Official sign of summer

After a full week of rain, the ground was soaked for days,
but one good thing came of all this water.......

.....Flowers finally started to bloom...

....and the grass grew... so you know what that means? Cut the grass time.
The sound of mowers and the smell of fresh cut grass has hit the air... summer is officially here!

Laundry strikes again!

Oh for heaven's sakes? What does my laundry room have against me? First I twisted my back/neck by putting clothes in the dryer, this time my hair got stuck on something?

I was trying to get the items that had fallen behind the dryer. 4 paper towel rolls, and a piece of tupperware. So I hopped up on the dryer and with one of those grabby things?, you know the pinchers at the end and you squeeze a handle? anyway, it was all working fine. I Had retrieved 3 of the rolls but I couldn't grab the last one so I was coming back to find something else to use, when, my hair was stuck on something sticking thru the shelf. I couldn't see it, and I couldn't tell how badly it was caught in my hair? I imagined Dean or Maddie coming home and finding me still caught there, but after struggling with it, and getting it loose from the clip in my hair, and untangling my hair at the same time, I was finally free.

I tell ya, I think I'm giving up on laundry. 3 strikes and I'm done!!! Who knows what that room has in store for me next!

Bite taken out of Shark

Well the first casualty of the Writer's strike to hit our house is Shark. We loved that show. James Woods is awesome, it was like a mini movie every week. I am very sad that our Thursday night line up ( who am I kidding, we PVR everything ) will be one less show. As it is our CSI's are getting us worried too. Grissom lost 2 great people this year, one a horrible death, and one a sad heart wrenching loss. Miami is really sucking this year, and then there is the ever reliable New York. But I am preparing for the cancellation of one of these, hopefully if one has to go it will be Horatio.

Hopefully another network will pick up Shark and run with it. James Woods is just too good not to be on TV.

How puzzling?

Have you ever done a puzzle with a missing piece? It's so frustrating. You throw the puzzle away cause you don't want to be frustrated again. Then.... 6 months later you move a book, and the missing piece falls out! Grrrr, I hate when that happens. I'm puzzled as to which dilemma is more annoying!

What to do when you can't go outside?

It has been raining almost continuously for 6 days nows. What is a person to do when The Drudge Report gets boring?




The Rubik's Cube, of course. Maddie bought it for me for Christmas and it has sat on the bookshelf taunting me unsolved for 5 months now.


With the help of Dan Brown on You Tube, I started my quest.


The cube's solution is simple enough but complicated in that you have to memorize certain algorithms depending on where on what step you are are on with the cube. Anyway, I started late last night and just a few minutes ago - bam - I solved the cube!



By actually memorizing the algorithms in Dan's video, the Cube is solvable in a few minutes. Very cool.


Rainy days and Rubik's Cubes are good for something!

Seemed smaller in the Showroom

Well, last week our brand new couch was delivered. I don't remember it being so big! It takes up allot of space. It's normal if I have to crawl over it get to the other side of the room right? But now we have a nice big comfy couch with lots of room for visitors. We don't have to crowd onto one couch any more. :-) The fight for the Chaise begins...moi haha. Just in time for Katie's visit!

Ugly Dragon?

Katie and I were at the grocery store and we bought a Dragon fruit for Maddie. It is somewhat strange looking but by no means should it have been called an Ugly fruit? We were confused, then the clerk said they got a new fruit in, and it was called Ugly fruit so she thought maybe this was it. When we got home off to Google I ran, and I found the Ugli fruit!

UGLI


DRAGON

An ugli fruit is a citrus fruit created by hybridizing a grapefruit (or pomelo according to some sources) and a tangerine[citation needed]. Its species is Citrus reticulata x Citrus paradisi.
It was discovered growing wild in Jamaica where it's mainly grown today. Its name derives from the unsightly appearance of its rough, wrinkled, greenish-yellow skin, wrapped loosely around the orange pulpy citrus inside. The light green surface blemishes turn orange when the fruit is at its peak ripeness. An ugli fruit is slightly smaller than a grapefruit and has fewer seeds. The flesh is very juicy and tends towards the sweet side of the tangerine rather than the bitter side of its grapefruit lineage, with a fragrant skin.

So there you have it! Your new food for the day!

Russ - just for you!

Maddie's Youtube Pick of the Week....

This video is Maddie approved!

Technology Make Me Dumber Sometimes.

We were leaving for Edmonton and doing the usual scurrying around before we left. Ok - I was scurrying around, Selena and Maddie were born travellers and can prepare to go anywhere in about 60 seconds. They were already in the car!

Doing my last minute checklist, I came across the fact that I did not know how to get to our hotel in Edmonton. First rule of Travel Club: Know Where You Are Going. Ah! Technology to the rescue. Google maps provided me with directions on exactly how to get to our hotel. Great. Oh no! My wife has turned off her computer so I can't print it. I don't want to wait for it to boot up just for this. Hmm. What should I do? A real conundrum. Do I email it to my blackberry? Hmmm. Can I do that? What else can I do? Should I just wait for the computer to boot up? What ever shall I do?

Then suddenly, a thought popped into my head.

What did people do before they had printers to get things on paper?

Merlin's Beard! They WROTE THINGS DOWN. So I sheepishly copied the directions onto the paper in ten seconds without the help the internet, email, print servers or colour laser printers.

Haha.

WEM day 2

Back for more punishment, we hit the (mall) pavement again.
First stop Mine and Maddie's favorite store, Millennium.




The newest trend.... Tophats


I saw this in a store and I'm not sure what it means??
Halloween and Christmas together??
Is so that you can decorate in October and not change things til January??

On the ride home we gave the girls some beads to make necklaces.
It helped passed the 3 hour drive!

Off to WEM

Sunday morning early. we loaded up the Kia and the 5 of us headed North to Edmonton. Destination West Edmonton Mall, To shop til we drop, and the girls were headed to the water park day one. Day 2 they were shopping til they dropped. Our hotel was the Delta Downtown. I highly recommend it if anyone is heading North. It was easy access to WEM, reasonably priced and very, very nice. Also a great perk, was it is located inside another mall, City Center Mall. Comparable to Market Mall. At night we ventured to a lounge and never had to walk outside. The girls ran to the movie theater to buy popcorn, again inside the mall. It was great!


Some interesting knife holders we saw at a store called Le Gnome

Us and thousands of other people were at the mall this weekend.

The Sea Lion show


Big ship

Katie questioning the fact that Dean wore the competition's T-shirt to Starbucks! ( Cafe du Monde

Maddie and Martina are in there somewhere

Supper at Moxies

The mall is closed. It empties out and we can actually see each other now.

Leaving the mall......
Here are some "wiki-facts" from the always suspect Wikipedia. These ones seem accurate but there is some debate going on to the number of stores. The mall says 800 but some people are strenuously arguing it is only 600. Someday when I have time I will go to the website and manually count them and report back. Anyway, here are the Wiki-facts:

West Edmonton Mall covers a gross area of about 570,000 square meters and cost 1.2 billion to build. There are over 800 stores and services and parking for more than 20,000 vehicles. More than 23,000 people are employed at the property. The mall receives 28.2 million visitors per year and between 60,000 and 150,000 shoppers daily depending on the day and season. The mall is currently valued at C$926 million.

CSI in Evanston

The imagination of these 2 doesn't stop! Maddie had a CSI kit, so, her and Martina made a crime scene, complete with a body! Afterwards during questioning they were inconclusive as to who the murderer was. They had their suspicions tho! ( It wasn't me )




Imprint of the footprint at the crime scene.

Entrapment in Evanston

While we were on the deck, the girls, Maddie and Martina took a ball of string and made a very cool game out of it. They arranged all the kitchen chairs and wrapped the string crisscross across all of them. If anyone saw the movie Entrapment, you know the image. It's where the lasers make the beams that Catherine Zeda Jones has to cross through. That's what the girls did! It was a great show of imagination, especially in the electronic world of today!!

Katieface, back for more.

On Saturday afternoon, we picked up our friend Katieface, from the airport. We whisked her away to the house and promptly served her many glasses of wine. Dean did ribs on the BBQ, and they were scrumptious. The rest of the night we sat on the deck and chitchatted. Maddie's friend Martina came for a sleepover, so we coerced her dad Chris into sharing a beer on the deck. It officially feels like summer now!

No more Breakfast Nook! Please!

Before the canadian teams were dumped from the playoffs, I was watching hockey every night. Selena had A LOT of scrapbooking to do, so it worked out nicely. Every year, you get to see a lot of commercials over and over again. The bad ones really begin to annoy. All you hockey fans know what I am talking about. I hated Scotia's Bank's "Breakfast Nook" the most. You know the one. Anyway, why am I babbling about commercials? I saw this one while watching (what else?) CSI. It is entitled What If Firefighters Ran The World - funny, creative and worth 30 seconds of your time. Enjoy!

Oh yes we did!!

OK, those who know me, and have a seen a glimpse of any scrapbooking I have done, will not be surprised by what I am about to say. I am a pack rat. I save every piece of memorabilia from everywhere important to me. I am the farthest thing from a "photographic mind". I need to SEE, in front of me, everything. When a memory is in my hands, I'm happy! so..... then understanding all of this about me, you will see why we turned the Blog.... into a Book!! Oh yes we did. Dean found a printing company online called Lulu, who will take the PDF's that you send them, and print out a bound, "professional looking" book, with your own hard cover design on it!!!! This is the greatest thing I have ever heard of since sliced bread! Every blog entry, and yes the comments too, from Dec 1 to April 19 2008 are in this book! What else can I turn into a book? I must go look!!!

If anyone else in interested in publishing a book you can go to Lulu

http://www.lulu.com/content/2411923 also, if anyone was interested you can order our book there too!! LOL

Don't worry about the expiry date...

At the end of our tour of The Katrina Site, our busdriver handed out coupons. We noticed the expiry date was for 2005? She said, don't worry about the expiry date, the cards were printed before Katrina!

Cafe du Monde

A package arrived today, From Cafe du Monde, New Orleans. The cafe on Decatur street that stays open 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. It has been open since 1860. And let me tell you, they know how to make coffee! A little yellow can with a pound of coffee inside can bring much joy to this household. What a great way to prolong a holiday, order it to your doorstep. We're seriously thinking of becoming a member of the coffee club. You get a pound of coffee mailed to you every month! We also received a tasty sweet donut mix called a "beignet". We ate them in New Orleans but haven't made ours yet, so we'll keep you posted.

Well, off to have our coffee and look through the catalog.

Attention K-Mart Shoppers!

K-mart in Pen Plaza in the heart of Manhattan.

Another Lost Blog:

The tour guides on the downtown tour would always take the opportunity to point out the K-Mart when we passed it. Why? Because it has a really interesting story. The first thing the tour guide asks when you pass it is if you notice anything strange about the store. After a few seconds of staring at blank faces, he says triumphantly "No parking lot!" And then launches into to the story of Manhattan's K-Mart. Here is what he told us:

K-mart was at first very relunctant to open a store in Manhattan because there was no parking. How are you going to get your larger items home on the subway? The City of New York made K-Mart a very attractive offer. They said try it for two years and if it fails, the City will pick up your lease for the two years. So K-Mart opened in Manhattan. The K-mart in Manhattan is the number one in the country for sales and made so much profit that K-mart was able to close a whack of stores in other parts of the US without hurting profits.

However, we are not sure that the story is true. We have been unable to substatiate this story. In fact, according to a December 1994 New York Times article (click to see the article), Manhattan was a complete change in strategy from a company in response to Walmart's new dominance in the discount marketplace. The article specifically says that no incentives were offered:

"No state and city subsidies or tax abatements were offered to lure the giant retailer. As America becomes saturated with discount outlets like Kmart and Wal-Mart, high-rent urban centers like Manhattan have become more attractive. The Manhattan move is part of a larger strategy by Kmart to tap fresh markets in the face of flagging earnings and sharp cost cutbacks. Because of aggressive openings in recent years, Kmart officials said they now have at least one store in each of the most populous 50 metropolitan areas."

The profit part of the story seems to be true as K-Mart returned to profitability for a short time after they open their stores in Manhattan. However, it would appear the City of New York never offered any special incentives for them to move there. If the City of New York offered K-Mart incentives like the tour guide described the New York Times would have known about it and reported it. But it is strange that a native New Yorker like our tour guide would get something like this wrong. Hmmm. We report. You decide.

Fome Fugar for your coffee?

We took this picture at the Williams-Sonoma 4 storey kitchen store in San Francisco. Ruby and Jade were in town for baseball this weekend and Ruby noticed something strange about the recipe picture:


Click to enlarge.

You will notice some curious spelling mistakes in this recipe. We never noticed this when we took the picture and Ruby thought the mistakes are why we took the picture. Haha.

So this got us thinking and we wanted to know why the spelling mistakes were there. Well, through the magic of the internet, we were able to shed some light on this.


The above recipe appears to be from a old cookbook published in 1792 called The Universal Cook: And City and Country Housekeeper By Francis Collingwood, John Woollams.

Courtesy of Google, this book has been digitized here:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=xJMEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=toc&vq=fugar#PPA245,M1


If you click on the link above, you will see the term "fugar" used throughout the book and also the practice of replacing the letter "s" with the letter "f".


So there you have it, it must have been a '90s thing. The 1790s.

Lost Blog: Cab Fight!

We were at the Southside Seaport and we had just gotten off the Water Taxi where we had just taken a great tour of New York Harbour. We were walking down the street and came upon our first and only cab fight. Papparazzi Selena was right there secretly snapping photos so the guy wouldn't see us and come over and smash our camera or something. It is amazing to me that more of these fights don't happen.

The man at the cabbie's door owns that black car at the right.

He thought the cabbie ran the stop sign and let him know

what he thought of that literally face to face.

Altered Book

Has anyone heard of this idea? I didn't even know it existed. I found a "how to book" in the scrapbooking section at chapters, and since then the name keeps coming up. We were watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and there it is. An altered book right in the movie. If you remember the scene with the pirate lords. The book of codes is an altered book. What it is, is a book that you glue, saw, drill, tear, and staple anything you want into it. You take a regular book. Change everything about it so that there is no trace of the original in site, and voila you have an altered book. We had some leftover items from our Honeymoon, so we thought we may try this out. Here is the start of it.