Monday, July 08, 2002
John C. arrived late this afternoon, driven over to our place by some of his Mother's relations who live in Etobicoke. He's my second cousin, the son of my cousin Howard. I had head a lot about him, but this was the first time I had ever met him.
He's 19. He's a bit stocky, like a rugby player (which he played extensively in school), and a bit shorter than I expected -- he obviously didn't get the Roberts' tallness gene. His face also looks uncannily like his father's.
I invited him out to the backyard, brought out a couple of beers and we started chatting. The beers broke the ice and sitting in the Muskoka chairs in the back garden was relaxing. In this way I caught up on about 19 years of family history: what his mother is like, what led to the divorce between his mother and his father when he was 1, growing up in Nottingham, what his step-mother is like, why he's here (to attend a friend's wedding), about what life in a British Public school is like and his rough plans for the future now that he is about to enter college. He's a cool kid who seems to have his head on straight.
Afterwards I took him on a rough tour of The Beaches. Went down to the boardwalk, along and then up to Queen Street and made our way back. I wanted to go into the local music shop to grab a copy of the latest Bowie CD, and it turns out he is a big Oasis and Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. Cool. ;-) CD prices are about half of what they are in the U.K. (ouch!), so I expected him to snag some things but the local shop didn't have a particular CD he was looking for.
I also pointed out the cool clothing shops, such as the famous Overkill shop and the skateboarding-wear shop. Also the various cheap places to eat, of which there are plenty: several pizza places, three or four all-day breakfast restaurants -- and then there's the various pubs.
This may seem an odd thing to say, but I like his politics. Or more to the point, his more Liberal politics makes a refreshing change from that of his Thatcherite-era grandparents. (What is interesting is that my Father was a life-long Liberal -- ditto my Mother for that matter -- though he came from the same background). Love my overseas Aunts and Uncles very much, but I remember wincing inside whenever the topic of politics came up with them.
That evening one of our neighbours had a birthday party, and we took John along with us. I remember him having a spirited conversation with the local radio DJ Jay over the merits of Oasis. Afterwards I joined him back at the Muskoka chairs in our and talked into the wee hours. I got the distinct impression that he felt he had "arrived in heaven". I could tell he was beginning to like it here.
Last Friday (the 6th) I posted a couple of pieces to my site. Then, I went to check to see how the entries looked on the site.
But I the page wouldn't load. As many of you may already know, this has happened from time to time. I knew my domain was set to expire in a few days, and wondered if that may have been the problem. So I renewed the domain for another year and didn't think about it again until Monday.
Monday I checked again. Still down. So I typed in my Web host's URL: www.hosting-canada.com. Also a dead page... Uh oh. Not good.
I did a Google search on them for their contact phone number and support email address, pulling them both from cached pages. The phone was never answered. There was no reply to my email (though it didn’t bounce). So I ended up having to get a new Web host service. Changing the DNS to the new server was the trickiest part, involving several faxes to Network Solutions, since my old, defunct robertsk@wave.home.com email was listed as the confirmatory email address for captmondo.com’s owner.
Oddly enough, after I’d done all of the work I heard again from the rep at hosting-canada. The note canceling my account with them got through, and all of a sudden they were up and running again, but by that point it was too late. It’s too bad, since on the whole they’ve been pretty good to me, but I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole switching the DNS again – and besides, I didn’t imagine that outage they had.
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