There's A Couch Sized Hole In My Soul

Well, today was the end of an era. We no longer have our lovely green leather couch. We went out to The Brick on the weekend and bought a new couch and recliner (sadly, not a reclining couch) and since they're delivering the furniture tomorrow, I needed to find a home for the furniture stat.

Dave got the first dibs and tonight he came down and put his fancy new truck to good use and hauled away Ol' Greeny. It's kind of sad to see that couch go. We've had it since we got married 11+ years ago and it was at my parents' place a good 7-8 years prior to that. That couch has seen many a friend snooze on it, many a kid jump on it and many a game played on it. Hopefully the new couch will live up to its legacy.

It was tough to find a couch that had the right feel to it but I think we picked a winner on the weekend. Of course, what I'm REALLY looking forward to is the recliner. I've wanted a recliner for as long as I can remember and we never had one growing up, so I've had to live vicariously through grandparents and in-laws. Now I shall recline all on my own!

'Stachetastic

So yesterday saw Freeappaday.com unleashing a truly awesome productivity killer upon the world: 'Stachetastic.

From The Kids

Behold pirate Garrett.

I think it's a $0.99 app normally but I've been having fun putting beards and mustaches on everyone I can get a picture of at work and home :)

Super Soup Tuesday!

Man, the soup I made is probably the tastiest soup I've ever made. I was worried that it wasn't going to turn out right but mmmm... it's delicious. It took two days of simmering but it'll be worth it for supper tonight.

Bean & Ham Soup

We basically just saved the water we used to boil the ham on Sunday, added a lot more water and the ham bone and simmered it all night on Sunday. Before going to bed, remove all the bones and gristle and nasty bits and cool it in the fridge overnight. Remove the fat the next day, add 2 cups of beans and let simmer again all day. Cool again in the fridge overnight, let it simmer all day, add ham chunks, serve and enjoy.

I was mostly worried that it would be too salty, but nope. It's delicious... on par with my mom's Bean & Bacon soup if I do say so myself!

Freeze Or I'll Chop Off Your Head!

I forget if I've linked there before or not, but if you want to read something truly amazing, check out Axe Cop. It's a comic written by a 5-year old boy and drawn by his 29 year old brother. This is the kind of thing I want to do with Garrett. It's astoundingly awesome in its absurdity but as the father of an almost 6 year old boy, it's scarily familiar.

I mean, it has a vampire baby man, shark ninjas, unicorn babies and a guy with socks for arms. How can you not love that?

That Was Strange...

I just had a call from Bell's loyalty center. They wanted to know why I was cancelling my internet after being with them for 10 years. I was like, "What? I just upgraded to your fibre optic lines last week!"

The guy was falling over himself to apologize for the cancellation order. It was kind of sad. I should have held out for some free internet though. I even asked him, "Is there any kind of great deal you were going to throw my way to woo me back?"

Alas, I'd already tipped my hand. Sigh.

TRU? More Like TRFU!

Well, I just sent Toys R Us an angry e-mail. Why?

Remember how I picked up the DSi last week for $179? Shopper's Drug Mart has DSi's on now for $159. So I figured I'd just go back to TrU and get my $20 back. Well, that was a lost cause.

They called the local Shopper's and they had DSi's in stock but not in White, so he wouldn't give me my money back. I was livid to say the least. If I was more of a person inclined to make a scene, I would have, but I restrained myself. It's not like I shop at TrU very often, but I definately won't now.

I would have been fine with them turning me down because none of the local stores had DSi units in stock but to turn me down because they didn't have the exact colour? Bugger that!

We'll see if anything comes of my grumpy e-mail.

My Gift To You

We survived the trip to the Children's Museum in Kitchener today and took in the Our Body exhibit (which was like a slightly cheaper, less impressive version of Bodyworlds) and Kara got over her fear of elevators... at least for today.

We had a delicious steak dinner for supper but that was marred somewhat by Kara's bedtime meltdown. Sigh. She's had a very packed week and I think we've overloaded her brain. Hopefully a couple of quiet days will help get her back into a regular bedtime routine.

Anyway, here's a really cool tilt-shift video of New York City. I just love the way that tilt-shift video really bends your perception.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Thanks Mom & Dad!

I'd just like to say a big, "Thank You!" to my parents for giving the world the opportunity to meet me 34 years ago today.

Now to go play some Infinite Space and see if they'll give me a nice shiny spaceship for my birthday :)

It's NO Day!

Kara was in a fine mood today. The first half of the day was great. We all went out to Terra Cotta for the maple syrup fest and I even had a chickadee come and eat seeds out of my hand. St. Francis, eat your heart out :)

But man, this afternoon it was like a switch flipped. Kara had a major freak-out when Julie put her blankets in the laundry and that lasted a good 20 minutes or so. She eventually settled down but was pretty cranky for the rest of the day. This evening didn't go much better as she was just yelling "NO" to EVERYTHING for what felt like an hour but was probably 15 minutes or so.

We're just pooped. I think I got a bit of a sunburn from the morning tromp in the woods and from spending a couple of hours outside with Garrett as he played with our sitter's kid on the scooter she gave him yesterday. He'll sleep well if nothing else. Hopefully Kara gets whatever bug crawled up her butt out of her system so that we can have fun at the Children's Museum in Kitchener tomorrow.

I mean, it's not like she can be much grouchier!

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

So last week we got a call from Bell offering to upgrade us to the new Fibre Optic network that they've rolled out. We decided to bite because it will cost us about $3 more than what we're paying for our DSL connection with a huge boost to the speed we can pull in off of the net.

Today's the day they're flipping the switch so hopefully we'll notice a huge surge in speed later today. If I never update again, well, you'll know why :)

Listen To The Leprechaun!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! We're celebrating by getting a babysitter and going out for wings and (for me) a pint o' Guinness :)

Why Am *I* The Tired One?

We didn't do anything incredibly groundbreaking yesterday. The kids went to the Alliance church in Georgetown for a Music Maker activity morning and had a lot of fun making music videos, crafts and other goofy things. After that was done, we toodled over to EB to pick up God Of War 3 (woo) and then it was off to Dash Sports for Garrett for a couple hours.

Once that was finished, we hit the park and the kids ran around for a good hour or so, then came home and ran around with one of the local kids for another hour.

Yet Kara STILL stayed up until almost 9pm and I'm the one who feels like I was chasing everyone around. Sigh.

I had to chuckle in the afternoon though. I sent Kara out into the backyard to get fresh air and sunshine while I fired up God Of War. She kept coming in, complaining about bugs (there were a lot of flies). So I handed her the flyswatter and sent her back out. She had a lot more fun slaying the wee beasties once she was armed :)

We're not 100% sure what we're going to do today. I'm probably taking the kids out to the glow-in-the-dark mini-putt in Guelph in a little while. They're busy building Lego structures for the contest at the library as we speak.

Holding Mass For The Fallen Games

And Mass Effect 2 is finished. I think I did a very bad thing at the end of the game with one of the choices I made, but I think it was one of those decisions which will come back to haunt me in Mass Effect 3 regardless of which way I went with it. It's a definate damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario.

I lost two squadmates during the final mission which made me a little disappointed. I'd really thought I had a plan which would have resulted in everyone surviving... oh well. The sad thing is that I was more concerned with the fate a few of the NPCs on my ship than about the squaddies that took one for the team.

Talk about good timing though. I've got God Of War 3 arriving tomorrow and Final Fantasy 13 still puttering away in the background. The nice thing is that GoW3 is the last game I'll be getting for some time. Heck, I went and bought a DSi yesterday so there went any inkling of extraneous gaming for some time.

A Fitting Birthday Present!

In case you haven't picked up my birthday present yet, feel free to order me an XL of this shirt!



I think it fits, literally and figuratively.

A Busy Do-Nothing Day

This morning I woke up on the first day of March Break and had no clue what we were going to do. By 5pm, we'd done a lot more than I expected.

We started the day by going to the Guelph Children's Museum (which I was unware of even existing until this morning!) and had an hour or two of fun there.



Afterwards, we went to St. Jacobs and had lunch at the Stone Crock before heading over to the outlet mall.

We went to the Lego store/fun-land at the end of the day and saw some really cool things, like, say, LEGO BATMAN!




If you click on that, you can see some of the giant Lego mechs and such too. It was daunting... esp. when you go into the store and see how much they're charging for Lego!

More Like Tweedledum and Tweedledumber

I took Garrett to see Alice In Wonderland today and we both loved it. I was worried it would be too dry for him but my fears were allayed as soon as Alice fell down the rabbit hole. And I LOVE the design of the card soldiers. Great flick.

Alas, I ruined my good mood by swinging by my usual EB to see if I could gripe to the manager about the fiasco that was my Yakuza 3 pick-up the other day. She was there but on the phone and she vanished into the back room. When I gave up waiting and queried to the clerk about the possibility of there having been a pre-order bonus for Yakuza 3, I had to endure the same blank stares and incessant repetition of the name of the bloody game that I endured the other day, only this time I wasn't even going to be getting anything in return. I had to bite my tongue when the clerk told me that the girls working the counter on Wednesday night were pretty knowledgable because my experience was that both girls would have been hard pressed to be aware of the act of breathing, let alone esoteric Japanese brawler/RPG pre-order bonuses.

It's a shame, because that store has usually been the bastion of sanity that I use to counter most gripes about EB that I read on the interwebs. Alas, most of the old staff and managers have been sent to the 4 winds (some of them still work at some of the other local stores, but they're shuffled around like a deck of cards) and the new crew they have a) doesn't know me from a hole in the ground (my doing because I took a few months off of patronizing their store) and b) seems to consist entirely of teen girls who are more interested in caking on make-up than knowing ANYTHING about their products. I feel sad because I probably know more about the way their policies and procedures work than they do and I have never worked for EB for a day in my life! Sigh.

After GoW3 hits, I have nothing else on order at that store and I think I'll just patronize the other non-GS/EB store where I know the owner and don't want to strangle the staff. That, and Amazon. I'm only going to bother with EB if there's a good pre-order goodie that is worth the hassle... or if they rotate out the dead weight and get some people in there with a brain in their noggin. Sadly, the manager is good people, but her staff, aside from one person, is dumber than a sack of rocks.

Is This You?

I had a couple of calls tonight, both on my cell and land-line, from a 416-645... number. I figured that they must have been trying to find me because they called both the house and my cell, but the number is unlisted and in Toronto. Strange...

I wonder if it's YOU!

Finally...

Achievement Unlocked: Find a store willing to sell me a copy of FFXIII the day before it hits store shelves.

Now I have to wait until tomorrow to get it. Grr... But I can't wait! I've been chomping at the bit to get this game for months!

Bask in the Japanesey goodness!

That's Now How You Make A Drive-Through!

After finishing up a coffee run during the day today, we saw on of Halton Hills' finest taking pictures in the parking lot of the convenience store next door. We couldn't figure out what was going on until we pulled out around the cruiser and saw that a car had driven into the front of the convenience store.

I guess Rallis' Burger really wanted a drive-through :)

It didn't look like anyone was hurt, thankfully. But man, what a mess.

The Best Fairy Ever

If Kara ever got her wish and became a fairy (instead of her other wish, which would to become a princess), I have a sneaky suspicion she'd be this kind of fairy.

Sharing Time With The Kids

The kids and I are up here in Thornbury with my parents, giving Julie a well deserved break. We're staying at the timeshare until tomorrow. Today was a very busy day indeed. We went snowshoeing over near Blue Mountain and the kids loved it. It was a little dicey when we went over the suspension bridge and it started to sway but the kids were troopers and didn't chicken out.

We had wings at Blue Mountain afterwards and went swimming this afternoon. Unfortunately, Garrett seems to have managed to get some water in his ear and has succumbed to the travails of the day and swimmer's ear and has been snoozing since 6ish. Hopefully a good night's sleep (and a dose of Tylenol) will make everything better by the morning.

Check my Twitter feed for some pictures from our day (including the museum pieces in the arcade here at the timeshare). I'll put more pictures and some videos tomorrow when we get home.