Happy Birthday Kaia

Today in Canada we get a day off work to celebrate Victoria Day (the last Monday in May before the 25th) to celebrate Queen Victoria's (1819 - 1901) birthday, as well as the date our nation celebrates our current reigning monarch's birthday.


Around my house, we tend to use this day to celebrate my youngest daughter Kaia's birthday, and today she is fifteen-years-old, so we showered her with presents of books, vampire movies and more (although I  kind of wish there was more to the swimsuit her older sister gave her), and as we are spending the day focusing on her, that's about all I've got.


She's a pretty awesome girl, and I can't believe that my tiniest baby is going to be starting high school in a few short months.


Happy Birthday Kaia.

Transcribing a podcast

Hi everyone,

So after trying to get my podcast up over the weekend and not having a lot of luck (meaning, any), I've decided to simply transcribe it:

Bookmonkey: Hi and welcome to the 150th post on my fabulous blog, this is Bookmonkey speaking, and for today's post I figured I would try something different - a quick podcast, likely lasting less than five minutes and to help me out I've invited my lovely daughter Kaia to ask me some questions about my blog.

Kaia: Hi everyone! So Dad, why did you start blogging in the first place?

Bookmonkey: As a long-time reader of genre fiction, I guess I've just got a lot of opinions I'd like to share, in addition I have some aspirations to be a writer someday, and I figured if I had to put out a regular product (being 3 posts a week), my writing would get better.

Kaia: How long does it take you to write a blog post?

Bookmonkey: It basically occurs in three stages, the idea for a post can take anywhere from a minute to a couple of days, the writing of the post takes about 40 minutes and finding the pictures/links takes about 15 minutes.

Kaia: Why is your blog called Wisdom of Bookmonkey?

Bookmonkey: Short answer, when I tried to register my blog as bookmonkey it was already taken, so I tried Wisdom of Bookmonkey. Long answer, I like the orangutan librarian character from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, but I also like monkeys, plus I like to pretend I'm wise.

Kaia: Which has been your favourite post so far?

Bookmonkey: I guess the one about Junior High Girls freaking me out - basically I remembered that all the girls in my junior high years were reading V.C. Andrews books but I had never read one, after I tried Flowers in the attic, I got seriously creeped out, not just about the novel, but about the girls who really got into that series.

Kaia: What are your plans for Halloween?

Bookmonkey: I'm actually going to take the entire month of October to do a series of posts on the Twilight books; yep, I'm going to read, watch, listen, play, and even eat the phenomenon known as Twilight - as the father of two teenaged daughters I feel a responsibility to try it out and I feel that my loyal readers deserve to have my experience inflicted upon them.

Kaia: Weird - well bye everyone!

Bookmonkey: Thanks for checking out my first podcast - if it works out it may be the first in a series, otherwise I'll give videos a try!

Tomorrow I will live in a house of teenagers

On Friday May 21 my youngest daughter Kaia will be 13-years-old and both of my kids will officially be teenagers.

I've got her a bunch of presents, but it took a little bit of searching for me to find one that would work both as a present for her and a good post for my genre-based blog.

In the past she has complained that I don't have enough pictures of hunky guys on my blog.

So to start, here's a photo of her current genre crush, Zachary Qunto (pictured right). Happy Birthday Kaia

Next, I figured I should find her a new genre based show for us to check out this fall.

You see, Like her mother, my daughter Kaia has the bizarre ability to kill TV shows she likes. Two episodes after she started watching My Name is Earl, it died. Three episodes after she started watching the 2006 BBC series Robin Hood it was cancelled, and earlier this week she found out that her current favourite show on NBC, Heroes, will not be coming back.

Like her mother, Kaia has learned to be guarded in her praises of new shows, as she is pretty sure someone can hear her and cancels them immediately.

But I've always been a hopeful person and I think I may have found an upcomming show that might ease the parting blow from the loss of Heroes.

On Tuesday nights this Fall ABC will start airing the series No Ordinary Family - think of it kind of like a mix between Heroes and The Incredibles. A family survives a plane crash and then each gets super powers. You can check out the trailer here.

I know that a super powered Dad might not be as cool as Sylar, but what the heck, it looks like it has some pretty great potential.

Happy Birthday Kaia,

Dad