– note: this post was written while aboard the cruise ship on the 17th of July and posted on the 19th of July after arriving back –

Well, Diane and I are now waiting for debarkation from the ship. It’s awfully early — 7:30 in the morning, and we’ve been up since 6 so that we could have breakfast. I don’t have much else to do, so I figured I’d get caught up with the blog posting.

I left off before the second musical show called “Spin”. This time around, the show was themed around a wheel with different destinations on it. After each song, they spun the wheel to get a new destination and they’d do a song around that theme. There was quite a few places they did, most of which were in the United States. We arrived a bit late, but caught songs themed around Texas, New York, New Orleans, Puerto Rico and a few others that I can’t remember. It was pretty fun actually.

After the show, we headed off to dinner. By this point we’d started to get to know our dinner partners John and Dawnyelle. Our dinner conversation was pretty fun, and we had a pretty good time. There was escargo on the menu, which is something I’ve never tried. John mentioned that they were there, and then it became something we had to try. So the four of us split an order of escargo. It was sure buttery and garlicy … and you really couldn’t taste what the snail tasted like. It kind of had a texture similar to calimari, which I suppose makes sense. So, one thing off the list of things to try! For a main course, both Diane and I had some battered fish and shrimp. It was fairly tasty, although some of our other dinners were better.

After dinner, rather than going to see the “R-rated” hypnosis show, we decided to just head to bed. The next day would be our Ensenada excursion, so we didn’t want to stay up too late for a show that maybe wasn’t that exciting. I imagine if he standup guy was back, we might’ve stayed up for him.

We slept in a little more than we had when we hit Cabo, but that’s partly because our excursion didn’t leave until 10:45. This time, we went to have breakfast at Tiffany’s (that’s what the buffet restaurant is called) and then got off the ship well in advance of our tour. It was a nice day though, so we wandered around the little market, and sat in the shade for a little while before heading off on our tour.

The tour we had signed up for was a kayaking trip — the first leg of which was a one hour bus ride to the site. The main tourist attraction in Ensenada is a natural blowhole called El Bufadora. This formation is a place where air pressure builds up in a natural pocket and every few seconds the blowhole sprays water up high into the air. Our kayaking would bring us within a few metres away fromwhere the water exits.

The bus ride was fairly nice. Our tour guide was very excited and talked almost all the way there. She told us about the city of Ensenada, about the state we were in, and about Mexico. She gave us shopping and bargaining advice. She did a pretty good job, and her English was really quite good so it was pretty informative.

After getting off the bus, we got a quick lesson in kayaking from a friendly guy named Carlos. From there, we walked a little ways down to the beach where a bunch of two-man kayaks were sitting. One by one, the kayak tour guides pushed each boat into the water where we paddled out a little ways. The water was beautifully clear, so we could see quite a ways down. The biggest feature in the water was by far the large kelp forests — our kayaking took us through several patches of the stuff. It’s pretty crazy how large these plants must be. We couldn’t see the bottom of the ocean anywhere, but the kelp grows on the bottom and extends their branches to the top of the water and they extend across the water for quite a ways. A pretty incredible sight.

On the way out to the blowhole we spotted several dolphins. It’s pretty cool to see them swimming along not really all that far away. The trip to the blowhole was pretty short, but we sat in the water for awhile to watch it. I risked bringing my little camera along so I took it out and took several photos and videos of the blowhole in action. It was pretty neat to see it from our vantage point, and I’m pretty sure that’s the best way to see it. The vantage point from land really wasn’t nearly as good since you don’t get to see the bottom of the spray.

After the tour guides took anyone who wanted to closer to the blowhole, we started paddling back to the beach. On the way back, Diane and I spotted a seal! It was awfully cute. On our way back, we’d see it several times coming up for air, but we never managed to get a photo of it. We got surprisingly close to it, actually — and every time he came up we paddled a little closer. I wonder if it thought we were stalking it.

The tour guides helped us get up on the beach from our kayaks and we walked back to the bus to wash off the sand and dry off a bit. The bus tour guide was very excited to take us to the market leading towards the blowhole — so even though it wasn’t officially part of our tour, we got an extra hour to wander through the market. It was quite interesting … the people there were quite eager to sell us stuff. At times they were quite pushy. In preparation for our kayaking, Diane and I forgot to pack some money with us, so we actually couldn’t buy anything. It was kind of amusing being hassled into someone’s store to look at their stained glass, but not having money to purchase anything. Of course, the guy there didn’t know that … but we did. Some of the stuff on sale was pretty odd. There were several drug stores down the stretch selling all kinds of spam-subject drugs like viagra and cialis. One guy went so far as to touch my arm and say something along the lines of “you could go all-night baby”. I was a little creeped out to say the least. Makes a good story though.

We wandered through the market for a little ways, taking some free samples of churros, and homemade bread. It helped us last until we got back to the ship. We got back to the bus well before our 3:00 meetup time, and waited around for the rest of our tour people to come back from the market. There was a group of four that were late, and we came very close to leaving them behind but thankfully they got back just in time. The bus ride back was kind of relaxing and I had a very quick nap.

Arriving back at the ship, we cleaned up and then wandered around the ship for a bit. There was supposed to be ball room dance music playing in one of the lounges, but when we showed up there was nobody there. I guess nobody showed up, so they stopped (or never started?). So we hung around for a little bit. Diane had a nap, before we went off to dinner. Our last dinner with John and Dawnyelle was fun. We exchanged pictures and email addresses. Maybe they’ll come visit us in Ireland some day. I had veal parmigiani for dinner, and Diane had the salmon. Both were pretty tasty. We chatted for awhile after dinner and then wandered back to our room where we stayed for a little while before the 10:30 show that evening. The neat thing about the last show was they had been doing auditions at karaoke for some well known artists like Garth Brooks, Brittany Spears, Madonna, Elton John, Elvis, Ricky Martin, etc. The best ones were picked and they put on a show where these people got to get up on stage dressed up like the artists they were impersonating. It was actually pretty fun. The guy who did Garth Brooks sounded almost exactly like him which was pretty awesome. The rest of them ranged in quality a bit, and some definately looked a bit nervous which is totally understandable. It was a neat idea that worked pretty well I think.

After the show was over, Diane and I went off to collapse. In order to get up in time for breakfast, we had to get up pretty early so we set an early wakeup call at 6am. It came too fast, but both of us woke up pretty quickly. We showered, packed ourselves up, and moved out of our room in pretty short order and made it to breakfast a little before 7:00. Breakfast was rather nice — we went for the dining room where we got full service. It didn’t take too long for us to get our croissants, eggs benedict, fruit juice, and coffee. It was pretty tasty, but by the time we were finished and sat around for a bit, it was only 7:45.

So now we’re sitting in one of the lounges waiting for our debarkation number to be called. They’ve gone through numbers 1-9 so far, and we’re number 16. Once we get called we can head off the ship and head to the airport where we’ll wait until 3:20 to leave San Diego. It’s gonna be a bit of a long day methinks. Still, it’s a bit hard to believe our honeymoon is almost over. In some ways it’d be nice to stick around a bit longer, but it’ll be nice to be back home too.

Morgan

– note: this post was written while aboard the cruise ship on the 15th of July and posted on the 19th of July after arriving back –

To continue where I left off, Diane and I headed off to the captain’s reception to go enjoy some pre-dinner cocktails and appetizers. They introduced the senior officers to us, and we got to hear more about what was coming up in the next day or two. Shortly after the reception, we wandered over to the dining hall to have our “Cruise Elegant” dinner. We had lobster and shrimp, which was quite tasty … both Diane and I particularly enjoyed the shrimp — they were quite large and juicy! For dessert, I had a chocolate melting cake which was wonderfully chocolatey. The loud woman was there again, but she wasn’t as bad as she had been the night before at dinner which was a welcome relief.

After Dinner there was a show in the main show room called Rythm, so we wandered over that way and found ourselves a seat to watch the musical. It was okay, but I was a little weirded out by some of the costumes the dancers were wearing. There was some questionable choices I believe … some of them were just very strange!

Anyways, after that, there was a midnight “R-rated” standup comedy show by the same guy who did the standup show in the welcome show on the first night. It was quite a good show actually. He did a pretty decent job, and we laughed at a fair number of his jokes. He did get a heckler though from the audience which was rather interesting. The heckler really didn’t have much content, but she certainly had a lot to say. The guy handled her about as well as you might expect, and eventually she shut up. The last joke of the night was pretty funny again, so he once again did a good job of ending his show on a high note.

We headed off to bed right away after the show since we had to get up early the next morning to get off the ship in Cabo San Lucas. Before going to bed though, we filled out the continental breakfast room service form so that we could get something to eat before heading off the ship. The room service on the ship is complimentary, which is pretty sweet. So we figured this would give us a backup plan just in case we slept in.

The next morning we got our wakeup call and stumbled out of bed and had breakfast. Bagels and creamcheese, some fruit, coffee, and some smoked salmon. A nice filling breakfast before our busy day in Cabo San Lucas. We finished off breakfast and went down to get off the ship. There is no concrete dock in Cabo, so we anchored in the bay and were brought to shore by tender boats. The first thing we had to find was somebody under the “Canyon Canopy” sign for our excursion.

Our excursion was a canyon zip-line, rock climbing and rappelling trip. The first stage of which was to get in a van and drive for about an hour out to the site. Our driver, Alex, was a bit of a wild driver. He sped down the highway a bit faster than I would’ve liked and tail gated a lot more than I would’ve liked, but we made it there safely in the hot desert.

After a quick safety and introductory session, we started the trek. It was quite a lot of fun! There were several rope ziplines, a rock climbing wall, a “commando bridge” which turned out to be a rope across a canyon that you had to walk on holding onto a second rope, and a rappel. It was a lot of fun, and pretty wild.

It took probably 2 and half hours or so to go through the canyon, and we were pretty tired after the whole thing. They fed us PB&J sanwhiches, fresh fruit, and chips and salsa — and most importantly ice cold water. The only bad thing about the trip was they wouldn’t let me take my camera on it. They claimed safety concerns, which were probably fair to some extent, but I would’ve loved to have it with me. As a “replacement”, one of the people with them brought his camera along and took pictures of people as they navigated the course. The problem was, he wasn’t very good at getting good photos, and didn’t take any photos of the scenery (which was really what I was interested in). Plus, to makes matter worse, they charged $12 a photo, or $79 for a CD full of … 8 photos. Sound ridiculous to you? Yeah, to me too. I’m convinced that if the photographer took more pictures of the surrounding area, and sold a CD full of all the photos you liked for $30, just about everyone would buy one. I would, and I’m a cheap Canadian.

But that’s my rant. We were driven back to Cabo San Lucas where we went straight to the ship via a tender. After cleaning up, and taking a quick nap, we went off to see the hypnosis show. Diane and I arrived a bit late, so we found a seat a little on the side, but we caught most of the show. It was mildly amusing, but I guess hypnotism doesn’t appeal to me quite as much as it does to some.

Afterwards it was dinner time so we went and enjoyed quite a few helpings of appetizers before the main course. Only one of the other couples at our table showed up. I figure the other ones got a little hammered in Cabo :).

Rather than attempt to attend any other shows that night after dinner, Diane and I retired to bed much earlier and went to bed early after our big excursion. We slept right in to ten and from then relaxed for a little while longer before going up for another sit down lunch in the dining room. There wasn’t a lot on the schedule today that we felt we wanted to do, so after waffling a bit, we went up to the deck to read and relax in the sun. After a couple hours, I had got a bit pink from the sun, and decided to come in for a bit. I hit up the pokerpro automated poker table for a little while. I didn’t make out very well, but I got a chance to give it a try anyways, so that was cool. I went back to join Diane and we wandered up for the end of high tea.

Again, today’s schedule hasn’t really appealed to us that much so we just kind of hung out for a bit and eventually ended up back at our cabin, so that’s where we are right now. There’s another musical show at 7:00 before dinner so we’ll probably do that. At the moment we’re watching finding forrester on the cabin television. I love that movie.

Morgan

Diane and I slept in again, quite a bit later than I figured we might given that we went to bed super early. I guess we needed to catch up on some sleep. We wandered down for the complimentary continental breakfast which was alright, but not spectacular. Then we headed off to the zoo! It was just one bus from downtown, so we picked up a transit all-day pass and rode the number 7 bus from downtown all the way to the zoo.

The San Diego Zoo is *huge*. It was very overwhelming at first, but luckily our tickets gave us a free bus tour throughout the park so we decided that the best way to start was to take the bus tour around to get a feel for what the park had to offer. The bus tour was at least 20 minutes, and I was able to get a few decent photos with my telephoto lens from the top of the double decker bus.

After the bus tour, we started to wander a bit and saw a large number of exhibits and took a lot of pictures. Diane and I teamed up — she wrote down what the animal’s names are while I was taking pictures, so hopefully we have most of my pictures labeled with the actual names of the animals.

What were my favourite ones? I think I liked the meerkats a lot. The Pandas were awfully cute, and it was pretty fun to watch the monkeys swing around in their little playgrounds. Also, the many deer related animals: the gazelles, the antelope, etc were really cute. Especially the baby ones. One of my other favourite things was walking through the aviaries. These were so much more picture friendly than some of the other ones where the bars just got in the way of the little birds.

We stopped for lunch halfway through the park at the treehouse cafe. It wasn’t all that great, but it was okay. I had a meatball sub and Diane had a bread bowl full of chili.

Wandering through the rest of the zoo took us until after 4:00. One of the highlights in the afternoon was riding the Skyfari tram from one end of the zoo up to the other. It was quite a nice view from up there! We could easily have spent more time at each exhibit or made an effort to see some of the shows they put on there, but we basically explored fairly quickly and took pictures at many of the exhibits.

We headed back to the hotel and got lucky that the bus arrived right away. We sauntered back to the hotel and changed and consulted directions to an improv comedy show we picked up a pamphlet for. Dinner was at Anthony’s Fish Grotto which apparently has been around for a long time. It was quite good — I had a plate of fried fish, scallops, and shrimp. The coleslaw they gave me was some of the best I think I’ve ever had. It had bits of pineapple in it, and the cabbage was very very fresh.

After dinner it looked like there was enough time to try and find the improv comedy place, so we boarded a trolley car which on the inside looked startlingly like the LRT cars in Edmonton. We took it two stops and found the comedy club with time to spare. The improv show was very similar to the guys in Edmonton who do Improvaganza. It was a pretty fun show, although I kind of felt that the referee needed to do less talking and explaining the games and more time letting the improv people improvise. Still, it was quite fun.

We got back on the train and headed back to sleep. We have to check out of our hotel by noon, but the cruise ship check-in time is 12:30 so I think we’ve got a pretty good plan of attack there!

I’ll probably be disconnected from the internet for the majority of the cruise. I have no idea how much internet will cost on the ship, but I have a feeling it might be expensive. I’ll continue to type blog posts though and I’ll post them when I get the chance. If the cost of internet there is reasonable I might jump online once in awhile and post something, but for the most part I think I will disconnect myself.

Morgan

Alright, so I’ve got only a few minutes here to try and catch myself up to today, so this will be a relatively whirlwind post about the past two days.

On Monday, we had to move hotels because we are too cheap to pay the price for a Rio suite. So we moved to the Flamingo hotel on Monday morning. After checking out of the Rio, we moved our large number of bags via two taxi cabs to the Flamingo where Kevin and I checked in and got our room keys. After dropping our bags off, it was more than time to get ourselves some food so we stopped at a little cafe called “Tropical Breeze” in the Flamingo. It was alright, but not incredible. Across the way from the cafe there was an exit to the Flamingo gardens that was quite pretty. They have some wildlife out there that’s pretty cool including some real live flamingos. There’s several water features and a very large swimming pool as well. So it was nice to wander around that for awhile.

A couple people in our group planted the idea of entering in a low buyin poker tournament as a big group. As it turned out, there was a $45 tournament at O-Shea’s that looked appealing so a group of about 10 of us all registered for this tournament. In the end, Mike B lasted the longest and chopped the first and second prizes up with another guy for a decent profit. Way to go Mike! I didn’t do so well. I just couldn’t get any cards to help me stave off elimination. Oh wells.

After getting busted, a few of us went over to the nearby bar and played some beer pong. In this rather silly excuse to get drunk game, you arrange 10 cups in a pyramid formation and put a little bit of beer in each one. Then you toss ping pong balls at the other team’s cups and try and land your ball in one of their cups. If you do, they have to drink it. There’s a bunch of other rules, but that’s essentially the game. Diane and I lost the game we played, but it was kind of fun. I don’t think this is something I’d want to do very often though.

After that, some of the guys wanted to go play poker, but I was hungry and wanted to get something to eat. So Kevin, Nolan, Diane and I wandered out of the casino to find something to eat. We ended up at Bally’s at a little cafe that was actually quite good. I had a California club sandwich which was delicious. It had turkey, bacon, avocado, lettuce and tomato on sourdough bread. Mmmmm, tasty!

It was rather late at that point, so rather than sitting at the poker table, Diane and I called it a night… and proceeded to sleep until noon. Guess it was a good thing we decided to get to sleep! All those late nights were really catching up with us.

So on Tuesday “morning”, I called Darse up to see what he was up to, and he headed over to meet us. We had brunch at the Flamingo buffet which was not nearly as large as the Rio World buffet, but it was still good. We then met up with the rest of the guys and headed off to explore some of the strip hotels and casinos. We ended up walking around the Venetian, the Wynn, and Treasure Island. The Wynn is quite a fancy place and we spent a fair amount of time there oohing and ahhing at the pretty architecture of the new casino. We stopped at treasure island to see the show there which ended up being pretty neat. Lots of fireworks and fire were used in the show. Like the Rio’s show in the sky, though, they sure relied heavily on scantily clad women. That seems to be a staple of Vegas.

Eventually, the group of us (minus Darse and Xan who headed back to rest a bit) ended up at the stratosphere – a hotel/casino that has a large tower that you can go up and view vegas from. There’s also three thrill rides up there. So we went up there and most of us rode the “Big Shot” — a ride that shoots you up the top of the tower at 4Gs. It was pretty fun :)

We rode the monorail back to the hotel. Some people went right down to the end of the line and walked back, but Nick, Johnny and I got off at the flamingo and played a bit of poker. This session didn’t go well for me though — I just couldn’t get any cards to punish the bad play at the table. That’s the way it goes sometimes though.

I’m not too sure what the plan for today is yet. We’ll be meeting up with the rest of the gang soon and head out to get some food. After that, who knows what will happen! I hope to get around to my photos soon, but that might actually have to wait until I get home to process them all. We’ll see how busy we get in San Diego before the cruise.

Morgan

We got up yesterday morning at a far too early hour of 8:00. Having gotten ourselves up, we congregated at the stoxpoker booth at around 9:00 so that we could take a group picture, and then get ourselves setup for the first match. Quickly, they threw a curveball at us. Nick, the guy who was supposed to play on the expo floor couldn’t start at our designated 1:00 start time, so we had to start him at 11:00. We weren’t quite ready, but we did in fact get him started in not too much time.

Early on, Polaris was up a very large amount. But as soon as the first break was over at 200 hands, Nick started to play really well on the bad side of the cards to not lose as much as he could have. In the end, the humans tied Polaris with Polaris having a small 5 small bet margin. So Polaris is now 1-1-1 going into the second live match.

My job so far (and probably for the rest of the event) is to run around with my picture and take photos of the various people and the expo so that we can post them on the website. You can see a gallery of photos from day one here. I think I got some good photos, and I’ll be aiming to get some better ones today.

After the expo was complete, we spent a little time cleaning up, and posting information to the website, but we had ourselves a relatively free evening. So a group of seven of us went to go see Penn and Teller. I enjoyed the show, but I guess I was a little disappointed at the same time. It felt awfully short to me, and there wasn’t enough WOW moments. I mean, there was definitely some. Penn and Teller pulled off a pretty major shock value trick where they switched a person from the audience into Teller on stage. The trick setup was this: They called for someone from the audience who could handle a video camera. They get him up there, but while they are showing him the stage and everything, Teller is behind the set in front of a video camera there and says “this is not the trick he thinks we’re doing”, or something to that effect. They then go through a routine where Teller provides Penn with all sorts of props to have fun with the person behind the video camera. It’s all very funny until the end of the routine where Penn gets up and says that there was a bunch of things that the person with the camera didn’t get. There was even stuff the audience didn’t get … like that you are actually Teller. High shock value, and very clever — although we think we figured out how they did it. I just wish there had been more tricks like it. Anyways, I enjoyed it and certainly thought it was worth my money.

We returned to our rooms to chat for a bit about the show and hang out for awhile. A couple of people who didn’t go returned from the poker tables reporting that the games were rather soft. I’ll have to sit down for a session or two while I’m here. I got to bed a bit earlier, but I think I’m still not getting enough sleep. One of these days I’m going to crash and need some serious snoozing time.

Diane’s doing well, although I wish I could pay more attention to her. I’m glad she’s down here with me — but there’s an awful lot of work to do during the matches. She’s been taking Mike’s video camera around and shooting the event, so it’ll be cool to see what we can use those tapes for after the event is all over.

It’s almost 9:00, so it’s time to start the process all over again!

Morgan

It’s been a couple days, but I’m still amazed at how generous people were with the gifts they bestowed upon us. It took us over an hour to open all the gifts and note down who gave us what. I’m really hoping we got everything right! It’s been a fairly hectic few days since the wedding, but as soon as the photographer gets us our photos, we’ll get to work on preparing thank you cards for all the gifts everyone gave us. We feel incredibly blessed, and more than a tad spoiled!

So here’s a general thank you, to be followed with a more specific thank you in the hopefully very near future!

Morgan

Yesterday came and went in a big crazy-fun blur. I’m still trying to settle myself down and let the fact that I’ve been married to the most wonderful woman I can imagine sink in. I don’t really have time at this moment to talk my way through the whole day, but before I forget them, I just want to jot down some quick highlights from the big day from my perspective, and also thank the people who volunteeered for various tasks and who all did a fantastic job.

Highlights from the weekend:

• There was a lot of people at the rehearsal dinner that Diane’s parents put on for us. It was very welcoming.
• Food at the rehearsal dinner was beef or chicken burgers, with all the fixings. Salads and beans were also available in plenty. Dessert was a full out sundae and banana split bar. I was reminded of Marble Slab’s selection.
• In the middle of the rehearsal, my Grandpa says the line where anyone who might object to the marriage say something. A couple seconds later a huge crack of thunder goes over our heads. I look up at the ceiling and say… “Oh really?”.
• Several of the groomsmen stayed over at my place the night before the wedding. It was a whole lot better to spend it with some good friends. I think I would’ve had a whole lot more trouble getting to sleep if I was on my own all night building up the next day in my head. They helped keep me calm and relaxed (as much as possible anyways).
• Waiting in the church for the Bride and her bridesmaids to arrive was pretty fun. The guys hung out in a side room and it was a little surreal to be getting so many sneaky waves as the many people I knew passed by the room’s door.
• I’m not used to being the centre of attention.
• When the warning came in that the bride was there, I had to leave the groomsmen and wait by myself in the choir room. That wait was a bit more awkward since I didn’t really have anyone to talk to.
• Kepi fell over partway through the ceremony. Many jokes were made at his expense throughout the evening, but he was really good natured about it. I had no forewarning of it happening, but people later mentioned that he had gone pretty pale.
• My Grandpa, who performed the service for us, forgot to let me kiss my bride. In my confusion, I asked a little louder than I might’ve, and the whole congregation had a chuckle. Hey, that’s what I signed up for! ;-) We got our kiss in after the signing of the register.
• Despite our note at the bottom of the bulletin asking for a moment to reflect with each other in private immediately after the service, Rebecca (one of the bridesmaids) barged in to our room. We learned later that she hadn’t seen a bulletin. Whoops! It was okay though.
• The ceremony took roughly 35-40 minutes.
• The congregation exited the church, and hung around to see us leave the church and enter the limo. That was another surreal moment – once again I’m not used to all the attention.
• I’ve never been in a limo before. It was a bit tight for 10 people. It was fun, but I probably wouldn’t sign up for it again. It was nice to be able to see all the wedding party members between photoshoot locations.
• Jason Kasumovic, our photographer, was fantastic.
• Family formal photos were taken next to the St Albert Public Library.
• The weather couldn’t be better (thank you for not raining on us!).
• Other shooting locations included the Muttart Conservatory grounds and the Royal Alberta Museum grounds.
• Lunch was picked up from the Upper Crust Cafe. Absolutely wonderful sandwhiches. Two words: cheese bread.
• Good turnout at the reception. It was good to see so many friends/family there.
• The head table was a very tight fit.
• The food was excellent.
• First course: spinach salad with feta cheese, held in place by a long cucumber slice around it all.
• Main course: salmon and roast beef. The salmon was a bit overcooked I thought, but the beef was very tender and delicious.  We heard the salmon at the buffet was pretty good though, and we hope that was the case.
• Dessert: A wonderful strawberry shortcake in several layers. Absolutely delicious.
• Speeches: Short and sweet. Some touching words from everyone.
• Note to other people planning their wedding: don’t wing the bride/groom speech. Also, I actually wanted to say that we had planned big-O(wedding) — that’s a computer science joke.
• Second note: have someone organize the details of the reception and come up with a schedule. It’s very hard to organize and not be frantic at the same time when things don’t quite go smoothly. Let someone else trustworthy handle the details and sit back and enjoy.
• First dance: Diane and I were a bit rusty with our waltzing, and we had to avoid tripping on her dress. But eventually we got going.
• Rickroll: Yup, we pulled off a rickroll. I didn’t hear many comments about it though, so I wonder if people actually liked it. Obviously a bunch of people were very confused.
• Slideshow: Absolutely wonderful job by my sister who I kind of threw the job at her at way too late notice.
• Dancing: I’m glad people got some serious dancing in. It was good that it got some use.
• DJs: Dan was absolutely fantastic at the DJ booth. Props to Ryan and Brad too for helping, and Ryan for his adventures getting the equipment there and returned.
• It was a lot of fun to visit with a lot of the guests. I’m sorry if we didn’t get a chance to talk to you before you had to leave — I’m sure there’s a lot of you that didn’t get a chance to talk to us.
• Last dance: Danced to Norah Jones, Come Away with Me. There was less than 20 people left at that point, and we helped close out the joint. Not too bad I think.

I just want to say that it was an amazing day, and this is just a sampling of what I was thinking about throughout the day. I want to also make sure to thank some of the important people who made the evening possible:

• The Parents. Thanks to both sets of parents, who took care of more details than I can imagine. They were extremely supportive of our desire to run the show our way for the most part, but they were also very helpful in making sure we had details we hadn’t thought of figured out. I don’t really want to know what all went in to making everything look so wonderful.
• My Grandparents. I am extremely fortunate to still have my wonderful grandparents around to not only see my wedding, but also play an important role. My Grandfather got a one day licence to wed us (he no longer has an active licence since he retired from ministry), and was very supportive in helping us find the right choices for the ceremony we eventually performed. My Grandmother is simply awesome :)
• The wedding party (and as a subset, both Diane’s and my siblings): They put up with our lengthy photoshoot, as well as the huge number of tasks that we put on them with little to no notice. Thank you so very much!
• Many thanks to our Ushers: Rhianne and Brendan.
• Thanks to Simone who arranged the beautiful cello quartet that played at the ceremony!
• Nolan played a couple of key roles: he videotaped the ceremony for us, and he provided the projector to play the slideshow on. Thank you very much for your help!
• A huge thank you goes to Ryan Falkenbe(rg), who endured quite a saga to get the audio equipment to the venue on time. Thankfully, his jeep didn’t lose a window! Ryan put up with a bunch of harrassment from me to get the audio equipment booked, and transported.
• Thank you to Paul Myroon who did a very good job displaying his MC talents.
• Thank you to Dan, Brad, and Ryan who were in and around the DJ booth for most of the night playing some great tunes. I understand Dan took over the show, so he deserves a great deal of the credit. But thanks to the other guys for stepping in as well!
• A big thank you the the group of people who helped setup the hall. Pam and Madeleine were two people who helped our mothers setup the hall. I sure hope I’m not missing people here, but we weren’t there to see that setup.
• Thanks to Jodie for pouring out the tea for our tea ceremony.
• Thanks to An, Jasmine and Crystal for watching the guestbook and the gift table.
• Thanks to Anita for setting up the key prank.
• Megan did a fantastic job with the slideshow too. We kind of threw it at her last minute and she did a fantastic job. She even managed to figure out a way to pace through the slides so that the end of Diane’s pictures happened at the end of the first song, and the slideshow ended right at the end of the 3rd song. She was at the laptop hitting the right arrow key to show the next slide.
• Jason, our photographer, spent 12 hours of his day following us around and posing us for some excellent shots. We’re really looking forward to seeing the results of his work!
• Our very pretty wedding cake was designed and created by Claudia Kalogirou, who brought the cake herself and arranged it and everything!
• Diane’s mom’s friend Marilyn drove up from Red Deer to help decorate and serve the rehearsal feast, Diane’s neighbour Jane-Anne made us a potato salad with radishes carved into flowers, and Diane’s Aunt Janet pitched in too despite feeling a little under the weather.
• And a very big thankyou to everyone that came to enjoy the ceremony and/or the reception. It was so good to see so many faces — some that I hadn’t seen in far too long. We are so happy that so many people were able and willing to come out and see us get married and to enjoy some food and dance with us. Thank you so very much.

I sincereley hope I haven’t forgetten anyone. At this point in time I’m pretty tired, but I wanted to make sure that this got out soon. There are just two last things I wanted to say before I ran off to go collapse.

1) Since you got this far, you deserve a reward. Jason has posted a sampling of the photos he took at the wedding. They are posted at his blog. Go there and enjoy! We’re incredibly happy with the results.

2) I just want to say that this blog will be sticking around for the long haul. We’re going to use it as a way to communicate how we’re doing while we’re in Ireland. Our experiences, our photos, and our thoughts will all be shared here for you to read. I hope that at least some people find this a useful way to learn about how we’re doing overseas. Feel free to comment liberally on the posts we make!

Thank you everyone! It was a wonderful day.

Morgan

This year has been quite busy and exciting for Diane and I. Here’s a brief-ish look from my perspective at the year that was 2007. Obvious highlights for the year are the engagement in May, finishing my MSc degree in January, and the Man-machine poker match in July.

January was a pretty relaxing month for me, despite my master’s defense being scheduled then. The biggest reason for this was because my thesis needed to be turned in three weeks prior to my defense. So for the bulk of the month of January I didn’t have a lot that I needed to do so I spent a lot of my time playing poker. My friend Mike had convinced me to switch my game over to shorthanded no limit hold’em, and I quickly found more success there than I had had in my couple of years of limit play. After successfully defending my thesis, I was hired on by my former supervisor to continue work on the poker project at the UofA. Finally, Diane and I went on the annual department ski trip to Jasper on the last weekend in January. It was quite fun, as usual. This time, unlike past years, Diane and I spent both days on the mountain skiing instead of joining the usual group that hiked down Maligne Canyon on Sunday.

The biggest event in February was the free beer that I put on with my friend Jeff who also recently defended. In our department, it’s a tradition for freshly defended students to hold a department-wide free beer night. Jeff and I held a rather successful free beer (the bill is pictured). I also happened to have a birthday in there as well somewhere.

In March, Diane and I joined a couple of our friends and for another ski trip, this time to Kimberley. This was the first year in a long time that I had managed to get out to two trips out to the mountains so I was pretty happy about that. The weekend was quite a success, and we look forward to our next trip out to the mountains now that it is wintertime again.

April saw my photography hobby become much more serious as I purchased a couple of new lenses for my camera which had been getting increased use up to that point. I purchased a new low-light wide-aperture lens and a better walk-around zoom lens. You can view some of my work on my flickr page. I’ve been more and more active on flickr, uploading 178 photos over the year. Another key event in April was the first Bayne family reunion in over a decade. We went to Camp Nakamun which is a pretty nice facility, and got to spend some time meeting some family that I haven’t seen in many many years. So that was cool.

Diane and I were engaged on May 31, so that was the big event that month. We had a pretty good meal at the Creperie for her birthday, and I would pop the question later that night. By that time, we had been dating for over 3 years, and we both kind of felt that it was the right time.

June was a frantic month for me as my officemate Darse and I worked hard in preparation for the upcoming AAAI poker competition. The bot we eventually entered won the bankroll competition (with the other UofA entry taking 2nd place), so that was pretty cool. Following the deadline for entering we began working towards building a bot for the man-machine competition which had been confirmed for July. So the entire poker group began working like crazy to get a bot ready.

As the deadline approached, we worked long and hard to get a bot tested and ready for the match. Along with those responsibilities, we also needed to organize the match details, work on public relations stuff like webpages, press releases and interviews and all sorts of little things. The match went pretty well with relatively few hitches. My duties during the match included taking photos and working on a live blog on the website so that people who couldn’t attend could still follow what was going on. After the four sessions were over, we barely lost with a record of 1-2-1. It was a lot of fun, and pretty cool to be able to meet and hang out with the poker pros Ali Eslami and Phil Laak.

After the last match, Diane joined me out in Vancouver to take a few days of holiday. I had only been in Vancouver once before, and we only went to the beach and then moved on in our travels. So there was a lot of touristy stuff I hadn’t had the chance to see. We spent a few days there and saw the Aquarium, the Capilano Bridge, Stanley Park, the Sun Yat Sen Chinese garden, and quite a few other things. We stayed in a lovely bed and breakfast, and it was a quite relaxing trip!

August was a slow month. With all the wild preparation and the work that went on during the big match, I felt quite a bit of post-match let down and managed to not get a lot done in August. It was in this month that I found out my officemate would be going to Ireland to work at Full Tilt. Darse’s departure is a big blow to the UofA poker group.

In September, I was able to start picking up my productivity at work again. Two particular events of note were Diane’s family reunion in Manitou, Saskatchewan, and Darse’s Wedding. The family reunion was pretty cool – Manitou is a small town in Saskatchewan where their claim to fame is their lake that has some sort of mix of minerals (mostly salt) that make you float in the water more easily than normal water. So we spent a fair amount of our time swimming around in the pool that was fed from the lake. I got some glorious photos while I was there (pictured) since we caught sunset at the exact right time over the lake. Darse’s wedding was an honour because I was one of the only people that got invited (thanks to my camera hobby). They held it in a lovely spot next to the river valley, and my job was to take some photos. Several turned out quite well I think and they were pretty happy with the results.

Diane and I had our engagement photo shoot in October, and we started getting down to business with planning the wedding. By this time we had the hall picked out, the church booked, and the photographer chosen so we were feeling pretty good about where we were at. Hopefully the planning continues to get done at a good pace.

November and December lacked any big stories or trips. We’ve been busy with social and family gatherings, and have been out of the house to see people or attend parties. It has kept us real busy and in some respects I think I’m starting to get a little drained.

Christmas was good this year. It was pretty low key, which is something that makes me pretty happy. The gift giving thing has come down to a minimum which also makes me happy — I’m a fan of the main gift of Christmas being the time that everyone spends together playing games, and enjoying each other’s company.

I think I’ve managed to remember most of everything. If I’m missing something important, Diane is sure to remind me and she’ll mention it in her year in review (forthcoming).

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season and a very happy new year. Good luck to everyone in 2008!
Morgan

I’ve been working on the site for a little while. The beauty of using a content management package like wordpress is you can put together a pretty impressive looking site in pretty short order. I’ve installed a plugin that lets us upload photos and present them in a pretty slick way. If you head to the Pictures page, you can check out a selection of our engagement photos. I’ll try and upload some more photos in the next little while as well.

Once the DNS has updated, you should be able to access the website using www.minoragenda.com. This should happen later on tonight I hope. I also added a little countdown timer to the sidebar in anticipation of the big day!

Do you like the design? Please leave us some comments if you see something wonky or that doesn’t look good. We tweaked a publicly available theme with one of my photos to get this and changed the colour scheme so there are probably some weird fragments we haven’t spotted yet. Also, we’d appreciate any suggestions you’d have for content we can add to the site. Photos are obvious, and we plan on keeping people informed about the wedding plans, but if you have any other ideas we’d love to hear them!

Also, if you’ve got a blog that I didn’t put down in the blogroll on the right, it wasn’t a concious error. Please help me correct it!

Morgan