Day 7.077: Mission accomplished

I left work at noon, ate my packed lunch on the road and only stopped to fill up the car in order to be home in time to set up the Xbox so that Exile #3 and her friends could dance. 

They are gathered for a sorry-you're-leaving party and are currently watching a movie. Various parents will be picking them up over the next hour or so.  I think they've had a good time.

Tomorrow is E5N1's turn - although he has another excuse for a party too.

Day 6.364: Sci-fi bonanza

As I mentioned, the only ice left in the cove is on the shoreline. Still, a sunrise can add a little glamour to almost anything:

...or make it look completely other-wordly.

Speaking of which, in between running and working, I've spent the last week and a half reading Wool by Hugh Howey and playing Halo 4. My goodness they were both good (in very different ways).  I know Halo 4 is old news but it is beautiful, engaging and challenging and Wool was the first book in a while that's kept me awake at night - first unable to stop reading and then unable to get it out of my mind.

Day 6.359: Too cold for me!

I've run when it's 1°F, 0°F and even, perhaps, a few degrees colder, but this morning, even though I left it until 7am to get out of bed, when faced with this:

(that's -24°C) I decided that an indoor day might be in order.

So I spent the day watching TV, internet videos, reading (I'm about halfway through the excellent Wool by Hugh Howey) with a bit of cooking and clearing up.  I've also been playing Halo 4 - yes I'm this guy:



but with nearly up-to-date hardware and a more manageable 1 year delay.

Day 6.355: Party like it's 2009

...or maybe 2006?

We got the Rock Band stuff out this afternoon. E5N1 requested we play Lego Rock Band (release date 2009). The kids are getting quite competent. I took this while the three of them were playing:

And then E5N1 chose to sing "Monster" by "The Automatic" (release date 2006). Here's a clip captured by Exile #2:



And with that, we bid farewell to 2013. Happy New Year!

Day 6.208: Time to rock

It's been some time since we got the Rock Band stuff out. It was the kids who prompted it this time. Here is E5N1 and Exile #3 both doing a great job with something!

And yes, the adults have joined in from time to time too!

Day 6.085: En Montreal

The day got off to an inauspicious start when my morning run was in fairly heavy, settling snow.

Our plans to visit the Botanical Gardens were put on hold until tomorrow and instead we headed to the old port area - in particular to visit the Montreal Science Centre.

What we saw inside is once again, more than I can do justice to, so here are some photos from our out-and-about time.

The bottom right picture shows that there was still quite a lot of ice left in the port.  The top left picture shows an extraordinary development.  I thought I'd never seen anything like it, but I was wrong.

Somewhere, we saw this sign, but it's in French so we don't understand it!

Do you?  And no, I don't mean the one that says, "Welcome!"

Day 5.345: Sketching and technology

It is a cliché that people use a napkin at dinner (or a bar, or a cocktail party) to make a great discovery, do an innovative design or exchange some world changing idea.

Just because it's a cliché doesn't mean it's not true.

However, today, two people at our dinner party were using a Samsung Galaxy Note (it's a giant smartphone or a tiny tablet depending on your point of view) with a stylus to do exactly what has been done with ballpoint pens on napkins for years!

I got home in time to see all my kids although E5N1 was very very sleepy.  Earlier in the evening he had done one of his (optional) homework assignments: write or draw something you look forward to doing over the holidays.  His answer was part sketch, part technology too:

It reads, "Play LEGO Star Wars with my Dad" and there we are with our Xbox controllers!

Day 5.229: Rocking, out

There was time for a few more songs from the cousins while I recovered from my long run and the rest of our visitors packed their bags.

We said goodbye to them just before lunchtime. They should be more than halfway home by now.  The house will seem empty again, but we haven't much time to miss them as this week is shaping up to be about as busy as can be - especially for Exile #2 and E5N1.

Day 5.227: Play hard

I spent part of the afternoon playing volleyball with my colleagues.

It looked a little like this:

Flickr user: Breyten Ernsting

but without the crowds, other games or competence you can see here.

This evening, after dinner we took a constitutional walk around the neighborhood which turned into a stumble in the dark - wow the evenings are getting dark early now! Then, after the kids went to bed, the four adults in the house played a bit of Rock Band - and yes, we played hard!

Day 4.088: The fourth was with him

Happy Birthday to E5N1 who turned four today.  We started the day with some very enthusiastic present opening.

Then the girls went off to school and we were joined by another dozen pre-schoolers for the birthday party. It was an energetic affair and did include cake although I'll save that for another day since I have exclusive facebook content (for the first time) and it is on that subject.

However, I will share this set of photos showing the downfall of the Death Star Piñata. It worked out pretty well.

This evening we played some Rock Band with friends. We realised that it was a fitting tribute to this day four years ago when Exile #2 was attempting to play Guitar Hero between contractions during the afternoon. E5N1 was born exactly four years ago now (11.55 pm).

Day 3.363: Forty!

When I was growing up, my desires for a white Christmas were almost always disappointed, but I would fairly regularly have a 'white' Birthday. Today was another one - we had a good six inches during yesterday and overnight.  Fortunately, the snow was basically done by this morning.

The day was spent getting ready for a party this evening. We had a quiz with 40 questions (about the number 40, 1971 and other people turning 40 this year), a cake with 40 M&Ms around the outside (that we never got out in the end) and balloons and the door hangings advertising my landmark.

I'd like to say we had 40 people here - but I think we topped 50. People ate, drank, chatted, played Kinect games (eventually the adults got a look-in), sat by the fire, were thrilled or baffled by my taste in music...

Exile #2 worked incredibly hard to bring it all together and, it turned out, to bring distant friends and family to be part of it through these emailed-and-printed greetings from the UK, New Zealand and elsewhere in the US. So cool.

Thanks to everyone who sent greetings, came to the party, wrote on my facebook wall...and generally gave me a great day today - all thoroughly appreciated!

Day 3.352: Little Rockers

I may have mentioned before that there are people who flee from the winter in this area and spend the coldest months in Florida or some other more temperate state.

We were seeing our friends off on a road-trip to Texas today. Eight of them are driving down there in two cars on a nearly-three-week trip for a basic-training graduation ceremony. So, naturally, we called a mid-week Rock Band night!

The kids were keen to be involved. Exile #3 joined in with the singing, Exile #4 tried out her real keyboard skills on the fake version and E5N1 brought his ambient dancing.

Have a good trip guys and we'll see you in the Spring - snowbirds!

Day 3.350: Boxing Day?

It's possible that, because December 26th falls on a Sunday this year, Boxing Day may be tomorrow, or even Tuesday - but for me it is always the day after Christmas Day and it has its own traditions.

One is a cold turkey dinner with mashed potatoes - so good today! Another is playing Kinect Sports and virtually knocking out my kids in the boxing ring. No - not really, but we did do that today.

We were over at Albaniana's for lunch which was very convivial - ending with the kids off doing their things while the adults sat around the dining table chatting.

This afternoon we had a Winter Storm Warning which is in effect until tomorrow afternoon. As a result we decided against going to our church gathering. Having decided that of course, the snow was slow to get going, but the kids were tired and getting a bit cranky so maybe it was just as well to have a quiet evening. I'm just in from shovelling the first three or four inches. If the predictions are accurate we will have as much again to deal with in the morning so I will be glad of this evening's efforts.

Day 3.334: Guitar-typing

One of the things I get paid to do is to write computer software and one of the languages I use is Python. In Python, there is a concept called 'duck-typing.' It isn't anything to do with how you use a keyboard, but rather it is about finding out what type of thing something is by seeing how it behaves. "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck - it's a duck*"

So, is this a guitar? Well, it looks like a guitar, I can play it like a guitar, I can even make it sound like a guitar...but no it is NOT a guitar. It's a Rock Band 3 Pro-Guitar controller and it is mind-bendingly fiendish but lots of fun - especially to an old guitarist like me.





* or as real pythonistas will tell you "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck - I can treat it as a duck!"

Day 3.319: Thanksgiving: dinner, dance!

We had as close to a traditional Thanksgiving as a bunch of British ex-pats could muster. Our guests were T & S and family - they were the first friends to get a 'name'-check on the blog back on Day 17 - nearly 1400 posts/days ago.

This is how our day went:

Preparation - including Exile #2 making it clear she wanted me to stay-out-of-the-kitchen, dinner (not pictured) - which was excellent featuring Turkey, lots of vegetables, pies (pumpkin and key-lime), and then Kinect dancing (and other games) by adults and children alike followed by a very chilly group photograph on the deck.  For comparison, here is a group shot from three and a half years ago.

We had a great day. This evening we lit the fire and had a little picnic, a game of Uno and then bedtime stories in front of it.

Day 3.314: Flying downwind

We had a packed day. In the morning I ran the lawnmower around the yard to pick up the straggling leaves and add them to the huge piles at the roadside. It was gratifyingly successful - dealing with pine needles and small seeds much better than the rake does - and using significantly less effort.

After lunch both Exile #3 and Exile #4 headed off to separate sleep-overs and the remainder of the family went off on a fruitless shopping trip looking for a reasonably priced wardrobe - it turns out that wardrobes are an exotic item of furniture here (presumably because everyone has built-in closets) and hard to find at any price.

When we got back it was time to get ready for Rock Band night - much quieter than last week and not just because of the absence of the girls - but good nevertheless. We ended the evening by introducing J & T to the Kinect sensor. They played several of the Kinect Adventures mini-games - this was weightless bubble popping in space:

As we said goodbye to them, I saw my handiwork in the front yard. Or rather I didn't. We have had a very windy afternoon and a huge number of leaves have blown from our side-of-the-road piles back onto my briefly-cleared lawn. Ah well, tomorrow is another day.

Day 3.307: Early adopter

I've never been a particularly early adopter of technology - at least, not for a while. I did queue up to buy my ZX Spectrum pretty much as soon as it became available in 1982 (it was the 48K version too - no messing around with 16K), but after that things went downhill. I got my first mobile (cell) phone in 2000 and my first (and only to-date) digital music player in 2006.

However, we obtained Kinect - the motion-gaming controller for Xbox 360 - a week after its US launch and are thoroughly enjoying this technology. We have been throwing ourselves around to the mini-games that make up Kinect Adventures for a couple of evenings in a row, and today we introduced the kids to Kinectimals and they have been loving adopting their cuddly big-cat cubs. Here is Exile #3 with her lion cub Leo. The other new members of the family are a leopard cub called Sunshine and Fluffy, a young black panther. So now, we are all early adopters.

Day 3.300: Red Ring of Death

Photo by Flickr user tomasland.

My faithful Xbox 360 has seen a lot of action - mostly, in the last few years, of the Rock Band variety. Alas, it has finally given up the bits and gone to the electronics recycling pile in the sky. In fact, it happened when we tried to get it fired up for Rock Band Night yesterday. Happily, unlike when we started the event, we have another one to call on as a substitute and the 'show' went on.

One of the disadvantages of it having survived a long time is that it is now out of even the extended warranty for this famous error. Of course that means that I have an excuse to replace it with its less error-prone, sleeker, quieter and wifi-enabled younger brother.

The rocking will go on, but for now, a moment's silence at the end of a busy day (that I plan to tell you about on Monday) for a valued member of the household:


[this is it!]


and, goodnight!

Day 3.299: Rock Band 3

We had a a good crowd for Rock Band Night today - swelled by it being a farewell evening for one of the group and by the arrival of Rock Band 3.

I think everyone had a good time.

Day 3.298: Please Do No+

It's been a bit of a quiet week. Busy at work. No need to rush home for incidents with the car. A bit of Rock Band 3 in the evenings.  I won't pretend it's not quite welcome after last week, but it doesn't make for exciting reading I'm afraid.

Mind you, the header on the blog does promise you the 'mundane days' too - so, if all you get is a slightly amusing sign from a restaurant rest-room, you'll have to make do with that until tomorrow!