M-I-A-M-I

M-I-A-M-I

Today I've got another 'Retirement Ramblings' post for you from my dad, Peter.


No, not about Kourtney & Kim in Miami.

My-Ami

In 1993 our family went on a trip of a lifetime. I was given approval to go to Miami for 2-weeks of training at the US National Hurricane Center. It didn't take long for the family to decide that we'd make this the vacation to end all vacations. We tacked on an additional week to spend in Orlando and do the theme-park thing (Disney - Universal Studios - you name it).

For a couple of months all we talked about was our upcoming trip to Disneyworld and Miami. The anticipation was delicious. My Mom also joined us on that historic trip … we made a deal with her that we would pay for her to come with us if she would look after both kids on 3 or 4 of the evenings over the 3+ weeks so that Deb and I could go out for date-nights. Faith was 4 years old at the time and her brother, Christian, was 6. We drove down from Halifax, through the storm of the century (look it up if you don't believe it … the March '93 Superstorm is actually categorized by North American meteorologists as the real "storm of the century.") Needless to say we were idiots to drive through that weather, but hey, we weren't going to pass up a chance to go to Florida when my office was paying for the travel.



For 2 months we talked about the trip. Disney and Miami - Disney and Miami - that's all we talked about. On the 3-4 day drive through the storm and all the way down I-95, all we talked about was Disney and Miami - Disney and Miami. We were as excited as the kids were.

Toward the end of our Disney week Faith and Granny were talking about the rest of the week and the 2 weeks that would follow. My Mom said something along the lines, "It will be even hotter in Miami." To which Faith responded …. "Granny, how long until we go to YOUR-ami!"



This is one of those cute family stories we still cherish (right up there with Faith's reaction to meeting Minnie Mouse that same week - which is a story for another day).

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I will leave you with one last gem... My brother and I holding parrots. Oh yes.

I've always had a colourful personality

Happy Tuesday, lovelies.

Last night I was looking on Instagram and noticed that my pictures have been pretty colourful lately. I love posting my #OOTD (outfit of the day) a lot lately, and I have to smile at all of the colour in my wardrobe. I can't help but think that my grandmother would be so happy to see my daily outfits.

For the longest time my wardrobe mainly consisted of black, and grey. About two years ago I started incorporating purple, but that was it. My grandmother didn't like seeing anyone in black, especially not her granddaughter. I can't tell you how many times that sweet woman asked me to wear pink, red, or blue and I would just laugh.
'I don't look good in colour' I'd tell her, but she'd just shrug and smile.


These are clothes that I now own...

Last year my grandmother passed away. She made it clear that absolutely nobody could attend her funeral wearing black (also, it wasn't a funeral - it was a celebration of her life). I got the news that she had passed, packed my bags, hopped on a flight, and flew across the country (6,000+km) in about 10 hours. Once I got to Nova Scotia, my dad made it absolutely clear that I was not allowed to wear black to the funeral. I only brought black pants and jeans back to Nova Scotia. No Black, okay... jeans it was. Now for shirts, I only had black shirts. 'A-Ha!', I found a black and white floral shirt. My dad said it wasn't acceptable, so I went shopping and bought a bright pink ruffled tank top, and a bright blue ruffled tank top. I work the pink tank top and jeans (I know, it doesn't sound right) to my grandmothers celebration. Despite the fact that it wasn't what you would normally classify as 'appropriate' to wear when somebody passes away - I knew that Granny would have been happy that I wasn't in black.

Fast forward three months to the day that I fell in love with coloured pants. I found red jeans at the store and decided 'Why not?. I quickly became obsessed with coloured pants, and I started buying numerous pairs. I can't even remember the last time I bought normal jeans. This addiction honestly came out of nowhere and now (on a daily basis) I'm wearing Coral, Mint Green, Fuchsia, etc... I love it, and I know Granny would be so happy.

A couple of said outfits:




Anyway, the whole point of this post was to say:
Apparently I've always had a colourful personality and my family has known it my whole life.
This is a quick story that my dad wrote about me when I was a kid:

Side-note: Dad asked me to title this story 'Duh'.

When Faith was 3 or 4, her older brother was being a bit chippy with Debbie and I about something. Faith sat quietly (and joyfully) as we chastised him for his poor behaviour. He retorted, as kids are want to do, that his sister didn’t get the same treatment and that he was being singled out … that she was somehow, favoured(Obviously I was your favourite child, dad). We assured them both that we were consistent and fair.
He couldn’t let it go and persisted in a highly sarcastic tone, “Faith is so perfect and never gets in trouble, but I always get yelled at...” We chided his attitude and told him to stop being sarcastic.

“Well at least I understand what that means. I bet Faith doesn’t even understand what sarcasm is.” Then looking at her, he taunted in the most sarcastic of voices, “Do you?”
We had to stifle our snickers as she, with comedian-like timing, did a perfect imitation of a teenage Valley-girl as she tossed her hair and twisted her little body with hand on hip and said, “Duh!”


Yep – she understands sarcasm.

I think what we take from this story is that I've always had an understanding of sarcasm and I most definitely have always had a colourful personality.

The customer is always right.

Title Correction: The customer is always the customer.

Sometimes customers can be real jerks, and you wish you could yell at them - but you can't. So instead, you act as polite as possible, and the second you hang up the phone, you look a little something like this:



Today's blog is brought to you by my daddy for another 'episode' of Retirement Ramblings.

Being newly retired I've been enjoying some fond trips down memory lane (in my head, of course). This morning I recalled four funny stories, all from the mid to late 1980s when I worked at the weather office in Bedford, NS. I thought I would share:

I got a call from a man who wanted to know the water temperature at Lawrencetown beach, along the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. Canada was still in its infancy with the metric system and we were required to ask our citizens which units they wanted. Being a good and dutiful public servant I responded by asking him, "would you like that in Celsius or Fahrenheit?" He cheerfully replied, "Oh it doesn't really matter, I'm quite comfortable with both sets of units … but I guess you can give it to me in kilometres." I gave him the Celsius number but choked back the laughter while wondering if the number would mean anything to him at all.

Sometimes our citizens (clients) humble us with their confidence in our abilities. A meteorological colleague in Ontario once summed up his job perfectly, "Peter, my job is to manage expectations."

He is spot on. We all know that it's the national pastime to roast the weatherman and make small talk about how weather forecasts are useless.
The reality is that the majority of people have an unrealistic expectation of our capacity. Case in point … one of the guys received a call in February inquiring about detailed weather conditions in New Brunswick in July. Well the only credible information that is possible 5 months in advance is a climatological perspective about what happens on average, so my coworker provided this generic, but still useful, information.
The citizen picked up that the weather expert was not providing an authoritative nor definitive answer about what the day would behold, meteorologically speaking. He tried convincing this citizen that such details were beyond the scope of reality. The citizen really didn't buy it but acquiesced to a generic answer. An hour later my buddy had a similarly ludicrous call inquiring about detailed weather in June in PEI. Everyone in the office had a long chat about the unrealistic expectations that exist out there in the public.
The final straw though was a call from a woman who was helping her daughter plan her wedding. The daughter was getting married on the 3rd Saturday in August in Halifax (yes … about 6 months into the future) and she wanted to know what the weather would be like in Halifax. Without hesitation our expert questioned, "what time will the wedding be?"
Needless to say the rest of us were rolling on the floor.

Retirement Ramblings Part II

Happy Hump Day!

I know I told you all last week that dad was going to be posting for my once a month, or every few weeks... but I really felt like this story needed to be shared sooner rather than later. This is a situation that happened to my dad in the Spring of 2010. He sent this EXACT e-mail to everyone in my family and I remember laughing so hard and forwarding it to a few of my colleagues immediately. Enjoy!

Take it away Daddy!

*P.S. Sorry for the ridiculous gif's dad, I thought they added a little pizzazz*

I thought I'd share a workplace adventure that took place in April 2012. Here is a post-adventure email that I sent to the facilities manager at my workplace.

..............................
Date: April, 2012
From: Peter Bowyer
To: Everyone

Subject: Washroom Debacle

While I had noticed the modifications that have been made to the men's washroom, I had never taken particular care to observe the subtle details of the workings of those changes.

As in dozens (hundred?) of times before, I entered the washroom and observed that my entering triggered the interior lights to come on. The purpose of my visit required the use of a stall. While involved in a spell of brief contemplation I observed that the main lights went out, clearly as a result of a timer. No worries as the emergency lighting was still on. This did not afford much lighting in the stall, however, much lightning was not required.

While engaged in contemplation someone else came into the washroom, thereby, enabling the full washroom lighting once again. His (I assume it was a male) sojourn was brief and he left. Within a brief period the main lightning extinguished, leaving me in the once-again dim glow of the emergency lighting.

Apparently, my "contemplation" period exceeded the scheduled tolerance because while I was still in-stalled, the emergency lights also timed out (unfortunately, I wasn't looking at my watch to know what the end of the tolerance window was). As well, since I chose to not take my blackberry with me in order to enjoy a purer form of contemplation, I was in pitch blackness … no blackberry light was available to come to my rescue.

Having been somewhat observant in the weeks leading up to today's adventure, I had noticed a device in the upper corner of the washroom, and had wondered if it was either a motion or sound detector. I clapped my hands; it was not a sound detector. Blackness prevailed.

Unfortunately, I was a particularly undignified stage of my business rendering me incapable of standing in order to wave my arms to test if the device was a motion detector. Waving my feet out of the stall door was ineffective and my conclusion was that perhaps motion needed to happen at a higher level. So, in the dark, I extracted a toilet paper roll from the newly installed dispenser (one which I had never closely examined … so the extraction was a non-trivial process in the dark). Once extracted, I tossed it in the air in such a way that it would trip the potential motion-detector, and then fall straight back into my awaiting arms (in the dark). Here's where the adventure occurred … it was the only roll in the stall … and my stage of business demanded that I not lose hold of this particular roll.

The story had a happy ending because, sure enough, the device was a motion detector. The ascending roll turned on the lights in time for me to see the descending roll so that I could confidently catch it. Happily, everything came out all right (pun intended).

Lessons learned?

Take your BB with you to the washroom even if you seek pure contemplation … you never know when a little light will come in handy.

Study the toilet paper dispenser carefully in the light in the event that you need to make a roll-extraction in the dark.

Practice throwing toilet paper rolls so that they go straight up and come straight back down.

Observe multiple sequences of the twin-lightning timers in order to know confidently what the windows of tolerance (opportunity) actually are.

Train yourself to complete all business within those windows of opportunity.

Work is never a dull place if you're open to adventure! But I do wonder if our search for efficiency has gone just a tad too far?

Retirement Ramblings Part I

Happy Hump Day lovelies!

My dad sent me an e-mail last week - now that he is newly retired, he has a little bit more time on his hands to do the things he never used to be able to do. He told me that he read all of my blog posts and loved everything that I had written so far (aww, thanks daddy) - he then asked if he could write a guest blog post. Of course I immediately said yes - and then we decided that he would do a guest blog post at least once a month. He's got a ton of funny stories to share from his 30+ years working for Environment Canada.

Without further adieu, here is dad's first ever blog post:

Spreadsheets Tell You the Ugly Truth

I love spreadsheets.

Seriously, I’m a spreadsheet guy. Call it what you will: quirkiness; misguided interest; signs of a misspent youth; character flaw; or just plain lame. I love spreadsheets. While others engage in hobbies like sports, gambling, knitting, reading, driving, and movie-going, I play with spreadsheets.
More on this later.

So at the beginning of each year the municipal tax office sends me my property tax assessment. This includes a statement of what they believe to be the retail value of my house as well as the assessed value for tax purposes. They swear (and have done for the 3 decades we have owned houses) that there is no link between property tax and house assessment. They seriously must think we’re idiots. OF COURSE there is a link. Duh!

Anyway, we just got our assessment and I was, well, shocked … in an ecstatic kind of way. I know what we paid for the house … and with some mental arithmetic (not math … just arithmetic) I determined that, if they were right, then our assets had increased by $145,300 in just 8½ years. Wahoo! That’s an impressive average gain of just over $17,000 per year. I imagined myself trying to build up a savings account at that rate. I imagined having a savings account at all.

Now I’m an optimist. Not a goofy Pollyanna kind of optimist, but a results-based optimist. The difference between the two is that a results-based optimist is one who believes that things can and will get better, but he believes that while accepting the stark reality of the world in which he lives. I don’t look at the world through rose-coloured glasses. My career as a science guy has bred into me a healthy respect for data … and data are neither positive nor negative … they are just data. And where there are data, there is a grand use for spreadsheets.

I decided to put my spreadsheet hobby to use and create an elegantly simple construction of a cells and formulae that would calculate for me the reality (the truth) of my newfound assets, after weighing in the not-so-hidden liabilities inevitable when choosing a house over an apartment. We begin with my mortgage payments, averaging about $1200/month since we bought our house … a price that is comparable to the rent of a decent 2/3-bedroom apartment with underground parking. With the monthly mortgage payments swapping out for the rent, I pondered what other costs there have been that were unique to owning my house … costs that would have never arisen had we been renting an apartment. Turns out there were a few, all of which I fired into the spreadsheet.

The first one that came to mind was the water heater which chose to burst on December 22 … yes 3 days before Christmas … which set us back $740 to replace. If we had been in an apartment we would have never seen that cost. Next I thought about the $4,169 that we spent 18 months earlier to replace the furnace when it had given out. And of course that quickly reminded me of the $8,263 and $9,335 that we spent only a year before that to replace the roof and windows, respectively. Now I was on a roll: there was the $5,647 for new appliances since moving in and $1,800 for replacing a couple of those already (they just don’t make stuff like they used to); there was the $12,000 to turn an unfinished basement into fully finished; and of course the $10,000 in other renovations and home improvements along the way (paint, flooring and counter-tops aren’t cheap).



Phew … my profits were vanishing before my eyes. That’s when I started thinking about the routine stuff that an apartment dweller would never see, such as the $4,800 on lawn care that I’ve coughed up in the 8.5 years, not to mention the $33,600 in property taxes that my municipal government dogmatically declares is unconnected to my property value. Then my wife Debbie said, “and don’t forget the extra costs for power, oil and water that we pay compared to those lucky apartment people!” Crap! Even if I guestimated a monthly utility for apartment dwellers to be $150, my total costs for just those 3 “amenities” EXCEEDS theirs by another $25,249. I was quickly becoming a lapsed optimist. That’s when the dark side got hold of me and I started nickel-and-diming my “good fortune” to the point where I estimated that I’ve likely spent $800 in additional gas because of the idling in my driveway each year while I clear the ice and snow from my car windshield … something that underground parking would negate.

The final bit of reality hit when it occurred to me that in order to realize any of these “assets” I would need to sell my house in order to liberate said-equity. MLS listing fees are 6% (sure, you can do better, but experience says that the quickest and best sales come with the benefits of those fees). I intentionally withheld my assessed “retail value” until now: $400,100. The 6% fees on a full-price sale would be $24,006.

If you have taken the trouble to use even an abacus (you don’t need a fancy spreadsheet for this) you already know that my net profit on the house sits not at $145,300 … but rather, at an incredibly depressing $4,931!

Are you kidding me? That’s what I get for the 510 hours of renovations that I have personally put into the house … and the 300 hours of lawn care (35 hrs/year) … and the 120 hours of snow shoveling (15 hrs/year) … and the 52 hrs of windshield snow/ice clearing (30 min/week during the winter months) … and the 442 hrs of additional cleaning that a 4000+ sq.ft. house required over an apartment?

My wicked spreadsheet taunted me with the ridiculous reality that we put 1424 of extra house-only hours into a house that has netted us $4,931, for an effective wage of $3.46/hour. My final salary before retirement was 15x that … and my consulting fees are already coming in at more than 40x that.

I told Deb that my daughter is a genius because she lives in an apartment and that we need to do the same. ASAP!!!!!! (superfluous exclamation marks for effect) She said, “you’ve been playing on your spreadsheets again, haven’t you? Why don’t you take a break from that for a while because the snow’s really coming down and you need to go out and start shoveling?”

Before putting on my boots and gloves I went and deleted Excel from my computer and punched the monitor.



I hate spreadsheets.