• Own a cowboy hat.
• Teach Sunday School.
• Own a Vespa (always wanted to, never thought I would).
• Aspire to own fewer things.
• Work for a lobbyist organization.
• Bring something new to Edmonton.
• Visit the Canadian north (and have a strong desire to live there one day).
• Drink a drink with a human toe in it.
• Have a minor notebook fetish.
• Self-publish a diary-like thing called a “blog” on this Internet thing (it seems so normal, now, but who would have thought?).

I have decided, albeit on a whim, that I want to visit every province and territory in Canada.

I’ve already got a few crossed off the list, but there are still great swaths of the country in whose borders I have never touched foot. I’ve only ever visited one of our three coasts (the west). I have only visited one of our three northern territories (which, admittedly, is more than most people can claim).

I want to travel across my country. Ideally, I’d like to make it a road trip, but that would probably take a good three weeks, not including the territories.

I mean, sure, you can drive across Canada in less than a week if you don’t stop to actually experience the country. But that’s not what I want to do. I don’t just want to say, “I’ve driven across Manitoba.” I want to be able to say that I spent some time in Manitoba, even if all I did was spend 24 hours in Winnipeg.

Realistically, travelling across this country and visiting all 10 provinces and 3 territories would not be a single trip. At least not for me, in my current financial and employment situation. And that’s OK.

But, I want to set a goal. I want to say that I’ll visit all of these places in the next, say, 5 years. But I don’t know if that’s a realistic timeline. 10 years? That seems too long, but is probably more likely.

I’ll work on figuring out a timeline for myself.

In the meantime, here’s a list of the provinces and territories of Canada. The ones that are struck out are the ones that I have visited.

• British Columbia
• Alberta
• Saskatchewan
• Manitoba
• Ontario**
• Quebec***
• New Brunswick
• Nova Scotia
• Prince Edward Island
• Newfoundland and Labrador
• Yukon
• Northwest Territories
• Nunavut

– — – — –

* Not an actual McMuffin; McDonald’s has sure managed to make their name synonymous with the English muffin breakfast sandwich though, hey?

** Technically, I have been to Ontario. I’ve even spent a few days in Ottawa. But I was so young that I don’t remember. The only time spent in Ontario that I do remember are brief trips from the Ottawa airport and into Quebec to visit my grandparents in Wakefield, QC. As a result, I consider Ontario to be a province that I haven’t experienced in the sense that I hope to experience those parts of Canada that I have not yet visited.

*** Similarly, my time in Quebec has been spent almost exclusively in the small town of Wakefield, just outside of Ottawa-Hull. And, technically, I don’t think I was even in Wakefield. My grandfather’s home is in a cottage community a few minutes outside of town. It’s also an anglophone community, so it’s not necessarily representative of Quebec as a whole.

When I was younger, I thought that being a writer meant writing novels. I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to be an author; I wanted to be an authority.

I can recall an incident in elementary school—I must have been in Grade 5 or 6—when an author of young adult fantasy novels visited the school to talk about his books and about being a writer. It must have been a reward for a certain group of students, or something, because I remember that only a few students were in the room when he gave his talk. It wasn’t a big assembly. It was held in the detention room, of all places.

At one point in his talk, that author talked about royalties and noted that he gets something like $0.25 per copy sold. Who still wants to be a writer? Ha ha ha…

Then he discussed the fact that the illustrator who designed the cover of his latest novel receives something like $10,000 per cover design. Who wants to be an illustrator? Ha ha ha…

While many hands were raised in response to this question, I was sitting there resigning myself to being poor. Writers are poor, I figured. And, frankly, this is often true (at least if writing is their only source of income).

These days, I still want to be a writer, but I’m not so sure what that means. I no longer think that it necessarily means being a novelist. And I hope that it doesn’t have to mean being poor.

For me, it probably means being a poet, since that’s mostly what I write now. But, then, maybe it means being a blogger. I probably blog more than I write poems.

Can I call myself a writer if I don’t get paid for most of my writing? Do you have to be paid for something to call yourself that thing (with regard to vocations)? I don’t think so. I mean, a volunteer firefighter is a firefighter just the same.

But, without pay, I am technically not a professional. Am I then, at best, an amateur writer? If so, is that a bad thing? I mean, Olympic athletes are amateurs (at least on paper…unless they’re hockey players, for some reason). They’re certainly not lesser than athletes who are paid for their sport.

Perhaps it’s enough to say that I’m a writer because I write.

• I was fairly productive a work.
• I got a haircut.
• I had pizza and Caesar salad for dinner, and a good beer to wash it down.
• And California’s Proposition 8 (banning same-sex marriage) was overturned.

That last one obviously doesn’t directly affect me, but it’s still very nice to see. Preventing people from getting married just because they’re gay is ridiculous. There’s no reason for it, so I’m glad to see that Prop 8 has been deemed unconstitutional.

I had booked the day off, on the assumption that my friend Chris would be in town. As it turns out, he wasn’t. While he was here for the weekend, he’s visiting Calgary and Vancouver this week, and will be back in Edmonton next week.

What did this mean for me? Well, it meant having a day off with more or less nothing to do. And it was nice.

I lounged around for most of the morning, then went out and did some shopping in the afternoon. Frankly, none of it was of particular interest. All men’s shorts are on sale at Zellers for $10 a pair. It was discount Tuesday at the grocery store, which meant waiting in line for 20 minutes or so (and after all of that, I think that the cashier forgot to give me the discount).

And then I did laundry.

So, I suppose it wasn’t necessarily a lazy Tuesday. It was fairly productive, but certainly not one for the books. And yet, here I am, writing a blog post about it.

Fancy coffee system makes fancy coffee!

As I was catching up on my blog reading, I came across an entry on Allie’s blog where she discusses the process by which her husband makes coffee on Sunday mornings. I had neither seen nor heard of an AeroPress until I read the post.

After checking out the Wikipedia article about AeroPress, I totally want one. It sounds like it makes an even better cup of coffee than a French press. It’d probably also kick the crap out of my moka pot.

The one thing that I don’t like about the AeroPress is that it uses disposable paper filters.

The lack of any disposable filters in a French press and a moka pot is one of the big selling features of those two coffee-making methods, for me. That, and I honestly think that they make better coffee than your standard drip machine (which can also be used without disposable filters, if you buy one of those reusable metal-mesh filters).

Plus, I’m supposed to be simplifying my life and reducing the amount of stuff that I own, not increasing it.

So, despite the fact that I think the AeroPress is a really cool coffeemaker, I probably won’t end up buying one. Having said that, if anyone who knows me in real life owns an AeroPress, I would love to try a cup of coffee made from one.

And, since we’re on the subject, something for the comments section: what is your preferred method for brewing coffee at home?

In an effort to blog more regularly, I’m going to start a lot more personal writing. Not necessarily, “Here are my dirty secrets,” or, “I had sex in public today,” type of stuff. Just day-to-day diary entry type stuff.

Since many of the people who read this blog know me personally and read this as a way of keeping in touch with me, I don’t think that switching to a more personal approach will be a bad thing. It’ll get me to write more often and it’ll give you more info about what’s happening in my life.

I am officially a part of the problem—the problem of declining newspaper sales, that is.

I cancelled my Edmonton Journal subscription today, after being a loyal reader for as long as I can remember. The main reason that I cancelled was that I just never seemed to find the time to read the paper. And when I did find the time, I was usually reading it online, rather than out of the physical paper.

A secondary reason was that the paper was massively cluttering up my house. Newspapers generate a huge amount of paper waste. And, because I recycle the paper, it tends to build up and take up a huge amount of space in between trips to the recycling depot.

I feel kind of bad about cancelling my subscription, because I am a part of the problem. But, mostly, I feel liberated. No more paper cluttering up my apartment. No more waste, since I’m not reading it anyway.

There’s also the issue of cost. I was originally going to switch to weekend-only service, since I usually do have time to read the paper on the weekend, but the difference in cost between 7-day service and weekend-only service is only about $4. I understand that this is done to encourage people to go for the full 7-day service but, for people in my situation, it’s essentially a deterrent. If I can save $26 a month versus only saving $4 per month, I’m going to opt for the greater savings.

How Will I Get My News Now?

When I want to read the paper—and when I have the time—I will do so online. And I’ll continue to get my news from other sources: television, radio, various online outlets, and Maclean’s (yes, I subscribe to the actual print edition and don’t plan to cancel it anytime soon).

Sorry Edmonton Journal. It’s nothing personal. I still like you, and I think you’ve got some incredible journalists writing for you, but the physical newspaper just doesn’t fit into my lifestyle anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. My apartment is a pretty nice place. I like the neighbourhood. I like the building (more or less). And I liked the resident manager. (There’s a new manager now, so hopefully he’ll be good or better than the old one.)

The apartment itself isn’t really a shit-hole. It’s just that I haven’t been maintaining it and taking care of it.

It’s a giant mess and that makes me depressed.

Living in a state of horrible clutter is depressing. Depression causes me to give up and not make an effort to fix the situation. It’s a pretty vicious cycle. But…

I’m getting out of the funk. I’m getting out of depressed mode. And I’m going to massively tidy, clean, and declutter the place. I’ll be getting rid of a lot of stuff. I’ll be getting rid of some furniture. I’ll be getting rid of some clothes. I’ll be getting rid of some books.

I might even be getting rid of some CDs and DVDs.

While it will likely take a while to go through everything and decide what to get rid of—somethings will be very easy to part with, others very difficult—it will be totally worth it. My living space will be less cluttered and easier to take care of, which will translate into a simpler life overall.

And, with less stuff sitting around just sort of being there, I’ll be better able to enjoy the remaining stuff—the stuff that actually adds value to my life.

Starting Monday, the Big Clean™ begins. Starting Monday, my life gets back on track.

It turns out that everyone dreams all of the time. Even if you never remember a single dream, you still dream at night. That’s just the way that the human body works.

Last night, or early this morning, I had a dream that I remember very vividly. It was long and story-like. And it was horrible.

In the dream, my girlfriend was pregnant. (Insert joke about that being horrible here.)

Things were going along well, and I was able to gather that, in this dream world, the pregnancy was a good thing and that we were very excited to have our first child.

Then it got bad.

I don’t remember a lot of the details at this point. Mostly it was just visceral, horrible emotion.

There was a miscarriage. There was crying. There was sadness. And there was some of the most intense emotional pain I have suffered, especially considering that it was a dream and none of it really happened.

When I woke up, I was seriously messed up. I was in a daze of depression and devastation for a couple of hours this morning before I left for work.

Shortly after waking up, I looked up miscarriage dreams online to try and see if I could figure out the meaning. Perhaps not surprisingly, everything about this type of dream had to do with women having them. Why would a man dream about his girlfriend or wife having a miscarriage, after all?

So, I pretty much have no idea how to interpret this dream, other than that it was the worst dream I have ever dreamt and that I’m still pretty damn shaken up about it.

I have rarely felt an emotional pain this raw and visceral, and never as the result of a dream.