight but we aren’t afraid to finish it.

We are proudly Canadian, we will fight, we will not yield. We will support each other, while simultaneously supporting others in need. And we will prevail, stronger than ever before.

The gift of gifts

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Today is the first day of Birthweek. My wife doesn’t just get a gift on her birthday, she gets a little something every day of the week leading up to her birthday. This isn’t a family practice. My kids and I don’t get it, it’s just birthweek for my wife. It started when we were dating and has been a tradition for almost 30 years.

For me it’s pretty special. My wonderful wife buys almost all the gifts for family events. She even bought a couple gifts for herself for this birthday. But be it Christmas or anyone else’s birthday, she is the one buying a thoughtful gift from both of us.

My job is birthweek. A small card with a few kind words, a scratch and win lottery ticket (I buy 7 a year, just for this week), and a small gift each day, with a nicer gift on her birthday.

You might think it has become a chore after all these years. I will admit the small gifts can be challenging, trying to not overdo it, but also not just get something tacky or frivolous. But there is a gift in being a gift giver. There is the thoughtfulness of trying to get something for someone you know they’ll appreciate. And since my wife does the vast majority of the gift buying, this is my chance.

I don’t remember how it all started, but I’m grateful for my wife’s birthweek.

Design, purpose, and practice

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I was having a coffee with a friend just outside of a Starbucks on a beautiful, sunny morning, when we witnessed a dog owner tie his dog to this post and head into the coffee shop..

“ATTENTION
PET OWNERS
DO NOT LEAVE PETS UNATTENDED”

A few things occurred to me:

  1. The sign (obviously) isn’t going to stop the behavior.
  2. The sign is at the wrong height… it should probably be at the height that the person would tie the dog to the post. (Which would also make tying the dog there more difficult as well as being more likely to be read.)
  3. The sign doesn’t solve the problem. Dogs can’t go into the store, and a pet owner will still leave their dog tied somewhere, so they can quickly grab a coffee.

I don’t know what the solution is? Even if the post wasn’t there, the pet owner could use the tree that’s just a few feet away… but I think it’s funny that the very post with the sign is the most convenient place for dog owners to leave their unattended pet.

I understand that this has potential to cause issues, with strangers (potentially kids) petting the dog, or other dogs passing by with their owners taking issue with the tied up dog. But is there something else that can be done? Is there a way to design a store line up that is dog friendly? Is there a way a dog owner could be queued in a line from outside the store? Could there be a location the tied up and unattached dog is less likely to be an issue?

The purpose of the dog owner is to respect the rules that dogs don’t come into the coffee shop, and so they leave the dog outside momentarily while they grab a coffee. The purpose of the sign is to stop unattended dogs from being a safety issue. This is a common practice with dog owners, and I struggle to think of a time that I’ve seen an unattended dog cause an issue.

So is this just an etiquette thing where owners of dogs that shouldn’t be left alone simply shouldn’t do so, and just forgo the sign? Do we need to have a sign to prevent stupidity? Or is this actually an important enough issue to warrant a sign? If so, what solutions can we come up with?

PS. I think it’s worth mentioning that I don’t own a dog.

In Rome’s Shadow

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I asked Grok3, an AI LLM, what the similarities are between the fall of Rome and what we are seeing happen in the US. This was the response:

Here are six bullet points that draw direct comparisons between the fall of the Roman Empire and the potential fall of the U.S.

1. Leadership Betrayal and Enemy Deals

  • Rome: A general shaking hands with eastern thugs (like Parthia or Scythians) betrayed allies for personal gain, weakening Rome’s unity and trust.
  • U.S.: Trump siding with Russia—berating Zelenskyy on February 28, 2025, and pushing for a peace deal—sells out Ukraine, a key ally, mirroring Rome’s disloyalty and boosting a rival power.

2. Allies Breaking Away

  • Rome: The west (like Gaul) broke free from Rome’s control, rejecting its rule as it weakened.
  • U.S.: The EU steps up to support Ukraine and isolate the U.S. politically and economically after Trump’s actions, acting like provinces ditching a faltering empire.

3. Economic Collapse from Trade Mistakes

  • Rome: Markets crashed and trade stopped as Rome’s taxes and neglect dried up its wealth, leaving farms barren.
  • U.S.: Trump’s tariffs choke trade—hurting markets and raising costs—mirroring Rome’s economic self-sabotage, pushing the U.S. toward isolation and decline.

4. Internal Division and Chaos

  • Rome: Leaders fought each other, splitting the city into thieves versus thieves, paralyzing Rome’s ability to act.
  • U.S.: Political infighting—Congress and Trump’s administration clashing over Russia, Ukraine, and tariffs—echoes Rome’s bickering, stalling any unified response to the crisis.

5. Rivals Gaining Ground

  • Rome: The east (Parthia) grinned as Rome faltered, ready to exploit its shrinking power and borders.
  • U.S.: Russia laughs at America’s diplomatic mess and weakened stance, gaining leverage as the U.S. loses global clout, just like Rome’s enemies circled its decay.

6. Loss of Belief and Influence

  • Rome: Temples rotted and people stopped believing in Rome’s greatness, letting its moral core crumble.
  • U.S.: America’s reputation tanks after the Zelenskyy fiasco, with allies doubting its leadership and soft power fading, akin to Rome’s lost glory.

___

I find the choice of words fascinating: (emphasis mine)

“mirroring Rome’s economic self-sabotage, pushing the U.S. toward isolation and decline”

“America’s reputation tanks after the Zelenskyy fiasco”

I know there are some things that are not comparable. I know that the US still holds economic, political, and military power that the Roman Empire probably lacked when it fell. And I actually want to see the US survive and even thrive, because I think that democracy and world peace are likely both casualties of a fallen US ‘empire’… But the US needs leadership that understands the geopolitical threats it is facing. And that is severely lacking right now.

When the President of the United States calls the Prime Minister of Canada a Governor of the 51st state; When he blames the victims of an invasion for the war they are in; When he literally shares a narcissistic video of a war torn region, renaming the area with his name, and says that the people of Palestine won’t mind being relocated… it doesn’t show diplomacy, it shows ignorance. It would be hyperbole if it wasn’t his own words and deeds.

But the biggest threat to the US lies within. With a growing number of people who are financially worse off than they were even a few months ago; the undermining of government positions that ensure the government runs smoothly; and the dismantling of healthcare and education… with cuts that will have lasting and costly implications… the potential for social unrest is alarming.

The protests will start. The unrest will be violent. The response will escalate the violence.

The worse part of this will be the lack of civility. Peaceful protest is part of democracy. Violent unrest and insurrection are weapons of tyranny. We aren’t going to see democracy and western principles prevail through force and violence. Instead we will just see a once vibrant nation that promised its people a dream and left it in the shadows of ruin.