Anniversary and weekend festivities

It was Eric and my 4th year anniversary on Thursday. I got him a watch while in Houston, and he got us tickets to see Wicked at the NAC, at nice cook book and a very yummy dessert from Les Fougeres in Chelsea. The photographer who took all the photos for the book, Andrew VanBeek, was our photographer for our wedding, so it all tied together nicely!

Saturday morning we just hung around the house, doing errands and working around the house. Eric got started on the screen porch door, and I cleaned and did laundry - fun!! Gillian found a fun game to play, called "Balancing Act", and discovered the sport of climbing:






Saturday night was the night we had the tickets, so we had Eric's mom come over to sit. We went for dinner at Milestones in the market, which was good as always. Then we headed over to the show. It was amazing! I'm sure all of those who have seen it can agree that it was a perfect mix of comedy, romance and wonderful singing! It was probably my second favourite show now, the first being Phantom of the Opera.

Sunday afternoon we went to our friend Mandy and Danny's cottage which was a lot of fun. Abby played with Ali and Mitchell and Gillian just followed them around talking "Gillian Talk"


Then today we had breakfast with our friends Steve and Lorna, who were visiting from Calgary. They were at the cottage yesterday and ended up staying over at our place last night. So we cooked up a nice pancake breakfast and had a really nice visit. Just before lunch the girls were going a little nuts, so we decided to take them for a walk in the woods, before Gillian bit off another piece of Abby's face (did I mention that Saturday was a big biting day for Gillian - she was out of control!! It was a tough day, thank got we got to go out!). It was getting close to lunchtime, so Gillian ended up falling asleep in the carrier, so Eric went ahead and just took her back to bed, and Abby and I did the "toddler speed" hike.







Finally I prepared a nice dinner for us all - Roasted chicken with mushroom artichoke wine sauce on a bed of couscous, roasted peppers and cauliflower, steamed green beans and a corn on the cob. It was very yummy! The only bad part was halfway through I dropped a small saucer and it shattered and sliced open my hand. Ouch! Maybe it wasn't so bad because then I didn't have to clean up, because I couldn't get it wet! But it's throbbing now, so I'll sign off and re-bandage it (Eric is no nurse....) and get ready for work tomorrow.

Houston

Houston is a big city. And a hot city. We were staying on the east side of town, and there really wasn't much for us to see because of our location and time available to travel. So all we saw was the inside of the Galleria. It's a huge and high end mall. If you are into spending $650 for a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes then this is the place for you! Mind you they did have the regular stores, which probably had different merchandise than Ottawa, so it wasn't all a lost cause. The seminar we attended was good, it was ironic however, because the man giving it was on our plane from Toronto!! He lives there. Boy we could have saved a bit of money and time there eh?

Downtown Houston from the nutty cab
This was as close as we got - we were on the other side of town

Big City = LOTS of traffic!

View from the hotel - not much to see
our workshop was in a little building
beside that big on on the right

Another view from the hotel.

Off to Houtson

I'm off to Houston today. My colleague and I are attending a one day conference on implementing an LMS (if you really need to know what that is, leave a comment). As we only have tonight and tomorrow night to visit the city, our only goal is this place:

The Galleria

A huge mall right beside our hotel! Fun. I wish we were staying at least an extra day, but it was too complicated with arranging it, and to be away from the kids an extra day (I sound nuts eh!!) So next time!

Happy Monday to Wednesday!

Quiet Sunday

We are spending a quiet Sunday at home since yesterday was go-go-go! The girls are quite tired, but in pretty good spirits. They spent the morning playing, which gave me some time to scrap a couple of pages:




This afternoon, I have to pack because I'm off to Houston, TX tomorrow. It's a quick trip, but should be neat to be in Texas, can't wait to hear all those southern accents!!

As promised some shots from the party yesterday:

Getting ready to swim

Scott and Paige

The girls get prime spots at the snack table.

The gang eat supper.

Gillian eats the ketchup!

Never Say Never....

The rest of the week was busy at work, and a VERY late Wednesday night game... more like Thursday morning, by the time we got off the ice, meant not much blogging this week. Eric also had a golf tourney Thursday with dinner, then his hockey end of season party Friday, so I was on my own with the girls. Thursday night I basically went to bed as the same time as them... fun! Friday I made it a little later, but wasn't really in the mood to write or scrapbook. What I did do however, was have another go at the photo I had tried to scan for my Mum, but couldn't get an image from. I looked at the negative a little closer and noticed that there was some detail in my grandparents faces. So I fiddled with my scanner, adjusted a few things and got this:

So it makes me think what did I do?? But it also makes me think - Never say never when it comes to this stuff, there may always be a possibility!

Today we went to our friends house for a pool party. They had just build a new pool in their backyard, so they invited a group of their friends over, of all ages and had a party! Abby was excited about it. Before her nap she said - I want to go to the pool party, when I get up. So when she got up we packed her backpack, she got her hat and sunglasses on, and then had to wait because Gillian was still sleeping and Eric was at the Yacht club. It was so cute to see her and how excited she was to go. Of course while there, we couldn't get her out of the pool! She went in on three different occasions. By the time we left she was saying "I'm tired...".

I'll download the pool party pictures tomorrow, in the meantime I did this layout from photos I took at the daycare on Friday! More swimming....

It's that time of year

Eric always said that the first trees to change colour are found on Notch road in Chelsea. And he was right. I noticed the one tree, the one that always changes first, was turning red about two weeks ago. Each day I drove past it to go to work, it was turning more and more and then today I noticed the other trees around it following suit. I know it's early, but with the recent cooler temperatures - especially at night, the darker mornings and the trees on Notch... something tells me it's that time of year. The end of summer (I hear gasps and boos coming from the audience). Let us all have a moment...

Ok, as you may know I've stated scanning old slides, photos and film. I just did a batch of old negative films from my Mum dating back to the 1940s. They were in surprisingly good condition considering they've been kept in an envelope for the past 60 years, only having a few scratches and marks. It's been fun to scan the film negative and see what pops up on the screen. They are shots of my Mum, her sister and brother, as well as a few of her Mom and a couple of her Dad. I'll sit down with my Mum this weekend to tag each photo with information on the history and dates. In addition to scanning, I'll have to do a little restoration work, as some of them are over, or under-exposed, they are scratched or have lots of dust.

Here is a sample of the SOOS (Straight out of Scanner):

As you can see it's quite under-exposed, crooked, and what you can't see is that it's got some noise and dust. While I didn't have the time, or patience right now to remove every spec of dust - I still haven't reached that chapter in the book - I did do some global fix it's and came up with this:

It shows that there is a lot of detail not seen in the original scan, and show the potential of what can be done. So don't ever think that a negative or slide is lost... unless it looks something like this:

Unfortunately in this case it was too over-exposed and there wasn't enough "data" in the blown out areas to recover it. It's too bad because it's one of the only photos of my grandmother and grandfather I scanned.

It's been really fun discovering all these old images and I hope to share more with you in the weeks to come! A couple things that I've quickly learned from working through this process which we could all apply now: 1) take more photos of yourself... if you are like me, I'm always behind the camera - like my grandfather was 2) document, document, document. Document the time, place, ages, etc. It's a little easier now because of the metadata included with each digital photo taken, but there is so much more to a photo that the date!

Shutterfly Book - The Bruce

This is the first Shutterfly Book I've created:

It's just posted to their gallery for now, but I'll order a copy when I get the discount coupon code next week. I can't wait to see what it looks like!