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Today Evan had to work through his Birthday and was grumbling that he didn't want a party. Boy did I get him! I secretly invited his parents to come over and with the help of Mom and Dad watching the kids I was able to make Evan a Birthday cake in the shape of his favorite food... a hamburger.



The hamburger is a three layer cake with fondant cheese, onions and lettuce. The rest is icing and the burger is covered in crushed cookies to make it look BBQ'd. The fries are shortbread cookies cut into strips.

I'm sitting and waiting for files to copy. As part of a home-office reorg this morning, I pulled out the old Blue and White G3 computer that used to be the web server for this site. I set it up, with the intent of letting Miranda play her Dora games on it. As I was starting to figure out what drive space I had for installing Mac OS X, Tammy asked "What's in the Trash?" She could see the icon signifying that something was in there. I opened it up and saw tons of stuff. Rather than sift through it, I just hit "Empty Trash" and saw that it was preparing to delete over 10,000 files. I chickened out and decided to cancel the delete and sift through whatever was in there.

And OMG. A iPhoto Library. With pictures from 2003. I think they are the same ones I thought I lost. I'm copying the folder to a flash drive to transfer. Man, USB 1.1 is slo-o-ow.

This could be the best Thursday, July 2nd ever.

Update

I was right. I just finished importing the photos and organizing them. 376 photos covering May to December 2003, recovered. I am so happy right now, I can't describe. A lot of photos of moving into the house, baby Zachary, and Tammy pregnant with Miranda.

Tonight, I attended a free workshop put on at Tom Lee Music's Victoria store. It was called "Home Recording 101" and since I have been known to dabble with recording using GarageBand, it seemed to be worth a trip into Langford. After all, I learned a lot when I attended their piano-buying seminar. I was expecting a similar thing, but I was wrong: instead of a poor turnout, there were 25 people in attendance. It wasn't in the store proper, but in a concert room in the back (the store was closed). Instead of barely lasting an hour, it was fully two hours long and could have gone longer. Now, since I am a regular listener to Inside Home Recording, there wasn't a ton of material that was new to me (it was new to a lot of the people in attendance, though), but I did learn a couple of things. I also was talking with a fellow sitting behind me, and got a lead on a good guitar instructor at Tom Lee named Darren. Sounded like something worth following up. I also got a demo copy of Ableton Live and I won a door prize: a black Ableton golf shirt.

Unfortunately, that meant that I missed out on my call to Pender tonight. Miranda is staying with Colin and Carol for the week, and it's nice to hear her voice each night and hear what she did. She was supposed to go visit the little girl Sadie who lives across the street today.

As you can see here, the Hub-a-Maniacs aren't doing to shabbily this year. Tonight, we won our fifth game in a row 9-6, and now sit in 2nd place, at 8-3-1. The last two weeks we beat the #1 and the team that was the #2 team, so we're feeling pretty good right now. The weird thing is that we're playing in the bottom tier, but observing the other games in the other tiers above us seems to indicate that this "bottom" tier is actually full of guys who just want to play on Sunday nights, regardless of their skill level. Oh well, makes for a challenge.

So this shortened weekend was packed full. Shortened, because I put in a half-day's work this morning. Saturday was waffles (thanks, Tammy!) followed by a bit of guitar practice and taking Miranda to karate. A picnic in the car at the beach followed (cool and windy) and then the rest of the afternoon was working in the yard. Tammy pitched in with mowing the back yard and helping with the weed whacking, and I managed to weed the front yard bark mulch slope up to Chris and Lorri's yard. Pizza and a movie (The Golden Compass) and it was time to turn in.

This afternoon was "games afternoon" at Jeff and Sasha's. Sasha was interested in trying out the A-maze-ing Labyrinth game that Miranda is enjoying playing these days. We ended up staying for supper, and Sasha taught us to play a card game that is popular in Russia. I can't seem to remember the name right now. I got a chance to show Jeff my Robo Rally board game, and he was interested in playing it sometime! Yay! I never get to play it.

Tomorrow is into the office. Gotta do my expenses and then attend a meeting all afternoon. Come on, Canada Day!

Simon is on his way back home today. Just had a call from him saying the flight Edmonton-Kelowna-Victoria has been delayed by about a half hour.
It has been an extraordinarily long week this week without him. It was worse than the last time. I found it very overwhelming. I caught myself gritting my teeth and pulling out my hair a lot. Maybe I should have worn my mouth guard during the day.
I am glad he will be at home for a couple of weeks now before having to go back.