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I started my career at Bell Canada with a lie. And now I had to somehow live up to it. The question from George Walker, my interviewer, was “Have you ever worked in a Central Office?” “A Telecom Central Office is the main switching facility for a telco, providing access to the Plain Old Telephone Service…

The Early Years I have been a very lucky man. Many times, my life has been a series of fortunate events, tied together by good fortune and propelled by the generosity of others – and sprinkled with liberal doses of happenstance and dumb luck. Oh there has been lots of misfortune along the way, as…

Oh, What a night! I was 11 years old when dad promised I could go with him to the horse races for the first time. I had watched him leave in the late afternoon on several occasions, for an evening at the horse races in London. Dad’s friend Vern Soper, was a standardbred horse breeder,…

I never wanted to be like my father. Not because he wasn’t a good man, but because I wanted to forge my own way. He was old. He had old ideas. He was set in his ways. He was inflexible. Or so my brain thought at the time. I think the first time I realized…

Democracy Dies in Darkness is a phrase attributed to the Washington Post, a media company that focuses on news and journalism across the globe. The primary meaning of the phrase draws a parallel to the idea of light and darkness with the colloquial terms of knowledge and ignorance that we often use. To say that…

As of this writing, I have been on this earth for 69 years. That is 828 months, 3,558 weeks, 25,105 days, 604,440 hours, 36,266,400 minutes….and counting I have learned a few things along the way. In no particular order:

The Revelation Our eldest son Trevor married the love of his life on New Years Eve. Joanna is a wonderful and beautiful woman, both inside and out. We are incredibly proud of him and happy for them. What has that got to do with coaching you might ask? Well, it dawned on me during the…

No matter the language you speak, nor the belief system that guides you, may there be peace and happiness in your world over this holiday season and throughout the years to follow. To all of you that have read my musings over the past year, a sincere “thank you” for your indulgence. I hope they…

“Nothing frightened me more than the faith in my young children’s eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors I’ve mostly admired eventually revealed chinks in their armour, cracks in their facades and tired feet of clay.” (Paraphrasing a favourite author, Greg Isles, in “Natchez Burning.”) We have two critical…

Now I completely understand if you are dead set against hunting – that is your prerogative. While this story is indeed about hunting, it is more about the folly around two seemingly intelligent human beings being toyed with by Mother Nature. It was humbling! I have hunted in the north since I was 17 years…