Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone is having a great (American) Thanksgiving! This year I missed Canadian Thanksgiving so it was hard to miss American Thanksgiving too. So I decided to make the best of the holiday even though I had to work today. We had a "feast" of cornbread stuffing, rotisserie chicken and snap peas. Plus Claire said that she's going to make me a real Thanksgiving turkey this weekend when we go out to visit.

I know, I know Thanksgiving isn't supposed to be all about food. I'm very thankful for my life (even in the "arctic" north) & Dewey and I have many things to be thankful for.

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New Post below......it took me a while to be able to add pics. More soon.

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The Dixie Chicks.....

ROCK!!!! The Chicks visited Calgary for two shows on Sunday & Monday. I had floor level tickets for the Sunday show. I bought two so Dewey & I could go but Dewey had other ideas. The Dixie Chicks are not his favorite band. So instead, I took Claire (my MIL).

Bob Schneider opened the show. I was super-excited by this fact (which confused all my Calgary friends). No one in Calgary has EVER heard of him. I, on the other hand, used to go see him all the time in Austin. The really cool thing was that he came out and signed autographs after his set. After years of being a huge fan in Austin, I finally get to meet him....in Calgary. Weird.

The Dixie Chicks took to the stage to "Hail to the Chief". The show really rocked. They played all (I think) of the songs from their latest CD & alot of the songs from their previous CD "Home". At the end of the show, a poster from the audience was brought up for Natalie to see. She said "I think someone from Calgary wins the best poster of the tour award. I've always said "If you don't have something good to say, you can sit by me"." Then she showed us the sign. It said "Nobody Likes a Nasty Bush!". Too funny. To say the least, I am looking forward to seeing their documentary, "Shut Up & Sing".

If you have a chance to go to one of their shows, GO!

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Photography Class

Since we bought the Nikon D70S, I’ve mostly been using it as a glorified point and shoot camera. While it takes much better pictures than my little digital camera, it’s still a bit of a waste. Sooooo….. I decided to sign up for a photography class to learn how to use the manual functions on my camera to take better pictures. I had NO IDEA how hard it would be! I’m used to see it, point at it, push a button & voila you have a picture. Now it’s see it, point at it, fiddle with a couple of buttons and dials, press a button, swear, fiddle again, push a button, swear, repeat as necessary until you get some semblance of a good picture. Nicole has shown an amazingly large amount of patience since I follow her around snapping dozens of pictures but even she is getting tired of it. (Will gets tired of it after about 2 pictures.) Having said that, I think I’m getting better. Here are my first attempts at manual photography. Our assignment was a portrait, a macro shot & a shot of something white on a white background. Hope you like them.

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Nicole & Matt’s Wedding

Dewey & I traveled to Dallas for Nicole & Matt’s wedding. You might remember Nicole from my 60k Walk to End Breast Cancer. She & I have been great friends ever since we were neighbors in Austin. I had always hoped that she would find someone great to spend the rest of her life with & she has with Matt!

They chose to have their wedding in Dallas b/c her dad & step-mom live there. It’s also a super-easy place to travel since it’s a major hub for American Airlines. Dewey & I were quite excited about getting there without having to change planes. Nicole planned a weekend full of wedding festivities. On Friday night, we dined at The Blue Mesa Grille. Dewey & I got our Mexican food fix! On Saturday, their wedding was at the Dallas Aquarium. The aquarium really fits in with Nicole’s personality….she loves water animals. She even did her grad school thesis on turtles! The wedding was beautiful & the party after was great. Their band, Big Daddy Alright, was AWESOME. Dewey & I had a great time dancing (which is unusual for Dewey b/c he will rarely dance). On Sunday morning, we drug our butts out of bed for breakfast tacos at The Cadillac Bar. The weekend was a great time for all & I got to spend way more time with Nicole than I figured I would. It’s always great to see her & to see that she is going to be so happy.

Dewey also got to get his geek on while we were in Dallas. We visited Frye’s, which is an electronics store the likes of which Canada has never seen. Dewey was in heaven. Amazingly enough though, I spent more money there than he did. I bought a new Nintendo DS Lite (b/c I need more time wasters in my life). It is great but I need to buy more games for it. So far I have Brain Age which supposedly helps you maintain your mental acuity as you age. Dewey swears that it’s helping him already. Who knows?

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Happy Late Halloween

Long time no blogging. Sorry for the long hiatus. The next few posts will be ones that I should have posted in the last week or so. They will not necessarily be in chronological order.

Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween. It was a pretty big non-event for me this year. We had a Social Club Halloween event at work & that was it for the day. My photography class nudged out any time to be able to hand out candy, though I didn’t really see any kids around our condo complex. Hopefully by this time next year we’ll be in a house so we’ll have trick or treaters.

That reminds me…..we’re selling our condo. Before you yell “But you just moved in”…..let me say, “Believe me, I know”. It’s just too small. We’re planning on starting a family at some point so we need more room. When Will & Nicole come for their weekends, the condo is full to bursting. Adding another person into that might work for a very short time but not for long. So….we’ve decided to put it on the market and see what happens. We’re also taking a chance by doing the whole “for sale by owner” thing. So far we’ve had one showing & we have one scheduled for today. Hopefully it will sell soon so that we can find a new house (I refuse to look until we have an offer b/c I don’t want to get my heart set on something & then not be able to get it b/c we haven’t sold our place). The positive to this whole thing is that the market in Calgary is much higher now than when we bought the condo. It’s slowed down a bit recently but the prices for inner-city haven’t gone down. The prices in the suburbs HAVE gone down though so that’s helpful to us (b/c that’s most likely where we’ll end up). Needless to say that the condo is cleaner than it’s ever been. Keep you fingers crossed that we’ll be able to sell soon @ something close to our asking price.

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