A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

We were up bright and early Saturday morning so we could make our way to downtown Chicago and visit the Museum of Science and Industry. Before heading out, Yavini informed me that Saturdays were reserved for McDonald’s breakfasts. Sounded pretty good to me and I put my order in for a Bacon McMuffin. When they got back, I witnessed a display of utter absurdity.

Her and Kevin made an order for their Egg McMuffins without butter, cheese, or the ham. They then removed the egg portion of the sandwiches, cut out the yokes, and re-fried them. They then fried up some of their own ham for the “McMuffin”, and added some low fat cheese, but not before re-toasting the English Muffin for a more crispy texture. This is all fine and dandy to be health conscious, but I was so confused as to why we didn’t just make the McMuffins at home? To each his own, I guess.

We waited for their nanny Ms. Anna to arrive before we took off. She was going to stay home with young Liam while the rest of us went to the museum. We all piled into the SUV and headed for downtown Chicago. Since the drive was about an hour, we spent the time reading some books we bought for Chiara and Mira.

The lineup to buy tickets into the museum was hilarious. There was probably around a bazzilion people buying tickets, but I will give them credit – the line moved really fast.

The museum had everything from farm equipment to a Boeing 737. One of the cooler things was a captured Nazi U-Boat – the U-505. I’m not sure if this was the submarine that the movie U-571 was based on. The tour of the sub was sold out for the day, so we weren’t able to actually go inside of it.

There was also a live insect display which was pretty freaky. I’m not a huge fan of bugs, so I kept my distance, but Kevin was pretty brave and let an eight inch millipede crawl on him. How would you like to find this thing in your house?

We bought tickets for a 3D show called African Adventure. As I was watching it I was having a really hard time getting anything to look right. As a matter of fact, I was actually starting to feel a little nauseous. I figured there had to be something up with the 3D glasses I was wearing. I finally decided to flip them around and everything came into focus and took their 3D form. Literally, 2 seconds later the show ended. It seems Michelle had the same problem, but she didn’t get her gasses flipped around in time.

We left the museum following the show, and Kevin drove us around downtown, giving us a quick tour of some of the big sites. Before we left their place, he looked up Barack Obama’s address so he could show us “Democrats” his house. I thought the Secret Service were going to stop us for sure when we drove by the house once, turned the SUV around in the street and slowly drove by again – this time with the window rolled down and me (a brown guy with a beard) taking pictures with a big camera and zoom lens.

As far as I know, we weren’t tailed. But I do think a Predator was was in hot pursuit. I managed to capture his thermal imaging of us.

Once we got back to St. Charles, Michelle and I had a quick nap before we headed out for dinner with just Kevin and Yavini. This was a good time for the four of us to just get some visiting in without having to give all of our attention to the three little ones. When we got back to their house, the children greeted us as though we had been gone for three weeks. Everyone was in bed before ten o’clock, but Michelle and I were up real “late” – 11:30pm.

You can see more pictures from the day by following the links below.

• Thumbnails
• Slideshow

Beep.  Beep.  Beep.  That’s the noise that greeted me at 3:30 Friday morning as the alaram went off.  We both put the final touches on our packing, got showered up, and were in a taxi by 5am to catch our 6:30 flight to Chicago.  We were greeted by a rude Air Canada Jazz check-in attendant who was speaking so softly that I’m not entirely convinced that he wasn’t just moving his lips.   He managed to feed us much dis-information about our trip.

I had no issues in security despite my backpack full of every type of electronics device you can imagine.  Michelle wasn’t so lucky and was “randomly selected” for a full search.  Apparently the security woman doing the search was really throrough.  The flight went well, but we had less than an hour to pick up our baggage and get through customs in Calgary.  We cut it pretty close, but we did manage to get to the gate as they were boarding the plane.

The new Air Canada planes have in-seat entertainment.  Not satellite TV like WestJet, but an on-demand system which is pretty good.  I watched a couple of HBO comedian acts – David Attel and Bill Maher.  Attel was super-crude, and mediocre.  Bill Maher had me literally laughing my head off with his American political jokes.  People must have thought I was crazy.

The flight was fairly short, and we arrived in Chicago before we knew it. My sister, Chiara, and Mira greeted us at the airport, and we were on our way to their house in St. Charles. We spent the rest of the day just visiting, playing with the children, and eating. Michelle and I were quite exhausted so we had a quick nap before dinner, once we were able to trick the kids into leaving our bedroom. Before calling it a night, Michelle, Yavini, Kevin, and I decided on our plans for Saturday – The Museum of Science and Industry.

Michelle and I fly out to Chicago early Friday morning for our first summer vacation together.  The plan is to visit my sister and her family out in the suburbs for four nights.  I haven’t seen them since last summer when they came out here, so I look forward to seeing them all.  Plus they have never met Michelle so I look forward to that as well.

Once we wrap up our visit, Michelle and I will head downtown where we will stay for the remaining three nights.   We’re staying at   The Sofitel Chicago Water Tower which is right on The Magnificent Mile.  Our time downtown is going to be very busy as we play the tourist role since neither of us have been to Chicago.

I’m going to try and blog each day we’re there, so make sure to keep your eye on A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year.  And as usual, I will be Twittering frequently throughout the day.   You can follow all of my Tweets on my Twitter page.

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.

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