Canada Day 2005

You know, for all the complaining people do about how cold and miserable the winters are around here, I must disagree with them. Take for instance a great weekend that I had on Jan 21-22nd. That weekend had all the trappings of a classic Canadian winter outing. A group of 13 of us guys got together to snowshoe out to Jim Doucette’s property out by Calabogie Peaks for a night of Poker, Cigars, beans and booze. What could possibly make for a better outing I ask you? The cabin, although not completed yet, was plenty comfortable for us. I hauled out a proper poker table, and Jim brought out a ton of food. To make the outing even better, Mother Nature blessed us with a dump of like 25cm of fresh snow. Were it not for that, it might have been a slush-fest. Instead, however, we were treated to a nice peaceful trek in the snow (and of course an associated shovelling of a path to the outhouse!). When we got out there, Jim put Darcy, Kevin and myself to work getting things ready for the rest of the crew. Once 3 other people showed up, I declared a shift change, and the 3 of us went out for a great little snowshoe around the area. Kev took a bunch of pictures throughout the weekend, and you can check them all out in his Calabogie Poker Night set.

Since I’ve got your attention on these matters, I think I’ll also share another source of inspiration that I’ve unearthed. I was going to tack this onto the end of my last post, but decided that it was important enough to get it’s very own post. This inspiration comes from an unlikely source. Well, maybe not unlikely, but undiscovered by me until just today. It came in the form of a news article shared to me today by Larry, an old co-worker of Jody’s from her CREA days. This article was about a fellow by the name of Randy Pausch, who just died today from pancreatic cancer. He was a university prof with a very distinguished pedigree in the world of virtual reality. So just what is the source of inspiration from him? Well that would be his 1hr and 16min lecture that he delivered in September 2007, which was his ‘Last Lecture’. Basically, profs at Carnegie Mellon are given the chance to reflect on their lives and give a lecture based on what they would say if it would be the last lecture they would ever be giving before dying. Well, in an odd twist, Randy was actually doing just that. He had already been handed his death sentence resulting from the cancer diagnosis, and had to come to grips with it.

Welcome back to another addition of “Just what the hell has Steve gone out an bought now?”. My co-workers are always commenting that I obviously don’t have any children, as coming back from a weekend, I’m always sharing stories of long days training, or hard nights drinking, or even on occasion of new toys purchased selfishly for myself. This post will be about just such a thing I suppose. True, having no children likely does afford me a certain amount of leeway in my purchases that others don’t have, but I’m okay with that 🙂 From a very young age, I was raised with the understanding that if I wanted something, I had to buy if for myself. I never got fancy gifts as a child, but was always encouraged to find ways to get the things I wanted. That’s never really left me, and here’s a little post about my latest acquisition that I’ve been lusting after for some time. Read on about my new UMPC!

Whew! We’re almost there. I finished off putting the quarter round along all the new carpet, to give it the finished look. I also managed to get all the speaker mounted, with the wiring running through the walls and ceiling. It was not what I’d call and easy task, but the end result is a very clean installation of the sound system for the bar / rec room. You can check out the latest shots of the basement, including a nice picture of the rat’s nest that is the wiring jumble for all the AV gear in my media cabinet. Basically, all that remains is getting the new couch, which we’ve just got word will be delivered to us next Saturday (Dec.3rd), and building the bar. Now obviously, the couch is an easy one. However, getting the bar built is a different story. I’m working on it now, but there is a lot of fine woodwork that’ll have to go into it, and I don’t want to screw up. I’ve even bought yet another toy to help with that. I picked up a new 2 1/4 HP plunge router for the detail work. So, even though the materials will have only cost me about $700, the tools that I ‘had’ to buy for the job ran me over $1,000 extra!! Good grief. Anyway, stay tuned for updates on the bar build.