I opened up this morning's Calgary Herald and made my way through a bunch of garbage about the Liberal Leadership Elections, eventually finding myself on page A6 and reading the headline "Thatcher set free on full parole."

Since May of this year, Thatcher had been granted day parole. I guess we all knew it was leading up to full parole eventually. However, Mr. Thatcher has never admitted any wrongdoing and has denied completely any participation in his wife's 1983 murder.

One of the conditions of Thatcher's parole is that he report all romantic relationships to the parole board. It appears, at least at face value, that he is going to avoid this altogether:

"I have seen people come back [to prison] because of a conflict with a partner," he said. "I would be hesitant to give someone that kind of power over me." (CBC)

It's interesting that Thatcher had actually served 22 years of his life sentence. The only other Saskatchewan-convicted-murderer I can think of that served the same or more time was David Milgaard, although chances are examples are simply escaping me. Of course, Milgaard was wrongfully convicted and served 23 years. John Murney seems to believe that Thatcher was also a victim of wrongful conviction. I, do not.

I wonder how the people of Moose Jaw and surrounding area will be taking his decision to relocate there.

I paid my first visit as a student to Mount Royal yesterday morning. It was just a simple, boring workshop of some kind but nevertheless it has again piqued my interest in actually getting myself back into school.

I will finally pick my classes tomorrow, although I'm sure I already know what I'm going to take. I just have to be sure to pick classes that will transfer properly. I'm quite excited to actually start class, which apparently will happen on January 8, 2007 - a little over a month away. I never thought I would actually be looking forward to going to class. I'm sure this will all pass shortly after they've begun, but what the hell. It doesn't hurt to hold a little bit of anticipation.

I don't usually post stuff I randomly find on the internet to my blog, but this begged for an exception. The video in question is of someone (Raffaele Picca) drawing a car from scratch in MS Paint. The video is 5:18 long and is a must watch.

I can't believe that producing something like that is even possible in Paint! Wow does that guy have skills. Although, I'm not overly certain being that proficient in MS Paint is really that marketable of a skill these days.

On November 21 an email arrived in one of my email inboxes from Karen Brownlee, a reporter for the Regina Leader Post. Unfortunately I didn't check that account until the 28th, by which time she already had enough information for her article about Saskatchewan bloggers, Sask. bloggers create online interactive community.

I was a little miffed at myself by coming up late when I had a chance to be mentioned in the article, but all is well. Ms. Brownlee does a nice job showing the community attitude that most of the bloggers in Saskatchewan take, and gives a couple of people good "face-time," namely Lance, who runs the Sask Blogs Aggregator and Saskboy among others.

It apparently has driven quite a few people to the Aggregator, and has resulted in a bit of a spike in traffic even here. Cool. Be sure to check the article out.

I've flown a lot of times in my life. So many that I can't actually count the number of flights. I've never been scared of flying. Never second guessed getting on a plane. Never got jumpy during turbulence. Never held my breath while landing. I am not aviophobic.

However, while I was sitting at the airport on Monday night waiting to board my flight to Saskatoon a sudden wave of fear struck me—hard. The weather was nice in Calgary and I had no idea what the conditions were in Saskatoon. I can think of no reason at all that I started thinking about plane crash statistics. I knew that WestJet had never had an accident, although it did have one incident where it had to make an emergency landing and no one was hurt. But for some reason I couldn't help but think that eventually a plane somewhere is eventually going to crash. Then I became convinced that it was going to be my flight.

I managed to reason my way out of this ridiculous notion—until the pilot started talking.

The take off was fine and I was calm, cool, collected and enjoying the city lights as they faded away below me. Then the pilot came on to update us. He let us know we would be climbing to 39,000 feet and then said "the current weather conditions in Saskatoon... well, I don't think we want to go there. It's very wintery, currently -11, overcast with light and blowing snow." Shit.

This made me a little nervous as all of my pre-flight thoughts came rushing back, but I was able to put them aside. We flew at 39,000 feet for what seemed like four minutes, then the captain announced our descent into Saskatoon.

Then the clouds came.

And they really came. I could barely see the tip of the wing. After descending for a minute or so, and still not being able to see the ground I started to get nervous again. Then we started banking a turn, which made me even more nervous, not knowing how close to the ground we were, wondering how the hell the pilots could possibly know.

I finally saw the ground just as we were flying above Saskatoon, and for a minute everything was alright. Then I remembered that there was blowing snow, and the plane started rocking back and forth as we were coming up to the airport—very close to the ground. The pilot managed to land the plane perfectly.

As I said earlier, I have never had any qualms about flying and have absolutely no idea where this mental episode came from. Maybe it has something to do with me stressing out for the three and a half hours prior to the flight trying to get a taxi. Anyway, I hope that this won't happen again, because I seriously love flying.

According to Wikipedia, fear of flying can be caused by fear of having a panic attack, of which I've had a couple. It can also be caused by fear of heights, as I was when I was a child. Maybe I should see a therapist. Maybe I am aviophobic.

On Saturday night I had another episode in which my right knee gave out. The last time I mentioned anything was on December 1, 2005 (My knees! Part III), and that was pretty much the last time I had anything to update with. I was supposed to have surgery in March, but wasn't able to make it back to Saskatoon in time for the surgery. Apparently, the surgeon's office tried to get ahold of me in September but were unable to, and no one (read: my brother) relayed any messages.

So anyway.. last night I went to the doctor's office to get my sore knee checked out, again. The kind doctor did a couple of tests and informed me that my right knee was massively screwed and needed to be looked at by a surgeon ASAP. He instructed me to come back at 8:20 this morning, so I'm going. I'll have more later today.

For the past few weeks a couple of friends and I have been hard at work on a new blog, that we are calling Too Real. The site is not quite feature complete yet, but the postings will be regular and from a plethora of writers. We've launched this afternoon with one article, and will continue to post 'em up regularly. So head on over, check it out, bookmark it, add the RSS feed to your reader or do whatever you do!

I've been watching a bunch of stand up on YouTube and the like lately, and I have decided that Irishman Tommy Tiernan is for sure the funniest man alive today. Tommy has been a mainstay at Just For Laughs for a while now, and was on this years JFL Comedy Tour.

Go search for Tommy Tiernan on YouTube, watch a few clips then head over to his website and buy one of his DVD. Do it. Now.

I found this great post about creative advertisements and just had to share. It's really quite ingenious the way some of these people thought about public spaces and ways to advertise their client's products.

I wish we had advertising like this in Calgary or Saskatoon, it would make for an interesting streetscape. Found via Samantha Burns.

I've been neglecting my blog again. It seems to me that this has become a rather regular issue for this particular slice of the web. I've been hit with a rather heavy dose of real life again lately. On Friday I attended Lana's Christmas party. Gillian's birthday fell on Saturday. Then Marc got back from Buffalo on Sunday. So, at least I've had excuses unlike some of the hiatus' we've seen around here in the past few months.

Anyway, I've got not much to say tonight, but I'll try to get back to some real content tomorrow.

I was looking through my RSS Reader and came across a video of a trip between Saskatoon and Prince Albert made by Thomas Friesen, found by way of Randall Friesen. I wish all one-plus hour trips could take this long. It's actually quite interesting to watch, so I suggest you head over.