Links & Blinks

A few weeks ago, our parents took a vacation to B.C. While they were away, my sister hatched a plan to give them an excellent birthday gift. My brother, my sister, Cam and I teamed up to completely remodel their two-car garage. My brother bought and installed a new garage door opener, which my dad has been dying to have for a couple of years now. My sister worked her butt off for two weeks, mudding the drywall and a number of other things. And Cam and I joined the fun, spending tons of time over one weekend painting and cleaning and installing new window blinds.

It was an excellent surprise that utterly astonished our parents. Flabbergasticated. My dad wrote about his reaction here and my mom wrote abour her reaction here. Congrats a la famille!

(And now for something completely different...)

Just for fun, I recommend that you visit the website http://wordle.net/create. You can enter a URL or type in a paragraph of text and it creates a randomized graphic with the words. Click the "Randomize" button at the bottom and it will change the layout. The trick is that words that are used more frequently appear larger. I plugged in my blog and it generated the picture shown above, and you can see that I speak fairly frequently about my loving wife Cam. ;)

As for sports, I happened to come across an ancient article written by the legendary Bill Russell, 11-time NBA champion. It was published in Sports Illustrated 1965, and he explains various tricks that his teams used to psych out their opponents. Fascinating insight into what it takes to get that competitive edge...

Finally, my good friend Battle has created his own photostream on flickr. He's still out around London creating his awesome graffiti. Keep up the good work, mon ami!

Nicest Thing Ever

Over on Taken4Granted, my dad writes about a recent event for our family. My mom and my sister were in Toronto shopping and they were just about to get onto the 401 highway when the tie-rod for one of the front tires fell apart. Had that happened on that 401, it could have been a major accident.

My dad relates how the tow truck driver happened to come from China. Since my mom and my dad have been there, and since my sister taught English there, the driver went out of his way to pull some strings and tow the car for free all the way from Toronto to London, giving my mom and my sister a ride along the way. It saved everyone a huge headache. In my dad's words, "That was the greatest act of kindness that I have experienced in my life."

That statement kind of shocked me. Seriously? A complete stranger did the nicest thing ever? Shouldn't we expect some family member or close friend to have done the nicest act of kindness in our lives? What does something like this really mean?

So I'm reviewing my life a bit today, trying to consider this over-the-top form of generosity. Why would someone go that extra mile? Does it come down to the type of person you are? Is it based on relationship, or some moral code, or some Good Samaritan example? Maybe it's mere circumstance - if you don't have serious problems, there's less opportunity for extravagent gestures.

I can think of two moments in my life when someone has told me that something I did for them was "the nicest thing anyone has ever done." One of those times cost me very little but it meant the world to the other person. The other act was physically almost impossible to do but I pulled it off and it's still a cool story.

On the receiving end, there are a few times in my life that stand out for me. My wife Cam planned a number of activities and gifts and other things to celebrate my recent 30th birthday, including a surprise breakfast with many of my friends. That was the best birthday ever. And before we were dating, I used to work as a manager at AV-Base Systems and when I left Cam organized an amazing scrapbook to commemorate my time there. I aptly called that the Best Parting Gift Ever and it's my favourite single gift of all time.

And what about you, Dear Reader? Can you think of anything that anyone else has ever done for you that just amaze you to this day? And can you think of something that you have done that had an impact like that on someone else?

My Everything

We're married!!!

It all happened on Saturday June 21st, 2008. It was wonderful to have so many family and friends join us and help celebrate such an amazing day. Cam and I have so many incredible memories.

Rather than detail every part of the day, I just wanted to list a few of the highlights...

• After the Bridesmaids had completed their processional, I close my eyes and offered a quick prayer to God to thank Him. When I opened my eyes, there she was. She was so beautiful she brought me to tears in an instant...


• During the entire ceremony, I couldn't take my eyes off of her. I hardly noticed the audience at all, and she was definitely glowing.


• Cam and I served tea to our parents in a traditional Asian ceremony to thank them for raising us. Then we all poured four different colours of sand into one vase to symbolize the joining of our families and our lives.


• I wasn't actually able to get through saying all of the vows that we had written for each other. I was too emotional with the final two sentences and all I could do was mumble the final word. Cam and I were both standing these crying and completely in love.

The entire day took place on my parents' property in Dorchester. The ceremony took place along the Thames River and the reception was held inside a large tent that we had rented.

• My parents worked so hard to groom the landscape, my brother was our caterer, my sister handled desserts and Cam's mom cooked a lot as well. Add in all of the work that our friends did with the flowers and so many other arrangements and we couldn't be more grateful. There are too many people to thank here, actually, but we'll be sending our thanks to everyone individually within the next few months.


• It rained in the morning but fortunately that dissipated around noon and allowed us to set up. It was a bright day with a cool breeze but nicely overcast skies, which gave consistant lighting for the pictures. The best part was that the rain held on just long enough for us to make our official introduction at the beginning of the reception. And then once the rain came, it downright poured! A bunch of my guys immediately jumped up, suits and all, to grab the "walls" for the tent and hang them up. It was hilarious! Cam was so concerned about how wet my friends got but they were awesome (like Abe). As my dad said, that tent was certainly worth the money that day.

Finally, we had the best photographer ever. Joee Wong and his assistant were there for about ten hours, capturing the setting and the casual shots and the formal photos and the intimate ones. We saw a selection of his final work yesterday and the photos were stunning. As one friend commented, they attended the wedding and these photos look even better than real life!

In any case, I have included a selection of our photos here and you can see more on Joee's blog. And once again, our thanks to everyone. We couldn't be happier to be married, the day was fabulous and now we can look forward to spending the rest of our lives together!

The Big Three-Oh: Just The Beginning

The big three-oh rolled into my life yesterday like a slow boulder that is gradually tumbling down a low hill and it refuses to be stopped by anything. Wow, has my life ever changed since my 29th birthday. I now have a brand-new vehicle, I have the best job that I have ever had, I live in a cool apartment in Mississauga...

And the most important thing, by far, is that I am in love with the girl of my dreams, and Cam and I will be getting married next month.

My life has changed so much in the past year. It's nothing that I could have planned or hoped for or even expected. I just look back on my life, and on Cam's life, and it's like God was preparing us so that we could find each other at exactly the right time. Everything that we have experienced and the people that we have become has created this perfect supernova that explodes across the night sky. God is amazing, and Cam is My Everything.

I have been blogging regularly since April 2004, that's a total of 452 blog posts. Recently, my blogging has taken a back seat to wedding stuff. Not just our own wedding but also that of Richard & Tara and Joel & Lindsay. These guys are two of my dearest friends and it's been so much fun to be involved with their weddings. (Joel and & Lindsay are gettin' hitched later today and Richard & Tara were wed last month.) Throw in moving to an entirely new city, starting a new job, changing churches and who knows what else and it's obvious that my writing had to take a backseat.

Well, that's not entirely true. I actually have written quite a bit in the past few months but it's usually directed towards the love of my life. I used to write about things that God has been showing me and ways that I have been growing personally. In the past year, I have learned so much about love and life that it would be almost impossible to get it all down with some scribbles. So much of that is due to Cam and her deep wisdom, mixed in with plenty of God's grace. So while I have learned more during this period that I have any other time, most of it is just between me, Cam and The Big Guy.

I just want to thank all of my friends for their well-wishes, and I'm really looking forward to the best year of my life. This journey that Cam and I will be sharing will be the most thrilling and fulfilling experience ever and I can't wait to see the kind of surprises that God has in store for us next!

Richard & Tara: Part II

At long last, I managed to post the second half of Richard & Tara's wedding day movie, courtesy of Ariel Terry. (See Part I here.) Please excuse the low quality since it's hosted on Google Video.

Richard & Tara Phillips Wedding Day (Part II)