We’ve found what appears to be an excellent new daycare provider, but first we need to get her relocated. It may take a few months for her to become accustomed to the cultural differences between her homeland and Milton, but I think she’ll catch on quickly. English is her first language, and the kids seem to get along well with her so that’s a bonus.
So for the sake of my children, please buy this house:
It’s a lovely four bedroom in Welland, Ontario (mother-in-law not included in the purchase price). Click here for the full listing.
The call came at 12:45 that the load of guys from Waterloo would be passing by Milton shortly. I packed up my stuff and abandoned my family who hadn’t quite finished the tee-ball end of year extravaganza.
Aww, isn’t that cute? Anyways, I met Darryl, Graeme, and Tim at the carpool lot on the 401 where our adventure continued. We met the rest of the guys downtown.
Stop number one was a tour of the distillery district on Segways. The tour itself was marginally interested (as expected) but zipping around the area on Seways was really fun. The tour began with a lesson on how to ride the Segway and a short obstacle course. It’s a fairly simple process of leaning forward to go forward, leaning back to slow down or back up, and twisting the left handlebar to turn left or right. After passing our compulsories, we were off in a line touring through the area. Comments from other tourists in the area ranged from “that’s really neat” to “do you realize how dorky you look”. Yes, by the way, we realize how dorky we look. My favourite was a bride getting her wedding pictures taken who took a second away from sucking on her cigarette to yell out at us “hey, I want to ride on one of those!”.
We finished the tour and headed to Steamwhistle for a brewery tour. It turns out that they take water, barley, hops, and yeast and transform it into a magical beverage . When we arrived at the brewery, they handed us two tickets each to sample this “beer”. A tight-shirted gentleman then toured us through the facility and described the whole process. He was such a nice man that we decided it would be only polite to drink more of this so-called beer throughout the remainder of the evening.
The highlight of the brewery tour for Darryl was discovering another guy who was there for a bachelor party who was clearly wayyyy nerdier than Darryl.
We then headed to Jack Astor’s for dinner, where the waitress proceeded to dump an entire glass of ice water into Darryl’s lap. He was advised by the manager to blow-dry his lap using their high-powered hand dryers in the bathroom and to enjoy his free meal on the house. The group moved from Jack Astors and on to the Bier Markt where we remained until the music got too loud for comfort. Then on to Fion McCools where we sat on the patio until a nearby patron threw up on the sidewalk and then called it a night.
Thanks for driving Tim, and I hope you had a fun night Darryl!
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!
My one-time boss James shares my love of southern BBQ, and sent me an excited email a few days ago. It seems he was driving in the countryside north of Waterloo and passed a BBQ stand set up in the parking lot of a local tire retailer. Now we’d seen this sort of thing several times before in Tallahassee, but never up here in Canadia. A road trip was in order.
So today we hopped into James’ new mustang convertible and headed out for an adventure. I absolutely needed to give this place a try, even if it means a mild case of food poisoning.
We drove north to Heidelberg, and sure enough there in the parking lot of Bast Tire is a trailer set up with two big barrel smokers and several picnic tables under an awning. On the menu was pulled pork (on or off of the bun), brisket (again, on or off the bun), sausage, ribs (if pre-ordered 8 hours in advance) and chicken (again, with the pre-order caveat). They also offer a family meal which might be something to try if you’re a local. I ordered the pulled pork on a bun, with beans and coleslaw. On the condiment table they have the usual onions, sauerkraut, etc plus a selection of BBQ sauces. I went with the sweet sauce, but they also had a vinegar-based sauce and a mustard-based sauce that were both very good after a taste test.
And for the taste-test, it was a great pulled pork sandwich. I said to James as we finished up our lunch “Something tells me I’ll be on a first name basis with this guy before too long”. I’m pretty sure that this is going to become a regular lunch stop for me.
I also found an article in the local paper talking about the owner:
http://www.waterloochronicle.ca/news/article/136998
SOS BBQ is located not far from the St.Jacob’s market, google map below.
View Larger Map
I’ve been hearing some buzz about this lately, and the site launched today. In a nutshell, this is a series of interviews with regular people to talk about why they think Vista is terrible, and to get their reaction to a new version of windows “Mohave”. In the video below, a woman rates Vista on a scale from one to ten as a “zero” and then rates Mohave as a “ten”. What they don’t know is that what they’re really seeing is Windows Vista.
Video: Mojave Experiment
There are lots of other videos available on the website, http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/.
This is a really interesting campaign, and a counter-strike somewhat to the Mac vs PC ads.
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.
