Archive - Sep 2006

Well, another weekend has gone by, and what a busy one it was. Love of my life Jody has finally caught up to me as far as decades go. Yup, Jody has joined the masters club by turning 30 last week. The celebrating started on Thursday, and didn’t stop until Sunday night. What a lucky lady! As a result of my second job, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to spend Thursday evening with Jody, so she made her own plans. She chose to take the bus to the cosmopolitan city of Montreal for the day. Personally, I don’t see how the shopping is any better in Montreal, but apparently the ladies see it another way. She had a full day there, and even made it back in time for us to watch Survivor. Then it was off to bed early to get ready for a fun weekend. Jody actually opted to take both Thursday and Friday off, to properly give herself time to get used to the idea of being 30. Sadly, I had to toil away in the salt mines at work, then go home and put in extra time on the laptop, even on Friday. Such is life though.

Well, just by fluke, I happened upon an email I sent out a while ago after my 30th Birthday Party. After celebrating Jody’s 30th over the past weekend, I thought I’d post this one on the blog, in order to properly archive it, as well as re-live it a bit. The party took place over the July 1st weekend, in spite of my actual Birthday being in May. This was mainly due to the multiple races I had lined up in June, and the fact that we had guests coming up for the weekend that I really wanted to share the fun with. Enjoy, and if you want to check out some pictures from that life-changing weekend, head on over to Kev’s folder on flickr. For some reason, we don’t have any pictures on our site from that party. Weird… I’ll have to get the chief archivist to look into that…

Greetings from the world of me again. Time rolls on, and I’ve been delinquent on my ramblings. It is with good reason this time though. In the past 2 weeks, I’ve taken on a second job. Yup, I’m not only a public servant, but I’m also doing contract work with a local start-up company as well. I was solicited by Dragonwave through some of my friends that have landed there. It’s not full time work hours or anything, but between the two jobs, and training for my last race of the season, time is at a premium. During the week, I’m up around 6am to work all day at the CRTC, then putting evenings in at my 2nd employer! Although that may be riveting for all of you, I’ll move into the topic of this post. After all, as most of you know, work is a means to an ends for me. Although I have to like my job, I much prefer talking about my hobbies than my career. That’s what separates us from the animals! Or was it opposable digits. Either way, on with my (briefer than usual) tale.

Wow, things really get different in the off season for me! This past weekend was a complete departure from the disciplined Steve that I've been of late. Instead of denying myself all of my vices in order to train hard, I decided to just 'let my hair down' and party hard. Luckily, the doctor had just what I ordered. Friday night was set to be the Dr. Teeth year end party, to celebrate the close of yet another year of playing Ultimate Frisbee. A nice laid back (and by laid back I mean really intense) evening at Dave's crib with the team-mates. Then, instead of recovering and taking it easy on Saturday, it turned out that it was our good friend Andy's Birthday! Huzzah. Hmmm, now, how to celebrate that occasion? Why, Lucky Ron of course, with its associated delicious quarts of beer, followed by a nice pub meal at Patty Bolands, along with more beer, then off to some place called 'Collection' for a crazy round of Martinis (thanks I-A!). Now, normally, this would conclude my broadcasting night, but instead, we had to head to yet another party at McLarens on Elgin, to help Ian and Esther celbrate their upcoming wedding in New Brunswick. Yikes, turned into another crazy evening again! What follows isn't for the faint of heart ;-)

Well, I've done it! I can honestly say now that I'm half a man! Well, half an iron-type man that is! This weekend marked the successful completion of my half iron distance triathlon right here in Ottawa. For those of you who might not be aware of what that means, or the distances, I'll summarize it for you. For starters, you swim for 1.9km, then you hop on your bike and pedal for 90km, then to finish it (you) off, you put on your running shoes and plod through 21.1km of running. The full iron distance, in case you haven't figured it out, is twice as far for every discipline ;-) I registered for this race way back in February, and at that time, I was torn betwen doing the full iron distance, or the half iron distance. In the end, sanity won that time, and I registered for the half. After all, I did the half marathon before tackling the full marathon as well. I guess that can only mean that next year, I'll have to take on the full distance. But I digress (as I often do). This blog posting will be all about my race experience in "The Canadian 1/2 Iron Distance Triathlon", put on by Somersault events, and raced out of Mooney's Bay beach. The weather was great, I had a nice little contingent of supporters (Thanks Jody, Kev, Grant, Bonnie, Maya, Natasha, Dave and Meghan!). That kind of thing always makes things go better. To save everyone the trouble, the bottom line is that I did way better than I had hoped. My goal was to finish in 5hr 30mins., but I shattered that by finishing in 5:11:13!! Luckily, there's also a good bunch of pictures that were taken by Kev and Jody, which you can check out in their folder on flickr. For the gory details, just read on!

Welcome back race fans! It's been another busy two weeks, with a couple fun races that I got to take part in. Last weekend, I headed off to Calabogie peaks to try my luck at an off-road triathlon. For those of you who might have been paying attention, I was actually supposed to take part in this years' Sea2Summit race at Mont Ste. Marie, which is an adventure race that I took part in solo last year, and managed to come in 3rd place! Well, this year, the brilliant organization that runs this usually great race totally fell apart. Not only did the race not take place, but they didn't even have the common courtesy to let anyone know. Yup, even now, if you head to their website, it advertises the race, and says costs are 'TBA'. These clowns definitely get my vote for jerk of the week. Of course, rather than just kicking back and drinking beer all weekend, I decided at the last minute that I'd sign up for this fun-sounding race. The Calabogie Peaks Multiman weekend, featuring a full weekend of races less than an hour from Ottawa. I registered in the off-road triathlon, running on Sunday. The race consisted of a 750m swim, followed by a 15km off-road bike leg, finishing off with a 7.5km run. Sadly, I got very few pictures of this weekend, since I was alone, and there was only one race photographer covering the entire racecourse. If you'd like to see a few shots anyway, click on over to the folder on flickr. Now on with the rest of the story.