2007-06-17 - 23:42

Overdue update

I guess that this was my longest gap between entries. I'm definitely losing my motivation to post here but we'll see how it goes.

The last month and a half has been fairly busy. Three consecutive weekends in May included a visit from Laurie's mother and sister, a visit from her cousin Jackie, and the wedding of one of her former coworkers. The visits coincided with the Tulip Festival, so we checked that out a couple of times. We also took Laurie's mother over to Gatineau Park for her first time.

Although I've been slack on this journal, I have been keeping up my other site, including the pictures section. So, if you're interested, you can see the highlights of the Tulip Festival, this year's first trip to Gatineau, and the wedding, as mentioned a mere paragraph ago.

Things have also been coming together on the planning for our wedding. When the future in-laws were up, we went in to sample some menu options at the hotel; and I think we more or less reached a decision. (The lamb was awesome; it was the definite winner for the main course.) We also picked out our rings, which came in last week.

We have a good start on fulfilling the idea that we have for spelling out the names of the guests in Scrabble tiles to mark their table places. This task is a good one for us, since it let Laurie develop an eBay addiction, while also feeding into my love of repetitive, menial tasks. (Upon separating and tallying the letters from our first order, it turned out that we had received four extra tiles.)

Here's a question for you. What letter turned out to be the deciding factor in how many complete Scrabble sets we would need (assuming that the people we expect to attend do, and that all of our tiles come from full sets)? For example, there is only one Q in a Scrabble set, so if we needed 10 Qs, we'd need 10 sets. On the other end of the spectrum, there are 12 Es per set, so even if we needed 60 Es, that would only require 5 sets. Keep in mind that we are spelling out first names only.

Also in wedding news, Laurie and I put together a web site for the shindig. It still needs a bit of filling out but I think that it has come together fairly well.

It's too bad that I didn't add any entries for so long, because I should have hyped up the fact that the Ducks were my pick to win the Stanley Cup from the get-go. Ah well. If you're local, you've heard me say it enough. (I will admit, though, that I was getting a little worried about the run that the Sens were on. The last thing that I need is to hear Ottawa fans mouthing off all year.)

One of the funniest parts of the playoffs was the fact that the wedding we attended started at the same time as Game 5 of the conference finals. I think that everyone ran to a TV when the ceremony wrapped up. If the game had gone deeper into overtime, I bet that a lot of people would have been late to the reception. This is another point in favour of an October wedding, I must say.

There have been a few concerts since my last entry, all of which I've described in more detail on the concerts section of my web site. Tapes 'n Tapes were a lot of fun, with Ladyhawk opening. Feist was as charming as ever, and the new songs really punched up the set list, although the Bronson Centre was already feeling like a sauna. Finally, The Evens played an amazing and intense set this past week, after first getting the audience to take a seat on the floor of Club SAW. Ian MacKaye stayed after the show to chat with people, so I picked up the first album on vinyl and had him sign it. That's going up on the wall!

Somewhere in the midst of this, I also picked up a Wii, which Laurie has been wanting for a while. I don't think that I can blame it for my lack of updates, though; I haven't been using it too much, after a marathon burst of Super Paper Mario. I'm sure there will be some more interesting titles coming out sooner or later, though.

Oh, and I also turned thirty last weekend, which is getting up there. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to be called crotchety yet; but I'm pretty sure that it's okay to sigh when I stand up. Maybe if I end up tearing out the front steps, I can get a porch and a rocking chair and start shaking my fist at the kids.

I'll see if I can avoid such a large gap before my next update. I should have lots of concerts to write about, with the Capital Idea! Festival starting this week and Bluesfest just around the corner.

J.