Greg’s weblog

Erin and I finished watching Enterprise over the weekend. Boy it got dumb near the end…I also managed to catch the hockey game Saturday night, which had a happy ending. With Erin and the kids being sick, we didn’t do much else all weekend, though I did some tidying in the basement, and the VCR was pronounced DOA at the Greg school of VCR repair. We literally never use the thing anymore, so it’s not a huge loss, but we do have some VHS tapes that I might have to look into transferring over to DVD at some point – our wedding video primarily. I don’t really know what killed the VCR, but I suspect it had something to do with William putting wooden blocks into it.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix.” – Comic book guy

Last night I snuck out to Rob’s place for a poker night. It was lots of fun, even though I lost my buy-in. While the deck was hitting Rob in the face, it was busy kicking my ass with bad luck. Either way, I learned a couple of new games and shared a bunch of laughs.

A side effect of all the warm weather we’ve been having is that there’s a lot of ice on the sidewalks in the morning. This morning in particular, I was walking to the bus, and not really worrying about it too much – then I came to a patch of ice that looked slippery, so I thought to myself “Be careful, don’t slip” and changed my walk. Didn’t work – my left leg went straight up in the air, my right leg bent, then lifted off the ground too. My bag slipped out of my hands, and went 10 feet up and 10 feet forward (it just sounds better than 3 metres Trent :) ) and I landed on my elbow and butt. Other than having a sore forearm, I’m none the worse for the wear, but it still sucks.

Oh, and Erin and the kids all have a bad cold, which means we haven’t been getting the best quality sleep around our house lately. It hasn’t hit me yet, but I’m sure that it will :P

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Now listen to me, if Marge Simpson goes to jail, I can kiss the chick vote goodbye. And if I go down, your gonna break my fall.” – Mayor Quimby

Erin realized yesterday that we hadn’t gotten the stickers for the van plates, and thus were effectively driving without valid plates. The insurance rolls over automatically, so we were still insured – the plates just weren’t valid. I picked up stickers on my way home yesterday, and the woman at SGI mentioned that you could wind up with a $500 fine if they catch you driving without valid plates – regardless of if you’re insured or not. Luckily it’s been so warm here that the plates were tough to read through all the mud ;)

I haven’t watched a lot of hockey this year (though I did witness the Habs get destroyed over the weekend) but I’m still glad to hear that the Ducks are dropping “Mighty” from their team name, and coming out with a new logo. I think that “The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim” is a symbol of a dark period in NHL history, when history and tradition took a back seat to marketing. Hopefully this name change is a sign of things to come – could they possibly bring back a more balanced schedule? How about renaming the divisions/conferences again? I think the NHL lost sight of it’s rich history for a while there, and they’re now realizing that it was a mistake.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere. Like that time I took the ferry over to Shelbyville; I needed a new heel for my shoe. So, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickle, and in those days, nickles had pictures of bumblebees on them. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have any white onions, because of the war; the only thing you can get was those big yellow ones.” – Grandpa Simpson

Erin and I voted yesterday, and that was the last that I even thought about the election. I knew that my riding would wind up Conservative regardless of my vote, and I figured the makeup of Parliament would be about what it is – which is to say more Conservative, but still with significant Liberal representation, and unlikely to last more than a year or two at the outside. The Conservatives made political hay while they were the opposition, so it will be interesting to see if they can maintain that momentum, or if the lack of a really strong national mandate will slow them down. I found it quite telling that Stephen Harper’s victory speech, he made mention of the fact that our International friends don’t have to worry – there won’t be any big changes in our economic policies (though I can’t find the exact quote right now…)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.”

The weekend was productive. Saturday, I spent the morning cleaning up downstairs, then Jonathan and Bryan came over and helped me move a cabinet from the garage to the basement. After they left, I got out the hammer and put the wall back up at the base of the stairs, and now the basement is looking a lot better.

Sunday afternoon, William and I went grocery shopping while Erin was at a friend’s place working on her LLL leadership applicant stuff. When we were done supper, William and I made some paper boats (from the instructions in “Curious George Rides a Bike”) and then he immediately wanted to have a bath. It was pretty neat to see him playing with his paper boats – “Oh no! it’s taking on too much water!”

On an unrelated note, this is an interesting article about an experiment with using The Socratic Method to teach Binary Math.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “You mean the mob only did me a favour to get something in return? Oh, Fat Tony, I will say good day to you.” – Homer

So, since William is really into his little flash games now, Erin and I have discussed getting him his own computer. When I was poking around the site that I usually buy computer stuff from, I priced out the computer that we bought at the end of December 2004 – turns out that to build the same one today would cost nearly the same amount of money, which is a little surprising. We haven’t really committed to buying anything yet, but I’m leaning toward a small form factor machine of some sort – something along the lines of the Aspire X-Qpack case maybe.

Like I said though – I don’t even know if we’ll wind up getting him one, or just leave it for a while.

Simpson’s quote of the day:
Hutz: “I didn’t win. Here’s your pizza.”
Marge: “But we did win.”
Hutz: “That’s okay. The box is empty.”

Dadada, Daddy

That is all.