It's hot, damn hot

Ontario at this time of year is pretty warm and it's warmer earlier this year than the locals remember. Over 40 today when you include the humidity, or the humidex rating (the opposite of the wind chill rating in winter. The ambient air temp was actually around 33 today but the humidity was giving a Queensland summer a run for it's money so it felt more like 41. The central air-con has been on for the last 36 hours or so and we wont be thinking of turning it off until mid-day tomorrow when a storm is due through and temps should drop to low 20's.

We think that our rental situation will be resolved in a day or so. IBM has been great and will come to the party to increase our rent allowance so we can stay where we are and the kids can continue to go to the same school. 'The Donald', our landlord, had better not show his face around here again, I'm not sure what either of us will do if we get a face-to-face with that scum bag. Anyways, stress on that front should decrease and we can enjoy our summer.

The kids are madly anticipating their summer break, Cam only has tomorrow to go and he's a kinder kid no more, straight into Grade 1 in September. North American school has two years of kinder, junior and senior or JK and SK for short. So while it looks like he's moving from kinder he's really finished Prep and ready for Grade 1. When all the kdis come back they are likely to be 6 months ahead of home in the school year but I'm sure that the levels of achievement are pretty similar between Aus and Canada so no major transitional dramas are likely.

Canada Day is this weekend and, like Australia Day, is a big holiday weekend here, it usually marks the start of summer holidays. We will be traveling to the lake cottage we've rented on Monday and should miss most of the traffic as people return from their weekend away and we head into a week with the bugs. Before that though we have a big weekend planned, soccer of course, then a barbie with our good friends the Andrews on Saturday night (they're good people to get bent out of shape with), then Sunday is a round-robin and BBQ at the Bronte Tennis Club followed by an evening with another great set of friends the Doe's and hopefully some fireworks to celebrate the countries big day. We have a wad of explosives which we bought for the last major holiday but didn't get around to letting off so we should be lighting up the night on Sunday. Sadly there are no rockets, looks like the powers-that-be are discouraging them, perhaps due to tar roofs being set on fire. So all our fireworks are ground-based but hopefully still decent.

Speaking of rockets we finally set of Cam's model rocket last weekend and it was a hoot. The first engine we used was the small one, a B4, short burn and not much power. But there was some wind so I wanted to see what the thing could do before we popped a bigger engine in the tail pipe. The B4 was a good first shot, with the gantry angled slightly into the wind the rocket perhaps made it 250 feet up before blowing it's nose-cone, popping it's parachute and floating back down within 20 meters down wind of the launch pad. Feeling pretty good about ourselves Garry and I loaded up the C6 motor, a much bigger unit, and without waiting for a proper countdown Cam hit the big red button sending the projectile out of sight, well over 500 feet up and several streets into the wind, down range.

The nose-cone doesn't have a parachute, just a red streamer and a spongy rubber nose. The main body, supported by the parachute dropped quite a bit further away than the first shot, maybe 50 meters up wind. Finding the body was easy but we figured that we had lost the nose-cone, including it's cute digital accelerometer which tells you the rockets maximum speed in both miles and k's per hour when you retrieve it. As luck would have it we found the little bugger in some mugs front yard, several houses and at least two back yards away. Silly me had forgotten to turn the switch on so we don't know how fast the little bugger went. Luckily we have 3 more C6 motors... I love the smell of rockets in the morning.

Andy, out.

Back from the Tomb

Man, what the heck have we been doing? Not posting here that's for sure. The last 4 weeks have been pretty full on. Summer has started, officially today at 2:06pm, they do it here using the correct celestial time, not like us back home by the first day of the month. The days have been really warm, much warmer than normal the locals say and it has been pretty hot and humid on a number of days. Cam and Abs are well into their soccer and both had their first wins this week which is pretty cool. Cam already has about half a dozen goals to his name and Abs is one of the more attacking players on her team which is awesome, neither of them have played competitive sport before so the concept is pretty new to them. We spend our time as parents teaching the kids to play nicely with the other kids, share and take care. Now we're trying to undo some of those lessons, 'get in there and attack', 'be in front, push if you have to', 'don't worry if one of the opposition falls down, keep going'. We have taught our kids well, these lessons in competitiveness are proving difficult to teach :-).

Our rental situation is not resolved but we have irons in the fire and we're not afraid to use em. An update and likely resolution in the next week I suspect.

We have a cottage booked for the first week in July. It's a great Canadian summer thing to do, hit a cottage on a lake far north of Toronto when the weather warms up. The place is right on a nice lake with a sandy beach and shallow entry for the kids, plus some human powered boats if they get adventurous. We just have the Monday to Saturday but we're looking forward to a break and relaxing time, our first non-touring holiday since we got here (although I'm sure we'll go to Algonquin National Park while we're in the neighborhood).

The whole family is playing tennis on Friday nights down at Bronte. The kids get a clinic and then Jo and I play mixed adhoc matches from 7pm til after 9:30. Jo's also hitting the courts during the week and is actually out at the moment (it's after 11:30pm atm) hitting the green balls. It's a lot of fun and we're all improving our games, the kids are enjoying it so we might have to keep it up when we get back.

Work is very busy at the mo' and I'll be glad when the next week is done as we'll be finished all our testing and be into a slight more mellow state of mind. It looks like we'll be here for this release and the next two so home before Xmas is a possibility, March 2008 is a hard stop, definitely home before then.

So we're enjoying our summer, remember that we went from winter in Aus to winter here so if we do come back by Xmas we'll get our payback with two summers in a row, that'll be pretty good. All our girls have their birthdays this month and we haven't organised a single party yet. Last year Jo and I went all out and conjured up 3 pretty awesome gigs, this year we're busy and thinking of other things, the poor kids are wondering whether they'll get parties. I'm sure we'll get our acts together soon enough.

Anyways, enough from me, I need another G&T (off the beer and lowering the carbs, fooling myself).

Andy, out.