Flog in the nair

I never noticed that "flog" is "golf" spelled backwards. And I gave that game a good flogging today.

Ken and I hit the mostly par three Kinkora today for a round after work in the rain. Well, it wasn't heavy rain, although it was at times, but it was moist to be sure. Kind of like golfing in a cloud, but not bad at all frankly. Are there bad days on the golf course?

A fun little round, some nice short iron work and a good whack of the balls.

What else can you ask for? I was stroke for stroke with Kenny on the front nine, but the wheels came off and he hit a 68 and I hit a 73. Whatever.

Mini-paper

I have an interview with a very cool caricaturist from Toronto tomorrow who has recently moved to Chilliwack. I sent him a photo of the mayor so I'm hoping he'll do us a freebie. His stuff is here: gobestimpression.com/Pross and this, obviously, is one of his of Freud. Cool eh?

Another production day today. The smallest paper since I've been at the Times at 28 pages, but still provides a lot of work when Mike is on holiday.

I made the mistake of trying to do something I did last year, but last year it was done fore me. That thing was a map of construction projects in the city. Given how much paving and road construction is going on I figured we should let people know what's up next. But I had to make the map in Adobe Illustrator because the city didn't do one as they did last year. Always good to learn something new, but kind of not my normal expertise.

Another story I did for tomorrow's paper, well, I didn't really do it, but took it from our news service, was a very sad one about a Chilliwack woman and her seven-year-old girl who were killed after being tossed off a boat in the Northwest Territories last week. Her 13-year-old boy survived. He was found on the shore two days later. Brutal.

But my page one story on the local woman who just reunited with her son she was forced to give up at three years old after 33 years is a nice positive one. Turns out good ol' Facebook was the connector. Oddly this guy, who has lately been a missionary in the Czech Republic, was raised by his adoptive family in Burlington next door to me and he is my exact same age. He went to Pearson. I laughed with him that if he had played junior soccer in high school I might have played against him.

One more paper until my two weeks off. Although this is a three-paper week and Mike and I are both away on Friday, so I'm going to have to do some serious extra story filing so the editor, Ken, doesn't have a heart attack all alone with Aidan our new sports reporter on Friday.

A Weekend in the 'Wack

Back to blogging and this time I'm going to keep it up. I know no one is reading this, but that isn't the point. The point is to keep myself blogging for the same reason a 15-year-old writes in a journal. And for the same reason I wrote in a journal long past 15. (Although I'll have to keep myself reined in.)

Here's our townhouse under construction in Garrison Crossing on Saturday. It is looking like it is progressing a lot every week to the point where shingles have gone up on the porch and inside crown moldings are in. But we have just had to sign something agreeing to extend our move-in date from Aug. 22 to Aug. 29. Only a week but kind of too bad. I just hope there are not any more delays. It's not like we can ask for anything extra (as in free appliances or something) because even when we signed on the Aug. 22 move-in it was always in the contract that the date could change based on shortages in labour, materials and whatever else the builder decided was causing a delay. Locusts? Acts of God? As far as we're concerned the good news is that the owner of the crap-hole (brand-new condo mind you) we are living in told me that her daughter isn't moving in Sept. 1 so we can stay as long as we want.

Phew.

Joanne and I had a pretty good weekend with a bit of a date feel to it. I did the groceries as usual Saturday, picking up some treats from our butcher shop, and some fresh Okanagan fruit from Hofstede's, our favourite fruit and vegetable spot. Superstore is always a nightmare; an anthropological study for me as I see what the sketchy people eat. And it isn't good. I'm that guy looking judgmentally into your grocery cart shaking my head at the KD, Pepsi, Chef Boyardee and potato chips. As HIV is to AIDS so to is these clowns' shopping carts to diabetes.

Then we went to Pala Lago, a relatively new restaurant in Cultus Lake on Saturday night. We wanted to walk across the street from our current home at the Newmark in downtown Chilliwack to Bravo, a restaurant that is so good and so out of place in this town. But, as I called to make a reservation I find out they took a holiday. Do restaurants normally do that sort of thing? Take a week in July off? Anyway, we went to Pala Lago and had a beautiful spot out on a nice evening on the patio. Unfortunately my meal was mediocre at best. A dry, flavourless piece of halibut covered in a bland passionfruit seed salsa. Kind of too bad frankly. But it was a nice night as we were celebrating me getting a raise after my two years at the paper.

Today we took it very easy, went to Canadian Tire and bought Joanne a $30 Roger Federer Wilson tennis raquet and we had a "game" of tennis. Had a good sweat and that's all that matters. And then we had an awesome dinner of grilled vegetable kebobs with this awesome cabernet vinegar/dijon sauce, corn on the cob with limes and a Caribbean spice mix, and she had sun-dried tomato chicken kebobs and I had garlic sauce beef kebabs. Tasty.

Back to work tomorrow and four days until we go to Ontario. It's a three-paper week because of the long weekend, which means neither Mike nor I am at work on Friday so hopefully Ken, the editor, can deal with stuff. I'm sure he'll be fine. I'll be chilling at Joanne's parents so what do I care.

Enough for now.