Another Family Blog!

I think I'm almost out of friends who have blogs to which I have not linked yet, so I will need to start to find a new source for material. Mark, Mark Thompson (he doesn't like it when people forget the "p" in his name) blogs about his family life in the Mino Family Blog. Mark is a friend who I met when I started singing barbershop music, we had an immediate bond as two of the very few men under 50 who were in the chorus at the time. Mark went to Japan with the Jet program to teach english, and while there, met his wife Junko (she was in one of his adult english classes). They live in a small-ish town in northern Japan with their two boys, Conan and Leif, where Mark now teaches english at a number of local schools on a permanent basis, and Junko works in the family business. Mark and Junko have come back to Canada several times to visit family and friends, so we have all had opportunities to meet both Conana and Leif.

One of the stories about Mark that I am often reminded of (every time I eat spicy food) revolves around the fact that Mark loves spicy food. While at Ryerson, he developed a particular fondness for a Thai restaurant called "The Salad King" where they measure the spicy heat of a dish by a number of chilis from 0 to 20 (of course "mild", "medium" and "hot" are all less than one chili). I think that Mark once got up to a 10, and I can still remember him talking about the ring of fire... it burns as it goes in, and as it comes out!