I've been a little busy lately. I had a trip to Rutherglen, Ontario, a class in Colchester last week, and have been busy enjoying the weather and getting some work done outside and around the house.

We took the kayaks out last weekend, and I've been fishing a couple more times.

Biggest news: we have tickets to go see Donna Summer in concert in July. Looking forward to that! Just saw her on American Idol tonight. Man, she has gotten older, but hopefully she will still be good in concert!

I'll try to catch up more soon.

I finally got one of our kayaks in.  Still like pulling teeth with those guys at The Great Outdoors though.  Who would have thought it would be such a hassle just to get those fishing rod holders?  I called them up on Friday to check status on the rod holders which are apparently being delivered by camel from Pakistan or something.  One was in and installed, but the other one was "probably at their Enosburg store".  Whatever.  I went down to pick up at least the one.  

My fear is that I would get the kayaks after we have had all this nice weather and then it will suddenly turn constantly crappy.  I really wanted to try it out.  So I went down to the store which is like less than 1/4 mile from our house.  I had the Prius which ended up being good.  The kayak is pretty short, only 10.5 feet long.  I was able to open the hatch back on the prius, fold down the back seats and fold back the front passenger seat. Doing that, I could load the kayak into the Prius and just tie down the hatch.  It is nice to know that I can do that because that is infinitely easier than putting it up on the roof, especially for a short trip.

I took it up to the house and checked it out.  It has foot pegs in it that you can adjust to your leg length for comfort. Well, I must have messed around with them for 10 minutes and I couldn't get one to move.  Then the other one got stuck too and I couldn't move it.  I was like, "What the heck?!" Am I just an absolute idiot with this thing or what? I did a quick internet search to see if I could find anything that I was doing wrong, but that yielded no results.  So I picked up the phone and called the guys at the store.  They must hate me because I have been calling them like 3 times a week about the kayaks.  I don't care, we spent a lot of money on them. So the guy said he would just come over and take a look since we are so close.  He drove up and said it would be pretty simple to move them.  However, he had just as much as a struggle as I did.  He finally managed to force them back into place.  We are not sure if maybe they were installed wrong at the factory or something, but when they go all the way back, they get stuck.  The temporary solution is not to move them all the way back.  When the second one is ready, we will compare them and see if there is one part that was installed backward.  If so, he will fix it.  Not a show-stopper, but just goes to prove my theory that no matter what you buy these days, it always SUCKS. I cannot remember the last time I bought something and there wasn't some sort of issue.  Why can't anything ever be easy and work as advertised???

Anyway, I wanted test out the roof mounting system.  Although the kayak only weighs about 50 pounds, it is still pretty cumbersome to get on the roof of the car.  Then there are five straps to strap on there.  The Prius also annoyingly has its antenna on the roof, so I had to angle the kayak cockeyed to not hit the antenna. But I got it on there and figured everything out. However, it is still way easier to just put it in the back if possible.  I imagine putting it on the Corolla will be a little easier because the car is smaller, and there isn't any other option with that anyway.  

I drove out to Clyde Pond to test it out.  There were a lot of people fishing in Gardner Park, so I didn't want my first kayak experience to be in front of a bunch of people in case I embarassed myself.  I got in and paddled around the pond for a while. I really like it.  It actually goes a lot faster than I expected and is pretty easy to do.  The only hard part is going in a straight line.  That is the disadvantage of getting such a short kayak -- it doesn't go straight as easy, but it is more maneuverable.  Also, getting in and out is a little tricky.  It was very stable once I got in it, and I never thought I would tip it over or anything.  I am sure I will get better at paddling it around with practice.  

Had quite an active past few days. Work was busy as usual. I had to go in on Saturday morning to deploy the latest price updates to our marking stations. I have to do that on the weekend so we don't have to incur downtime. Not a big deal because I had a lot of the work done ahead of time.

After giving a lot of praise to The Great Outdoors about our kayak purchases, I am starting to get a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth from them. I went in last week to see when they would be in. Our fishing rod holders that we were getting installed by them were the wrong ones, so they had to get other ones that would be compatible with our boats. They said they would be ready by last Thursday at the latest. So Jaime went in on Thursday to go pick them up with Tony, since they had his truck. When she went in, the dude was like, "Uhh....we keep forgetting to get them." This was after he claimed he didn't even know what we were talking about and wanted to see our receipt. So obviously that dude was an ass-clown (not the guy we had been working with before). He told Jaime that she could just take the kayaks and we could install them ourselves. Luckily she was smart enough not to do that. Why would I risk screwing it up and wrecking my kayaks, if they can do it? I checked again yesterday and one rod holder is in and the other one is on order. So hopefully they will come in this week. The ice is pretty much gone.

We have had really nice weather this week, so it has been wonderful working outside. Jaime went down to see her cousin Amanda in New Hampshire on Wednesday. Amanda is about ready to pop with her baby. I had a doctor's appointment Wednesday afternoon for a physical. Or so I thought. I went in and checked in with the receptionist and had a seat. I got there 15 minutes early. After about 45 minutes or so, I was beginning to wonder why they hadn't called me in yet. Finally, the receptionist called me up and informed me that I was a week early, that is why she couldn't find my sheet. I knew it had said the 16th on the note on our fridge for my appointment so I was a little miffed, but whatever. It was really nice outside and I wanted to go home and get some work done rather than going back to work that afternoon. I checked the note on the fridge, and sure enough, April 16th at 2:00 was right there. Well, come to find out that that note was not for my doctor appointment, it was for Jaime's facial she was getting down in New Hampshire. My appointment was on another note beneath that one sure enough, for the next week. So Jaime and I have to work out a better system for this stuff. First off, the note wasn't even labeled for what it was for, just a date and time. So that led to my confusion. Jaime wonders how I ever managed to survive on my own.

We took the plunge and plopped down the cash for the kayaks. Hopefully they will be in this week. Actually, they are in, but we are getting them outfitted with fishing rod holders, so we are waiting on that. No rush, there is still ice on the lake.

Jaime got a stomach bug this weekend, and spent most of Sunday sick. So that was no fun for her, especially since she is starting off her vacation week. Today she seemed to improve and I am sure she will be back to normal by tomorrow. She has a lot of things planned for the week so I am sure that she wants to not be puking so she can get them done.

It has been fairly nice outside, so I have been walking instead of sweating in the hot gym. It has been nice. It is the time of year when it is still cool enough outside that I want to walk. I go for about an hour, probably about 3-4 miles around Newport.

Work has been busy as usual. I have been finishing up a few projects, so it is nice to see some stuff come to fruition. I still have more work than I can possibly do, which does keep me busy. Sometimes I feel like I could lock myself in the office for about a year and not run out of things to work on!

I have a new personal finance program I am using. Right now I am entering all my transactions from 2007, then for 2008. I used Microsoft Money years ago, and that worked pretty well for me, but since I pretty much switched to Linux exclusively, I haven't used anything. I have been using Gnucash, which seems to be a little more like Quicken. I haven't gotten too deep into it yet, but I think it will meet my needs. However, it does take time to get things set up the way I want. So I am plugging through it little by little.

I also want to continue to get caught up on going through my pictures. That is also a never-ending process.

To distract me from these things, I have been addicted to the following game:

http://arcade.itch.com/games/random-defense/

Today is the last day for my intern at work, Matt. He's been a great help on a lot of my projects, so it was a bummer to see him go. I took him out to lunch at Hoagie's for a going away. Unfortunately, he was supposed to be an intern for the whole mill, but no one else took much of an interest in him and I don't think he got everything out of it that he could have. There is only so much time I could give him, but no one else took advantage.

On our way to Hoagie's, I noticed a sign in front of The Great Outdoors stating that they were having a sale on kayaks for 15% off. Jaime has been saving her money and wanted to get us kayaks for our 30th birthday this summer. I was really excited about that when I found out about her plan, so I have been doing a lot of research on them lately and looking forward to it. We didn't really know where to go to get our kayaks. We had heard there was a place down in Lyndonville and a place in Stowe, but we didn't think to look locally for some reason. I had never thought of The Great Outdoors. So we decided to walk down there and check them out after work since it was nice outside.

I wasn't expecting too much, but to my surprise the sales guy in the store was very knowledgeable about all their kayaks and the accessories and such. He also seemed interested in saving us money too, which I thought was good. He wasn't trying to sell us up to stuff we didn't need. Anyway, after pricing them around, and taking his recommendations into consideration, I think we will probably get our kayaks from them. It is good to shop locally too. It seems like a good deal because it is 15% off for the first one and 20% off for the second one, and 15% off any accessories we get at the same time (paddles, life jackets, thingies to put on roof of car, fishing rod holder). I think we are going to go with the Old Town Canoe Dirigo 106 Kayak.

I think this will suit our needs. I wanted a kayak that would be good for fishing, and also somewhat a beginner level kayak, but with a lot of storage space. Also, these are fairly short in length, so they should be light and easy to transport. There was also an "Angler" addition that already came with the rod holder and an anchor, but he said that it was like $100 more and you could add those things separately for less money. We can both get the same one this way too, because they should be good for just paddling around recreationally.

The sale ends in a few days, so we need to make a decision on this now, instead of waiting until our birthdays. Which is good anyway, because we can use them once the ice is off the lake and it warms up a bit and not have to wait until almost July. So I think I am going to go down there on Wednesday and close the deal. Probably the only drawback is that unless we had a roof rack on our cars (which we don't), we can't put them both on the roof at the same time, unless we wanted to invest in a roof rack. So if we want to go somewhere, we need to take both cars. If we were to go down a river, we might need to do that anyway, so we could leave a vehicle the end of the trip to pick up our stuff.

So, I am pretty psyched!

First off, thank you to everyone who has donated to mine and Jaime's Relay for Life team. The donations are for a really good cause and I look forward to walking all my laps in June! Thanks especially to Sarah and Laura for you generosity!!

The winter weather is trying to stick around a little longer but I think it is in its death throes right now. We are supposed to be getting some half-way decent weather the next few days. Hopefully that will just about do in the rest of the snow. Maybe I just don't remember from year to year, but it seems like it has been winter forever this year.

My last couple of days at work have been spent with one of our programmers, Tim, from Portland, working on our marking station project. So it has been a change of scenery for me working in another building. We will hopefully have all the bugs worked out by this weekend. I am working Saturday to implement the changes we have been making to accommodate a potential new process.

Today it snowed again, much to my chagrin. I got a couple more donations for the Relay for Life, so I was happy about that.

My intern at work only has a few days left. He has been extremely helpful to me since he has been there. I will miss having my own personal assistant ;)

I hit the gym pretty hard this afternoon and that felt pretty good. I couldn't sleep at all last night due to the fact that I slept in so long yesterday. I am figuring on paying the piper tomorrow.

I spent the evening putting a few more pictures on Flickr. It is a time consuming process.

We watched "Dan in Real Life" tonight since nothing was on TV. I thought it would be a funny movie because it had Steve Carrell, but unfortunately it was about the most estrogeny chick flick I have seen in forever. It made "Love Actually" and "Terms of Endearment" look like guy movies. So I didn't like it too much, but Jaime enjoyed it.

Today I woke up at 11:00 AM, again very unusual for me to sleep in that late. Jaime wasn't too amused. But I guess my body needed it. I do tend to stay up rather late most nights getting things done that I need to do and giving Jaime several snore-free hours of sleep.

She went to visit our friend Lisa and her kids. I took the opportunity to finally fix the bird feeder that the squirrels destroyed. They had broken off the part that attaches it to the pole (broke a metal weld!), so it was just hanging there useless. I attached a block of wood to the inside and drilled a hole in it the size of the pole. I put it back on the pole, but it didn't seem like it was going to cut it. The block wasn't as deep as it needed to be (just an end of a 2x4) so I needed to improvise. It was a fairly new bird feeder and not very cheap, so I wanted to salvage it if possible (BTW: it was advertised as squirrel-proof). So I busted out the trusty duct tape and used that to further secure it to the pole. We'll have to see how long that holds up. I used a lot of tape.

I went in to work again today. I have been working on a program and I seem to get much more done in a long uninterrupted chunk of time that I get on a weekend rather than the normal work week. Jaime went to her cousin Amanda's baby shower today.

Last night we took Phil out for his birthday (which was a month ago) to the Seymour Lake Lodge. The food was excellent as usual. I had a big bourbon soaked steak and also got the fried ice cream for dessert. I know, a real killer for the diet. And I wonder why I have plateaued!

Tomorrow Jaime will be going to visit our friend Lisa and her kids. I am not going, so I will probably get some stuff done around the house.