Maintenance Marshmallows

Saturday morning I did a little maintenance on my site, had some lunch, then went for a dog walk with Sue, KaptainK, Yoshi, and Digger at Island View Beach. Fun times. Except when Digger decided that he needed to do a little business right beside a family that was roasting marshmallows over a fire. Bad dog Digger!

Some snaps from the day:

Yoshi running on the beach

Digger digging

tired Digger

tired Yoshi

And for something a little different, here we have Digger digging on the beach.

Saturday night was fun too! We went to Christie’s Carriage house pub for some eats and drinks. Nothing like miing a good pub burger with some excellent beer (Kilkenny). Very enjoyable day in all.

Brewing Donuts

Friday night was fun. A guy from work had won a gift certificate for a brewery tour at Vancouver Island Brewery. It wwas a great way to get to know some of my coworkers. I met up with them at the brewery, had a couple drinks, did the tour, then had a few more.

The tour itself was pretty interesting. There was a history of beer brewing on Vancouver Island, an overview of the ingredients, and the process for making beer, the steps followed after the beer is brewed, then an overview of their bottling facility.

After finishing up at the brewery, we then decided to head down to the Canoe Club for some mroe drinks. Mmmm, beeeeer!

Around 12:30 I decided to call it a night and was going to grab a cab home. When I got to Johson St, I couldn’t find any cabs, so I just walked home, stopping at Tim Horton’s for a late night snack. Gotta love those Canadian Maple Donuts.

Mistakenly Fun

window dressing

Last night the photo club met once again. I mistakenly instructed them to meet at the corner of Fort and Douglas, when I really meant Fort and Blanshard. Oh well, we worked with what I said.

I mixed it up a little though. I had everyone divide into two groups. We were all on the same block, but were not allowed to cross the street. One group had to shoot at things across the street, and the other group had to shoot at things on the same side of the street. It was interesting, and kind of fun. I am not sure if I will do that again, but perhaps we will.

Here are my pics.

Turnaround Packets

hidden gem

Tuesday night we had a couple people over to watch the Flames take on the Tampa Bay Lightning. We also ordered in from Salty’s Fish and Chips.

Definitely a good dining experience there! Service was quick, and friendly. They are only a few blocks from my place too, so turnaround time from ordering to eating was in the neighbourhood of 15 minutes. This meant that the food was still piping hot. Speaking of the food, it was yummy! The battered fish was excellent, and the chips spectacular (even when they got cold). Also, the measure of a good fish and chip shop is in the amount of tartar sauce they give you. We had just he right amount, so that was pretty good. The downside was that it was all in individual packets so getting to the sauce was a pain.

As for the game, it was pretty good too. I quite enjoyed watching the Flames beat the Lightning.

hidden gem

Downhill BBQ

lush forrest

Yesterday Sean, Darryll, and myself had a nice spin at the dump. We started off with Mark and Stephen, but they had to peel off pretty early due to time commitments.

Seaners

Darryll

The three remaining riders took it easy on the way to the top of Green Ribbon. From there we blasted down Green Ribbon to Rolly Ridge, back up, then down Y2J, and Skull back to the lot.

Seaners launching on Green Ribbon

Personally I had a great ride. I was feeling pretty confident, I had loads of energy, and heaps of motivation to use that energy when going uphill. The confidence was a big hit with me when the trails was heading downhill. For me this ride was the reason I love mountain biking. I was in a zen space where I felt I could do almost anything I wanted to (on my bike). I was killing the DH, and slaying the UH. It was all good. It is that kind of magic that I am always trying to attain.

This ride left me wondering what was so special about it? Did I eat differently in the morning? Did I warm up differently? Am I in better overall shape than previous rides? Why was this ride so special, and how can I recreate it?

I don’t think I will ever know the answer, but I sure enjoyed the feeling.

To top off the ride, as I was pedalling into the parking lot, I could smell a BBQ going. I assumed someone down the road was having a good lunch. Boy was I wrong! There were two guysin the parking lot cooking up hot dogs for anyone who wanted one! They also had ice cold drinks to go with the dogs. Holy smokes. Who were these guys?

They work for Mac’s Cycle Centre here in Victoria. Their boss closed the shop for the day, and sent these two lads to the parking lot to cook dogs for hungry cyclists. These guys were getting paid to sit in the lot, BBQ, listen to music, and talk with like minded folks. Props to Mac’s! I will check them out the next time I am looking for parts. I haven’t been there in a while, but the next time I go in, I will definitely mention the BBQ. Excellent idea for advertising.

Deprecated Weather

retaining bolts in a deactivated gun emplacement

Well, today was supposed to be about yardwork, but since it started raining, I had to put that on hold. Instead I did a little site work. I cleaned up the taxonomy (not that you will notice much), removed the cloud module since it has been deprecated in Drupal, configured the weblinks module to output my monitored links (essentially replacing the site cloud), installed the weather module, and installed the subscriptions module (only useful for users who login).

Pretty successul I would say.

As a side note, I will leave the notifications module, and the subscribtions module running side by each for now. They offer similar functionality, but offer it differently.

The notify module allows you to receive emails when new content is put up here, or if new comments are added to any story.

The subscription module allows you to subscribe to certain threads, or certain taxonomies (categories of posts). It is a little more fine grained than the notify module. I haven’t really tested this one yet, but hopefully it will just work!

Intermediate Crashing

dinosaur model in a toy shop

Woohoo! Results are in. I placed 8th out of 27 with a time of 4:13.88 in the intermediate class. The winning time was 3:49.95 I am very happy with these results. Trés cool.

:guzzle:

I think I could have gone a little faster, but I might have run the risk of crashing, or perhaps running out of steam and ending up being slower than I was.

Darryll did great too. He placed 20th out of 39 riders. Very good for his first race ever. Congrats Darryll.