Bryan

Pictures on the Internet

2007-01-09T19:43:00.000-05:00

I was recently asked to remove a picture from my www.flashthecat.com photo gallery website, and it got me thinking about the whole issue of posting pictures of friends and family on the Internet. Although I post the pictures for harmless fun, and have no intentions of embarrassing, upsetting or pissing anybody off, I should make it clear to everyone that I can remove the pictures very easily if you are uncomfortable with any of them. If there is a specific picture that you would prefer to have taken down, for whatever reason, just let me know and I'll take it down asap. In addition to that, if you would rather not have any pictures of yourself posted, just let me know and I can avoid posting them as well. You won't hurt my feelings.... I promise.

Keeping on the topic of my website, I would just like to thank everyone for your compliments and comments. I have a lot of fun with it, and it's easy to keep updated when you have a number of crazy friends who aren't shy of the camera (unlike me... which is why I take the pictures). And a special thanks to Flash the cat, who is slowly going blind due to the number of pictures I take of him while learning all the neat features of my new camera.

Later,
Bryan

Ringing in the New Year

2007-01-07T13:46:00.000-05:00

This is a little delayed, but Happy New Year everyone! I can't believe it's 2007 already... where is the time going? It doesn't seem all that long ago we were celebrating the year 2000 with all our friends. Speaking of celebrating, this years party was a blast. Heather and I had a number of our friends over again this year, and it turned out to be whole lot of fun. Nothing real crazy happened, but a few decided to carry on the gitch parade tradition and run around the block in their underwear... ah good times! I'm sure my neighbours really loves us now! The downside of all this, however, was the fact that it was raining out and a particular person (by the name of Kyle) soaked his pants and went the rest of the night without them. You will see in the below picture the lovely sight the rest of us were so lucky enough to view for the remaining of the evening. Anyway, it was all in good fun and a great way to ring in the new year. To view all the pictures I took that evening, head over to my picture gallery at http://www.flashthecat.com. The pictures came out great, and I'm sure you'll have a few good laughs. I'll warn you though, there is one particular picture that may haunt you and cause you to have nightmares. I'm ashamed for just taking the picture. Anyway, have a great 2007!

Christmas

2006-12-29T14:38:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas this year... I know I did. Having been on vacation from work and not really doing much, this Christmas season was very quiet and relaxing. It doesn't get much better than that! It's been great to just hang out and visit with family and friends, have a few drinks, and play around with the new toys for my camera. The only real downside to this Christmas season was not being able to spend any real time with Heather, and she has pretty much been living at work. It stinks that she has had to work so much, but what are you going to do?

Anyway, the whole point of this blog post was to notify my loyal readers (does anybody even read this stupid blog???) that I have posted some pictures of both Christmas Eve and Christmas day on my webstie. My site is http://www.flashthecat.com. Feel free to browse around and post some comments. So that's it for now. Hope you all have a great new years!

Has it been that long...

2006-10-30T22:36:00.000-05:00

Wow, over a month and no new posts... I suck. I just wanted to create a new post to thank Tony and Jeannette for hosting the 2nd Annual Halloween Bash this year, and for inviting Heather and myself. The decorations were great, the costumes were cool, and the party was a blast.

Now this is the part of the post where I apologize to everyone for being an idiot and a royal pain in the ass. To keep this short, I basically had far too much to drink (or did I?) and took far to many pictures. I basically remember taking up around 150 pictures (which is far to many), but when I uploaded them to my computer the day after, there was a nice surprise of 310 pictures taken. While looking at the pictures, I seriously can't remember for the life of me taking half of them. My only explanation for this is that damn Absinthe... That stuff is crazy. I blame this devil drink because before that I actually didn't have much, a few rum and cokes, and very few Jello shooters... Nothing that I couldn't handle before. But after that 1 shot of Absithe, my night was done. I don't remember anything beyond that point. So my apologies to everything who I may have annoyed that night... The camera stays home next time :)

Now that's out of the way, I just wanted to let everyone know that I posted a few (of the many) pictures that I took that night on my website. In case you don't know the address of my website, it's www.flashthecat.com. Feel free to post any comments.

New Website

2006-09-20T22:10:00.000-04:00

Let me first apologize for not getting the pictures that I mentioned in my previous posting posted... I guess I maxed out my picture space or something. On the upside, I did manage to get around and registering myself a domain name, and was able to score some free webspace from a good friend at work. My new website is www.flashthecat.com. For now, since I've been pretty busy with a bunch of stuff around the house, I only posted our pictures from the wedding. I'll eventually create a proper main page with a number of picture galleries. That's it for now.

New Tom Petty CD

2006-08-26T15:30:00.000-04:00

Anyone looking for a good, easy listening CD should get the new Tom Petty album. It's called "Highway Companion", and I gotta say that it is pretty damn good. I've listened to the CD twice now, and I can't find one song that I don't like. It's one of those albums that probably won't have big commercial success, but it's full of great sounding songs... not one of those albums that has 2 or 3 great songs, but the rest is crap. That's pretty much the extent of my music reviewing abilities, so I'm going to leave it at that. Maybe Joe Sambol, who's been a big Tom Petty fan for many years, will have some more to say about the album.

Wedding Photos

2006-08-26T15:06:00.000-04:00

I gotta say that I'm more than impressed with our wedding photographer Jim Evans. Not only did he take some great photos, he was a lot of fun and very fast in printing and delivering our pictures. Because there are close to 500 pictures that he took, and I obviously can't post them all here, I figured I'd post a few good ones and a few that I've played around with. My plan is to eventually create a real website that I can display full galleries of pictures, but that would involve me doing actual work. Hopefully I can get the ambition to get this done.

Something must be wrong with Google, because I can't upload any photos at the moment. I'll try again a little later. I guess this is a sign for me to start that webpage of mine :)

Love the Adobe Photoshop (*updated)

2006-08-13T22:21:00.000-04:00

I've recently been on another Adobe Photoshop kick, and was tinkering around with some new techniques. Below are a few pictures that I've been messing around with. Comments always welcome.

Speaking of pictures, I think I've finally got Heather convinced to let me buy one of those digital SLR cameras that I've been drooling over lately. Nikon just released the D80, so we'll see what the price is when it hits store shelves, and just maybe I'll be an owner of one. With photography becoming a more popular hobby for me, I think it would be money well spent.

Holy Busy Month Batman!!!

2006-08-03T21:22:00.000-04:00

All I can say is wow, what a busy few weeks these have been. I know it's been a hell of a long time since I've last updated this site, but my priorities were elsewhere... Hope you all understand. Everyone else pretty much covered our wedding on their blog site, so I won't bother getting into details. All I'll say is that I was very impressed with how smoothly everything went and how very grateful we are to have such good friends and family to make everything a success. I hope everyone who attended had as good a time as I did... It sure looked like everyone did. I was one smelly and sweaty bastard on that dance floor!!! The only other thing I'll mention is that the night was great ;)

As for after the wedding, our week vacation out at camp was pretty darn good. Heather and I had expected to stay out in our tent, but it was a nice surprise to hear that Heather's uncle Spencer had pulled his Fifth-Wheel trailer out to the campground for us... Pretty sweet deal. We were damn glad that we were in the trailer cause man did it ever rain. There were a few storms that rolled in and just let go on us... It rained so hard that it was almost funny... Almost! One of the highlights of the week was taking a drive up the highway to visit Aubrey Falls. Along the way we had stopped on the road to take a look at this crazy fox that just stood there on the side of the road... I swear if we opened the door he probably would have hopped in. I was super pissed that I didn't have my camera close by. The falls themselves were quite nice... Definitely worth the drive if you ask me. I took a crap load of pictures, so once I sort through them, I'll post a few. Ummm this is starting to drag on, so the only thing else I'll say is that the fishing was great, the canoe was great, and yeah, everything was great.

Day O' Fun

2006-06-26T20:21:00.000-04:00

If anyone has every hiked up in the Superior Provincial Park areas, you know what I'm talking about. If not, I highly recommend taking a day and spending it in this beautiful area. On Saturday, Karl, Lisa, Heather and I made the 1.5hr trip up north and spent the entire day hiking along the Sand River trail, and quickly visiting the Pictographs. The weather wasn't much to be desired when we left in the morning, but it quickly cleared as we went along. Below are some pictures... As you can see, Karl always makes for a good picture:

A little change in scenery

2006-06-21T20:17:00.000-04:00

After looking at a number of blog sites this evening, and then looking at mine, I figured it was time for a change in scenery. I was getting quite bored of what I had for a theme. There's really not much to choose from, so I selected the simple white theme. I'll stick with this one for a while, but I'm sure I'll be changing it eventually as I tend to get bored fairly quickly.

On the weekend, Sandra and Jeremy hosted a pool party for the triplets birthday party. The weather cleared up, and it turned out to be a real nice day. Everyone had a good time, playing some ring toss, cups, swimming in the pool, and drinking beer. I added a few pictures from the party below. Just so you know, a dye called Lagoon Blue was added to the water to give it that artifical blue colour. It wasn't supposed to turn skin or clothing blue, but unforunately it did to some extent... but nothing to bad. It was kind of funny though.

Just started listening to the new Billy Talent album. It's been great so far... Lots of catchy tunes with lots of energy. I can't wait to go crusing to the beach while listing to it, and do a little Grand Turismo down the mile hill!

America's Rockin' Roller Coast...

2006-06-18T00:23:00.000-04:00

Last weekend we went to Cedar Point again, and man was it fun. The weather was perfect, not too warm & not too cold, and it was what would be considered on the quite side in terms of the number of quests. We managed to get on all the rides we wanted and were able to ride the Millennium Force numerous times... The best roller coaster ever.... ever! Just a little advice for those who ever plan to go down... Stay in the Breakers Inn hotel and go to Famous Dave's restaurant.... You won't regret it. The Breakers Inn hotel costs more to stay there, but you are only a 2 minute walk away from the park entrance, and you get in 30 minutes early. Famous Dave's is a restaurant that has the best ribs, and all other kinds of other bbq meats. If you're hungry, then that's the place you want to be. That's all I've got for now... here's a few pictures for your enjoyment.

Freak Cat

2006-06-01T21:37:00.000-04:00

My cat is a freak... plain and simple. A few months ago Heather and I had brought flash to the vet to be declawed. And then the other day we noticed that he was bleeding from his paw and he seemed to be trying to scratch at stuff quite often. After closer expection, we found that his claws had started growing back. A head scratcher, I know. Heather did a little research on the topic and found that this does occur from time to time, about 1 out of every 20,000 or something like that. So as of Tuesday, our poor little bugger had to go in for a 2nd operation. We have to keep him drugged up, so he's a little out of it, but he's doing OK.

The Midway Fair is to blame!

2006-05-24T22:42:00.000-04:00

I blame the Midway Fair for the total crappy weather experienced over the May long weekend. Should I have been surprised by the weather? Probably not, since it usually rains every year the carnies roll into town. The long weekend wasn't all bad, as we did manage to spend Friday night out at Tim's camp (or cottage). No real good stories to tell, but everyone had a good time. Due to the cold and the rain, it was decided to pack our crap up and go home. I was willing to tough it out, but other's were not. We'll try it again later this year.

What else.... Oh ya, we did go see the Da Vinci Code on Saturday night. I thought it was pretty good, but I have already read the novel. I could see how people would not enjoy it very much not having read the book, as there's quite a bit that the try to ram into the movie. I'm not much of a movie critic, so I'll leave that job to someone else.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much doing a bunch of yard work, trying to get the front lawn all ready for new sod. It will be so nice once it's done, so I don't have to hang my head in shame as being the neighborhood redneck. I also installed the outdoor fire pit in the back yard, and I can't wait to use it.

And that was my weekend! How was your's?

Internet Problems, Stag & Doe, and Other stuff

2006-04-30T11:26:00.000-04:00

The last few weeks have been pretty eventful, but I'll try to keep things as short and sweet as possible. About 2 weeks ago I attempted to get onto the Internet as I always do when I get home from work, and I find that I have no service. I figure it's just some work being done to the service or something, and assume it'll be back up in the morning. My assumption was incorrect. After two days of farting around, I finally gave up and called Shaw's technical support, only to find out that the arseholes dissabled my service due to bandwidth abuse. OK, I'll admit that it was my fault, but they did not once send any kind of warning email or try to contact me stating that there was any kind of problem. I was pretty ticked off about the entire situation, so I cancelled my service from Shaw and signed with another ISP. The transition was not as quick as I thought, so I was without the Internet for about a week, which explains why I haven't been around. I especially feel bad over the whole camp vs. cottage debate that pretty much started because of a fairly innocent comment I made. I was able to read all the posts and comments that went out full force (from work), but was not able to get involved in the debate. Although I did enjoy the debate, and found it quite entertaining.

Now for the good stuff. Yesterday was the night of the Stag & Doe that was put on by Sandra and Chrissy. It was a hell of a good time, and we couldn't have asked for a better party. A lot of hard work went into the planning and setup, but it was well worth it, as everyone was very impressed. I don't have final numbers, but there were over 200 people who showed up. We had a great dinner, there were a lot of amazing prizes, and there was so much baking and snacks that it was disgusting. You'll find some pictures from the night below... Enjoy.

For all you Red Hot Chili Pepper fans, I highly recommend their new album "Stadium Arcadium". I'm a few songs into the double album, and it is amazing. Well that's it for now.

Stag & Doe

2006-04-15T16:36:00.000-04:00

Since I have nothing really to write about that's Blog worthy, and I'm about due to post an update, I figured I'll take the opportunity to announce that there is a Stag & Doe being organized for Heather and I. For those who may not know, and you happen to be reading this (does anybody even read this?), there is a Stag & Doe on Saturday April 29, 2006 at the Verdi Hall. Dinner is at 6:00pm, and it goes till 1:00am. There's a DJ, snacks, games and lots of prizes. Tickets are $20.00 and they are going fast. If you are interested, and would like tickets, let me know... I'll hook you up!

And just because I like to post pictures, here's a picture taken at Pine Island. I was taken a while back, but it's one of my favourites. Enjoy!

Weekend Getaway

2006-04-03T19:47:00.000-04:00

It's the weekend, you've got no plans, and you are in desperate need of cloths... what do you do? Why you go to Traverse City, that's what you do. And that's exactly what Heather, Sandra, Jeremy and myself did. We packed our bags and took off for a few days. While I must say it was fun, it wasn't without frustration. I figured "it's only Traverse City, how hard can it be to find a stupid hotel without exact directions". Let me tell you, it was a freakin' nightmare. It was dark out and pouring rain, and the basic directions that I got off the internet had me all over the stupid city. I guess I'll take the blame for that one, as it was my fault for not taking the extra minute and getting a map or something. But on the good side, my mission to buy some new clothes was successful, although mighty expensive. Since the Soo has absolutely no good clothing store to shop at, I went all out and shopped up a storm (hope that doesn't make me gay!). Below is a picture of one of the classic shirts from Ambercrombie & Fitch that I bought. I don't normally like to spend a lot on 1 shirt (or any article of clothing), it was just too nice to pass up. My justification is that I need decent clothes for work! Other then that, the getaway was well worth it... it's nice just to take off for the weekend. I'm just glad that we didn't get pulled over at customs... I had way more then what I had claimed :)

I've got nothing to do

2006-03-25T16:03:00.000-05:00

It's Saturday afternoon and I've got nothing to do... I suck. I can't wait until this damn snow melts, and it's warm enough to get outside. I'm looking forward to getting out on the bike, playing some ring-toss, and having the bon fires out in the back. But until it warms up, I'm stuck inside dreaming.

Last night Heather & I watched The Chronicles of Narnia on DVD (don't ask me how I got it). I thought they did a great job adapting the book to a movie, while staying true to the book. I had just finished reading the book by C.S. Lewis a few days earlier, so it was fresh in my mind. The special effects were amazing, and I liked the actors who were casted for the characters. However, I think I prefer the novel over the movie, which is usually the case. My next DVD movie to watch is King Kong.

I just finished working on a new picture that I would like to have enlarged and printed for our dining room area wall. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I'm back...

2006-03-23T20:01:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry for being away for so long, but I'm back now. If you're wondering why I stopped posting for so long, let me tell you. When I first started doing this, I only had the craptastic light-speed Internet that sucked hard. Due to frustration, I ended up giving up on this site. Until now that is. Now having a full high-speed Internet connection, and renewed interest after seeing some old friends blog sites, I decided to start posting again. I never usually have much to talk about, but I'll try to keep things fresh. I'll probably end up posting a lot about our wedding plans, as that will be keeping Heather and I busy for a while.

Today's random picture is of our cat flash... he's quite the character!

Back from Shauna's

2005-07-20T22:40:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm back from visiting Shauna at her new house in Dryden. Well actually, she lives in a small township just outside of Dryden called Oxdrift. It's a very nice house, and it's freakin' huge. I think the barn she has is bigger then my house :) The drive is long, but it was worth it. Brian, my Dad, and myself got out to do a little fishing, and we caught are limit. Other then that, it was good just to kickback and relax, although the skitters were a royal pain in the ass. Oh ya, how could I forget... Shauna's dog, Bo, is one cool dog! He's an American Bulldog and Boxer mix, but don't mistake the bulldog in him for one of those short fat guys! Here's a portrait of Bo... it's the only picture that I haven't lost.

What a good Canada Day long weekend!

2005-07-03T21:32:00.000-04:00

The long weekend couldn't have gotten much better. Tim, Al and I spent the majority of Friday afternoon and evening drinking beer and hot tubbing. We took a break to stumble to the fireworks (I managed to miss most of them) then we stumpled back to Tim's for another hot tub. Saturday morning & afternoon were spent cleaning my car. I washed, vacuumed, scrubbed it down with the clay bar system, and then waxed it. The car is looking damn good!!! And then on Sunday, the gang went to the beach. It was a perfect day for it, although my skin says otherwise (I managed to get a pretty wicked burn... almost as if I had sex with a lobster!)

Anyway, here are a few pics from the weekend...

A day at the park

2005-06-30T21:16:00.000-04:00

What better way to start the long weekend then with a good game of ultimate frisbee at the park. A group of us meet every Tuesday and Thursday at 7:00pm to play pickup... a friendly, non-competitive game. If we had a few more players, we would have been able to have subs, and I would have been able taken a picture of us playing. But for fun, here are some other pictures for your enjoyment.

Pics of our new home

2005-06-26T12:29:00.000-04:00

For those who haven't seen our home, and want to take a peek, here are a few pics to give you an idea of what it's like. Enjoy!

First Post - Welcome

2005-06-23T22:46:00.000-04:00

Welcome. Heather and I are going to try this out, post some stuff about our house, wedding, and weekend fun. Please stop by every now and again to check out if anything's new. I'll try to keep new pics posted frequently.