Wednesday, April 27, 2011

VGL

This should be interesting.

I'm taking Garrett with me to see Videogames Live tonight (Wed) in Kitchener. I'm very excited as it's a fantastic concert and I think he'll have a blast. I need to make sure he wears something videogamey!

I'm also interested to see how many tags I can get with my 3DS. So far I've found ONE person in the wild and that was at the Sarnia easter egg hunt. If I don't find very many other people with a 3DS tomorrow night, I won't find them anywhere!

Happy 4th Birthday Kara

Kara turned 4 last week and I was so busy I forgot to post! I'll have to dig up some pictures from last week's string of birthday parties, but suffice it to say, she's very happy to be four now!

Monday, April 18, 2011

Happy Birthday Mom!

My mom is [REDACTED] years old today! Congratulations for making it through another trip around the sun, mom!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Fun Is Work!

Speaking of work that is fun, I've been totally engrossed in this Portal 2 ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that has been going on since the beginning of the month. The reason it is so neat is because there's a chance that, due to a lot of geeks playing a lot of indie games, Portal 2 will be available at least a day earlier than planned! It is supposed to launch on Tuesday but because everyone has been playing a bunch of neat little games on Steam, we'll be able to play it by Monday night if all of the calculations are correct.

I'm sure that's gibberish for most of you, but it's really cool and one of the great things about being a gamer. What other medium will give you a chance to partake of their content early by watching/reading/listening to other movies/books/songs?

Work Is Hard

If you see a few more gray hairs on my head, I think it's because work is out to age me 20 years over the past few weeks. The last couple of days have been the first where I feel like I've got my feet back under me and it's so nice to have a day where I can just cook food and hang out with the guys instead of being buried in paperwork up to my eyeballs.

Not that I don't have paperwork, but the high priority stuff is definately wrangled for the moment. Phew!

Monday, April 04, 2011

It's Still Easier Than Explaining It To My Grandparents

Please check out this epic flowchart detailing how to explain the internet to a 19th century street urchin. It is about 8 kinds of awesome.

And it's pretty funny too.

Saturday, April 02, 2011

The Best Worst Thing You'll Hear All Day

If you've been exposed to the virulent strain of earworm that is Rebecca Black's 'Friday', do yourself a favour and watch this video.

At the very least, Colbert & Fallon have managed to wash the sound of the original version out of my brain.

Edit: I give up. Just go on Youtube and search for Friday and Colbert.

Chicks Dig Scars

Garrett & I got to spend about 6 hours or so in the local ER waiting to see if he had any kind of internal damage after he had an unexpected meeting of his stomach and the bare metal end of his handlebars while riding around outside today.



We were a little concerned that the force of the blow and the fact that it took the skin off his stomach (and left it imprinted on the inside of the shirt!) so I drove him over to the hospital after work to have a professional give him a once-over. While we did have an almost 6 hour wait there, they took it seriously enough to do a urine test and ultrasound to ensure that there wasn't any internal injury. Thankfully, it looks like he'll just be tender on his tummy for a bit and have a very odd scar to show to his friends when he's older.

And I have to say, for a kid in some amount of pain and with not a lot to do, Garrett handled the long wait at the hospital like a trooper. He played his DS, my 3DS, my iPhone, read some magazines, flounced about a bit and ate a bunch of junk food from the vending machine with nary a complaint. I think he was more interested in all of the stuff going on through the glass doors into the ward and with all of the people around to realize how dull it was!

To add insult to injury to this whole evening, we got trapped in the parking lot for about 10 minutes when we were trying to leave. On the upside, we didn't have to pay the obscenely high cost for parking ($16 to park for 2 hours? SERIOUSLY?!?) but it was kind of annoying nonetheless.

Friday, April 01, 2011

On A Happier Note...

This has been a bear of a week for me, but tomorrow (today?) is my day off (yay) so I'm finally getting a bit of time to decompress. Despite the insanity of the previous post, the absolute emotional wringer of a day I had on Wednesday at work and the fact that it was year end at work on Thursday and the paperwork was flying furiously, there is a glimmer in the darkness!

Our church had a spectacular opening Sunday on the 27th. Our first service was about 75% capacity in the sanctuary, which holds about 700 people. For the second service, it was standing room only, not to mention all of the people spilling out into the foyer and the coffee shop. Altogether, we had something like 1200 people come to the church on Sunday with 200 kids in the children's area. Woo!

And in a fit of insanity, I had volunteered to help with parking. Here's a still shot of the parking lot from the far edge of the lot to show how many cars there were...



It was a bit packed. We had cars lined up all the way from the cul-de-sac at the end of 10th Line to the lights at Argentia at one point, but we managed to squeeze about 400 or so cars into a lot designed to hold about 300. It was nuts. 3.5 hours of nuts, to be precise, because that's how long I spent outside directing traffic that day! At least the weather was beautiful, though I got a pretty nasty sunburn for my troubles.



Hopefully the coming Sundays will be a little more... sane. We had a lot of visitors, special guests and curious people who likely won't be around on a regular basis, though it would be awesome to have this kind of turn out every week.

I'm just happy that we have a building to call home for the church now. It has been a long time coming and it's like the church is coming into its adolescence now (almost literally, what with the congregation being about 10 years old this coming September) so we have all sorts of new challenges and opportunities to look forward in this new phase of the church's life. Time to sit back and buckle in and enjoy the ride.

Take That, Good Deed Doer!

How I wish this was an April Fool's joke. There is a very surreal thing going down around our neighbourhood and it just goes to show how small a town Acton is.

A week ago or so (during that crazy freak blizzard) one of the people living near us had their dog either stolen or lost from their yard. I'm not sure whether they're exaggerating or not and I honestly don't know why anyone would wait until the nastiest day of the year so far to bother to try to steal their puppy, but that's their story and they're sticking to it.

So they went to the cops, it didn't seem like much would happen but a few days later, it appears that they've retrieved their dog from a supposed breeder or some such. Hooray! Happy end of story.

Except now it seems that one of our friends that lives across town has learned that no good deed goes unpunished. They found a dog on one of the sideroads near Acton and called the local humane society and someone came to take the dog to the shelter. And yes, it was that missing puppy. So the cops have been paying a visit to our good friends and they're worried that they're going to be under the spotlight as suspected dognappers when they were just trying to do the right thing.

And to make things even more crazy, it turns out that the person who came from the shelter to take the dog away is a fake. The shelter has nobody like this on staff. So that's a whole other layer of insanity on this surreal pancake.

Hopefully everything will be fine for our friends and the real dognappers in this case will be caught and/or never stalk the Hills of Halton again, but it sucks that our friends are stuck in the middle for having tried to do the right thing.

Draaaama!