Margo suggested that I write a year in review. Since I don't think making new year's resolutions is a productive exercise, I thought I'd give this a try.

Probably the "biggest" thing I did last year was to beat the video game Demon's Souls....

OK, I'm kidding. The biggest thing was getting married! Much of last year was consumed with wedding preparations but there were a few other things which happened as well.

I got married - Yep. This is the big event of 2009 for me. I've blogged enough about it though...Best wedding I've ever been to. Sorry to anyone who's wedding I've been to, Margo and mines was better - mostly due to Margo

I moved to Orleans - Technically, I suppose you could call this a wedding preparation but, when I moved I was not married and this was from one end of the city to another so, I think it counts as a big deal. Unfortunately, I'm perpetually lost in Orleans because in suburbia, everything looks the same. I'm still amazed that Margo can navigate what seems to me to be an endless maze of streets with houses that all look the same and arrive at the mall without spending much time on a major road at all. If I'm going to the mall I have to use major roads or my GPS.

My grandfather died - Aside from the actual dying part, the worst part of this was that Margo didn't really get a chance to get to know my grandfather. She met him once but, he was in pretty rough shape - certainly not himself. I know he was happy for me - getting married and all. In the end, he lost his mind. It's sad because I think he really wanted to keep his faculties about him. Fortunately it was only a short time. I'll miss him.

Margo eats the chili - and likes it!! I really have to count this in the "big win" category for the year. Margo was pretty clear about not liking chili. "But my chili is really good" I said but, I'm sure she's heard that before. I was prepared for a life with very little chili in it but thankfully now, I don't have to. We kinda had to ease Margo into chili with nacho chips..

Lets face it, bad chili is a serious societal problem! You probably make bad chili. In Seanland, meat and beans are the base of good chili. Limit the vegetables...The more vegetable you add, the more water you add and so your chili will likely be soup. My chili recipe is a combination of my Mother's chili recipe and a variation of one of Jamie's chili secrets and a few tweaks of my own.

Spending time in the kitchen - a lot of time was spent in the kitchen in 2009. The hits of 2009. Invisible cookies. These are chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal cookies (from my aunt Mimi which, are mostly sugar). Marbled cheesecake brownie was a big hit as well. I learned to brine and BBQ turkey, roast a beef tenderloin and make sesame broccoli as well as roast green beans in shallot butter - all good.

The misses of 2009 - Margo! (misses/Mrs. Get it? we got married so she's a Mrs. now..hehe -Bad Pun) Ok seriously... the misses of 2009. BBQ Pizza - Made my own dough...burnt it. Peppermint twist biscotti - The candy cane in the dough added too much sugar...burnt it.

Taking this show on the road - Margo and I did a lot of travelling around to see family, go places and do things. It was a busy year for that. Probably since I moved to Ottawa, 2009 was the year I've seen my family the most either, going to them or them coming to see us. We've been all over the place this year. It's been fun but we need to remember to schedule ourselves some downtime in the future.

Revisiting the keys - Way back when I was a young'n I learned me to play the piano. In 2009 I've gone back seriously to playing keys again. I still play my guitars however, I'm working with Jamie who's launching a new band (yet to be named, I think) It's an interesting experience for me and a challenge as well.

Sold for a song - at the end of the year, my job was outsourced to another company. I work for a different employer now, doing the same thing I've been doing for the past 8 years for my old employer. I don't have a warm fuzzy feeling about the transition but I'm keeping my options open at the moment.

I think that's it for now...Maybe I'll think of something later.

OK...I beat this game before I left for the holidays. It was a pretty good game. Gamespot agrees with me and they awarded this game the prestigious "Game of the Year : 2009" title. Demon's Souls is now in the hands of Rawlio. I probably won't sell it right away when I get it back since I have a funny feeling there will be some add-on content for this game.

More weirdness....

I've been playing this game for a while now...

So, someone invaded my game and tried to kill my guy whilst I was playing. I experienced everything the reviewers said I would. I felt a weird sense of dread as the words "Your world has been invaded by So-and-So" popped up on the screen. I turned around in time to see the red outline of someone running toward me, weapon drawn. I made my guy switch to his sword..

Chop-chop and the fight was over...I won! YaY!!! It was a really quick fight. I dunno how the game picks opponents so maybe I was not evenly matched but that's besides the point. It's a really cool feature which actually makes the game harder. If I had been somewhere else in the game and unable to focus my attention on my unwanted guest my dude would have been killed.

I died shortly after anyway...I never manage to stay alive long in this game becasue it's so hard. In that sense, I've gotten used to just having less hit points (a consequence of dying) so that's an advantage too I guess.

We're well into the Christmas season and I've noticed something or rather, the lack of something. There's been hardly any news stories about the war on christmas. Maybe I've been too busy to read a lot but, the Christmas controversy seems to be at an all time-low this year. These doesn't seem to be a lot of complaining about holiday trees vs christmas trees or complaining about putting up religious/non-religious symbols in public places.

I did notice a story about a group that goes around and identifies companies that hate Christmas by the way that they advertise at this time of year. This group then encourages people not to buy anything from the stores that hate Christmas... Honestly can you imagine a consumer based company that hates Christmas? This is like the best time of year for them with so many people doing their holiday shopping...It's like christmas to them...oh...wait. Anyway, this isn't really news though because this group does this weird report every year. (Here is the link!) The list seems kind of arbitrary to me and I have a hard time believing that people are not going to shop at Best Buy this year because they're on this list as "Naughty"

Last year there was a big hububaloo about "holiday trees" in New Brunswick. This year seems pretty quiet. I wonder if it's a sign of people becoming more reasonable or if it's just an off year

Tomorrow is the Wilson family Christmas party and Margo and I are headed off to Pickering in the morning to attend this illustrious event.

In preparation for the festivities, I spent the evening baking invisible cookies. Invisible cookies are pretty difficult to make. How successful you are with invisibility in cookies depends on a lot of things.

Production of cookies leaves a lot of evidence. To minimize your cookie footprint you must dispose of the evidence. This means that once cookies are produced, you must either hide the cookies or eat them all. It's not just the cookies you have to hide either. You must also hide the evidence of producing them. The area in which you made the cookies must be cleaned and appear as if no cookies were made. You can't over clean either otherwise this could arouse suspicion - "Things are clean...too clean...YOU MADE COOKIES!!!!!"

One thing that's really hard to hide is the smell of freshly baked cookies...You really need to allow ample time for the cookie smell to dissipate. Unfortunately for my invisible cookies, I was a little bit strapped for time because I was driving all over Orleans running some errande so I didn't get to start until later then I wanted to. I probably lost 2 hours of cookie smell dissipation because of these errands though they were worth it.

The first errand was a visit to Futureshop. It seems that the large 52" TV I purchased not too long ago went on sale. Futureshop knocked over $200 off the price I paid for the TV. My Brother-in-law who, helped me pick up the TV noticed and told Margo so, we hit Futureshop and got our $200 rebate!

The second errand took a lot more time. I needed new winter boots. The boots I had hurt a lot to wear. It was weird too because they were Columbia boots which is a good name from what I understand. The boots were comfy when I bought them but I've never been able to wear them for very long I figured they just needed to be broken in but after a couple days I had these painful red marks where the boots rubbed in the wrong spot. I've tried to wear them every year without success so, I'm done with them now. They're in good shape so I'll donate them somwhere...They should be able to keep someone's feet warm (as long as they're not walking around in them)

Hunting for boots in Orleans was hard. I went everywhere I could think of. I'm not that picky they just need to be warm, waterproof and fit properly...I didn't even care what they looked like and yet, everywhere I went there seemed to be a shortage of size 9 boots. There was no way I could wear my old boots for another day so I had to find something. I eventually spent a lot of money on some good boots at Sports Experts after going to Marks Work Wear house, The Shoe Company, Walmart, Payless and Canadian Tire.

Back to the cookies for a minute...I kinda figured I'd be found out so I planned my strategy as a strategy within a strategy. Wheels within wheels. I made two different kinds of cookies! One batch of cookies was sacrificial which I expected to be discovered. The plan was once the second sacrificial batch of cookies were discovered someone might make the assumption that there were no other cookies, thus the first batch would remain invisible...I even baited the "cookie monsters" by leaving a single cookie from the second batch out on a plate!

I made some mistakes and my efforts were discovered. Here are the rules for next time based on the mistakes I made:

1. Start early enough that the smell will dissipate
2. Don't over clean because it arouses suspicion
3. Don't hide the cookies in the same place.
4. Don't be cocky and bait the "cookie monsters"
5. Don't blog about invisible cookies

:)

I found this really cool site which teaches you to play songs on piano. It seems geared towards people like me who learn by ear and muscle memory rather then read music. I can read music but I find the whole process really cumbersome.

Consider, modern musical notation - staves, notes, meter has not changed a lot. Modern notation is focused on piano with modifications for other instruments as needed. For something like a guitar, a song written in standard musical notation makes it much more difficult to learn the piece. Still, if you want to play with another instrument, there is a need to have a standard notation that everyone can read even if that notation is not very helpful for a particular instrument.

So back to reading music...Even on the piano where standard musical notation works best I find it doesn't work well for me. I was always amazed by my piano teacher who could just look at a piece of music and play it. I got through many piano lessons by reproducing what she did from my ear. She even caught me once when I accidentally transposed a song by a semitone and didn't realize it. More often then not, I would only use the notation when I was lost. She did actually teach me to read music but I was never very fast at it. Basically, I memorized where middle C was and a couple of mnemonics to place the other notes. I don't think she was a very good teacher though since I took an introductory music course in university and aced the course. They covered all the notation stuff and I understood a lot more.

Anyway, this website is pretty cool...It uses a "guitar hero" notation along with actual video of hands but for piano. There seems to be lots of songs available including some good ones by Ben Folds...You know where I'm starting.

Well, he's OK. I might kill him the next time I see him but at least he's OK...for now.

Dad had a stent put in to open a blocked artery. He's so lucky there's been no damage to his heart. So anyway, he gets out of the hospital after this procedure and what does he do? He goes to the friggn' hockey game. *hand*-*palm*-*head*

He's supposed to be on bed rest, doing nothing. He's gotta take meds, do rehab, change his diet, lose weight and get some exercise as part of his new life 2.0. I know a little something about that myself. Sean is not pleased...

Ok, I'll admit it, I'm an "experience junkie". What this means is that I will seek out new experiences and sometimes commit a significant personal expense to experience new and novel things. My wife is the same way but we share slightly different interests. One thing we agree on is food so we were excited to go to "Atelier" together with some friends. Atelier is a fancy schmancy restaurant here in Ottawa which, was written up in several places (including the Air Canada magazine we had during our trip to Nova Scotia) as one of Canada's top 10 new restaurants.

First of all...there's no sign on the front of the restaurant. In a way, that actually contributed to the experience for me since we seemed to be going to a "secret restaurant". I can imagine a few practical reasons for not having a sign out front though.

You don't order at the restaurant. Instead, you get 12 courses of small servings of whatever they're making. The group of people we went with has a mixed bag of allergies and strong dislikes so, we're all actually pretty creative cooks ourselves since, we have had to work around issues with fish and sea-bugs, nuts and beef when we get together as a group. The restaurant gladly took down all our requirements and modified what they were making to suit.

I have a "strong dislike" of fish and sea-bugs (lobster, crab etc). I'm not sure "strong dislike" is a strong enough term since I actually have a physical reaction to eating things from the sea. Mostly it turns my stomach upside down and causes me a bit of nausea. I can stomach it if I have to but, it's kind of uncomfortable. One of the substitutions they made for me and my dislike of sea bugs was Elk. I found out that I like Elk and now I'm a bit curious as to how I could make it myself.

Anyway, 12 courses, no matter how small the plate, is still a lot of food over all. And speaking of plates, these guys invent their own cutlery to serve special purposes...they have a spoon which had a clip to attached some torched rosemary so you would smell it as you're eating whatever was served on the spoon. The spoon was rested on what looked like a bit of PVC pipe. They had another spoon with a test tube vial built into the handle.

The actual plating of the dishes was awesome. The food looked great almost, futuristic. some of it almost didn't look like food but, everything was edible.

Now, the most important part...How did it taste? Well, I won't rush back and there are a couple of reasons for that. One reason is the price. It's $85 a person. Now, I don't feel like I was ripped off or anything just in general $85 is a lot of money. My understanding is that this restaurant is doing quite well so I would not expect the price to go down at any point.

Another reason I wouldn't rush back is that I'm a picky eater. Now, I was never served anything that was horrible for me to eat. In fact, I even tried some things I know I dislike and found them to be actually pretty good. Still there was some stuff I didn't love. I suppose with 12 courses you can't love everything though. I did find a few dishes that were really delicious. The funny thing was with the large group, none of us could come to a consensus on what was delicious and what was not so delicious.

I guess that is the worth of the evening...You may not love everything but the experience was awesome. 12 courses was actually exhausting. We were there for 4 hours and I'll tell you, I slept like a log that night. So my final word on this is it's worth it to go at least once...being the uncultured fellow that I am and not having much of a refined pallet, I suspect that $85 for this type of meal/experience is actually pretty reasonable (in comparison to going to a "trendy place" like this in New York city or something) so, I would go before they realize it ;)

I've been pretty busy lately... I haven't had a lot of time to do any blogging so this is one of those "I'm still alive" posts. You know, the kind of post where I say "I'm not dead" but, I don't really write anything significant.

It's been a bit of a whirlwind couple of weeks for me:

• I went to church, ate "Jesus cake" and did not instantly convert to Catholicism nor did I melt or experience any ill effects whatsoever.
  
• I travelled to Nova Scotia for a few days to meet some new family
  
• I transitioned to a new employer
• My dad has developed some unknown health issues so I've been a bit worried about him.
• I had a really odd coincidence...I flashed the bios on our home router and noticed afer, that I was unable to log into the playstation network. The upgrade was a significant one. It actually required an upgrade of the software we were using to share our printer. The really weird thing was the playstation network was having a massive outage for Ontario and Quebec (I believe it was limited to Bell internet customers only) at the same time as the modifications to my router so I spent a little bit of (wasted) time trying to figure out what the issue was.
• I made a vat of Jambalaya (delicious and healthy)
• I baked delicious cookies (from my great aunt's recipe) which Margo has now forbidden me to make ever again because they're too delicious.

OK...that's all for now.

It's that time of year, again. I've got my Michelin X-Ice winter tires (the ones I got for free last year!) on my car now. It funny how tires make a difference. I must admit, I prefer how my car handles with the winter tires on then my all-seasons (summer) We haven't had that first snowfall yet but when we eventually do, I'm ready.

I had some other maintenance done on my car - A brake job, an alignment check and they cleaned some induction system. All together, it was kinda expensive...but the car is happy.

I stick to the standard GM maintenance schedule for my car...I really don't know any better. I know some people scoff at the standard maintenance schedules as being excessive but I honestly wouldn't know what to refuse and what to accept...So far, what the standard maintenance says has been pretty good. I was overdue for a brake job according to the maintenance schedule and you could tell. The brakes were squeaky and the car shook when I applied them...no longer.