The Simpson Blog

I've been on a photo scanning and retouching binge lately, and it began with the scanning and re-scanning of hundreds of pro wrestling pics from my collection. My dad snapped a lot of them at WWF events at Maple Leaf Gardens in the mid-to-late 1980s. I took a lot at indie shows in the late 1990s. 1993-03-06 Ring N Ears 3 - The Opera House - Toronto ON I've been posting them under Scott Simpson Google+ photo ablums and in a 1980s/1990s Wrestling Flickr collection . I'm going in for double hernia surgery in a couple of weeks, and expect to be laid up off work for about a month afterward. In that time, I'm hoping to begin work on a large blog chronicling my wrestling fandom through this photo collection.

There's still more to do, but with the weather having turned cold and wet and windy, I'm calling the seemingly never-ending deck refinishing project "done" for now. We started in July 2011 -- last year -- thinking it would only take a couple of weeks to take the old solid deck stain off, clean, and put a new coat on. Here's what we were facing. Some areas were flaking badly. Others had a green film. We bought jugs of high-powered and expensive Behr deck stripper. It's caustic stuff and we have the scars to prove it! We had mixed results. Some patches of paint would come off cleanly by following the directions: Apply the stripper, let it sit for about 20 minutes while misting it to keep it wet, then wipe or hose it off. Other areas needed some heavy scrubbing or pressure-washing to get the paint off. And we were stumped by areas in which the paint -- no, it's really solid deck stain, but it might as well have been paint -- would not come off at al

The countdown is on to the third week of April, when my wife Amanda is expected to birth our first child. I'm pretty sure everyone in the inner and middle circles have been informed. Now the news is ready for public consumption. We're pregnant! I don't much like that saying, but I got told off when I said "my wife is expecting our first child" so I'll go with "we're pregnant." Yes, I'm excited. No, we don't know the sex yet - ultrasound for that is November 27. Coincidentally, I'm having double-hernia surgery on November 26, so I'll be in some kind of messed-up shape and maybe a wheelchair for the ultrasound. Yeah, she's been feeling pretty crappy. No, we haven't picked names. No, we don't have the nursery started yet. Yes, I'm looking big and round. Today we went to the doc for another prenatal visit and our first chance to hear the baby's heartbeat via Doppler Supercomputer Radar. Actually, the gadget