Trilobite

I usually get only junk mail at work, but today something interesting came for me. It’s addressed to “Dr. Lehotay.” Ha. I like the address stickers pasted onto the letterhead.

Today Celine, Banjo, and I went geocaching in Lemoine Point. We have been to this cache before, but we wanted to drop off a travel bug. Afterwards we went to Queen’s where the first aid team was teaching CPR for free. The course was only an hour long, but the instructors managed to convey the basic concepts. At the end we were given Saint John’s Ambulance CPR level A certifications. We are even insured by St. John’s Ambulance for $100,000 of legal fees if we do a bad job resuscitating somebody!

Tonight for dinner I made whole wheat cr�pes and Celine filled them with shrimp, asparagus and peas in a bechamel sauce. Yum.

Grrr…. blogger.com and tripod.com have suddenly stopped working together and we are unable to post any blogs. (I am posting this entry “by hand.”) I asked blogger.com about it and they blamed it on tripod, saying tripod only accepts active ftp connections, which blogger.com no longer supports. So now I have emailed tripod and we will see what they say. I don’t have much hope, since the tripod ftp documentation says that they do indeed support passive ftp. I have a suspicion that the two companies are being intentionally annoying to each other because tripod recently launched their own blogging software. We may have to move the blog again. Grrrr.

Last Saturday evening Celine, Christine, and I went to Ottawa and had dinner at a Thai restaurant in Nepean called Baan Thai. It was quite good. Sunday we went geocaching and I was very excited to find the cache. I spent several days in November decrypting the clues for this particular cache, and Celine and I tried and couldn’t find it when we were last in Ottawa. But this time we were successful! I think it’s most difficult cache we’ve found so far. Photo: Banjo catching snowballs.

We had a very nice dinner Sunday night at an Italian restaurant downtown. We were walking around trying to find a place to eat and Celine saw a bottle of Big House Red on a shelf through the window. Well, we just had to go in! We sat next to the fireplace and warmed up after our chilly afternoon outside.

Monday was Celine’s birthday. We stayed home and had a quiet evening. Christine and I gave her some presents, which I think she liked.

I am very tired of fixing broken HPLC machines at work. I’ve been working on three of them for the past week or so. Hopefully they will stay fixed now, but that’s not too likely.

Ack! The ads used to be about conservation lands in Africa. Now they are about popup advertising! Big brother is watching me! Double-plus ungood!

I recently noticed that the banner ads on this page were kind of interesting (but not so interesting that I wanted to click on them). I did a bit of searching around and discovered that Tripod and Google work together to place relevant ads on all Tripod web pages. That means the ads will change depending on what we blog about. I can’t decide if I think this is neat or frightening.

By the way, if you use Internet Explorer and are annoyed by the popup ads on Tripod, you should install the Google toolbar. It lets you block popups everywhere, including on Tripod.

Celine went to the pet store yesterday to get some dog food, and I ended up buying rodent bedding and mouse food. Our mice are back and I don’t have the heart to put them outside when the weather is so cold. I figure if I catch any I can wait until the spring to release them, or maybe there is a mouse breeder in town who would want them. I set the trap last night, but it was untouched when I checked on it this morning.

Today we made our delicious cranberry orange scones for breakfast. I always like those. Later I took Banjo for a walk and watched the hockey players on the rink in the park for a bit. The kids and adults play together. At first I thought this was unfair, but then I saw a 6 year old kid check one of the adults and knock him over!

We are going to Nepean when Christine gets off of work this evening.

This weekend Rheni had a few people over to her place for vintage night. The best wine of the evening was a Goundry ’98 cab (Australian, of course). I’ve never heard of that winery, but now I’ll keep an eye out for more of their wines. There was also lots of good food. Jonathan’s gambas al ajillo were excellent. Steve was out of town and when Mica went to bed she slept with his shirt.

More photos: Rheni, Jonathan, Ze, entertaining the kids, Celine snacking

It was -25°C this morning with a very cold wind. When does summer start again?

Now that the blog is up and working properly again, I can finally post some pictures from our trip to Ottawa this past weekend.

We drove up on Friday night and went to the theatre to see The Return of the King, which we enjoyed very much. Saturday afternoon we went geocaching (it was very foggy) and in the evening Celine took me to Parliament Hill to see the Christmas decorations before they were taken down. We both liked the snowflakes that were projected onto the parliament building. While we were wandering around we came across a peaceful gazebo, and also a ghostly ship in the nearby lock station which made me feel like I was in an episode of Scooby Doo.

On Sunday we squeezed in a bit more geocaching before we came home.