Posts from — March 2008

Let me introduce the latest Sill household member: Prophet

Prophet is the name of my new bike! I finally got myself a full suspension mountain bike. Isn’t she pretty?

The Hogans told us about an amazing one day sale going on at Bow Cycle. We decided to check it out. They had 1/2 price bikes and tons of gear on sale. I test drove a bunch of bikes but this one was sooo nice and a great deal!!! Jeff is really jealous and wants a FS bike but he bought a new cyclecross bike last year so he has to wait a bit before he gets a 4th bike…

I had planned to buy a new bike with my tax return since that’s what I did 2 years ago when I bought my first Cannondale bike. But now I just need to file my taxes. I bit out of order but now I have incentive to file.

Unfortunately I bought a bike yesterday and then it went and snowed today. Boooo!

This weekend was super fun. Played rockband at Heath’s house. Bronco is putting in a bid for Potlatch, a tournament we try to go to every year in Seattle. Every year they have a theme and this year it is leap. There’s over 100 teams that go to this tourney, but it’s super competitive to get a spot, so the more creative your application, the better.

Going with leap, we created Legendary Eighties Alberta Punk. One part punk, add some rockband, some photos and a hand-held tape recorder from the eighties…and voila, you have an application and a super fun day. Here’s a photo of us rocking out:

After rocking out, we went to Greg and Kim’s for a pi-potluck. It was a ton of fun with tasty food. Spent the evening learning dance moves from Steve and learning about everyone’s professions. Unlike Greg, Jeff and I didn’t really know what people did for a living. I guess I just assumed everyone spent the days tossing a disc around…or playing rockband.

Finished the weekend off with breakfast and hot-tubbing with the Hogans, and some squash this afternoon since I couldn’t go biking.

Now if the Canucks would pull off a win against the lame flames, it would be the perfect finish to a perfect weekend.

Yesterday, I attended a Distingushed Speaker Lecture at the University. These things happen about once a month and are usually fairly interesting. Anyway, this months guest lecturer was an old professor from UVic so I had some extra motivation to attend. The title of the talk was

“Research Challenges in Cognitive Radio Networks”

The idea of the talk being that right now people buy bands of frequencies for cell phone use (or whatever) and only use a portion of the band. In New York City (a huge wireless user) only 13% of the capacity is being used. Therefore, lots of research is going into determining how to use this under-utilization of the airwaves….

I dork-gress.

So, there was around 25-30 people at the talk which is fairly normal for these talks. However, I really think they could have jammed more people into the room. How?   Well, they should have marketed the talk

“Chance to Win a 2008 Toyota Matrix”

You see these things always have coffee and cookies. Well, since it’s RUTRTW time that’s what was served. So, I attended this talk with a chance to win a 2008 Toyota Matrix….

Unfortunately, I have to Play Again!

As we were driving home from running stairs tonight we started just BS-ing like we usually do and the song “The Streets With No Name” by U2 was on the radio.  So, we started asking a bunch of random questions…

How actually do you get around in a city with street with no names?

Does the city have a name?

Are the city streets numbers?  And if so, are numbers considered names?

Lindsay thought we should do some sort of Not So Deep Thoughts – By The Sills.   Similar to the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy but with less “deepness”.  So, there you have it the first Not So Deep Thought.

Maybe we ran too many stairs….

Well, the weekend has come and gone and what an action packed weekend. Just a quick recap.

Friday – Went throwing with Terri and Heather and we all learn’t that Larry can’t catch. And by Larry I don’t mean my Dad. I mean our left hands. But it’s funner naming your hand and then blaming someone else. Then you can say stuff like

COME ON LARRY!

or

You have to make that catch Larry!

We then picked Bob and Susan up from the airport and headed to Lindsay’s sisters restaurant for dinner. Atlas Pizza has tasty pizza if you’re ever DEEP in the northeast. And it’s DEEP dish pizza…. hmmmmm?

Saturday was a little Ikea-ing (yes, I just created a verb). Saturday night was Rockband central. Lindsay and I are slightly addicted to the game … and by slightly addicted I mean ‘we’re glad we don’t own it because then we’d probably never leave our house’

Sunday morning Susan cooked a fabulous brunch and a little more rockband. Then we played some disc golf.

And to cap off the weekend we made a fresh pasta dinner! yum.

How about that for a jam packed weekend?

Wow, it’s been a while since we’ve posted anything. Busy, I guess, or maybe lazy.

Not much to report. All done our training sessions and we survived all 10 weeks (Jeff and I had perfect attendance)!  It was a fantastic program and it has left just enough time for us to eat chips and get back out of shape before the weather gets nice enough to play.

In other news it’s Easter which means a long weekend!!! My parents will be in town for a visit so we’ll be doing a little bit of shopping as well as playing some disc golf at forest lawn.  Should be fun!

Here’s a great picture of Jeff inspired by the big Canuck’s win over the Oilers tonight! Looking good Jeff.

While I’m putting up pictures, might as well finally put up the ones of us painting!

And the final product:

Now that painting is done and I have bit of spare time on my hands (and am procrastinating from cleaning the house and putting it back in order), it’s time to recap on things that went on last week that I didn’t have time to blog about.

Last Tuesday we went to a Flames game. Normally this wouldn’t be that interesting to write about, but I wanted to thank Jeff’s boss Elise for the great tickets! Not only was it a super exciting game (I know, shocking for the Flames), but it’s the first time in a while where I didn’t get a nosebleed from going to a game.

Then Saturday, back to the Saddledome again with more free tickets! Jana from work heard on the radio that in order to get people interested in the Roughnecks (Calgary’s professional Lacrosse team) they gave out free tickets. Somehow I missed this announcement but Jana was nice enough to give Jeff and I tickets! The Roughnecks won and it was also a super exciting game.

On Friday we went to Bruce and Andrea’s going away party. They are moving to Dubai and we’re going to miss them tons. It was a fun party, but I don’t like to encourage going away parties

I took a few pictures (there’s more on our picasa site):

Viv and Andrea looking at the scrapbook made by the Hogans.

Bruce and Scott

Bruce on the phone-hard to imagine he has anyone to call as all of his friends are in the room-they have ALOT of friends for the record.

Friends:

So, as most of you know (if you don’t know where have you been?) Tim Hortons is having their big Roll up the rim to win (RUTRTW) contest.   So to commemorate this event I’ve added a little widget to the sidebar on my right to track my progress.  I figure once I get to the double digits I might start forgetting my record.

Side note: How sad have I become?  Have I been hanging out with too many competitive / super great awesome people that I have to track my RUTRTW record? 

A  friend of mine at work and I were talking and we think the reason I like RUTRTW so much is that it’s the closest to Vegas you can get without going to Vegas.  You see in Vegas you play the slot machines, tables, roulette or whatever to get the free beer.  I realize that I’ll lose (with some smmmalll chance of winning) but I figure the beer only costs whatever the time at the machine costs.

In a similar fashion, the RUTRTW only costs whatever the coffee costs!   It’s a bit of a win-win  drink-lose situation if you ask me.

In other much more exciting and less rambling-on manner.  My brother is having a baby tomorrow!   How neat is that?   Good luck Kev & Tamara!

Lots of fun stuff going on lately. Jeff and I shut down 2 parties last weekend, after ironically discussing the day before how some people just never leave at a party and can’t take a hint when the hosts are ready to go to bed.

We were those guys. Last Friday we closed down Sue Hunter’s bonus day (Feb. 29th) martini party and on Saturday night we celebrated Robert’s 50th in style until the wee hours of 4am! At around 2AM I discovered Rockband (Playstation, not to be confused with a rock band-wrong era) and realized that I missed my calling in life as a singer in a rock bank. Maybe it’s not too late.

Robert’s birthday was incredible. Thanks to Mary Ann and Robert for such a good time! If you want to throw a 1920’s speakeasy (or casino party), talk to them. There was roulette, poker, blackjack, drinks-a-plenty, a comedian, and tasty treats.

The costumes were incredible. Here a few pictures of the costumes:

Jeff and I

Mary Ann

Birthday Boy Robert

Jeff manning the roulette table

Check out the rest of our photos at here.

A little saturday song for everyone.

Hey hey we’re the monkey’s,

People say we’re monkeying around,

But we’re too busy doing all kinds of stuff like painting, training, ultimate, disc golf but not singing

To be monkeying around

Oh wait! We did monkey around today over at Heather’s house and here are some pics.

More later and hopefully of some before and after pictures of our painting job… once we finish the after part.