In late fall of 2018, I bought what I thought was going to be my final vehicle: A brand new 2018 GMC Sierra 1500. I got the extended cab in quicksilver, with the legendary 5.3L V8 and a 4x4 drivetrain. This truck was a statement that said I was successful in my career as an Electrician. It was union built right in my hometown city of Oshawa by friends and neighbours on an assembly line which I and my crew had put in the power distribution system for, so there was a lot of my pride in this truck. I reasonably assumed, based on the large number of mid- to late-90’s V8 GMC trucks that were still on the road today, that I would get at least 20 years out of this truck, which should have lasted me into my retirement, and possibly beyond. To make sure that this would be the case, I had it sprayed by Krown every year, and made sure to stay on top of the maintenance. Then, in the spring of 2025, the unthinkable happened: At around 107,000 kilometers, the engine destroyed itself.

I had wanted to post this earlier, but then my country and the US entered into a trade war and I felt that posting anything that might promote the US would be in bad taste. I became emotionally paralyzed and did not write anything for a long time. But then something happened on September 10 which made me reconsider my position on a lot of things, and then I realized the importance of sharing happiness and joy in this world. This post is dated as of the date it was supposed to be posted; this paragraph to explain the delay was added after. So with no further ado, let me take you to Orlando Part 2: Universal Studios.

We decided to take an early spring vacation to Orlando, Florida at the end of March. Given the current political climate, you might be wondering if this was a wise choice. In my defense, we booked this vacation back in December of 2024, before Donald Trump started his tariff war against my country and announced his desire to annex Canada. We actually considered cancelling this trip, but realized we would be losing money and missing out on a unique opportunity to return to a place my wife and I had visited 29 years ago. We didn’t feel the political climate was going to improve at any point in the foreseeable future, and it’s hard enough for the three of us (my son, my wife, and myself) to get a week off from our jobs at the same time, so we decided to take one last trip to the United States before all hell really breaks loose.

As we move into the heating season here in southern Ontario, I have been thinking about a trend whenever evidence is presented for the promotion of a new “Green” technology, where heat is described as an undesirable “Waste” product. For example, it’s been long understood that the incandescent light bulb converts 5% of the energy it uses into light, and the other 95% is “wasted” as heat. The same is said about the internal combustion engine; that a lot of the energy is heat waste. It seems to me whoever came up with these conclusions is pretty ignorant of the reality of the world I live in. Perhaps these conclusions are of people who are fortunate enough to live in warmer climates closer to the tropic of Cancer than I do. I will now put a light on my own reality with some graphs.