Adventure

Today’s Fortunes, part 2

Continuing the theme started a couple of days ago, here are today’s fortunes:

A big fortune will descend upon you this year.
Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark.
To make dreams real, first you have to have them.
Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.

Had a good trip out to Dakin Dairy Farm with Joy a couple weeks ago; my first. Stinky fun! Nice to get a tour of a local producer. Evidently dairy farmers are a dying breed. Sampled then bought some of their chocolate milk. Soon they’ll be producing their own cheese.

Weekend: Gasparilla 5k 2011; Avenue Q; misc awesome

(1) Hanging out with Cam, Melissa and Frank Thursday night.
(2) Hanging out at Devin’s Friday night with Christina, Melissa and Eduardo; good food, beer and shark stories around a backyard fire pit
(3) Saturday morning, Gasparilla 5k in Tampa, beat my goal by 30 seconds with a time of 33:27.
(4) Saturday night, Avenue Q (great) at the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre downtown with Joy, Heather, Pam, and two new friends, Leonor and Cynthia.
(5) Sunday afternoon, watching my first-ever polo match at the Sarasota Polo Club with Jovee, Chrissy and Saba. Dressed up as Jeff Goldblum for a celebrity look-alike contest. Met two ultimate players, Dan and Justin, from out of town, just because we were throwing a disc around.
(6) Sunday evening, birthday party with Jovee and Chrissy at South Lido County Park. Played beach bocce!
A few pics from this whirlwind:
Gasparilla 5k:

Avenue Q:

Sarasota Polo Club:

Birthday at South Lido County Park:

New Apt

So this marks the end of an era. The end of my time at Heron’s Run Apartments. It’s been a swell 7 years! I’ll miss the green landscape, and community pool and hot tub, and my 3rd-floor balcony and view. I won’t miss the pollen.
I am off to greener pastures, in the form of a villa, which as I understand it, is kind of like a condo. But different. In any case, it’s big, is newly renovated, has two floors (stairs!) and a two-car garage. It’s in a nice neighborhood too. Looking forward to sharing it with my sweetie.
Spent the majority of the weekend moving items from my and Joy’s places to the new one. Was looking forward to Ultimate today, but a wall of rain cancelled those plans! Next week I guess.

Six Celcius

So, according to my car’s thermometer, it’s six Celcius (42.8F) outside right now.
Sure was warmer in Las Vegas!
What? Oh yeah… in case you didn’t see it on the book of faces, I was in Vegas again over US Thanksgiving. Ha. This time with my Joyjoy, and Nkosi and Ross and Tarne and, for a day, with Kim and Steve. Mayur was notably MIA. No, not her.

Insanity is one of the thrill rides on top of the 1100 foot Stratosphere hotel. It was a bit too, er, insane for my tastes. But if you think you can stomach it, you can see a video of it in operation here (requires .wmv-playing capabilities). For you gearheads, here’s some engineering info on this and its sister ride, X Scream: click [PDF, 212k].

Camping Hallowe’en 08

This past weekend Joy and I went on a camping trip to Hillsborough River State Park, about an hour’s drive north of Sarasota. Picked out gear Friday, then it was up to the park on Saturday morning. There we met up with Cam and Melissa and Joe and Owen; Mark, Laurie and the girls; Rob, Jeanine and the kids; Louis and Jasmine; Jean and Peter, David and the rest of the crew. A big group from work came, and it seems to grow bigger each year. It was a pumpking-carving, site-spookifying, tram-rider-scaring affair for the traditional “Haunted Woods” trick-or-treat; we all had a blast…. already coming up with ideas for next year.

Kite surfing; dinner & Ding Dongs

A couple weeks ago, Devin asked if I’d be interested in coming out to the beach to help him try out his new kite surfing kite, which he’d just purchased off eBay. This particular kite is shaped like a “C” and is about 12 meters across… giant. Let’s just say so big, that, when we put it into the air, we had the resident kite-surfing expert come running halfway down the beach to tell us to ground the thing — I guess 35mph sustained winds are too much for a kite that size, haha. Anyway, I tried out Devin’s previous kite, and what can I say… it was a ton of fun, and actually a lot more controllable than I thought it would be. Devin brought along a couple smaller two-line kites; Cam and Melissa and the kids came out too; we all had fun flying them. It was a ton of fun, I think at the very least I’m going to have to pick up one of the smaller two-line kites if not something bigger!
Later on Cam and Melissa had Devin and I over for dinner, and Joy joined us part way through (she had to work). For some reason Melissa had a whole box of Ding Dongs too, so we broke those out, haha. I think you could seriously live longer if you ate enough of those. I could feel the preservatives the moment I bit into one, haha.

Christmas 2007 in Victoria

Yeah, these are WAY late but better late than never, right? Clicky for you-know-what.

Waiting the in Tampa airport, en route to Victoria

Having Tim Hortons for the first time in a long time

Cam’s parents and Joe

Me en route!

Arrival in rainy Victoria

Melissa and Owen hike off the tarmac

Avocado tree growing in Mom and Dad’s dining room

At Daniel’s get together, held the night I arrived; shortly before I got sick and had to spend two days in bed (but unrelated)

Mom with one of her paintings, and the mother of the girl pictured

At a little cafe in Estevan Village in Victoria, with Dani and Davin *dumple*

At the ECHL hockey game, Victoria Salmon Kings vs Alaska Aces

Some of the action

Final score — home team wins!

Me, Cal and Nick

Cal, Amy, Me, Nick, Tex

Island microbrew

A refined pool hall, who’d a thunk it

View from the outside

Lori, Nick, Mavis, Me at the Blue Fox cafe for breakfast

From the outside

Carla and Mark and family, Mavis, me

Christmas eve, mom killing time…

…while Anand plays

Hanging out in the livingroom

Anand snaps a couple shots

Caroline

Neil

Davin showin off his new duds

Caroline gets canvases from Mom!

Anand is now part of the exclusive Elbow Patch Network, or EBN for short

Me being arty.. did I succeed?

Dad gets a giant book of guitar tabs from Anand and Davin

Davin and Caroline

Santa rocks!! I mean socks

Neil offers Anand some of the traditional Greenwell potato chips, haha

At the family reunion up at Auntie Arlene and Uncle Hans’ place.. Uncle Neil

Uncle Hans

Auntie Arlene

Auntie Carole

Auntie Maureen

Uncle Bill, my cousin Cathy, and Anand

Auntie Sylvia

Neil gets the golf ball on the tee.. much harder than it looks

Cathy and Cheyenne

Mom

Anand with co-op coffee

Cousin Kelly capturing the action

Alicia and Auntie Arlene

Davin, Anand and Uncle Neil

Uncle Steve

Sharon and Lucy

Eloy

Gail

Cheyenne and Uncle Hans

Eloy and Alicia

Singing carols

And back to Victoria… Out with Kathy and Sean for sushi

Sean and me after a brisk walk up Mount Doug… Sean you’re gonna kill me if we keep that pace up

Me and Aaron at Tim Hortons

Aaron’s pimped out iPod touch

Aaron and Tex

At 5th St Bar and Grill with Kathy, Daniel, Nicky, Ben, and later, Sean and Jackie. Here’s Kathy.

Sean

Jackie

At Rene’s place. “How to Fix an iPod nano”

Fixed

Out front of Rene’s; Tex, Nicole, Paul and me. It’s 3am and pouring rain.

Out at Shizen sushi with Brian, Hilary and Todd.

Sean loves him some banana bread. Mmm good

The van. I am *so* glad Anand is okay. Watch out for black ice people.

From the Dec 2008 photogroffee. I’ll be making a separate post for photos from it.

Karen and Maryanne at Mar’s wedding reception

Dad and Mom’s scrabble game… on an ACTUAL BOARD and not on Facebook!! Crazy. Haha.

At Ferris’ for brunch. Michael enjoying his food 🙂

Kathy and her anonymous blueberry tea

My meal, mm

Edd and Megan

Coreen, Kathy and Mark

Edd, Megan and Coreen

Coffee

Tex demonstrating the awesome focusing power of his Canon Powershot S5IS 🙂

OJ

At Capital Iron

At the art shop

At “Liberty”… upscale home furnishings

Nicole and Tex at Bean Around the World… they have the best mochas

Coreen and the BATW storefront

In the world-famous Fan Tan Alley

Out for dinnner with Calvin, Amy, Brian, Derek, Coreen and Tex.. here’s Cal and Amy

Hil

Bri

Me, Tex and Coreen

Best buds

Derek and Me out for Thai

My brother opened for Adam Freeland. How cool is that? So cool.

Great to see tech making positive contributions like this.. Sarasota’s doing pretty well on the solar front, too

De dutch bakery. Love the mix of old and new buildings in Victoria

At A&B sound, which, contrary to opinion I’d heard earlier, is still open (though, with much smaller selection). A healthy selection of blu-ray discs are for sale.

And a good selection of HD-DVD discs, too. Though, now I think the balance is shifting toward Blu-Ray, since most of the major studios are dropping support for HD-DVD.

New Year’s Eve at Sean’s place, hanging out and having fun 🙂

More of Sean’s living room.

Mark with a “Can I get a woohoo?” Midnight strikes and it’s 2008. Then we ran out on the porch, screamed at the top of our lungs and banged pots and pans, which was awesome

Walking by my old highscoool with Karen, saw they had the old grad photos close to the door…

Oh, and look, there’s Karen

And there’s me! Hahah…

Walking to the new Starbucks by yon olde 7-Eleven

Hanging out with Karen

My old highschool! Man it looks small. Still have the portables in the back, 13 years later.

Me and Tex getting breakfast at Floyd’s

The bumper stickers read “Got Grog?” and “I brake for saucy wenches”

Getting lunch with Jim at Azuma…

Outside of Azuma.. shortly hereafter we stopped by the camera store and checked out the Oly E3… had the fastest autofocus I’ve ever seen

In the Eaton Center

Mom, Neil and Dad seeing me off at the airport

Joe playing with the big toys in Calgary

It was a long trip back

What happens in Vegas…

…stays in Vegas. Mostly 🙂 Clicky! A big hello to Mayur, Tarne, Chong, Hiren, Sachin and of course Florida locals Steve, Kim and Nkosi.. I had a great time, time to plan another trip!
Reflections on Vegas: fun city if you like to gamble; don’t bring your kids; beer pong and flippy cup at O’Sheas pub/casino (on the strip) is awesome. I’m not really a gambler so I played slots the majority of the time; ended up +$17 on 200! Ha. I did end up getting a lesson on Craps while I was there, and thank god… it’s one of the noisiest, confusing games I’ve ever seen. Heh. But it turns out not being so bad.. just a game of statistics mostly. Didn’t get up the nerve to place any bets on it though.. next time. The buffets are alluring, but if you’re there more than few days it’s easy to tire of them… and given you’re stuffed after eating at most of them, you’ll want to skip them anyway in favor of something smaller. That was pretty easy at Planet Hollywood (where we stayed), thanks to the multitudes of connected shops. If you ARE looking to eat at a buffet, you only need to consider “The Buffet” at the Bellagio; it was by far the best I ate at during my six-day stay ($30). In terms of non-slots gambling, I’d also like to relay a tip from Steve and Kim: if you can find one, play the 1-cent 100-hand video poker machine. Even if you’re really bad, $10 will last you at least an hour and if you’re lucky, quite a bit longer; meanwhile the whole time you’re getting free drinks. Not a bad way to kill some time and you could potentially win quite a bit! Anyway, I gotta say despite some initial skepticism, I had fun. Guess you really never can judge a book by its cover (which, in this case, was a whole lot of flashing lights and fake monuments).

The blog stirs

Hey all… just an update to say an update is coming, ha ha ha… on a side note I will be in Victoria this Christmas, so if you read this blog and are going to be there too, please get in touch!!!

Tag: Adventure