Stevie Wonderful

Time has a strange way of making you miss things. For example I am a little sad that I will never get to see Michael Jordan play basketball live, or that I will never see Freddy Mercury prance across a stage singing We Will Rock You in excessively white pants. Granted all too often I let these potentially great moments pass by as my life is full of other mediocre moments which I deem more important at the time, only to realise later that I am stupid.

Last night I had an unexpected opportunity to see Stevie Wonder, a performer I thought would be past his prime, but I didn’t want to regret missing this on an assumption and to regret not going - so against Kirsty’s best attempts to stop me, I bought tickets.

I am a little ashamed of how few of his albums I have, or even how few I am familiar with. His greatest hits and Songs in the Key of Life are basically the only albums that I have any degree of familiarity with. But with over 30 top 10 hits, including 9 #1’s and 26 Grammy awards, I was confident that his quality would overcome my ignorance.

The concert was good, very good in fact. I was a little dissapointed with the sound early on, but about 5 songs in the band did a series of solos and that seemed to be what the sound people needed to get their act together a little, it was never quite right though.  Apart from that glitch, it was an excellent concert.

He just has so many songs that I can’t be sure if some of the songs that I was unfamiliar with were old or new. It was probably about 20% of the set list which I hadn’t heard before, and he had quite a lot of tempo changes from upbeat numbers that had the whole of GM place on their feet, to some quieter moments.

An unexpected highlight for me was a cover of Michael Jackson’s Human Nature done with a voice box. He started out just playing around with the sound of it and entertaining the crowd, but then settled in to a really cool version of a song I like but wish Michael Jackson didn’t sing.

The expected highlights were Sir Duke, Higher Ground, Superstition and Signed Sealed Delivered. The superb 10 piece band plus 3 back up singers made these funky numbers the unquestioned crowd pleasers and brought a large smile to my face.

Stevie Wonder himself showed no sign of age. His voice was every bit as strong as the recordings I’ve heard, his energy levels were high - including a nervous moment in signed sealed delivered where he decided to walk around stage for a while, and his stage banter kept the crowd laughing. He didn’t really give you a choice but to laugh when he was making fun of himself and cracking that enormous grin.

This is one of those moment that I am happy I didn’t let pass for something less memorable.

Gripes and Groans

I usually try to resist the temptation to use this blog as a forum for complaints, but hey - right now I feel like complaining so here goes:

Issue # 1

Why do people say they will come round to look at your bikes which you have for sale and then not come? I could have been out in the sun enjoying myself, instead I am sitting at home waiting for a phone call.

Right now I have a beautiful new bike waiting for me at a bike shop, I have paid for most of it but my lovely wife won’t let me pay for all of it until I sell my other bikes. My bikes are currently beautifully clean and in ready for sale condition - that means I can’t ride. Ever heard the term “motivated seller”?

Issue # 2

Come on people, are we not yet completely sick and tired of Crocs? I am willing to conceed that they are practicle for say kayaking or gardening, but does that make them acceptable to wear in public?? No!! So what if they are comfortable, so are pajama pants, should I wear those to the movies?? No!! I thought the issue had past, but no - it was just winter.

Issue # 3

Why is it that when HP has a “known problem” with their network card, they don’t tell me and then when it breaks I have to send it away in their specially marked box and be without a computer for “7-10 days”? If they have a known problem, how about having someone who knows how to fix it in this city - not like its a small back country town, this is a major city, can no-one just take the bad card out and slip a new one in? And what if thier “known problem” broke after the warranty had expired? Why do they take all my details when I buy a computer if they are not going to tell me when something goes wrong?

Issue # 4

Why is it that I sit down to complain, I can only think of 3 things, and even those things are pretty lame? oh yeah - cause my life is pretty cool.

Happy Canada Day

Today is Canada’s birthday, that means a day off and fireworks at the waterfront. I guess there is more to it than that, but that’s all that anyone talks about. For most people today was a nice day off in the sun, for Kirst and Me it was our first day back at work after taking a long weekend instead of the Tuesday off.

It was worth it too, we went down to Seatlle on Friday night to pay Jamie and Hillary a visit for the weekend. Hillary was having a Hens night on Saturday so Kirsty went along to that while Jamie and I went climbing.

Jamie took me out to this area with a very inventive name, it was called “exit 38 climbing area” as it was just off exit 38 from the highway. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to take any pictures as I was either climbing or belaying and it wasn’t the safest to be taking pics from either position.

Climbing is really growing on me. I did my first lead climbing this weekend, that means that instead of setting up a rope from the top and dropping it down to keep me safe, I had to climb up and put in protection as I went. They go in about every 10ft, that means that while I’m putting in the next clip I have 10ft of rope between me and the next safe point then of course the rope has another 10ft to fall after that. (This should be a test if my Mum is reading this). It was a different challenge and I managed to lead a 5:10c which I was quite proud of.

After some more hanging out with Jamie and Hill, we drove back on Sunday night in time to get to sleep for a drive up to Whistler yesterday.

Ryan came up with us to test out his new bike, it was good to get up there with him again. I managed to get a few pictures, sorry they’re not the best quality - we need some practice:

 

Ryan getting his lean on around one of the berms on “Crank it up”

 

Kirst getting some flight time

 

Me on the first jump of “Heart of Darkness”

 

Getting some bigger air on the next jump.

 

Kirst in nice form.

Unfortunately the jump after this one Kirsty got some crazy air and landed flat resulting in a big bail. I’m glad I wasn’t there at the time (Ryan was taking the pics) as she kinda messed herelf up a bit. WARNING - NEXT PIC IS NOT FOR THE FAINT:

 

Yep, that’s a hole - Ryan got punctures in his tires, Kirsty got one in her! She finished riding down then looked like she was about to faint, so went to the clinic to get patched up and got her tetnus shot. After that she came back up and was riding again. I have a tough wife.

It was a fun day, but as the temperature was in the mid 30’s we were all cooking and enrgy levels were not the highest. The end of the day we ran in to a friendly local, he looked happy eating and as we had had to ride by it anyway, thought I should stop for a quick portrait, he didn’t want to turn and smile though.

All in all, a very fun weekend and our bodys now have a week to recover before the next round of fun.

 

Tofino - Just like home

This weekend just gone Simon and Vanessa invited us to join them for a long weekend in Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver island. We gratefully accepted and are glad we did. That place was so much like home I couldn’t decide if it was making me homesick or if it was so much like home that it felt like I was there.

Lance and Rach joined us on the Friday night ferry over which was beautiful. That’s vancouver on the left, Mt Baker on the right.

The drive over was fantastic, it was like driving New Zealand roads - the road actually had corners, real corners ones that sometimes you had to slow down for even and there were lots of them in a row, not just one but lots. I loved it, but I was wishing I had my little primera rather than an SUV.

On Saturday morning we decided look around town to go kayaking around the islands. The place reminds me a lot of the Corromandel, a sleepy kind of town where everyone is in cruise mode all the time. The kayaking was cool, lots of islands surrounded by mountains.

One of the main reasons we went over though was to surf, Tofino is pretty much the only place on this side of Canada where anyone surfs. Other places further north have waves, but you kind of need to be wearing a submarine to handle the cold water.

By Sunday there were 13 of us there, so we all went down to one of the hundreds of rental shops and got boards and wetsuits. By wetsuits I mean the thickest wetsuit I have ever worn along with booties, gloves and a wetsuit hat which I don’t even know what they call them but the whole suit makes you look like a ninja.

I thought it was a bit over the top, that is until I got in the water and nearly died. When I went under the water it was like my head stopped working, it was so cold I had to reorient myself when I came back up. It was worth it though, really nice to be out in the waves again. They were small and closing out pretty quick, but the occasional ride reminded me of how fun it can be, and riding a long board made it easy to get back in to it.

I’m not sure this kind of surfing is me though. I usually like the whole thing of surfing, the paddling out, the waiting for the waves, the watching out for the right one. But with water this cold it takes a little something away from the enjoyment.

We had a good day surfing and lying on the beach but decided one day was enough, so Monday we just did some sight seeing before heading home. There were so many different parts of Tofino that made me say “this reminds me of ‘insert New Zealand place name here’”.

There are a bunch of pictures on Picassa, take a look: http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelstormer/Tofino

 

Ten things

I’m a little mad at Dan right now, you see he “tagged” me in his blog and apparently that means i’m “it”, or it’s my turn or something stupid like that - it is a little bit too facebookish for my liking. However, the “tag” was to write 10 things that people may not know about you on your blog and I have enjoyed reading others so thought it might be interesting to do.

Some of these things will be very familiar to some people and completely new to others, but here goes: ten things you might not know about me.

1. I took saxaphone lessons for 5 years. I got reasonably good, but didn’t really enjoy it very much because I wasn’t learning to play music that I liked and I was more interested in playing basketball.

2. I can (or at least used to be able to) do a back flip on a wakeboard, I got pretty good one year at camp in Wisconsin. I never landed a 360 though.

3. I am a high school drop out. I finished a year early because I was doing really bad, I got accepted in to a Diploma of Business course at Eastern Institute of Technology even though I was supposed to have finished high school but I got lucky and they needed to fill up the numbers and were happy to take my money.

4. I hate cucumber. Everything about it, the taste, the smell, the texture, the fact that it makes me burp and I taste it over and over all day long - hate it!

5. I have a weak lower back, short hamstrings, problems knees, problem ankles and a neck that clicks out sometimes. To help prevent this I stretch for at least 10 minutes every day.

6. I am a little claustrophobic. Not badly, but I get tense if I spend very long in a space which is too small for me to lie down in. I also feel nervous in A frame buildings because the walls feel like they are closing in.

7. When I was a kid I had really bad eczema. It was so bad that I took baths that had oatmeal in it and before bed, my parents had to wrap me head to toe in bandages to stop me from scratching my skin to pieces.

8. At my parents house, we have a salt water swimming pool. This is partially because they noticed how much my skin improved after swimming in salt water. I also had one of my favourite holidays sitting by that pool reading the Lord of The rings Trilogy and The Hobbit in a week.

9. My Dad (who is a doctor) sent me to school with apendicitis. A couple of hours after school started a teacher called my Mum (Mom for you Americans) who came and picked me up and took me to another doctor. He admitted me to hospital and I had my apendix removed that day.

10. When I was 5 I was desperate to go to school, so I made my parents take me even though it was almost the end of the school year and I was supposed to wait until the next year. At lunch time I walked out and walked about 1.5 kilometers home. I got home and told my parents that I never wanted to go back, and it was true - I never again wanted to go back to school.

So there you have it - 10 random facts about me.

Unfortunate technology

About a week ago I installed iGoogle as my home page at work and at home. I’m not convinced yet that it is very good, I guess time will tell on that one.

One mistake I made though was installing the weather feature which can track more than one place at a time, so I set it to show me the weather here in Vancouver and at home in Napier (They didn’t have Hastings as an option, so Napier had to do). This is the unfortunate sight I look at every time I open the internet.

This is a significant improvement in Vancouver from the last 4 days too. It doesn’t look so bad until you remember that June in New Zealand is the equivilent of December in Canada, so winter at home is proving to be a lot more pleasant than summer here. Technically it is still spring, but we’re talking days.

My friend Dan told me the other day that he is sad that his daily prayers now include the weather. My morning ritual is now 1. check my e mail, 2. check the weather forecast. And now look - I’m blogging about it.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, where is summer??? I want summer!!!

Oh yeah “Unfortunate Technology”…. well if it wasn’t for this technology I would be living in weather ignorance and that would be a good thing!

Senova Restaurant Review, great food, great bathrooms :-)

At work when people are talking about their weekends, most people that I talk to will have eaten out and had a fair amount to drink, then they sound amazed that I went snowboarding or mountain biking and wonder how we can afford it. Well we don’t eat out very often, it is the one area that we can save money so that we can afford to buy all our toys.

But last night we decided that it was about time we went somewhere nice and there is this restaurant around the corner from us which we have always looked at and wondered what it was like. So, making the most of a rare break in the weather, we wandered around to Senova.

I could go in to a lot of detail, but I know it will only interest few so i’m going to go with bullet points here:

* Interior, very nice - reminded me of the vineyards around home. Nice atmosphere without being too loud to talk.

* Staff, very good - he was new and told us so but obviously studied the menu well and could tell us what was in everything and was attentive without being in our faces.

* Food, excellent

- To start we shared a bocconcini and tomato dish wrapped with prosciutto on a bed of lettuce with a fantastic think balsamic dressing.

- For mains Kirsty had some sort of seafood bowl in a broth which she said was delicious. I had this fantastic mustard encrusted lamb cutlet, only just cooked enough to be warm and with a sauce that was almost almondy on top of a potato rosti, asparagus and slow roasted roma tomatoes. I’ve gotta say, they were the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted.

- Desert, Kirsty had a creme brule which was above average and I had a lemon tirimasu. I had never even heard of lemon tirimasu before but it was superb - mmm, that nice fresh lemon taste with that thick creamy goodness.

* Wine, large selection but not much for the more budget conscious amongst us, there were only a few options below $50.

All that said it was a very nice night out and we would be happy to recommend it to anyone. It is at the higher end of the price scale, but worth it.

Ladies, you may wish to stop reading now because this might weird you out a little.

One of my favourite things about the place was the bathrooms. Nothing special about the room itself, but the urinal had ice cubes in it I loved it, seeing how many i could melt - turns out i could melt quite a lot! Makes the whole bathroom experience a lot more enjoyable when you can add a challenge to it.

 

Hanging out

Cheesy title I know, it always cracks me up that the names climbing gyms are usually puns or rip offs from movies that involve climbing, for example the vancouver gym is called Cliffhanger, the one that we we go to is called The Hang Out - I just decided to follow the trend.

This weekend we did our first climbing trip of the year up to Squamish. If it wasn’t for the town of Squamish and the waterfront being really quite ugly, it would be one of the most popular places in the world i’m sure. It is only about an hour from Vancouver and an hour to Whistler, it has amazing hiking, mountain biking, windsurfing, kiteboarding, cross country skiing, white water rafting, fishing etc etc etc. And it has some of the best rock climbing in the world.

We went up on Friday night with Lance and we met Jamie and Hillary up there - these people:

We stayed at this great camp ground, the only picture we took was this one which was from beside our tent:

Some friends from church were nice enough to let us use their rope and fastenings, unfortunately they couldn’t come but we are looking forward to climbing with them in the future. Thanks Nathan and Karen, you guys are awesome.

I have realised again how much I really like climbing, Indoor is fun but when you get outside on the real rocks it just feels right. As well as the climbing being fun, it is a really nice time hanging out with friends, extending yourself and encouraging others to try new things.

I think (but am not totally sure) that it was Lance’s first time on real rocks. He picked it up really well and did this one line better than any of us. It was rated a 5:10b (19-20 for my downunder friends), that is the hardest climb I have done lately maybe ever so I was totally impressed by Lance.

Anyway, here are some pictures:

UC Outdoors Trip #1

For those who don’t go to UC, Kirsty and I decided to start an outdoors group in our church. We are really just running a database to help people connect with others who have similar interests, so whenever anyone is going sky diving or fishing, for example, they can let us know and we will let others know and arrange for them to enjoy outdoors activities together.

This past weekend we went on the first event. Our pastor Geoff organised a camping trip for his family and invited us all along. This is the e mail Geoff sent out:

We’re planning to initiate our kids on an overnight hike to Elaho Canyon.  We’ll leave after church on Sunday May 18^th and drive up past Squamish to this conservation area.  It’s about 2 hours away.  The total return trip of the hike is 13 km and it’s basically flat.  There is a bush camp about 3 km in on the trail from the parking lot and we’re planning to overnight there.  The next day we’ll walk on to the waterfall and back again.  It’s mainly to test our equipment and our kids, but we’d love for some other people to join us.  All welcome.

Sounds nice huh? Well it had potential…….

Actually it was fun, but nothing really went quite to plan.

To start with, the 2hr trip estimate would have been about right, except that when we were about 70k away from our destination point the road turned to gravel, and not just the nice gravel either but rocky, bumpy, holey, trees fallen on the road type of gravel.

On the ride in we were treated to some really spectacular scenery. Flowing through the middle of a valley there is a river which is close to flowing over because of the dozens of waterfalls flowing in to it from the snow melting all around. There were some amazing rapids with lots of water falls in the river that made me wish I was in a white water raft.

Eventually we came across a tree fallen across the middle of the road, some one had been nice enough to cut a gap just wide enough for a car to get through, unfortunately the gap had about a foot of snow in it. Geoff was in front and driving his minivan, it looked easy enough so he gave it a shot and, yes, he got stuck.

His tires slipped so quick that before he could do anything his tires sunk so low that the chassis was sitting on snow. We tried pushing and pulling, we tried to tow him out but we only had a couple of very cheap very thin ropes so that failed quickly. Eventually we jacked up the car and effectively built a new road underneath him with rocks and logs and he drove out.

We figured we were about 2 k away from the start of the walk, so decided to leave the minivan there. I drove through, once again grateful for a 4wd, and loaded our car with the packs while the others walked. After heading to different places for a while, we met up at the start of the track. This was around 4 ½ hours after our 2 hour journey started.

We took a quick look at the track to see which direction to head in. We couldn’t quite tell because of the waterfalls covering most of the track. The snow that covered any flat area was also a bit off putting.

So we ended up camping in the car park.

We had a pleasant evening around a camp fire and in the morning, it rained. So we came home.

It was an interesting start to the group and if it wasn’t for the fact that we had a group of positive and enjoyable people it might have been a bad time, as it was and with the group that we had, it turned out to be a good time.

Thanks for organizing Geoff.

Here are a couple of pictures; sadly most of them were taken on the day it rained.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ipod Myths exposed

In a way this is a retraction from my previous post.  Itunes “days” report at the bottom of your itunes screen is wrong.

My suspicions were aroused today when listening to Cat Stevens and I thought “I shouldn’t be up to that already”. So i looked and figured i have 5552 items, based on 52 (according to my itunes) 24 hr days that means i have an average song length of 13.49 minutes

This didn’t sound right so i copied and pasted my library into excel, calculated the total minutes (25,744) divide by 60 minutes to find the hours (429) and then by 24 to find the days.

Using that basic math I find that my ipod has 17 1/2 days worth of music on it - not the 52 that itunes tells me it has. I did another quick calculation and saw that 52 divided by 3 gives roughly 17 1/2. So itunes really counts their “days” in 8 hour lots.

My new anticipated finishing time is now July 25th. I am actually really dissapointed.