Father of the Bridesmaid

An awakening reminder of how time sometimes slips away is to pay attention to your kids.

Yesterday, I shared a memory of a vacation in 2011. In the post, I included photos of Kid 1, who was 10 years old at the time.

Looking at those photos, it seemed like only yesterday.

A couple of weeks ago, DW and I went to our first wedding in decades. It's been so long since we last attended a wedding that we couldn't remember which wedding it was or whether we even had kids at the time.

There was one wedding, where DW was barely pregnant with Kid 1, and I accidentally tipped our hand in one photo, where a friend who took the picture noticed that I had my hand on DW's belly.

Oops.

But at this recent wedding, DW and I really noticed how time had flown. If our last wedding had, indeed, been when Kid 1 was still baking, this wedding involved Kid 1 as a bridesmaid.

She loved standing next to me, because with her heels, she was as tall as me. She kept ribbing me that she was taller in her shoes, but I'll let the photo that DW took of us show the truth.

She'll never really be taller than me but boy, does this photo ever make me realize just how much she's grown. Now, excuse me while I sob in a corner.

Happy Friday!

Riding the Waves

"I've never swum in the Pacific," I told DW, as we were watching the sun approach the horizon on Playa Santa Teresa, in Costa Rica, last February.

"What about when we were in California?" she asked, referring to our trip in 2016.

"You and the girls swam in the ocean," I said. "I watched our things on the beach."

"What's stopping you from going in now?" DW held out her hand to take my D-SLR and tripod, and my hat and glasses. I was dressed in bathing trunks and a quick-dry t-shirt, with my Keens on my feet.

I held onto my 360-degree camera, which was on an extendible, three-metre selfie stick. That, I would take into the ocean with me.

I needed some video footage of the massive waves that were crashing in.

So, I've finally swum on both coastlines: the Atlantic and the Pacific. I've been in the Atlantic Ocean several times—in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, and if the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, in New Brunswick, counts, then there, too.

And then, there's Cape Cod.

In August, 2011, we made a last-minute decision to vacation in Dennis Port, on the southern shore. It was a very last-minute decision: DW found an available cottage for rental on a Saturday morning, booked it, and within an hour the entire family was packed up in our Honda Odyssey and on the road.

We pulled into the cottage around 10 pm that evening.

One of the nice things about the cottage was that it was right beside an old cemetery. The neighbours were dead-quiet. But the best thing about the cottage was that it was a short drive from a great beach with excellent sand and perfect waves: big enough to play in but not too big as to have us worry about the kids playing in them.

While I spent most of the time on the beach, watching our things, DW and the girls took our wave boards and played in the surf. I captured tons of photos of the three, having a blast.

At one point, DW came out of the water and reached for my D-SLR. "Go have fun," she said. "I'll watch our stuff."

She managed to capture me on the wave board, having fun, and spending some daddy-daughter time with Kid 1.

I don't go in the water very often because if my head goes under the surface, my sinuses often give me grief the next day. But on this day, in August of 2011, just as it was in February of this year, it was worth it.

I have shared some of the bigger adventures that we had on this Cape Cod getaway, be it whale watching, car woes, or avoiding a hurricane, so if you want to know more about this trip, you can click the related links.

But this day was one of my favourites of the trip.

Happy Thursday!

Stormhour

Exploring 1,000 Islands

Of course, we didn't paddle around a thousand islands.

We did, however, take our kayaks around about 20 of them.

We've adopted a habit of packing up our car and heading out to various rivers and lakes almost every weekend for the past couple of months. Our friends, Nina and Brian, have joined us on all of these outings, too.

We refer to ourselves, on our group chat, as Paddlefolk.

I haven't attached my video cameras on every trip, but so far this year, I've recorded four of our adventures. I wish I had recorded the weekend when we practised rescue moves, because I rocked. I never knew how easy it was to pull myself out of the water, in the middle of a lake, and get back into the cockpit.

I'll make a video of this another time, this summer.

So far, I've published two kayaking videos, this season, to my YouTube channel, with a third one coming on August 3 and the fourth one in edits. The latest one dropped on Saturday and you can view it here.

We visited Gananoque in June and paddled around the 1,000 Islands to the immediate southwest, on the St. Lawrence River. We covered more than 13 kilometres over about five hours, which included several stops and a picnic lunch on one of the islands.

We saw fish, found a shipwreck, and explored a tiny but interesting bay. And much more.

Have a look:

And, as always, if you like the video, give it a thumbs-up and subscribe to my channel. I'd like to hit 300 subscribers by the end of the year.

The next two videos were recorded closer to home. Stay tuned...

Productive Off My Feet

My feet just can't catch a break.

A few months ago, after seeing countless ads on my Instagram feeds and in the margins of my Yahoo mail account, I decided to buy a pair of Vessi shoes. I have several pairs of walking shoes but none that I can wear in the rain without soaking my feet, and I was able to apply a discount code, so I thought I'd roll the dice and try them out.

It's the first time that I've ever bought footwear online.

Ten days later, the shoes arrived on my doorstep and I was excited to try them on. They fit more snugly than a regular pair of shoes but that is by design. They're 100-percent waterproof so you don't want any gaps that can let water in.

I wore them around the house for a couple of days before taking them outdoors, and the only issue that I noticed was that if I sat with my feet up for any length of time, my feet would become numb: especially, my left foot.

That foot has hardware in it, from my reconstructive surgery, and so the top of it bulges just a bit more than my right foot. All of my shoes are more snug on that foot.

That's the price of a pain-free foot that I wouldn't trade for the world.

I started wearing my Vessis outdoors, especially on rainy days. I'd step in puddles that I would avoid in any other shoe. One time, while photographing a memorial site, I accidentally stepped in some grass that was flooded and the water came right up to my ankles.

But my socks and feet stayed perfectly dry.

However, after a weekend in Toronto, where DW and I walked everywhere—and me in my Vessis—I noticed a small blood blister had formed on the ball of my right foot. It didn't hurt so I ignored it, confident that it would heal in a few days.

I wore my other shoes, most of the time, though I would put my Vessis on if it was raining and I was only going a short distance. (Though, I wore them for the photo walk that I lead, in June).

The blister, which started deep under my skin, was making its way to the surface, and that's when the trouble started. I began to play with it while watching TV.

One evening, I absentmindedly started picking at it, while watching TV, and suddenly, it began to bleed. A lot. Without noticing, I had created a small puddle on the hardwood floor of our bedroom (thankfully, my feet were dangling off the bed).

I cleaned the wound (and the floor), applied some antibiotic ointment, and covered the wound in a bandage before heading to bed.

In the morning, I noticed that some blood had soaked the bandage but thankfully, did not get on our sheets. I cleaned the wound, applied more ointment, and placed a fresh bandage over the wound, which seemed to form into a berry-like bubble.

Walking on it was a problem, as I always seemed to burst that bubble. Over six or seven weeks, I had gone through dozens of bandages (which was actually for the best, as many of those bandages were at least a decade old). I used them all up before opening one of our first-aid kits that is packed with several boxes of newer bandages of various sizes and uses: waterproof, flexible, and breathable.

When it seemed like my foot wasn't getting any better and continually bled, I made an appointment to see my doctor. She inspected the wound and, to my relief, told me there was no infection. I was, however, treating it in the worst way by applying the antibiotic ointment and keeping it constantly covered.

It needs to air out, she told me. Keep it bare for a couple of days, at least until it dried out. She applied some nitrogen to it, which made it scab up, and wrote me an order to have some blood work, with which she would follow up in a couple of weeks.

The blood work was to determine whether I was diabetic or not. The wound shouldn't have been taking this long to heal, and because my father was diabetic, I was at risk.

I meet with her to discuss the results at the start of August.

So, for more than a week, I've tried to stay off this foot as much as possible. I sit barefoot while I'm working at my home-office desk and whenever I watch TV. I only apply a bandage when I have to go out and when I do, I wear my spongiest shoes and tread lightly.

It's getting better.

This past weekend, I bowed out of kayaking with DW and my friends, and I spent most of my time barefoot and sitting at a desk, editing video and producing content for my YouTube channel. Not only did I upload one video to my channel, which I'll share tomorrow, but I also produced a second video that will be available on my channel on August 3.

And I've begun work on yet another video. Plus, I wrote today's, tomorrow's, and Wednesday's blog posts.

Who knew that a pair of shoes could lead to me being so productive?

I still love my Vessis. They are comfortable (even though they produced a blister, I wasn't in pain while wearing them) and they keep my feet perfectly dry in the wettest of conditions.

But for now, I'm sticking to my other shoes.

Stay tuned for more news on my foot...