We left Medicine Hat a couple of days ago, and Jodi and the kids are in Red Deer and I am in Edmonton. Me and my Dad went to a Tigers game, and they got blown out 5-1 by the Hurricanes. A couple of highlight reel plays on the Hurricanes side made the Tigers' goalie look pretty silly. I haven't been to a Western league game since I think I was about 16. It's quite a bit different now, with people around us doing work on laptops during the intermission and lots of text messaging going on, and no more 'smarties' colored seats. I can't remember seeing that stuff at NHL games recently, but the show at an NHL rink is much more enthralling. The sound system at the arena is terrible; we could barely hear any of the music or announcements, so that hasn't changed much over the years. I don't know if I just don't like hockey enough anymore, but the game seemed really slow. No one really stood out, and poor passing and unpolished skating styles kind of detracted from the game. I suppose I tend to critique too much having played hockey for quite a while, but after getting around that, I found a couple of players on Lethbridge were pretty good. In the end, it was a really good time, and thanks to my Dad for the ticket. They had a pretty funny contest during one of the intermissions. They brought out five appliances from Leon's onto the ice and situated them in a circle. Then, they blindfolded a guy and put him in the middle of the circle and spun him around a couple of times, and then he was supposed to go find all the appliances in the alotted time of one minute. Each appliance he found he got to keep. I think maybe it was the first time they tried the contest because either a) they weren't too concerned about dishing out $4000 in appliances (unlikely) or, b) they had no idea how easy the contest was. Needless to say, they made the circle so small, the guy took ten steps, found the first appliance, took another ten steps, found the second appliance, took another ten steps, repeat ad absurdum, and he ended up getting all of the appliances with time to spare. Pretty funny. Another contest had participants either answer a Tigers' trivia question or shoot the puck from the red line into the net. All but one of the ten contestants picked the shot. I was quite surprised at how difficult people found it to hit the open net. Only two managed to do it. A couple whiffed it just outside the crease, and one even shot the puck directly into the corner.
We had quite a fiasco at London drugs trying to get our passport photos for the visa applications. We had to redo everyone's except Jodi, and I think I did around eight redos. After you get your picture taken, you have to wait around 4-5 minutes for them to develop it and make sure you faced the camera and there are no shadows. So imagine us with our two young kids trying to get them to first, sit still for the picture, and then occupy their time while we got ours done without destroying the store. By the end of the hour or so it took, Reese was swimming in my arms and Erika had opened up her own shop in an adjacent aisle, organizing and promoting a collection of notebooks. In terms of my photoshoot, I don't understand what the problem was. I'm no photography expert, but if you continually develop shadows in the same top corners of the picture, maybe you should tilt the camera up a bit so the flash catches the upper part of the exposure? Or just brighten everything up with more exposure. No offense to the girl who took the pictures, but as George Bush so eloquently put it:
Jeff
