Have I reached the perfect age?

I have been thinking lately that I might well have reached THE PERFECT AGE! Could it be? Maybe I had more energy years ago. Perhaps I didn't require as much sleep. When I am older, I might learn a thing or two.
Right now though, things are about as brilliant as I figure they can get. Why this train of thought? I was sitting in the pub waiting for the mechanic to call me to tell me the car was ready to be picked up (a story for another time). I had a seat in the corner of the bar, and a cold pint of Pilsner in hand. I was reading my Maclean's magazine about Harper and whether we would be going to the polls. But my ears were trained on the conversations going on around me. There were three older guys sitting to my right talking about granola, birds, and their toys. Three things I really like. I spend a good deal of time watching the birds flutter around my various feeders. I have also been looking for a really good cereal/granola/flax sort of thing to eat in the mornings before setting out on my walk. And who doesn't like talking about the toys they have or plan on getting?
To my left was a group of young kids. 3 girls and one dude. They were decked out in their U of A clothes, and funny hats. I happened to love hearing the, "dude" or "like" every couple of words. Seems like it is a filler when they use when they don't know what they want to say next. Well, they were talking about music, and snow boarding much of the time.
It all leads me to believe that I have found a balance between the generations where I can understand things like fishing, bird watching, and eating enough fibre. But snowboarding, and top 40 music is still all over my life. Either I am the oldest cool guy, or the coolest old guy. I'll

Holidays

It's amazing how quickly a week can get away from a guy. Friday tomorrow! It's been a superb week off work, and this picture of the fish I got yesterday is about all I have to show for it! I've not really done much other than drink coffee, visit, watch movies, and hang out. But this was a good chance to get out and drill a few holes in the ice. Luckily dad got the auger going and we were able to get out there. This is actually a pretty nice little fish, that would've made a decent meal, but I tossed it back as usual. With some luck, I'll get another chance to haul a couple more out over the weekend. Cheers to holidays!

What a winter!

I know the mailman doesn't get a lot of sympathy when it comes to the hours I work. But this has been a winter for all winters. We have had snow, ice, melting, freezing and yet more snow. It has been my toughest winter of the four I've worked at Canada Post. The pictures below will show you the snow banks on the side of my driveway.
But first the most exciting news is my new car!!!! I was able to sell the little red Ford to a friends son, and I am the proud new owner of a 2003 Honda Accord. I just put this picture of the old girl for sentiment. I don't really miss her at all!
Pictures of the new car will have to wait for another day. Thanks to Uncle John for helping facilitate the deal through one of his pals.
But you have to take a peek at the snow. Totally insane!

The backyard must have two to three feet of snow because those railway ties are almost covered with snow. It looks brilliant, but today touched the mid-minus 30's with wind chill. I don't always like to include the wind, but when you are walking outside, it counts! Let me tell you! Tomorrow is March, so hopefully spring is on the way.

Feeling Motivated

I'm not sure where the inspiration came from tonight, but I have uploaded some more photos. I wish I could ease you in and have some sort of flow, but this is the way the photos showed up on the screen. And we all know what a royal pain in the butt it is to play with the positioning on Blogger.
Here's Alvin and Jason taking some target practice in the garage. Jason bought me this BB gun for my birthday. No, not my fifth birthday....... my 31st! You'll recognize the gun if you've seen the movie, The Christmas Story. It's the 70th Anniversary Edition Daisy Red Ryder.
These pics are from our Christmas party. Notice the festive Santa target.

Here's Devo fooling around with my redneck coat on and the gun.

And then a shot of the backyard as it looked in the fall. As you can see, the grass really came a long way from when we moved in. We had so much fun working out in the yard and doing the suburban stuff.

What is with this guy?

Wow,

July this time. Well, I have a decent excuse these days. For months we've been having problems with our computers. The tower is toast, hasn't been turned on for months. And the laptop was working only part of the time. I thought it was a pain in the ass to get on the computer and wait half an hour to write something.

But thanks to our wonderful neighbour Troy, who is an IT guy at NAIT, the laptop is back up and running. Beautifully, in fact. So I thought I would go in and look at some of the pictures I had taken in spring of the backyard. Maybe put together a before and after type of thing. So I will post the pics from the spring when the yard was in rough shape.

There we're all kinds of ruts and dips and valleys in the back, most of which we've fixed. And the dead patches have all filled in nicely.

Here's the little garden we dug in the spring. And what a wild success it was. Cucumbers, peas, carrots, lettuce and beans were abundant.

Here's my little Jalapeno plant. The best part is that I actually still have that one so I can show the results. Everything else is pretty well out of the ground now. So I can only show the grass and some leftover results of the garden.

If I were only a week or so quicker I could show what it looks like today. There was a trace of snow this morning so things aren't exactly looking their best.

The best part of the summer in our yard was the potatoes, and we planted those in the front flower bed!!!! They were incredible. Thinking I should dig up some more of the front yard and put in a while bunch of potatoes.

So my plan is to go out and take a few shots when the sun comes out so I can show my legion of faithful readers the yard as it looks today.

Stay tuned for that one.

Floating on the Pembina

Hahaha, Perhaps I should know how to post pictures more smoothly by now.
Last week after work we hauled out to the Pembina River. It was a really hot day, and it was the perfect thing after work. It's a little more than an hour out there, so being a postie helps me get an early start. And I guess if we think about it, Devyn's working at the bank so we do have time for this kind of thing. The blue tube in the front of the picture is Trevor's. Mine is the same, as you can see. Only yellow.
That's about the deepest point of the river. It's quite shallow for the most part, but a really nice location.

There's my legs with the cooler at my feet. Notice the $7 pair of "aqua socks" I got. I went to Zeller's with Trevor and we got the same tubes and water shoes.

Darn I am so cool! I think Dev was trying to do one of those "arm-extension, self portrait" kind of things. It would be cool to have a picture of Dev once in a while, but clearly she is not too fond of having her picture taken. Have any of my legion of male devotees experienced a woman not wanting to appear in any shots? I think I can recall my grandma, mom and Aunt Martha all avoiding having their picture taken....... anyway, I ramble on the blog as well as in real life I see. Hrmphhh! You can see Dev's brother Brayden in the background of the picture above. He loved it more than anyone I think.

Woops! I spoke too soon! It appears that Dev tried to take another picture of herself. She got my arm in this one. That was the best sumer afternoon lounging EVER!

And on another note all together, we had a beautiful surprise visitor on our cherry tree in the backyard. A Downy woodpecker came over the other afternoon. What a treat! Dev noticed him while she was outside, and called me to have a look - knowing I would be really excited. I got the camera and ran outside to see what she had found. After getting close and having a good shot, I went in and got my Compact Guide to Alberta Birds. ( Thanks mom and dad) It accurately reads, "These approachable little birds are more tolerant of human activities than most other species."

He is only 15-18 cms long. Such beautiful colours for the little guy.

Perhaps I should have cropped the picture a little and made it more clear. But there's no telling how long that would've taken me. I think it gets a lot bigger if you click on it.

Calling Lake

This is a quick recap of our fishing trip to Calling Lake over the Father's Day weekend.
There was a size limit of 45-55 cms for the Walleye. These two were closer to 65cms. So we laughed out loud as we threw them back in. I don't think I would have ever imagined throwing a 6-7 pound Walleye back. Dad's cooking up the fish here on Saturday night. We had 9 Walleye and one Pike for supper that night. Not my favourite meal, but just two or three hours out of the water isn't too bad really.

The weather was perfect and the company was just great. Me and dad on one boat and Max, Tom, and Barry on the other. Lots of laughs and some major fishing.

This was the rustic cabin we stayed at. The cabin was actually at Baptiste Lake (near Athabasca) and about 60kms from Calling Lake.

Oops

Well those photos are going to have to wait. I am going golfing, and don't have time to dick around with blogger and the photos. Sorry.

Calling Lake 2010

Where have I been? Yikes, I have barely thought of posting on here, but should any of my faithful followers check this, you're in for a treat. Run-on sentences and all. On my mom's birthday and father's day I was fishing with my dad and a few other guys at Calling Lake. This is the fishing trip of a lifetime. Honestly, I have never seen fish like this. If you would've told me that I'd throw a 6 or 7 pound walleye back into the water and laugh that it was to big I would've thought you were cracking up. But that's precisely what happened.

Ahhhhhhhh!

So Dev got a text message from our tenants yesterday saying they had found a house and didn't need to rent our place anymore. What a pain in the a#&!!!!! There wasn't a whole lot of interest, but there certainly was some. We got confirmation from the young couple and even got a security deposit to hold the place for them. I guess we'll be keeping that, but we did lose out on some valuable time if we are going to be able to rent it April 1st.
The money would be nice - that much I know - but there would also be some drawbacks to sharing walls again. I don't totally feel bad because we hadn't even had one rent cheque yet, but we were counting on it coming in on April 1st.
I don't know what we'll do yet, but I am not too broken up about this. The guy is a cop, and I am generally kind of intimidated by the police. So we won't have to worry about that.
But alas, we're back at square one. Gives me a little more time to lay some new tile in the back entrance.......... that will be another story of it's own I am sure.

There's a first time for everything

If ever there is a time for a post, this is it.
My dad gave me a huge external drive for my computers several months ago and we have slowly been hauling pictures and music and things to the drive in order to keep the computers running as smoothly as possible.
Whenever anyone else gets onto one of the computers here they can't believe how slowly they run. So I figured this might help. It also is nice that Devyn likes to organize and name things. So some of the works was pretty easy for me, but that is beside the point! Anyway, once I got five years worth of pictures and music off of this laptop, I went to type something and the keyboard would not work. Oh oh! This could be a problem..... what did I uninstall that disabled the damn thing?
So I did what anyone else would do and turned off the machine and promptly forgot about the problem.
Fast forward a month-ish and I just turned the sucker on this evening and got snooping around the maintenance and performance sections of Windows. Low and behold I have returned the keyboard to a functional state and here I sit.
I was ready to hunker down for the evening and wait for this thing to tell me what to do. What a pleasant surprise! I even had time to look at motor homes and quads and other things I'd love to waste a bunch of money on!
Now I better lumber off to bed. Happily.

Update

Woah, I have some things to fill in, but not a single picture to go with it.
First, we got renters for the basement. So we'll have a nice young couple living under the stairs paying a hunk of my mortgage starting at the end of the month. That should help the bottom line somewhat. Even if we aren't crazy about having tenants. We thought we'd better give it a chance though. So here we go!
On another note, I joined the iPhone army last week. My contract was set to expire and I phoned and tried to play some hard ball with the Telus reps. To make a long story short, I ended up with the same cheap plan I got in Toronto, but I had to add some data plan for $25 in order for the phone to work. So they are happy to have another customer locked up for another three years and they soaked me for more $$$. Hmmmmmmmmmm. The phone is very cool though.
The only trouble was that the new phone was my only camera for our fishing trip and I had lots of big plans to text pictures of my monster catch and that just didn't happen.
Me and my pops went up to Lawrence Lake on the weekend to fish with a couple of friends. Max and Tom were already up there. So on Saturday morning after Dink's tux fitting (a story of it's own) we hit the road to Athabasca area and fished Saturday afternoon and Sunday. What a terrific time with some really cool people. I have pics on the new phone, but don't want to start trying to take photos off the phone. I know it's easy, but I am not going there right now. I should get to that just to show a few shots of the cabin. What a place! Maybe I'll get a few pics from my dad if he has any.
And only one final little note is that I went to Kevin's Tux fitting on Saturday morning. I am going to be a groomsman at the September wedding. So we are 6 months early???? I shouldn't be surprised though. The guy has been engaged for a couple of years and his engagement party was easily a year ago! I think the future Mrs. Meghan Savage is a bit of a planner......... Otherwise, everything went just fine and the wedding will be lots of fun.

Will we have a tenant?

So there's not too much to report. I've been thinking of various reasons to get on here and write a post, but hadn't thought of anything interesting. But I suppose that's a matter of opinion.
When we bought the house we thought there was a good opportunity to make a bit of extra cash by renting out the basement suite. Nothing came of it for quite a few months mainly on laziness, but also a bit of reluctance. Not sure if we wanted to share our walls again. But we've decided to give it a shot, and a few people over to look at the suite.
I think the fact that we advertised it as a basement suite might scare some people away, but it's actually quite a nice place. Anyway, a lady came by first, and she was "middle-aged". Not too crazy about the idea of having an older lady down there. We can imagine any number of situations with a high-maintenance tenant.
The next day a young couple came by to look and they seem quite interested. I am hoping we hear back from them.
It would be nice to have somebody pay half of my mortgage. This young couple would be just fine with me.
We put an ad in the local rag and got some interest, but we forgot to include the price, forgot to say no pets and forgot to mention no smoking. It's been a learning process. I must thank Devyn for taking care of all the "stuff". Sarah wouldn't be too surprised by this. Some things never change with me I guess. Like the time I got Sarah to go buy me a Playboy magazine when we were kids at a garage sale because I was too shy. hahahahah.
Anyway, quite an experience so far. I'll keep you posted.

2010

Two full months have passed me by since my last post. My legion of faithful followers must be diminishing....... can't say I blame you!
Anyway, lots has been happening these days. Work had been tremendous. Last week I wore only a sweater. Can you imagine a week in January as a mailman, and I wasn't even wearing a jacket. My grandma always says she worries about me working outside in the harsh Edmonton winters, but it's totally fine. And I'll remember this week in the middle of July too.
The house is great, we're having lots of fun making picture frames and hanging some of our Africa photos and sort of just making it feel like home.
I had been somewhat slow in getting these pictures up, and we wanted to make this frame to wrap some fabric we bought in Africa around. The idea came up when we first moved in, and Devyn decided that it was going to get done last weekend at any expense. So she got Jason over here to do the job. I must say that I felt my manly-ness was being called into question, but Jason's an engineer, and I knew it wouldn't be such a big job.
We fired up the air compressor, and Jason brought his nailer, and we had picked up some 1" x 1" cedar for the frame. Within an hour this was hanging on the wall. Not a bad effort if I don't mind saying.
The top picture is my attempt at providing some idea of where we are talking in the house. You'd sort of be standing in the front entrance area looking in for the first picture, and standing in the edge of the living room in the second.
On Tuesday afternoon the Olympic torch came rolling through St. Albert. I was done work early enough to join Dev and her parents down there. It was kind of cool despite the fact that I scoff when I see it come on the CTV news every night. Perhaps I made the national news that day.

The Perfect Game

This was the sky out back the other evening. Of course I use the term, "evening" rather loosely. I would venture to guess that was at 430 in the afternoon. It's that time of year in Edmonton where we don't get too much afternoon sun.
But the moon was out loud and clear.

And this is some relatively old news, but it was amazing none-the-less. Dev rolled a perfect game of Wii bowling with me, Jason and Trevor.

We've had the Wii for quite a while and this was the first time anyone hit a perfect game. So Dev can rest knowing that the top score will never be topped. We went literally wild shouting and cheering and "high-five"-ing. It was something to behold. Congrats.

Pileated Woodpecker

Here's a visitor we had to the yard this morning! Dad tells me it's a Pileated Woodpecker. Roughly 40-48 cms in size. It was amazing.
Not sure if the pics will show up too clearly, but they look good when enlarged. I bet I was a bout four feet away at one point.

The move

Here's the entire gang on our housewarming/Halloween party. Looks like a zoo, but it was really only this crowd for a little while. Dressing up was obviously a bigger thing for some of us.
Here are Mike and Mike. If you haven't seen the Saturday night live skit where Justin Timberlake does this Dick-in-a-box video that is terribly funny. That's what Mr. Rennick and Mr. Barry are doing.
This is a little better shot so you can see what's happening. Too funny. They out some effort into this get-up.
Here's little Kai. Al and Brandy's baby. I put this up mostly because Sarah always has a million babies on her blog.... but he's cool.

Kev had us all in stitches when he called the Wendy's help-line to see how best to clean up a pop spill on the floor in the garage. I do have to admit I was responsible so I couldn't yell at anyone. We didn't really know that this was a gangster/flapper type party with all of Sheck's family etc. Yipes.
We hit the dollar store and bought moustaches for that party and for actual Halloween.
Marc and Alaina came by on the 23rd too. Nowhere to sit yet as you can see. But it was cool to have my dad around that afternoon working with Dev. Then the boys came by, and Alaina. Then Uncle Wal even made it for a beer in the garage on the very first night we had the house.
I think this was on the 23rd also. We get right down to it. Big job, but it's been a lot of fun to be honest.
This would be when Trevor got his big bread truck on Saturday the 24th and dad had burger's ready for us when we were done. Not a moment too soon, but they were awesome.
There's Bobby Harris and his boy. Hadn't had the pleasure of meeting Leyland. I hope that's how you spell it. He was such a cute little guy. This was just a few minutes after he licked the tires on the big truck.
And there she is in all her glory. That was so nice of Trev to help us with that. It wouldn't have happened as smoothly as it did if I didn't have these friends to help with all the stuff. So things have started to settle down and I will try to keep things a little more up-to-date

Oops

Well this is pathetic really! Not a single post since August.

But what's the point of beating myself up over it? I know those of you who have gone through the process of buying a house will have some sympathy for me. There is so much to do. I bet I've used ten times the daytime minutes my phone plan allows. Calls to the lawyer, the mortgage lady, the bank, the realtor, the cable company, utilities ...... and Devyn has done more than her share of these calls.

I don't look forward to seeing my phone bill next month. But it will likely be the least of my worries......

Anyhow....

The real reason I wanted to finally get on here is because I've finally taken the photos from the Rider game off of the camera.

There was a little storm threatening and we weren't sure if there would be rain or snow. A tremendous rainbow came out.

It's tough to tell from this view during half time. There was a regular season attendance record with more than 65,000 fans. Another quick note about the picture above - those lines of people on the field are 50 years of Eskimo Cheerleaders. There were teams from years past. One of the lines had the cheerleaders from the '60's. It looked walking into my grandmas place at supper time - 200 old ladies with poodle cuts.

Here's the happy couple early on.

I'm not so sure Dev's having as much fun as I was. haha - Really I think it was more the weather than anything. It was chilly, and I certainly wouldn't call Devyn the most devoted football fan. I pretty much begged her to come with me.

And this last pic will show you who won. There were SO many Roughrider fans! I think it would've been close to 50/50 actually. Lots of fun!