The little countdown meter on the right side of the page has cleverly informed me that there is a scant 15 days to the wedding! Needless to say, we’re pretty excited. A lot of the pieces are falling into place for us, but there’s still lots to do.

The past few weeks have been insanely busy for both of us. Between work and the many extra-curricular activities we’re up to, there hasn’t been a lot of time to sit down and just do nothing for an evening. It’s good in a way, since it can help keep myself from panicking since I’m too busy to panic. On the other hand, every so often I feel like I’m losing a handle on what’s going on. Between organizing the wedding and getting our bots ready for two big competitions in the next two months, AND getting ready to move to Ireland, we’ve got a lot of balls in the air as it were.

But, this is no time to Panic!

The wedding is coming up very quickly now! We’re now a month and a few days away from the big date, and there’s still lots of little details to nail down. One of the things that we need is volunteers to do setup and takedown of the hall. If you’re interested in helping out, please let one of us know soon so we can give you a task.

// Diane’s comments follow

Also, does anyone want to usher or possibly babysit a video camera?  I have made a list of tasks and descriptions that you can look through and decide from the available jobs what you would prefer if you decide to give the gift of helping our big day run smoothly, kind of like a little registry for volunteering.  This would make a very good gift!!

// Aaand back to Morgan

We’ve been asked by a few people what we’d like for gifts. We’re just starting to send the word out that I’ve been hired by a company in Dublin to start working over there starting August 1st. That means that we’re not going to need a lot of “stuff” since we’re going to have to be pretty choosy about what we bring with us to Europe.

For those that would like to get us physical things, we’ve setup small registries at The Bay, and Linens-n-Things. However, the traditional wedding gift for Chinese weddings is cash. If you would like to go along with this, then that’s a perfectly good solution too.

We thought about trying to setup a travel registry for our honeymoon, but we heard that many travel registries take a percentage cut of that which didn’t really seem fair.

The wedding is in just over a month. If you haven’t returned your RSVP cards yet, please do that soon! We’ll start bugging people about that soon so that we know if we have enough space to invite a few more people.

Happy spring everyone!

Morgan

We’re going to have to visit Morgan’s grandparents more often, even though they have moved to far away Rimbey. Morgan and I took a sunny drive out there on a Saturday several weeks ago and had a very pleasant time. We’ve been back since for Morgan’s grandpa’s 80^th birthday (!!!) and to help celebrate 55 long years of wedded bliss for him and Morgan’s grandma, but perhaps we ought to make that a special post all its own. This one’s from sometime in February…

We arrived at lunchtime and Morgan’s grandparents took us to a local restaurant called Monterey Jack’s. The owner/chef (whose name really is Jack) did his time at NAIT and has built a menu that is fairly extensive by small town standards and very reasonably priced. Not only did he serve us himself, but he offered various off-the-menu options, like grapefruit-and-something dressing for my salad (I don’t know what was in it, but it was great). The experience was as refreshing as the salad – with the small number of potential customers in his area, I guess Jack has to impress everybody to get repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising. Apparently it’s working. You’ll have to try the crème brulee cheesecake if you are ever in Rimbey!

You’ve got to love grandparents – it seemed that no sooner had we made it back to the house full of chicken cordon sandwiches than Morgan’s grandma sat us down for some of her uber-healthy bran+orange+raisin+cranberry+flax muffins, all pre-cut too. Food was kind of a theme for the day. There were certainly more colours on my plate at dinner than I’ve seen in my days of cooking for one – pot roast, spuds, gravy, corn, spinach salad with all the fixings, fresh grandma-made buns… and ice cream for dessert! Morgan and I are pretty sure we weigh about five pounds more that we did at the beginning of that weekend. We came home with freshly baked cookies and muffins, and if we had stayed the night, a hot batch of cinnamon buns could have found its way into our happily stretched tummies.

We did find time for a few things besides eating. We went over bits of the ceremony and vows with Morgan’s grandpa, who has agreed to marry us and who had to get a special one-day marriage conducting permit just for June seventh. We took the tour of the estate and put some holes in the walls for shelves, and then we played a game of “Murder” which is kind of like “Trouble”, but better. It was pretty tempting to stay and eat cinnamon buns and hide the measuring tapes and see the organ at the church on Sunday morning, but eventually we made our way back along the snowy roads to the familiar anonymity of the big city. We’ll definitely have to go back soon!

Diane

I had a chance to go out to Vancouver to visit my sister a few weeks ago. We rode around the city on the bus and took in the sights… and food that Van had to offer. The weather was fine, with not too many rainy periods and even a few hours of blue sky!Carrie has gotten lucky with a really nice little townhouse with good landlords and roommates who call her to find out where she is if she isn’t home on time, which is really nice of them. I also got to meet Trio, who is a very pretty grey striped cat.

We spent the mornings sleeping or reading and making porridge for breakfast – I discovered that the girls have quite a large collection of books that appeal to me between them, which they very kindly shared.

We did the most important things first – a walk on the beach and a trip to the cupcake store downtown by the harbour where they have the international fireworks competitions. Those little cupcakes are expensive, but very fun with all the different flavours they have. Carrie was also adamant that she wanted to take me to try some fancy hot chocolate at a place which is conveniently located right beside the cupcake shop. Care had some creamy milk chocolate, and I had dark “mexican” hot chocolate with some spicy cayenne or other pepper in it – very tasty!

Carrie took me to the site where she was a movie extra for a few days – she was ten feet from Keanu Reeves and some other girl. It was a pretty non-descript lot – I wonder how it was chosen.

On Friday night we all went down to Granville Island to watch some Theatresports. The improv was some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The actors were experienced and totally on fire, and we all appreciated a chance to laugh. My favorite skit was built around a squeaky spot that one of the actors had found in the floor of the stage. It reminded me how much fun I have at improv nights – I’ll have to try and make it out again soon! Afterward, we went to a tapas place by the entrance to Granville Island called The Cat’s Meow for their sweet potato fries. I had some crab cakes that were really good too.

The next day Care and I went back again for the market. I really love it there, even though it’s crowded beyond my liking. I like to see vendors selling directly to their customers, and there are so many fresh and exciting products to be had. Carrie and I munched on some turkey sausage and rosemary bread with herbed butter and strolled from shop to shop. We visited a dive shop, a stationary store, a store that sold natural dyeing supplies…

I felt I had to show Carrie a restaurant that Morgan and I had found in the summer called Memphis Blues. There’s a couple of them in Vancouver, but the only one I’ve been to is on East Broadway. The “Memphis Feast” only comes to about $30 or $35 and you get a year’s supply of meat with bbq sauce and cornbread. Morgan’s skillet cornbread is much better, I think, but I love the pulled pork. Two times I’ve been, and two times I’ve left with a considerably large doggie bag. Ah, meat.

Carrie’s roomy lent us her car, a cute little Honda called “Josh”, to do a grocery shop on Sunday morning, and I got some split green peas and sausage so we could boil up a mess o’ comfort food. You could stand a spoon up in it – a real big spoon!

Well, there was even more to do – we tried on potential bridesmaids’ dresses and found a style Carrie liked and played with hairstyles for me. It’s been a while since I had my hair in curlers. We made some tasty cookies and Care opened birthday presents from home. Carrie’s roommate drove us out to Deep Cove and we walked around on the dock and ate some sushi in a warm little place nearby. Mmm, west coast sushi!

Eventually, it was time for Carrie to get to rehearsal and me to head back to the airport. Unfortunately, I never made it to a runthrough of Wedding of the Year, but I did have plenty of time to admire the artwork displayed in the Van International. The stone carving is lovely, and the whalebone work is actually pretty imaginative. I couldn’t do it, that’s for sure.

Anyway, it’s business as usual for me again, but I have enjoyed my excursions to the coast the last little while. That makes 3 Vancouver trips for me in the last 12 months.

The wedding is getting close, so here’s a quick update. Diane and I are now starting to pass out invitations. We’re hoping to be able to invite everybody who would like to come, but there are space considerations in the hall and we’re likely to hit the max there. Everyone is of course welcome to come to the ceremony. The space considerations are only on the reception hall. As we get replies, we’ll update our status and send out invites for spots that are freed up in the hall.

If you’ve already got your invitation, you might be wondering what the symbol on the cover is. It’s a Chinese symbol which means double happiness. It is a pretty common word used on Chinese wedding invitations, although Chinese wedding invitations almost always use red. Here’s a wikipedia page on the character for double happiness.

The plans are going smoothly, but there’s still lots of little details to do!

Morgan

On Saturday, the bulk of the wedding party gathered at the big mall (read: west ed) to spend some time shopping for wedding apparel. We wandered a bit, and eventually us guys found tip top where we gathered looking at the selection of tuxes that were available. It took me quite awhile to come up with a choice. I’m not too good at this sort of thing — you might know that I’m not exactly fashion conscious, so many of the options looked the same to me. Maybe they were! Anyways, it took awhile, but we selected our options and showed the girls our selections. It seems they were okay so we’ve got another things checked off that list.

Diane and the girls spent a fair amount of time looking at different dress options. It sounds like Diane’s found some fabric to use to make the bridesmaid’s dresses, so that’s exciting.

The next big thing on the plate is wedding band shopping. I’m not really looking forward to this, although I am kind of excited about getting the bands. The trouble is that I’ve never been in a jewelry store that has made me feel comfortable. They are very careful about only revealing prices to you when you ask. There’s very little window shopping you can do besides “ooh, that looks pretty”. Ugh. Anyways, any suggestions on where to go? We’re looking for some pretty simple white-gold wedding bands. Diane will probably want one that’ll go well with her engagement ring.

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

Welcome to the fancy new addition to Morgan’s workload :) I mean, our website for us as we begin our life together, to which I will regularly contribute… every once in a while.

Isn’t it pretty? We stole the template from the trove of WordPress goodness, of course, but the background is a scene that Morgan took with his little Powershot (which has since fallen to me) while en route to Vancouver for Jazmine and Ryan’s wedding oh so long ago.

The title is an anagram of our first names. We were having trouble generating a clever name for our page, so we found a number of anagramifying engines that returned things like amino garden, a daring omen, neon diagram, etc. If we ever have a band, we can call it mandarin ego. Maybe if we get rock band?

Anywho, Morgan dreams that someday the site will be a thriving forum for pictures, links, and blog entries that will help us keep in touch with our family and friends. And who knows? I may even see the day I make another post!

But first, the playing with colours and fonts!

Diane