Absolutely nothing

...going on.

Last weekend was the annual Banff Ekiden Relay race. Frontrunners sported two teams this year. The weather was great and the winning times were very fast. I ended up doing Leg 5 again this year - Tunnel Mountain Long. It's a 12.4km route over Tunnel Mountain and back into the Banff townsite via Tunnel Mountain Road. This year I did it in the high 54:00 range - pretty slow. I looked at some of my previous times and five years ago, I did the route in 49:30 - I was running a lot back then (back in the triathlon days), and now five years later and focusing on the bike has lost me five minutes...sad.

Saturday night Doug and Ryan came over. We hung out until Raymond and Nick came by to pick us up and head to Twisted Element. It was Nick's birthday, but Joe and Doug wanted to leave pretty much as soon as we got there so we were home before freaking midnight...double sad.

This week has been pretty quiet. I've ran two nights this week - two loops of Edworthy trail. BK and I did 17km last night - amazingly I was feeling pretty good today. Reid and I met up for coffee yesterday and discussed doing some running together this winter. Since the Craig, Chris and I are committed to doing the Peak Power program again this winter on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday again , Reid and I planned out that we will run Mondays at lunch, and every other Friday. I'm still obligated to organize the Frontrunner Wednesday night run from Eau Claire all winter, and Saturdays will continue as usual. It looks to be another hectic off-season!

Jeff got back from San Francisco on Monday, so we chatted on the phone for quite a while last night catching up on things. I think a bunch of us are going to meet up for drinks at the Backlot tomorrow night. Doug and Darren are heading up to Edmonton for a change of scenery this weekend so it will probably be another quiet one. The following weekend is Halloween - Doug's party and Tim's big 4-0, so maybe that's a blessing! The gang is planning on heading back to SF for Pride in June 2007, but I think it might overlap with Nationals in Bromont. I hope not - it would be fun to go with (a combination of) Joe, Jeff, Doug, Kelly, Matt, Calvin, Curtis to SF in June! But it will be just as awesome to head to Montreal/Bromont for a week or two at the same time.

That seems so far away right now.

Joe finished his mid-term last week for Course 2 (Oil Production Accounting -- whee!)of his CAPPA certification and is writing the final next week. I hope it goes well and he can continue to pick up the pace. I think he's getting quite tired of the service industry and is ready to move to something that will pay him more closely to what he's actually worth. The guy's a whiz with numbers and has the memory of an elephant!

My dad's surgery went about as well as it could have and the test on his prostate and lymph nodes after the surgery showed no cancer cells outside the gland, so everything sounds very positive. I'm glad it's over. God this aging of the parents thing really sucks. Inevitable but shitty.

What else? Not much. I've got some Western Cup and Synergy meetings plus the ABA AGM coming up in the next few weeks. More paperwork, more action items. Keeps one out of trouble, I guess.

Halloween is going to be fun. Joe and I were originally planning on dressing as Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous (like, who could pull that better off than us?), but since we've slacked on the preparations, I doubt it's going to happen. I picked up a Spiderman suit costume on eBay for cheap in the summer that I'll have as a backup!

Tomorrow the work group are getting together for a farewell lunch for our manager Jeff. He's moved on to the Business Intelligence project that is starting up. His position hasn't been filled in the interim but Rod, the End User Application Support team lead, is filling his shoes indefinitely. Quite a few people in our department have jumped on the opportunity to telecommute so the office is sort of looking empty these days. The company is releasing the 19th and 20th floors of Gulf Canada Square (apparently they are making a LOT of money in the process), so they're really pushing the telecommuting thing to get people out of the office and squeezing everyone else into spots on the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 9th floors, which are the only ones fully or partially occupied by the company in the building anymore. Quite a difference from five years ago! I was hoping the party was going to turn into an afternoon of drinking, but it looks like we're going to be expected to return to the office in the afternoon. Boo-urns. I've been working on modifying XSLFO stylesheets this week for a new PDF generation product that the company wants to implement as a corporate-wide web service, and as you can tell by the description, an afternoon of drinking is much more preferable.

That's about it from here. Maybe if something less than absolutely nothing happens in the next few days, I'll freaking post about it. The Conservative 'Clean Air Act' that was introduced in Parliament yesterday has me pretty livid. Maybe I'll talk about that in a future post....no hard caps on greenhouse gases until 2020? Pul-lease. That's the definition of doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Who is fucking Rona Ambrose anyways? Do any of the Conservative ministers have any experience in any of their portfolios? What a bunch of goons.


DOING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
Gang of goons - PM Stephen Harper, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose (both front), Health Minister Tony Clement (top left), Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon (centre) and Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn.