hexstatik

Boo! Today my team won our company’s annual pumpkin carving contest! woot woot!

so you may or may not know (depending if you wear a propeller hat or not) that jerry seinfeld is the new “spokesperson” for microsoft (even though he used a mac on his show).

anyway, the first commercial starring jerry seinfeld and bill gates has been released. if you can understand it, can you please explain what the hell is going on? i don’t get it.

last weekend, crystal and i got into the saddle of our mountain bikes for the first time this summer (shameful, really) and hit the whistler bike park. it was a fantastic ride, with both crystal and i pushing our limits all day long. i guess the advantage of not having biked for so long is that you forget all your fears, earned by crashing and burning. :)

see below for crystal’s little video of our day.

very early saturday morning, crystal and i headed out to horseshoe bay to catch a ferry to the sunshine coast for a weekend of kayaking and crabbing in sechelt inlet. after a short wait for the ferry, we found ourselves pushing off from the boat launch at peddles and paddles and on our way. our chosen campsite was on the west side of the inlet, so we decided to cross right away before the winds got too strong and make the crossing more difficult to manage. after only a short paddle, we were across the inlet and heading toward our campsite at halfway beach. we had timed our padding so that the prevailing winds and tide would be in our favour and they definitely helped to make the 2.5 hour paddle that much easier.

after getting caught in a freak rain shower, we arrived at the beach to find that one group had already set up camp at the far end, so we planted our stake at the south end of the beach. in no time at all, we were all set up and back on the water to drop our traps (1 crab and 1 prawn) into the water. with only 50ft of rope on each trap, our options were limited and it took a bit of trial and error before we found a spot that would work. we left our traps in over night with the hope that we would score some prawns.

unfortunately, except for a few jelly fish and two sea stars, we came up empty all weekend. crystal blames the “commercial” crab food the we opted for considering we didn’t have refrigeration for either chicken or fish heads. while i was convinced it would work at the time of purchase, i think we’ll stick to chicken or fish heads next time.

overall, it was a great, sun filled weekend that allowed us to try out all our new super light camping gear. the conditions for the paddle home this morning alone would have made for a great day, but combined with the sun and fun of the previous two days, it was definitely a great long weekend.

Crystal’s version of the weekend’s events are up, and hers has photos!

after reading an wired article about the clover, i did a quick google search to find out if any cafes in vancouver had managed to aquire one. luckily, of the only 250 machines manufactured by hand before the company was bought by starbucks, 8 are located in vancouver, 2 of which belong to caffé artigiano.

caffé artigiano is known locally for bringing in world class coffees and cup of excellence winners that often retail for $130/lb or more and over the past couple of years, i’ve tried a few different winners from the cup of excellence awards. it will be interesting to compare those (brewed in a french press) to the el salvador cup of excellence winner #2 i’ll be sampling tomorrow with my team for our morning coffee break. at $5.95/cup though, it’s not something i’ll be enjoying very often. i’ll report the results back here tomorrow.

Update: so, the results are in. the coffee was pretty damn good, and didn’t have a single tinge of bitterness. now, was it the clover, or the award winning coffee? i don’t know, i would have had to have a cup brewed in a french press and a cup from the clover at the same time to distinguish if the clover machine itself made that much of a difference. either way, it was a nice little treat.