New Toys and Psychic Nikki

On Mix 99.9 this morning, they had Psychic Nikki on as a guest - she comes on now and again and they get people to call in and ask her questions about their love life, job, financial situation, stuff like that. What a crock. Every single person who calls gets a positive response - yes, your money situation will improve. Yes, you will meet the person of your dreams within a few months. Yes, you will get promoted or get a new job. This morning she was also doing "past lives readings". Humble Howard apparently was a German fighter pilot in WWI named Deiter. The funniest part was the very first caller - she asked about her past lives, and Nikki told her she was one of Henry VIII's wives, who was beheaded. Puh-lease. There are approaching 6 billion people in the world today, and the first person to call the Mix this morning happened to be one of Henry VIII's wives in a past life? Come on. I get a kick out of Psychic Nikki whenever she's on - it's such crap.

Now for the real fun stuff - toys! I went out to Factory Direct yesterday and picked up a PVR card and DVD burner for $60 each. I need to put a cable TV jack in the office now, but there's one in Ryan's room which is on the other side of the wall, so I could probably just cut a hole in the office wall opposite the jack in Ryan's room and move the jack over. Then plug the cable into the card and voila! I can record TV shows on the computer, then burn them onto DVD. I have anothor thing called a Dazzle, which plugs into the computer, then you plug the video camera into that, and it allows you to transfer video tape to the computer. Now we can transfer our video tapes of the kids to the computer, and then onto DVD. This will obviously make watching them easier, but will also allow us to put the original video tapes in the safety deposit box - backup and offsite storage is a critical part of disaster recovery, dontcha know.

The PVR card also has a FM tuner in it, so I was able to listen to the radio through the computer yesterday as well. I'm sure I won't use that feature all that often, but it's cool nonetheless.

Top 10 Great Album Names for Bad Albums

10.	Songs about Fucking - Big Black
	Honestly, I have no idea what this band sounds like, but you just gotta love the honesty of the title.
9.	Eat 'em and Smile - David Lee Roth
8.	All the Best Cowbows Have Chinese Eyes - Pete Townshend
7.	Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors - Fish
	Not that bad an album, but not nearly as good as his stuff with Marillion.
6.	The Spaghetti Incident? - Guns 'n Roses
	After Appetite for Destruction and the Use Your Illusions, this one was a bit of a downer.
5.	Counterparts - Rush
	Not a great album, as Rush albums go, but the album art plays on the word "Counterparts" very well, listing a bunch of words that go together, as well as pictures of things that go together, and other things like a blueprint of a kitchen sink and parts of a clock (get it? Counter parts?).
4.	Happiness Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch - Our Lady Peace
3.	Badmotorfinger - Soundgarden
	I loved Superunknown, and had heard lots of good things about this one, so I bought it. It's OK, but Superunknown blows it away.
2.	Sailing the Seas of Cheese - Primus
	Tommy the Cat and Jerry was a Race Car Driver are both good, but the rest was rather forgettable. Frizzle Fry is a much better Primus album.
1.	Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence - Dream Theater
	Again, not a bad album, but not as good as other Dream Theater albums. Awesomely cool album title though. This one gave me the idea for this list.

Update: Honorable mention to The Worst of Jefferson Airplane by (who else?) Jefferson Airplane. This one's good not only because of the good name, but because (I believe) it was their debut album.

Maybe next I'll list the worst album titles for great albums -- pretty much any self-titled album (that's not a debut album) or numbered album (Chicago II, Chicago III, Chicago IV, ..., Chicago XVII, ...) would count here.

Optical illusion

Check out this optical illusion - takes a few seconds, but it's quite cool.

Blogging

Here is a comic about the blogging craze. Makes me wonder why I write in this blog - is it for the money? No, though it's kind of nice. For the chicks? No, though, again, that's a welcome perk. Because my thousands of devoted readers are clamoring for more of my innermost thoughts? Um, no.

I don't really know why I have a blog. Sometimes I think it's kind of a historical document - so in a few years, I can read what I was thinking way back when Figgy died, or when we went to Vegas, or something like that. Other times, it's just an outlet for me to vent about stuff (ObVent: if someone passes you on the right, in all probability it means that you're in the wrong lane, not them!), and sometimes I feel like I want to share my opinions with someone, but I don't know who, so I just post 'em here.

It's funny - I'm not sure if Gail even knows I have a blog. It's not a secret - there's a link to it on our own web site fer cryin' out loud - and I'm not trying to keep it from her, I just haven't made a point of telling her about it. And I know why I haven't -- the first thing she'd ask is "why?", and I don't really know the answer.

Gambling and lotteries

I read somewhere that while gambling is legal in Nevada (there were even slot machines at the gate in the airport), lotteries are illegal. This is misleading, though, since there's a game called Keno available in every casino we saw -- and even in some restaurants. Keno, which has the highest house advantage (see below) of any game in Vegas, is simply a fancy version of Lotto 6/49 - you get a card with numbers, pick a bunch of them, turn your ticket in, then a computer picks a bunch of random numbers and depending on how many numbers you got right, you win varying amounts of money. There are lots of different ways to win, but it's essentially a lottery.

The "house advantage" is the amount you can expect to lose at a particular game over a long period of time. For example, Keno has a house advantage of something like 30%, while slots are under 10% and poker and blackjack are under 5%. Roulette is pretty high as well, but I don't remember the number. Basically, the more skill you require, the less of a house advantage. My problem with gambling is that I get bored at slots because there is no skill involved whatsoever, but games like blackjack or poker require more skill than I have (to do anything other than lose consistently), so I'm outta luck. I did have fun playing video blackjack though, and had some luck the first night. I would like to learn more about blackjack though, and maybe next time I'm in a casino, I'll have the confidence to actually sit at a table with a real dealer!

One thing struck me as funny while gambling in Vegas -- the number of people who are frighteningly uninformed on games of chance. People who won't play a slot machine because it paid off recently - or try to play machines that have not paid off recently, figuring they have a better chance of winning there. The funniest thing was the big video board next to each roulette table, listing the previous 20 numbers that came up -- like this gives you any useful information whatsoever. One board I saw showed that four of the previous seven spins had been 1. Question: does this tell people to bet on 1 because it's coming up a lot, or don't bet on 1 because it's already come up more often than the "law of averages" allows? Answer: It tells you nothing. On a wheel with both 0 and 00, the probability of getting 1 on the next spin is exactly 1/38, regardless of whether 1 has come up recently or not. I wonder how much money casinos make because people can't seem to figure that out?

Funny, except not

On Wednesday, while taking a cab to one of the shows we saw (at The Bellagio, I think), the cab driver asked us where we were from. When we said Toronto, he asked if we'd had any snow yet. We laughed, and told him it was only October, and we don't generally get snow until December, maybe late November.

It's snowing right now.

Viva Las Vegas!

Gail and I are back from our 5-day trip to Las Vegas, celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary. I never really had any interest in going to Vegas, since I don't gamble, but Jeff and Kerri went last year, and had a ball, and after they told us all the cool things they did, we decided to check it out as well. It was well worth it.

We stayed at The Mirage, with a great view of the Strip (well, we started off on the 4th floor, with a great view of the roof of the parking lot, but we asked to be moved to a room with a better view, and the next morning, we were given a room on the 21st floor. Much better). We saw a celebrity-impersonator show called Legends in Concert (very good), a typical Las Vegas revue-type show called Jubilee (not so good), and "O" by Cirque du Soleil, which was amazing. Jubilee was topless, which was a first for both of us, and was quite disappointing. The dancers were all lovely and great performers and everything, but the fact that they were topless certainly didn't add anything to the show - it made Gail uncomfortable, and I have to say, didn't do much for me either. The weird thing was that some of the dancers were topless while others weren't. One of the words used to describe the show was "sexy", but I didn't find it sexy at all -- seems like a paradox, but I think it would have been sexier had all of the dancers been covered up.

The size and scope of things (note that I'm no longer talking about the topless show :-) ) along the Strip was just unbelievable. Caesar's Palace is FOUR separate buildings, at least two of which look like they're 20+ floors, and takes up a full city block, and it's not the biggest hotel there -- that would be the MGM Grand. It seems weird that you can forget about places like the Flamingo, Imperial Palace, Monte Carlo, Aladdin, and Harrah's, all of which are multi-hundred-million dollar hotels with over 1000 rooms and numerous restaurants and casinos and shows, and would be the largest hotel in just about any city in the world — but along the Strip, they pale in comparison with the MGM Grand, Mirage, Caesar's, New York New York, Venetian, and Bellagio.

Anyway, I could sit here all day and compose pages and pages of stuff about our trip, but I think I'll break it up into smaller entries. For now, suffice it to say that we had a great time. We took something like 12 rolls of film and an hour of video - once we get the rolls developed (Gail still refuses to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world of digital photography), I'll scan a bunch of them and add a Las Vegas page to our web site.

Figaro

We had to have Figgy put down this afternoon. He seemed to be getting better for a while, and then worse. His vet's appointment yesterday morning showed that his liver enzyme numbers were elevated again -- not as bad as the first appointment, but still 4-5 times higher than they should be. They gave him an ultrasound yesterday afternoon, where they found cancer in the lining of his liver. Perhaps he had fatty liver disease as previously thought and perhaps not, but either way, the cancer was there too, and so there was nothing that could be done.

Obviously this was a very difficult decision to make, but at the same time, it was a very easy decision. At best, Fig's uncomfortable and unhappy, and at worst, already suffering in pain. Either way, the suffering would get worse, and there is no chance of recovery, so ending the suffering was the only choice we had. Anything else would be prolonging his pain.

The weird thing is that once we found out about the cancer, and brought him home for the night, he acted differently, almost back to normal. He even ate some dry food this morning, which he hasn't eaten in 2 weeks. He slept beside Gail last night, and purred when we pet him, and didn't try to hide under or behind things. It's almost as if he understood what was happening and had accepted it.

Sleep well, Figgy. You will be greatly missed.

Pandora

I discovered a cool music web site the other day (again, through wilwheaton.net) called Pandora.com. It allows you to set up "stations" which play a variety of music. The cool thing is that you can give it a band or song and it will choose songs from its huge catalogue that are musically similar to the one you chose. By "musically similar", I mean it ignores the "style" of band or the popularity of the band, and just goes by the song itself. It even tells you why it chose a song -- one such description was "Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features mild rhythmic syncopation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and many other similarities identified in the music genome project." Several were chosen at least partially because they contained "a dirty electric guitar solo". :-)

My first station started off with Dream Theater, and it chose bands like Dio, Chris Cornell, Korn, Anthrax, Three Days Grace, Triumph, Tool, Obituary, Ozzy, Sevendust, and a few bands I'd never heard of like Angra, Shadows Fall, Avenged Sevenfold, Further Seems Forever, and Soak. Some of them were a little heavier than I like (Dio, Ozzy, Korn, Anthrax -- the Obituary song (Dying) was very cool musically, but the vocalist was a little too death metal for my tastes), but in general, they were all similar. I just added Rush to the station, so it should start choosing songs that are similar to both Dream Theater and Rush, and perhaps get a little further away from the death metal stuff.

It's free for 10 hours, and then you pay $36/year. I've been listening to this all day, and I think I may subscribe.

Burning question of the day

If C-3P0 is fluent in over six million forms of communications, why can't he teach R2-D2 one that isn't the vocal equivalent of assembly language?

Free-as-in-beer music

A band out of Seattle called Harvey Danger has released their latest album "Little by Little" on the internet as a free download. I've never heard of the band at all, but I downloaded it anyway because (a) I can, without feeling guilty, (b) if the band is keeping track of how many people do this, higher numbers might push other bands to do the same thing, and (c) maybe they don't suck.

Turns out that they don't suck. I've only listened to it once, and I don't know if I actually like it yet, it'll take a few more listens. But they're competent musicians, the singer has a pretty good voice, and the production is pretty good (i.e. it doesn't sound like it was recorded in someone's basement).

I read about this on wilwheaton.net. Actually, it was on Wil's temporary blog site, since his main site is experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.

Cool stuff

I saw an article today on the 100 best (computer-related) products of 2005, so I thought I'd come up with my own list of products that I can't live without. Well, OK, maybe "can't live without" is a little strong, but here are some products that I really like.

• Mozilla Firefox. It blocks most pop-up windows, allows multiple pages in tabs, has a google search feature built-in, and allows smart keywords (i.e. I can enter "wiki <anything>" in the address bar, and it will load wikipedia and search for the "anything" that I entered. And it doesn't allow useless and dangerous ActiveX controls. And it supports web standards like CSS way better than IE. In short, it just rocks.
• A few extensions for Firefox: Adblock, Web Developer, and Add Bookmark Here are all very useful.
• The MP3 player in my car. When the CD player in my Grand Prix got flaky, I replaced it with one that also plays MP3s. I quickly created a few disks with lots of albums on them, and now I'm hooked. I can put in a disk in, hit shuffle, and not hear the same song twice for days or weeks. I have a single CD with the entire Tragically Hip collection, plus one or two other albums, since there's room.
• IrfanView. It's an image file utility that can do things like display slideshows and stuff, but the only thing I use it for is batch image conversion. For example, I had a directory containing 25 .jpg files that I wanted to scale down -- they were all something like 3300x4800 pixels, and 800 dpi. For the web, I only wanted maybe 150dpi and 800x1200 or thereabouts. With IrfanView, I selected the images, told it what I wanted it to do, and it did it to each one in turn. Very cool.
• My universal remote control. I use it to control the following components in our family room: TV, DVD player, VCR, receiver, CD player, and even the ceiling fan.
• Wireless networking. We bought a wireless router about 4 years ago (cost something like $350 for the router and $150 for a wireless card - way cheaper now), and I don't know how we survived without it. I guess before Gail and I had laptops, we just used our PC, which was always in the same place, so there was no problem. Now, I bring my laptop home from work and turn it on, and it immediately connects to the internet, and I can do this in any room in the house.
• My cell phone. I don't get a lot of calls; about 90% are from Gail, asking me to pick up dinner on the way home from work, or stop off at the grocery store, or whatever, but I always make sure I have my phone with me whenever I go anywhere.

One more item that's on the very cool list, though I've never really used it, is Mac OS X. I've never been a Mac guy at all, but I did work at a company that did NeXTStep development. NeXTStep was the best development environment I've ever worked in. Once NeXT was bought by Apple, they kind of based OS X on NeXTStep, and made it even cooler. I've only seen it a couple of times at work when John (a faithful reader of this blog, and quite possibly the only reader of this blog) shows me the cool stuff his Mac can do. It's basically your standard Unix system, but the GUI is far cooler than any other Unix GUI I've seen. It does cool things like being able to temporarily tile all of the windows, allowing you to pick one, and them moving all the windows back to where they were. The Windows UI team could learn a thing or two from OS X.

Figgy's coming home

Heard from the vet today - Figgy's going to be fine. He's been eating pretty well, and his liver enzyme numbers are way down (one of them is supposed to be under 120 -- his was up over 940 on Friday, and down to about 240 today), so the doctor said he'd be happier in his own home environment. Gail's going to pick him up this afternoon. You can be damn sure that we're going to pay closer attention to the amount of food he eats from now on!

The Figster and Runnin' for the Cure

Had a bit of a scary day on Friday. I went to the dentist in the morning and when I came back, my cat Figaro was sitting on the kitchen chair, looking at me. I noticed that his ears and nose seemed a little yellow, instead of the usual pink. Upon closer inspection, I found that they were quite yellow, as were his nose, lips, and the whites of his eyes. Gail and I had noticed the day before that he hadn't been himself for a day or two. I immediately called the vet and brought him in. She examined him and told me that he had liver disease. She said that most of the time, this is caused by cats simply not eating. After a while, their body starts to process their body fat, and sometimes the liver gets overwhelmed and shuts down. Then this causes nausea, which makes the cat even less likely to eat, so the whole thing spirals. He's lost a pound (i.e. 10% of his body weight) since his last checkup a month ago (at which time he seemed in perfect health). She told me that they'd have to keep him there for the weekend.

The type of liver disease that she thinks he has is very treatable - as long as he starts eating again, his liver will start to regenerate itself, and he'll be fine. They started him on anti-nausea medication, and managed to get him to eat something, though he threw everything up Friday night. We went to see him Saturday morning, and he did seem a little less yellow, and a little less lethargic as well. We tried to go again Saturday afternoon, but they were just starting a procedure on a dog, so we couldn't go through to where Figgy was, and they were about to close. The doctor called me a little while later, saying that he hadn't thrown up all day, and was eating some more, and was even more bright than the morning, so this is good news. We heard nothing today (vet's office was closed)- she's going to call with an update tomorrow, and hopefully he can come home.

Figgy's been with Gail and I almost as long as we've been together -- we started dating in February of 1992, and we found Fig (he was a stray) in November of '92. I know that he's not going to live forever, and I know that at 14, he's already lived longer than most house cats. If anything were to happen, Nicholas is too young to understand, and likely won't remember Fig for long, but Ryan seemed genuinely upset on Saturday, and said a number of times that he hopes Figgy gets better. Gail would be devastated, and I'm not sure I'd be much better. C'mon, Figster, you can beat this.

On another topic, we all walked in the CIBC Run for the Cure this morning. It's a 5k run/walk to raise money for breast cancer research. My mother and Gail's mother are both breast cancer survivors, as was Gail's late grandmother, so this is a cause that's important to us. We raised $325 ourselves, and the event, held at over 40 different locations across Canada, raised over $21 million. Last year, the four of us plus my parents walked the 2k leg, but we decided to walk the full 5k this year. We knew the boys wouldn't walk the full 5k, so we brought the wagon -- good thing too, since they both stayed in the wagon the entire walk. Gail and I split pulling the wagon, so we each walked 5k, 2 1/2 of which was pulling a wagon holding 80 pounds of Perrow kids.

Spam-o-rama

At work, we use the services of SpamShark to filter our email spam. Every now and again, I log in to their web site and peruse the spam I've received, on the off-chance that some useful piece of email was accidentally marked as spam. The top four types of spam I receive seem to be:

1. Cheap drugs (Viagra, Cialis, et al)
2. Porn
3. Stock tips
4. Watches

The first three I can understand - sex, drugs and money - but watches? Who the fuck cares? For me, a watch is a tool that tells you the time. If it's got the date too, alarms, stopwatches, etc. that's great, but the time is the important thing. My watch is a cheap Timex Expedition - $40 at Wal-Mart, and I've had it for years. If I were in a different line of work where I had to deal with customers face-to-face, and wear suits and stuff, then sure, I'd probably get myself a nicer watch. But are there really that many people who are dying for a Rolex or a Rolex clone? If I see someone wearing a Rolex, I think that either (a) he bought a cheap knock-off to try to impress people, or (b) he's got more money than brains. Either way, I'm not terribly impressed.

It's the same with wheels on cars - when I was picking out stuff for my car, upgrading the wheels is about the last thing I'd spend money on. I simply do not care one iota what the wheels on my car look like.

Castle on a Cloud

We went to see Les Misérables last night in Toronto. I really like that show; this was my fourth time seeing it, and Gail's third. Most of it is not especially upbeat or happy (as Gail mentioned to Kerri last night, Mamma Mia this ain't), but it's a very powerful story, and is all about love - Fantine's love for Cosette, Valjean's for Cosette, Eponine's for Marius, Cosette's for Marius, Marius' for Cosette, and eventually even Marius' for Valjean. The actors playing Valjean and Javert were both excellent (I saw Michael Burgess playing Valjean a few years ago, and he was amazing - this guy was about as good). Cosette was more of a soprano than I'm used to (my parents used to play the soundtrack CD a lot when I lived at home, so I'm very familiar with the music), but I wasn't that thrilled with Eponine. She was pretty good, but not at the same level as the rest of the cast.

The title of this post refers to a song sung by the young Cosette. It, along with Hold On by Sarah McLachlan, is one of the saddest songs ever:

There is a castle on a cloud
I like to go there in my sleep
Aren't any floors for me to sweep
Not in my castle on a cloud

There is a room that's full of toys
There are a hundred boys and girls
Nobody shouts or talks too loud
Not in my castle on a cloud

There is a lady all in white*
Holds me and sings me a lullaby
She's nice to see and she's soft to touch
She says "Cosette, I love you very much"

I know a place where no one's lost
I know a place where no one cries
Crying at all is not allowed
Not in my castle on a cloud

Call me a wuss, but I get choked up whenever I hear that song. No child should ever have to feel that much depair.

* This song is sung shortly after Fantine (Cosette's mother) dies - during her death scene, she wears a white gown, and has a bright white spotlight shone on her.

Deiter's Love Golf Tournament

I played in the Deiter's Love Golf Tournament this past weekend - this is the one that I'm doing the web site for. There were well over 100 golfers, so it was by far the largest tournament I've been in. I was in a group with my friends Jeff, Steve, and Doug, all of whom are better golfers than I am - though Jeff hasn't golfed much in the past few years, so his game has dropped off a little. I couldn't hit anything off the tee most of the day, but my short game and putting were pretty good. I did come within about an inch of a natural birdie on a par 4 -- we used my tee shot, then my chip pitch onto the green (I learned the difference between a chip and a pitch as well), and then I almost sank the birdie putt. Luckily, someone else sank the putt, and we birdie'd the hole. We played pretty well overall - no bogies at all, and four birdies, so we ended up 4 under, which was good enough for 5th overall. Note that this is the 5th best score overall - there were at least 4 teams with lower scores than us. Could be that 5 teams tied at 5 under, putting us 9th, not 5th.

After the tournament, there was a dinner and a silent auction of hundreds of items ranging from toys to gift baskets, golf equipment to crafty things. There was even a big bag of dog food and a can of ceiling paint. My friend Wendy got the ceiling paint - doesn't seem that exciting, but she paid less than half of what she would have at a store. Hey, if you need it anyway, may as well.

I bought a couple of things at the auction - a putter and dozen golf balls for about $55 (the golf balls are normally about $25, so I got a pretty nice putter for $30), and a picnic set, which consists of a big cooler bag, and another bag (that attaches to the first one) containing plastic plates, cups, cutlery, a little cutting board and bread knife, and some other stuff. Not bad for about $50.

I'm not really sure why I decided to bid on the putter - maybe just because I golf left-handed, and it was a lefty putter. The thing is, I already have a pretty good putter, which I'm perfectly happy with (used it to sink a long nasty putt on our last hole, thankyouverymuch). I'm probably done golfing for this year, so I'll have to wait until next spring to figure out which putter to use.

Published again!

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Flamborough Review last week, and it was published in today's edition. There was a column last week suggesting the possibility of a "gas-out", i.e. a day where everyone doesn't buy gas, forcing the gas companies to lower prices. I pointed out that if you don't buy gas on that day, when you normally would, you'd have to buy it the day before or the day after, and so demand over that three day period wouldn't change. If gas prices drop at all, they'll climb right back up the next day.

This is the second time I've been published in the paper -- I had a letter to the editor of the Hamilton Spectator published a couple of years ago.

Creating gradient images

So I'm working on this web site I mentioned before, and it's got a purple gradient image down the left side -- i.e. it's purple right at the edge, and then it gradually fades to white, like this:

I like it, so I put it on the new site. Stacy also likes it, but says she'd rather have it green, not purple. Well, I'm not a graphic designer, I just know HTML, CSS, PHP, stuff like that, so I have no idea how to change it from purple to green, or to create one from scratch. I do some googling and asked Gail, and she suggested that Microsoft Word has a thing called WordArt which does this sort of thing. So I played with Word until I found it. I managed to create the green gradient following these steps:

1. Used WordArt to create a word that changes from green to white. It can only do this in the background of the word, so I made the word "WWWWWW", just as wide as the old image. (I figured that W takes up more room than any other letter, so I would have the least amount of playing to do. Thinking about it later, I think using "IIIIII" would work better.)
2. Save the document as an HTML page. Word saved the document as a gif.
3. Load the gif into Microsoft Paint, and copy pixel colours until I have a single line of pixels that goes from green to white. Save as a png, otherwise Paint messes the colours up.
4. Create an html file that contains the style "background: url(images/greengradient.png); background-repeat: repeat-y;", so that the image is repeated down the left side of the page.
5. Load this html file in a browser, maximize the browser, and use the PrtScrn key to copy the desktop onto the clipboard.
6. Chop up the image until I have an image that's the size of the gradient on the original image (with the heart logo and the purple gradient), then copy it to the clipboard.
7. Load the original image in IrfanView, select the old gradient, and paste the new one on top.
8. Save the new image as a new gif.

Whew! Lots of steps, but it ended up looking pretty good. Unfortunately, Gail thinks the green at the left is too bright, which means I'll have to do the whole thing again, starting with a different green. Groan.

A Special Day

Today is a special day for two reasons: First, it's Ryan's 6th birthday today, and second, it's the first day of school. Ryan started Grade One this morning, though wasn't sure how he felt about it. I guess Adam told him on the weekend that there's no playing in grade one (though Adam is himself starting grade one, so maybe Liam told him). We tried to assure him that there was indeed playing in grade one, though perhaps not as much, or maybe a different kind of playing than in SK. We went to see his classroom when we dropped him off this morning, and his teacher happened to be there, so Ryan confirmed with her that they do get play time. After that, and after seeing his SK friends in the YMCA before-school program, he was fine.

Jeff had his annual golf tournament this past weekend, and Gail and I both played in it. There were only 16 golfers playing - I'm sure Jeff's had a lot more in previous years. Our team included Steve and Laura, both of whom golf a lot more than Gail or I do. Gail only golfs once a year, but she had her worst day ever - she was hitting the ball a lot better at the driving range than on the course. Steve reassured her that everybody hits better at the driving range than on the course. She did rebound on one hole though, and almost got herself a natural par. We used her drive and her chip, and then she left her putt maybe one inch short of the hole. I had a pretty good day - and even got my first-ever birdie. Our team did pretty well - we shot 1-over for the day, placing us second, Steve won the men's closest to the pin award, and Laura won the women's longest drive award.