I love small town service. I don't know if they do this in the city, but today I parked our RAV4 at work and left the keys there for walkterton toyota to pick up. I came back out to go home for lunch and the car was in the same spot, the keys were in the driver side visor with the bill. Otherwise you would have never known it had left to get a check up and oil change. That makes me happy.
Though I do have to say that while I really enjoy this part of walkterton toyota, we think that the service of the woodbridge toyota we used when we lived in toronto was better overall. Thats not to say that they did better work, but they seemed to care more about how we felt about the service. They always made us feel good where as in walkerton (and owen sound) you get the "i'm just another customer" feeling.
The RAV4 is happy as always and has 85500Km's on it after just over 2 years (we bought it new). Still feels new to me though.

We went skiing last night at Blue Mountain. Anne's parents were kind enough to watch Maya in the lodge while we were on the slopes, which we are both so grateful for.
EXTREME COLD basically sums up the weather there, but the snow was great and there were lots of big jumps. Going up the lifts was a lot colder than going down. Plus, because there were a lot of roads closed earlier in the day and it was so cold there were very few people there. We only had to wait in line once or twice.
Anne did very well considering she is still not quite 100% and she only fell once and not badly at that.
We hope to get at twice next week as well. I didn't feel 100% either but had a lot of fun and got so pretty big air off of a couple jumps.
The driving there and back wasn't too bad, just a bit slow as most of the roads up here are snow covered.

I made the following post at Shacknews yesterday morning.

"As a Canadian I have to say I that I am more scared of George Bush than anything a terrorist might do. Anyone else feel the same way?
He is just trying to assert to much power over the rest of the world if you ask me. The bits I watched of the State of the Union address last night just make me sad for the United States.
Not everything is all rosey in Canada but at least Paul Martin is mostly normal... "

Nothing like a politically oriented post to stir up a rats nest. First time I ever posted something that got more than a hundred replies. Fun to read though.

I have the Monster Jam 2004 Gallery up now. I will put a couple more videos up later. Most of the pictures didnt' turn out that great, the lights in the stadium seem to reek havoc on the lens. They do get the point across though, so enjoy.
Monster Jam is sort of the same format every year, the was one cool addition this year though. This is the order of things this year, after the big enterences by everyone: 1)Monster Trucks Race 2)4x4 Trucks Race 3) Quad Runners Race. They do that twice to quailfy and try and beat each others times. Then there is an intermission. The new thing this year was that after the intermission they had a human cannonball. It look like 20 minutes to set up and Ian and I weren't really expecting it to be that cool, but HOLY CRAP the guy went extremely high (200 feet apparently) and wowed us mightily. You can see him in the one picture in the gallery as he is on his way down. Then the races take place again to se who the winner is in each of the catagories. The quad wars are like the WWF really and are totally rigged, and blatently so. Still fun to watch, but they would be better if they just did real races and made them longer.
Anyway, after all that there is the monster truck freestyle where they just try and do the coolest stuff, thats where the vid from the last post is from. And the finale is the demoition derby.
All in all lots of fun had and we plan to go again next year.

The Monster Jam was super fun, just as it has been every year. They put a little more effort in it this year I think, which is nice. I will get a gallery up later, but don't get too excited as most of the pics didn't turn out that great. The videos are pretty good though.
Here is the best one I got to get you through the work day :) Keep in mind the video is about 5 Megs big and you need the Divx codec to play it.

I post the details later.

New Gallery of Maya from around the last week or so. There are a couple of our other child in there as well.
Enjoy!

I am looking forward to Monster Jam this coming Sunday (...SUNDAY, SOMEDAY) at the Skydome. My buddy Ian and I are going for the 4th year in a row. No video cameras allowed so I will just have to take some with our camera :)
It should be good, the new thing this year is some guy being shot out of a cannon. Hopefully they have better things to crush this year than that have the last couple. The first year they had a TTC bus in the middle of some cars and vans. Nothing since then has topped that. Should be awesome.

P.S. This is another favorite "One" from Homestar.

Hmmm we are getting lax with the blogging again. We are bad bad bad.

Not much going on though, I am amazed at how much less time there is to do play old every day stuff with Maya around (I hope you are listening Brock) and gaming time is very much lessened. Fortunately Maya is cute enough that I don't really notice and have a lot of fun with her. We were just sitting here head banging to treble charger and she was liking that, she didn't like Linkin Park though.
I did try and make a quick video with our camera of her "chasing" George but Anne didn't know how to press a button so I did the show and there was no video. Next time I guess. I will try and have a newer gallery up soon to make up for it.

On Monday the streets and ground were bare. Today, for the second day, everything in the area is pretty much closed and we have like 2 feet of snow. We are supposed to get around another 50cm tonight as well. I love weather like this, its a lot of fun to drive in as well.
The point of this post is that I think skiing is in order :) It looks like Blue Mountain is recovering from the lack of snow and deluges of rain nicely.

Maya is exactly one month old today!! Holy crap! I will get a happy "you are a month old" pic of her up later.

Its something I hardly ever do but I watched TV almost all day yesterday. Why? Well Speed TV had rally racing on all day and so I watched as much as I could. Overall I found it very enjoyable and will probably do the same thing next year.
However I have a couple of nits to pick. 1) The stupid "Speed TV Rally-thon" logo in the bottom right of the screen covered a lot of important info about the cars. Such as speed and times. ARG!! 2) because its an american view of the races I found the commentary boring and to technical, I really wish they would just rebroadcast the euro airings.
Other than that it was great. Unfortunately this year there weren't really any huge spectacular crashes or anything. The most exciting one was a car that caught fire and rolled into a ditch (after the hand brake burned out) and burned out ten acres of land. Another car snapped a tree in half that they hit, that was kinda nasty I guess. Other than that I was interested to see how the drivers got to the top of the leaderboard and how emotional they were etc. The sense of speed you get watching these cars on public roads is very satisfying, espeically on the tarmac races.
So anyway this definitely go me revved up for possible going to that rally in Pennsylvania in June.