Rally Pictures
Here are 5 pics I took while at the Rally on Saturday. They are scanned pics so not great quality.
- I really like Evos. I think this one acually won the whole rally in the end.
- My only night shot in which you can acually see a car...sort of.
- The WRX was going by VERY fast and so I guess I tracked ahead to far. :(
- They could have done better...
- This may have been the one that rolled eventually...

We finally got our digital camera, a Canon Powershot S230 Digital ELPH. I have been fiddling with it this evening and so far find it very good. It has a lot more features than our old point can shoot film camera so there is a bit of a learning curve. Here are a couple of sample photos:
- Anne showing her belly. Keep in mind we are due in the next couple of weeks.
- A nice close up of my model Subaru Impreza WRX STI the WRC edition.
I am having trouble figuring out the focus in regular pics but I just need to read the manual for that. The macro ones seem to turn out great though!

I am still sore from Sunday. I played tackle/touch football for about 2.5 hours on Sunday. It was fun, one guy seperated his shoulder though. Then I played hockey for an hour and a half with only one sub on my teams bench. So today I am not walking funny like yesterday, but my legs are still pretty sore.

So yesterday myself and my friend Ian went to the Rally of the Pines near Bancroft. During the waits between runs we decided that "its coolness was only outweighed by its awesomeness". I believe the term "bowel-loosening" was also used. Sooooooo much fun even with the waiting and such. Seeing the cars turn corners at the speeds they do and the spray of gravel and the close calls (and booing the not so close ones) was worth the wait every time.
The first spectator stage was pretty good. We had good seats atop the small grand stand and could make out the whole part where the cars went by. They took 3 runs past this part so it was totally crazy to see the open class cars take the turn the second and third times as I don't think they actually slow down for the corner much at all. They come very close to the crowd too, within arms reach of some spectators. Its interesting to see how many cars are left by the third time they go past as there were about 60 at the start and only about 20 or so by the third run.
Castledine was even better as it was a pitch black night and you got a longer view of the cars coming into in curve there and the hairpin at the end. The diagram does not do it justice at all. It's crazy to see how fast these cars are going at night, it hard to describe the excitement. There were 2 runs on this one and only about 10 cars left. On the second run through one (a Subaru Impreza WRX) went over the embankment and rolled (much to the delight of the roaring crowd).
All in all an awesome event and much fun was had by and I expect it to become an annual occurrence. Next year I am taking a video camera for sure.

Edit: Yes my spelling and grammar are atrocious at night. So I have fixed up the post.

Optical Illusion
This one is painfull but interesting. Click here and it looks like the circles are rotating even though they are obviously a static image.

Rally Racing!!!
Tomorrow morning myself and my fried Ian are heading up to near Bancroft to attend the Rally of the Tall Pines rally race, which is the championship race for the Candian series. I am so pumped. We are getting there early to check out the cars and stuff before they head off or while they are getting serviced. It should be good fun and I am going to get lots of pictures if I can.

The Two Towers
Picked up the LOTR:TTT SE last night. With the extra footage its almost 4 hours long.
Anne and I watched some of the features on the 3rd DVD last night and thoroughly enjoyed them. Its just incredible the amount of work that goes into these things.
We decided though that before we watch the 2nd one again that we are going to watch the LOTR: FOTR SE again first.

Just a quick note to say that you don't have to enter all your info in the comments page. You can just enter your name and post just fine. Just letting you know that because I noticed everyone entering everything and its a pet peeve of mine if I have to do that to post.

New Comments!
Due to the trouble with Enetation I have now switched over to Haloscan they definitely seem to be a lot faster and are the highest rated comments system on google. So Everyone let me know if you have problems with this set.
Sorry for the loss of the previous comments, we shall miss them greatly (but not to much due to the aforementioned problems)
Also those of you who don't post comments and read the site, get commenting!!! You know who you are :)

Matrix Revolutions
I saw Matrix Revolutions Friday night and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would considering all the bad things I had hear about it. But it seemed to flow a lot better than the second one and the actions parts seemed better to me. It is a ton of fun seeing the squidies trying to take out Zion. The Neo-Smith match was good but not as fun as the fights from the first movie.
Overall I would recommend it.

The Storm
So the area was hit pretty hard by that storm on Thursday. Goderich (a town that's pretty close) record winds up to 120 km and hour!
And it was quite snowy here at the time so it made looking outside very interesting. There are still big drifts all over the place even though we have had 3 consecutive days above zero degrees.
At work we were supposed to have software demos from 2 different companies. Needless to say they couldn't make it. Hanover only lost power twice for not more than 10 minutes. Our wide area network was out for half the day though which sucked.
I was talking to a co-working whose husband does hydro and he was still working all through the night Saturday to get stuff up in running. I guess along highway 21 at Kincardine and south of there it was very very bad. Point Clarke was "like a war zone" With huge trees and hydro lines all over the place. They couldn't even get down most streets to fix stuff due to the trees.

Driving here in town on unplowed streets was a total blast though :)

So Wednesday night we had our second prenatal class. This one was more interesting than the last one for a couple of reasons. One reason was that there was a video to watch and the second was other peoples reactions to various things.
The video was funny because for the first three quarters of it while going through the different stages of labour it was obviously trying to avoid having any "private parts" of the women shown, but then in the last quarter (where the actual births take place) of it had all sorts of boobs and vaginas showing in all sorts of stages of birth. I was alright with this as it all was in the appropriate context but hearing a bunch of married people and other expecting mothers giggle like nervous school kids was really funny. Seriously, what did they expect to see?
Anyway, nothing like seeing a head pop out of some woman's vagina and stuff squirting all over the place to sober you up to the reality that its going to happen to you soon. And where the heck to they find the couples for these things? Why do they have to be soo ugly! I am sure good looking women can give birth too!
I think I am going to be just fine during the actual event as I am not squeamish about that type of stuff and the video didn't make me feel woozy or anything. I think one of my friends that was there with his wife though may have a bit of trouble judging from his reaction. :)
Anne was not impressed with the way the class was taught either, as she knew there was a lot of information being left out. Plus we got to leave a half-hour early.

So on the weekend I finally got my Subaru Impreza! And not only that its the WRC version! I didn't even have to pay for it as it was a present from a friend. I can't exactly drive it but it rocks none the less. I soooo very wish this were me.Thanks Ian, you're the best!

We had our first pre-natal class Wednesday evening, it was okay. Saw a couple of people we knew from high school that were expecting as well so that was interesting.
One thing that bothers me is statistics that use sometimes just don't make sense. One they used that bothers me is that in relation to SIDS. Keep in mind (as far as I understand) that there is no hard information on what causes SIDS or what you can do to prevent it from occurring. So in the class they recommend some (fairly paranoid) percautions but like to throw in some stats with them. For instance, putting in a baby in a crib with no bumper pads decrease the risk of SIDS by 40%. So how did they come up with that figure if they have no idea what causes it in the first place.
Also things like alternating which way you baby lies in the crib so they move their head in a different direction and that sort of thing all see really paranoid to me. Anne and I really snickered as some of the points the nurse made.
One sad bit at the end was when we left and we say at least one pregnant woman like up a cigarette in their car as soon as they got in it, right after all the harping in the class on how bad it is. That REALLY makes me mad and sad as the same time.
All in all it wasn't that great but they next couple having to do with labour might be a bit more fun.