The weather is looking nice today. I’m really hoping that it holds for tonight, and through tomorrow. We’re heading out to the campground right after work, and hopefully will get all set up before it gets too dark to see what we’re doing. Fear not, we won’t leave any beer out for the bears.

The Canada Remembers Air Show is this weekend, and the skies around here are full of interesting planes. On the way to work this morning, I saw 5 hot air baloons fly over downtown (I’m told that there were at least 10 in total, but I didn’t see them all personally.) There are jets buzzing around, and large (troop transport?) planes as well, making lazy turns over the airport. It’s fun to watch the variety of planes out my office window.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “And after visiting the area for, uh, the past 2 weeks, I have determined it is not feasable to construct a super train between Springfield and Aruba.” - Mayor Quimby

I briefly toyed with the idea of having the counter beep, to increase the tension, but then I thought that I’d been cruel enough for one week.

This weekend is approaching fast, and with it, our first camping trip of the summer. Friday night, we’re going out to Pike Lake and setting up the tent. We’re planning on staying for at least two nights, but I think it probably depends on how William deals with the first night. It’s supposed to be fairly cold out too, which won’t help things much.

So, I’ve been playing around with an RSS aggregator - I finally found one that I like, at least so far. There are lots of little things that I’d like it to do differently, but for the most part, it works pretty well. If you’re interested, check out Sharpreader It requires the .Net 1.1 framework be installed, which wasn’t a problem for me, but might be for you.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “First some ground rules. Number one, we get bathroom breaks every half-hour.” - Lionel Hutz

But Katriona and Dave are getting married pretty soon. Look up to the countdown timer above to see how long :)

Simpsons quote of the day: “Oh, I don??t have the discipline to be a hippie” - Homer

I received a request to continue mentioning the fact that Dave and Katriona are getting married next weekend (only 11 days to go :)) so I thought I would do just that. Ok, Katriona, now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, we can all continue.

Last night, Erin and I dropped William off at my parents’ place so we could go out for a celebratory supper. With all the company (both past and future) it was nice to have a little quiet alone time with Erin. That’s something we haven’t done enough of since William arrived. We went to Cheesetoast, which was basically empty. The food was good - I’m guessing that Monday night just isn’t their busy time. I know that they do pretty brisk lunch business.

When we were trying to decide what restaurant to go to, I looked through the yellow pages, and saw Crawdaddies. Sadly, Crawdaddies is no longer with us. That had to be one of my favorite restaurants in the city. It had a unique menu, and everything I had there was delicious. I guess I’ll have to find some other place to get my gumbo and jambalaya.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I can be a jerk and no one can stop me!” - Homer Simpson

We accepted an offer on the house over the weekend. The end result is that (pending financing approval) our house is sold. So that’s a big stress that’s been relieved.

Saturday night was my brother Dave’s stag, we wound up at the casino. I’ve been to three stags in the last two years that wound up at the casino, but this was the first time that we stayed for more than an hour or so. We settled down at a table called “Triple Shot” which is a three part game - War, Blackjack, and Poker. We played it on and off for probably 5 hours or so, we went through 7 or 8 dealers, who mostly had a good time with us. I think I ended the night down $15, and $4 of that was on a single spin of the roulette table. We had some really fun dealers, and some boring dealers. I think that once they realized how we were interacting with them, they took it well, but at first, some of them seemed a little reserved. The last dealer that we had (she cleaned Dave out) wound up laughing so hard that she could barely speak. It was a lot of fun though, so I think the next time I go to the casino, that’s the table I’ll wind up at.

Plus, it was the only table in the casino with blue felt :)

So, that was Saturday. Yesterday, I didn’t do much of anything. Erin went to “Katriona’s Shower Part Deux” and William and I stayed home and played/watched Caillou.

Erin’s uncles came to visit on Saturday, but I didn’t see much of them, and they were gone by the time we got up on Sunday. They left a bunch of stuff behind, including some medication, so hopefully it wasn’t anything too important, or they could get a prescription filled quickly or whatever. Her grandparents are coming into town this weekend for Jess and Ryan’s wedding, so we can send the stuff back to Edmonton with them (if we remember to.)

So, yeah, we’re into wedding time now, a family wedding on each of the next two weekends. This weekend is Jess (Erin’s cousin) and Ryan, then next weekend is Dave and Katriona. I’m looking forward to them, they should both be a lot of fun. I’m actually taking the next two weeks off, so posting will be sporadic at best (between August 23rd and September 7th) during that time.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “And these ones are smarter than the average bear! They swiped my pic-inick basket!” - Moe

It’s looking like this weekend is going to be a scorcher - well, as much of a scorcher as we’ve had this summer anyway. Hopefully the weather stays nice. The countdown to wedding time is reaching a critical point - we’ve got a wedding on each of the next two weekends (not this weekend though) so it will be good to have the house stuff finished off and out of the stress-zone. After next week, I’ve taken two weeks off. We haven’t planned anything for the time off, other than maybe an extension to the weekend’s camping activities (the first wedding is being held at a nearby campground, so we’re going out Friday and staying for at least Friday and Saturday nights probably.) It’ll be good to have some relaxation time - I haven’t had any extended time off since February, and I even worked the stat holiday this month, in order to ensure coverage at work in case anything blew up (it didn’t.)

Damon Allen going down with a potentially torn ACL last night is sad. I’ve never been a big Damon Allen fan, but nobody should have a great career ended like that. At least it was a nice completion, and not an interception or something.

Simpsons quote of the day: “Silly customer! You cannot hurt a Twinkie!” - Apu

The server was down yesterday because my IP changed. Sorry about that. You can expect another period of brief outages at the end of November though, when we’re moving. I’m going to try to minimize that as much as possible, by setting the server up temporarily at my parents’ place while we’re moving, and then move it to our new place when we’ve got internet service.

So, anything new in the interim? Well, we put a sign on the front lawn, and had several people through to look at the house yesterday. We actually have an offer on the table, and another one pending a meeting with the bank, so things are looking good. I think the key is that we didn’t get greedy with our listing price. I won’t discuss it much beyond that though. We should have something in place by Saturday anyway. That’s the last major obstacle with our new house purchase (that, and the home inspections) so it’s good to have it underway.

It’s good to have the house in the kind of shape that we can show it - I don’t think it’s been this organized since we moved in. Seriously.

Simpson’s quote of the day : “Please get out of my store, and thank you come again.” - Apu