In the last year I’ve tried to come out of my safety zone and get out in the world and meet new people. I’ve always been someone who has had a reasonable amount of friends, but since Corina and I moved to Cambridge its become harder to get together with friends who live out of town. Most our friends who did live in Kitchener migrated back to Paris, while Corina and I were moving the other way as we both landed jobs in Guelph and looked to cut down on commute time. We then moved to Clyde, which is on the far side of Cambridge and this only added to the problem of not seeing people, since Clyde isn’t central to anything.

Since Corina and I had moved to a new city(to me at least), I really wanted to get out and meet some people. Working as a designer I found I really wanted to get out and meet peers in my field. Where I work now I’m the only designer, so being able to talk shop with other designers really appealed to me. Inherently I’m not the most outgoing person in the world, so getting out there and meeting people was a big hurdle to cross and last March I went to my first Meetup of the Waterloo Region Web Design & Technology Group. The first night I came out we met up at The Huether in Waterloo and I had a really good time. The group wasn’t too big and I got to make some good contacts.

Over this Winter I had intended on playing hockey with my Dad for the first time in his Sunday morning beer league, but that didn’t materialize at all for me. That left me with nothing active to do over the winter. In November I discovered that there was a co-ed indoor soccer league running Cambridge that was starting the winter session in January. I tried to get my old team that used to play co-ed together, but there was a general lack of interest because of prior commitments, pregnancies or just lack of money. So instead of relying on other people to go along with me I decided to sign up as an individual player and go it alone. Before going to my first game I was a little nervous about playing with people I didn’t know. Turns out pretty much everyone on my team is pretty nice and we make up a pretty solid team so far. The other thing I liked is that there were no preconceived notions. I find when you play with people you know you tend to get typecast as to what you can and can’t do on the field. With a team of people I don’t know I’m able to forge my own identity on the field. It’s rather liberating in that regard.

I just felt like sharing my experiences with everyone. I find as you get older it’s so much easier to fall back on your laurels and not get out there in the world. I’m not a particularly outgoing person, but going out and meeting new people definitely has been an enjoyable experience for me. Next week I’m planning on going to a the Tech Triangle Tweetup in Kitchener. As Radiohead said, meeting people is easy.

When we went on our trip to Buffalo awhile back Corina bought me an argyle sweater from Target. It wasn’t necessarily my style and I never wear V-necks, but I finally got around to wearing it this weekend. It looked pretty good and Corina really liked it on me. It subsequently got washed and put through a dryer load, which resulted in the picture below. I’m not sure I’ve ever owned a wool sweater, but I’m sure people who have might have experienced this. While obviously unfortunate it definitely is pretty funny. It started out as an XL and now couldn’t be much larger then a small.

Figured I would follow up on my blog from last week. We got all our financing sorted out and signed the papers, so now we have our deal in place to buy the house. We will take possession lucky Friday, March 13th. Now we just have a lot of cleaning and packing to do. I did the house inspection last Friday and the house was given a good review with only a few minor repairs to be done. I was most happy when the home inspector pointed out that the basement is wired for in-wall speakers. Score! Now we just have 3 months of packing and getting ready in front of us, which is the part I’m kinda dreading. I’ve just moved too much in the last 4 years, I’m looking forward to settling down a bit.

I wrote awhile back about how we had been looking at buying a house by checking out various open houses. We’ve been looking casually since about September, but only recently started to seriously look at houses once Corina had her contract position made full time in November. Corina has been very gung-ho about this whole process from the get go. She combed MLS to find listings she liked and knew all the new listings in our price range in the neighbourhoods we were interested in inside-out. It was to the point we couldn’t drive anywhere without her pointing out which houses we passed were and weren’t in our price range.

This weekend we decided to check out a couple townhouses in a neighbourhood we were highly interested in with our agent. We hadn’t really been looking at townhouses, but having seen one of them on this street previously on open house we decided to give it another look. Sure enough one of the places we checked out we really liked, even though it was a middle row townhouse. We mulled it over a bit and decided we’d like to put an offer in on the house on Monday night. Our first offer was a lowball offer which we entirely expected to get rejected. Today after work we met with our agent where she told us they had counter offered and dropped $4000 off their asking price. It was still above what we wanted to pay, so we countered with an offer $7000 below asking, but still $6000 more then our original offer. We got word back tonight that they accepted our offer.

I find I’m happy about it, but I’m also a don’t count your chicken before they hatch kind of person. I know my parents have had numerous real estate deals fall through, so well aware that these things can fall apart. We now have a week to sort out our mortgage financing and whatever else needs to be arranged to meet the financing conditions. Should make for an interesting 7 days.

Last night Corina and I threw our annual Halloween party, which resumed after taking a year off last year amidst the wedding, honeymoon and moving chaos that occurred last October. Every year we try to go bigger and better and I think we achieved that this year. We’re on the verge of being labeled those crazy Halloween people, but that’s alright by me. Our horde of Halloween decorations is actually starting to rival our Christmas decorations. This year we turned our back patio in a spooky graveyard, which worked out pretty well even though the smoke machine I bought really didn’t work that properly outside. It just kept blowing away 2 minutes after the machine pumped it out.

This year I went as everyone’s favourite comedic daredevil, Super Dave Osborne. My costume was comprised pretty much of a painters jumpsuit, a bunch of electrical and duct tape and some gold stars. I searched out getting an old motorcycle helmet through Kijiji, painted and taped it the appropriate manner. Corina’s mom constructed some pockets and fashioned a collar out of the jumpsuits hood. I even attempted to make an SD truckers hat which didn’t really turn out very well. I thought the costume as a whole worked out alright, if a little sloppy in some regards. I heard toward the end of the night that apparently people thought I had actually bought the costume, which I guess tells me I did something right.

Every year we have a prize for the best male and best female costumes, but this year we decided to mix it up by adding a pumpkin carving contest and Halloween trivia component. My buddy Dan was able to supply some corporate sponsorship from Remington, enabling us to give out mens and ladies electric shavers as the best costume prizes, which was really awesome. Nick won for best male costume for his Riddler outfit. He’s about the only person I know who is thin and wiry enough to pull it off. For the female award we had our first tie, which in true Halloween Spooktacular tradition, results in a dance off. The 2 females who were tied for best costume really weren’t the extroverted types, so we allowed them to choose a designated dancer to participate on their behalf. Dennis and Carmen battled it out, with Dennis coming out the victor on behalf of Laura who had dressed as Harley Quinn.

The best pumpkin award ended up being awarded to “Swissy”, who had just arrived the night before from Switzerland and was dressed as a pumpkin. Sure it was a little sketchy allowing a human entry into the pumpkin competition, but what’s one of our parties without large amounts of controversy? In reality we all know Chad’s The Dark Knight pumpkin was the best entry, but Swiss was so excited by his prize, an Alexander Mogilny bobblehead.

Today we did all the cleanup and dispatched of the pumpkins. Corina’s Dad had me load up the tractor loader with all the pumpkins, take them up to the compost pile and smash them all up. He then had me hook up the rototiller and till the compost pile. There was just something so satisfying about crushing pumpkins with a big tractor. So what was a bunch of nicely carved pumpkins last night is now a pile of compost. It was a pretty amusing experience. You can see all the photos in the album slideshow above.

Halloween 2007
Halloween 2006
Halloween 2005

For the last little while Corina and I have been going through the process of looking for our first house. Our goal is to find a house by next spring, so we’ve been sorta getting the wheels in motion with regards to the whole process. We’ve been trying to gauge what our dollars will be able to afford us in our price range, so most Sunday afternoons for the last month and a half have involved cruising around Cambridge checking out open houses.

Today of all the days we’ve had so far was probably the most varied. There seemed to be lots of open houses today and we managed to hit up 5 different places in the areas we’re looking. The part I find amusing about open houses is how telling they can be about the people that live in them. The first place we hit up was in just immaculate condition. Almost too immaculate. It was practically like Roger from Sell This House had set the place up. I looked for hidden cameras and Tanya Memme, but to no avail. I find after watching shows like that it makes me extra skeptical of the house. Makes me think they’re trying to use furniture arrangement and clever paint application to make things look bigger then they are. The second house we went to was by the same agent as the previous house, and it too was pretty well staged, though not to the degree of the previous one. At least that one felt lived in.

We then checked a random for sale by owner house. We started touring the house only to discover after looking at a few things that it was the same layout as our friends place which was located a few streets over. This house was huge and owned by a nerdy single guy in his 40′s. I could tell he was nerdy given the 3 monitor computer setup, large closet full of computer components and a healthy amount of sci fi novels on his bookshelves. He did have a ridiculously large TV too. It had to be a 60″ set in the living room.

The next place we went to was very awkward and claustrophobic. The guy who lived there apparently loved model cars. Like I mean like more then a friend. In the basement he had to have had 100 boxes of various model cars that he had built, along with a little desk to assemble them at. Just weird things you would never find out about people without nosing through their house. I’m not judging though. You go into my office and there is a weird array of Oasis albums on vinyl, a complete set of He-Man figures from McDonalds, boxes full of cords for every electronic device you could imagine and a couple Star Wars posters.

The last house we went to was the weirdest and most likely to feature dead bodies hidden behind the walls. It was an elderly couple who had been put in a home, so the house pretty much had nothing but a few couches from the 70′s and the smell of old people and vinegar. I started laughing when we investigated the basement and found a second kitchen complete with chandelier that couldn’t have hung more then 4 and half feet from the ground. I snapped a picture of it. The weirdest thing about that place was the catacombs of storage they had down there, that I assume had shelves lined with pickled beets, jams, preserves and presumably was where the dead bodies were also stored at some point.

Since we’ve started this process, which I begrudgingly accepted to do I find I’ve started to enjoy our Sunday afternoon ritual. Corina is usually quite observant on most aspects of a house. Myself I find I always notice useless stuff like where people have their modem and wireless router setup. Most people seem to always have the same Bell modem, or at least the houses we saw today.

Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I’ve been battling through a bout of monkey SARS, Avian Flu and ebola so I haven’t been quite on the ball. I just googled monkey SARS and found someone actually owns the domain monkeysars.com. Bet that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Corina’s Dad Howard has to be one of the handiest people in the world. This isn’t anything new to me, as this has been proven over and over again in the last 5 years that I have known him. He’s built box car racers out of scrap wood and plastic chairs. He’s made a trailer wagon for a tricycle. He built the 12 foot arches that served as the backdrop for our wedding. He is just generally really handy and resourceful.

So tonight I came to him with a small problem. We are selling our glass top Ikea Magiker coffee table, which although really nice, is just too big for our living room. The legs were a little wonky so I went about tightening them only to find one of the Allen screws holding the leg together was totally stripped. Since I didn’t have any screws of that size I asked Howard if he might have a screw the same size as the one from the coffee table.

So off to the garage we went in search of a new screw. He wanted to get a bolt that was the next size up, which we were able to find after a little bit of searching. He then pulled out his Tap and Dye set for re-threading the old hole in the metal. I had no idea you could even do that, yet he had a whole 60 piece kit for just that purpose. He put the leg into the vice grip and re-threaded the hole in no time. The leg had a mounting bracket that now needed a larger hole for the bolt to fit through, so he fired up the drill press and I can say I helped in this whole process as I lowered the press and drilled the new, larger hole. I then used a ratchet to get the new bolt tightly secured into place. The only problem now was that the bolt head was too tall and would keep the mounting piece from sitting flush against the wood of the table. No problem for Howard. He just pulls out his grinder and works the bolt head down until it sat flush. There were sparks flying 5 feet in every direction. All told this took about 10 minutes and I had a good as new table leg.

And to think all I asked was if he had a screw to simply replace the one I already had.

This past weekend Corina and I embarked on a road trip to Cleveland, Ohio. It seems the biggest question most people asked beforehand was why? And to answer that it was really a just because trip. She and I both had a blast on our trip to Chicago, which sort of got us on a kick about driving to major US cities. We took our honeymoon trip to Boston, and I personally went to Pittsburgh last year to see an NHL playoff game. So I had the idea of driving to Cleveland after my visit to Pittsburgh, mainly because it seemed like a pretty manageable drive to do in a day.

The big scheme for this trip was to go see a Cleveland Indians game and check out the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Things started off badly on Thursday night as I went to go look for the tickets to the game which had been FedEx’d to me a month and a half before and couldn’t find them. I have this bad habit of leaving things in envelopes and just throwing them somewhere, so I suspect I actually threw out the tickets in a tidy up frenzy awhile back when I got my new computer. I was just crushed by this, as I had secured some pretty good seats and now had nothing to show for it. So I then went online to StubHub and ordered some e-tickets which were about half the price of the lost tickets, but at least we were able to go to the game.

The drive down was pretty easy and straight-forward. We were staying at the Hyatt-Regency Arcade in downtown Cleveland, which was absolutely awesome. The Arcade was apparently the first mall built in America and was originally financed by J.D. Rockefeller. The Hyatt retrofit the building, turning the top 3 floors of the mall into hotel rooms, while leaving the bottom 2 as retail space. It was a very cool place to stay. The first room we got had a broken bed, so we ended up getting upgraded to another room that goes for $550 a night. It was pretty awesome.

The baseball game was pretty great. The Indians jumped out to a 5-0 lead after 2 innings, only to have the Twins claw back and make it interesting in the 9th. Canadian boy Justin Morneau hit a 2 run homer which I managed to capture with my camera.

It landed about 15 feet to our right. Everyone was chanting to throw it back, but they didn’t. Afterward there was a huge fireworks display. I have to say, if there is one thing America knows how to do well, it’s blow shit up. This was probably one of the best fireworks displays I’ve ever seen.

We went to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, which I have to say was massively underwhelming. It should be called the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame of America or something. As a fan of lots of music outside of the US it just wasn’t represented there. I suppose it’s not surprising though, since in reality they have only inducted bands up to 1983, so music that would have influenced and shaped my life really hasn’t been acknowledged yet. I found the only people who seemed to really be old people who really were into it. I heard one woman while we were walking down the Hall of Fame wall debating about how the Moody Blues should be inducted. This interested me, so I did some looking into the Moody Blues, as they were a band I know little to nothing about. They did Knights In White Satin, and that’s about it from the looks of it, so in my estimation there is probably a reason why they’re not in the Hall of Fame.

We probably couldn’t have asked for a better place to stay in Cleveland. It was right downtown and the one end of the Arcade lead right out into an area with lots of good places to eat. While there we checked out the Winking Lizard before the ballgame, which was a cool place and they were celebrating Christmas in July with Christmas tunes, cookies and candy canes which was rather amusing. We had dinner on Saturday at Fat Fish Blue, which was a Cajun restaurant. I quite liked the beer battered catfish I had. Makes me kinda wish we had a decent Cajun place around here. And on Saturday night we checked out a place called The Corner Alley, which was a hip martini bar/bowling alley. Unfortunately we couldn’t afford to bowl considering they charged per lane as opposed to per person, so we opted to play some pool and have a few drinks instead. Corina and I both did a lot of research for this trip on where to eat. On previous trips we were kinda lost as to where to get good food. It seems so odd, but in the big city it does tend to be hard to find good eats given the multitude of options. This time we were prepared. I found Chowhound to be a pretty good resource for information, as it tended to have lots of good grassroot recommendations that came through in spades.

Overall we had a good time on the trip, I would definitely recommend taking the trip and checking out a ballgame, and after doing the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame it kinda made me wish we went to the neighbouring Great Lakes Science Center instead.

I uploaded some photos from the trip to Picasa as well.

Corina was telling me awhile back about how she had seen this collection of photos of people holding the sun. Here’s a bunch of Flickr examples of people holding the sun in photos. So last week we gave it a go when we stopped to take photos at the Seagrams Lofts in Kitchener. It’s a pretty fun shot to take, though it’s kinda hard to take for the photographer. Getting the hands in the exact right position is tough.

I meant to mention this last week, but it got kinda forgotten. We were in Uptown Waterloo for the 2008 Waterloo Blogstravaganza that I had been invited to by James Bow. I met a couple bloggers from including Jenny from Ideal Pragmatist and Greg from Mr Sinister, as well as others I can’t seem to find blog links for. It was a good time. I find anytime I’m at the Huether is a good time, so no complaints here.