Kaitiaki Hamon’s Look At Weather And The World

[NOW PLAYING] 😈 Dog Days Are Over – Florence + The Machine 😈
/the boxes are packed, the dog days of this suite are numbered, run toward the new place/

Somebody in your world is running a hard race nobody is timing. Notice them today, say their name out loud, and mean it. ❤️

🌤️ Intro

Hey crew, Kaitiaki Hamon here 🌳🚜, it's Friday, the rain is hammering Edmonton sideways 🌧️, and my whole life is currently in boxes stacked in one room waiting on keys 📦. Tomorrow I step into the ring for my battle, Sunday is the big move if the keys land on time 🔑, and somewhere in between all that the TANIWHA canvas keeps giving my dot hand a fighting break from MANAIA 🎨. The cockroach suite era is nearly over and I can taste the finish line 🏁. Inside today's blog you'll find the 5 Things Most Pro Landscapers Won't Tell You, the Deep Dive, Today's Message, Today's Weather, the Star Wars galaxy forecast, the Daily Landscaping LOL, and Ron Hairemy's Songs That Guarantee LAWNgevity 🎶. Let's ride. 🚀

🛠️ 5 Things Most Pro Landscapers Won't Tell You

1. 🌿🛠️ Use today's rain as a free eavestrough leak test: chalk the drips now, seal them on the next dry window
2. 🌿🛠️ Close foundation and crawlspace vents before tonight's freeze gets a vote on your pipes
3. 🌿🛠️ Roof heat cables go on BEFORE the first ice: zigzagged above the eave line, never stapled, never just lying in the gutter
4. 🌿🛠️ Stockpile traction sand and grit DRY and indoors today, before tonight's rain and freeze weld the outdoor pile into one lump
5. 🌿🛠️ Photograph your irrigation controller wiring and zone map before you kill the power for winter

👇 Continue reading to learn more, the full breakdown on all five is waiting for you after the joke.

🌟 Today's Message: The Runner Who Ran Home: Tom Longboat

Tom Longboat was born on July 4, 1886, on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Ontario 🇨🇦, an Onondaga kid whose name, Cogwagee, means "Everything" 🌿. Like so many Indigenous kids of his era, he was sent away to the Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford 🏫, a place built to take his language and his identity, and Tom made his decision the only way he knew how: he ran away. Twice. The second time he ran all the way home and stayed there, working odd jobs with his uncle, running everywhere, to the fields, after the cows, down roads nobody else bothered timing him on 🏃💨. That run home was not an escape from his story. It was the start of it ✨.

Because the kid who ran home turned out to be able to outrun just about everybody on the continent 🔥. In 1906 he won Hamilton's Around the Bay race, the oldest road race in North America, by more than three minutes while spectators laughed at the idea of betting on him 😤. Then on April 19, 1907, in cold, rain, and blowing sleet, he lined up for the Boston Marathon and won it in 2:24:24, nearly five minutes faster than the previous record, at one point racing a train that threatened to cut across his route 🚂💥. He represented Canada at the 1908 London Olympics, collapsed in the brutal heat like half the field, then came back in 1909 to win the world professional marathon championship at Madison Square Garden in New York 🏆. A boy the system tried to erase had become one of the first Canadian athletes to make a living from sport alone, and one of the most famous runners alive 🌍.

And still the world found ways to make it harder for him 💔. The sports press mocked his training, because Tom alternated savage hard days with long easy walks, and writers of the day sneered at it as laziness instead of seeing what every modern coach now knows: he had figured out hard and easy day periodized training decades before it had a name 🧠⚡. He was falsely accused, doubted, and written off, and he answered the way he always had, by winning more races and breaking his own bests until the criticism ran out of breath before he did 🥇. Then, at 29, at the height of his fame, he set the career aside and enlisted for the First World War 🎖️. The fastest man in Canada became a dispatch runner with the 107th Pioneer Battalion in France, literally running messages between units through shellfire, getting wounded, getting reported dead at one point, and still winning the eight mile race at the 1918 Canadian Corps Dominion Day sports day 🏃🔥. Even in a war, the man ran.

Tom Longboat died in 1949, back home on the reserve where it all started 🕯️, and Canada has been trying to say his name properly ever since. He is in Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, he was named a National Historic Person in 1976, and Maclean's voted him the number one sports figure of the 20th century 🇨🇦🏅. Since 1951 the Tom Longboat Awards have honoured the top Indigenous athletes in this country every year, which means every young Indigenous runner lacing up today is quite literally running in a lane he cut 🌟. His lesson is not complicated and it is not soft: when the place you are in is trying to make you smaller, running toward home, toward your people, toward who you actually are, is not quitting. It is the whole race. So check on the runner in your own life today, the one doing the hard miles with no crowd, and be the voice in their ear that says keep going 📣❤️. Forward is always a choice, and that means YOU too!

Sources:
https://www.pc.gc.ca/culture/designation/personnage-person/tom-longboat
https://www.veterans.gc.ca/en/remembrance/memorials/canada/tom-longboat-junior-public-school
https://cmea-agmc.ca/node/15120
https://www.ammsa.com/publications/ontario-birchbark/best-best
https://mythesetrealites.ca/en/key-figures/tom-longboat

🌤️ Today's Weather

Edmonton: Today: Rain to start and rain with conviction 🌧️: 3°C right now but feeling like -2°C, humidity at 94%, wind NW at 23 km/h gusting to 40, and the morning carries the worst of it with rain chances in the 82 to 91% range and about 5.2 mm total on the day. High 5°C, low -2°C tonight; by afternoon the rain backs off to cloud, the NW wind actually picks up to 30 km/h gusting past 50, feels like -1°C, and by evening it is partly cloudy and 1°C feeling like -4°C heading for the freeze 🌙. Sunrise 8:16 AM, sunset 6:18 PM. The vibe: a proper prairie eviction notice from autumn 🍂. For work and yard, today is a watch and mark day, not a dig day: let the rain show you every leak and low spot, then do the fixing in the dry cold behind it 💪. Scale of the Pantaloon: L5: "Time to Break Out the Sweatpants" (5 to 10°C) 👖

Aotearoa (Auckland): Today: Spring doing the opposite shift 🌸: morning around 15°C feeling like 14°C and partly cloudy, building to a high of 20°C by afternoon with mostly clear skies, a low of 11°C tonight, humidity easing from 79% down to about 59%, and light south to southwest winds around 11 km/h. Sunset not until 7:44 PM 🌇. The vibe: gentle, green, and in no hurry whatsoever 😎. For mindset, they are gaining daylight down there while we ration ours up here, and both ends of the planet are just running their season honestly 🌏. Scale of the Pantaloon: L7: "Bust Out the Booty Shorts, Baby!" (15 to 25°C) 👖

📅 Next 5 Days: Edmonton – Aeoteroa

Saturday, Oct 24, Edmonton: Partly cloudy and cold, high 4°C / low -6°C, precip chance near 0%, humidity 61%, wind NW at 19 to 20 km/h 🥶. Last night's rain freezes where it landed, so watch every shaded walk at dawn. Pantaloon: L4: "Jeans… No Cap!" (-5 to 5°C) | Aotearoa: Partly cloudy, high 20°C / low 13°C, rain 10%, humidity 71%, wind W at 15 km/h 🌤️. Pantaloon: L7: "Bust Out the Booty Shorts, Baby!"

Sunday, Oct 25, Edmonton: Partly cloudy, high 3°C / low -5°C, wintry chance 10%, humidity 71%, wind ESE at 11 km/h, with a full moon rising over frozen beds 🌕. Quiet, grey at the edges, and cold enough to make every puddle a rink. Pantaloon: L4: "Jeans… No Cap!" | Aotearoa: Cloudy, high 19°C / low 12°C, rain 10%, humidity 66%, wind WSW at 19 km/h 🌥️. Pantaloon: L7: "Bust Out the Booty Shorts, Baby!"

Monday, Oct 26, Edmonton: Mostly sunny, high 5°C / low -5°C, rain chance 10%, humidity 68%, wind SE at 15 km/h ☀️. The one dry, workable window in the run: this is the day the chalk marks from Friday get fixed. Pantaloon: L5: "Time to Break Out the Sweatpants" | Aotearoa: Partly cloudy, high 20°C / low 14°C, rain 10%, humidity 66%, wind WNW at 21 km/h 🌤️. Pantaloon: L7: "Bust Out the Booty Shorts, Baby!"

Tuesday, Oct 27, Edmonton: Mostly cloudy, high 5°C / low -4°C, rain chance 10%, humidity 69%, wind NW at 12 km/h 🌥️. Cold holding pattern, nothing dramatic, nothing warm either. Pantaloon: L5: "Time to Break Out the Sweatpants" | Aotearoa: Rain, high 19°C / low 12°C, rain 80% with about 6.5 mm, humidity 84%, wind NW at 32 km/h 🌧️💨. Their turn under the hose. Pantaloon: L7: "Bust Out the Booty Shorts, Baby!"

Wednesday, Oct 28, Edmonton: Mostly cloudy and colder, high 2°C / low -6°C, wintry chance 10%, humidity 71%, wind NW at 15 km/h 🧊. The season tips its hand: this is winter clearing its throat. Pantaloon: L4: "Jeans… No Cap!" | Aotearoa: Partly cloudy, high 17°C / low 13°C, rain 20%, humidity 63%, wind WSW at 25 km/h 🌤️. Pantaloon: L7: "Bust Out the Booty Shorts, Baby!"

⭐ Star Wars Galaxy Forecast: The Coming Week

Friday opens over rain lashed Eadu 🌧️, 5 degrees, where the Imperial research outpost sits in permanent drizzle and Galen Erso's old colleagues check the same leaking roof seals for the thousandth time, wind worrying the landing platforms all day 💨. Saturday turns cold and muddy on prison world Wobani 🧊, 4 degrees, mostly cloudy over the labour camps, the kind of grey that gets into your boots and files a forwarding address. Sunday the twin suns do their thing over Jakku 🏜️, 3 degrees by our thermometer but all glare and scavengers in the wreck fields, Niima Outpost haggling over parts while the Starship Graveyard watches the sky. Monday clears bright over jungle moon Ajan Kloss 🌴, 5 degrees, Resistance trainees running drills in the mist while the old base's roofs drip yesterday's rain into the ferns. Tuesday clouds up over Arvala-7 🌥️, 5 degrees, where Kuiil's vaporators hum and the blurrgs complain about the damp in two languages, neither of them Basic. Wednesday drops to 2 degrees over haunted Ruusan 🌑, mostly cloudy above the Valley of the Jedi, cold settling into ruins that remember too much. And Thursday closes at 2 degrees over the great library world of Obroa-skai 📚, part cloud over the archives, where Zorii Bliss is definitely not smuggling anything and Babu Frik is fixing a droid that only speaks in weather reports. He says dress warm. He is right 🚀.

😂 The Daily Landscaping LOL

A piece of string walks into a bar, sits down, and politely orders a drink 🍺🧵. The bartender squints at him and says, "Sorry pal, we don't serve string in here," and throws him straight out onto the sidewalk 😤🚪. So the string ducks into the alley, ties himself into a knot, frays out both of his ends like a man with nothing left to lose 💥, walks right back in, and orders the exact same drink. The bartender leans in close, narrows his eyes, and says, "Hey… aren't you that piece of string I just threw out of here?" 👀

"Nope," says the string. "I'm a frayed knot." 🤣

🛠️🌿 The Deep Dive: 5 Things Most Pro Landscapers Won't Tell You 🌿🛠️

1. Use today's rain as a free eavestrough leak test: chalk the drips now, seal them on the next dry window 🌧️
Heavy rain is the only honest eavestrough inspection there is, and today Edmonton is getting about 5 mm of it with the worst falling this morning. Walk the house while it pours and watch the joints, corners, and downspout seams: drips, waterfalls over the edge, and stains down the siding mark exactly where the system fails, and a stick of chalk or a phone photo pins the spot before you forget it. Do not try to seal it wet: most sealants need a dry surface and a few degrees above freezing to cure, which makes Monday's dry 5°C the fix day and today purely the diagnosis. A leaking joint you ignore in October becomes an ice dam's water supply in January, dripping meltwater straight at the foundation it was built to protect 🧊.

2. Close foundation and crawlspace vents before tonight's freeze gets a vote on your pipes 🚪
Open foundation vents made sense in July, when they aired out the crawlspace. In late October they are just a funnel delivering -6°C Saturday night air directly onto the plumbing that runs under the floor. Close the vents, or block them with fitted foam board from inside, before the first hard freeze weekend, and leave them closed until spring thaw is genuinely done, not the first warm afternoon. The pipes most likely to burst in an Edmonton house are rarely the ones in the warm centre of the basement; they are the ones in an exterior wall or a vented crawlspace that nobody thought about until the water was already coming through the ceiling. Ten minutes with a flashlight today beats a plumber's emergency rate in February 🔦.

3. Roof heat cables go on BEFORE the first ice: zigzagged above the eave line, never stapled, never just lying in the gutter 🔌
Every fall somebody climbs a ladder in December to install heat cable onto a roof that is already an ice rink, which is exactly backwards and how people get hurt. The cable belongs in a zigzag clipped along the eave, reaching up past the wall line where ice dams actually form, with a loop down through the downspout, because a cable lying flat in the gutter melts a tunnel through the ice and changes nothing. Never drive staples or nails through the cable, that punctures the insulation and creates the short you were trying to avoid, and plug it into a ground fault protected outlet you have actually tested. On a north facing Edmonton roof with any ice dam history, installing this weekend, on a dry shingle, in daylight, is the whole trick ❄️.

4. Stockpile traction sand and grit DRY and indoors today, before tonight's rain and freeze weld the outdoor pile into one lump 🪣
Here is the trap built into today's exact forecast: it rains all morning, then it freezes tonight and stays below zero all weekend. Any sand, grit, or gravel sitting in an open outdoor pile or an open bin soaks up that rain and wakes up Saturday as a single frozen brick you have to attack with a pick before you can sand a single step. So move the winter traction supply under cover today, into lidded bins or buckets in the garage or by the door, with a scoop living in each one. Dry sand spreads, flows, and actually lands where the ice is; a frozen lump gets carried, dropped, and abandoned by the third morning. Come the first black ice dawn, the crew with dry grit is working while everybody else is still chiselling 🧊.

5. Photograph your irrigation controller wiring and zone map before you kill the power for winter 📸
The blowout gets all the glory, but the spring startup horror story is almost always electrical: a controller unplugged for six months, a common wire that came loose, three zones nobody can match to the yard anymore. Before you power the system down, open the controller and photograph the wiring exactly as it sits, every coloured wire on its terminal, then screenshot or sketch the zone map with what each zone actually waters. Tape a printed copy inside the controller door. In April, when a zone will not fire and the client is watching, that photo turns a two hour diagnostic hunt into a five minute fix, and it costs you ninety seconds today. Pros are not smarter in spring; they just left themselves better notes in fall 🗒️.

🎶 Ron Hairemy's Songs That Guarantee LAWNgevity 🎵🌱🔥

Canadian R&B silk, cockney knees-up chaos, Arch Enemy gone ravenous, Classified carrying the flag, Nesian Mystik for the people, and Collective Soul shining over the whole beautiful mess. Range, crew. Range.

🎸 Momentum
😂 Morale
🧠 Focus
⚔️ Endurance
🎤 Reflection
🌌 Creativity

All music. No filler.
(Except comedy… because everybody needs a laugh.)
No Nickelback.
No Slipknot.
No T-Swizzle.
As it should be.

Canadian Track'O'The Day: "Shook" by Shawn Desman (clean ✅). Toronto's Shawn Desman, born Shawn Fernandes, and "Shook" was the debut single off his self titled 2002 debut album, the song that put a Canadian R&B pop kid on every radio in the country overnight 🇨🇦🎤. Desman went on to a long career as a singer, dancer, and choreographer, and the track still sounds like pure early 2000s Canadian pop confidence. For me it is a move weekend song: everything rattled, everything boxed, and the groove still holds 📦. Play it while the last room gets packed and try not to dance with a box in your hands. You will fail 💃.

Today's Musical Funny-Bone: "Rabbit" by Chas & Dave (clean ✅). Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock, London's finest cockney piano and bass duo, and "Rabbit" was their 1980 signature hit, built on the old slang that to rabbit means to talk and talk and then talk some more 🐰🎹. The whole joke is one affectionate groan: he loves her, she is wonderful, she just never, ever stops chatting. For me this one is pure pub warmth, the sound of two mates who played a thousand working men's clubs and earned every laugh the honest way 😄. Play it on the drive, sing the chorus at full volume, and check whether anybody in the truck has gone quiet. They have not 🎶.

Hair Whippin', Head Bangin', Finger Blazin' Therapy: "Ravenous" by Arch Enemy (clean ✅). Swedish melodic death metal, Arch Enemy, built by guitarist Michael Amott out of the ashes of Carcass, and "Ravenous" is the opener's punch off 2001's Wages of Sin, the first album with Angela Gossow on vocals 🇸🇪🔥. That record is where the band's modern sound locks in: twin guitar harmonies flying over a rhythm section with bad intentions. For me this is the Arch Enemy run continuing by popular demand, and a Friday storm cannot compete with this riff for sheer forward motion 💪. Play it while the rain hammers the truck roof and feel extremely prepared for winter 🌧️.

Tongue Trippin', Bar Spittin', Beat Killin' Bars: "Powerless" by Classified (clean ✅, but heavy subject matter, handled straight). Classified is Luke Boyd from Enfield, Nova Scotia, a Juno winning rapper and producer who built a national career without ever leaving the East Coast 🇨🇦🎤. He released "Powerless" in April 2018 and called it some of the most important words he has ever written: the song and its video, filmed on Millbrook First Nation in Truro with Mi'kmaq drummers and dancers, take on child maltreatment, violence against women and Indigenous people, and the national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. For me this is the slot used properly: bars carrying real weight, from stories real people trusted him with 🕯️. Play it once, properly, not as background, and sit with what it asks of you.

Māori Track / Aotearoa Pick: "For the People" by Nesian Mystik (clean ✅). Auckland's Nesian Mystik formed in a music room at Western Springs College, a crew bringing Māori, Tongan, Samoan, and Cook Island ancestry into one sound, with main songwriter Te Awanui "Awa" Reeder carrying the Māori line in the group 🇳🇿🌿. "For the People" was a single off their 2002 debut Polysaturated, an album that debuted at number 1 in Aotearoa and went four times platinum, and the single itself went Gold and Top 5. For me the title alone earns its place on a Friday when everything I am doing is for my people and my next chapter 🌱. Play it with the windows down on a spring Auckland afternoon, or in a rainy Edmonton truck pretending, both work 🌏.

Ron Hairemy Spotlight: "Shine" by Collective Soul (clean ✅). Collective Soul out of Stockbridge, Georgia, and "Shine" is the song that dragged them out of demo land in 1993 and onto every rock station on the continent when it was re released on 1994's Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid ✨🎸. Singer Ed Roland wrote it as a kid in his parents' house, and it became the band's breakout, the "yeah" heard around the world. This one comes straight off my own "All time faves in the spotlight!" shelf, and for me it is the light at the end of a packing tunnel: one more box, one more trip, and then a new place with my name moving toward its new name on the door 🔑. Play it on the last load, loud 🚚.

That's the goal. That's LAWNgevity. 🌱🔥

🌅 Conclusion

Tom Longboat ran home from a school built to erase him and then outran the whole continent, which tells you everything about what a person can do once they are running toward their own people instead of away from somebody else's idea of them 🏃🇨🇦. The yard version today is smaller and it rhymes: watch the rain like a pro, chalk the leaks, close the vents, and get the grit under cover before tonight's freeze locks every mistake in ice 🧊. Shoutout to every Indigenous athlete carrying the Longboat name forward, to Kyle and the chain gang getting these boxes staged, and to everybody with a battle, a move, or a hard race on their weekend 📣. Run your race, crew. If you liked today's blog, be sure to star, speak out, and stay a while for updates. Until next time, this has been Kaitiaki Hamon. Keep your stick on the ice. And may the Force be with you. Always! Ka kite, landscaping whānau!

Sincerely,
Kaitiaki Hamon (Ron Hairemy)

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