Surfergeeks

If you look over there to the right. No, the other right. You’ll see a new feature I’ve added – mini movie reviews! I’ll do my best to update it after each movie that I watch.

I am so sore right now. I had anticipated being sore tonight but not nearly as sore as I really am. You see, today I went over to Jen & Mike’s to help Mike demolish part of their 3rd floor. The plan was to demolish the baby’s room, the bathroom, and the hallway. And be demolish -we’re talking right down to the studs. Oh, and it’s plaster, not drywall. So it was MESSY. We all had masks on and I’m sure they helped immensely but I think I still managed to inhale around five pounds of plaster dust. So, as I mentioned, I planned on being sore – lots of lifting, ripping down wood, plaster, etc. but then things changed.

The baby’s room used to be a kitchen, complete with a row of cupboards above where the sink used to be (that was removed ages ago). We took down the cupboards and put them out on the back balcony, standing up. There were 6 doors so it was probably a good 10′ long. I said to them, “I don’t know guys. The wind may blow this over.” They poo-pooed the idea and we went back to work.

Later, I’m out dumping a pail of plaster into the trash bin below when, sure enough, the wind blows over the cupboards. I didnt even see it coming. It struck my right arm then my right leg before nicking my one toe and giving it a small cut. My arm and leg definitely took the brunt of the blow. Both of them now have HUGE welts and damn nice bruises. That really took the wind out of my sails.

While it may seem incredibly unlucky that the 5% of the time I happened to be in the position where it could have struck me it did; I actually consider myself VERY lucky. If I had been over a bit more or bent over then cupboards could very easily have struck me on the head (not that getting hit there would do any damage) and knock me off the 3rd floor balcony into a huge trash bin filled with sharp plaster and nails on the ground below. Nikki could have been rich!

So I just got the latest Nelly Furtado album. Included with it was the video for “Promiscuous”. Wow. She is smokin’ hot in that video. Quite possibly one of the most beautiful women in music today. And not weird either. I haven’t listened to the rest of the disc yet but I’m suspecting that there’ll be a couple more worthwhile tracks at the very least. Plus, it’s an added bonus that she happens to be Canadian!

So yesterday was Father’s Day. Alex was so excited about it he thought he’d get an early start to the day by getting up at 5-freakin’-o’clock in the morning. I could only get him to settle down for 15-20 minute chunks of time. I finally surrendered at about 6:10 and we were up for the day.

Since he’s still rather on the youngish side we didn’t have any real big plans. However, we DID have a couple fairly big poker tournaments to play in so we asked Nikki’s folks if they would like to borrow Alex for the day.

The first thing we did after dropping off Alex was head over to Golden Griddle for their weekend buffet breakfast. Yum yum yum. After that we had to track down a cover for the pool. Hopefully this will stop the animals from puncturing the inflatable air ring around it. Our first stop was Toys ‘R’ Us. We didn’t find any pool covers but we did find a shit load of stuff we’d LOVE to buy for Alex. I soooo can’t wait for him to get older. Hot Wheels and Lego…I can’t wait!

Off to Wal-Mart. Jackpot! Pool cover central. So we scoops up the pool cover and head home with a quick stop at Price Chopper to grab some baby food.

We got home just before 1pm so I head out to the backyard to re-patch the pool and put the cover on. I didn’t get a chance to reinflate the air ring last night and there was a rather large rainstorm. When I heard it coming down, I was hoping that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning and find a completely drained pool. THAT woulda sucked in a BIG way. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear to have lost any water. I’ll reinflate it today and see if it holds.

The first poker tourney was a freeroll at UltimateBet for an entry into their $1million Freeroll in July. This was the monthly qualifier. We had already made our way through the daily qualifier and the weekly qualifier to get to the monthly. Unfortunately, both of us busted out before the entries were handed out.

Next up was the World Blogger Championship of Online Poker (WBCOOP) at PokerStars. Big field of 2274 players. Only 54 places offered prizes. Nikki went out 313th and I was VERY shortstacked so I pushed all in with KJs and was called by AQs. He caught his flush and I was out 303rd. While not making the prizes kinda sucked, I was still very happy with how deep in the field that we made it. Most of these players are VERY good players.

So after busting out, we headed back over to Nikki’s folks’ place to pick up Alex. After chatting there for a bit we headed home where we retired to the backyard briefly. Alex played in the sandbox and I dug up some weeds in the backyard. I also scrubbed all the bird crap off of our cars. We then gave Alex a cool bath and tried to put him down for the night. Note the word tried. He wasn’t having any part of it. Maybe it was because he didn’t really get a chance to crawl around the living room for a bit before bed or maybe it was because he was over-tired (since he was awake at 5 and only napped for a total of about 1 hour over the entire day). We ended up bringing him out to the living room so he could play for a bit and finally got him to bed around 9.

We then played in the poker forum league event last night. I started off rather decently but then lost a decent sized pot dropping me down near the bottom of the list. I managed to claw my way back to 3rd and managed to hang in until there were six of us left. Unfortunately, the cards weren’t coming my way and I ended up being down again. I pushed and was called. I lost.

So all-in-all it was a pretty kickass Father’s Day. I know that it’s just the first of many to come and I’m really looking forward to the ones when Alex is old enough that we can actually do things.

So I was playing around on MLS.ca today just because I was bored. For shits & giggles I was seeing how much real estate was in other cities. I happened upon Calgary, AB. My first search was between $100K-$125K. There was exactly one entry – a bachelor “suite” in a retirement home. Okay, check <$100K. Three entries. $125-150: two entries, but really it was just one. $149,900 for an EMPTY LOT!!!!

Okay, let’s go to the other end of the extreme: $500K-Unlimited. 474 entries! I forgot how many millions the first one was but on the very last page I found a bunaglow for $519K. It was 949sq. ft. on a lot 50×120. What?!?!?! The?!?!?!? FUCK?!?!?!?! So basically what that tells me is I can buy, basically, my EXACT same house, only in colder Calgary for a paltry $400K MORE than what I paid for it here in London! Our house is 920sq. ft. on a lot 42×120. So, basically the same damn thing.

Un-freakin-believable…

One of the online comics that I read has started posting a weekly range of questions every Friday. On the weeks that I remember, I’ll post them up here and people can reply in the comments section.

1) If you could have any superpower what it would it be and why?

2) Know the movie Groundhog Day? Let’s say you could live one day over and over again, and never age or die, what day would it be?

3) What is the biggest secret you ever kept (without naming names)?

4) What is your favorite smell?

5) If you could jump into one person’s body for one day and do anything, who would it be? What would you do?

6) Which would you rather have?
A life of constant sameness, never experiencing extreme happiness nor extreme pain, but overall, being okay; or living a life of extreme moments of pleasure spiked with horrendous moments of misery?

Here are my answers:

1) Telepathy – full blown being able to read AND influence people’s thoughts. Without a doubt. Sure, telekenesis would be cool, but with full blown telepathy I can just MAKE people move things for me

2)  Oooh. Tough one. I don’t think that there’s any one day I would want to live over and over again. I mean, parts of some days were kickass but then the rest of the day kinda sucked. The best day that comes to mind would be the day that Nikki first told me she loved me (ya, sappy, I know) but then I had to leave for work. That sucked.

3) If I told, it wouldn’t be a secret would it???

4) Pizza

5) Here’s where my evil side comes out. I’d jump into some mega-celebrity’s body like Britney or Paris or Lindsay and then go out and do the most depraved things and make sure it’s all caught on video tape. I’m evil like that

6) A life of extreme moments, without a doubt. If you never experience pain and misery than you really never learn to appreciate the moments of happiness and pleasure.

So, what are your’s? Post ‘em in the comments!

So Alex has his first shiner. He was trying to stand up in front of the TV and instead of falling backwards like he usually does, he fell forwards right into the TV stand. He hit is face pretty good and as as you can see from this post, he’s now got a black eye. Maybe Rob’ll take a pic and post it.

So Alex had his 9 month checkup today. No needles today but he gets one in 3 months (then 2 more 3 months apart after that). Anyhoo…here are the stats that everyone has been pestering us for:

Height: 30 inches (he’s standing now so no more of this “length” shit – the next time someone talks about his length it better be the girls in high school locker room)

Weight: 21lbs 8oz.

I’m not sure where that puts him in the percentile range but it’s big!

Also – boatload of new pics coming soon

EDIT: We found the percentile thingy. According to one website he’s in the 92nd percentile for height and 52nd perctile for weight. What that means is that we have a tall skinny kid.

Well, it turns out there WAS death and carnage on the 401. Seems like some dumbass decided to drive his truck the wrong way down the 401. Must have been playing too much Burnout 3: Takedown or somethin’. If so inclined, you can read about it here: London Free Press.

Well, we made it home from the Toronto Zoo just before 10pm tonight. We left the zoo right around 5pm. It’s a two hour drive. You do the math…

Somewhere right around Kitchener-ish (I think) traffic slows to a COMPLETE crawl stop. I can see some flashing lights off in the distance. W00t! Death and carnage. As we get up there, we see a car sideways against the concrete barrier. No death. Not much carnage. Boo! So by the time we get through that it’s almost time for Alex to eat so we head into the Mickey D’s @ Kitchener to feed him and top off our tummies as well. Whilst there we overhear some others saying the 401 is closed further west, but were unable to discern any details as to exactly where or why.

After filling up, we head back out and are making great progress and then WHAM – full stop. This was just past the Ingersoll/CAMI turnoff. We SLOWLY move forward and FINALLY get routed off the highway at Putnam, then back on at Hwy 73. Looking in the rear view mirror I could see a LOT of orange flashing lights and possibly a few red/white flashers but couldn’t be sure. Going to watch the news at eleven to see if I can find out what was going on.

So, the zoo…

It rained.

And rained.

And rained some more.

The original plan was for Jen, Mike, Bri, and Serena to join us, along with Jen’s friend Erica and her two kids, Ben & Ella. Unfortunately Erica had to back out earlier this week. As today approached Jen & I kept watch on the weather network to see how the weather was shaping up. First look was 30% chance of scattered showers. Then 80% chance of showers. Then 80% chance of thunderstorms. Ugh. Well, this morning it was still sitting at 80% thunderstorms but we decided to go anyway. So we may get a little wet. Big deal. Jen called and had to cancel as well as Serena came down ill and was running a fever. We’re still going damn it!

We got there just after 11am and made our way into the zoo. We picked up a rain poncho for the kid that was only about fifteen times too big for him. (as in we could of stuffed 15 of him into the thing) We also snagged a wheelchair for my Mom to ride around in. The walking would have been too much for her and the pushing gave me a good workout! We saw tons of things we didn’t see last year and had a terrific time. The only really disappointing part of the day was that the kids’ zoo was pretty much closed due to the rain. Most of the animals were hangin’ out in their shelters so they didn’t get wet. Not that I blame them.

We took a shit load of pictures too. I’ll try to get those downloaded off the camera and captioned and uploaded to the site tomorrow.

Alex was still a little too small to appreciate what he was seeing. Some of the things caught his attention because they moved. Others, like this giant snapping turtle, didn’t really seem to do much for him since it didn’t really move. He’s sorta like a T-Rex in that way – if it doesn’t move, he doesn’t see it.

Would the zoo have been better if it was warm and sunny? Absolutely! Did we have a great time anyway? Most Definitely!