The Bushrod Chronicles

big al the aquarium feller that is…

whilst the childrens were at their grandmother’s house love-of-my-life karen and i went to the uber cool aquarium store and bought our way into the hobby…

’twas sweet… armed with a little reading research and some great advice from one of k’s board buddies who has run a fish store and had lotsa experience… we flagged down our new best pal trevor and spent an hour putting together a stylin’ setup…

we ended up going with a 72 gallon bow-front tank… upgraded the lights… upgraded the filter… got some stylin’ plants… and to start we got some velvet wag swordtails (xiphophorus helleri yo)… ’cause they’re cool lookin’ and… err… ‘hearty’… which means maybe we won’t kill ‘em as we ‘cycle’ the tank and get it all in equilibrium and ready to provide us with lotsa fish-watching-based joy…

in poking around lifehacker, one of my fave sites… i came across some posts about backpack by 37 signals…

a sweet app that i’ve started using daily… very simple… good nuts-and-bolts feature set… as i heard it referred to somewhere “it’s like a big ol’ spiral notebook on your computer”… and i’m a big fan of spiral notebooks…

and there’s a handy list of hacks by taylor mcknight here… also via backpack…

between backpack and goto by amigo steve my daily have-everything-where-i-need-it needs are handled…

very cool…

so one of our trepidations in relocationg away from seattle was the thought that we might have trouble finding some sweet sushi restaurants… we were spoiled by a couple of really really good ones there…

well we found a wunnerful lil’ place here called mi.ne sushi… love-of-my-life k and i went there a while ago, sat at the bar and met one of the owners who treated us well and made us a bunch of awesome goodies…

we’ve been back a couple of times… just the two of us… and a couple of times with les chilluns… at this stage of the game i think i prefer the former… hah… i think we’ll maybe keep mi.ne for the parents for now…

when i was looking for a link i came across an article saying that mi.ne had opened a restaurant in hong kong… i don’t know if it’s the same folks but i thought the review pictographs down the page were kinda cool…

wow…

as a long time fan of bob dylan i was quite happy to see these videos on google video… good stuff…

hells yeah…

with love-of-my-life karen and my new-found childcare options comes opportunity to get out into the world on occasion and try some new stuff… i guess we could sit around a lot too… but we’ve decided to do a little experiencing of new things to have fun and maybe meet some folks in the new town…

along those lines we’ve decided to do a little curling… there’s a club in town and, by golly, we’re all signed up… hah… our curling career starts next week… i reckon it’ll be a hoot… i’m strangely drawn to the sport for some reason…

and i’ll fess up to liking men with brooms… should probably watch that again… y’know… for research…

bringing cars to canada from the states… easy as pie yo…

well not exactly… actually… all things considered… if we woulda known then what we know now and whatnot… we woulda sold a perfectly good car just not to deal with the hassle…

and we woulda bought out our lease on the other one much earlier so as not to totally take it in the shorts not once but twice during the moving process…

having said all that and acknowledged our naivite along the way… after many hoops were jumped through, today i (finally) got the official canadian-type plates for our second car… the end of a rather huge ordeal…

i never thought that screwin’ on a coupla license (errr… licence) plates would ever give me so much satisfaction and joy…

heh heh… i said screwin’…..

saw this site referred to on amigo steve’s blog… the parenting tips are grand… more than that i thought the entire concept was pretty darn spectacular…

via steve and parent hacks…

so upon our arrival back from our latest oregon adventures we were greeted with a wondrous sight… our deck… i love a deck… we had a good ‘un at our seattle abode and now we do here too…

and here’s me doing the mj…

… bacause no one seems to think jim beam (cue angels singing) is worth stocking in pubs here…

i am not happy about that… (cue angels crying)…