A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

Three days and counting. It’s been a while since I’ve had a real vacation. Probably over seven years when I went to Maui for my sister’s wedding in January of 2000. Sure I’ve taken ‘vacation’, but it was usually spent visiting my family and friends in Saskatchewan and Alberta while I was living in Ontario. I’m not trying to say those vacations weren’t anything special, but they just weren’t ‘go somewhere cool’ types of vacations.

My friends Ryan and Connie are currently living in Los Angeles, California. As Ryan put it, they are “on a global project.” A quote from their website sums it up.

Leaving Edmonton in September, our home sold, our belongings in storage we have started a new life working on a “global project”. Currently in California, not sure where we are going next (or when), we are enjoying the ride….

As an engineer, Ryan is hopping around the globe from project to project. Los Angeles is their first stop, with rumours of Europe being next. I figured I better take advantage of their journeys and try and visit them in each locale. They’ve been in L.A. for well over a year now, and I was supposed to actually visit them about a year ago. But since I had just made a big (and expensive) move from Guelph to Saskatoon, my trip needed to be postponed until now.

I leave for the city of angels early in the morning of Tuesday, April 3rd and return on Thursday, April 12th giving the three of us plenty of time to do lots of “stuff”. And let me just say, our schedule is FULL of all sorts of “stuff”. Here’s a quick look at our schedule.

• Tuesday, April 3 - Depart for L.A.
• Wednesday, April 4 - Temecula Wine Country
• Thursday, April 5 - The Getty Center
• Friday, April 6 - Hollywood, Rodeo Drive, Sunset Strip, The Tonight Show
• Saturday, April 7 - No plans - just chilling
• Sunday, April 8 - Tour downtown L.A., Lakers vs. Suns NBA game
• Monday, April 9 - Las Vegas, Cirque du Soleil (Love)
• Tuesday, April 10 - Las Vegas
• Wednesday, April 11 - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory tour
• Thursday, April 12 - Depart for Saskatoon

As you can see, I wasn’t kidding. I figured that if I’m going to be out there, I may as well see as much as possible. I’m more-or-less ready to go, and have just a few things to take care of. Today I’m going to buy some American money and shop for some summer-esque clothes. Then I just need to pack, and I’m good to go. I plan on posting everyday while I’m out there, so be sure to check back here to see how everything is going. Hang ten, bra!

To celebrate my buddy Kipp’s 30th birthday, a group of his friends and family all met in Edmonton for the weekend. The agenda included water slide and wave pool fun at the West Edmonton Mall’s World Waterpark on Saturday afternoon. For the evening we had tickets for a show at a comedy club, The Comic Strip, in the mall.

I was supposed to travel to Edmonton Saturday morning with the infamous brothers, Travis and Todd. Since they both backed out at the last minute, I ended up making the trek by myself. Here is a picture of me driving to Edmonton (I was bored).

I was on the highway by 7:40 in the morning and was parked in the West Edmonton Mall parking lot at exactly 1:00 pm. Even though I made pretty decent time, water sliding was scheduled for 1:00 so I needed to get my tail in gear to hook up with the crew. After finding the waterpark, I bought my ticket and got changed (not before figuring out how to use high-tech locker system). The waterpark was insanely busy and I thought I would never find anyone. But I immediately ran into Kipp and his brother Ben and we made our way to one of the slides. The lineups were out of control and we probably waited for 15 or 20 minutes for the 30 second ride. Since we had a party room booked for 2:00 and we had about fifteen minutes to kill, we decided to get one more slide in. The lines were even longer and Kipp and I waited for at least thirty minutes. This slide took about ten seconds to go down - but it was a pretty fun ten seconds.

We were a little late for the party, but we were pretty sure they wouldn’t cut his cake before he got there. After eating some of the delicious cake and visiting with everyone, a few of us headed over to the “bar on the beach” for a couple cold ones.

The wave pool was looking pretty good so we decided to spend some time in there, rather than in lines for the waterslides. It was awesome as always, despite getting feet in the jaw and knees in the back of the head. After our eyes were filled with chlorine, and our legs had turned to Jello, we thought we had better get more watersliding in. The lines were no better than before and we ended up getting only one more slide in before having to leave to get ready for the evening’s events. Below is a picture of me in my bathing suit at the waterpark.

After checking into our hotel and getting ready we headed back to the mall where we planned on eating at a restaurant on “Bourbon Street” before heading to the comdey club. It turned out that all of the restaurants had around ninety minute wait times for a party of 12, and this just wouldn’t fit into our schedule. Curtis and I decided to just go grab something in one of the food courts and the other guys went to eat at the comedy club.

The comedy show was super-funny and we all had an awesome time. The MC was an Edmonton radio host and he was surprisingly good. There was also a couple other opening acts as well as a Bubbles (from Trailer Park Boys) look-alike who was great. The main act was John Wessling, a dude from Texas who was on Last Comic Standing. He had everyone laughing hard. Since we were out of the club at around 10:00 eight of us just headed back to the lounge at the restaurant and hung out before calling it a night.

On Sunday we all went to Denny’s for breakfast and then went our separate ways. Curtis rode back to Wilkie with me. As we passed Sherwood Park we decided to go visit my brother and his family since it was still early. We visited for a couple hours before heading out.

One thing I noticed while in Edmonton was that service there (and apparently all of Alberta) is terrible. People in restaurants, hotels, etc. were either rude, ignorant, or incompetent….or a combination of the three. I personally have never seen anything like it. Apparently the reason is because there is a real shortage of service workers in Alberta and places are under-staffed, or hiring anyone they can. I understand that, but come on - that doesn’t give you the right to do a half-assed job or to be rude.

Other than the service issues, the weekend was great. I got to see a lot of people that I havent’ seen in a while like Kipp’s brother and sister and their families, as well as some old friends from high school. I took a few pictures while at the waterpark and you can see them here.

I wanted to do some experimenting with video editing, but didn’t really have a theme to work on. So I thought I would throw together a quick video tour of my condo - not the most intellectual or ground-breaking film, but it was fun to produce, nonetheless. I also thought it would be cool to give my friends and family who live far away the opportunity to see where I live.

So sit back, grab some popcorn, and hit play.

Once again I took part in the Farmers’ Days competitive co-ed volleyball tournament this past weekend in Wilkie. The tournament has been going on for about a decade and a half, and I’ve been competing in it for about the last ten years. It is definitely getting harder on my body as the years pass by. I remember being part of one of the youngest teams in the tournament. As the years went by, the older teams started to drop off. I never really thought about it until this year, and it suddenly dawned on me that all of the other teams were getting younger and younger. And all of a sudden, I was on one of those older teams. Geeze. Time sure flies by. Note: three of the ladies on our team were under 24 and helped keep the average age of our team WAY down.

Anyway, this was the first year that we didn’t have to scramble for team members. Our team was assembled early, and consisted of Jason “Mr. Fundamental” Fenrich, Travis “The Drunken Master” Weber, Cheryl “Little Engine” Fenrich, Domini “The Dominator” Zeigler, and “The Shepherd Connection” - Laura and Sarah Shepherd. Oh yeah, and there was me, Hemant “The Wall” Naidu. Our team name was The Toronto Raptors, in homage to the basketball team’s great play this season (can you guess who organized the team’s entry this year?). You can watch a video demonstrating some fundamental volleyball below.

As always, the schedule was fierce and without mercy. We played 6 matches (2 game total point) on Saturday. The top six teams were seeded for Sunday’s playoffs, based on their Saturday record. We were pretty sure we didn’t make the playoffs, and we (or at least I) were pretty content with that. I was extremely stiff and could barely walk. It really is not a good idea to play volleyball only once a year, especially in a competitive tournament. It hurts too much.

Not being in the playoffs would be somewhat of a relief because Farmers’ Days is also known for its great cabaret at the town civic centre. To everyone’s delight Wilkie’s legendary band, Danny and the Dusters, was playing. After dinner and getting cleaned up, our posse rolled into the hall with our regular swagger. It didn’t take long to run into the volleyball tournament organizer who was happy to inform us that we squeaked into the sixth and final spot of the playoffs. Gee. Great. Our game was at 10 am.

The dance was fun as usual, and Danny and the Dusters played their rendition of Authority Song to perfection, disappointing no one. I took it easy that night, considering I was pretty wiped from the days activities, plus I didn’t want to be a total puddle on the court in the morning. I was home and in bed by 3 am, but I do know that some members of our team were up until around 6 am.

I made sure I was at the gym nice and early to get stretched out, since I was still having trouble walking. The rest of my team showed up and once we started warming up, I loosened up pretty quickly. Our playoff game was against the tournament organizer’s team, and we were fairly evenly matched. The game was extremely close, but we ended up losing, and being eliminated from the tournament.

This ended up being our most successful run in the Farmers’ Days Volleyball Tournament. We usually are completely terrible, but this year we had a fairly decent team. Another good thing was that this year’s teams were somewhat evenly matched. There were two or three teams that were incredible (that’s what happens when you have Husky players on teams), but they knew when to take it easy.

So until next year’s tournament, take a moment to check out some pictures. I put my cameras in the trusty hands of Curtis and Nikki to take some action shots during some of our games. You can see them here.