Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Making Room(s) for Baby

So we are over half way to the arrival of our little 'bean' and thought it was about time to start making a few changes to the house to accomodate the new addition.
Our guest room has now been in the process of becoming the nursery while we were wondering where we were going to put our guests. Scott decided, with some inspiration from our renovating friends Spencer & Brenda, that he would build a new room downstairs. So here is where we are at the first couple of days into the changes and lots of help from family.

And with the carpet removed to reveal the beautiful original hardwood, we are ready to do a little priming & painting. My good friend, Holly, will be up down this coming weekend to help paint the baby room. So we'll see how it goes...only about 4 more months to go and the time's a ticking.

Friday, August 24, 2007

The Quebec Festival


At long last here is the conclusion to my trip to Quebec.
So we arrived in Quebec at around 11:00am...that is the City of Quebec. I've been talking to our bus driver and it seems he's more then meets the eye (or is that the Transformers), he's worked in the music industry for years and has been the tour manager for bands such as Slayer, Poison, Tesla and Steve Earle. He drives bus cause it more relaxing. As we pull into the city I give our tour manager a call to tell him we've arrived. He sounds a little frazzled as the festival promoters are "dicking" us around. I offer to help him by getting the band and their wives into the hotel and also get our credentials for the day (I find out later from my friend that being given this responsibility is very rare for a tour security guy). I manage a quick shower in one of the hotel rooms...the Hilton seems nice...at least its shower is. My next order of business is to figure out transportation. normally this means talking to one driver about pick-up times. This festival is so big however that they have 16 vans driving around the city picking up various artists and VIP's. This means I have to make sure I give the entire schedule for the day to the director of transport unfortunately our schedule changes about twenty times a day. I don't know what they did on tours before cell phones. The days goes by like most others with press and meet and greets and show time finally comes around. Once again Alexisonfire is opening for Billy Talent so the Mosh pit is going to be huge. I don't realize how huge until I get my first look at the crowd. The Festival De Tete is one of the largest festivals in Canada and tickets are so cheap that they normally sell about 60,000 tickets for the ten day festival. Today we have broken all previous records with 80,000 patrons. The festival has never hosted a lineup with such a heavy Mosh crowd before and while I'm in the pit helping the security guys I notice a large problem occurring ... the barricade that has been placed to cut the mosh pit in half isn't holding up to the crowd crush and has broken. This is a metal barricade!!! Between Alexisonfire and BT's set we quickly fix the barricade with pieces of wood and about 8 security guys. The show goes pretty good with no serious injuries in the pit...the barricade barely held but it did hold (see picture above). As I'm down checking out the damages to the barricade I run into the only patron left in the venue...an intoxicated young guy. I say hello to him and he tells me to f#%k off and starts to climb over the barricade towards me...I think what the hell? Then after a short struggle manage to wristlock him and remove him from the venue...drunk people are stupid. It's know about 12:00am and some of the guys are looking to go to one of the local bars. I tell them I'll see what I can do (80,000 people are wandering around the city looking for bars as well) I manage to find a local who knows a guy who knows a guy that manages a bar...after a brief conversation through a translator the guy agrees to come pick up our party and drive us to the bar. Furthermore he tells me that we will get free alcohol, a VIP room and our own security detail. Sure enough when we arrive an hour later they have 5 security guys (well they look more like gorillas then guys) waiting for us at the door and they quickly usher us through the bar to a VIP lounge stocked with alcohol...so this is the rock star life style I hear about. We stay till 3:00am and it is by far the easiest night I've had working in a bar. We get back to the bus by about 3:30am and quickly start our journey back to Toronto. I hit my bunk by 4:00am...for once an early night.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Five Years and Counting...


It's time to get back to updating you all on what's new in Smalliver.

The main reason for my blog break is the impending arrival of our little 'bean'. That's what we have been calling our growing baby that will be arriving in Jan '08. We are very excited to have a little one on the way. And no, we do not know what it is yet, but maybe at the next ultrasound we will find out. Either way, boy or girl we can't wait. It has been a long time trying for us, over 2 years, but that still doesn't prepare you for all the changes that we know are coming. And we are very happy that our new one will have a cousin about the same age from Scott's sister & brother-in-law, Sheri & Vic.

Scott & I have just recently celebrated our 5th Wedding Anniversary. We decided on a nice quiet dinner at Fairview Mountain Golf Course, which is where we had our wedding reception five years previous. We also decided it was time to open up our wedding time capsule that was created on our wedding day. This consisted of messages written on small origami foldings created by our guests during the reception. So to those of you out there who helped us celebrate our wedding day...Thank you very much for all your lovely well wishes and funny marriage advice. We can't believe that five years have passed already, but we can't wait to see what the next five hold.