Posts from — February 2008

Big news this week… I finally got published in Nature magazine. For those of you who aren’t as big of geeks as I am, it’s kind of a big deal.

However, if you are a science dork and are interested in the research I used to do, check it out:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature06664.html

Sorry, apparently the whole article is not available yet, but check back next week if you enjoyed the abstract!

Off to my dance class!

We played in a disc golf tournament this weekend to take a break from painting. It was a ton of fun!!! It started at 10am on Saturday and we played 2 rounds. Jeff and I were joined by Jana, Jill and Mark. The organizer was nice and let us play as a group since we were the random people who didn’t know anyone else. There were about 30 dudes and just us 3 ladies. I was guaranteed at least 3rd in my division!!!

However, I came in first and won a trophy!!!

It wasn’t really fair since I have been playing disc golf for 6 years and Jill and Jana just started, but we all got pretty cool prizes. I won the trophy (have to get it engraved and return it next year) and an ultimate bag. Jana came in second and won a t-shirt and a wooden frisbee and Jill won a frisbee. Jeff and Mark played really well but were in a more competitive division.

The wooden disc that Jana won is so cool and we had put a bid on one at the silent auction (got outbid by $1 in the last minutes..grrr) so Jana was nice enough to trade me the ultimate bag for the wooden frisbee. You can see a picture along with some other pictures from the day on our picasa site.

The tournament was a huge success. We raised over $5000 and a bunch of food for the foodbank and the women’s shelter. The tournament takes place in cities all over Canada and you should really consider checking it out next year if you play. Jeff and I will be there for sure, as I have a title to defend!

Wondering why the lack o’ posts as of lately? Home Renovations.

No, Seriously. Stop laughing. Home renovations is the REAL reason. No sarcasm or anything…

The Sills are doing home renovation. It’s like we’re Bob Villa and we’d start the blog thevilas.net but unfortunately that’s already taken. (man do I get sidetracked easily. No wonder renovations have taken so long).

What renovations you ask?

Painting our bedroom, closet and bathroom. I’ve never really painted before (besides trying to mess up my parents paint job when they were painting) so it’s definitely a learning experience. Glad we picked the room where no one goes in first.  We’re painting it from a gross green to colours named frosty chocolate and chocolate sparkle.  How can that go wrong?

Highlight so far is painting the roof and having 4″ chucks falling down…. We have that spackle stuff on the roof and I don’t know if you’re suppose to paint it or not.  But let me tell you… ours isn’t suppose to be painted.

The other thing we figured out in the process. Whatever the owners before us did, do the EXACT opposite. Seriously, the pictures frames on the walls must have weighed somewhere around 300 lbs. No joke.   I took two plugs out of the wall that were 3/4″ diameter and 2.5″ long…. I’m no carpenter but what were they hanging with these?    Statues?

That’s all for now. Pictures of before and after …. once the after arrives.

Tonight we had another session of our training. Was a good session and by good I mean we got WORKED OVER. Lindsay and I have never really run intervals before. For htose that haven’t felt the pain.  Intervals (typically) are those exercises where you run a certain distance in a certain time and then have the same time to rest. Repeat way too many times….

The intervals in this case was two laps of 160m track in 70-75 seconds. Which I have no idea if that’s ‘good’ or not. Let me tell you though… it’s hard. Especially number 3, 4, 5 & 6.

Besides that I have a little rant.  My rant is how much the American Presidency Race (or whatever this candidate race is called) is costing… If we go to the CNN Election Center page we can see that Hillary Clinton has spent $80 MILLION and Obama has spent $85 MILLION! I also love the part when you break down the people who dropped out of the race.

• Edwards -> $36 Million
• Richardson -> $13 Million
• Dodd ->$10 Million
• Biden -> $10 Million
• Kucinich-> $3.5 Million

Did those last 4 really think they had a chance to be president? Seriously, did they?  Were they really that sure that they’d risk $3.5 million+ dollars on this? What a waste of money. And yes, I do understand the importance of this job.  However, maybe their should be some sort of cap on spending for a campaign.

Either way that’s $237.5 Million dollars worth of campaigning, SO FAR! And, I’m glad we’ll have to go through a similar situation when the democrats and republicans face each other. All I know for sure is that that money could feed one or two people….

End of rant.

We have to play ultimate again tonight at 10:30…  ouch!   I’m sure it’ll be fun but 10:30 – midnight on a sunday night just makes a painful Monday morning.  But enough whinning.

Yesterday we played some squash at the University.  While I was getting changed I heard a guy say.  “did you see anyone go in here? All my stuff’s gone”    The guy was in a towel and just went to shower and left his locker unlocked.   Unfortunately, no one saw anything so this guy had to borrow clothes from a friend.   Man, do I hate thieves.

In other news, it was Susan’s birthday on Friday and for her birthday we gave her the gift of technology!     You guessed it, a blog!    BobandSusan.net  Hopefully she’ll enjoy writing on the blog.  And as you can see from one of her recent posts she gets some quality tech support (aka, thesills).

oh! and I found this picture on a Jeremy’s Facebook page.  It’s from September 2006 at UPA regionals.  I thought it was a sweet picture as you can tell I’m totally going to and the guy is making an amazing play.  I’m going with thrower error on this one because I foggily remember the play and did my best to salvage it.   Either way, at least I’m not looking like a total tool.  I’ve also attached some other pictures from the tournament.  Pretty sweet pics!  You can see more on his flickr page.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. We’ve been ummm. busy?

First off, Happy Birthday to Susan who’s birthday is tomorrow. However, by the time she reads this it’ll be her birthday (or past it). We sure hope you had a great birthday Susan!

Last night we did our Wednesday night get “our asses handed to us by a trainer” training. It was a pretty good session. We had to do these ‘quick feet’ drills . “Apparently,” I don’t have ‘quick feet’ because it took me forever to figure out the drill. Then when I finally did it felt like I was falling over while doing it. Pretty sure having quick feet and falling over doesn’t help in ultimate. I’ll let you know come April/May.

Finally, I wanted to post some funny videos that I’ve seen online recently. The first is from the Superbowl commercials. The second is from Jimmy Kimmel a late night talk show host. Enjoy!

[youtube gdfvWAp5GUw]

[youtube 4KUowJzpgxs]

Last night was “bring a friend night” to my hip hop class. Just for clarification it is Lindsay writing this blog. I brought my sister since I haven’t seen her since my wedding in July and I was beginning to forget what she looked like. At the class we learned how to “crank it” to the song “Soulja Boy”. If you would also like to learn how to crank it, check out this link on You Tube. There were a lot of videos to choose from so I tried to find one of someone who looks about as ridiculous as we did learning it. If you can’t learn from the video, feel free to ask myself, my sister, Marcie, Gindl or Mauri for a private lesson.

[youtube 5PRYBTuOAvM]

Great weekend for watching sports. Went to a Flames game on Saturday night with Jeff’s parents. Great for me (cheering for Dallas), bad for the rest of Calgary. Exciting game (surprisingly when the Flames were involved) but the stars took it 2-1. The most exciting part was that we were up in the nosebleed seats and we still ended up on TV!!! Got home, and were watching the highlights and we were on CBC and TSN!!! There were a bunch of Stars fans sitting behind us and we snuck on camera with them!

Larry and Brenda made it home safely after a great visit here, but once again Air Canada lost some luggage and they arrived but their bags didn’t. AC didn’t even come through with the 75% return on luggage that they gave us.

Sunday was also exciting for sports. Cory and Jamie hosted a superbowl party. Beer, pizza, stew, popcorn and friends. It had it all. Felt kind of bad for Cory when we invaded his house and cheered the Giants all the way to victory when he’s one of the biggest Patriots fans out there….. Maybe next year Cory.

After the superbowl we spent a bit of time playing Nintendo Wii. The only bad part about that was how badly we want a Wii now!

The weekend ended with a super late Sunday night ultimate game. Enough watching sports, it was time to play them. Made for a rough Monday morning when we didn’t finish playing till midnight! It was a great win and our team really came together. All tied up at 10-10 and we pulled off a big 15-11 win!