I have been getting more and more frequent hits to my site from people searching for Alaska, time and again the information seekers are of Asian descent. To help guide these seekers back along their proper path, I have included some tourism links below.
The official tourism site: Travel Alaska
English
Japanese
German
Korean
Hope that helps
Monday, July 25, 2005
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Long time no post, but here are some fast posts. This is Erin and I's new fishes. We got the tank from my brother and his wife when they moved out of town. (Thanks guys) So here is our fishies, the two on the bottom are Red and Opal, they are our gals, and the one hiding at the top is Fireball, he is pretty funny looking. So we got them all setup this week, and I just wanted to share.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
The House
On to the topics that so clutter my mind; so the first topic, starting chronologically back in April, is the house. We did the final paperwork on a bright and sunny Wednesday evening at the lawyer?s office in Milton; no one tells you that when you buy a house that you must first complete the paperwork decathlon. There are probably over 20 documents that require signatures in triplicate when you close a house, who knew? We signed weird things, bland things, final zoning things, bylaws things, and a waiver thing that acknowledged and dismissed a perceived but non-existent conflict of interest, a what??? The whole while we were signing away we were grinning ear-to-ear for our first house. We topped the evening with dinner at one of the many Irish Pubs of Milton, I think they are about four (well English/Irish style pubs) so far we have tried two and both are great.
We closed the following day, April 21, 2005, after some hanging out in the house to be cool, sent Erin back to Guelph to finish packing, and I went to bed at my parents.
Friday of that week I hung around the house and watched a parade of Bell, and Cogeco people hook things up, I also paid this guy next to nothing to install all the phone jacks. Bell wanted something absurd like 150 + 70 per jack I think, and this guy did the whole house for $55, and he was very professional. I think his website is www.buildinghomes.ca, (see Flickr if I like you, you get a link, but I digress.)
Saturday was the big move; we started out in Guelph at about 8am (the earliest we could pickup the truck.) At Erin?s apartment we had a whole pile of people from her lab, including Karen, Erin Anderson, Homed (sp) and I think Cory, but I am not sure. Karen, and Erin A for sure were there from the start and great helps, Karen even came with us to Milton to unload, but don?t underestimate Karen, under here diminutive appearance she is surprisingly strong, heck she would be considered strong for someone twice her size, suffice it to say that Karen was awesome! We rapped up in Guelph surprisingly early, like 9:30 ? 10:00, which put us way ahead of schedule, and we were still waiting for Becky and her boyfriend Louis who were showing up around 10:00 ? 10:30. So Trevor (who had been there since 7:00 am when we left Mississauga to go pickup the truck,) and I headed to his house to pickup the BBQ. Between Trevor, Ellie, Brad, Jodi, Kevin, and Lisa they all went in together to buy me a BBQ for a wedding present which was totally awesome. It?s one of the ones with the backburner for rotisserie, and makes things sooooo good, but again I am off topic. Then we did a quick stop over at my parents to get a whole pile of junk and coordinated with them when they would drop off the rest. Then back to the house!
By the time we got to the house it was raining something awful and the 'lawn' and 'driveway' had become a giant mud pit. Also with no attempt at coordination, Trevor and I arrived at the house at the same time as Josh, and Erin with the car full of people. So Trevor and I dropped the truck ramp right into the garage, and carried things in to the garage, where we handed them off to our stocking clad movers who quickly dispersed the items into the house. Again, we got ahead of schedule so Trevor and I were off to Erin?s parents to pick up the washer, dryer and sofa that they were donating to the cause. By this point Brad had showed up, so he and Josh were going to follow in a second car and help.
Here is where we get confused and silly, Josh and Brad following a HUGE CUBE TRUCK got lost, and when they finally realized that they were lost, Trevor and I were in the process of man handling the first of the appliances out the door. So after a flurry of confused cell phone chatter we sent them on a quest to buy pizza to take back to the house. Trevor and I returned to Milton with our truck of heavy objects just in time to get some lunch, after which we carried the appliances in, it was pretty much the hardest thing we did all weekend and it hurt, a lot! They were heavy, and awkward, and we had to do strange turns to get them into place. Thanks to all my friends that helped, that weekend would have been a disaster if it wasn?t for so many hands helping out. We wound out the afternoon all flopped around on what ever makeshift furniture we could find, and then after returning the truck did dinner in Waterloo with Becky, Josh and Louis. Following that we dragged our sorry butts back to the house and collapsed into a comatose state of exhaustion.
Sunday, also known as crazy fool day, I decided in my exhausted state of physical weakness that it would be a great idea to buy office furniture, so I went to the Neoset factory outlet and purchased a great set of matching office furniture, the whole thing, which would have been over $2000 if purchased at retail, came out to about 1000, so I was happy. In my crapulence of money savings I realized the flaw in my plan, Neoset if HEAVY! So I got my office furniture in, but the cost to my body was something terrible, but in the end, I think it was worth it because my office looks great! I will get some pictures up soon.
Since moving in I think we spend as much time and money a week at Canadian Tire as we do at the grocery store, there are just so many widgets one requires for a house, Garage door opener, and Air Conditioner just for starters, but those I promise are epic tales for a post of their own. All and all we are really happy with the house, the only complaint is the quality of the builder paint, but we understand that it is universally bad across all builders. So that is the conclusion of the many months of house construction adventures, again pictures forthcoming of the various rooms and exteriors of the finished house, at the end of the day its great to come home to my wife and our house, and in the end that makes everything worthwhile.
We closed the following day, April 21, 2005, after some hanging out in the house to be cool, sent Erin back to Guelph to finish packing, and I went to bed at my parents.
Friday of that week I hung around the house and watched a parade of Bell, and Cogeco people hook things up, I also paid this guy next to nothing to install all the phone jacks. Bell wanted something absurd like 150 + 70 per jack I think, and this guy did the whole house for $55, and he was very professional. I think his website is www.buildinghomes.ca, (see Flickr if I like you, you get a link, but I digress.)
Saturday was the big move; we started out in Guelph at about 8am (the earliest we could pickup the truck.) At Erin?s apartment we had a whole pile of people from her lab, including Karen, Erin Anderson, Homed (sp) and I think Cory, but I am not sure. Karen, and Erin A for sure were there from the start and great helps, Karen even came with us to Milton to unload, but don?t underestimate Karen, under here diminutive appearance she is surprisingly strong, heck she would be considered strong for someone twice her size, suffice it to say that Karen was awesome! We rapped up in Guelph surprisingly early, like 9:30 ? 10:00, which put us way ahead of schedule, and we were still waiting for Becky and her boyfriend Louis who were showing up around 10:00 ? 10:30. So Trevor (who had been there since 7:00 am when we left Mississauga to go pickup the truck,) and I headed to his house to pickup the BBQ. Between Trevor, Ellie, Brad, Jodi, Kevin, and Lisa they all went in together to buy me a BBQ for a wedding present which was totally awesome. It?s one of the ones with the backburner for rotisserie, and makes things sooooo good, but again I am off topic. Then we did a quick stop over at my parents to get a whole pile of junk and coordinated with them when they would drop off the rest. Then back to the house!
By the time we got to the house it was raining something awful and the 'lawn' and 'driveway' had become a giant mud pit. Also with no attempt at coordination, Trevor and I arrived at the house at the same time as Josh, and Erin with the car full of people. So Trevor and I dropped the truck ramp right into the garage, and carried things in to the garage, where we handed them off to our stocking clad movers who quickly dispersed the items into the house. Again, we got ahead of schedule so Trevor and I were off to Erin?s parents to pick up the washer, dryer and sofa that they were donating to the cause. By this point Brad had showed up, so he and Josh were going to follow in a second car and help.
Here is where we get confused and silly, Josh and Brad following a HUGE CUBE TRUCK got lost, and when they finally realized that they were lost, Trevor and I were in the process of man handling the first of the appliances out the door. So after a flurry of confused cell phone chatter we sent them on a quest to buy pizza to take back to the house. Trevor and I returned to Milton with our truck of heavy objects just in time to get some lunch, after which we carried the appliances in, it was pretty much the hardest thing we did all weekend and it hurt, a lot! They were heavy, and awkward, and we had to do strange turns to get them into place. Thanks to all my friends that helped, that weekend would have been a disaster if it wasn?t for so many hands helping out. We wound out the afternoon all flopped around on what ever makeshift furniture we could find, and then after returning the truck did dinner in Waterloo with Becky, Josh and Louis. Following that we dragged our sorry butts back to the house and collapsed into a comatose state of exhaustion.
Sunday, also known as crazy fool day, I decided in my exhausted state of physical weakness that it would be a great idea to buy office furniture, so I went to the Neoset factory outlet and purchased a great set of matching office furniture, the whole thing, which would have been over $2000 if purchased at retail, came out to about 1000, so I was happy. In my crapulence of money savings I realized the flaw in my plan, Neoset if HEAVY! So I got my office furniture in, but the cost to my body was something terrible, but in the end, I think it was worth it because my office looks great! I will get some pictures up soon.
Since moving in I think we spend as much time and money a week at Canadian Tire as we do at the grocery store, there are just so many widgets one requires for a house, Garage door opener, and Air Conditioner just for starters, but those I promise are epic tales for a post of their own. All and all we are really happy with the house, the only complaint is the quality of the builder paint, but we understand that it is universally bad across all builders. So that is the conclusion of the many months of house construction adventures, again pictures forthcoming of the various rooms and exteriors of the finished house, at the end of the day its great to come home to my wife and our house, and in the end that makes everything worthwhile.
Blog Back
While short of some poorly annotated pictures, I have been excessively remiss in my blogging of late. I even gave you a run down of topics I wanted to blog about, and never did. To say that I have been busy is an understatement, but this hardly takes any time at all and makes the excuse paltry and weak. So I think my resistance to the pen came at the hands of the overwhelming subject matter backlog, so I am going to try and tackle some of that on the way to work this morning.
Finally my other excuse is that I can't post pictures.... While not 100% true, I can't post pictures in the fashion that I would like. If you look at the pictures most recently posted you can see that they are blocky, there is in fact nothing wrong with the originals, only the posting mechanism. I used Flickr to post them, and Flickr does not get a link to their site because I am mad at them, because they take a perfectly reasonable resolution image, and garble it up by re-re-sizing it. Not happy, not happy at all, but the alternative is Hello, and it doesn't support my network setup with proxy, so I am hoped, beyond manual picture posting, but really they do a better job then me. Also Blogger just updated its tools to allow picture posting, but they don't work, grumble grumble grumble.
So my catching up is going to come at the expense of pictures, I hope you are all okay with that, if not, wait a few weeks, and I will do a little bit of picture work when I can, maybe this weekend.
Finally my other excuse is that I can't post pictures.... While not 100% true, I can't post pictures in the fashion that I would like. If you look at the pictures most recently posted you can see that they are blocky, there is in fact nothing wrong with the originals, only the posting mechanism. I used Flickr to post them, and Flickr does not get a link to their site because I am mad at them, because they take a perfectly reasonable resolution image, and garble it up by re-re-sizing it. Not happy, not happy at all, but the alternative is Hello, and it doesn't support my network setup with proxy, so I am hoped, beyond manual picture posting, but really they do a better job then me. Also Blogger just updated its tools to allow picture posting, but they don't work, grumble grumble grumble.
So my catching up is going to come at the expense of pictures, I hope you are all okay with that, if not, wait a few weeks, and I will do a little bit of picture work when I can, maybe this weekend.
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