Another week has passed. A surprisingly busy week actually. First we finished the entryway, mostly. I still have a couple pieces of trim to put in but the major part is done. I've included pictures of before and after.

The big news around here has been the Vancouver Canuks getting into the NHL playoffs. The excitement is especially high after they made it past the first round by beating St. Louis (the Cardinals I think, or maybe the Rams). Of course this is Hockey so the only thing smaller than our knowledge of the event is how much Marsha and I really care about it. Not that we let anyone know around here, we might get strung up. Of course it is Canada after all, so they'd probably drag us out in the street and politely beat us with hockey sticks. But it has been been fun to see everyone get so excited.

So this week I had to go to a meeting at Vancouver Island University. I noticed something surprising about the parking there. The lot was prepay like the lots at the U of MN and you have a choice. $1 for 2 hours, I can already hear the people at the U of MN groaning. It's a lot cheaper than U of MN Parking Services charges. It gets better though. $2 will get you 4 hours. $3 lets you park for 9 hours. But the best deal of all is yet to come. $15 lets you park for 31 DAYS. I've never seen a pay parking lot that had a rate for a month at a time.  It might even be worth it to park here and commute to the U of MN.

Speaking of cars I've noticed an odd thing. Up here we have mostly the same cars as the US but some of the cars have different names than they do south of the border. They are the same models but often the names are more British sounding,  more Anglo Saxon. This came to mind one morning when we were leaving the Superstore parking lot. I noticed the car in front of us was a Kia Mega-Tits. I thought it was a bit much even for liberal Canada. I pointed the car out to Marsha and we both had a good laugh about it. Then Marsha pointed out that it was actually a Kia Magentis. I'm not sure she was laughing at the same thing I was.

In a totally unrelated bit of news; this week I'm going to be scheduling an appointment to get my contacts checked.

Have you ever been going along when something totally absurd jumps out into your path? Something so completely incongruous that it brings the normal flow of the day to a shuddering stop? I had one of those this week. I was at work in the back office at home. I usually have classical music playing and it was a normal quiet afternoon of computer work. The announcer on the radio said the next piece was going to be Spring from Vivaldi; The Four Seasons. The music started and I realized there was something terribly terribly wrong. It turned out that they were playing a version of Spring arranged by a court musician for some French king centuries ago. Vivaldi is just not the same when played on mandolin, hurdy gurdy, tin-whistle, and bagpipes. It really brought the flow of the day to a complete stop.

I've been updating the new web site. I have more to add but the essentials from the old site have been moved over to the new one, and this weekend I took the old site down. My ONLY web site is now

http://web.me.com/geoduck/Site/Welcome.html

Also one more item. Last week we had some problem sending our update. In particular our message kept getting blocked by Hotmail and MSN e-mail recipients. We don't know if it was a transient issue or if it will continue. We've done everything we can from this end. If you are unable to get our e-mails and are unable to unblock umn.edu e-mail on your end, you might just have to start checking the updates on our web site.

Here are a bunch of pictures of the entryway. As promised the first two are before and after. Then there are two better views of the space.

Doug & Marsha