My family has long told the following story about my father, and at his recent funeral, I included it in my eulogy.

It seems that my dad was visiting his parents in Texas, and borrowed their car to drive to the mall. Once he had finished shopping, he returned outside to the enormous parking lot and realized that he had forgotten where he had parked.

It’s a common enough story, but my dad was both the very image of the absent-minded professor, and also far from automotively inclined. A mall security guard recognized his confusion, and tried to help him narrow down the possibilities.

“What make is the car?” asked the guard.

Pause.

“I don’t know.” A reasonable answer for someone borrowing an unfamiliar vehicle.

“Okay then, so what colour is it?”

Longer pause.

“I… I’m not sure.”

“Sir, you are on your own.”

My dad eventually found the car after an exhaustive search for the little disability wheelchair icon on the licence plate. Turns out it was a navy Buick.

Naturally, the story has been an endless source of amusement to the rest of us, and not one that we feared repeating.

Which brings us to today.

Walking out of my class at the College this morning, I realized that, not only had I forgotten where I had parked, but also the make, model, and colour of the car I had driven up the hill. You see, we traded our truck to a friend for her moving day, and borrowed her small car in its place.

The College’s parking lot isn’t that large, so it only took me three tries of the key before locating the copper Chevy.

And I’m not even a professor. Sheesh.

Carole and I are excited to be attending our my first Dawson City Music Festival this July: the tickets and room are bought and booked.

We then checked out the proposed slate of bands, and if you should happen to open all of the links on that page at once, something like the following will burst forth from your speakers:

Twenty-eight ungodly seconds of the 2010 DCMF (630KB MP3)

Listening to ‘em all at once is a real time-saver.

Or, if you respond better to an overload of visual stimuli, here are all of the bands’ glamour shots stacked one on top of another. Try to spot your faves:

This sort of thing would be much more common if the concept of time did not exist.

Oh, and why is it that every band has a MySpace page? I though the trend-setters had long ago moved to Facebook. Although, judging by some of the bands’ websites, “trend-setting” is far from the correct term when it comes to Internet presence.

"If spring came but once a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change."

"Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done."

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

With apologies to Lewis Grizzard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Matthew Arnold, and Rainer Maria Rilke, respectively.

Carole’s mother catches her flight from Timmins to Whitehorse today. Unfortunately, she’ll have to wait in the Vancouver airport overnight before boarding the plane for that last leg. They also make you claim your checked luggage for evening layovers, but at least YVR has some pleasant waiting areas — including benches that don’t have armrests all the way along so that you can actually stretch out — and lots of West Coast First Nations’ art to admire.

If colouring books actually contained drawings of mothers-in-law, I'm sure they would look something like this, but perhaps even more spangly.

Once she arrives, she’ll have a chance to rest and recover in the room we formerly called “the office,” but should be properly named “the how-high-can-we-stack-unnecessary-possessions room.” This week’s task is to convert those two things into simply “the guest bedroom, filled with bright blue bins that are, yes, stacked to the ceiling.”

Then comes the awkward decision of what to call my mother-in-law: Mom? Lorraine? La belle-mère? That lady trapped under the fallen bright blue bins?

I think I’ll skip the French option, as the various forms of address for types of mothers is confusing to the English speaker with only high-school-level bilingual credits:

I believe I’ll stick with trusty old “Lorraine.” Bienvenue au Yukon.