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Well, it has been several months since I last posted. My streak of posting at least once per month for the past 4 years has ended. Oh well. It’s been a busy few months at work, plus moving to a new house, so that’s my excuse.

I was reminded to post again due to the situation happening at Acadia. It was over 2 1/2 years ago that I posted this about the strike while I was living in Toronto. Let’s hope that it’s a short strike… but also that we get to see the guy with the awkwardly large hand costume again!

This morning we went to Heritage Park, Canada’s Largest Living Historical Village. It’s only a few blocks away from our place, but it took us almost 2 years to go there.

The day consisted of taking the old steam train around the park, floating around the Glenmore Reservoir on the old-fashioned paddle boat, and looking through the old houses, churches, and stores.

Pictures coming soon…

This past Christmas, Caitlin gave me a most excellent present of a gift certificate for a 1 hour Discovery Flight at the Calgary Flight Training Centre. I was waiting for some nice weather, so last week I booked my hour for this morning at 11am.

After going through the checklists, the instructor and I headed out to the runway in the Diamond Katana. There was a decent wind of about 13 knots coming from the south, so we departed from runway 16 ahead of an WestJet flight coming in on final. As we were cleared for takeoff the instructor said that I would be controlling the aircraft for takeoff, so I grabbed the flight stick and pulled back a bit, and we were airborne.

After takeoff we headed west, just north of downtown where I had a great view of the Shaw building where I work. When we reached 5500 feet, I took control again and kept us in a straight line towards Priddis Corner/Bragg Creek. As we left the Calgary Terminal airspace, we were handed off to Springbank and we climbed to 6000. Upon reaching Priddis Corner, we took a right turn towards the mountains and the instructor let me try some turns. After my turns, he asked if I’d like to see what a sharp turn felt like, so he took control and did a 45 degree turn to the left followed by a 60 degree turn to the right. Then he asked if I had ever felt zero gravity, which I replied “only on a roller coaster once”. Soon thereafter we were nose-down towards the ground for several seconds, experiencing zero gravity.

Once we completed these maneuvers, we made the turn back towards Calgary following the Banff highway. As we entered Calgary Terminal airspace we were instructed to descend to 5000 from 6000, so the instructor showed me what a ’slip’ is like where we dropped about 800 feet within 5 seconds and then leveled out at 5000. We were then cleared to land on runway 10 which gave us a great view of several other aircraft taking off on runway 16. After an hour of flying, we were back on the ground. Now I’ll just have to start saving up to get my private pilot’s license!

Picture of the Diamond Evolution’s cockpit

The opening day for Slo-Pitch started last night in Calgary and we played a double-header. Even though we lost both games, it was still a lot of fun to be on a baseball diamond for the first time in quite a while. It brought back memories of playing in little league back in New Brunswick. However, it was easy to see that I wasn’t in as good shape as I was then. I slid into third base during our first game and cut up my knee and pulled some other muscles which had me limping around the the remainder of the evening. I’ll remember to stretch before the game next week to prevent any other injuries.

Other new/interesting stuff going on:
- Tomorrow will mark 4 months into my job with Shaw and my desk is moving to a corner cubicle/office with a view of the mountains and Bow river from the 12th floor.
- Caitlin and I will be celebrating our 1st anniversary in less than 2 weeks!
- Last week we saw ‘Hot Fuzz’ at the theater. It was a great movie and the last 20 minutes was the best part! Then we watched ‘Shaun of the Dead’ on Friday night which stars the same British actors/director as ‘Hot Fuzz’.

This afternoon I got off work early and we picked up my dad from the airport since he will be visiting with us for the weekend on a layover from his trip to BC. It was so nice here today that after supper we walked down to the Dairy Queen for ice cream. However, tomorrow it’s supposed to start getting cold and there are some snowfall warnings for Monday. Oh well, spring will be here soon.

Tomorrow morning we will be going to the Farmer’s Market and then Caitlin’s parents are coming down for lunch, so it should be a fun day. Then we’ll have to find some indoor things to do during the next couple days when the cold weather hits us.

I’ll finally be getting my first vacation day on Monday since I started working at Shaw in early January. And looking ahead to the next 10 days, I’ll only be working for 3 of them which will be great to have a bit of time off for once!

February is almost over, so I must post to keep my blog’s ‘at-least-one-post-a-month’ trend on the go. I don’t think I’ve missed a month where I haven’t posted since September 2003, so I can’t stop now.

There isn’t too much to talk about this month… everything is going well with work and other things. The only new ‘news’ is that we have started to have our groceries delivered to us instead of doing any grocery shopping. It isn’t necessarily because we are lazy, but due to a company called SPUD (Small Potatoes Urban Delivery) which has a wide-array of organic produce and other healthy foods which some of the grocery stores don’t have. If you live in their delivery area and are interested, let me know and I can send you a promotional code to save some money off your order.

Until next month…

Well, this post is quite long overdue since there is a lot to mention. I think this has been the longest I have ever gone without posting to my blog.

Caitlin and I had a great time on the east coast for Christmas. We spent about 10 days in the Maritimes which included a nice Christmas with my family, going to Halifax, and seeing all of the Acadia folks in Wolfville for a classic lunch of Scott Skins at Joe’s.

Our trip also ended our “vacation” of not having to work for the past couple of months since I started a new job the day after we arrived back in Calgary. I’m now a software developer for Shaw Communications and I’ll be doing some J2EE development, for those who are interested. With a job at a cable company also comes the employee discounts and other benefits of digital cable with every specialty channel you can think of… which sure beats not having cable during the past year and a half.

As the end of January nears, both Caitlin and I will be celebrating our 26th and 25th birthdays, respectively, next week. We will be celebrating this weekend by having our annual Birthday supper at the Calgary Tower and staying a night at the Palliser Hotel Calgary.

Well… that’s about it from us.

It has been almost a full year since I was last on the east coast… and I’m back again for Christmas.

Caitlin and I had an early morning yesterday as we arrived at the Calgary airport around 6:00am for our 7:00am flight to Moncton. After checking in, which only took 10 minutes, we were faced with a security line of atleast 300. We ended up getting pulled out of the line and put through the express security line and we made it through that in only a few minutes. All in all, we only had about 20 minutes of waiting at the airport on the busiest travel day of the year. Not bad at all! Our flight back to Moncton through Hamilton went really well except my in-seat satellite tv was on the fritz, but I made due.

We are now on the east coast for the next week and a bit, so we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy Christmas, visit Halifax and Wolfville, take in a Wildcats game, and just relax before heading back to Calgary and a new job.