Travel on the Company Dime

I'm not one to count my chickens before they are hatched, less disappointment that way, but the boss sent out a short email yesterday looking for volunteers who would be willing to travel to India to train a handful of techs to do our jobs with a small number of servers. My arm, in reflex action, shot up. I've been sorting out the passport requirements for Argentina in the fall but now I have to rush to get it ready to go in the event they need someone quicker. The good thing about this is that the location of the office is in the really warm part of the country and on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Get out your atlas kids and look up Chennai.

Cats Are Not Evil (And They Have Talent Too!!)

All of this talk of evil cats and ugly ducklings got Willow a bit perturbed. At her request I am posting this, she tried typing but her feet only mashed the keys. Willow says to click on the link to Airborne Cats and then click on the "view as slideshow" option on the upper right side and sit back and marvel at the skillz these cats in Japan have. Please note: no mice, simulated or otherwise, were harmed in the making of these photos, we don't know where the fish are, and the bird cage door must have been loose.

HONK! (fixed it!)

1)In this scene, Laura played a goose. The geese tried to help return the ugly duckling back to his home, but the evil cat foiled their rescue! Laura is the one with the scarf and aviator hat (aka, in the second row, 4th from the right).


2) Here's Laura and Dad in the lobby.


3)Here is our little chicken in the glorious world of the backstage dressing room.

She did a great job!

*All post-posting image and post manipulation by Blog Elves Inc. - Quietly Modifying Blogs, Blog Photos, and Blog Posts Since 2000

Reporters to the Left of Me, Reporters to the Right!

As I stood in line for a bowl of soup in the food court of our building, Paul Hunter and Eric Sorrensen got in line behind me and chatted about the whole David Emerson fiasco.

Pop Tart Mattress

My mattress arrived in a cardboard box that was no where near to the size needed to hold a double mattress. An hour or two after I had cut it free from it's plastic prison it was close to full size, easily 12" thick and very comfortable.

this ones for Mitch

We have a customer that come in just about everyday, she has a little son who is about 7 and can't get enough of Starwars! He has all tha toys and really enjoys bringing them by the shop to show me. His family went on a little vacation to Disneyland and there they have a MAJOR Starwars theme area?(is that what you call it) Anyway this little guy was just dynig to show me some of the stuff he bought! These are little M&M guys dressed as Starwars figures, theres even a Darth Maul!

An icicle that defies gravity!??

This thing is crazy! The rain spout come 2 feet from the wall and the bottom of the icicle almost touches the wall, but not quite! Just another crazy Pass siting!

Jessica's latest knitting project

This is one of my soon to be matching pair of Super Bad skully mitts. I'm totally excited!

Todays weather in the Pass

These shots were taken just a few minutes ago! This snow is after we had 48 hours of t-shirt weather and RAIN!!! Over night it turned to what you see and has been doing it all day!

Nice Winter pic's for Mitch

These shots were taken after we got about 18 inches in 24 hours! Made it look like Christmas should have been.

The Honourable Members of the House

Olympic Beavers

If you want to see the web site for these two beavers, Frank and Gordon, Google

www.frankandgordon.ca

They are jealous that a groundhog has a special day and they don't and they want you to do something about it. You can also get lots of Bell stuff on their site, too.

Olympics

The weather here is great and where are we most of the time....glued to the Olympics. Well, Dad isn't quite as much as I am.

I thought about staying up for the 2:30 a.m. coverage last night but at midnight, changed my mind. Not quite THAT dedicated!!

Back to the Olympics!!

Single Again

I'm on my own again. Rebeca decided she did not wish to be with me any longer and has moved on.

Happy Birthday, Mitchell

Greetings on your birthday!!! Are you going to Winterlude to celebrate? Never mind lugging your skates along this year. Eat a Beaver Tail for us while you're there. Wear something outlandish so when we watch the news from Ottawa tonight, we'll spot you in the crowd. Better yet....go to Speaker's Corner. We only come across that in a hit or miss fashion so it would be dumb luck if we happened to tune it in at the right time. Anyway you do it, have a happy one. I suppose Rebeca is working so when will you celebrate or did you do something special ahead of today?

Have lots more birthdays to enjoy in the years ahead!! xxxx Dad and Mom

Reno'd cupboards under espresso machine

This is what two hard working people choose to do with their day off! It's not to bad a job either, i don't think the pictures do it justice though. It only took us about 4 hours to do the painting and i made the handles out of old Silver forks about 3 or 4 days before we painted. The old white paint was looking quite grubby and no amount of scrubbing would get them clean. so this is what we came up with!

Any tax consultants lurking out there?

So we met with our landlords yesterday re: advancing the end of our lease and getting started on the sale/purchase of the building. It didn't go well. Since they sold a property in AZ in the 2005-2006 (July to July) tax year, their tax consultant has told them to hold off selling our building. He told them they'd likely pay close to $70 000 in tax and it wouldn't be worth their while to sell until next year. ARRGH! It's so frustrating!

We've asked them to seek out a second opinion, and as they genuinely seem to want to sell to us, they are going to find out from another source if that's the best route to take. What I'm wondering is, should we find out as well from a tax consultant, if this is the real scoop? We don't have all of their background & tax details, but there has to be some creative solution to buying the building without the title changing hands until next year. Some kind of deferred thing? Like we are making mortgage payments to them, but the building wouldn't 'officially' be ours until 2007, or something?

They said we didn't have to feel pressured to stay after our lease is up, if we wanted to look elsewhere, they wouldn't hold us to anything...we dont' want to go anywhere!!! They did assure us that they wouldn't sell to anyone else as long as we were interested, even though they told us a realtor we may have trusted had offered to buy it from them. Scumbag! We have 5 realtors next door and I'm pretty sure I know which one it was.

Anyway, any guidance here would be much appreciated. Any creative financial solutions out there? Where could we go to find some other purchasing options? There has to be a way around this.

Brush With Fame

Yesterday as I walked up O'Connor Street towards Parliament Hill to catch my bus home Joe Clark walked by. I was looking at him to make sure it was indeed him and he looked at me, smiled and said "Hi".

MOM!

Stop deleting your posts!!!

awwww!

Aren't they lovely?
I don't know how to rotate the picture, which is unfortunate!!

This is Mom and Dad before the big work party. Daddy isn't looking at the camera because he says he gets red eye, but he gets it anyway. How silly of him!

Photo modifications courtesy of the Blog elves.