Marathon Man

My buddy Sam is in London (England, not Ontario) right now studying rock n’ roll. I sent him an email last week apologizing for not being able to email him right now, on account of being too busy. After searching my sent box for something else, I came across it, and thought it would make good blogging. So, here it is, with some of the cuss words cleaned up a little bit…

OK, so I gots some sleep in me. London sounds super cool - its good to hear that school of rock is going well - Does Jack Black get annoying as an instructor after 90 minutes though? Brewery [stuff] has been great, but what a crazy lifestyle.

As an example… Thursday I got up at 2:30am to do some reading for an OCB meeting in Toronto at 10. Hit the road at 3:30am and landed in TO around 8:30. Slept in the car for 45 minutes, found a Tim Hortons, bought a pint of coffee and went to the meeting.

These meetings are seriously marathon sessions - no bathroom breaks, 10 minutes for lunch, finish usually around 3:30. Meeting finished up, did some schmoozing with some of the industry veterans (including the Bill White who is responsible for Keith's being so [gosh-darn] popular) and then booted over to Jordans (web-guy).

We finished off the design for the mural we'll be installing next week outside the brewery then went to Sneaky Dee's, where Buddy Disease [that really is his name, seriously] was already waiting for us. Ate a burro favorito with a pint of Amsterdam Nut Brown, said bye to Jordan and then took off to Home Depot with Buddy to buy the paints for the mural. Pain in the ass slow service made us change course and go to RONA instead. It literally took over two hours to match the paints because their scanner couldn't register the colour swatches we brought in and we had to guess our way to the right colours in some cases.

Finally left RONA at 10pm, dropped buddy off at his place and started the drive down. Couldn't keep my eyes open by the time I got to Kingston, so I pulled over at the rest-stop and slept in the car for another hour. Bought a disposable tooth brush to scrape the gunk off my teeth, bought another pint of coffee and got back on the road.

Got home at 5am, crawled into bed and slept till 8am. Got up and started getting ready for a meeting with the director of commercial lending for the Caisse Populaire. Meeting was at 9 and finished around 10, then visited the place that is making up t-shirts for us to go over some details for our next run of shirts, then got back home.

Spent an hour hanging out with Ruby [my two-year-old], took another hour nap and then things got busy again. Lots of coordination with deliveries, events going on for the weekend etc. Jamie and I delivered a couple 50 litre kegs to Deja Vue, ran into Dale MacDonald and Jason (forget his last name, but pretty cool guy we went to school with) and shared a pitcher of Beau's with them. Then booted back home, picked up Nicola and Ruby and drove for 2 hours to get to a tasting event we were doing at the Baldachin in Merrickville, a fantastic beer bar.

Had a couple pints with the manager of the joint, ate some chow, and started heading back at about 11pm. Had a sneezing fit while driving and got pulled over by the police in Alexandria for swerving too much while I was driving (my allergies are totally kicking my ass these days) after he checked to make sure I wasn’t drunk he let us keep going. Got home about 1am, put Ruby to bed and hopped in the shower, and finally made it to bed around 1:30.

The scary part is, I end up pulling a marathon session like that at least once a week and some weeks are just non-stop like that; 2-4 hours is becoming a normal sleep, 6 hours is like taking a vacation. But at the same time, in the course of two days, I made it out for a pint 3 times. So its kinda like I'm never really working either. Some days I devote the day to visiting accounts, i.e., pub crawl.

Jen & Kev are moving up in the next couple days (Jen flies in tomorrow with the kids - new baby is named Rhett). Kev is driving the moving truck up and should land in H-bury by Thursday. Jordan is coming up Monday and Buddy is coming up Thursday to start the mural. Max RNR drummer Mike & Rachel should be up for the weekend and on top of that work still needs to get done. I tell you, this is one crazy life, but man does it have a lot of perks.

Cheers,
Steve