Sheep Guarding Llama

Nothing much happening today. Min slept most of the day after working last night and I just worked in the basement. In the evening, we watched more of The Family Guy. What a great show. Right up there with The Simpsons. Someone told me that recently but I couldn’t believe it. I had only ever seen one episode of this show and it wasn’t a very good one so I was surprised but how good the show was.

Art came over this evening and we played two or three games of AoE2. We wanted some practice at being rushed so I kicked his butt a couple of times. We played until about 2:30am.

After Art took off I went to Dunkin Donuts and got some bagels and coffee to take to Dominica at work. It was about 3:30 when I got into the hotel. Min was very happy to see me. I hung out there until about 5:00 and then headed back home to get some sleep.

Min had her interview at York first thing this morning. Just after she got back I had to take off to Batavia to get my foot checked up on. The weather was absolutely dreadful and I ended up stopping at dad’s house because I couldn’t keep driving. The wind was so bad that there were white outs and horrible drifts. I finally made it around on back roads and up to my appointment. Everything was fine and they looked at my foot for about thirty seconds. So it was a lot of driving for not much being there.

I spent the day working in the basement. I got a lot done. A good productive day.

I decided that our Canadian content has been running too thin so, in celebration of Miranda being with us this week, we are making today Canadian day. Which I thought of after noticing Miranda reading the book, “How To Be A Canadian”. So I decided that we all needed to learn a bit more about Canada (especially since the book tell us that the number one reason that Canadians hate Americans is because Americans know so little about Canada but in my experience, Americans are often annoyed by Canadians who don’t know much about Canada 😉 So we will start with a simply geography question. We all know the easy ones like the US and Canada share the world’s longest undefended border (running the incredible distance from Washington to Maine and then again all along Alaska.) And we all know that Canada is the second largest country in the world by land mass coming in just after Russia. So here is the first question: What is Canada’s second nearest neighour? This is an easy starting question. The second closest country to Canada is Denmark since Greenland is the largest land mass of Denmark. This, of course, discounts the very tiny area annexed by Holland in Ottawa but that would be just silly to include here. Okay, question number two, what are the five largest cities in Canada? Toronto is obviously the largest, then Montreal (although Montreal is more densely populated), then Vancouver (recently declared the second best city in the world to live and work in losing to Zurich and tying with Vienna), then Ottawa and finally Calgary. The really interesting part is that these rankings are by metropolitan area and if you were to include American cities, Rochester would just edge out Ottawa and Buffalo would come in just behind. Ok, number three: What year did Canada become a self governing dominion (called the Dominion of Canada – the name was changed later)? This was 1867, 91 years after the US declared total independence from England. Instead of using July 4 like us, Canada decided to be wildly different and go with July 1 and called it Canada Day instead of Independence Day since they didn’t actually get to be independent. Canada recently renamed itself Canada. So it is really easy to remember. Canada’s Chief of State is still Queen Elizabeth II. You can look up most of this information yourself from the highly reliable and official government source, the CIA World Factbook, just in case anyone was thinking that I wasn’t accurate. Lastly, Canada is still a Commonwealth – part of the British Empire. Zimbabwe just declared itself independent in December from the Empire. You can learn all about the Commonwealth at www.TheCommonwealth.org. Isn’t it cool what you can learn on SGL?

Min and I watched The Apple Dumpling Gang, the 1975 Disney classic and then we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark which we both watched recently but Min didn’t get to see on the big screen yet. Does anyone out there (Nate you MUST remember watching this with me years ago) remember Disney’s Gun Shy television series based on the Apple Dumpling Gang? Only six episodes ever aired but my dad recorded them the one time that they were on and these must have been the most watched recordings in our entire VHS collection which I was young. The short lived series aired in 1983, so I was just seven years old and the Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again had been released just four years before. If anyone knows how to find some digital copies of these six episodes, I would really like to find them. They would be great to have. I doubt that Disney will ever release this series on DVD. It would make a great single disc buy thought.

I ended up staying up really late tonight and working on certifications. I didn’t go to bed until 6:30 am. I got a ton done though.

My task today is to get the dining room chairs from the store. We ordered them in October and they came in in late November but we didn’t get around to picking them up until today. Min and I drove up to Rochester and met Phil for some lunch at Friendlys. Then Min went clothing shopping with her Christmas gift money while Phil and I took care of the chairs. When Phil and I got down to the house, we played a couple of rounds of AoE2. Later on, Andy joined us for a game and then Min joined us for two four player games. Min and I finally got a chance to play on a team again. It has been years. We had a really good time. During the afternoon, Min watched The Godfather III. She didn’t quite get a chance to finish it yet. She got hooked on the series yesterday and is obsessed with finishing it now.

We decided that today would be a fairly relaxing day. Andy took everyone (except Phil) out to dinner at Belladessa’s down the street. Then we came home and watched some Father Ted. Miranda say FT for the first time last night.

Min has an interview in the morning so wish her good luck. I am going to the foot doctor again midday tomorrow. I think it is just for a checkup but I am not really sure. I don’t pay very close attention to these things. I am posting early tonight because I am being lazy.

The snow started falling last night and some of the roads still aren’t plowed today. It is finally winter, I think. But with as late as it started, it probably won’t get a chance to last long.

Eric and I are planning on heading down to Washington during the last week of this month. We are going to be trying to get their truck based system working again. What a pain that system has been.

I had a meeting in Perry and a little bit of work to do there too so I ended up spending most of the day there. Then I drove out to Pavilion to take dad down to drop off his car for repairs. Min spent most of the day knitting and watching the Godfather movies. She has never seen them before and after Phil and Kate were attempting to watch all of the movies on the AFI Top 100 list, she felt that she had to see them.

I moved some old stuff into the archives today. I realized yesterday that I had forgotten to move November so the main page was getting unweildy again. The fourth quarter of 2003 ended up being quite busy for SGL. I thought that we were going to have a light season but we ended up having plenty of boring stuff to say and for everyone to read.

The four of us watched some Father Ted Series I. Miranda has never seen the show so we wanted to get her hooked on it early.

Today is Min and my three month (one season) anniversary. Today our job was to pick up our furniture for our dining room. We got up and called Ruby Gordon and asked the warehouse how late they were open today. So we drove up to Henrietta and borrowed Phil and Kate’s pickup truck in order to get the chairs. So we went to lunch at IHOP with the Ayers and then went to get the furniture. When we got to the store, they informed us that the warehouse was not open at all on Sundays. This was rather confusing as the warehouse phone line connects you to a person who tells you that the warehouse is open that day. But then again, everyone keeps telling us that we are idiots for shopping there at all so it is getting obvious that this is the case. So we scheduled to pick them up on Tuesday and returned to Phil and Kate’s apartment and watched Bridge on the River Kwai. None of them, including Min, had ever seen this classic war film. It is a little slow and kind of weird but it is a really beautiful and touching story of British POW’s held captive in Thailand or Laos during World War II by the Japanese.

After the movie, we all went out to dinner at the King and I because Min had been wanting Thai food since yesterday. Then we decided to go see a movie but weren’t able to find one that we wanted to see. We went to a couple of movie theatres and there just wasn’t anything good showing. So we hit Walmart to look for some movies. I found 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Apple Dumpling Gang and Batteries Not Included which was a classic movie that I loved to watch when I was younger. Kate really wanted to find a certain movie so we drove around to a bunch of different places, mostly closed, but at Borders, Phil found Bend It Like Beckim. So they got that movie and we went back to their place and watched it. It was really good. I didn’t know anything about it before today but I was really impressed. I had no idea that it was an Indian film made about an Indian girl soccer star in England. It was a good plot.

Right now, Andy, Miranda, Min and I are watching Disney’s classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It is always a debate as to how strange a measurment Jules Vernes used to denote going under water. A league is not meant to be a measurement used underwater. The fathom is the standard measurement of distance under water and is equal to two yeard or six feet. A league is three nautical miles. Each nautical mile is 1.151 regular miles or just over 6076 feet. So the title of this movie denotes a distance 69060 miles beneath the water’s surface. This is an absolutely ridiculous figure. The deepest point of the ocean is only just under seven miles. Quiet a difference. It is very clear that Jules Vernes had a massive lack of grip on concepts such as distance, depth, pressure or just plain common sense. The distance denoted here would suppose that the earth was more than four times THICKER than it was ROUND which makes no sense at all. It is very noticeable in this movie just how little Disney cared about nature and the environment and how little the industry was regulated back in 1954 when the film was made. The treatment of real undersea life in the movie is pretty awful.