It’s Canada Day here in Canada! Is that redundant?

Anyway as long-time readers of my blog have come to understand, I need to be supervised on the weekends — especially on long weekends. Self-injury is one of my problems.

This weekend was no exception.

Instead of me taking it easy and enjoying all of the sights on our place:

I decided to dust off our bicycles and adjust the brakes. After I was finished adjusting my brakes, I took the bike out for a test ride. Everything checked out well going uphill. I turned around and started on my way home — downhill.

The skid mark is the only evidence of my accident.

Cruising downhill, wind blowing by me, the bike felt good. Back brake felt good, front brake felt pretty responsive to light pressure.

It was as I was testing the front brake that someone who doesn’t know any better ran in front of the bike. My reaction was to squeeze the already-squeezed front brake harder. The reaction of my newly adjusted bike was to stop the front wheel without question or hesitation.

I know that my lines weren’t great, but I think I might have pointed my toes as I did a somersault over the handlebars. Mediocre dance form that was.

I’m now the owner of a modest case of road rash. I don’t have Bandaids long or wide enough to cover the scrapes, so DentalInsider suggested that I use Maxipads to cover them. Good suggestion, but I’m not sure how to get them to stick on. This will be maybe yet another use of duct tape.

Moral of story? If you’re masochistically inclined, know that softened water on open wounds is the same as salt water on open wounds.

For those of you who think that the practice of dentistry is merely a technical skill (like putting tires on a car), think again. Here’s a quote from a foreign-trained dentist who got in trouble for practising without a license here in Canada:

“I used to pull teeth, extractions, fillings, root canals, bridges, dentures. When you work like this, you gain the experience and you gain the ability.”

But Mr. Bytyqi said he and his wife, who is also a dentist, struggled to find their feet in the profession after they arrived in Canada as refugees in 1999. They have two children, aged nine and 11.

[...]

He also failed a Canadian eligibility exam four times despite taking courses to upgrade, he said. A letter from the Association of Canadian Faculties of Dentistry, dated November 2004 — after the last test Mr. Bytyqi said he took — states his score was 31 per cent.

Mr. Bytyqi said the exams relied too much on theory, which he had studied decades earlier.¹

Yeah, screw theory, let’s get down and dirty and just rip those teeth out of your head.

1. Story on Canada.com. [↩]

The deer in the backyard have been less visible this year than last. We’ve seen their tracks, but haven’t actually seen them. Not until this past Saturday.

I managed to grab my video camera and shoot a couple of minutes of footage. I got some really nice close ups. Unfortunately, my camera decided to malfunction during the video download and so I only got the first 30 seconds or so of what I shot. The really nice close ups aren’t in the 30 seconds.

The footage includes a shot of the deer feeder that we bought a short while ago.

We haven’t featured the parrots on the blog for a while. Here’s Sundance posing. Polly is in the background and if the picture had audio, you’d hear Tango screaming from the left.

This is one of the guys that has been making noise around our house lately. Not as cute as Woody, but almost.