On Friday night (the event was supposed to start Saturday morning), we put out 5 old bicycles and two large plastic cabinets (sorta like this) that had been out in the backyard holding sports equipment. One of them had a broken door, so I put a bungie cord around it to keep it closed.
Within an hour or so, the unbroken cabinet was gone, along with the bungie cord holding the other one closed. I was cheesed. But, the other cabinet went shortly afterwards, broken door or not. Four of the five bikes were gone before we went to bed that night. The last bike went mid-afternoon on Saturday.
We went for a drive on Saturday morning and picked up a very nice wooden desk chair. We were specifically looking for a solid wood dresser, and found one that was missing a drawer. I got out and looked at it and figured I could easily make the missing drawer to match the others, and got ready to load it into the car. I folded down the wind-blown FREE sign, and saw that someone had scrawled on it “I want this, have gone to get my other car to pick it up.” Apparently they had taken the drawer to ensure no one else took it! First come first served does not work that way! We were *this* close to taking it anyway, just to be petty. But we decided to be an island of civility amidst the Mad Max freebie hunter chaos.
From what we saw in about two hours of driving around various neighbourhoods, Winnipeg basements are entirely filled with old computer monitors, printers, cheap exercise bikes, tiny particleboard desks, ratty computer chairs, and decrepit barbecues.
After much deliberation and discussion, our middle daughter bought a pair of baby rats. We’ve had two pairs of rats before, so we know what fantastic pets they are. We’ve never had any this small though. They’re just 5 weeks old, barely weaned.
I give you… Primrose and Strawberry.
They’re so TINY!
Trying some cheddar in Jennifer’s hand.
They much prefer the pankcakes.
Strawberry loves to be on her back and have her tummy rubbed.
Truffles got along just fine. He doesn’t seem too impressed here, but he was calm and fine with being a climbing frame.
For better or for worse, we introduced the kids to Rayman’s Raving Rabbids on the wii. A slightly irreverent game at times (burping contests, spitting accuracy contests, flatulence rockets…) it’s nonetheless a whole lot of fun. Or maybe it’s fun because of the burping contests, spitting accuracy contests and flatulence rockets. Whatever.
Anyway, the subgames my kids like best are the music ones. They play along to “Satisfaction”, “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”. “Celebration” and “Funkytown” in the RRR version of Rock Band. I love it when my 10 year old walks around the house singing the guitar riffs from some of my favorite songs. They also love to follow the dance moves to songs like “Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go)”.
MrSnowy and MrsAsh were over, and the girls convinced us to do some dancing. The wives just watched and laughed and documented the occasion for posterity.
The kids have made a new game called “Zombie Tag” that they’ve been playing with the neighbourhood kids. Ah, those last few frenzied days of play before school starts.
This blog is a dump of great links I find while working on the net all day.
It *used* to be my personal blog, but the posts were getting lost among all of my weird links, so I moved my personal blog to Lego and Sawdust. Go there if you came here looking for woodworking, religion or family discussions.
I have left all the old posts here because the search engines bring lots of people. Any posts that aren't about weird links from the net will be on my other blog. Go there.
Because it's the source of most of my hits recently, here is a link to the "Faith" category of posts, where we discuss our recent decision to leave Christianity and the fallout that is occurring.
Winnipeg’s Free Giveaway Weekend was a great success, apparently.
