My funny wife - or - that big red mark on my head

My wife is funny. Sometimes, she is funnier than she is nice. I don't have a problem saying things like that because when I tell her she is doing something mean, she acts hurt and responds by saying things like: "But it's funny!"

So when she hacked my facebook account and put a picture up of my forehead hickey, I accepted it.

I will explain. My children received approximately four-hundred dollar-store toys at a Family-Day carnival on the weekend. One of these things was one of those popping half-spherical pieces of rubber. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. You turn it inside out, put it on the table and, seconds later, it pops up in the air, driven by the force of its return to its original shape.

Lilly and I were playing around with it, and I stuck it to my head. Pulling it off broke some surface blood vessels which resulted in a near-perfect circular hickey on my forehead.

Kim, being easily-amused, decided while I was reading, to take some oh-so-funny pictures of my injury, log in to facebook with my credentials, and post a new profile picture along with a funny status update.

I won't keep you in suspense anymore. Here is the picture:

Kim will probably make some plea to your sensitivities, telling you that she's some poor pregnant woman, and that her horrible, mean, and stick-in-the-mud husband is just being mean to her, never letting her have any fun. Don't let her do that. She is funny. There is no way to deny that. She's just not always nice.

Windows Live Writer - or - MS finally gets it right

So, I generally don't have anything too bad to say about Microsoft.  I use their products when I have to, I go Open Source when it's available, but I have to admit, I'm pretty darned impressed with Windows Live Writer.

Despite the fact that this is the first time I've used it, I see no reason to continue using Firefox Scribefire or trying like crazy to get OpenOffice.org's blogger add-on working.

This is basically a test to see what the functionality of the thing is and, well, so far, so good.

Pictures work.

 

Links (even self-referential ones like this one) work.

Even	HTML
Tables	Work

This is basically the <gasp!> moment for me.  You can import maps really easily.  So I could, like, show you guys where I bike to work every day.

Good form, Microsoft!

I am a winner!

See?
Can't see that? Try this one:
50000 words. Actually I made it to like 50036. Still, I did it. In one month.

In that same month, I also:

Had a computer die on me.
Reformatted another computer.
Released a version of our online banking software, which involved all kinds of big effort.
Traveled with Kim to Calgary.
Parented, actively, mind you.
Fought distraction after distraction.
Used, as my main writing computer, a laptop that's around ten years old, has no internet connection and can only transfer files using my iPod.

All in all, I'm pretty proud of myself.

My new bike

Friday, Kim and I went shopping for my new bike. We spent some time at the Sherwood Park mall. I'm sure it has a name beyond "Sherwood Park mall" but I don't know what it is.

We spent some time waiting for a bike to be assembled but time was bleeding away and we ended up missing out on the one shop Kim wanted us to hit.

Fortunately, there was another shop that was open for another fifteen minutes. We sped across town (actually, it was just down the road) to "Bikes and Boards" where we talked for nearly 40 minutes with the owner. In the end, I decided that JAMIS would be the next brand of bike I'd own. The guy had a two-year-old bike that a 60-year-old lady owned and that she rode a total of 12 kilometres.

I'll admit, the 60-year-old comment almost turned me off of this bike for good. I mean, who wants a bike a 60-year-old would choose? But then I decided that the way this bike fit me, the way it felt riding down the road, and the good feeling I got from this guy (when he said he'd take care of the bike if anything happened to it) decided me. I'm going to redefine this bike, from a hardly-ridden old lady's bike to a bike that a 30-year-old angry man would be proud to ride. (I just have to figure out how to get the ribbons out of the handlebars and the basket off the front. I'm keeping the clonkers on the spokes, though)

Seriously, here's what the bike basically looks like. (It's a product shot from JAMIS's site. I'll get an actual picture of it at some point)

Not exactly on the Christmas list, but...

For some of Kim's holisticky friends, the Winter Solstice is a time to get together and do some celebrating. Obviously, I wouldn't have mentioned this if we weren't part of this year's celebrations.

Dinah, a friend of Kim's, hosted a Solstice party (and incidentally had some kittens free, to good home). Short story even shorter, we got a cat. It was my early Christmas present.

It's amazing what people will do to be polite. I named the cat fingers, and person after person has paused in the dilemma of 'That's a really stupid name but do I hurt the guy's feelings?' and decided against it by saying, "Umm, yeah, that's a real cool... name?"

So, without further ado, here is Fingers (despite what Nicholas decides to call her):

A study in contrast

Preston



















Lillian



















These two shots made me realize how much Lillian looks like Preston did a couple of years ago.

If only I'd gotten that shot of Lillian as a profile.

Still, they're both babies, so they look alike, right? Right??

At least they're cute.

The Johnstone House

This is the Johnstone House. May, 2004, I took possession of this townhouse with the intention of living here a couple of years and then moving on to bigger and better things. The most alluring thing about the place (beside the fact that we could afford it!) was that the entry faces away from the street. Carrying groceries in can be a pain but it's worth it.















The kitchen is far from ultra-spacious but what it lacks in space it makes up in lack of counter-space.















My only complaint about the dining room is that the floor is carpet.
NOTE: We elected not to keep the For Sale sign in the window.















I took these pictures when Kim and I finally got the chance to look the place over together. At the time, I'd thought that they were decent pictures. What the hell was I thinking?

This is a great closet-shot of the computer room.

NOTE: Realtor's leg sold separately.















Another prize-winning shot. This time, of the bathroom sink. I could really do something as a professional photographer.

A fairly innocuous laundry room, until you realize that the Flame-Master furnace is older than I am and more likely to spew deadly toxins. (much more likely)















The best part about Nick's room is that he has about three acres of closet-space. This comes in handy with the baby moving in.















The Master bedroom is a little bigger than the other rooms but not by a whole lot. Still, for sleeping, it's aces!















Cute Nick-picture aside, this picture really shows the power of my photographic skills. This is the living room as it would look from the light fixture (if we had a light fixture in the living room.)














This shot shows off the spaciousness of the living room, not to mention the neighbour's house.

And this is the tree that we see when we look out the window. Trust me, it's the same tree.

Next, I'm going to post more pictures! Pictures of the house filled with our stuff!

The Family Dog

This is Jack.

We got Jack from the SPCA in November, 2004. This was an attempt to head-off the baby craze that hit both Kim and I in the insane post-wedding haze. (We'd originally wanted to wait until summer 2005 to begin trying - you can imagine how well our plan worked out)

Jack immediately became part of the family - running around like crazy, destroying things, upsetting the near-perfect calm that had settled in to the Johnstone House as we got into some semblance of a routine. In other words, he was the canine equivalent of Nicholas.

It was a close thing - we didn't know if we were going to be able to keep Jack, around the new year. He was getting worse, not better. Destroyed items were a common thing, it was cold outside and there was nowhere for our insane little Jack Russell Terrier to go. He bit Nicholas a couple of times - it was never very severe, but who wants to wait for that?

Finally, when Jack could spend some time outside, he started to mellow out. "Give it time," was a common line heard by friends and dog-fans. Nobody really wanted to say goodbye. And finally, our patience had paid off. Sure, he's a long way from perfect. He barks a lot and pees on people at the off-leash area, but he's part of the family and we won't be getting rid of him.

Jack enjoys swimming, nuzzling ducklings with his teeth, sleeping, running and chewing on his yellow blanket. By all evidence, he's probably a Sagittarius and his pet peeve is anything on wheels.

Bloggers, Jack.

Jack, Bloggers.