A Day in the Life

Beth of SUAR fame tagged me. So here you all are.

Today being Thanksgiving, I slept in. It being Thanksgiving, I knew I had to include some photos. I am crushed to admit there are only 16. Not twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was. I'm sorry.  Put me on the group W bench. At least I'm not facing blind justice here. (The young pups with no kulture that don't get the reference can email me.)

Here I am a few minutes after getting out of bed putting coffee in the microwave. Yes that is the right time. You don't want to see what my hair looks like. The last few mornings I was up at 3:30.

After some blog surfing I noticed the sun coming up, and tried to capture the frost on my neighbour's garage. I'm not sure how well that turned out.

I'd made a to do list for the weekend. A couple things have been done already so they have been removed. I'm really liking Notes Plus as an iPad app for capturing hand written (printed) notes.

Here's my desk, middling messy. I like to try to keep it tidy, but it doesn't happen that much. I also had to clean up and organize the tax paperwork from tax season. That's what the big mound of paper is. There was some other paperwork to be tidied too. The shoe laces are from the new Brooks. Now that I've done speed laces, I can't use regular laces for my running shoes. Note the medals hanging in the top left corner, where I can see them. Yes, I'm a Mac guy.

Here's the after. You'll note the AOL CD that I use as a coaster. I'm not sure how long it's been there, but it's about 10 years. It works really well. Once upon a time when I worked at Skystone Engineering, I brought in a bunch of old mainframe hard drive disks to use as coasters. Same idea, I like to use and reuse where ever I can. It's the way I roll. That's an old HP 11C. I love RPN. The extra cable is to synch my phone and iPad. Soon I won't have to worry about that.

After the desk I was out tidying the yard for winter. We could still go months without snow, but that's not the smart bet. One year we had a huge dump of snow on Labour day, and it never really let up. At the moment the forecast is calling for some snow next weekend. It supposed to be warmer than last winter, but that isn't saying much. As long as it's sunny, I don't care about the actual temperature. But when it's cloudy I get moody. Which, Susi, is why I don't live in Vancouver, and, V oh favourite cousin o'mine, why I don't live in the Fraser Valley.

I mowed the lawn it one last time, emptied the water barrel onto the flower beds, pulled a bunch of weeds and generally tidied. I also managed to talk to 3 of my neighbours, which is always nice.

One of the things about making your own wine is that periodically, no matter how careful you are, some of the bottles end up with some residue on the inside. As a routine thing one has to remove the labels and clean them, and that's a soothing activity. But once the residue builds up you have to get a bit more drastic. I'll dump some bleach into the bottles, and add hot water, with a bit more bleach in the bucket and let them soak a bit. Then I'll put in some small ball bearings in each bottle and whoosh that around. A bit of scrubbing and rinsing generally takes care of any film or deposits. But some of the crud is made from sterner stuff. I dump in some straight bleach, the ball bearings, maybe scrub with a bottle brush, and whoosh that around for a while. That always works. Rinse it all, and they are ready for the next batch of wine. Which we should be ordering in a month or so.

Here is a typical before shot. I don't know how well the film will show up. This is why I use clear glass rather than green. One look tells you if it's clean. The only reason to use green glass is to protect it from sunlight. Since my basement never sees sunlight, I'm not worried about it.

 Here's an after shot. Clean and ready for more wine.

Like I said, it is Thanksgiving. Here is the chosen wine for the meal. I bottled this December 4, 2004, and this is the last bottle. It's very good. There were several wine diamonds on the cork, and a huge one with a bit of sediment at the bottom.

Naturally, there has to be a bird. There's just two of us, so even the smallest turkey is mega overkill. We'd thought of ordering a Turducken, but left it too late, and even the smallest of them are still pretty big. This is a Guinea Fowl, with carrots, potatoes, dates, rice, shallots, wine, and fresh herbs mix good for poultry. Here's what it looks like in the pot.

Here's the the plate. It was every bit as good as it looks. There are also 3 containers made up for lunch next week. I could go on here about how we appreciate what we have, and the life we lead, but that would just make you all jealous. Fruit flan for dessert, and I've previously posted photos of them. No need to drive you all mad again.

One of the tasks is to move stuff away from the furnace and tidy up the fitness stuff. Now that I've got a new trainer, I've got an extra trainer. I can give you a really good price on it. Any takers? More of the summer fitness stuff was put away, and the winter stuff was dug out. I'm really looking forward to the next run in -35 C (-31 F) weather.

 After dinner we went out for a nice walk around the neighbourhood. Here's the view from the top of the berm just beside 37 St, looking south.

From the same place looking south and west. The mountains really are there, but they are hard to see. Mornings are the best times for mountain photos.

At the south end of Woodbine is a place that overlooks the west end of Fish Creek. This is a panorama shot using Photosynth.  We really enjoy walking around the neighbourhood, and with all my training I haven't done much walking lately. Normally I have a few routes I like to run, or I go down into Fish Creek and run through all those trees. It's a great park, and one could run for hours and not run on the same path. It takes me about 40 minutes to ride my hybrid from the west end at 37th street (just to the right of this photo) to the Ivor Strong Bridge at the east end.

After the walk I was downstairs doing some gentle stretching and core. The elbows to opposite knee thing sort of works, but I can really feel the deep core muscles just below my belly button protesting. They are still tired from the run last weekend.

As you can see, my to do list is much shorter now. I'm feeling very accomplished. I think it's time to pour another glass of wine, and maybe put on a DVD. Perhaps Buckaroo Banzai, I'm sort of in that mood. Or maybe the Fifth Element.

And Beth, don't hold it against me that you don't have a shirt my size. Should I win, I will give it to the girl that coached me last year. She is TOTALLY a Shut Up And Run kind of girl, and would love to wear your shirt. I'm totally loving mine. It's my go to running shirt, and has had several compliments.