Happy New Year
January 06, 2009

Hi, all!

I hope that the holidays were as good for you as they were for me! It was a real great week and a half off and felt really odd to spend New Years Eve at home with the family for the first time in many, many years!

Now, after visiting family and friends, I am back at home in the snowy Okanagan shoveling MORE snow. I love it though. Before I lived in the Vancouver area, I lived in Kitimat, B.C. and we got a lot of snow up there so I've missed it for a long time. It's a lot of fun to be able to go sledding again too! Nothing more fun than screaming down a scary hill at about 80 miles an hour on slippery snow for 2 minutes! And up here they actually have outdoor rinks that you can go skating on at your own free will! Awesome! I'm on my way to shoot a special in Whistler for CMT in the middle of the month and in between I am going to be in Vancouver to sing the national anthems at the Vancouver Canucks hockey game against the Phoenix Coyotes!! Just to give you an idea of what this means to me, when I was a kid I used to listen to the Canucks hockey games on my little transistor radio all the time. So much that my parents would know I was laying in bed on a "school night", supposedly sleeping, and they would yell at me to "TURN OFF THAT RADIO!", knowing full well I was listening to the play-by-play action of the game. At the beginning of every game would be the singing of the national anthems and I would imagine it was me singing them. Now, my dream is coming true! For me to be singing at this game is something really special. I've sang the anthems before at other games for different sports like at the Blue Jays game and at the ACC in Toronto as well but nothing of this magnitude that has meant so much to me. I played hockey at the Pacific Coliseum and at GM Place I got the privilege of playing on an arena stage with Toby Keith there as well but to me, this is as much of a thrill as those were. I grew up playing hockey in Kitimat, North Delta and Langley BC as a kid and still play to this day so my dream was to play professional hockey but I became a singer instead! Still, these guys, although many are several years younger than me, are guys I respect highly because of their ability to get to "the show" so I feel privileged to be asked to sing the anthems. I hope you can either make it to the game or be sure to tune into Sportsnet that night at 7:00pm!

Besides that, a few weeks later we head back out on the road to play some acoustic shows and get back to what we do the BEST! Playing live! See ya on the road soon and

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

CHEERS!

Aaron