This Party Aint Big Enough for the Two of Us

As far as birthdays go we've gone pretty hard and full-on at them this year. Jasmines was probably the least effort with most of it coming in a box (Nancy Drew game) but we still managed to put together a detective game down the trail and decorate the many 'scenes' through-out the house appropriately. The study still has signs saying 'leet haxors' and 'Join the World of Warcraft ladder' on the walls from being the setting for a CyberCafe. Abbies was more involved as she wanted a mystery party like Jazz, but obviously we couldn't just recycle Nancy. So Jo and I put together a kidnapping, Jazz went to Lara's house and we set up email clues and SMS messages for the kids to sort through. It's a lot of work but the kids do love it and we've had a few invites for the kids to go to 'Survivor' parties and other fairly involved affairs. That didn't happen much the first year. Mostly the kids got invited to attraction-style do's, like skating, laser-tag or play-centers. We suspect that the kids are really enjoying the home-made themes and are pestering their parents for more of the same... If that's thsa case then we're really sorry. We really didn't intend to make your lives the living hell that we signed up for by doing our own parties.

With the girls out of the way we rolled up our sleeves and set about executing our sons vision for a cowboy party. The three main games were a round-up, shoot-out and a scavenger hunt. If you saw the last post on the Blog then you saw the shot of the shooting range that we made. A huge piece of cardboard used as packing for our recent sofa purchase was turned into a western scene complete with over 20 drop-down targets. It was a decent hit but the problem with 6-yo's... they don't line up, they don't take turns, they don't wait around for their turn, they don't stand still for more than 5 seconds. So my read on the party was that it was a partial success, the games just didn't go how I expected. I think, however, that my opinion is irrelevant, to the dozen or so 6-yo's it appeared to be great fun. They went crazy, all had guns and shot each other, ate handfuls of zero-nutrition crap (the best kind) and went home with cowboy hats and sheriff's badges. Jo made a chocolate-ice cream-jelly cake shaped like a cactus that was almost completely demolished. And Cam scored pretty big in the pressie stakes with Lego, superheros, Bionicals and cars. Good times, our boy is officially 6.
So what else is up? It's pretty busy here actually. Jo is still playing heaps of tennis and I'm still loving looking at her in those little skirts [nice!]. The kids are enjoying school and getting lots of homework. Jasmine just completed a book report that was delivered as a video. She interviewed herself on camera and I editted the result together for her, she's hoping for a great mark. I'm driving down the QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way freeway) to Buffalo on the weekend with a local mate to see my first live NFL game, the Buffalo Bills vs the Baltimore Ravens. In two weeks I'm off to Las Vegas with three buddies to party hard, shoot some guns and gamble in my typical low-key way (ie. not much). Halloween is not far off, Oct 31st, and the kids have their costumes almost together. We've thought about dressing up the house a bit more this year as it might be our last, so expect photos of a bizarre front-door in the next few weeks.

On the subject of coming home... well as usual we're just not sure. My current gig will be up by end of January and then it's one of two outcomes - we come home for good, or I get another engagement and we stay a bit longer. At this stage there is another project brewing that IBM Canada appear to want me to run. Only snag is that it's in Montreal so we'd have to move. But the deal isn't finalised so we haven't considered it any further and these things have a way of taking time to resolve (remember when we waited for 4 months before coming over here in the first place? I expect more of the same). If the project does start then we're inclined to stay which might be another year. Hopefully if that happens we can come home for another flying visit in the New Year. Anyway, nothing locked in yet so no plans.

The weather is much cooler, it's nearly lunchtime and the fog is still at ground level. Temps in the mid-to-high teens and lots of leaves on the ground, hockey has started, baseball is well into the play offs... here's hoping we get a white Christmas this year.

Andy, out.

Not dead, just busy

Man, that's almost a record... over a month since our last update. It's not cos we're not doing anything, in fact it's the opposite, we're busy as hell. We survived the girls birthday parties, they were decent hits actually, and for the last few weeks we've been planning Cam's event. But before all that here's a quick summary of the last month or so...

• Jo and I played together in the Bronte Tennis Club Mixed Doubles tournament. We played first on Friday night and won, although it was more of a struggle than we expected, 6-2 7-6 (tie-break). This put us into the main round and we had to play against the 2nd seeds at the club the next day. We were creamed 6-0, 6-1, and we think they were going easy on us, they ended up in the semi's, but they were 2nd seeds so given that they beat us they should have won... quitters.
• Jo has signed up for the winter season tennis... and no... they don't play in the snow. The courts that the kids had lesson at a year ago are covered with an inflatable roof in the winter so Jo can continue her intense tennis odyssey into the cooler weather. Frankly I'm a tennis widower, she's been playing most days during the daylight and then often in the evening too. I'm stoked though, she's getting a nice little tennis chick body to go with the racket and cute skirt.
• The kids appear to all have great teachers this year. A major improvement for Abs who has a teacher who actually cares about her performance and is prepared to discuss any issue with us. Compared to last years complete loss, Miss Whatever was a complete idiot, this is a revelation for us and great for Abs too.
• Halloween is coming and we have some costumes sorted out. Jo is also being pushed, by the rest of us, to kit the house out a bit more this year, just in case it's our last here. So we're eyeing off giant spiders, zombies for the lawn and a witch to attach splatter-style to the front bumper of the car (like we ran her over).
• It's Autumn and football is back in full swing. I watched the AFL Granie at a mates place, it started at midnight on Friday here. Was a crap game but glad that Geelong won one or a change, always had a soft spot for them, dunno why. NFL is on and after 5 games my Patriots are 5-0 and my wanna-bees, the Tennessee Titans, are doing better than expected at 3-1 (they've had a by). I have tickets with a friend to go see a Buffalo Bills game (vs Baltimore Ravens) in a few weeks so that should be cool. Grid-iron is the shit, I love this game now. I always had an instant dislike for the game before coming here. I think that enjoying any type of game without having grown up on it is pretty much impossible. What makes a game interesting is not just knowing the rules, that's just the technical part of it and not much fun, but it lies in understanding the back-stories. For example it's much more interesting watching a game when you know the opposition quarter-back is coping some heat for poor passing and everyone thinks he's over paid... or that the key wide-receiver is under a drug cloud... or you watched one of the line backers win the college equivalent of the Brownlowe last season and now he plays for your team, is he gunna handle the hype? I guess what I'm saying is something sports fans already know, that the game itself is only part of the end-to-end experience. Once you're soaked in the news, daily topics, stats and line-ups you get a lot more out of it than you might have expected. Understanding the rules, and how the teams execute on game-day is only a small part of the enjoyment. The human factor is far more interesting. No small wonder I almost exclusively listen to sports radio in the car now...
• I love North America, here I can set of model rockets to 1000 feet from the baseball diamond across the street and buy guns for my kids that actually shot stuff, albeit Nerf bullets. We shot off 6 rockets last weekend and filmed it with the new video camera in super-slow-mo, the vids are pretty cool, I'll post em soon. The Nerf gun is a 1.2 meter monster sniper rifle that shoots foam darts very accurately over 30 feet. It comes with two magazines for loading the ammo, full on clips, a scope and and has a cocking action that rivals an M-60. This stuff rocks.
• I'm going to Las Vegas with 3 of my work buddies. Jo has agreed to cut the leash for 4 days and as of Nov 1st I'm down and dirty in the adult Disney that is the capital of Nevada. We're staying at the Venetian and planning on some shooting and stretch-Hummer-limo action before hitting the tables in an effort to take it all.

More later, we have more to prepare for Cam's birthday and after we execute I expect we'll have another post with some more pics. Above is the giant mural we painted for one of the party games. Various parts of the mural are targets and fall down when you shot them with a Nerf gun, like the stage coach wheels, jail bars and water tank. Should be a hoot.

Andy, out.