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.

This weekend Corina and I hosted the2008 Beer Olympics . Corina and her Beer Olympic Committee put together put together quite the great event. The whole concept of it was to have teams of 4-6 people each representing a country, facing off in a variety of events. Originally we had as many as 7 teams in the event when it was first proposed a couple months ago. But due to prior engagements, weddings, funerals, family illnesses and whatever else we only managed to get 3 full teams together for the event. This was quite frustrating, as many people waited until the last week or two to inform us that they couldn’t come, by which point we had already ordered too much beer. The days leading up to the event just seemed to point to things not going well, but the whole time Corina remained confident things would turn out well.

The day of the event started out ominous. The weather was overcast with impending rain and thunderstorms in the forecast. It rained in the morning which I’m sure scared away a few fence sitters away from showing up. But as the day went on the sky opened up and the sun started to shine as everyone started to roll in, which was a relief. We rented a keg fridge for the event and it gave us some grief. It’s lucky I have a few friends with some mechanical know-how and that Corina’s Dad had a garage stocked with parts that we were able to get the C02 canister and tap working properly. The rental place will be getting an earful about that. Anyhow, once that got sorted out the beers started flowing. We got 2 kegs, one a low-carb beer and the other was Adly’s Ale from the Lion’s Brewery in Waterloo.

We started the day with teams from Canada(my team), England and the United Arab Emirates. The first game to be played was the Beer-stacle course relay. We had to do 3 rotations of the hula hoop, then weave through some pylons, then take 5 swings on the swings, then go down the slide and finish by walking a rope line to the finish, all while carrying a beer. Each member of a team had to do one of the stages then pass off to the next in the relay. I managed to do the swings and not spill a drop until the handoff. We ended up winning that event, even though we had the slowest time because of having the most beer and no point deduction penalties.

Next was the chicken foot competition. We had to pick up a weighted paper bag from the middle of a marked out area with our teeth. You couldn’t put your hand down or your second foot down or you were out. This one was not Canada’s strong event, given all of us on the team are at least 6’1″. We tried hard, but couldn’t beat Mike from UAE’s bag picking up abilities.

Next event was the boat race. 4 members from each team had to chug a beer. This one was barely a competition. All 4 of us can chug beer and were finished in probably 40 seconds. Our team was born for that event.

We then did the arm wrestling match, which required each competitor to hold a beer while arm wrestling. When the beer Olympics were originally devised there was supposed to be 1 female per team, but it ended up there was only 1 team(England) with females on it. We still did the competition, but England got top points by default while UAE and Canada fought for first and second. Here was some boobie grabbing distraction tactics used by England to distract Rob from Canada. The highlight of this event had to be when Rob took on my father-in-law Howard in an arm wrestling match. Howard humoured Rob for a bit before putting him down. It was rather amusing.

Next we did the Dizzy Bat race. After apparently not doing the race right the first time, we had to do it a second time. I think in both cases Canada won again. At this point Robb decided to challenge me to a pound off, which I’m not sure served any purpose other then drinking more beer. I won the pound off, but at this point the fact I had dinner, just run 2 dizzy bat races and then chugged a boot full of beer caught up to me and I had to yak. Being the first to puke won me the light weight award for the evening.

The next event was the wheelbarrow race. 2 members from each team had to race to the end wheelbarrow style, where the wheel part of the barrow had to finish a cup of beer through a straw. Canada yet again prevailed at this one.

We then had the final secret event, which was baby bottle beers. 2 members from each team had to drink beer from a small baby bottle. Mike from UAE managed to be the first one to just bite the nipple off and drink the beer, at which point I think everyone did it.

In the end it was Canada crushing all challengers to take home the big trophy. United Arab Emirates take silver, while England takes bronze. It was great fun and I think everyone had an absolute blast. The rest of the night we just tried to put a bigger dent into how much beer was left in the kegs, had a bonfire, played some horseshoes and chilled out. We even got in some late night Guitar Hero action. About 10 people crashed at our place or in tents in the backyards. Already everyone is talking about next year. So I guess consider this your advanced notice if you want in for next year. I think we learned a lot from planning this event. A lot of people were scared away by the event because they thought it would be all about chugging beer, but that wasn’t the case at all. I figure after all the fun that was had this year we’ll definitely be able to get a bigger turn out for next year. We didn’t manage to break even on the event, but all the same it was well worth running as an excuse to get all our friends together and drink beer.

I arrived back in Canada yesterday after a long day of travel. In the last week I’ve spent way too much time in Newark. We got bumped forward and hour for our flight in Tampa, which seemed good, only to find it just made our stay in Newark that much longer. The part that sucked about that was that at least the Tampa airport had free Wi-Fi, while it would have cost $10 to use it in Newark. Then after landing in Newark we discover that our connecting flight is running late. By the time it was all said and done our flight was an hour late and we spent 3 hour twiddling our thumbs in New Jersey. I think the only consolation I took about my time in New Jersey was that I was at least able to see the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty on our decent. I didn’t actually know where Newark was in relation to NYC, so it was kinda a pleasant surprise to see. I almost didn’t believe it, as the Statue of Liberty was so small in the distance.

Overall I would say the trip went well. We got lots of work done, the conference went off without a hitch. I was just glad to be home in Canada. Though I had kinda hoped the weather would cooperate a little better. I had been hoping I might be able to transition from short weather in Florida right into the start of short weather in Ontario. I had my hopes up after hearing it was 15 degrees while we were away, only to come home to a dreary, rainy day where it was only 6 degrees out.

As I mentioned, this trip went pretty well, but there was one thing that really bothered me, so I’ll just come out and just say it. America, your money sucks. This was the first time I’ve been in the US and used American money for any sustained amount of time. First of all, it smells real bad. I know it’s made out of cotton, but it definitely stinks. The second issue I had was with $1 bills. They are so pointless. I come from a country that has $1 and $2 coins which have taken a lot of flack over the years, but personally I can’t see living without them. A few times while in Florida I got change back in all $1 bills. I think the most I got in one single transaction was 7 of them. In Canada nobody would ever dare give you 7 loonies as change without apologizing for it first. You just end up with a whole wallet full of them. Which brings me to my third point, your money all looks the same. When I look in my wallet I have no idea what my money situation looks like. With 5 US bills I could have $100 or $5. With Canadian money I know if I have all green bills($20) I have some cash for the night. If I look at my wallet and it’s all blue bills($5) and a pocketful of change I know I’m probably getting low on cash.

Looking forward to going home. I just had a nice long blog that just disappeared from my browser window, so I’ll just try and summarize since I don’t think I can rewrite it. The conference has gone well and been quite informative. I’ve laid low the last few nights as we tied one on pretty good on Tuesday night. We’re planning on going out tonight to the Tampa Bay Rays game in Clearwater, then going out for drinks. Then tomorrow morning it’s onto the plane and back to Canuckistan. Can’t wait. Tampa has been cool, but I’ll still take Ontario any day of the week.

I finally got some time here to blog. It’s been a tad hectic and tiring the last 5 days. After getting in late from the hockey game, I decided to go out on Friday night for drinks with friends until 4am, get a short night sleep, then spend all Saturday getting prepared to fly to Tampa, Florida for work. I then had a crappy night sleep(as I usually do before trips where I have to get up early) before flying out on an 11:05am flight. This was the first time I’ve flown internationally since I was 8, so pretty much the whole experience was new to me. I flew out with my co-worker Harry while my boss Wayne was on an earlier flight. We thunked down in Newark, then had a 2 hour stop over. I say thunked down because the pilot really put that plane down with authority, much to my chagrin. We then boarded our plane to rainy Tampa. After setting down we went out to some dive bar for drinks with some co-workers from the Tampa office and were out until 2am, at which point we decided to go to the IHOP for breakfast. So I can definitely say I was tired by the time we went to work on Monday.

We went into the office and met everyone. They were all pretty nice. It was good to get to meet people I’ve emailed and MSNed the last 6 months. We went out to a BBQ place called Sonny’s which I quite liked. So much so I decided to buy a bottle of their BBQ sauce to take home. I find when I’m in the US I make a point of eating at places that aren’t available in Canada. After hearing some rave reviews from a friend who had recently gone to the states, we checked out Steak & Shake, which was really friggin good. Since I had never been there before I had to try out their namesake meal, the double steakburger, which is ground up steak in patty form and I think it was called a side by side shake, which was 2 flavours in one glass. I opted for Vanorange, which was quite good. It also came with salad and shoestring fries. It was one of those meals that you get and it doesn’t look that huge, then by the time you finish it you want to explode. We had gone to the grocery store and bought all this food before dinner to have in the room. I think we all bought way too much.

I gave Corina a phone call yesterday night after much trial and error trying to get Vonage to work. We have Vonage but don’t actually use it really. I didn’t want to give up our phone number when we last moved, so I’ve just kept paying for it and forwarding onto Corina’s parents phone. Our internet just isn’t high speed enough to cope with VoIP at the moment. I brought my Airport Express and tried to configure with no luck. I planned on hooking the Vonage box to it, so then I tried a simpler tact, try sharing the WiFi connection through the laptop. Again no dice. I upon doing some searching I discovered Vonage had a Skype-style program to make calls. Bingo. So now I can use it and it not cost me anything since I’m already paying for these minutes and not using them.

So after the Steak & Shake experience I definitely wanted to use the hotel gym this morning. It wasn’t much, but it did have a treadmill, eliptical and a stationary bike, which was good enough for me. This was the first time I’ve been to the gym in ages, so it was tough after not playing sports all winter, but it did feel good to exercise. I have a long way to go to get into soccer shape. After that I opted to check out the continental breakfast, which was pretty decent. They had this cool waffle iron to make fresh right there, which I thought was a pretty touch. So I’m off to work, I’m hoping to give a few more updates about my trip this week.