Tonight I completed what was possibly the most frustrating soccer season I’ve ever played. My team, the Spurs in the Ayr Adult Soccer League, managed to finish the season with a record of 0 wins 14 losses and 2 draws, including the playoffs. It just absolutely eats me up that we were unable to get a single win during this whole season.

Our problems started at the teams very inception. In this league there is a draft and each team captain chooses his own team. The only problem is our captain couldn’t make it, so the team was drafted by another person who had no vested interest in the team, and was drafting another team at the same time. Talk about a conflict of interest. So our team was off to a rocky start.

We started the season off reasonably well, picking up 2 draws in our first 3 games, which gave us hope that we would be at very least competitive over the span of the season. Little did we know this would be the high point of the season. Our team played hard, we were never a pushover to play and we frequently lost close 1 goal games. It wasn’t like anyone on the team folded. We started playing very well down the back stretch of the season, but still couldn’t catch any breaks and simply didn’t have enough scoring power.

Our first round opponent in the playoffs was of course the #1 seeded team that only lost twice during the course of the season. We played our best game of the season in pushing them to a 0 – 0 draw through regulation and overtime, only to come up short in penalty kicks. Tonight was our last chance to avoid the embarrassment of going winless over the entire season as we played in the consolation semi-finals. Again we pushed a much better team to overtime, but ended up coming up short in extra time by a score of 2 – 1.

This whole thing really pisses me off. My whole team was full of good people, we fought hard and played our asses off all season. There were no jerks, there was no attitude, egos or infighting. We just couldn’t buy a break all season. Nobody on this team deserved the infamy of going winless over a whole season. The reality of the situation was that we simply didn’t have enough talent on our team to compete. I was the leading scorer on the team with 6 goals and was one of our better players. While I’m a decent soccer player I know I’m also not someone who you’d pin your hopes on to carry the scoring load over an entire season. I know that I’m a complimentary player, not a natural goal scorer. Before this season I hadn’t scored in 2 previous Ayr league seasons.

In my opinion the league definitely let our team down. They had it fully within their power to trade players from one team to another to restore the competitive balance. There were teams that were absolutely stacked with talent that could have easily withstood losing a decent player. Instead we got a guy off the substitute list who only showed up to half the games as the band-aid solution to the problem . He did help when he was there, but there was probably a reason he was on the sub list in the first place. Everyone in this league signs up to have fun and get some exercise. Obviously there is good natured competitiveness that factors into things, but at the end of the day that is why everyone signs up for this league.

I hope that in future they learn from our experiences and actual set out rules to combat things like that. Every team in the league should have an opportunity to compete and I don’t think we were necessarily given a fair shake.

Through some veiled thinly veiled references on Twitter that some readers might have caught I mentioned that I was out of work. As of last Friday I was let got from where I worked as they wanted to go in another direction with the design. While this whole change of events was obviously unsettling, especially in this current job market, it does have its silver linings. Working on the same site for almost 2 years definitely was a challenge and left me spinning my wheels in a lot of regards. I’d been unhappy at the job for awhile and was at least keeping my ears open with regards to any other opportunities.

The unfortunate part about the timing of when I was let go was that Corina and I had planned to take a weeks vacation this week, our first week off since our honeymoon in 2007. So instead of being a vacation it’s been more work as I’ve been sending out resumes and getting in contact with people. Right after mentioning I was looking for work I had a former co-worker mention he had some freelance work to offer. I then mentioned to my former boss from a previous job that I was looking and she is hooking me up with some work as well, which is awesome.

While ideally I wanted to land a full time position which didn’t have the hassle of exchanging US cheques into Canadian, managing my own taxes and with health benefits, I’m now entertaining the idea of freelancing for awhile and testing the waters. 2 years ago I was at this same point, unemployed after having been let go from my job along with numerous other good people. Though I definitely feel some differences between my situation then and my situation now. 2 years ago I had just moved to Cambridge and really just felt cut adrift and alone in a new city. Now in these subsequent 2 years many of the people I worked with at my previous job have spread out all over the place, starting new companies and new jobs. Since I was the only designer at my job I kinda felt isolated and started going to monthly designer meetups in Waterloo to network and socialize with people in the same field as myself. And I also started using Twitter, which has enabled me to connect with many freelancers who work in the Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge area. I definitely feel more connected and better prepared to manage as a freelancer at this point in my life. Who knows, maybe it doesn’t work out and I want to get a regular 9 to 5, but at least I’ll have tried.

So anyone need a designer?:)

As I mentioned a little over a month ago we got a rescue dog named Chance as an addition to our little family. Before we got a dog many people mentioned the concept that getting a dog is like training for becoming a parent. My parents had dogs for nearly my whole life growing up in their house, so having a dog wasn’t necessarily a new thing to me. My parents always had pretty low maintenance dogs and that was something we were looking for when it came time for Corina and I to find a dog of our own. Even though we found a dog that was past the “puppy stages” in life it hasn’t meant the road wouldn’t be bumpy.

mangled blinds

In our first month there have definitely been some highs and lows with our whole relationship. I find the biggest thing I can take out of dog ownership is to begin to understand what my parents went through raising my sister and I as children. How one day a dog can bring so much joy and fun into your life, then the next decide to wantonly destroy stuff in your house. Tonight was one of those low nights. We went out for dinner and did some shopping for Father’s Day only to pull into the driveway to discover the blinds at the front door window maimed beyond recognition. Before we left it had been raining and Chance doesn’t typically like rainy walks so we skipped it tonight. Obviously he was none too pleased that we left him at home alone. When we went upstairs we discovered that he had also destroyed the blinds in my office. Colour me unimpressed.

Chance is really a great dog, but so far we’ve found he does have a bit of a defiant streak in him that we are working on training out of him. In the month we’ve had him he has definitely shown loads of behavioural improvement as he has settled into his new life, which is very encouraging. I just hope we don’t have too many repeats of the blind massacre that happened tonight, because buying new window coverings all the time isn’t cheap.

After a long search Corina and I recently made an addition to our little family unit. Meet Chance, our new dog.  He is a border collie cross that we got from a rescue agency in Guelph.  He’s an old dog, they suspect roughly 5-6 years old, but we were kind of looking for a dog that was past the puppy stages.  We’ve had a few friends go through those stages with their dog in the last year and it definitely made us want a dog that was mature.

So far we’ve had him since Friday and he has been very good.  He just seems to fit right in with things and not be too bothered by his change in situation.  He had been living out on a farm with foster parents in St Clements for the last couple of months, but so far he doesn’t seem to be too bothered by the hustle and bustle of city life.  Originally he had been rescued from a shelter in Ohio, so we now have a yankee dog.

Corina and I had been looking forward to being able to get a dog since we first moved in together back in 2005.  But given we had lived in apartments that didn’t allow for dogs up until the point we moved into our own house getting a dog wasn’t really an option.  Both Corina and I are dog people, having grown up with dogs in our houses most of our lives.

As you can see he is a bit of an odd looking dog.  He generally looks like a border collie, but has short legs.  The rescue initially classified him as possibly crossed with a corgy, but after talking to the fosters and spending some time it definitely seems like he’s mixed with some type of hound.  He’s got that hound bark and tends to lock onto scents like hounds tend to do.  He’s very good natured, loves to get attention and just generally seems to be a happy dog.

We’ve been moved into our new house for 3 weeks now and things have been going quite well so far. Its definitely been a total life adjustment compared to where we previously lived in the country. The only issue I’ve found I’m having a tough time adjusting to is having neighbours up in my grill all the time. We have a middle unit townhouse, which has a mirrored entrance to our neighbours. That inherently isn’t a big issue. I mean that is the very nature of townhouses. The issue I have with our neighbours is that there are 4 adults who live there who all smoke out on the front porch. There just always seems to be someone out there on the stoop sucking on a cancer stick. To me this is just irritating. Personally I don’t like people seeing our comings and goings or what we might purchase going into the house.

Now don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people. I don’t have a beef with smokers really. If there is one thing I really dislike in the world, it’s awkward conversation. I just really have no interest in getting to know them on a level more then “hello” or “how’s it going?”. I have no real desire to get to know the guy down the street who keeps his cats on leashes on the front lawn either. Is this just me or does anyone these days really go out of their way to get to know their neighbours? Or am I just being a snob for not wanting to do it?

Hey all, I’ve finally reached the other side of our whole moving adventure. We ended up moving on Friday, but due to technical difficulties we only got the internet setup tonight. Either way I’m happy things seem to be falling into place. I know I’ve heard people say that there is no such thing as a smooth move and I can agree with that after ours.

We had lined up the delivery of a stainless steel fridge and stove for this past Saturday, bought them 2 months in advance and figured we would be good to go. We receive a call on Thursday from Sears telling us the fridge was on backorder and wouldn’t be delivered until the 26th, which was pretty much unacceptable. As luck would have it, the appliances we originally said we didn’t want were left in the house by the previous owners, so we weren’t totally screwed. Either way, I negotiated to get another comparable fridge, but even that couldn’t be delivered until Wednesday. So we’ll finally have a working kitchen as of tomorrow night and be actually able to buy groceries.

We purchased a brand new couch a couple of weeks ago, thinking that it was smaller then the big couch we already had. Our basement staircase is pretty tight, so we knew we might be in for a battle. On move-in day we try to get the larger couch down first, without any luck. Then we tried to finess the new couch down the stairs and discovered it just wouldn’t budge either. I have to say this was about the last thing I wanted to deal with. The next morning my buddy Curtis and I decided another approach, the brute force method. We pushed it into the stairwell and made a nice hole in the ceiling. The way I looked at it was having a couch in the basement was way more important then any damage we could do to the ceiling.

All in all the experience has definitely been fun, if a little stressful. I’m just glad that my life can take on some semblance of sanity after the 3 months of moving related chaos.

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.