Jeffrey Vanneste’s Personal Blog

When we moved to Montreal we left my papasan at Hemant‘s place. The papasan was my TV/video game/lounging chair so something had to be done to replace it. I had heard about these new “beanbag” chairs for awhile now and decided it was worth a try. Enter the Sumosac Gigantor.

The chair is around 70 pounds takes up about the same space as a love seat. The chair came in 2 big boxes which contained 3 cubes of foam, a liner and a cover:

The instructions said to open up the plastic cubes and put the foam cubes inside the liner.

After the cubes were in the liner the instructions said to break the cubes apart and then wait 24 hours for everything to expand. Breaking the cubes was not terribly enjoyable. It took quite awhile to break each cube into chunks. Once finished I let it sit over night and when I checked it out the following morning it had grown to what I assume is the proper size.

Rachel and I can both cuddle on the chair comfortably. It’s fantastic for watching TV and playing video games. I highly recommend you check one of these out if you are able to.

[Photos on flickr.]

After 2 years of promising Brent that I would come and visit him I finally took advantage of a 50% seat sale with Air Canada and flew to Dulles airport for $450 return. It’s crazy expensive for how close it is. Oh well. The plan for this trip was to sight-see as much as possible. For Friday night though, Smothers Brothers. You may think you don’t know who they are, but you do. For my generation I think we recognize them from the Shreddies commercials that they did. At their show they showed clips from their old shows and I definitely didn’t recognize any of that. The one brother came out as “Yo-Yo Man” for a bit which was pretty cool. He was quite good at pulling off all his yo-yo tricks. I can (or could) do most of the tricks that he did which made me happy.

Day 2 in Washington we tackled “The National Mall.” I originally thought this was an actual mall. Like lots of shops and stuff. Apparently I’m an idiot. The national mall is actually a national park in Washington, DC where all the museums, Capitol Hill, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and the white house are. Brent lives in Bethesda, MD so we had to take the metro to get to Washington. Bethesda, the metro and everywhere I was in Washington was uncannily clean. I saw 2 pieces of trash on the street and I think they were both unopened bottles of water. Unlike Montreal, all the metro stations looked the same to me in Washington:

What really blew my mind? Escalators that are outside:

Canada would totally own that escalator.

We walked around the national mall and checked out some sculptures on the way to Capitol Hill. We saw this one sculpture that had a sign beside that said “Woman sitting”. Here is the sculpture:

We stared at it for quite awhile and couldn’t figure out why it was called “woman sitting.” Eventually I looked a little to the left and saw this:

This was my favorite sculpture. Everything else was human, but not this one:

So Capitol Hill looks just like it does on TV except you totally aren’t allowed close to it. They had fences setup around it so this was the closest shot:

The Washington Monument was also, exactly what you’ve seen before:

And the Lincoln Memorial was not a giant ape like The Planet Of The Apes would have you believe.

When we left the Lincoln Memorial I wanted to get a picture with Brent and I with the reflection pool behind us. I set the camera up, set the timer and took the first picture:

Since I wanted to make sure it turned out I figured I would do a 2nd shot. As we waited for the timer I heard to my right “Bill, go further. Further Bill!” Bill just kept walking into our shot so I shouted “No Bill, too far Bill. Nooo Bill!” He thought it was pretty funny that some stranger was yelling his name. He ended up walking into our picture.

We had a good time making fun of Bill for the rest of the weekend. Sadly, he never showed up in any of our photos again.

After that we made a quick stop in at the white house to say hello to Obama. He told us to wait outside the fence so we humored him and did what he said.

Our first museum was the Museum of National History. We walked through here pretty quick. There were lots of gems, dinosaurs and mammals but it wasn’t really my thing.

The next museum was the Air and Space Museum. By this point we were pretty tired so we decided to check out some of their IMAX shows. The first one was “Space Station” followed by “Fight Pilot: Operation Red Flag”. Touring the museum had what you would expect. Planes and space stuff.

By this time it was 5pm so we had 30 minutes to run through the American History museum. There was suppose to be a C-3po costume some place in the museum so that was my goal. We saw “The Ruby Slippers” from The Wizard of Oz:

Seinfeld’s fluffy shirt:

And when we gave up all hope when they were kicking us out, we finally saw C-3po.

The next day we decided to drive to Baltimore (only 45 minutes from Bethesda) to check out the Baltimore Aquarium.

They also had a dolphin show there so I guess we couldn’t pass that up.

The aquarium was pretty awesome. The line-ups were crazy to get in. We bought our tickets at 10am but weren’t allowed inside until 1pm. We walked around Baltimore a bit but I wasn’t overly impressed with what I saw. Granted, we only walked around the harbor and little Italy.

The day I was leaving I only had half a day to kill so we decided on going to the International Spy Museum. The museum was setup like you were going through spy training. It starts off with you picking an identity in the first room with a bunch of facts about you. Throughout the museum you were asked different questions about your identity. There were lots of spy gadgets, guns, bugs, and interactive displays. My favorite part was crawling through the air ducts trying to make as little noise as possible to not set off the alarms. No photos were allowed in the spy museum so I’ve got nothing for that.

So that was my trip to Washington. I really liked the city overall. I can see how you could spend a lot more time sight-seeing. Definitely more than 2 days for the museums would be a good idea. All my Washington trip photos are up on flickr as usual.

Sean came up to visit us after we got setup in the new apartment.  We wanted to hit up some ski hills this year since we both had new skis to use.  Turned out that we got a horrible weekend.  It was -30′C and then the wind chill on top of that.  The Saturday we headed to Mont Tremblant (this is suppose to be THE ski hill in Quebec) to ski for the day.  It’s about 90 minutes away from the apartment which isn’t too bad of a drive.  When we arrived I took a picture of Sean’s car.  It’s crazy how much salt is on the roads here:

Everyone’s car is white in winter I guess.  Mont Tremblant turned out to be some what of a let-down.  The mountain was maybe 4 times the height of Table Mountain.  After going to Panorama for the last decade I think I’m spoiled from skiing out west.  It probably didn’t help that it was so cold.  We could do 1 or 2 runs before having to warm up.  It also sucked when their main lift stopped working (which was a gondola and not a quad chair.  It was really weird having to take your skis off to go up the hill).  The line-ups were horrible.  I’m not sure if this was because the one lift was broken or what.  I think it’s likely always this busy.

After finishing up skiing we decided it was too cold to attempt a different mountain on Sunday so we decided for a much warmer visit to the Botanical Gardens and biodome.

We went to Reuben’s for supper one night and I had spaghetti with Montreal smoked meat on top.  It was incredible.  I’ve been back a few times since then to get the same meal.  Mmmm.

Haven’t posted in awhile so I have to catch up from my last post.  My December was spent preparing for the move out East to Montreal. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until the house was broken into.  The thieves stole some money, liquor, all the jewelry they could find, 3 laptops (ouch), xbox 360 and an ipod nano.  It happened a week before Christmas so that sucked too.  On the upside everything was covered by insurance (though you can’t really replace jewelry.)  It’s been over 2 months and I’m still dealing with the insurance agency though.  I’m grateful that the insurance covered it but I can’t wait for this to be finished with.

Christmas was at the Webster’s this year.  My big present was some sweet monitor arms.

They allow me to keep my laptop raised up and use a normal keyboard.  I highly recommend the Ergotron LX if you work on a laptop all the time.  I got the dual arm model so I can keep the laptop on the side and my main monitor in front.  Love it.

We successful sold the RAV4 right before leaving.  Rachel asked for more than I thought we could get for it but in the end someone came along and gave us what we wanted for it.  We ended up with about $10k extra which got spent on our movers (Premiere Van Lines), paying off all our loans (yay loan free!) and paying for some new furniture for the new apartment.

Speaking of the new apartment.  It’s awesome.  Comparing it to our other Montreal apartment it is a huge leap.  I have a lot more room for my office here:

The living room is nice and bright and the projector works great in there.

And our kitchen has 2 sinks (I love 2 sinks.)

All the appliances are new.  The location is amazing.  We have bus routes close to us and a metro stop one very short block away.  For the times we need a car Montreal has a service called Communauto which lets us “rent” a car for pretty cheap.  It ends up costing about $10 to get a car to goto Costco.  For more apartment pictures go here.

As for Montreal, the last 2 months have been really busy for us here.  We are still hanging pictures and getting things organized.  I think by the end of March we should have everything unpacked and pictures hung up.  Rachel spends almost all of her evenings studying for her genetic counsellor certification exams in September and November (one for Canada and one for USA.) I can’t wait for her to be done studying for stuff.

This time in Montreal I’ve been making more of an effort to leave the apartment.  I was expecting on having lots of extra free time here but I’ve:

• been going to a boardgame meetup every 2nd Saturday.  These have been awesome.  I’m getting to discover some new games that I’ve never heard of before.  What’s even better is most people who come to this own so many games they just want people to play with.  It works out well cause I don’t want to buy any games, I just want to play them.
• joined the McGill squash club which has monthly meetups but has exposed me to a lot of new people to play against.  I have about 2 games a week.  McGill is about a 20 minute walk from the new apartment so I’ve been liking that too.
• twitter meetups.   Ya that’s right.  Twitter meetups.  Technically they are called “tweetups”.  I’ve met some great people at these.  I lucked out at the first one and met some new friends that have a weekly Wednesday movie/supper night which I’ve been going to every week since.
• checking out tech community events.  The tech community is very active here.  From general “technology” breakfasts to iPhone dev camps to Python meetups.  I think there is at least 2 events every week.
• spending time with the wife in the same city.  Granted, I have to steal her from her studying.  It sure is nice to be in the same city.

That’s about it for this post.  I have some picture event posts coming up.