FolkWolf.Net : Category personal, everything about personal

My favourite blue skies quote this year

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:17:05 +0000

From David Scrimshaw's post A guide to Blue Skies Music Festival

Although Blue Skies is an amazing cooperative event completely created by volunteers and dedicated to the creative arts, the environment and peaceful coexistence, the race for good camping spots is a savage competition that requires speed, strength and guile

Music critique in the age of twitter

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:06:00 +0000

This is an amazing rant about the state of music criticism, and the state of the music industry in general.

The ride to conquer cancer continues

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:26:00 +0000

I have great news, Liz and I are going to be riding after all. 200km from Toronto to Niagara Falls this Saturday and Sunday.

How can this be you ask, have you met your fund-raising totals? Well we have not yet met the $2500 we are required to raise but we have received and extension and therefore we can ride!

It was the fantastic financial and emotional support, we have received throughout this adventure which had allowed our continued commitment.

For those of you who have donated thank you very much, I appreciate it and am overwhelmed by individuals generosity.

For those of you who are considering a donation, let me reiterate that the money goes to the Princess Margaret Hospital, one of the leading cancer fighting hospital in Canada.

To donate to Matt: http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/mattrose

To donate to Liz: http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/lizmcdermott

Anything would help, forward this if you are so inclined, Thank you, Matt and Liz

P.S. we have raised almost $1000 each and thank you all.

Ride to Conquer Cancer

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:40:00 +0000

Well in Two weeks Liz and I are scheduled to ride our bikes from Toronto to Niagara Falls. This is to raise money for the Princess Margaret Hospital and their cancer research and fighters. We will not be able to ride unless we raise enough money, sadly it looks as though we will fall short. I know many of you saw Liz and I at Kelpfest this year, riding a stationary bike, during each show. This was part of our fund-raising efforts and along with being good training it was great fun.

Please help Liz and I realize our fund-raising goals and help us to ride to conquer cancer.

To donate to Liz, you can go to

http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/lizmcdermott

and to donate to me, you can either go to

http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/mattrose

or if you have a facebook account, you can go to my facebook profile and click on the Donate Now button in the ride to conquer cancer box

First Ride to the Gatineau Hills

Sat, 30 May 2009 18:47:00 +0000

I did my first ride up to the Gatineau Hills today. It was as hard as I expected, but it was still a lot nicer than I remember it. I only made it to the bottom of the Pink Lake Hill because I want to go on another bike ride tomorrow, so I didn't feel like pushing it.

Also, there's a whitewater kayak course right near my house in behind the new condo building accross from the War Museum

iMapMyRide 30-May-09 7:08 PM
Find more Bike Rides in Ottawa, Ontario

first long ride

Mon, 18 May 2009 16:46:44 +0000

I did my first long bike ride of the season. My lungs are killing me, but other than that, I feel surprisingly OK. Details are below. I've taken to using my iphone and imapmyride to map my rides, and it's actually pretty handy, also, it lets me embed my training rides for everyone on the internets to make fun of. iMapMyRide 18-May-09 5:32 PM
Find more Bike Rides in Ottawa, Ontario

Random Google Earth

Sun, 17 May 2009 09:15:00 +0000

This is where we camped after our first year going to BM. It's only about a 6 hour drive from Burning Man to the Northern California coast, but you might as well be on a different planet. After being in the desert, the cold damp was a huge shock. We ended up wearing all of our winter gear all the time, usually good to about -25C

xkcd

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:32:00 +0000

I think half the brilliancy of xkcd is the author's knowledge of geeky obsessions, and her willingness to alienate a good chunk of her audience just to make a small chunk of her audience laugh uproariously. The other half is the brilliant writing...

How not to buy a house.

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 10:53:00 +0000

Do not buy the first house you see
Don't get into a bidding war
Don't buy a house without the following conditions
House Inspection
Financing
Give yourself lots of closing time

We broke all those rules. Yet we still ended up with a fantastic house.

The story starts almost three weeks ago, when Liz was looking at MLS on a lazy saturday and said, "we should go look at this open house tomorrow", we thought about it, and 2 pm rolled around the next day and we discussed it some more, and we were both a little uneasy about seeing the house:

Liz; "It's a big deal, it just weirds me out a bit"
Me: "I'm just afraid we're gonna want to buy it"
Liz: "No, we won't, it won't have a backyard, or a basement, it'll be terrible, besides it's a huge investment, we won't just buy the first thing we see"
Me: "Like our car, or our dog..."

Needless to say, a half hour later we found ourselves asking: "So, how do you buy a house?"

We got the name of a realtor from our parents, who had just bought a house the same weekend we got married. We met with the realtor at the house a couple of days later, and she said... "This house is so hot we're going to need oven mitts, you better think about how much you want this house, because if you want, we're going to have to go all in, and make an offer with *no* conditions, no house inspection, no financing conditions, you're going to have to make an offer that doesn't just compete on price, but makes it easier for the seller to sell to you than any other offer"

So Liz and I thought about it overnight, and decided we wanted to go all in. We arranged for a house inspection on a house we didn't have an agreement to buy, and we met with our wonderful financial advisor, who jumped through all the hoops, and even possibly bent a few rules to make sure that we could ensure that financing was in place, before even putting an offer on the house.

The seller started accepting offers at 7pm the next saturday evening, so we met saturday afternoon and discussed offers. We decided to on two numbers. If there were no other bidders, we were going to go under the asking price, and if there were other bidders, we were going to go with an offer that was significantly over the asking price, with no conditions, and a closing date of two weeks. We were hoping that would be no other offers that night.

A few hours later, I got a text message (as a sidenote, we did an amazing amount of communication over text messages. The last time I had a celphone was before the days of SMS, so this whole text messaging thing was a weird novelty), saying that there was at least one, and probably three other offers on the house. OK, big offer.

We all trooped down to the realtors office at 6:30, and filled out the offer sheet, since we were all kind of mad at being made to spend our saturday night at a realtors office, we made the offer close at 7:45. The seller didn't make it 'til 7:15, so we presented our offer, and the other three bidders presented their offer, and we spent a very tense 15 minutes, and when the seller's agent came in at 7:30 and said that our offer had been accepted, the looks on our faces must have been something to see, because the seller's agent said "Don't look so shocked!"

So monday, I went looking around at Insurance. The House Inspector had said that the 60A incoming circuit would be a problem getting insurance. I still can't figure out why, as the less electricity coming into the house, the less chance of fire, but there you go. And I discovered that when you say your house is over 50 yrs old, getting insurance is much more involved of a process that takes running back and forth between me, the broker, and the insurance inderwriter. That was dealt with by Wednesday of last week, and then, it was pretty quiet for a week.

A week of painful waiting. Both Liz and I like things to be 100% assured, and for a week, things were almost 100% sure, but not a done deal yet, so neither Liz nor I slept very well that week.

On Tuesday, we met with the banker and signed a few more papers, and she went over the mortgage. Thursday, we went to the Lawyer's office and signed our names what seemed like thousands of times (a whole bunch of documents, three copies of each, with each page initialed by both Liz and I)

And ta-da! Friday afternoon, Liz went and picked up the keys.

Today....

Moving. Ugh. I hate moving.

Looking to buy a PC

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:27:52 +0000

I've decided to re-join the dark side, and get another PC with (ewww) windows. Problem is, the last PC I bought was probably about 8 years ago, and I have no idea what I'm looking for anymore. Basically I want it to play games, but I'm not looking for a hardcore gaming machine.

I'm asking the lazyweb where to buy a PC in Ottawa, I went to Best Buy, and they didn't have anything compelling there, and I went to Future Shop, but I couldn't get a sales-guys attention, even though I was standing around in the computer aisle playing halo for at least 10 minutes...