Picture This

Another group set.  This one has a lot of history to it.  This has to be around '97 or '98.  Our departed buddy Steve let us use his cottage in Caissie Cape to set our equipment up and record music for our cassette demo for YQM.  We kind of were just a 2-some at the time, with a fellow named John, who played some pretty wicked guitar.  I guess we wanted to get a shot of my drums, or the boulder we had to put in front of them because it kept slipping.  You can see Pete with his bass on the left, and me decapitated behind the drums.  Fun fact about Pete... he's ambidextrous on guitar.  He can play left handed and right. And here's John and Pete doing some backup vocals, probably on a song I sang lead on at that moment.  In YQM, we all sang, with Pete writing most stuff, and I wrote a couple and sang on three, including one of Pete's songs, 'Amazon Girls', which you can find on YouTube if you look it up.  It's just a jokey little slide show...

Here's a blast from the '96 past.  I'm putting a few in one shot here, because it makes a bit more sense, where these all come from one particular space in time.  This is my buddy Pete here, he of course being my friend since teen years.  In '96, KISS did their famous Reunion Tour, and Pete and other friends Tim and Al, and myself, traveled to Montreal via Tim's car to stay at a hotel for a couple of nights and see the show.  Tim and Al decided to go downtown in Montreal the night before, while Pete and myself were content to hang out in the hotel.  This picture here is actually from after the show, though.  This is of course Pete doing his pretty-boy pose.  🤣 And of course, naturally, we had to get a shot of myself with my KISS tour book.  This was a very good time in my life.  Our daughter was born, I got to see my original heroes in concert, hit Montreal, I had the best job of my life that I'd just started working, and the world generally...

  Meet Mr. and Mrs. Hansen, our lovely next door neighbours at what looks to be maybe the mid '90s.   Obviously this is my wife's parents, Elmer and Martha.  There are some changes since this particular period, probably the most glaring one being Kiwanis Pool still standing at the right of the picture.  Over the years that pool became an issue of neighbourhood safety and it closed down, with the newly opened YMCA to pick up the slack. The house that the Hansens occupied from 1985-present day was once the McGivney house.  I kind of knew those folks.  They were in the 'hood with the rest of us, but not quite in the same group as mine.  Mary lived there, who turned out to be a co-worker of Janice's at the drug store up the street.  She tragically passed not long ago.  I believe her brother Ronnie, also.  I remember I mowed the lawn for Mr. McGivney a few times.  It was difficult!  A lot of hills and uneven ground for a skinfl...

How about this!  Witness Boss Janice at Green Gables on High Street.  I wish the picture was clearer. You can see the Krispy Kernels snacks on the pegboard by the window, with what might be newspapers, I believe.  It's obviously night time here, most likely evening.  Janice did work many night shifts, which is crazy to think about today.  I was the main midnight shift guy, at least at first, and that was quite a rough neighbourhood.  I dealt with two robberies in my GG days, the second one was at this store.   This particular building may have been a Fina gas station in its infancy, but now was a Wilson's gas bar with the store.  Janice ran it quite well, but the longer we were there, the more joy was lost.  I think we left at a pretty good time, though at that moment, times were about to get pretty hard. But these are the first days of Janice and me being together.  We'd met in '85 at the other Green Gables store, now a Papa John's...

Back in our old Green Gables days, when Janice was running the store on High/John streets, we were doing fairly okay.  I'd rebounded a bit from a pretty rough couple of years, and we thought we'd treat ourselves to see Madonna on the Girly Show Tour in Montreal on October 23, 1993.  It was just Janice and me, and we flew out for a weekend jaunt, and just taking a plane ride is a pretty great treat for us.  On the flight back we actually witnessed the twilight skies, where one end is dark and the other's had the sunset.  Beyond beautiful. The concert was enjoyable enough, but we were in the nosebleeds at Olympic Stadium.  It was so far away that the binoculars we had were best used to watch the video screens.  And a punk behind us spilled his beer all over the tour shirt I bought.  When I brought it back to the tables and told them what happened, they replaced it, though. A couple of restaurants we went to were absolutely great, for our palates anyway....

Here's a blast from the pretty distant past now.  Our old boy Rocky the cat, who followed Janice and me from Emmerson Street, to Pinder Avenue in Riverview, then on to Satinwood Drive where we lived from '93 to '98, then finally back here at the house.  He passed in '04, I believe.  It was really hard to take.  Still is. It got so hot in that basement some summers that we gave Rocky haircuts to help him stay cool.  In those days, basement apartment life was the way; the most affordable places were houses with finished basements.  I bet Rocky really liked moving to our house here, where he had lots of room to run around. Everybody loved Rocky.  I got him from a friend of mine named Debby, whose friends owned him and had to give him up when he was two because a baby came into the picture and he was leaving ... presents under the crib.  When I met him, he wouldn't leave me alone.  I'd never seen a cat quite so sociable as that. So I brought him ...