Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

It seems like we have had few days where we have done nothing, or been stationary, but we have been enjoying ourselves. Our Aussie guests have moved on to NYC for New Years, and the next batch will be here on Monday. It has been good to see everyone. Friends I haven’t seen in years and some I won’t be seeing again for a long time. I wish we had more time to hang with people (well we have lots of time) but people are only around for a day or two and they are off again, so we take what we can get I guess.

I have been enjoying watching the World Junior Hockey Tournament and having NHL highlights every day. I have been trying to teach Jo a bit more euchre, and think that I will try to bring the Euchre Tournament to Australia this year. We can start off small, and see where it goes. Should be good.

Posting is going to be light but we have been adding pictures almost daily, so check the flickr badge on the side or go here.

Team McOwen… The Winners!

Anita Pybus Invitational Euchre Tournament 2006, originally uploaded by zamboni49.

The Anita Pybus Invitational Euchre Tournament 2007 went off last night. We tried a page from the Lyn euchre club (I can’t remember what they were called, but needless to say there was a “Olde” in the title!) and made use of a “Master Table”. The Master Table serves as the pace table. When the Master Table finishes their game then all games are done and the scores are calculated as such.

This was a good experiment, however, upon reflection I think that those who were able to stay at the table (through winning, and the set up we had for table rotation) got to play to the maximum points possible, which was definitely and advantage. I happened to win games with scores of 4 and 7 due to playing with talkers (of which i am one) and new players. So being able to win with 10 points every time definitely comes in handy. These are not criticisms necessarily, but just observations. It was a lot of fun.

Congratulations to Kevin (3rd time winning) and Doug (1st time) for their victory, and to all previous winners your names will be immortalized on the new plaque that will be displayed in the Pybus home and each subsequent tournaments.

We are hoping that we will be able to be involved again next year through a surrogate and skype. Here’s hoping!

Christmas Cards

These are 2 of the cards in the Euchre Decks I made for Christmas gifts this year for my Brockville clan. I think they were well received. I do have a special addition to make when I get home, but for the most part they turned out very well. I already have some ideas for next year.

An Original

X-Wing
Originally uploaded by zamboni49.

This is an original X-Wing fighter from Star Wars. When you pressed the R2D2 down onthe back the wings would open up into the “X” formation. The button on the back triggered the “laser sounds” which kinda sounded like an electronic buzz saw. There is mucho dust on this bad-boy, but it’s still kicking around in my parents basement.

There were many cool Star Wars toys back in the day, which one was your prized toy?

Stump Surfing

Stump Surfing
Originally uploaded by zamboni49.

Today was the first day we didn’t have anything scheduled. First day since we landed, and will be the last day until next Tuesday. Jo and I took a walk up through our maple sugar bush to… well… see what we could see. It hasn’t been great weather, but it hasn’t been horrible either. The ridiculous cold hasn’t hit yet, but the sun hasn’t come out much since we were here either.

Going through some of the boxes I left here I have come across some great stuff from my childhood. I will be taking some pictures of them and posting some “generally boring stuff” about them, but it’ll amuse me, so deal with it.

Heading to Toronto on Friday morning. Looking forward to it.

Can I Pass Along This?

If you have a credit card I highly reccommend calling them right now and asking them to lower your interest rate. I have done this 3 times now and every time they have lowered it. Just did it again today and got a 9.9%. And all I did was ask. I don’t do anything special. I don’t yell or threaten to cancel and go somewhere else. I ask them if they can give me a lower interest rate. If you get declined, I’d call back and see if the next person you catch will do it for you. It’s worth a shot isn’t it? I can’t remember who shared this with me in the first place all those years ago, but it has been a gem. Especially for those of you who carry a balance on your card like me. Personally, I think credit cards are evil, but are handy in an emergency. Once this one is paid off, we will get out limit lowered to the price of a flight home and keep it only for a crisis. They are a trap and they only feed our consumerism.

I don’t know if they have an equivalent in Canada but in Australia we have a debit Visa card. You can use it like a credit card (i.e. eBay, iTunes, restaurants, etc.) but the money comes out of your bank account, so you have to have money in there to use it. If we don’t have them in Canada I think they’re a good idea. Such a simple concept huh? Don’t spend money you don’t have.

Oh, Canada!

We are here. For crying out loud, we already have the tree up. Yep that’s right. 8 hours in the country = 1 Christmas tree. Nothing better than tripping through crown land, and dragging a huge ass tree out. Yep.

So, Jo is watching some 90210 marathon on tv and I am catching up on my internet reading. Will be posting pictures of stuff shortly. So, I am in Canada now… you Canadian people… if you want to hang… call me. Email me for the number.

Out.

Christmas In Darfur

So, we’ve decided we are going to Darfur this Christmas in order to shoot a film. Since people don’t seem to be responding to yet more Tear-Jerking Movies about how terrible things are, we’re going to try to connect to the audience by interviewing the people from the US and Europe – folks like you and me and your cousin and your uncle and your sister – who have volunteered for little or no cash to go spend their Christmas away from their families in the middle of some hellhole trying to stem the tide of genocide.

from Christmas In Darfur

>1%

Its comprehensive study of personal wealth has revealed that the richest 10 per cent of adults accounted for 85 per cent of the total global assets. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely one per cent of global wealth.

Link via Scott

The New Online Home

This will be where you can find me from now on. Blogger has bit my ass for the last time, and I just won’t be using them again. Simple.

I have been unable to post to my url for almost 2 months, and my emails to support have fallen on deaf ears. I tried to post the “mucking” site there, and stuffed it up to the point where I couldn’t post on it at all.

So I will be moving as much of my older stuff over as I can tolerate. It will be a slow go I think, but it’s 5 years of my life that is fun to check back over from time to time. WordPress does have a transfer option, but it couldn’t solve Bloggers issues and so things will come over manually.

I may design a new template sometime in the new year, but this one is cool enough for now. Plus I need to play around with css again and see what we can do here.

All in all, my frustration with this thing is over. I look forward to using this new app.

We leave in 2 days!

***Update***
Figured out how to transfer over my archives, so that is now done. Also found out that my issues may not have been entirely Bloggers fault. My ISP may have changed servers on me.

However, wordpress has quite a few bells and whistles I like. And built into their platform. It’ll be good to learn a little more css and how to tweak their templates. Should be able to migrate it all over to my own domain over the holidays. Out.