things I miss

  • My friend Ken
  • The redness of my hair (It's going all blonde.)
  • Playing in snow drifts up to my hips
  • The walk to the community pool
  • Summer vacation
  • Old high school friends
  • Saturday morning cartoons
  • My grandfather, sometimes
  • The back grounds of my first grade school
  • Climbing cherry trees
  • What it felt like, as a young person, to discover things for the first time
  • The excitement that led up to Christmas
  • The way they used to show old movies on TV all night, instead of paid programming
  • Sneaking out to the livingroom to watch those movies
  • The simple pleasures in train travel as a child
  • How huge the Montreal train station seemed to me when I was young
  • Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker as Doctor Who
  • That moment of triumphant glory when you caught up with the ice cream man
  • The whole process of buying school supplies
  • The party dresses I had when I was little
  • Goody bags from birthday parties
  • Queenston Mall (They've torn it down to make room for big box stores.)
  • The huge tree in the corner of the parking lot of that mall, which, to me, bore a striking resemblance to the tree on Gilligan's Island
  • Chocolate malts
  • Financial freedom
  • Being thinner
  • The Yorkshireman
  • The large tree branches that shielded my bathroom and bedroom windows
  • Stealing rhubarb out of my cousins' grandfather's garden
  • Picking coal up off the train tracks across the street from my aunt's house in Cape Breton
  • Sitting at beachside cafes on the beach by the Mediterranean at night
  • Wandering around the city near dawn when I was a teenager
  • The rooftop benches and fountains at the art gallery. (Thanks for the sculpture garden, but couldn't you have put it off to the side a bit more, and left some fountains in?)
  • My old public high school. The Catholic one, not so much
  • The little cardboard trains they used to hand out to children on long train journeys on CN and VIA
  • The hilarity of the way my grandfather used to swear in his sleep
  • Certain aspects of *nix/BSD, like:
  • control
  • not having my whole system go down because of one flakey process
  • not being forced to reboot every time I installed something
  • The chubby Polish sausages my grandmother used to get for me when I was little
  • The older, simpler, days of the Web, when it seemed a little more amusing; or perhaps that's just the eyes of the newly curious talking
  • tenderness
  • the excitement I felt when I first became interested in Formula One racing
  • feeling connections with people
  • my old sense of self-respect