My grandson has a new bike. It’s just the right size for him. His previous bike was too small. Although he had outgrown it, he rode it relentlessly because he was born to ride. And yet, when he visits his neighbourhood buddies, he insists on riding their bikes – even though those bikes are bigger than the one he is just big enough to ride.

So today, he was riding a friend’s bike in a nearby park along with the friend’s younger brother. After crashing about, they dropped their bikes on the grass and climbed aboard the gym rigs there.

Later, they realized that the bike my grandson borrowed was gone. Stolen.

When he got home he announced what had happened. No explanation why he was using his friend’s bike and no reason for not minding it while it was in his care. In fact, he seemed quite indifferent about the theft except that it provided a minor frisson of excitement.

However, there was a happy ending. The other boy’s father drove around the neighbourhood, spotted the stolen bicycle and retrieved it from another youth who explained, “It was just lying there, so I thought I could take it.”

So why are some kids so blasé? As parents, do we care more about their possessions than they do? Is it because they have too much stuff? So much that each thing is of little value? What do you think?

After a long and frustrating hiatus from this journal, I'm finally exasperated enough to start venting again.

Although I got a bunch of things off my chest after my quad bypass surgery last fall, I found that I tried to get back in harness much too soon and tried to accomplish more things than I was capable of in the ensuing months. I have since resolved to moderate my ambitious goals and do what I can in a more sedate fashion. Let's hope I won't leave out anything important in the long term.

I was shocked to find little or no real support for my ethical issue with a fellow member of my Rotary Club. The individual should have been tossed but the old guard felt we should just muddle through because "we've had bad presidents before and we survived...". Lack of management and operating skills is one thing but sexual harassment is quite another and I found that kind of behaviour intolerable. My only choice was to leave the club that I had worked so hard for in the past and still had many ambitious projects to implement in the future.

However, making these kinds of breaks, however hard and hurtful they may seem at the time, has enabled me to look at shedding much other clutter from my life both literally and figuratively. So I'm on a reorganization, clean-up, tidy-up, toss-out streak in my office, around the house, the garage and -- my head too I suppose. It's a purge of the unnecessary, unread and unneeded. Let's hope it opens up opportunities for new ideas and new energy.