daveb: personal

monday i go to bolivia · Oct 18, 04:04 pm

so in a few days i’m jumping on a plane and heading off to bolivia. i think i’m spending 17 hours in travel. i fly to toronto, then to santa cruz, brazil (300ft above sea level) then to cochabamba (6000 ft above sea level) then over the two weeks i’m in bolivia we’ll travel up to potosi (14,000ft) then down to la paz (12,000ft) to fly back to toronto.

i’ll keep a ‘nose bleed’ tally.

while i’m there we’ll be meeting the people of bolivia and building relationships so we can provide support once we’re back in canada.

stay tuned for more updates.

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jasper to lake louise · Sep 8, 08:00 am

starting about now i’ll be hefting myself up onto the saddle and pointing my bike towards lake louise. starting in jasper.

my goal is to ride 220km in one day with 2 mountain passes between me and my destination.

the terrain

this image shows the trip in the opposite direction. this trip also breaks it up into a sane 7 day trip.

i’ll take some snaps as i ride and post them so you can see how it all went.

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tour de young life · Sep 6, 10:00 am

this weekend i’ll be riding my bike from jasper to lake louise in one day to raise money for young life – and darb erickson in particular.

i’ll be riding 220km with 2 mountain passes, so hopefully my training will put me in good stead.

if you want to support the cause and my fundraising goal – head over here and you can donate online.

for more info on the event you can head to ironbike.ca

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happy birthday to me. · Aug 7, 02:57 pm

it’s my birthday today – so i decided to do something nice for someone else.

i’m sure i’ll get a gift or two today, so i thought it would be the perfect day to start an account at kiva.org

through this fantastic group i can lend money to the working poor all over the world and help someone make their community a better place.

of course i’m also holding out for a new work bench for the garage – so we’ll see how it all turns out.

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thor and the mystery pants · Jun 12, 07:11 am

my brother paul and i shared an apartment for a while in the arlington apartments on 100ave and 106 street in edmonton, alberta. it was a great place with enormous character, cheap rent and very little pestilence.

along with the character of the murphy-bed-closet, enormous windows and black and white tile on the kitchen floor there were some interesting people who lived in the building. one of these people was thor. he was scandinavian and looked exactly like a storybook norseman. he was tall, blond, and was the only person i’ve ever known who could make one of those metal helmets with the two horns sticking out the top really work.

he lived in a cheap apartment because he had an interesting bachelor suite in the basement where he had fashioned a fascinating loft. i went down to see his place once and he had reclaimed scrap metal and either welded or weaved it into a sort of second floor, sort of bunk bed type landing in his apartment. there were terribly precarious edges where sharp metal poked out here and there, but every night he would climb up onto this tenuous structure and sleep. it was large enough to hold several people, and i tried it out to see how sturdy it was. the space was remarkably comfortable and peaceful. i can’t imagine what the landlord said to him the first time he saw it.

i found out through some of our conversations that he had lived in many places in the world: some exotic and some ordinary and he was currently working as an architect in a well known and established architectural firm in town. he said he knew how to do that sort of stuff.

one day paul and i woke up, bumbled around our arlington apartment a while, and one of us eventually opened the front door. outside was a pair of pants – neatly folded. it took us a while to sort out what to do. eventually (i was a student at the time) i tried them on to see if they would fit. the smart thing to do would be to wash them first, but it wasn’t that sort of an apartment, or time in my life.

they didn’t fit.

we gave it a couple of days to see if in our daily social rounds we could sort out who had dropped off pants on our doorstep.

by logical deduction of who would could gain access to our building, but wouldn’t knock when dropping off pants, we decided it must be thor who left us these trousers.

i went down to talk to him, and he said that they were a nice pair of pants, and they didn’t fit him. he thought we might get some use out of them, so he dropped them off, but it was late, and he didn’t want to wake us over pants.

thor also mentioned he hung out at the petroleum club on occasion. i have no doubt that he was quite wealthy, or could have been so if he had any interest.

he was a kind, genuine person, and one of the people i am sad i didn’t keep in touch with.

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