Absoblogginlutely! – IRL

So I’m almost ready to run my first 5k Run on Oct 29th in aid of Tyler Burchett, the son of a work friend who suddenly became paralyzed through Myelitis a couple of months ago. The run is a fundraiser to help support the family with medical bills and home modifications.

So, if you’d like to sponsor me and will see me in person before (or shortly after) Oct 29th 2011 then I’ll gladly pass your donation on. If you are not going to see me in person but still want to sponsor me or donate to help this family then you can use this paypal link

(Note that the money will go into my account which I will then transfer to the Burchett family – You will have to trust me on this – it was the best way of reducing the credit card fees. Incidentally if you have a paypal balance there are no fee’s. Otherwise there is a small credit card fee that I will cover up to the first $1000 of donations if you do not wish to pay the credit card fee – let me know on the sponsor form)

If you are a runner in the Columbus,OH area and want to run a 5k to support a local family then there is still time to sign up at the official race page – all the race fee’s have been covered through corporate sponsorship so your race fee goes directly to help the family.

Thank you!

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For those of you who are not on facebook, you may not have realised that I had the awesome experience of jumping out of a plane last week. I was on vacation in the Outer Banks and was originally going to see if I could get a flight lesson above the Outer Banks to get some good aeriel photos and some more flying time booked. Unfortunately there did not seem to be any companies doing lessons so my search expanded and I found a site doing helicopter rides – something else I always wanted to do. However they also had a link to their sister site – skydiveobx.com and I was interested! Looking through the photos and videos I knew this is what I wanted to do. So I booked a jump session for the Thursday morning and had to wait 2 days. Early Thursday morning I got up far too early for a vacation and drove to Manteo and after watching a video, some brief training and I was in the air. The flight up to 9000′ was really cool as I got to see a fair amount of the Outer Banks as we flew up – unfortunately I couldn’t take any photos but you do see some views in the video below. Enjoy the film and if you get a chance – go skydiving.

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For the first time ever, I’ve needed to change my windshield (or windscreen) wipers. Today it was snowing like crazy and my wipers decided to completely come off of the arm. Annoyingly I had to go back out in the snow to go get some wipers (which I had stupidly put off doing). After getting the wipers, I read the (useless) instructions on the back of the wipers and pushed the little tab down.  Nothing happened and there was no way these wipers were coming off.

One quick little youtube search and 53 seconds into this video I knew the secret. The tip was to rotate the blade and then pull down towards the windscreen.

Funny thing is that I wanted to support my local hardware shop, called up and asked  – “Do you sell car windshield wiper blades?”  I even made sure to specify windshield rather than windscreen blades.  They hadn’t a clue what I was on about, passed me to the electrical department who said they didn’t have any – I’d be very surprised if an electrical department stocked wiper blades.

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It’s been a long time since I posted anything on this website due to a variety of reasons. However, I’ve worked tons of overtime this week so I decided to take the day off, enjoy the gorgeous weather and relax at the zoo. I picked up the camera and spent about 4 hours at the zoo. I was pleased with the shots I did manage to take, although a lot of them had to be through glass. Some of the animals were not cooperating today, but as I got a zoo membership I’ll now be back taking more photos in the future. I’ve not been to the zoo for about two years, so today I got to see the “baby” elephant who is now 19 months old, the polar bear exhibit and a very cute baby bonobo.  Didn’t see any moose though!

I’ve also uploaded the photos to my Columbus Zoo 2010 skydrive account hosted on Microsoft (instead of flickr) as my flickr account is no longer pro. Let me know what you think of the Microsoft slideshow capabilities.

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I’m (at last) no longer using Vonage at home. There didn’t seem to be any point in paying $25.92 per month for their $17.99 plan – especially as we made no calls and only received about 5 calls a month – mostly from telemarketers or customer service calls.
We’re going to use cell phones from now on (and Google Voice in my case). Drop a comment if you need the new phone numbers.

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It wasn’t until Wednesday when someone asked me where I was from and how long I had been here (within about 3 seconds of me speaking on the phone) that I realised that Tuesday was our 5 year anniversary of moving over to the States. Time has flown by really quickly (as opposed to flying by slowly) . Ton’s of things have changed over the past few years but three things remain constant – death, (more) taxes and Winston sitting on my lap.

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This morning is about the only time I’ve been relieved we have the Spring Forward version of Daylight Savings Time. I woke up at about half past three this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I eventually got up – the great thing about DST is that it was really half past four so it wasn’t such a bad time to get up (keep thinking positive)…

Due to the lack of sleep, I found it especially funny when Frankie decides to join me in the shower – the crazy thing is that I’m sure he’d have stayed in there if I hadn’t shouted at him to get out. He also protested a little bit too much when I went to towel him down and get him dry, but after a couple of attempts at chasing him around the kitchen he eventually settled down and purred like crazy whilst I petted him with the towel. Unfortunately I don’t think Basil would be as keen to get in the shower which is a shame as of all the cats, he is the one who needs a shower the most. However, he’s also the least likely to be able to jump out of a slippery bath tub.

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Today is the last day of a long weekend (I had Friday off) and it’s felt like a looong weekend. As usual I’ve ended up with a cold for my time off. I’m pretty sure the body relaxes when I get a break and so does the immune system
With the amount of snow we had on Friday, I spent the morning shovelling the driveway on Saturday and spent the rest of the day coughing and sneezing. The annoying thing is that this cold has been around since about Tuesday – I could feel the symptoms coming on but couldn’t get rid of it. I felt better Wednesday afternoon and Thursday but not yesterday or today. I’ll be sitting curled up in a blanket with a Winston keeping my lap warm this afternoon watching the game. Hope your weekend went better than mine.

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Last Sunday afternoon I took Kristen out on a surprise trip to the Columbus Museum of Art Chihuly Illuminated exhibit as it was a family day and had extra events going on. What I didn’t know what that the family day meant the $10 entrance fee was waived which was excellent as it the exhibit area is pretty small and the rest of the museum was not very  impressive. The exhibit itself was good although I don’t think it was as good as the one at Franklin conservatory. Although the big pieces were pretty amazing and made your mind boggle as to how they would have been made. Photos online in my Chihuly flickr set don’t really do it justice – especially as the forest of spikes seems to have come out in black and white for some weird reason.

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It’s our tenth wedding anniversary today – time flies by so fast. We’re off to a nice restaurant tonight to celebrate. Thought I’d add one of my favourite photos from our wedding all those years ago.

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