A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

It was my nephew Jayant’s third birthday on Friday, and his party was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. I thought this was a good opportunity to take an extra long weekend so I booked Friday and Monday as vacation. I drove out to Wilkie Friday morning to pick up my parents and we arrived at my brother’s place in Sherwood Park mid-afternoon.

The weekend was fun and it gave me a chance to visit with my brother and his family – I hadn’t seen them since the summer. Most of the time was filled with playing with my nephews and playing Xbox 360 (mostly Gears of War) with my brother. The party was also a good time – not a huge event, but just a few of my brother’s and sis-in-law’s friends.

My parents and I left Edmonton around 12:30 Sunday afternoon after the Raptors game, despite my father’s objections. He likes to leave early, but I was driving so I was the boss. The drive was enjoyable, and even more so since the Raptors blew out the Los Angeles Clippers (all you nay-sayers should act early, because the bandwagon will fill quickly).

I was planning on staying the night in Wilkie, but I decided to just drop my folks off and drive straight through to Saskatoon. I thought I would use my day off on Monday to take care of my passport stuff. I rolled into the passport office around 11:00 am, and finally was out of there around 2:00. It wasn’t as busy as it was a week or two ago, but three hours is still long. It was quite the setup – waiting in lines to wait in other lines. Once I actually saw the Examiner, I spent maybe three minutes with him. I do feel bad for people who waited in lines as long as I did, and then were told their forms were inaccurate, or they were missing certain documents, but I think a lot of them just didn’t read the instructions. People were showing up without a guarantor’s signature, passport photos, etc. Luckily I took the thirty seconds to read the instructions.

Anyway, I took some photos while in Edmonton and you can see them here. Enjoy.