The bridal toss...

is a picture we have looked at many times, and laughed very hard at. We enjoyed this picture so much in fact that we thought it was worth it's own blog entry.

Andy is apparently being thrown back by the shockwave created by the high velocity bouquet toss which narrowly missed him.











Stephen happily watches on.











Mel is off to the side, she seems intrigued, but cautious.











Rob, soon to be married to Crystal, looks like he wants in there, although I don't know what that would have meant had he caught it.
Beer in one hand and bouquet in the other would have made for a funny picture though.










Angie is laughing at the ensuing insanity.











Crystal, soon to be married to Rob, has the eye of the tiger. She might be in mid "YAR! That be mine!", and screaming pirate swear words.











Ashley, engaged to Michael, is very focused, not at all distracted by the sounds of pirate swearing.










Dina, soon to be married to Will, looks completely focused, and seems to be using the force to bring the bouquet to her.










Ashley looks like she would kind of like to catch it, but that's a lot of pressure for someone my age. Maybe this lady in front of me will catch it.











Meh.









Tara wants that thing bad.







Ahhhhhhh! Mr. Henley laughs in the background.










So intense.

For those who did not see it...

or those who wish to watch it again, here is our wedding slide show.



An awesome job by Alley!

Irony...

Is when the "e" key dies on your keyboard and you go online to search for a new keyboard.

Youtube Aircraft Videos

Seems like more and more pilots of small planes are putting out videos, love it.

Here's some cool shots of a 152 Aerobat doing spins.



Here's a Piper Tomahawk doing spins. I LOVE doing spins in the Tomahawk. AKA Traumahawk.




Aerobatic Fun in Japan.



Oh and while on the topic of aviation, Flight Simulator X is out soon!... What aren't you excited?!!

Wikipedia Randomness

I was looking through bittorrents online when I came across Flight of the Navigator. A truly awesome movie from when I was younger. So I decided to check out what wikipedia had to say about the movie as it always provides me with random information about anything.


Well the dude who played Pee Wee Herman came up, since he did the voice of the ship, which led me to Pee Wee's Playhouse, which is where the realization hit me that Cowboy Curtis was Laurence Fishburne, the serious character we all know now from the Matrix. Too Funny.

Figure 1 - I am Morpheus, I am one cool dude. The fate of humanity rests in our hands.

Figure 2 - I am Cowboy Curtis, yeah okay take my picture now you &%^$#, dressed like a god damb cowboy, how the hell did I get into this job. God damb this wig itches, this s&$t ain't right. Yeah laugh it up.

Pictures from Scofo

Thought I would post some pictures..

Yes I am a nerdlinger. Check out my dual monitor setup for flight simulator. Great for practicing IFR. Hope to start flying a Cessna 150 out of Stratford soon.

We recently saw a bird in our back/side yard which we had not seen before. With a little reasearch on the web we found out it was a Northern Flicker. (Got this closeup shot by using the binoculars as a lens for the digital camera, very McGyver.)

Here we are at the butterfly conservatory in Kitchener.

A swan nest by the river in Stratford.

We got a chuckle out of this machine in Mount Forest which Sara thought for a second had a picture of poo with a top hat on it.

Sara in the water at Seth's cottage, always happy to be swimming.

Blowing bubbles at the beach.

Thinking Green

I went to the Canadian Tire website today and found they have a new natural power site.

www.canadiantirepower.ca

Hat's off to Canadian Tire, things like wind generators and solar panels are still expensive and may take little while to pay for themselves but this is the kind of initiative that gets people to start buying them, which increases the demand, which gets the ball rolling on lowering manufacturing prices and increasing efficiencies. Hopefully in 5 to 10 years cheap natural energy will be available for everyone, globally. Canadian tire obviously had the foresight to see this.
Also don't forget what things such as natural power could do for the world. Clean water generation, less dependency on nuclear and coal, less pollution, and god forbid with high enough efficiencies electric cars. Not to mention that the existing grid could be used to take any extra power generated and feed it to others. If it's not windy or sunny here the wind and sun miles away could help out. Sweet.

Before and After

I was looking through some old pictures we took of the house before we moved in, thought some before and after pictures of our work so far was in order.

Bye bye old smoky wallpaper. We hope to make this once again the actual front door, it currently goes to an enclosed front porch.

Still have to do the stairs.




Painted and added floating floor. Also added a doorway to the closet which was only accessible from the bathroom.



Happy Halloween! Not anymore.



So far so good.

Wedding Website

We're still working on it but please note the new link on the right to our Wedding Webiste.

The Hanso Foundation

During last nights episode of Lost a Hanso Foundation commercial was mixed in with the regular commercials. As I mentioned in an earlier post there is a huge online side to Lost and it just stepped up a notch. Go to

http://thehansofoundation.org/

For those of you that don't know the Hanso Foundation is the the company responsible for the hatch and pretty much everything else on the island.

This is one slick assed web site. Very well done.

Spins

Was just flying an Extra 300 doing spins and took this screen cap looking out the back. Thought it looked cool. Don't know what I'd do without flightsim.

South Park Cartoon Wars

How much pasta?

You have all been there, the water is boiling, you confidently grab the bag of pasta and rip it open, then a dilemma! "Gad Zooks ..." you declare out loud, "... how much pasta should I make?". You always hate to make too much, especially when it ends up being a moldy experiment in a ziploc container a week or two later, and not enough could be equally traumatic. Think... has anyone ever taught me a trick about this, nope, have I learned anything useful from the Swedish chef, well not for this particular problem.
Now if this were rigatoni or elbows you could just measure the amount in a measuring cup, but the long spaghetti / fettucine noodles on the other hand are what pose a challenge.
I did see a solution at Sara's family cottage which was a plastic shim with various holes in it just for this purpose, including how many people each would feed. To everyone's bewilderment I found this to be ingenious. I have not been able to find this item in any store, and I have never given up the search. For now I just continue to make too much.

Mmmmm Dharma

This is going a few episodes back, and I've been meaning to post about this for a while. First was I the only one that found it hilarious that there is dharma brand cereal in the hatch, let alone a complete line of dharma brand foods which seem to have become more and more numerous in the past few episodes. Also the logo on the box is specific to the swan hatch, so does this mean the other hatches / locations have their own specific food as well? Does the arrow hatch Kraft dinner suck compared to the swans?

I've been following the online side of Lost for a while now, and it's insane how many details and little items have been put into the show just for people (or "geeks" as Sara puts it) like me to read about online. This certainly doesn't hurt the ratings either as the latest major tidbit is one to really toil over, the neon map which the producers expected people to go ape over online. This is probably my fav. TV show to date.

Kinda Freaky

Got an e-mail today:

On Wednesday of next week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be:

01:02:03 04/05/06.

This will never happen again.

Back to work.

We arrived back from Curacao on Friday and had a great time. See Sara's blog for information and pictures.
I almost forgot to post in interesting fact about Curacao that I came across while researching before we left. Under the fauna section of the Curacao tourism website is the following.

" Without a doubt, the iguana (“yuana”) is the king of Curaçao reptiles. Because of its rare double penis, which can grow to 3 to 4 feet in length, the meat and eggs are coveted as supposedly powerful aphrodisiacs. Iguana soup is a local delicacy."

I did see a lot of iguana on the Island but apparently none of the ones I saw were, uh, particularly aroused lets say. I can't help but wonder if this was put in as a joke. This will require some research. I did eat some Iguana while there and it was pretty good. We're pretty sure that particular restaurant made us both sick for a day but the trip was still great overall.

New Bed!

Despite the past weeks snow squalls, and closed highways, our new bed finally arrived today, it is our first good quality bed. Our old one was pretty shot (guess that's what happens when you buy it from a places that closes down a few weeks after you shop there, oh well the price was right.).
And yes we did get a sheep, I would not accept the deal without one. We have #44 who has blue eyes and may be in this picture. I am sure Sara will post of picture of him/her on her blog soon.
And nope, I don't feel guilty about putting him out of work.

Snow Day!

I am growing to like life in Seaforth. Another snow day only this time entire counties have been closed including all side roads, that's a first for me. Snow days always seem to happen on Fridays or Mondays too, sweet!
The only downside... we were supposed to receive our new mattress today from Goderich. Will the weather clear up enough by this afternoon to get it? Stay tuned...

The Real Enemy

Now I am not trying to say Sept. 11 was not a horrific event but here is what confuses me, from my understanding:

About 2000 people died on Sept. 11.

Around 550,000 Americans die from cancer every year.

40,000 die in car accidents.

213,000 from diabetes.

36,000 from the flu.

15,517 die from homicide.

100 are killed by lightening.

Almost a 1,000,000 die from heart disease.

Yet America is so worried about terrorism that a substantial part of its budget is spent on defense. Fighting people they put into power. Using methods that will clearly make things worse.

So the next time you are at a BBQ and someone is smoking and eating a foot long chilly cheese sausage, with extra fried onions, talking about how bad and dangerous the "terrorists" are, ask yourself, "Who's the real enemy?".

Those Crazy Germans

Lets just say the Cessna 172 is NOT approved for aerobatics, in fact you aren't supposed to even do stalls and spins with passangers in the back. This is because the plane is not designed for this and there is a good chance this will get you killed, I don't think THIS GUY told his passangers about that.

Good News!

I just received delivery status notification that my Herbalerectus order has almost arrived. I can't wait to try it out.
Strange the spell checker did not recognize herbalerectus.

Soup or Juice?!?!

Wherever you travel different areas have their own little quirks. Around here in restaurants they seem to always ask if you want soup or juice, which I find incredibly odd. If you ask for juice they don't ask what kind and give you tomato juice. I just don't think the two are really comparable options.

Geocache

I came across this article on CNN. Apparently people hide a box or something with item(s) inside, then post the longitude and latitude online for others to find, then replace the items inside with something else.

Check out www.Geocaching.com.

Sounds like fun. See if there's one near you.

Hubble finds new moons and rings around uranus!

Click here for full story.

Wow, so many comments to be had, I'll just leave them all up to the readers.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Everything old is new again...

First off we have been trying to find hungry hungry hippos, a game I remember playing as a kid, mostly because it always upset the adults due to it's simplistic strategy of four kids whacking the hell out of a loud little lever until all of the balls were gone. (Come to think of it a well built sturdy game as well.) A minute or so of extreme adrenalin for us, annoying for them. This game has not been easy to find, apparently it's hotter than ever now that it has been brought back.
Later on a trip to old navy I saw multicoloured striped vests with camping patches on them straight out of the eighties.

Future shop now has an atari console with built in games with the origional retro 80's look, even the pho wood grain.
My new fear is that in a few more years hammer pants will be back.

Update

After cleaning up the image a bit with photoshop the image reviels much more.

Scientific Experiments in Seaforth?

Here is a picture our webcam caught tonight. Make of it what you will.

Welcome to the snow belt.

Last night just about every highway between Goderich and London was closed. I arrived at home just in time to find out the highway I took home had just closed. This morning most opened but there are still barricades blocking the road. So it's a snow day for me as we are supposed to get an additional 20+ cm today.

I put a foot long ruler on our table which I now refer to as our snow gauge. Almost up to a foot on the ground. I am definitely putting a covering on the side of our car port as drifting snow still gets in. The crazy part is it will be +12 next week. There should be some happily paddlers next week enjoying a very early spring runoff.

Now I don't do acid....

but if I did I would visit this site all of the time.

Lost

Everyone else gets flashbacks on the show. When will Vincent the dog get his? And what will he flashback about? That last tasty milk bone he had before the plane crash? And will the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 be on the back of that milkbone?

Deep Thoughts by Scott McCarthy

We turned right onto a highway not to long ago and a disturbed man in a red truck proceeding down this highway decided to accelerate behind us, perhaps to create a world in which we cut him off in his own mind. After watching him tailgate us and pass other cars over the crest of a hill playing automotive Russian roulette I had the following thought which Sara thought was blogworthy.

If there were no stupid jerks, the world would be a pretty boring place.

CNN

Just a couple quick thoughts.

1) Yes a plane landed with it's nose gear wheels sideways. But was it necessary to show the landing live while family members could have been watching? The gear is designed to take the beating but what if the plane came apart while children were flipping through the stations. (Yes I know, v-chip, parents should mind what their kids watch, bla bla bla, but I live in the real world and so should they.)

2) CNN has a great section on all coalition casualties with photos and bios, but I can't find information on the journalists, volunteers and way larger number of innocent Iraq citizens who have been killed, who did not sign up to be involved in a war. But there is lots of info on the weapons, heroes and political issues. Casualties are even broken down by countries, age, gender, but race?! Is the number of white vs. Hispanic soldiers killed more vital data than how many civilians killed in the country you have taken over is? Please correct me if I am wrong and I am missing something on the site, because I'd really like to be wrong on this one.

A pic of G.Bush writing a note to Condoleezza Rice at a U.N. meeting.