More Shots For Scott

A few days ago Scott went in for a doctor's appointment to get a few more booster shots (the previous visit was in October). They weighed him, measured his height, and then poked icky needles into his thighs. Poor little guy.




As you can see from the graphs, his height is 70th percentile. Weight is 64th percentile. People always say he looks big for his age, but the statistics suggest that he is hardly above average. On the cute scale, I think he is off the charts, however.

The Weekend the Woman Went

Today I was riding the C-Train back home from a job interview and I read an article in the paper about a new TV series starting this week called "The Week the Women Went". The show takes place in small-town Hardisty, Alberta (200km SE of Edmonton), where all the women are whisked away for a week's vacation while the men are left to fend for themselves. Apparently, they picked Hardisty because it's one of those places where the men are extra manly (read chauvanistic) and take pride in the fact that they don't do much around the house. Half of the fun is supposed to come from watching the men struggle at keeping the house together, the other half is supposed to come from watching the woman let their hair down while they air each other's dirty laundry. After all, it's a small town and everybody knows everybody else.

Well, this weekend is not going to make it onto TV, and it's probably not as wild or exciting as the show the CBC has prepared, but we've got our own little version here. R had a chance to fly to back to Ottawa for 4 days on Saturday, so I've been taking care of the little man without her. Fortunately, not ALL the women went to Ottawa this weekend, so I've had some invaluable assistance from R's mom. I managed on my own until Sunday night, but now I'm staying at the in-laws' place until R comes back on Tuesday, because I have to leave Scotty at home while I go to class, job interviews, etc. I would bring him to the interviews, but I think he would steal all the attention.

I've got another interview tomorrow, one on Thursday, and possibly some more this week if these ones go well. Needless to say, there hasn't been a lot of sleeping going on so far. But real men don't need sleep. Real men like those guys in Hardisty, Alberta

One Huge Cheque

How often do you get a chance to take a picture with a cheque this size? I went to the Calgary Society of Financial Analysts Annual Forecast Dinner last night and our group received this donation from the proceeds of the dinner. The amount will be used to increase the size of the portfolio that we manage as part of our finance education.


We also snapped this picture with the new Dean of the Business School, Dr. Leonard Waverman. He's just arrived in Calgary from the London Business School. He was very pleasant and quite willing to pose with us.

The Piano Man and His Hero Father

When Scott sees something he wants, he can reach about twice as far as you would expect. I'd say he has a range of about 12 feet, and he still hasn't even learned to crawl.

When he's sitting with us in the living room, he often catches sight of the keyboard that sits next to the couch. If he decides he wants to play the piano, we had better just get out of his way. The boy is serious about his music. I have put together a quick video of him tickling the ivories back in December:



He's not the only one in the family serious about music and serious about getting down and celebrating the new year. My brother posted a video from our New Year's Eve shin-dig at his place down in Highland, where there was no shortage of Guitar Heroes.

Four Part Family Photo

This year we sent out a few Christmas cards (mainly just to relatives) with a picture of our family on the front. It's a shot of all three of us on the main street of Banff, Alberta, the mountain resort town near Calgary:

I think it turned out pretty nicely, but that was only after a bit of wrangling on my part. We got home from our anniversary trip to Banff and realized that we should have taken a family photo while we were there, since it is such a nice backdrop. We had several decent pictures of us with Scott, but nothing of the whole family, and it didn't seem likely that we would have a chance to go take some more pictures before it would be too late to mail out a few cards.

So I set to work in Photoshop. Here is the photo I started with. As you can see, Scott is quite hidden from view.

I took Scott's face from another picture, and rotated it to fit into the new space. The first time I pasted it in, it was way too large (his head was bigger than mine) but the final version is pretty close to scale.

What family picture would be complete without mom? I had this perfect shot of R posing near the stroller that was a cinch to clip and add in.
For fun, I also threw in an extra mountain in the background. I think I determined that this was Mount Rundle. The sun is hitting it at a completely different angle than everything else in the picture, but I didn't really worry about it.

It seemed a little strange to send out a doctored photograph on our Christmas card, but I didn't do anything too dramatic to try to improve our appearance, so you can consider this a fairly reliable representation of what we might look like if we were to pose together on the streets of Banff.


We hope you had a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.