Happy Anniversary Dad and Mom

First, Merry Christmas everyone, hope you were all blessed to spend time enjoying family and friends. We were blessed by some great weather if you like temperatures in the freezing range, they are quite enjoyable except that they were accompanied by days of freezing drizzle. The temperatures are now back down into the -20 range with wind chills forecast at -40 the next few days.

It is Mom and Dads anniversary this week and I know they will not see this until after they get home from spending the holidays with my sister. Happy Anniversary to my wonderful parents.

Speaking of anniversary - Andrea and I have been together for 12 years this month, still a lucky man I am.

Next up is my birthday, we never really had any plans to do anything special but that changed I guessed. I have been running a 20 gallon salt water tank for a while and have been looking for a larger tank that will support more fish. It seemed every time we found something that would be the right size it was way over priced junk. There was one decent tank for sale, the guy had bought it from the same place we had bought Andrea's so we knew it was an amazing quality tank. He is selling it because the overflow is one the end so it was not the style he wanted and he had only had it about a month. We decided to buy it and use it as a room divider between the dining room and living room. The new tank will be 54 inches long, 24 inches wide and 24 inches deep. It is rated at 130 gallons (US) and like her's is made from starfire glass. We went and looked at the tank yesterday and it was literally mesmerizing, I had to literally pull Andrea away. The plan is to pick it up on the first, it is going to take a few days for the current owner to empty it out and get it ready to move.
Here is what it looks like in his basement. I will be using a different type of lighting, I ordered a light bar made by Orbit Marine that will be a bar that basically is almost the full length of the tank. As you can see it is meant to be enjoyed from both sides and we will be able to see it from the kitchen, dining room, great room and living room so it will be a great show piece much like Andrea's.

We are really excited to see how our grand children like the tanks, it looks like Ally will be the first to get to see the tanks but she should find them fairly entrancing...

In the meantime my little Christmas vacation is over, back to work in the morning, there is some really big projects going on as we are doing a major expansion of our production capacity and more modernization. With everyone from the production side on vacation it is time for our projects department and maintenance crew to get things done - of course that means I get to do what I do best: watch other people work LOL.

Andrea and Noah are on holidays until the 5th so they will get some nice time together. We have had several plans to go ice fishing but every time they have fallen through, but we will get there, likely not while we are getting -40 windchill's.

IMPREZA

Well after taking a weekend off from writing, I am back. A lot has happened since I last wrote. To start with I guess the big news is no surprise - Andrea replaced my VW Golf with a 2011 Subaru Impreza WRX. I mentioned she was looking at it last time, well she took it for a test drive (I had to go to ensure the passenger seat was adequate) and she quickly bought it. I guess it is safe to say Merry Christmas Andrea, it really is quite a car. We have made two trips to Winnipeg and is very impressive, rides solid and comfortable but is so sporty!!! The AWD system is amazing, we have constant ice patches on the road here and as much as in some ways I hate having traction control it is the only thing that makes driving easy in the truck, in the Subaru it does not seem to matter it just pulls and tracks like crazy. The leather seats are an adventure, I need the seat belt to stay in place when she touches the brakes...anyway it is good to see her having fun driving. I guess buying a bike woke her out of here slumber!!!

The VW will not be going to waste, I will drive it occasionally over the winter to keep it in good shape and then Jessica, Chris and Allie are flying up the 25th of April, they are driving the car home and it will give them a quality family vehicle for many years. Of course they will be here for Andrea's birthday to so that will be pretty exciting.

I had a great conversation with Johnathan last weekend as well, Andrea and I are planning to fly Mom and Dad up next summer if Dad is up to the trip and John, his Andrea and the kids would like to come up at the same time...it would be so very cool if that can work out.

On a personal note I am about two days from being windows free, (at home at least). I had to make a hard choice when I went back to school - I needed a quality fast light laptop, I went with an Asus Ultrabook and it was a great laptop for the purpose but I was very torn between that and a Macbook Air. I did hope that the touch screen and windows eight on the Asus would make it worth sticking with windows. I can say I just do not use the touch screen and I do not like windows eight any more than the other versions. Andrea has bought me a new Macbook Air for Christmas and I will be very happy to get it (I am getting it early) and move everything over to it. I am not a huge Apple fan - I do not think that Apple does anything special, but my Apple devices do something my Android and windows devices do not do - they just plain work, simple efficient and effective. Not perfect but reliable...and if Apple develops a new operating system they give it to you for free...

The downside is I ordered it online, Futureshop had it on sale for cyber Monday so a good price and free shipping..I decide to pay the extra 20.00 for express post, two day shipping means I should have it fast...right...NOT. I am hugely disappointed in Futureshop, it basically took them three days to get it moving, and then of course to expect Canada Post to actually give you what you pay for, duh, I guess I should have just drove into the city and picked it up, would have cost well under 20.00 in the VW and been faster by at least a week...I have ordered from several other retailers including Best Buy for electronics, several times and never this issue. I have ordered golf clubs from California and had them faster several times. The firearms dealer where I order the majority of my hard to get stuff from has it to me from Alberta in two to three days...anyway enough whining about futureshop, I do not have to buy from them again.

In other news, the twenty gallon aquarium Andrea had bought me for my birthday a couple of years ago was essentially going to waste. It had a couple of fish left but it was really just sitting in the basement being ignored, we sold the remaining fish and emptied the tank. I decided I wanted to use it as a miniature (properly named Nano) saltwater aquarium so I cleaned it carefully to get rid of all the left over fresh water algae and residue. Andrea had a left over bag of live sand so we moved everything upstairs and filled it with saltwater, added the sand and let it settle. Saturday we had to go find Andrea a new dress for my Christmas party at work next weekend (she will look GORGEOUS) so I bought a cheap wave maker, a couple of fish and some rock to place corals on once the tank is ready. The initial setup looks very sharp but I will need a much better light to grow corals so I will be watching the sales, I know which one I want. In the meantime I have three blue - green chromos in the tank with a couple of pieces of Andrea's rock to "seed" the tank faster.

Until next time...Geoff and Andrea