Kanata Sports Club Party Team

This year, I am playing for the Kanata Sports Club team in the Glen Cairn Men’s Fastball League.  They are not very good but really like to party.  We go to the Sports Club to have chicken wings after every game.

Of course, Laura came to the game when she was visiting.  She made friends with all of the guys in the Sports Club after the game.  They thought she had the most interesting life.

Laura couldn’t believe how much beer the guys would drink and still drive home.

Coffee with Stan

Laura wanted to hang out with me the whole time she was visiting.  She even wanted to hang out with me when I went for coffee with Stan.  So the three of us sat in the Barrhaven Second Cup and Laura found out how boring Stan and I were.  She never would have believed it if she hadn’t seen it for herself.

Red Shirt and Hat

I had read on the internet the Ashton Men’s Fastball League was looking for players.  So Laura went out on Thursday night to see them play.  I brought my equipment with me.

When we got there, there was no one around.  We thought the game started at 7 pm.  We waited and one player showed up.  He thought the game started at 7 pm too.  There was a concession stand at the park.  The lady there thought the game started at 7 too.

At about 7:30, a few other players showed up.  We found out that because one of the teams had dropped out of the league, they had changed to one game a night and decided to start the game at 8 pm.

There was one guy I knew.  He told me to suit up and get in the game on his team.  I even pitched a few innings because they have a rule that a pitcher can only pitch a maximum of 4 innings.

Later Laura gave me some Father’s Day presents from Vancouver.  They included a red baseball hat and a red tee shirt.  Now I wear them every Thursday night when I play for the red team in the Ashton Men’s Fastball League.

Laura’s Loving Home

Laura finally finished working on her movie and flew to Ottawa on her way to Halifax.  She flew all night and arrived early in the morning.

She arrived on Thursday morning which happened to be garbage day.  We had just put out her disassembled waterbed and her dresser.  Laura was very upset we were throwing out her bedroom furniture.  She cried about it and took a lot of pictures for her memories.

Later in the day, I got up and found a note at the front door which said “Please take me to a loving home”.

I was very upset that Laura thought her home wasn’t a loving home.  I worried about it for a long time.

Later I found out, Laura had written the note and put it on the dresser to say that she wanted someone to take the dresser to a loving home not that she thought that we weren’t a loving home.

eTransfer Mixup

I paid for the plane tickets to Ireland for Sarah and myself using my Mastercard.  Sarah said she would send me an eTransfer for her share.

Sarah told me the password and I waited but never saw the eTransfer.  After a few weeks, I asked Sarah about it.  She said she sent it the day after I booked the tickets.

I asked if she might have sent it to the wrong email address.  She found out she had sent the eTransfer to my Rogers email account which was deactivated.  So she was worried.  Fortunately, she called PC Financial and worked it out with them.  I received the eTransfer shortly afterwards.

Preparing for Father’s Day

My sister was going to Ireland to take care of my aunt, who has dementia, while my cousin and her husband are on vacation in India.  She was desperate to have some company and asked all of us to come over to Ireland while she was there.

Sarah really wanted to go.  She convinced me to go with her.

We got on the phone one night to book our tickets and I realized that she wanted to go to Ireland for her birthday and for Father’s Day.  Neither of us wanted to be away for very long.  So we booked a flight for just the Father’s Day weekend.

It turned out that going for just a few days was more expensive than going for a longer time.

Mom’s Award

A while back my sister and I found out that the Retired Women’s Teachers Association wanted to give my mother an award for her service.  They wanted my sister and me to be at the ceremony to accept the award on her behalf.  My sister got a nice portrait picture on my mother made by cropping one the family portraits we had taken when my sister and I graduated from Carleton University.

My sister wanted me to make a speech.

The ceremony was being held over lunch at a fancy golf club in Burlington.  My sister and her husband and Barb and I got there early and met some of my Mom’s old friends.  My brother-in-law and I were the only men in the whole room.

The ceremony began and one of my Mom’s old friends gave a speech about my mother.  Her speech went on and on.  The whole time she was speaking, I was thinking how I could shorten my speech.  Finally, they called us up to receive the award and I asked if I could say a few words.  My sister whispered to me “a very few words”.

I had a mindmap laid out in front of me with my speech on it but I only spoke to about two branches.  We found out my mother was president of the Retired Women’s Teachers Association at one time.  My sister and I never even knew.  In my speech, I said that we never thought of my mother as a leader but she had some great leadership qualities now that we think of it.  She was a great listener and she was an extreme optimist.

I related a story of my mother with her teaching partner, Laurie.  One time, Laurie dropped a large jar of yellow paint on the floor.  My mother looked at the floor and Laurie quickly said “Don’t tell me ‘at least it wasn’t black’”.

Touring New Place

Barb found a 55+ community near Kitchener called Morningside.  One of her pickleball friends in Kitchener is a real estate agent.  So she set up a system with him to send us an email whenever something came up for sale in the community.  Barb thought the houses sell so quickly, we would have to act right away if our favourite model went up for sale.

We were going to Burlington to receive an award for my Mom from the Retired Women’s Teacher’s Association.  We stayed with Sarah and Ali.  The award ceremony was on Monday morning.

On the weekend, Barb, Sarah and I went to Morningside to check it out.  We walked around the community and saw the river and walking trails.  We saw the vegetable gardens.  We found the community center was locked.  Barb had to use the bathroom.  So we knocked on the door.  A lady answered the door and let Barb in to use the bathroom.  They were having a party in the library.

The lady took time to show us the big hall which has a banquet room, an exercise room, an indoor pool, a woodworking shop and a craft room.  She said we would be very happy living at Morningside.

We now just have to wait until our model comes up for sale.  The community is 25 years old.  So the original owners are getting to the age where they have to move to assisted living homes.  It might not be long until our house comes up for sale.

Holiday Weekend is No Holiday

Sarah and Ali came to visit us for the long weekend of May.  We put Ali to work painting Julia and Laura’s bedrooms.  Ali once worked as a house painter.  So he was very good at it.

We had taken down Julia and Laura’s waterbeds.  So there was no furniture in the bedrooms.  We were seriously getting ready to sell the house and downsize.

Email Change

We changed interest service provider from Rogers to Distributel.  So I was going to lose my Rogers email address.  I didn’t use my Rogers account very much any more because I found it too slow and buggy.  I had converted over to gmail.

However, I had saved a lot of old emails that I didn’t want to lose.  So I spent a number of evenings cleaning up my email folders on my Rogers account and sending emails that I wanted to keep to my gmail address.

I didn’t get finished before Rogers cut off my account.  I was upset.

Then when I tried to log on to my Rogers account, I found I could convert my old Rogers account to a new Yahoo account and have all my email folders transferred over to the new account.  So I didn’t lose anything and I didn’t have to clean up the old account.

Cutting the Cord

Barb was tired of paying high fees to Rogers for cable television.  We didn’t have cable television in Florida.  Now that she had Kodi, she could watch all of her favourite shows over the internet.

So she started looking into over service providers.  After much study and talking to a number of sales people on the phone, she chose Distributel.  She bought just their internet and home phone service.

There were some kids selling Bell services in the neighbourhood.  Barb talked to them but they couldn’t beat the price and service of Distributel.

The Distributel service also had a great plan where we could put our service on vacation while we were in Florida for the winter.  We also have a great plan in Florida that puts our service their on vacation while we are in Canada.

The Bell man came and set up the DSL line through the telephone.  Then we received the Distributel modem and router in the mail. 

We had some problems with the original modem with the call waiting and call display features.  Barb was out when I phoned Distributel for help.  They wouldn’t help me because I didn’t know the password Barb setup, even though I could answer a lot of other questions to verify who I was.  I was fit to be tied.

I waited a little while and then phoned back.  This time I got a different person on the help line.  He was more reasonable and helped me even though I didn’t know the password because I convinced him I was the right person for the account.

We figured everything out.  When Barb got home, she told me the password.  I never would have guessed it myself.  But I will remember it now.

A Quandary Solved

Laura was in a quandary.  She planned to go to Halifax after her television show was finished. She had an apartment waiting for her and she was planning to take a course or two at NSCAD.  She was going to Halifax to participate in the Eastern Canada Pole Competition.

Then her crew was asked to work on a great new movie called Deadpool.  They really wanted her to stay.  Laura also thought that this job could lead to bigger things. 

So she didn’t know whether to continue with her plans to go to Halifax or stay in Vancouver to work on Deadpool.

Laura is constantly missing her flights.  This year she was planning to come to Ottawa for her birthday on her way from Vancouver to Halifax but she missed her flight to Ottawa. She could get a flight out the next day but would have to pay extra.

In the end, she decided to stay in Vancouver and lost all the money she spent on her flights.  I sent her some money for her birthday to use to pay for the flights.  She decided that that would be the last time she booked her flights ahead of time because she was always missing her flights.  From now on, she was going to buy her ticket at the airport.  That way she would never miss a flight again.

Mouse

We have often had mice in the house during the winter.  When we got back from Florida, Barb didn’t find any signs of a mouse in the house while we were away.

However, when she was cleaning out the Green Recycle Bin, she found a little mouse hiding under the paper.  I guess the mouse must have fallen in the Green Bin and lived on the old scraps of food in it.

Barb cleaned out the Green Bin but didn’t touch the mouse.  In a couple days when she went to look again, the little mouse was curled up and dead.

Damsel in Distress

Barb was not happy when she got back to Ottawa.  She spent two days cleaning the house and she had to do a lot of groceries.

She bought a big pork loin at Costco but the butcher wouldn’t chop it for her.  Then when she went to cut the loin into pork chops she found she had forgotten her good craving knife in Florida.

She went at the pork loin in a fierce state with an old dull knife she found around the house.  I sat at the kitchen table and stayed out of her way.

Later when she calmed down, she asked me why I didn’t step in and help her.  I said I didn’t think it was safe to go near her when she was holding a large butcher’s knife.

I could have been Barb’s Knight in Shining Amour coming to the aid of a Damsel in Distress.  I will do better next time.

eReader Change

When we were leaving Florida, Barb had just finished one the books in her series and I was in the middle of the book I was reading.

I looked up my book in the library and found it as an ebook.  So I downloaded the book for me to read during our trip back.  I thought it was great to be able to continue my book even though I was on the road.

When I got back to Ottawa, I looked up the next book in the Barb’s series up in the Ottawa library.  There was only one copy.  It wasn’t available and there were a number of holds on it.  However, I found that it was available as an ebook.  So I downloaded it and installed it on my eReader.

However, when I checked it on the eReader, it said File Can Not Open.  I checked my eBook and it also said File Can Not Open.  This was a change since I was reading it on my eReader the night before.

I figured they had changed the format of the ebooks at the library and my eReader was no longer compatible because it didn’t have a clock to tell the eReader to delete the ebook when it was due back.

I searched the internet for a way to change the format.  I found a 14 step process to unencrypt the ebook using Linux.  I stayed up late trying to figure out how it worked.  I couldn’t get the process to work because I missed one little sub-step. 

The next day I went back through the process and found what I missed.  I was able to unencrypt the ebook and put in on my eReader.  Barb never read the book that I converted but I was happy I could do it.

Book Arrives

When we left Ottawa in the fall, I suspended my holds at the Ottawa library.  Barb decided to keep her place in the waiting list.  The day we got back to Ottawa, one of the books that Barb had on hold for the whole winter came in.

Traffic Jam First Thing in the Morning

We drove through Harrisburg on the first day and stayed in a nice hotel just on the other side of the city.  We had driven for 18 hours.  So the second day we only had to drive for 8 hours.

We didn’t have to get up too early on the second day.

When we got on the highway just beside the hotel, there was a bad traffic jam.  The highway was down to one lane.  Fortunately, we were close to the accident and didn’t have too long to wait in the traffic jam.

The accident looked really bad.  A large 18 wheeler was off the road in a farmer’s field, flipped over and a load of planks were scattered around the side of the road.

We were happy we decided to drive through Harrisburg before we stopped for the night because we didn’t have to wait in the traffic jam very long.

Using Coupons

Our friends in Florida told us that they stop at the first rest area when they reach in a new state during their drive home to pick up a coupon book.  In the coupon book, they find good deals for hotel rooms.

We decided to stop at a rest area late in the afternoon but when we picked up the coupon book, we found out it was for a different state than the one we wanted to stop at.

Later we stopped again, there was a coupon for a hotel called the Friendly Inn that looked really cheap.  When we found the Friendly Inn, we found out why it was so cheap.  It was a real dump.

There was another coupon for the Dutch Inn that was going to expire the next day.  We stopped there and got a room for $44 with our coupon. 

Barb wondered what the real price was.  When she asked the lady at the desk, the lady said it would normally cost $70.  It was a really nice place and Barb was happy to get such a good deal.

Washington at Rush Hour

We had a map this year to see which highways to take.  We decided to take the shortest route even though we would have to go through Washington at evening rush hour.

However, on the highway into Washington we hit a rain storm.  Everyone on the highway was driving fast and the highway was crowded.  I was in the fast lane for most the way and I could barely see the lines on the road because of the rain.  It was scary but we made good time.

We found that the evening rush hour in Washington was not too bad when we got there. 

Happy to Get Lost

We were driving through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and missed our exit because it was an exit on the left side of the highway.  So we had to drive a ways down the highway and exit and then get back on the highway and find the exit coming the other way.

We got onto the right highway but the signs were not very easy to understand and we didn’t know when we were supposed to exit off the highway again.

Finally, we found the right exit and there was stopped traffic in the exit.  The police and the ambulances had just arrived because there was a bad accident in the exit with a number of cars off the road.

If we had been there a little bit earlier, we might have been in the accident.  We were happy that we got lost after all.

One Last Pickleball Game

Barb wanted to play one more pickleball game with her friends, even though her regular partner had already gone home and her regular pickleball courts were under construction. 

So on Monday morning before we left on Tuesday morning, she went to play one last time and hurt her arm.

She had come down to Florida with a hurt arm and she was going back to Ottawa with a hurt arm.

She had hoped to surprise her Ottawa friends by showing up to Thursday afternoon advanced league but now that she was injured she couldn’t do that.

Fast Delivery

Barb put in a bid on some outdoor pickleball balls on eBay.  She didn’t expect to win the auction but she did.

Then she read the expected delivery date.  It was next Thursday.  However, we had decided to leave for Ottawa next Tuesday.  So she was upset.  The pickleballs wouldn’t be delivered on time.

Then on Monday, Barb found the pickleballs in the mailbox.  She was so happy.

Sarah’s Prize

Sarah and her friends put one of their projects into a competition at the University of Guelph Engineering Department.  She was very excited about the competition because she thought they were going to win and the prize was $3,000.  They were the only girls in the competition.

On April 1^st, Sarah texted me.  She said guess what?  I said what?  She said they didn’t win the competition.  I felt bad for her because she had been so confident.

Then she said, April Fool’s, she did win.  Later she posted a photo of her and her team holding a big $3,000 cheque