Yesterday, Miranda and I went with Jeff and Katya to the Luxton Rodeo. Well, we went to the fair part of it anyways. Jeff has taken Katya each year since she was two. They have invited us before, but this was the first time we took them up on it. It was Miranda’s first time to a fair. It was a good day: mostly sunny but not too hot. We got there early (1:00) when the crowds weren’t too big. We scoped out what was available. Since Miranda is just a touch under four feet tall (46.5 inches, to be precise), I wanted to see what rides she could go on. As it turned out, the “size ratings” on the rides were pretty reasonable, with lots of the ones that were as adventurous as Miranda would want to try rated at 42 inches. Of course, the cost of tickets was ridiculous. Rides were between three and six tickets, with tickets costing a dollar per. So Jeff and I bought our daughters the $30 wristbands and six tickets for ourselves so we could have one ride on the Ferris Wheel. Jeff was counting right from the start, counting the tickets it would have cost if the girls hadn’t had the wristbands. By the time we left at 3:30, both girls had gone on enough rides that it would have cost 54 tickets each. The girls had great fun and were really enthusiastic and yet were listening well and staying close. Only once did Miranda get a little carried away and I lost sight of her for about 20 seconds: she had just finished Raiders (a big obstacle course) and immediately ran to line up again, while Katya was a little slower. I watched Katya do her slide to finish the course, then couldn’t spot Miranda. Turns out the line had moved quickly, and she was already climbing the rope net. Gave me a bit of a scare, but nothing bad. Jeff took lots of pictures, and I’ll post them when he sends them my way.
That looks to be the last big event of the week off. It’s been a busy week.
I started the week early on Friday, since I’d travelled to Regina on my own time. So I signed off at noon on Friday and made sure that my work phone was set to forward to voice mail. I haven’t checked email for the whole week, so I expect my inbox will be full when I get back tomorrow.
The week was full of appointments and things like that which we had been putting off. Work has been so busy that it’s been difficult to assure Tammy that I could book personal time to look after one or both of the kids. That’s especially a problem if the appointment’s in town. To that end, we had an appointment to meet with Dr. Vally, a GP here in Sooke and he is now our family doctor… for all of us. That should be more convenient. Other appointments: I got my eye exam out of the way, Tammy and Miranda went to the dentist, we took the Mazda in for a 55,000 km service, and we met with Miranda’s teacher to review her latest module.
Speaking of Miranda, she had a school outing on this past Friday to go bowling with a bunch of other SIDES students in Sidney. It was five pin bowling, and she had a lot of fun. She thought it was more fun than Wii Bowling, so that’s a good sign! Sorry about the quality of the photo, I took it with my Nokia phone.
I did manage to do a few things around the house this week, including the partial stump excavation and the installation of a new Apple Time Capsule. (p.s. Mom and Dad: I put your birthday gift towards buying this!) We’d been having some trouble with the wireless network, which always seemed to be fixed after restarting the old Airport Extreme wireless base station which we bought back in early 2003. It seemed like it was slowly losing the battle with age, and so now has been replaced. Combine that with automatic backups to the network attached storage and I’m a happy camper.
