Tuesday April the 3rd was a busy day for myself, Jenn and my Father. It was the day that everyone arrived in Ottawa for my wedding, well everyone on my side of the family that was coming to the wedding from out of town. This includes my Grandparents from British Columbia, Hamish and Morag from Scotland and Anita from Florida.
Anita arrived first that day around 2pm and I was 3 minutes late picking her up from the air port. We went back up and then back again with Jenn and my Father around 4 to pick up my Grandparents. It was nice to see them and my Aunt Gail who came to the pick them up and take them home. We hung out at the airport for a few minutes and then everyone went on their way. We passed the time in a Tim Hortons while we waited for Hamish and Morag, who were arriving about an hour or so after, to arrive at the airport. By this point Anita had travelled back and forth to the Airport three times which soon became a running joke of 'I know how to find the airport now' or 'as long as we don't go to the airport'.
That night Dinner was at Connors Irish Pub, where the food is always good and made fresh. Jenn and I have since been back about 4 times now. We're trying to go at least twice a month because it is very good.
I spent most of the week with Anita, on Wednesday we went to the Science and Tech museum and had dinner at The Works. While at the Science and Tech museum there was a human hamster wheel where if you run fast enough you activate a Tesla coil. The entire time you're running it tells you how much energy you're generating. It's a very neat machine unfortunately we do not have any video (that I know about).
Thursday was a little disappointing but fun at the same time. The plan was to get up early and go to Fulton's Sugar Shack out in the West end of the City. We were to leave at 7:45am and go pick up my Grandparents for 830am and then arrived at Fultons around 9am. The first, and most heart breaking, snag we hit was Anita's cold had taken a turn for the worst and she was not feeling too great that morning. She opted to stay home and rest so she could be in good shape for the rest of the trip. I left her a key to the house on the counter and left. Jenn and I made our way over to my Parents house to pick up the rented van for the trip. My Dad wasn't coming because he had dental surgery that day and my Mother had to drive him there.
Hamish and Morag, who were staying with my Parents, were already in the back of the van and we left almost right away. We arrived at my Aunt's house around 830am and chatted until around 9am.
Jenn and Brad's dog Leia quickly became fast friends.
I was expecting Fultons to be fairly busy and crowded since it was very close to the Easter weekend and last time I came around this time with Jenn, Jenn's Father, Jenn's now Step Mother and Jenn's Step Mother's Father we had to wait an hour or so just to sit down and eat. The line up almost went to the end of the parking lot.
When we arrived however there was one other car in the lot. We parked and walked right in. We ordered food and they had to make it fresh for us because there was no one else there. The lady was nice and brought the food to our table and let us take the maple syrup container with us. Everyone had a grand time and they even gave us a quick tour and history of the Maple farm since another family from Georgia showed up. We learned that the natives used to put the sap beside the first and put heated rocks from said fire into the sap to boil away the water and turn it into Maple Syrup. Now a days they use an evaporator to get all of the water out and make the thick and tasty maple syrup that we know and love today.
After a quick look around we piled back into the van and headed back, but not before stopping in Pakenham to go to the Oldest General Store in North America and the local Butcher. The General Store had one really neat thing that I remembered, the store train.
It runs around the top of the store and is just a nice touch since it is no longer something you see everyday. We purchased some hot cross buns and some cinnimon buns. My Grandparents, Hamish and Morag had a tour of the upstairs where they sell all sorts of plates, furniture, glasses, clothes, dolls and pretty much everything you can think of. One thing really caught my eye. It was the sun plate.
It was nice looking at the plate through the window, it glowed nicely and unfortunately this photography doesn't accurately capture what I saw.
From the Butcher Jenn bought me some ground beef for hamburgers, spicy and maple sausages and herself some of the breakfast sausages that are oh so good. We were able to sample them at Fulton's with our breakfast and after Jenn had some she said 'We need to buy these from the butcher'. They have the texture of Hot Dogs which is nice for a breakfast sausage. I prefer it over the lumpy fat chunks you normally get.
After leaving Pakenham we arrived back at my Aunt Gail's about 45 minutes later and stayed for a nice chat and a cup of tea. We left just before the traffic started.
We arrived back in Orleans were Anita was groggy on the couch and she said the cats were about ready to eat her since they didn't understand why she wasn't feeding them. Anita ended up going with Jenn to get the flowers for the wedding while my Dad, Hamish and I went to return the van.
When I returned home we left again to go to Harvey's for dinner. This is where Anita was finally able to try poutine and cheese curds, unfortunately she was still not 100% and probably couldn't/didn't enjoy it as much as she could. Either that or it really isn't food for everyone.
Later in the evening I told Anita that were getting up early again because I was taking her to the sugar shack on Friday morning.
Grilling Time 2:48pm EDT - Saturday, April 21st, 2012
Last week was my wedding, April 7th. I'm happily married now but that is a story for another time.
About two weeks ago my Dad bought me a BBQ as a house warming present and I can say I have been enjoying it. The first time I was able to BBQ was the day before my wedding. Anita came up for the wedding (yet another story for another time) and I made her hamburgers with beef Jenn and I purchased from Pakenham (another time).
I asked Anita if I could put curry, rosemary, sage, tyme and other spices into the burgers and it was a no. So they were a simple salt/pepper burger which turned out to be very good and I'll be making them again.
About two weeks later Jenn had me grill up a steak. I put pepper and rosemary on it while it was on the grill and it turned out looking and more importantly, delicious. Next time I might put some olive oil as well.
Jenn's Brother Mark, soon to be my Brother-in-Law has been building a cabin up North on the Quebec side and we went up on the 24th to finished the ceiling and hang a big wheel on the wall. Now this isn't the purpose of my writing today. The purpose of my writing today is that I got to experience something almost new; the (almost) new experience in question is driving on properly flooded roads.
The last time I was on a flooded road was in Scotland when Hamish was plowing through little patches of flooded road during a massive rain storm and the time before that was with my Father and he was plowing through large lakes in the middle of the road in his 1991 Volvo, which incidentally caused it stop running and we had to wait for the repair guy to show up and spray WD40 on the inside of our distributor cap.
What Mark and I experienced this time was slightly different.
This is a picture from outside the passenger window.
This is a stock picture of his truck (courtesy MSN Autos) so you can gauge how high the water was.
One last time 10:02pm EDT - Friday, March 23rd, 2012
I've come to the conclusion that I no longer have the same feel for riding a motorcycle as I use to. I made a joke about 4 years ago that I was having a quarter life crisis, maybe I actually was? Regardless, I'm going to be selling Elizabeth and giving up riding a motorcycle.
One of the major factors in this decision is that I am now getting married and I have someone that I care about and want to spend my time with and not inside my garage working on a motorcycle. Sure, I could get a new motorcycle and it would just work properly all the time for me but where is the fun in that? The only bike I want to ride is Liz (and Dot, I suppose, when she was running and she was still my owner). Another major factor is the 3 close calls I had within 45 days last year where I was almost turned into smear and news story by an SUV, truck and sedan. I just don't feel safe anymore, and no safety course is going to fix that for me. I can see how traffic works, and I know what people are going to do before they do it, but I cannot see everything all time (case in point when I hit the back of a van on my motorcycle). So I'm quitting while I'm still standing. Besides I've also realized that I enjoy the fixing part more than the riding part, my friends still have motorcycles to their names so I'll still be able to enjoy that. This also means we now have a dedicated follower car.
As for waking up Liz this year, it started off rather simple and quickly went down hill. Rolling her out of the garage and starting her up was the easier part of my day (started on the first kick, instead of last years 38 kicks).
it was after this point that the problems started to happen. I took Liz out for a ride and planned to go see Jeff to top up the tires, but that was quickly halted as Liz had accelleration issues, as if she was starving for gas. I removed the fuel filters to see if that was the problem and it didn't help. They are four years old so I will be replacing them. I also noticed that the headlight was not coming on. And for those of you that remember the same type of thing happened to Dot.
It took me two tries to engineer a new brass plate for Dot's switch. I did it the first try with Liz, obviously I'm a master of my trade. That trade is MacGuyvering.
Finally, the last problem I had with Liz today was the tail light. I left it for last because it was either a bad bulb or bad fuse. I had already fixed the tail light and there is no way it could be a wiring issue this time. As soon as I removed the tail light lense the problem was revealed to me instantly.
Now, last year when I was swapping Liz's throttle cable there was some problems with the screws that hold the throttle control together and I ended up needing to use vice grips to get them out. I fixed that today as well, by slowly screwing in one of the screws all the way and slowly removing it, repeating that process twice on both screw holes twice. I was afraid I was going to have to use a helicoil. However, last year I did manage to ruin a screw driver.
But there are worse things I suppose. Just thinking about it now I can file off the end and it would still work as a screw driver for larger phillips.
Over the weekend we had some really nice (abnormally high for this time of year, about 4x warmer than normal) weather. A few days before that I had picked up one of those pet pegs to put in the ground that you attach to the child pet. It worked really well and the cats enjoyed roaming the back yard and basketing in the sun all morning and afternoon for the periods they happened to be outside until the stray kid ran past screaming and spooked them all.
