Archive for the ‘Family’
My coworkers Cheryl and James recently got hooked on geocaching, and James spent most of the day on Tuesday getting me hooked as well. On Tuesday night I got home and decided to take the kids for a treasure hunt.
So what is geocaching? Geocaching.com defines it as:
Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS unit can then try to locate the geocache.
Put more simply and as I described it to the kids, someone hid a treasure for us to find and I use a map on my Blackberry to find the treasure.
There’s stuff hidden all over the world, below is a map of all the treasures available in Milton (click on the map to be taken to the geocaching website).
Here is what I did last night:
Once we got close to the area via GPS, we had to rely on the hints that were published within the description to locate the cache. It was near a standing dead tree, on the north side of a fallen tree. Even with the hint it took a good 10 minutes to locate what looked like a tennis-ball can hidden under some loose bark. The kids dissected the cache and signed their names into the log. 1 down and 646,632 more to go.
The types of caches get more advanced, and next time we’ll definitely bring something along to swap out of the cache (you can take something from the treasure so long as you replace it with something of equal value). This particular one had some stickers, a keychain, and some coloured glass beads.
I’m a bit more nervous than I’d normally let on about the procedure that my father is having done today. Okay, okay, I’m nervous about everything but I’ve been trying to hide it in this particular case.
He’s been having issues for several years with a fast heartbeat. They diagnosed it almost two years ago, and presented a suggested course of treatment. The “cure” is a somewhat complex procedure where they feed electrodes up an artery in the leg and try to isolate the part of the heart that is causing the electrical abnormalities. They then zap it to basically disable that area of the heart. After significant consideration, he decided to go ahead with the procedure which is currently under way at University Hospital in London, Ontario.
Anyways, it should be somewhat obvious after reading the description why it would cause a son to become nervous. Best of luck Dad!
We spent the last weekend at Brenda’s family cottage in Erieau. It’s an interesting place, built by her dad and other relatives out of materials savaged from CP (or was it CN) rail. The wood was salvaged from boxcars, much of the furniture from a decommissioned caboose, and clothesline made from steel rails driven into the ground. We’ve visited before, but this was really the first time at the cottage that was “kid friendly”.
Most of our time was split between fishing off the back-yard dock and swimming at the large beach on the lake side. After three days, our tally of fish was 55 Blue Gill all caught with either a Dora the Explorer or Finding Nemo kids fishing rod.
Katlyn and Graeme had some good times playing Tetris head to head on her pink Game Boy DS, which looked surprisingly at home in Graeme’s hands. Unfortunately I didn’t have my digital camera with me, but caught a couple of shots with the Blackberry.
On Saturday evening we headed over to my Aunt and Uncle’s farm to say hi to everyone. It was a quick in-and-out because they’re in the middle of tobacco harvest season and free time was at a minimum. They treated us to the full “city slicker” tour including a walk around the main farm area, some horse rides for the girls, and a driving tour of the vast Brush empire along the lake in Blenheim.
(this post was actually from a few weeks ago)
So today is the day. I’ve been working up to this moment for a few weeks now, and it is literally minutes away. As you may have read earlier in the summer, I (finally) managed to procure myself a smoker for our house in Milton. Getting the smoker was both a feat of marital manipulation and somewhat of a retail challenge to locate. But I have it, and have been working up slowly to a “big cook”.
Dinner number one was chicken halves, which is pretty hard to screw up. They were tasty but I found the hickory smoke a bit strong.
Dinner number two was baby back ribs, more of a challenge and a test of one’s ability to control temperature for a long time. Temperature went smashingly, texture was great, but the grocery-store ribs were pretreated and came out tasting like ham.
Dinner number three is a personal challenge. Invite 45 people over for the afternoon and attempt to feed them all via the smoker. I went to the local butcher last week to order the pork butts. They literally had no idea what I was talking about and had to pull out a diagram of a pig with various cuts labelled. This morning I stopped in to check on them, just to make sure they were actually able to get me the cut of meat I needed. Alas, they had arrived and were awaiting my slow-cooked smokey reinvention. This evening I trimmed the fat cap off of the three roasts, leaving me with approximately 21 pounds of meat. I slathered them with yellow mustard, applied a dry rub and threw them back into the refrigerator. I had planned to set the alarm for 4:00am, but after doing some additional reading today have decided to get started at midnight instead. At seven pounds each, the time estimate for cooking is anywhere from eleven to fourteen hours. I’d rather they be done early, apparently they hold nicely in a cooler for several hours.
As for the rest of tomorrow, we have guests bringing side dishes. I prepped some fresh salsa using hot peppers from the garden (tomatoes need about a week more before they’re ripe). Jodie has prepped some “dirt cake” for the kids which is served in a flower pot. Now if only the weather would cooperate. Until this afternoon, the forecast had been 26 degrees and sunny. The most recent forecast however calls for 70% chance of thunderstorms. Oh well, if it rains it rains.
Well, it looks like it’s time to fire up the smoker!
Well the trusty old Canon S45 has served us well. We bought it primarily so that we could take pictures of the kids as they grew up, and it has done its job well for the past five years. But it’s starting to show its age, not only because it’s outdated but also the shutter is failing to respond sometimes now.
I’m hoping I can hold on for about another year, as one of my key features is almost ready.
What I need:
- Pocket-sized (available)
- Good low-light performance (available)
- Optical zoom (available)
- Decent movie mode stored in MPEG4 (available)
- GPS tagging of location (not quite)
The camera that comes the closest is the GE E1050, which should be shipping in September with a model that does GPS tagging. But GE isn’t exactly known for great quality cameras. What I would really like to see is something from one of the bigger makers like Canon, Nikon, or even Casio that does GPS tagging.
We’ll have to see how long our old camera holds up, but I’m hoping that there are more GPS options available by Christmas time. I expect that GPS tagging will be the “next big feature” for digital cameras, but wonder if maybe it will take until 2009 to get some decent choice on the market.
The flight home was uneventful in a good way. We arrived back to Milton totally exhausted and missing the kids. Luckily, my parents offered to drive the kids to meet us and after lunch we had a family nap.
We returned home to discover three unexpected things:
- The yard was an overgrown swamp. Apparently it has been raining here for two weeks straight, and our spring thaw pond has returned. The vegetable garden has been overtaken by a pumpkin vine with a 25-foot wingspan. The interlocking brick is an explosion of weeds.
- The pool was also somewhat of a swamp. It was overflowing with water, and a nice kool-aid green. Reparations already under way.
- My fish tank was a cesspool. Somehow all of my cichlids, some of them seven years old, were not only dead but decomposing. The plecos were still alive, but I don’t know how. We cracked some windows for the smell and I went to town changing water, scrubbing ornaments, and de-clogging fish bits from the filter.
Luckily, Katlyn’s fish were fine. Those were actually the ones I was worried about, they’ve never been alone for an extended period before. The two-week block worked well in the 6-gallon.
As planned, we spent the last couple days relaxing in Waikiki. The hotel offered us some minor annoyances, uncharacteristically ignoring my Hilton Honors profile of “King, High Floor, Away from elevator”. Most Hilton properties follow it to the letter, I assume rooms are assigned by computer. However this one first attempted to give us a queen bed, which caused an argument with management until “we’re completely full” turned into “oh, look I just found a king bed for you”. The new room was right beside the elevator, but it didn’t seem too loud and I figured I had used up my quota of complaints for the day. The next day however, after not sleeping well, I did request and receive a new room away from the elevator.
Other than the room shuffling, the hotel was a great place to hang out for the last few days. The pool on the fourth floor was great for hanging around and reading a book, and the free drinks in the afternoon certainly helped.
We did some souvenir shopping, went out for a nice dinner, and that pretty much sums up the last two days before jumping on the airplane and heading home. Overall, it was a great vacation and I’d do Hawaii again for sure!
Today was pack-up day from the vacation rental and time to move back in to Waikiki for the remainder of the trip. We bid farewell to Tish the owner and headed into town with a full vehicle. Once again we ate at Zippy’s Diner prior to scuba and once again we had the same waitress. She noted that Jodie was looking a bit more perky this time around.
At the boat launch, we met with our scuba class and found bags of gear with our names on them. I was named “Jodie 2″. After a short on-land lesson we piled onto the boat and headed out into the ocean. Given the prep we went through, it was clear that this was going to be a bit more serious than what I had thought would be a shallow “better than snorkeling” adventure. No, they were going over some very real life-threatening scenarios, how to communicate, and how to not get dead.
When we arrived at the first dive site, they tied the boat to a dive line that was anchored at the bottom. We went in one by one, and the non-certified divers (including us) each had to demonstrate their skills about five feet down. How to clear your mask, how to clear water from the regulator, how to find your regulator when it falls out, how to take someone else’s emergency backup, etc. My mask was a bit leaky (I think my face is a bit abnormal) so I spent a good chunk of the first dive clearing water from my eyes. Jodie had a minor freak-out during the skill training, but the instructor brought her up to the surface and talked her down. She was fine after that. We then followed the dive line down to the bottom of the ocean, which was about forty feet deep. The instructor gave us a thirty-minute tour of the reef in that area, and we saw just a ton of fish. The water was saturated with these tiny little sea slugs, they were literally everywhere in the water. The dive instructors weren’t sure what they were, but they see them about once a year. If you pop one (either by flicking it or by random chance) they explode into a small cloud of purple dye. At the end of our first dive, one of the other people who was actually getting tested for his certification ran out of air. He completely freaked out (as would I) and the instructor had to try to calm him down at forty feet below, while getting him to take a hit off of his air tank. That ended our first dive a bit early.
The second dive went more smoothly. We knew more what we were doing, and they got me another mask that fit better. This dive site was near some underground craters, and there were several sea turtles who called this home. I got lots of pictures on this dive, but it was with an old-timey disposable 35mm camera so we’ll have to wait to see if they turned out or not. We saw a few turtles of different sizes, including one turtle who was sleeping in a crevice. Again, lots of interesting fish of different shapes and colours. After about thirty minutes on the bottom, we came back up to the boat. I wished that we could stay out longer, but alas we had no more air.
After diving, we met with the wedding group again for one last dinner together and said our goodbyes. The majority were flying back on Saturday night, and we would be staying for another couple of days until Monday afternoon.
After dinner, we went for a walk in Waikiki. At the international market, I mentioned to Jodie that I’d like to go back to the hotel to use the washroom but she convinced me to use the public toilet there in the market. Fair enough, so I went down a hallway to a small bathroom. Inside I could see three large scary-looking guys who gave me a bit of a glare. It was a tiny bathroom, with one sink, one urinal, and a toilet stall. At this point it was too late to turn back, so I mustered up my confidence and said “umm, I just need to go to the bathroom”, and they moved aside to let me in. The room was full of smoke, and in the stall behind me was the following dialog, “It’s good stuff, taste it. Yeah, I got two more grams. Now if you like it, you’re going to buy it right? Yeah…”. Fairly nervous about the situation at this point, I forced myself to use the urinal mostly for show. I washed my hands and got out of there, the dealer in his bathroom stall office finally noticing me and shouting “Hey, who’s out there?”. I walked quickly and confidently back out to the market, got Jodie, and went back to the hotel where we decided to stay for the rest of the night. I didn’t particularly want these guys seeing me on the street and deciding maybe it was a bad idea to not rough me up.
So we stayed in, rented a movie “Forgetting Sarah Silverman” which we soon discovered was set in Hawaii, and took place at Turtle Bay Resort. They filmed a major scene sitting in the very table where we ate dinner, and the entire movie used sites where we had just visited. It was a fun movie, and even more fun because of the setting. In one scene, the protagonist walks by a group getting married on the beach and says “A Hawaiian wedding, oh how original!”
We slept in a bit after the wedding, and got up in time to meet back at “the estate” to partake in an ice cream birthday celebration for Julie. After a quick sundae, we headed out to take in some snorkeling up on the north shore. Unfortunately, the weather had been a bit nasty in the last 24 hours, which by Hawaiian standards means windy and slightly more chance of rain in between the primarily sunny days. This had churned up the water where we went snorkeling, near Turtle Bay resort. While clearly it was a good spot with lots of fish to see, I had a hard time seeing through the stirred-up sandy water. Jodie however saw quite a bit somehow. I don’t have any pictures from this snorkeling trip, but it does give me an excuse to share some Turtle Bay pictures that I took earlier in the week when we visited for dinner.
We then packed up the gear and headed into the Polynesian Cultural Center to meet the gang for a Luau. We lined up for dinner, and each got lei’ed on the way in. The lauau was a bit more “cafeteria style” than we had hoped, but we had been pre-warned by Geoff and Sarah who had gone earlier in the week. They went through some of the history of the luaua, and pulled a pig out of the sand pit, but the rest of it was basically a buffet with some people dancing on stage. I did get a fix of some local food finally, including luau pork, poi, taro bread, and other items.
After dinner was the night show, which did a song and dance to cover each of the polynesian islands. It was pretty well done, and got better near the end. I was somewhat surprised to see New Zealand included in the same breath as Hawaii, as I see New Zealand as mostly an extension of Australia. Goes to show that I’m not as worldly as I thought; perhaps a trip to Australia and NZ is in order. A memorable part of the show was the crazy vigilance of the ushers to keep people from using flash photography. I found the ushers far more annoying than the flashes, as every time someone’s flash accidentally went off they would all chase that person down with flashlights. And they held up these annoying flashing signs that read “No Flash”. Ironic.
