Badger and Michelle's Capital Adventures

See, I told you I was bad at keeping in touch!

2006-02-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

Its been a busy three months since my last post, but you know how it is; when called upon to recall things that have occurred its always very difficult to come up with anything noteworthy. Let me try to list things out as best as I can.

First and foremost; Michelle successfully completed her French training, and contrary to the experts who said that learning a second language would be beyond her grasp, she actually excelled at her training and nearly acheived a level 'C' in Oral proficiency. All jokes about 'oral proficiency' aside, I'm super proud of her and so happy that all her hard work paid off. The difficult part now is keeping up her skills so that when she is retested in five years we won't have to go through the trial of language training again.

Through the hollidays I unfortunately was stuck working graveyards the whole time which prevented us from getting away to visit family. I think that as long as I am working retail I'll be unable to get away for Christmas.
This year however it did allow for us to start some of our very own Christmas traditions. Forgetting to defrost the turkey is something I hope to relive year after year. After massaging it in the sink for an hour I was able to get it in the oven without any other problems.

Once the bird was settled in the oven we proceeded to have the most relaxing holliday possible. We went and caught a movie and left the turkey to cook. Once back home we leisurely prepared the rest of the fixin's for dinner. Maybe cooking for two, or perhaps not having an audience made
things go alot smoother. Perhaps the wine had a hand in that as well.

New Years Eve came right on schedule and with it came the Resolution run to mark the completion of our 10k training clinic. We'd both caught winter colds during Christmas, but I had recovered enough to run in the freezing -17 temperatures. Michelle stood and cheered me on at the finish bundled up so much I'm not sure she saw me cross the line. In spite of drugging myself up before hand, my knee gave out after 7.5k so I had to walk the last quarter of the race. I finished in 1 hour 12 minutes. Pretty good, but I think I can break the 1 hour mark if my knee doesn't act up.

Once January arrived things slowed down for me at work so I decided to volunteer with the Running Room to help with their Learn to Run clinic. Its wild to see how much you've progressed when you start off a new class at two minutes walking, one minute running. We're up to 8 and 1's now but attrition has taken its toll and there are only about one third of the original class left.

We've also had two visits from Michelle's friend Noemie since I last posted. She's great fun and its always nice to see her. Michelle really looks forward to her visits. I guess I don't gossip and 'girl talk' as well as she'd like.

It was pretty warm for most of January. Lots of snow and ice rain kept the canal closed right through the first week of Winterlude. The weather improved and the canal was packed last weekend. We skated downtown and walked across to Jaques Cartier Park to look at the snow sculptures (Pictured left). The snowboarder is BC's contibution to the contest. The matching toques we are wearing were lovingly made by one of Michelle's french instructors. Thanks Caroline! They are super cute and we love wearing them.

Late January we discovered that my Grandpa was sick and he was admitted into hospital. They operated briefly in the hopes that they could help his liver/kidneys/gallblader function well enough that he could get better but unfortunately at 93 you don't really have the energy to recover from a whole lot. My brother and I flew home in the first week of February to see him
but by the time I arrived he wasn't awake to speak. He passed away in evening February 8th after everyone had a chance to say goodbye.

The difficult part about someone passing is the questions one starts to ask oneself. My Grandpa lived right next to me for sixteen years and I never really spent any time with him, I took for granted that he and my Grandma would be there. Also, he was married to my Grandma for 63 years. It scares me to think that I might be left behind, or leave Michelle behind after 63 years of marriage.

It makes a person question why they toil away at trivial things when important things, like spending time with the ones you love, slip past.

Which I guess leaves us on kind of a down note. But I'll close by saying how much we both miss everyone out west and how we wish we could be home to spend more time with everyone. It makes us really excited to get west again to see everyone.

Badger

The things we do when we can't sleep.

2005-11-15T08:26:00.000-08:00

First off; to satisfy curiosity here is a picture of Michelle's ring. We are going to take nicer pictures, but until then please excuse the chain link fence in the background.

Now to the point of my post:

Rather than busy myself doing productive things, I often find that I waste hours looking at garbage on the internet when I can't sleep. Today is a perfect example. Our building is testing each appartment's fire alarm system, so the alarm has been chirping every few minutes for the past two hours and isn't expected to stop until 5pm this evening. Sleep is overrated I guess, and shift work isn't common in Ottawa, so shiftworkers don't matter.

Back to the point I was trying to make originally. Internet garbage; I try not to inflict upon my friends the flotsam and jetsam that I acrue during my aimless wanderings of the internet. Inbox space is a precious commodity and the last thing I want is to be the guy who fills yours with hundreds of 'You gotta check this out....' emails. Also, what I find funny in my sleep deprived state doesn't necessarily translate into laughter for the masses. But I think the following will hopefully elicit a chuckle from one or two of you;

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5409947201428088801&q=harry+pot

I'm not some kind of internet technician. If the above isn't a hotlink, I'm sure its not too much of a burden to cut and paste it into your browser.

I hope the above gets you as excited for the new Harry Potter movie as I am.

Fiance's are fragile - handle with care

2005-11-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

In our local paper, like those in many other communities, there is a weekend travel section. The interesting thing about living on this side of the country is that in our local paper every item in the travel section is written about BC. Its understandable I guess, I mean who wouldn't want to spend all their time basking in the glow of our deserved western superiority. It beats the hell out of basking in the glow of 'Ontario is the center of the universe'.

Back in August there was contained within our saturday behemoth newspaper an actual 'weekend' trip for locals. On the other side of the river *wink*, there is a place called Camp Fortune. In the winter its a ski hill, but in order to drum up some summer business they've also created an airial obstacle course.

I was super psyched! How cool would it be to zing through the trees on zip lines and climb around and generally do things I haven't respectably been able to get away with for years.

Now Michelle is afraid of hights, but thats a relative thing isn't it? I mean how could one be concerned when safely ensconced in a harness and are safely attached to terra firma by two safety cables.

Well, anxiety isn't a rational thing, and really isn't calmed by any number of safety devices. But in spite of this she did amazing and followed along behind me, completing two hours of the three hour course. She loved sailing from tree to tree, but hated the wildly swinging 'Mario Bros.' platforms.

I have to agree with her; the course would have been much cooler if it was comprised of three hours of sailing through the trees. But you have to put in a little potential energy (climbing stuff) in order to get the reward of kinetic energy (wild zip-line fun).

Tragedy struck at the two hour mark however. At this point in the course you are instructed to clip your safety lines onto a giant Tarzan swing and hurtle across the gap and crash into a vertical cargo net on the other side. Once coming to a not so gentle rest against the cargo net you then have to unclip yourself from the swing and navigate the net to the safety of the ground.

This is the only point on the whole at which you aren't safely clipped into anything to prevent your fall, and this is the point at which I had to watch my fiance fall six feet (eleven from her head) and land square on her back on the ratty old crash pad below the the net.

The pads were sloped away from the net so that when she hit she rolled backward over her head. Scared the living crap out of me, but thankfully I knew she was ok when she started screaming 'I hate you! You knew I was afraid of hights and I did it anyways!'

Glad that she was ok, all I could think was 'Yeah, but I didn't know how afraid of heights you were'.

Thankfully her 'hate' of me lasted only as long as the pain, which subsided quickly after the course officials let us have all the complimentary water we could drink. Never let it be said they aren't generous on the other side of the river.

Her concussion lasted a week. When she finally realized there might be some external contributing factor to the wicked headache she had we finally went to the hospital. You get a pretty good collection of dirty looks when you take your girlfriend into the trauma ward and she cooks up some rediculous story about 'falling out of a tree'.

After all this I decided it would be better to err on the side of caution and wait a little bit before proposing.

And the pics just keep coming!

2005-11-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

Another post with a few more pictures:

The top most is a picture of and art installation at the National Gallery here in town. Your tax dollars paid $1 million for that POS

The second photo is of Dave, M and myself at the Elephant and Castle before his rehearsal dinner

The last one is a picture of Habitat '67 in Montreal. The next time M and I go, I am going to arrange a tour. Some of the residents will open their doors to allow visitors to apreciate the architecture.

TTFN

Badger

Damn if it isn't hard to find a venue to post pictures!

2005-11-07T11:50:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

I know I am probably the worst for keeping in touch so I hope to use this to let people know what M and I are up to. Mostly it'll be photographic, but I may get inspired to post something more from time to time. Top to bottom the pictures are as follows:

Carlson's Groomsmen at the pub consuming some liquid courage before he gets married off.

M and I at Upper Canada Village. A poor substitute for Barkerville, but we managed to spend the whole day there.

The last one is of M and I at a cafe in the Byward Market on Canada day. Hot as balls in this part of the country, and humid too. Coffee probably wasn't the best choice of beverage.