Posts from — October 2007

Happy Halloween everyone!

Last night we went to Shannon’s house and carved our pumpkins. What a fun little time. Friends, pumpkin’s, Orange, Orange Peppers and Seeds. Wait. Did you just say Orange Peppers? Yes, Calgary is so massively populated and such great consumers that there was no pumpkins to be had anywhere in Calgary. Jason went to 5 different grocery stores and didn’t find a single pumpkin. Nice work Calgary! Luckily Lindsay gave her pumpkin to Jason and he was able to carve the beauty you see below. Go Bronco Ultimate!

Shannon’s Pumpkin was definitely the most complex of the night. Nice work Shannon. Robbie’s was simple but effective.

Mine I named the decepticon from the movie the Transformers. Doesn’t it sorta look like a decepticon logo?

And the most original was Terri’s. An Orange pepper. Great work Terri.

Lindsay just liked to pick the seeds out of the pumpkin’s.

So now we’re at home waiting for the Kids to come by. The weird thing about this place though is that nobody uses the doorbell. They just walk up and yell “Trick or Treat.” But if you have the TV on or are talking then you don’t hear the yell. Then you hear them leave and go look and they come back. Weird. So far we’ve only had one buzz lightyear costume .

We just had a kid come to the door and Lindsay pulled the line “Oh, you’re a little late so I’ll give you lots”. And proceeded to drop 3 little bars into the bag. Maybe you had to be there but that was awesome. She almost needed to end that with a ‘syke‘

The best Halloween quote ever comes from our Wales friend Matthew (who now lives in Florida), “Don’t give them candy they’re fucking beggars.” We just texted him “Happy Halloween” and he wrote back “Don’t encourage the little bastards!” Awesome!

Just a quick email to say congrads to our good friends Tim & Kirsten. Tim and Kir had a little baby boy named Owen Sean Hogan.   Now the little Widget has a name!

Owen was born 7 lbs 1 oz at their house on Tuesday, October 30th (one day early). Actually, he wasn’t really one day early.  He was actually 8 days late but he was one day earlier then I guessed for the widget pool. But I did guess the sex correctly….

Anyway, I’m sure they’ll make great parents as they love kids and are definitely suited to be Father & Mother. Congrats guys!

This is the letter I just sent to Sleeman’s. I’ll let you know if I get anything back from them.

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Dear Mr. Sleeman’s,

I’m writing you as I’m in utter dismay with shock and horror. I realize it’s Halloween and all but I’m still rather frightened. You see I went to open a beer while making dinner and watching the football game on Sunday afternoon. You know a typical and normal Sunday afternoon activity, all is well.

As I opened the beer with my faithful bottle opener I took the top off of the beer bottle right off from the threads up. As you can see in the picture.

Glass shards everywhere! Luckily I wasn’t harmed in the process. Sadly, the same can’t be said about the beer.

What is a guy to do when that happens? Do you risk drinking the beer and getting all cut up? Do you pour it into a glass? Do you filter the beer appropriately? But what is appropriate? So many questions….. So much confusion…..

Maybe I’m a lesser man then some? Maybe I didn’t have the appropriate means to filter the beer? Again, what is appropriate filter method? As you can see I had to resort to pouring the liquid down the drain.

I want to apologize for having to treat one of your fine product’s in such a manner. However, some may say I’m a fine product myself. So I just couldn’t risk drinking the beer. I sure hope you think I made the right decision.
Anyway, I just want to apologize for having to waste a beer in this way. If you could inform me of an appropriate filter method or the correct steps necessary for next time this happens that would be great. Or likewise is there a research team investigating better, stronger more durable bottles? If there is or if you’d like a dedicated “bottle opener tester” I’d be glad to assist.

Thanks for your time,

Jeff

As most of you Calgarians know, we had a dump of snow on Wed night / Thursday morning. Which is actually sorta surprising that this is the first dump of snow because normally for fall league we’ll play at least 1 or two games in the snow. AND considering this is the last week of fall league it seems about right.

So Lindsay and I were out playing squash on Wednesday night for our usual Squash night. As always, it was a good time. Oh and did I mention that Joan is a crazy good squash player? Seriously. Got my ass handed to me. No, not that ass.

Anyway, on the way home it was snowing pretty hard and I made a bit of a revelation. I think my car might be a Mexican. I say this because when I was growing up my parents sponsored some Mexican guys to come live in Canada with our family for a couple of months. Anyway, while they were living with us my parents we had to drive to the mountains so that they could see snow for the first time. I figured because it was the first time our car had seen snow that it might be Mexican.

Here are some pics that Lindsay took from the first fall snow fall. Our Mexican car and our back porch.

There has been request lately on our blog (and we like to take our readers comments to heart as we adore our audience, as small or large as it may be). The most recent request was for “ass pictures” and “to maintain inter-blog continuity”.

So here is some ass for you:

Two quick things.

1) We sold our car. Not the Matrix. The old Honda Accord. And yes, we got money for “that old thing” It went into the buy and sell on Thursday morning. Saturday morning I received a phone call. The guy came and looked at it on Saturday. Boom, sold. Funny thing is I haven’t had another phone call about the car since. I must be a really good salesman.   Maybe I should become a used car salesman?

2) House hack.

What exactly is house hack?

Exactly as it sounds. Hacky sack in the house.

I think you know you’re obsessed when you put your shoes on, move all the furniture, laptops and water glasses so that you can play hacky sack in your living room.

Hi, We’re the Sill’s and we have a problem.

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Bad joke time.

Q: Why did we move our laptop’s before playing house hack?

A: So they don’t get hacked.

Jeff and I always try to take up something different every winter to keep us entertained and fill the void that is there once ultimate ends. In years past we have dabbled in pottery, cross-country running, rock climbing (scrambling), triathalon training (that didn’t last long!), soccer, snowboarding and wedding planning.

This year we’ve decided to take up badminton and squash, and hacky sack of course. We have started a mini squash club on Wednesday evenings at the University and it is growing exponentially. Who knew that so many people played squash and wanted to join our club all of a sudden? Unfortunately, they all have skillz and Jeff and I have not played since we have been together (over 6 years). Terri played “charity squash” with me Wednesday night. Charity sports are when one person is way better than the other but they say they aren’t and agree to play with you just to be nice so you have someone to play with. I never got shut out 0-9, but it was really close to that.

Jeff on the otherhand is improving weekly, and is starting to win games. Having the background skills of sprinting and wrist movements from ultimate really helps. Laying out in squash is not recommended but our friend Scott offers regular demos for anyone wanting to learn!

Next step: go out and buy all of the necessary equipment for said new sports, as usual. Why waste money on renting equipment? It’s way more economical to just buy it because eventually you will pay it off if you use it enough times right? Yes, providing you stick with the sport long enough…

So it’s official today our old Honda Accord is up for sale. The bargain finder (buy and sell equivalent in Alberta) publishes our ad today at 7am and is now in print. We’ll see how many phone calls (if any) we get. Should be interesting and might even create more Blog material!

You can find the ad here or here or just read this one.

Saturday, I finally decided to put up a knife magnet that we received as a wedding present. I put the knife magnet up successfully and it looks pretty sweet as you can see. Cool knifes too huh!

Anyway, because our cupboard was such a mess I decided to take a stab (get it, stab?) at cleaning it. What did I find in the cupboard? A wishbone that’d been drying out! How cool is that?

So I do what any normal 28 year old grown man does. I run find Lindsay. Anyway, we make our respective wishes, grab the wishbone with our pinky fingers and snap the wishbone. We take a look and see who won. Lindsay’s is the right half and I’m the left. Who do you think won?

I joke that I won and we discuss what we were wishing.

Lindsay’s Wish: to have no more migraines.

Jeff: to find more magic beer. (yes, this was actually my wish).

We conclude that it was probably better for her to win. Well, turns out that I won because about an hour later Lindsay was cleaning out her Ultimate bag and what did she find? Magic Beer. Make that Magic DUDE Beer!

As I mentioned in my last post I had jury duty summons to attend last friday.

So, Thursday night I called the number that I was suppose to call. Turns out the jury duty selection was canceled. Completely canceled. Not postponed, canceled. In retrospect, I would have liked to attend the selection and not been selected. Just to see how the whole experience works. Plus as Terri pointed out, it’d be some good Blog material.

Anyway, after leaving work early I decided to get the bottle recycling done. I was waiting for some neighbourhood kids to stop by fund raising with bottles, but nothing. So I finally decided to do it myself. As I was organizing everything in the garage I found 3 magic beer.

What is this “magic beer”?

These are those beers that are still full that you completely forgot about and which appear magically. I usually end up with a couple of magic beer every time I do the bottles

So after returning my bottles and collecting my $33.95 (yes, you’re right. That IS a lot of bottles) I headed to Safeway. While in Safeway, I was deeply immersed in selecting my produce I turned around and a dude on a segway wheeled (or is it segway-ed) by me. I turned around made complete eye contact with the dude and said, “AWESOME!” Basically in the same sort of fashion a kid that just got a bike from Santa Claus for Christmas would do.

Man are Segway’s ever cool!