A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

Since buying our house back in February, Michelle and I were planning on throwing a housewarming party. We initially were hoping for May, but that just couldn’t happen. Who’d have thought owning a house would make one so busy?   Before we knew it summer had arrived and we figured we better have the party now, or it would never happen.

When we started putting together the guest list, it didn’t take long to realize that this could end up being a fairly large shindig. We figured the more the merrier and sent out the invites. Most people RSVPed in some acceptable manner, but for some reason clicking “YES” or “NO” in the Google Invites continues to confuse people.

Michelle and I spent the few days beforehand getting ready for the party – buying booze and food, and getting the house and yard ready to accommodate a barrage of people. When the day arrived, it was also on the day of Saskatoon’s big Sidewalk Sale so Michelle was obligated to help her mom at her store for most of the day. I spent the day prepping everything, then my parents showed up and were able to help me out. Luckily Michelle got off early so she was able to put together all of the food platters.

Before we knew it people started showing up in waves. I was planning on BBQing at a nice pace, accommodating people as they arrived throughout the evening. How wrong I was. Everyone seemed to show up right at 6pm on the nose. I was BBQing like a madman for over two hours, trying to keep people fed. I guess you live and learn, but at least everyone got to eat.

The evening went really well, and I think everyone had a pretty awesome time. I know I did. The final count was about 45 people including myself and Michelle. It was pretty packed for a while, but luckily the weather was nice so people were able to hang out out on the deck and the backyard. It was also great that Michelle’s and my parents (and a bunch of her extended family too) were able to meet for the first time. They didn’t get a chance to visit much, but there will be much more time for that in the future.

I just want to end off with a big thank-you to everyone who showed up to help celebrate the purchase of our new house. We also really appreciate those people who were there until the bitter magnificent end (4am), and helped us get everything cleaned up. It really made Sunday morning a joy to wake up to.

If you’re interested in a nice character home built in 1928, and are looking for a nice quiet, rural lifestyle, this house may be for you. No, I don’t own a house by this description, but my parents do. They have decided to put their home in Wilkie up for sale in hopes of moving to Saskatoon. The house is listed privately right now and can be viewed here on saskhouses.com.

I have to admit that if the house does end up selling, I will miss my trips back to Wilkie. But I do welcome the idea of my parents moving to Saskatoon. The amount of cooking my mom sends back with me when visiting Wilkie is out of control. I can only imagine the limitless amounts of food I will get if we live in the same city.

Be sure to check out the listing here. You can also see more pictures of the house here.

The basement in the house was finished, but Michelle didn’t like the colour, nor the batons that were running every four feet. The plan was to remove the batons, re-mud, sand, and paint. Luckily Michelle’s uncle Ray was willing to help us with this. Seemed like a pretty easy job until Ray came by to do the assessment. As it turned out, the lower level of the wall (the house is a bi-level) actually had paneling nailed over the drywall, and that’s why the batons were there – to hide the seams. So our fairly simple job turned out to be ripping off the paneling, re-mudding all the drywall, sanding, and painting. Uncle Ray got to work right away, and I got out of the way.

For the next couple weeks, Uncle Ray and Michelle’s dad David were in and out of the house doing their thing. I wasn’t of much use until the sanding stage where I actually did some work. It wasn’t the most exciting work I’ve done, but since it was improving our house there was actually some satisfaction.

Once the sanding was complete Michelle and I started on the painting. The lower wall was going to be a dark brown and the upper wall a light blue. We started with the priming and quickly revealed further wall imperfections. Uncle Ray had warned me that further mudding and sanding would be required after priming so he had filled me in on mudding techniques. I managed to re-mud, sand, and re-prime the problem areas, leading us to the painting stage.

The blue went on quite nicely and only required two coats, but the brown was much more problematic and required three. While I was on the home-stretch of applying the brown, I tried to touch up one of the walls that had semi-dried. Big mistake. This rookie error required me to redo the entire wall. This however did not affect my spirit.

When all was said and done, the painting ended up taking a week. I hadn’t painted in a long time, but I did remember really hating it. I can safely say that I still hate painting. I hear so many people say how easy it is, but I honestly don’t think so. It is so difficult to get everything looking nice and even. Ours ended up being decent, but far from perfect. It definitely could have used a pro’s touch.

Michelle and I then stayed up until nearly 3 am setting up the room. It was good to get the TV finally connected. I was really starting to miss my Raptors, and watching movies. We have only set up one half of this room, mainly because we don’t have the furniture for the second half yet, but it is now completely functional as a TV room. I sure love not being in a condo, and in a house where I can watch movies very LOUDLY.

We still have some plans for the basement which includes replacing the carpet with the new carpet from upstairs when we put in the hardwood, and adding a bar and “lounge” type area. I’m really looking forward to getting everything completed. I really want to thank Michelle’s uncle and dad for working so hard to get our basement how we wanted it. And it’s great to know that Michelle and I got through our first home reno without killing each other.

You can see more photos of the house (and the renos) by following the links below.

• Thumbnails on Filckr
• Slideshow on Flickr
• Thumbnails on Picasa
• Slideshow on Picasa

Just over a month ago I posted about my dire housing situation. My landlord had sold the condo I was living in and I needed to be out by the end of March. Well I thought I would give a quick update on that whole situation. Two days after finding out about my place, Michelle and I looked at a house in Erindale in Saskatoon (actually about a five minute walk from Curtis’ new condo – yeah, the imaginary one). A day after that we made an offer on that house and it was accepted. Michelle wasn’t even in Saskatoon at the time – she was out winter camping (yeah, winter camping) with her school so I was sending text messages to her with updates such as:

• We’re putting in an offer on that house we looked at.
• They rejected our offer. We countered, and they accepted.

I believe the response I got was something like:

• OMG

We got all of our financing in order the following week, got Michelle’s condo on the market, and that was that. Her condo sold in no time and our possession date was set for March 18th. So in less than a week I went from being fairly content in my rental condo to being a proud new homeowner. Here’s a picture of Michelle entering our house for the first time. As you can see, she was very excited.

We hired movers for March 28th as to give us enough time to pack. As usual, packing sucked, but it did give us a chance to toss out some of our stuff. I managed to go through my clothing and fill five giant garbage bags to donate to Community Living. I also was able to get all of my recycling sorted out, and man, do I have a lot! I’m gonna be a millionaire when I take that stuff in for refund. Well maybe not a millionaire, but I’d be surprised if I can’t pay off our mortgage.

The movers did an awesome job and nothing got damaged. I cannot stress how well worth it is to hire pros. If you got a move coming up I highly suggest you go this route – it’ll be worth every penny. Unpacking started immediately and went on for days. The kitchen proved to be the real dilemma due to limited cupboard space, and our ridiculous amount of kitchen stuff. We had to go and buy a pantry to ease some of the pain.

I was able to put up with the mess for a couple days, but I finally hit my threshold and went on an unpacking rampage. Everything is more-or-less in order now except for the basement where Michelle’s dad and uncle are fixing some drywall. They are scheduled to finish up in the next couple days so Michelle and I plan to paint down there this weekend, and look forward to finally getting everything organized. Thankfully my brain is able to dimiss the chaotic state of the basement because it is in a “renovation” state. We also plan on installing hardwood on the main level in the very short term, but once that is all done, we’re good to go. None of this work was actually needed, but it was something both of us wanted to do.

So somehow Michelle and I have become one of those couples that have home projects on the go. I’m not sure how that happened, and I’m equally unsure how much I am actually going to be involved in these projects beyond the planning stage. My renovation skills are limited and I’d prefer to have things done properly. Why just the other day I screwed up the installation of a toilet paper holder (it actually wasn’t my fault – the wall was being childish). Luckily Michelle’s dad was there to save the day. I redeemed myself by installing the towel holder without incident.

I haven’t taken many photos of the house yet so stay tuned for those in the upcoming days. And let me take this moment to officially invite you over for a visit. Now that things are less chaotic here I’ll be a much better host.

Michelle and I decided to take a quick trip to the Rocky Mountains this past weekend. I had been wanting to do this for the last year or so, but just never got around to it. Since Jasper isn’t that far from Saskatoon, and my brother and his family could act as a halfway point in Sherwood Park, we decided to just make it a weekend getaway. We left mid-Friday afternoon and and pulled into my brother’s place around 6:30 where we would spend the night. This gave me the chance to hang out with my nephews who I hadn’t seen since the summer, and introduce Michelle to a piece of my family.

We left Sherwood Park shortly after 7 Saturday morning which had us rolling into Jasper around 10:30. We didn’t have much of plan other than doing some hiking, so we made our way over to the The Jasper Information Centre. It turned out that the person on duty was more interested in going for lunch than in recommending what trails we should venture upon. In all her wisdom she gave us some trail maps to figure things out. While finalizing our route over lunch, we realized that the maps we were given were for the summer trails (I also came to an understanding that I like relish on my burgers). Despite this we felt that the trails on the mountain around Pyramid Lake would work out fine.

We checked into our hotel, The Sawridge Inn, and got dressed for the hike. Our room had a beautiful view of the dining room. The hike we mapped out was to take roughly two hours since we didn’t have a lot of daylight. I’d never been on a hike, let alone one in the mountains so I was quite looking forward to it. Luckily there was snow tracks along the way, because there is not a lot of markers on the trail. After trekking uphill for around ninety minutes, we emerged on a cliff with a great view of the Athabasca River and the surrounding mountains. After firing off some photos, we continued on our journey.

As we plunged deeper into the wilderness we had the privilege of seeing a huge Mule Deer up close as it scurried away. It wasn’t too long from then that we realized we were completely lost. None of the markers were making sense anymore as we tried to figure out what trail we were on in relation to the map. We decided to backtrack a bit and get onto a different trail that coincided with the map. This route would take a little longer, but at least we knew where we were going. Or did we?

Things really started to fall apart as the trail took us higher up the mountain into heavy snowfall. According to our calculations we should have passed a fork in the path some time ago. It definitely seemed like a bad idea to be going higher as we ran out of sunlight. Once again the map made no sense and we were completely turned around. The direction of the sun didn’t jive with what we were seeing on the trails either. I decided to pull out my new Nokia n810 which has a built in GPS to try and get a lock of where we were, or to at least find out what way was north. The stupid thing couldn’t get a proper satellite lock, or was malfunctioning, or was having its signal scrambled by the Borg. Either way, I didn’t realize until later that it was trying to get a satellite lock and was showing old coordinates. I must learn patience.

It was too late to backtrack again since we surely would have run out of light, so we decided to push forward. Since I am a prime human specimen, I had no problem ascending the face of the mountain, but I did have to stop quite often to wait for Michelle. This too didn’t seem like the best idea since the sun wasn’t going to wait for us before setting. After about an hour of climbing uphill, the trail started to descend, and my blood pressure followed suit. We came to a fork in the trail and we thought this would surely let us pinpoint our position. Instead it further confused us since we saw a marker labeled ’2h’. This wasn’t even an option of where we thought we could have been on the map. It didn’t matter. We continued down the trail with our fingers crossed. It wasn’t long until we heard a car whip by on an invisible road through the trees. We both let out a sigh of relief. At this point we figured we would come out a few kilometres south of where we had parked, but it would be no big deal because we could just follow the road to the car. Instead we were pleasantly surprised to emerge from the trees into the very parking lot we had parked. Happy. Yes. Confused. Completely.

Now that we actually were at a trail map showing our position, we were able to trace where we had been. It turned out that we were in a “wildlife movement area” described to hikers as, “trails that are discouraged for travel in order to restore habitat”. As clueless as we were, we are also convinced that someone had tampered with the trail markers. Our original path was supposed to follow markers ’2b’ for most of the way, which we did. As it turns out we were on ’2h’ for the majority of time and never once saw a ’2h’ marker (except near the end). Michelle thinks that someone ‘jiffied’ the ‘h’ to look like a ‘b’. Conspiracy theorists unite.

Following this debacle, we just went back to the hotel room and got ready for a nice dinner. We walked into the heart of the town and went to a place called Wicked Dave’s. Everything about it was great. I ordered the Hell’s Jerk Chicken which had plenty of warnings in the menu in regards to spiciness. Even the server warned me that it was rated 9/10 on their heat scale. I held strong. As delicious as it was, I think it only warranted a 5/10 on Hemant’s Heat Scale. Following dinner we just crashed back at the hotel since we were completely exhausted from the day’s events.

Sunday we just grabbed some breakfast at the Black Sheep Cafe which was delicious. What was even greater was that they provided free wireless, letting me play with my n810 a little. We bummed around town a bit more and contemplated taking a different route back to Saskatoon, but decided against it since it would have taken a little too long. On that note we said goodbye to the Rockies. While filling gas in Lloydminster, we were lucky enough to be graced by the, “cleanest washrooms in Canada”.

Despite being a super-quick trip, Michelle and I had a great time. Sometimes it’s good to just get out and do something different. Since we had so much fun, we’re already planning our next extended trip to the area this summer. I’m also going to plan our hikes a little better – you know, like taking a flashlight and maybe some matches along with us. I’m just glad that my parents didn’t have to see something like this on the news Saturday night: “Two city slickers require search and rescue operation from beginner mountain trails near Jasper, Alberta, Canada.”

You can see more pictures from the trip below.

• Thumbnails on Flickr
• Slideshow on Flickr
• Thumbnails on Picasa
• Slideshow on Picasa

This year I decided to take two weeks of vacation around the holiday season. It had been a while since I had done this so I was really looking forward to the time off. I didn’t really have any major plans during my holidays, hoping just to have some downtime with my family and friends.

This year my brother and his family decided to stay in Edmonton for Christmas while my sister and her family celebrated in Chicago. My parents decided they just wanted to stay at home in Wilkie, so I was content with just spending a quiet Christmas with them.

I made it back in time for the annual Wilkie Outlaws Rib & Wing Night (photos) at the Wilkie Civic Centre. I had heard a lot about this event and since I had never attended it, I figured I would check it out this year. It was really busy there, and I got to see a lot of people I hadn’t seen in some time, which was great. What wasn’t so great was that they ran out of wings before I got a chance to buy any. Luckily I was able to scam some off of a generous friend.

That was pretty much the only time I left my parents’ house. Well, that’s not completely true. I did head to the Co-op to buy some milk on Christmas Eve. Other than that I spent my time visiting, reading, surfing the net, watching TV, and napping. These few days seemed like the prime opportunity for me to do some needed catching up on sleep.

Christmas day we had the traditional turkey dinner which my mother prepared to perfection as usual. After filling up during the meal, I chowed down on all sorts of baked goods and other unhealthy delights. As good as it is coming back to Wilkie for a visit, I always leave feeling fatter.

• Xmas Day Photos (thumbnails)
• Xmas Day Photos (slideshow)

My “cousin” (not really, but may as well be) Seshni got married to Scott this past Saturday, so family from all corners of the globe congregated in Saskatoon. My sister Yavini and her family were still here visiting, and my brother Veyantiz and his family travelled in from Sherwood Park, Alberta.

The wedding was a traditional Hindu celebration, and my mother performed the ceremony. It’s not often you get to see a non-Christain wedding around here, so it was quite a nice experience. There was a big break between the ceremony and the reception so the time was spent catching up with all of the relatives. The reception was a great time since so many people didn’t duck out early. I was hoping to take a lot of pictures at the wedding, but it didn’t happen. Feel free to check out a few I did take below.

We all headed back to Wilkie on Sunday and my parents’ house became Grand Central Station. The house where five of us used to live was now filled with twelve (including five under the age of seven). Despite the chaos, it was a pleasure to finally see the cousins together. The two oldest, Janak and Chiara were inseparable, thowing comments back and forth at each other (eg. “You’re the greatest cousin ever,” while the three youngest (all under the age of three) were not quite as “diplomatic”.

With all the kids playing together, I was no longer treated like a “human jungle-gym” (well, not 100% of the time, anyway) which was a nice break for my limbs. We spent a lot of the time in the backyard, and took them out to the park a few times as well giving me a prime opportunity to fire off a bunch of shots.

• Seshni and Scott’s Wedding – Slideshow or Thumbnails
• Ruane Kids at the Park – Slideshow or Thumbnails
• Cousins Hanging Out – Slideshow or Thumbnails

Day two saw Chiara, Mira, and Liam get a little more comfortable with their new surroundings, so they started to get a little more brave with me. For some reason, Chiara likes to call me the “Muffin Man”, and as a reaction to my beard, Mira told me that I had a “silly face”.

Since it was still so hot, and the house was trapping the heat like a greenhouse, we spent a lot of time in the backyard. Mom and dad have been working their butts off in the yard this summer so it has been a prime space to photograph the kids. If you’re interestested in seeing more pictures of them, check them out here or here.

Today was an exciting day since my sister Yavini and her three kids were flying in from Chicago. It had been a while since I had seen my oldest niece Chiara, and I hadn’t even met her younger sister and brother – Mira and Liam. I met my parents at the airport since it was going to take two cars to transport everyone and all the baby gear back to Wilkie. While we were waiting in the airport we had a pleasant surprise when some of our relatives from Vancouver (who arrived in Saskatoon on Wednesday) decided to come greet everyone as well.

Since the kids had been couped up on the plane for four hours, we decided to go back to my place to grab a bite to eat and just chill, letting everyone regain their senses. For those of you who have never been to my place, it is far from “kid friendly”, plus I am a completely insane neat freak. As you can imagine the children flew through there like a hurricane, and my blood pressure probably shot up by about twenty points as we needed to rearrange my living room on the fly. Needless to say, it was all worth it to finally get a chance to spend some time with them.

After a couple hours we jumped in the cars and headed for Wilkie. Once we arrived we knew that the extreme heat coupled with no air conditioning at my parents’ place was going to be hard on the kids, so we went outside and ran through the sprinklers. They turned out not to be so brave since the water was “so cold”. I did however use the opportunity to spray my mother with the hose nice and good.

Since the four of them were up at 3:30 in the morning to get to the airport, they were all pretty tired so the evening was pretty low-key. After some delicious dinner, the lot of them hit the hay. I managed to fire off a few shots while the kids were outside, and you can check them out here or here. They’re pretty cute…..just like their uncle.

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.

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.

I was planning on having a nice, relaxing Labour Day weekend. In fact, I even took Friday as a vacation day to give myself a four day weekend. My brother and his family were going to be at my parents’ place in Wilkie, so I was going to head back there to do some visiting, and hang out with my nephews. Then I remembered that I had a wedding on Saturday. For some reason, I thought it was the weekend after Labour Day. Since I didn’t want to miss my brother’s visit, nor the wedding, I decided to do both.

I was going to drive to Wilkie Friday morning and spend the night. I was then going to head back to Saskatoon Saturday morning so I could take in the wedding and reception. I would return to Wilkie Sunday morning, and make my way back to Saskatoon on Monday. Man, for a guy who was planning a relaxing weekend, I sure was running around a lot.

Amway, even though I didn’t get to catch up on any sleep (I think I actually got behind) I am glad I decided to do what I did. I had a great time with my brother, his wife, and my two nephews. The wedding also was a blast – small in size, but big time fun.

The main reason for this post was to point you to some photos from the weekend. Photos of my brother and his family can be seen here, and the wedding photos can be seen here. Enjoy.