Posts from — March 2009

Not much new…just painting our spare room and Jeff’s bathroom. After 4.5 years of living in our house, we decided we can’t stand the beige/pink interior in every room. Two years ago we painted our bedroom chocolate brown. Now, the spare room is yellow. Nice and bright for our guests, but not too comfortable such that they outstay their welcome

Rona had a fantastic sale, buy 2 cans get one free, so we bought 6. That should keep us busy painting for a while. I find the most difficult part choosing the colors. Finally decided on red wine and sandrock in the kitchen. Should spruce things up a little. Great thing about paint is that if it looks like crap you just paint over it! Will post photos later.

The Canadian renovations tax credit was also a huge incentive. Maybe we’ll do some other renos while we are at it.

(this has been a work in progress all week, writing a bit here, a bit there, and therefore a bit out of date)

Really fun, active weekend for Jeff and I. Saturday we woke up early (ok, early by my standards) and hit the open highway to spend some time in the gorgeous rocky mountains. We went to Banff for a day of hiking. It is the first time Jeff and I have been hiking since living in Calgary and I can’t believe it took us so long as we had a fantastic day. Wandered through town and then hiked the Bow Valley/Hoodoo trail.

The trail was not too exerting with only a 60m elevation gain over 5km but just enough of a gain to get a nice view of the mountains. We took our camera but didn’t get any amazing shots as there was some cloud cover. Started to clear as we were arriving back to the car but the wind was also starting to pick up so our timing was great.

Normally (as least what I remember from all the hiking I did with my family growing up) the end of the trail, at the highest point, is the most spectacular. This was not the case with this hike. The Information Centre in Banff said to do this trail “Hoodoo Trail” to see the hoodoos at the end. Wow. Deceptive. They were NOT worth the hike (luckily the views along the way were). The hoodoos (all 2 of them) were way off in the distance and not much to look at. Thumbs up for the nice hike, thumbs down for the hoodoos.

Here are some pictures from the day:

View of the Banff Springs from the parking lot

First off Happy Pi day (3.14)… To celebrate I set this to post at 1:59am. (3.14159).  Dorky I know.

Anyway, we went out for breakfast last weekend and the topic of conversation somehow made it to informercials and then onto the Snuggie.  Surpsing to me is that Lindsay had never heard of the Snuggie.  What you haven’t either?   Ok. Go watch this youtube clip.

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Anyway, while watching the video (and the reason for the obscure post) we watched the video for the WTF blanket.  It’s a pretty good parody and I thought it was amusing enough to post here…. If you’re offended by people making fun of informercials (who would be?) than I don’t recommend watching the video.

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Happy birthday to Willow as well as to Erika today!

Has everyone heard about the great race of 2009?   No I’m not talking about Ironman 70.3 in Calgary or the Climb For Wilderness where you climb the Calgary Tower. I’m talking about the race between Curb Side-Recycling in Calgary and the C-Train station in Crowfoot. Let me go back about a few years.

You see 5-6 years ago Calgary announced that they would be running the C-train out to Crowfoot area (at the time we thought that was a long way to bring the C-train, but now we live here… go figure). Around the same time the plan to have an actual recycling program in Calgary began (what a novel concept).

Fast foward 2-3 years.  C-train started getting built and the recycling program was getting presented to city council.  Wow!  We thought we’ll have curbside recycling soon surely before the C-train…(the Hare)  But alas, the cost of recycling was too high, we needed to debate whether we really needed a recycling program, etc…  Meanwhile the C-Train construction just kept on trucking…. slow progress but steady nonetheless.  Possibly the tortoise in this race?

Anyway, the C-train was set to open in March of 2009 (nice vague date, March!).  So today, we just received an email that the C-train has been delayed until June 13th, 2009.  (has the Tortois decided to take a nap now?  How does that story end kids?).  Back to the Hare…  The Recycling program started delivering blue boxes (1000/day) to Calgary residents just this week.  The NW of Calgary is the third quadrant to be delivered… which brings the date to right around June 13th. So as you can see the race is back on stronger than ever.  Who’s your money on?

Of course, we have our money on both.  Not that we think it’ll be a tie, but because we pay taxes….

Our nephew Conrad and our kitty Willow both turn one this week! Conrad turns one today. Happy birthday Conrad! After a year I’d say that Willow has a better grasp at walking but also talks back more. I’m pretty sure by next year Conrad will have caught up and excelled in both of these categories. I’d say they are equally competitive at being cute. Here are a few adorable pictures from the past year:

Conrad and mom

Willow and mom

Conrad and dad

Conrad playing

Willow and dad

Conrad's first introduction to video chatting

Willow enjoying winter

Conrad and Uncle Jeff

Tired Kitty

I figure since the majority of anything going on for Jeff and I right now is work, that I would blog about work. Two of my coworkers are in Italy so I’ve been covering for them, much like they did when I was in Hawaii, Japan, Kamloops, Quebec, etc. They both play ultimate so we all cover for each other except when we all leave for ulti. This is convenient and a good deal for me as I seem to be away the most often, but now I’m making up for it. We are hosting a Summit in Banff in October so it will be crazy for here on out.

As for Jeff, he’s been busy trying to balance his University job with his business.

Today I started experiencing problems with my new keyboard. The new Apple Keyboard is wicked awesome! Nice quiet, soft keys and they make it a pleasure to type. Today however my left shift key started being unresponsive. Sort of makes sense as I only use the left shift key (not sure anyone uses the right one and they should just remove it entirely) but really not cool that it is acting up when I’ve had it for less than a month (and was away for 2 weeks and never used it). So, I call the place where I bought it at UofC and they tell me to call Apple directly. I call Apple and they tell me to call Apple Care. I speak to 2 different people at Apple Care, who each put me on hold for about 10 minutes. Then they decide they can’t figure out how to solve this problem, and have to call me back. Three hours and a Product Service Specialist later we have found a solution and for the hassle they are sending me a brand new keyboard and letting me keep the old one. This is not the normal process and I am a special case, but I think they decided on this solution since I ripped some poor women’s head off. Seriously, what a silly process. They need to associate the keyboard with a computer (desktop or laptop) before they can even begin to help you. This is so that they can look up your file and see if you have Apple Support. Turns out even though I wasn’t calling about my laptop, they determine my warranty and therefore support had expired.

Having this process seems like a pain. The keyboard cost $45 and I’m pretty sure more than $45 in wages were lost today discussing what to do. The one agent alone (assuming he makes at least $45 an hour being a product specialist) could have paid for the keyboard with the hour he wasted…not to mention my wages. I’ll admit that I’m pumped that I’m getting a new keyboard and it gave me a nice break today.

Thanks for the great customer service and for redeeming yourselves today Apple!

As Jeff said in the last post, Roll up the Rim to Win is back on at Tim Horton’s. We have added a widget to our website, as we did last year, to track the status of our rolling. So far Jeff and I are both 0 for 2.