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Happy Birthday Troy!

I don’t think I have ever properly sent a Happy Birthday wish via this site to my cousin Troy…whom really is more like my brother Troy. So…Happy Birthday Troy!

If Randy was the man who introduced me to playing guitar, Troy is the man who prompted me to push into the realm of playing well on guitar, and entertaining the masses. Many a beer have been drank while listening to Palmer and Palmer at Aunt Dinah’s house. I’m pretty sure my finger actually bled after an eight hour session of jamming together.

Troy is definitely one of those gentlemen who put others first (both professionally and personally) and has so many hobbies that he probably doesn’t have a boring moment in his day! Whether it be listening to tunes, drawing, crafting some new songs, watching movies, following around his lovely wife to garage sales on Saturdays, he’s got plenty on his plate, but he still manages to keep in touch with all his family and friends.

Here’s to you brother on your birthday! Play the heck out of that Vox amp today!

So a car drove into a sinkhole last night on HWY 174 going into Orleans.

When you first heard about this, I know you were thinking the exact same thing I was…

Mole-Men.

That’s right.  Mole-men.  We know they exist.  They are probably plotting civilization’s demise right now and this was just a test.

I’m glad to hear that the driver emerged from his car unscathed other than a few deep scratches.  Could have been a lot worse!

Yesterday, Vero’s family and I went to a public auction run by Tru Liquidators. Vero and I have our eye on a few items for the house and wanted to see how an auction was run.

All in all, I was quite impressed.

It started out with a preview hour from 12-1PM. That wasn’t entirely exciting. We were expecting a lot more stock in the showroom, but in hindsight, an auction would take days if they had a warehouse full of stuff.

There literally is THAT auctioneer who rambles on some prices…”Do I have fifty, fifty, fifty, blah blah blah, how about forty, forty, forty?”. It was interesting to see him at work. They start out at a high price, then it drops, drops, drops, and then when people start bidding, it comes back up to a reasonable price in most cases.

From our viewpoint, 90% of the stuff sold was a good deal. There were three piece leather sofa sets selling for $1,000. There was also a 65” Panasonic TV that sold for $1,700. While I didn’t think it was a great deal, I checked Future Shop and they lowest price they have for a Panasonic of this size is $3,000. So that’s pretty good savings!

I also liked how sometimes they had multiple sets of an item so if the knife set was won at $30 they ask if anyone else wants a set at that price? In fact, a sofa set went for $2,000 but then they had three more that they didn’t want to bring back to Toronto so they dropped the price to $1,500! All were snatched up.

There’s a 10% buyers premium and I’m wondering if you have to pay taxes on the item as well. But all in all, we were impressed of how it played out…not ENTIRELY impressed with the selection. The only thing that piqued our curiosity was the sofa sets but we don’t know if we’ll like leather.

Labour Day weekend used to mean awesome parties at Matt’s cottage…but no more!  (actually, not for a long time now!).  This year was spent staining the deck in the backyard.  A much needed project and it shaped up to be a great weekend to do so.

Vero’s dad was on hand to help me do the bulk of it and Vero helped out as well when she wasn’t making some lovely lasagna with Danielle.  I started out Saturday morning with an alarm clock of 7:30 only to realize that the deck was soaked from the night before!  Argh…what a waste.  But I used the time to clean up the garage a little bit and stumbled upon a few items I’ve been looking for.

Around 11AM we started staining the rails around the entire deck.  We also sent Vero and Danielle out for another gallon of stain as well as a sprayer.  Gaetan said that the sprayer worked amazingly well with some sealer he used before so I figured we should give it a try on the planks.  Unfortunately, the stain was way too thick for it and it was more of a pain to have someone spray the stain and the other try and backbrush it with the brush.  PLUS it was around 2PM so the boards were HOT so as soon as you put some stain onto it, it just sucked it up.  If you didn’t get to it in ten seconds, you were in for trouble!  I wonder if it was also the fact that there was little to no stain left on these boards that contributed to it absorbing fast?

Either way, after some mishaps with the sprayer, we opted to have Gaetan roll it on the deck and I backbrushed it.  This was amazing simple and effective.  A few hours later, the deck was done and looking pretty fine!  I continued the evening with touching up little things like the flower boxes and whatever I could find.  I also had to buy ANOTHER gallon of stain.  In hindsight, it would take five gallons of paint to do the deck which comes out to $225 to stain the entire thing.

The next day we added another coat of paint to the floorboards but opted out of staining the rails again.  Unfortunately for me, I waited a few hours and walked across the boards and Vero noticed that my feet left some marks.  I guess the night before wasn’t a big issue since a) it was absorbed by the wood a lot more b) there was another coat going over top of it anyhow.  So at this point, it’s a waiting game of 72 hours before I set foot on them boards again and I may have to touch up a few portions.

That’s where I am left now…95% done and I have to get a few sides of the hot tub and some lattice.  The lattice was quite simple to stain with Gaetan and I having a good system down of rolling it on and then brushing it in.

2 full days of work and a little left over to do, Vero and I are really excited with how the deck looks now.  Not sure how long it will last but it is worth it.

Who would have thought that we would have to fend off a gorilla at our wedding? We sure didn’t! Quite the suprise!

Thanks to Uncle Greg for sending some photos our way from the wedding. These are the first ones we’ve seen!

http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/theteapartylive

I’ve talked about it before, but I have to say that I’m really enjoying the Kickstarter/Pledgemusic model of things nowadays.

Basically, it’s allowing people to create/sell a product ONLY if they raise the money for it beforehand.  What a fascinating concept!  Instead of bands creating a gazillion copies of CDs that may not sell, why not just see how many will sell first?

Right now, The Tea Party are going to create a live album on their current tour if they raise enough funds.  In three days it’s already at 82%.

I have also been backing various video game creator’s projects that were involved with Sierra Games back in the day.  I *love* Sierra Games so it’s great to see these programmers still out there interested in creating games that I love!

Here I thought I did pretty well, but this one nailed it!  While I sometimes love the Internet, I hate it because it shows that I can do better.  🙂

When the snow leaves the ground, it’s time to do a few things…crack a brew outside, soak in the sun, and get rid of those god-awful Christmas lights that have been sitting there for five months (at least in Canada!)

I believe I share this peeve with my father and mother as well…remember when those icicle lights came out years ago? Some people thought they looked nice enough to leave up all year long!

Fast fact: They do not. Take them down or move to the North Pole!

That being said, I am a procrastinator and I need some motivation to get things done sometimes. So that’s when I arrived at Mike’s house yesterday afternoon and noticed a nice string of Christmas lights up there in the month of May, I realized that he must be pretty busy and would appreciate some help.

Luckily, I found a ladder downstairs, and after figuring out how to unfold and lock the hinges (this ladder was pretty great!), I proceeded to climb onto the roof and remove the lights. While I was doing so, I was thinking “I wonder if someone is going to call the cops?” and then I thought of how ludicrous that call would have been. “Allo, police? Yes, there is a man on top of my neighbours roof taking off his Christmas lights.” The police probably would have said “Good on him! We were about to start handing out fines for Christmas lights 30 days after the last snowfall!”

Mike arrived and he had a good chuckle. But we chatted later over a beer and it’s like we said before…sometimes we all just need a little kick in the ass to get a few things done. Lord knows I’m guilty of that on MANY fronts. Pink garage door is a prime example.