Posts from — May 2008

Jeff and I have started biking for the summer. It’s such a great way to start and end the day. Our commute takes us through a golf course and is downhill there and uphill back. It will help get us in shape for the ultimate season and we hope to bike every day this summer, but we might cheat on rainy days.

The good: Biking to work is awesome.

The bad: Today I stopped at a red light and pulled up beside a car on my bike. It was a car full of young punks and they had the windows down and tossed a Big Mac container out the window (an nearly hit me). That made me angry! I’m doing a good thing saving the environment and biking while they are littering and so ignorant and too lazy to put there trash in a can. So I say to them in a very sarcastic tone “excuse me, I think you accidentally dropped some garbage on the ground”…to which punk#1 responds “I don’t understand you”…of course you don’t….you’re a freaking moron!

They proceed to roll up the windows, drive away and say “have a nice day”. If I wasn’t on my bike and afraid that they might run me off the road, I contemplated throwing their garbage back in their car. Some days I wish I was a police officer. One side order of garbage duty and a fine to go with their Big Mac.

The ugly: As if that story wasn’t ugly enough…I picked Jeff up after work today as he stayed later than me to celebrate Trev finally becoming a doctor – Congrads Trev!!!!

As I was pulling into our garage, I heard crunch…and remembered that Jeff’s bike was on the roof rack. Huge oopsa! It turned out about as good as it could have. The racks completely ripped off but the car (maybe a few scratches), the bike and the garage seem intact.

The strange thing is that I looked into the garage and saw mine and Jeff’s bikes and thought that it was safe to go in….forgot to check for Jeff’s nicest bike, the cyclecross that was on the rack. You might want to try it to avoid doing what I did, otherwise you might end up with this situation (luckily ours wasn’t this bad!!!):

I found a great suggestion online here about how to avoid this in the future:

When you leave your house with bikes on your roof rack, put your garbage can (or any large movable object, for that matter) in front of your garage door when you leave. When you come back, the garbage can blocking the way will force you to leave the car, move the can, and walk back to the car, by which time you be able to see the bikes on the roof; hopefully, this rings a bell in your head.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted so I could update you on Ultimate (going to Canmore for a ‘team bonding’ on Saturday). Or I could update you on our Kitty (who has MAJOR A.D.D). Or I could update you on how our Kitty has the loudest purr that I’ve ever heard. But I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to do some random stuff….

A friend at work / School is defending his PhD tomorrow. Let’s just say that he’s been at school working on his PhD forever for a while.

How about some Sill Blog Stats? Here are the top 3 ways people get to our blog through search engines.

1. The Sills
2. Heather Adams “calgary ultimate”
3. Back off get your own Sandwich
4. Friboug
5. redondo beach

Actually, if you add up all the different ways to “Back off get your own sandwich” we’d be at a lot higher number. Who knew that Sandwich theft was so high!

Now for the best random

• Wooden Frisbee
• Calgary “23cm”
• pictures of a sill volcano
• working at A&W?
• Innsbruck Strippers

Besides those random bits lots going on in the Sill’s corner of the world.

I was going to write all about our weekend in Bozeman, MT but Heather came with us and did a fabulous job summarizing the trip on her blog (better than I could have explained myself). Read all about it here. Call it lazy-man’s blogging if you want, but she seriously explained it exactly how I would have. Tons of rain, fun and car games (and a few disappointing losses). The only thing she failed to mention was Target: The best part about going to the US. We had a 15 minute time limit (it was 8pm and we hadn’t eaten dinner yet so some parties were getting hungry and impatient). I exceeded the limit slightly and ended up with 3 pairs of capris, a pair of work pants and 2 shirts. The clothes are so cheap and fantastic. Worth going back to Bozeman even if it rains next year!

Life has been pretty hectic lately. Got back from Bozeman late Sunday. Had practice Monday night and had to be creative for practice as every morsel of clothing was soaking wet from the weekend. Jeff and I decided to skip ulti tonight to get some much needed laundry done.

A big thanks to Scott for watching Willow this weekend. He took great care of her and tired her out so she slept like a baby on Sunday night. He built her a cat run in his condo with chairs and tables. What a great cat sitter!

Last night’s practice was really intense so a night off is welcome. Kudos to Chris and Jeff for doing such a great job. I heard from several people that it was the best practice that they have ever been to and I’d have to agree. It was the first practice that I’ve been too since the team was chosen and it seemed like everybody was fired up. Nothing worse than people dogging it after having the security of making the team!

Willow is coming with us to Canmore this weekend. I called the place we are staying and they are completely booked up for the weekend. However, by the luck of the draw we booked the pet-friendly suite. She’s so excited for the road trip that she’s bouncing off the walls lately. Should be fun. She’ll probably just stay in the suite all day as we tried the leash and collar out today and they weren’t a very big hit. In fact, she froze in her tracks and refused to move. Jeff wonders where she gets her stubbornness from…. She’s better at just following the leash as you drag it along the ground. Not sure how effective our method would be outdoors with her attention deficit disorder and all but maybe we’ll start in the backyard and give it a shot.

Just finished our league game tonight with Pi. It was one of the windiest games ever, not to mention frustrating. I called foul more times than I ever had in one game before. And it was all against the same person. I’m pretty sure that the person guarding me was on Temocil (for all you AD fans out there!). Side effects may cause numbness of the extremities.

Another player on the opposing team also had a side effect: hallucinations and therefore making terrible calls.

We ended up winning but it wasn’t super fun. It was so cold and people tend to get cranky in the wind.  I think it’s because the wind gets all in people’s heads and rattles around their brains.

Cute little Willow is attacking my foot and making this very difficult. Speaking of Willow, she has a big day ahead of her tomorrow: first shots.  I hope she handles needles better than I do!  We took her over to meet Bob, who is Jill and Mark’s cat. Mark has kindly offered to cat sit this weekend. By taking her to visit Bob we discovered that we have a bad kitten. She is very badly behaved and a huge trouble maker. Good luck and thanks in advance Mark.

Seriously it’s a tough call between cookies and cake. They are both so tasty. Jeff and I are “off the chips” right now (not allowed to buy chips because we have a serious problem) so I fill the void with cookies. There’s no rules against that yet. Apparently we run a tight ship in the Sill house.

Speaking of Cake, we went to their show last night. It was excellent. I’m not familiar with a lot of the songs they played but they put on an amazing show. The lead singer was great at engaging the crowd. We got to sing a ton which is fun. Some friendly competition between guys and girls. I think the ladies won.  He also played the coolest instrument: the vibraslap (also known as a mandible). Not sure was most entertaining: the music, the vibraslap, a ridiculous dancing man or a big dude wearing a bra. Scott and I would probably agree on the vibraslap. Super cool. It reminded us all of an egg beater, which would be suitable for a band called cake.

I was most impressed with band member Vincent DiFiore. He sang, played the trumpet, keyboard and some percussion.

Something neat was when they gave away a tree to an audience member. There was another friendly competition (Terri, something tells me you wouldn’t have liked this aspect of the concert), to tell a story about Calgary. The dude that won told a story about Grizzly bears on mushrooms…very interesting.  I think they should have given out cake instead of a tree. That would be awesome. I would have competed for sure.

So, in case you haven’t heard yet, the answer is b…we came back with a little kitten from BC. She’s a little grey tabby and we think she’s about 6 or 7 weeks old. We don’t really know her age because my stepdad found her in a park in a willow tree (thus the name) in BC a week ago at 5am when he was out walking the dogs. He quickly rescued her as with all of the wildlife in the area, she probably wouldn’t have remained in the tree for much longer. She was in BC for 5 days when we arrived for a visit. Jeff is allergic to cats, which is why we haven’t gotten one until now. However, this kitty cat is so adorable and fun that he couldn’t resist. My mom offered me the kitten early in the visit, but I left it up to Jeff to decide as I didn’t really want him to suffer through allergies just so I could have a cat. He ended up caving after the weekend with her. Thanks so much to mom and Doug for giving us to her. It’s so great waking up to a kitty and coming home to her. I know they were super sad to lose her (my mom cried when we left, but normally the tears are for me…not this time!). We love having her, so thanks a ton! Some days I’m sure you’d be thankful as she’s a lot of work.

We just had her running around the backyard with us while gardening. She got really muddy so we gave her a bath. That did not go over well.

She loves sleeping on Jeff:

Sorry about the lack of posts lately, but Jeff and I have been away vacationing in beautiful BC.

Our trip started off in the Okanagan where we played in an ultimate tournament, Sunflicker. It was a tryout for Bronco and we had enough people to submit two full teams: Bronco and OcnorB. The weather was perfect and both teams did really well. Bronco made it to the semi-finals and Ocnorb to the quarter-finals.

From Kelowna, we went to met our new nephew Conrad. Jeff’s brother Kevin and Tamara live in Princeton and have their hands full! New baby Conrad, cute Sage (who’s now 3 and full of energy), a rabbit, a guinea pig, fish, a bird, a cat and a puppy!!!

We stayed in Princeton for 3 nights. Played some disc golf on Kevin’s property (9 holes with tonal poles) and pretty much vegged out and recuperated from the tournament.

From Princeton we drove to Thrums (outside Nelson) to visit my dad and stepmom. There we went mountainbiking, disc golfing, played euchre and cruising along Baker street for the day. After a great visit, it was time to head to my mom and stepdad’s place in Genelle (outside of Trail).  We got to see mom and Doug’s new trailer…they warned us the they were trailer trash but it was anything but! The trailer was gorgeous and we made ourselves right at home. We went mountainbiking but it was stort-lived as I’m pretty sure I saw a cougar running through the bushes and totally freaked out so we left. Jeff, of course, remained calm and made me get on my bike and get the hell out of dodge.

We came back from BC with something. Do the quiz and then check back in a few days for the answer:

a.) a new full suspension bike for Jeff

b.) a kitten

c.) a new windshield

d.) a tent trailer

p.s. Happy Mother’s day to our moms Jackie, Susan and Brenda!