Unfortunately we didn’t get a picture of the five of us because we’re kind of dumb, but here’s a couple that show everyone from Carrie’s Flickr set of the trip (because I didn’t bring our camera along!):

(Lushes.) The top picture is from Future Bakery, and the bottom from the Victory Cafe. It was a pleasant surprise to me how easy it was to find places to flop on a patio that were kid-friendly, and with the heat and all the walking we did a lot of flopping.

It was a fun weekend on the face of it, but it was also great because this is the first time the five of us have all been together. Candice and I met Carrie for the first time at Trevor and Jenny’s wedding back last September. What happened next is complicated, but Carrie and I learned we had had an old mutual crush on each other, helped each other through some hard times in the month or so after that wedding (Carrie was a big help in my decision to withdraw from the MBA, for instance), ended up pretty close, and we had been struggling since to try to find the best way to remain a part of each other’s lives in a way that made our families feel safe and respected (and through a lot of change on Candice’s and my part, with me leaving school and us moving to Toronto!).

That hasn’t been easy, but this weekend things clicked. Misunderstandings cleared up; Jason and I finally met and got along well (and we learned we share an awful sense of humour, to the point where we were often racing to make the same bad pun first); Amie took to me so well that Candice and Carrie were calling me her boyfriend; and the whole thing was just comfortable. It felt like family, which was sort of a goal that Carrie and I had talked about months ago but which I sometimes thought was impossible.

What better way to finish off than this:

(And for those keeping track, now you know #23.)

I guess we’d better get this move over with quick before my wife becomes a pile of boxes like some modern wife of Lot.

I’m in Toronto! I got here on Saturday morning with Candice. We spent the weekend seeing apartments — 6 or 8 on Saturday, and then two on Sunday, staying at the Holiday Inn on Bloor at St. George. Most of the apartments we looked at on Saturday were roughly along St. Clair around Avenue or Yonge. We found some, and nearly went for one that would have stretched our budget quite a bit — until we saw this!

So Sunday we started out a little discouraged. And then we saw The Apartment, which I’ll talk about in a second, and then another one that was just as cute but up at St. Clair and Dufferin which was deemed too far away from the subway. We went out for dinner for Candice’s birthday to Coco Lezzone in Little Italy, which was good but not spectacular. (We’d forgotten to account for the difficulty in finding good dining on Sunday night here.) And then before we went to bed Sunday night I emailed about The Apartment.

Let’s talk about The Apartment for a moment: tonight I signed our lease! We now have an apartment (well, for January 1, but I have the keys) on Delaware Avenue, just west of Ossington and just south of Dupont. It’s right near here.

It’s a cute, medium-sized 1-bedroom on the main floor of a house, with hardwood floors, glass block walls, a giant kitchen, and a freakin’ backyard. How great is that? It’s two blocks from Ossington station, and not far from the Dufferin bus that will take me straight to the door at work. The photo of the house at right is linked to a Flickr set of the apartment, as yanked from the Craigslist ad that we found it with.The only downside: street parking, but there seems to be lots of room on that block alone whenever I’m over there.

Anyhow, back to the timeline: On Monday morning, I left the hotel and drove straight to FreshBooks World Headquarters, up on Dufferin just a bit south of Lawrence. The first day was a little bit hairy — not quite sure what I was expected to do, my manager was in interviews for most of the morning, I was stumbling around OS X for the first time ever, I was thinking about missing Candice, and I hadn’t yet seen the place I would be living for the next two weeks! But even then it was fine. Day Two felt like a “first day”, though, so the hairiness is irrelevant now. Days three and four had me doing a bunch of email support (best way to learn the product!) and finding my way around a bit more, and things are coming together pretty well.

I think it’s going to be a blast there. My coworkers are smart and a lot of fun and we seem to have much in common, and everyone, employees and customers, are really excited about the software. I’ll have plenty of interesting projects once I get up to speed on the sysadmin side, and I’ll have my fingers in a bit of the dev side as well from the sounds of things.

(I should’ve taken some pictures of the office. Drat. Also, I like OS X a lot, and need to find a way to get Candice and I MacBooks.)

Let’s see, what else? Until the new year I’m staying in Mike McDerment’s place, near Eglinton and Mt. Pleasant. Easy drive in, apartment to myself, lots around it. I’m driving back to Ottawa every weekend, and am going to be there over the holiday perineum, to see Candice and help pack up the apartment. Went over to Dan‘s to have a couple beers Tuesday night, was nice to socialize a bit, but found out just before I left that there was no beer — so went around the corner from Mike’s to the Granite Brewpub, who offer growlers of their beers to go. Their Peculier was just right.

All in all things have been overwhelming and exhausting and awesome.

However, today I left my gloves at the Future Bakery (at which I had their all-day breakfast for dinner tonight, $7 for omelet, toast, home fries, fruit, and coffee). Oh, well. Can’t have everything go right, I guess!

Mouseycat might be sick. She had a very loose canine tooth removed the other day and we found she’d lost nearly a kilogram (nearly 2.2 lbs) since the last time she was weighed. There’s a chance that she just lost the weight because it hurt to eat, but it could be something more serious; blood tests ruled out diabetes but there’s still elevated white blood cell and liver enzyme counts so the current hypothesis is cholangiohepatitis. She’s on twice-daily antibiotic pills right now (which she just loves, let me tell you) and we’re back at the vet next Wednesday to find out what’s next.

Candice and I were in Belleville for Father’s Day weekend, and we spent Saturday with Dad at a weekend-long Beatles festival, with Beatles cover bands playing one after another on a single stage. It was surreal and straight out of the Simpsons, with the site map pointing out the “All You Need Is Food” food concession, the “Hello Goodbye” entrance/exits, the “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” outhouse row, and a Paul McCartney lookalike wandering the crowds progressively drunker all night.

I took my bike in to get the bottom bracket overhauled and bought a helmet and now I’m ready to start riding everywhere. This is what I should’ve been doing instead of the motorcycle, I think. Silly me. I found that the commute to work along bike trails is about 10 miles on mostly level terrain, so I want to try bike commuting at least a couple times this summer. I took a test ride (to U of O and back, which I figured would be a handy benchmark for this fall) which was around 10 miles and found it easy, so I think it’ll be fine.

Related to that, I’ve been hitting the gym 2-3 days a week for the last month or so. I don’t like the workout I’ve been doing much but I just ordered New Rules of Lifting to give something else a try, but I’ve still been making it there regularly, at least. I need to learn to squat and deadlift.

In work-related news, this is not so good, apparently.

New laptop is awesome and so, so light. It also lets me leave my work laptop at work, which means I don’t have to carry a laptop as well as gym clothes and lunch when I go to work, which was getting particularly annoying on the bus, which I have been trying to take as often as possible instead of driving the car an extra 25 km/day.

Speaking of the car, I replaced the water pump recently because it was very noisy and obviously unbalanced (like me!), and pretty much every other noise the car was making went away too! It’s so quiet now. I guess I could have replaced the water pump a while ago.

Last Monday, Candice and I had been together for four years! In a couple of weeks it’ll be our first anniversary. Yay!

That’s about it for now. I’ll try to post more often, especially since I’ve got so many new things going on all at once. For some reason I try to avoid “Here’s what happened today” posts even when it’s sort of interesting. I shouldn’t do that.

We had about a dozen curlers total. Of those, only Eddie (the event organizer, Young Alumni president, and a member of that club) had serious curling experience. another three, including me, had been curling in a rookies’ program since September, and two others had curled but not recently, so I ended up coaching a bit. Eddie was all about the big picture, and I was more about suggesting to put the broom here and get your foot there and let go of the handle like this, so between the two of us we managed to get the basics across.

Everyone got in a half-dozen or so deliveries and some practice sweeping, and the new curlers picked things up quickly and we split into four teams of three. The team breakup was a little odd: my sheet had me, one very occasional curler, and four newbies, while the other sheet had Eddie, the two other rookie-league curlers, and two newbies. The occasional curler and I each skipped a team, and I made sure Candice wasn’t on mine so I wouldn’t have to teach her!

The game went well, with the strategy ending up along the lines of “See if you can get some rocks in the house”. My two newbies were both doing alright, but couldn’t be much more different: one was very interested in specifics and details and the mechanics of what was going on, while the other one… just sort of threw rocks and swept (regardless of whether or not the rock needed sweeping) and that was it. But we got through four ends of pretty good curling considering, and my interested newbie got to skip for a bit.

Candice’s team ended up beating ours by one point, although where that point came from was open to speculation: I went to get the measuring stick to show how to tell if a borderline stone was in or out of the house, an out-of-play rock somehow showed up back in the house. I don’t know what whoever did that was thinking — the end was a five-ender to begin with!

All in all it went well, though. At the bar afterwards one of my newbies seemed interested in doing a rookies program next year (I made sure to mention Granite’s, Eddie seemed unimpressed). I don’t think Candice is going to be signing up anytime soon, but at least she knows what I do Sunday nights now!

I nearly came home with a broom, too. I’ve been using the club brooms at Granite, which are fine but are club brooms. I stopped in the Hogline pro shop on the way out, but I didn’t want to buy too good a broom for what I need, but at the beginner end of the price range I couldn’t tell if I’d see a huge advantage over the club brooms, especially as skip.

(Dammit, I should’ve bought a broom.)

I think I’m in trouble.

Here’s a weird one for you: I installed Windows (XP Pro) on my laptop the other day. Yes, yes, hell’s frozen over, I know. I need to work in both Windows and Unix regularly, so I had to have some compromise. Until now the compromise has involved running the Windows apps I need (Office, Notes, Remedy, MMC, mostly) either in Crossover Office or via RDP on an old P3 under my desk at work, but more and more I realized that there were a bunch of things where I could benefit letting Windows have control of the hardware, from proprietary VPN clients to games to soft phones. So I bit the bullet and set things up dual-boot, although I haven’t really needed to boot back into Linux yet.

I’m satisfying the Linuxy side of the picture with cygwin, and so far that’s been sufficient — well, that plus a native EXT2 driver. Still reading my mail in mutt, still editing in vim, still IRCing in Gaim, still surfing the Web in Firefox, but it’s nice to be able to sync the Blackberry, use Google Earth and Sketchup, connect over a VPN instead of an SSH tunnel to work, run MMC locally, and so on. I’m actually pleasantly surprised at how well things seem to be working, especially wifi, bluetooth and so on that were all a bit persnickety under Linux. The laptop runs 10 degrees cooler on the CPU and 20 degrees cooler on the hard drive and memory, too, which surprises me.

It’s odd to have to catch up on the last four or so years of must-have software, though. If there’s stuff you think I probably don’t know about but should, let me know!

Other than that, not much going on lately. I took Candice out last weekend to Domus Cafe for her birthday. Tasty! She had a barley-mushroom-truffle “risotto” and salmon with (more) truffles, and I had a hot and cold foie gras appetizer and crispy duck. It was the first time we’d been to Domus. The decor and service were almost a little too plain — I know that it’s more of a bistro-type restaurant, but the atmosphere didn’t really flatter the food compared to some other places around here I’m fond of, like the Urban Pear. Still, everything was very good.

I booked my GMAT for January 31. No turning back now! I’ve been doing well on sample tests so I’m not too worried. I just need to practice and practice and practice. Such a bizarre, impractical test!

Curling’s going pretty well. I’m still only making about a quarter of my shots, but that’s average from what I’m seeing. Apparently serious amateur curlers average about 50% of their shots, so it’s harder than you’d think! Even championship curlers come in somewhere around 85%. In the new year we’re done the instructional part of the rookies program, and it’s all league play from then on. I’ve got a decent team who play hard but don’t take themselves too seriously, and somehow I ended up being skip, so it should be a challenging few months!

Must post more often. Nag me if you see me.

I’ve finally uploaded, titled and tagged all 150-odd images from our honeymoon in Paris! I’ll be writing up a description of the trip here soon, but you can see all of the pictures in this Flickr set.

We received our DVD of photos from our wedding photographer earlier this week, and last night I finally finished uploading about 1/3 of them (just over 400 in total) to Flickr.

Clicking on the image above will take you to the first of four sets, but you probably want to at least skim all four to see how cute we were:

• Couple shots
• Our ceremony
• Family group photos
• Our reception

I’m hoping to have time to get some Paris photos up and post about our trip really soon.

First, the executive summary: Everything went wonderfully. It was sunny and bright with a few clouds — a bit warm, but nearly everything was inside, so that was fine. But everything just worked. All of our vendors went beyond what was expected, all of our guests had a blast (as far as I know!), and the day basically unfolded without a hitch.

But I should start at the beginning, or at least the beginning of what people other than Candice and I got to see. After a bunch of harried running around on Friday afternoon (July 7th), dropping off decorations and props to the venue and Candice’s dress to her parents’ hotel room and so on (what I called “setting up the dominoes”), we headed over to my father and stepmother’s hotel suite in the Westin for a cocktail reception they were hosting for us with immediate family (parents and siblings, and my great-uncle Bud who came down with Dad). After that we all walked up to the Black Thorn restaurant for our “rehearsal dinner” even though we didn’t have a rehearsal (with no bridal party there was really no need). It was a fun, relaxing evening, which is exactly what we needed given how hectic the rest of the day and week had been.

The next morning, Candice got up early to head over to her parents’ hotel, from which she and her mother were going to get their hair and makeup done; she’d then get dressed there, so that was the last time I saw her until the Big Event. I got showered, packed for the night, checked into the hotel, and headed over to my father’s hotel to get ready. (He’s in the menswear trade, so he took care of getting my suit, but there was still one alteration to do at the last fitting so he brought it up with him.) I was originally going to get dressed at home, but I’m glad we did it this way — once I got to the room, everyone else cleared out to do some shopping, so Dad and I got to hang out in the room (on the 25th floor of the Westin, sitting in a big window overlooking Parliament and the Byward Market) and shoot the breeze. I wasn’t particularly nervous about the wedding, but I was even less so by the time I was getting dressed.

At 2:30 I walked up to the Tin House court — where Candice and I ended our first date! — to meet our photographers while Dad went to pick up Candice and drive her up there after I arrived. (We didn’t have enough places to go to warrant hiring a limo or something like that, since the ceremony and reception were in the same place, and that place wasn’t on a street anyhow, so Dad just loaded Candice into the back of his Explorer.) When I saw Candice in her dress my jaw didn’t drop, but I was sure weepy. (Click on the picture!) From there the photographers were shooting pretty much non-stop as we wandered through the Tin House court (ignore the weird cropping on the right there — I’m too lazy to fix album’s default right now!), over to the steps of the Peacekeeping Memorial, and over to the National Gallery (where we narrowly avoided being eaten alive), then back through Major’s Hill Park and down York Street back to the Courtyard Restaurant where the wedding and reception were held.

When we got back the room was full of guests, Andy Daub was piping away on his Irish pipes, and our officiant Floralove Katz was ready to go. After a bit of back-room coordination to make sure that all of the guests had arrived (which was difficult because I’d only met some of them once, and others never, and others still I hadn’t seen in years), the ceremony began just after 4:00; I went up to wait with Floralove at the head of the aisle while Candice’s father walked Candice down the aisle and Andy played The South Wind. . It was hard not to get weepy again watching them make their way up to the front!

The ceremony was simple and atheist with a bit of subtle Buddhism. Before we got into us, we lit a candle in memory of our grandparents that had passed on, and then Floralove gave her bit, followed by this reading we selected, from Rainer Maria Rilke:

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

We had a unity candle — my parents and Candice’s parents each lit a taper candle, and then Candice and I used those candles to light a bigger candle — but ours was off to one side and just a small component of the ceremony instead of the focal point (and the candles were poem- and frill-free).

Our actual vows were from Floralove’s standard ceremony (although most people apparently ask her to leave off the “until parted by death” part, which we did not leave off), but before those we had additional pledges to each other, which we took from a Buddhist-influenced ceremony and modified to use a lot less jargon that would have been confusing to our guests:

Candice and Richard, do you pledge to help each other to develop your hearts and minds, cultivating compassion, generosity, ethics, patience, enthusiasm, concentration and wisdom as you age and undergo the various ups and downs of life and to transform them into the path of love, compassion, joy and equanimity?

Understanding that just as we are a mystery to ourselves, each other person is also a mystery to us. Do you pledge to seek to understand yourselves, each other, and all living things, to examine your own minds continually and to regard all the mysteries of life with curiosity and joy?

Do you pledge to remember the disadvantages of ignorance, anger and attachment, to apply antidotes when these arise in your minds, and to remember the kindness of all others and your connection to them?

Do you pledge to work for the welfare of others, with all of your compassion, wisdom and skill?

Do you pledge to continuously strive to remember your own nature, as well as the nature of all living things? To maintain the awareness that all things are temporary, and to remain optimistic that you can achieve your greatest potential and lasting happiness?

I can’t completely remember the order of everything in the ceremony — it’s a good thing that we’re basically fed lines the whole time we’re up there, I’ll tell you — but of course we also had the exchanging of rings (“The wedding ring is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual bond which unites two loyal hearts in partnership”) and the signing of the register (with my father witnessing for me, and Candice’s mother for her). Oh, and there was something about a kiss, too. (I look hesitant but I was really just weepy again!)

We walked back down the aisle while Andy piped Planxty Hewlett and down a set of stairs into the restaurant’s lounge area to have a few moments alone while our guests moved into another room upstairs for a cocktail reception while the Courtyard staff set up the big room the ceremony was in for dinner seating, and we and immediate family headed outside for group photos. Not much to say about group photos, except that they went really smoothly, and that there was some confusion because my step-siblings look nothing like me, and the photographer thought that my stepsister Sarah was my half-brother Kieran’s date. Awkward. We headed back upstairs for the end of the cocktail reception after that, and then everyone moved back into the main room for dinner. Candice and I visited table to table until the champagne toast, given by her father.

Dinner was, by design, the focus of the reception. We didn’t want to do a dance floor or couple games or anything like that; we wanted our guests to sit back and relax and have a very good meal. That’s why we went with the Courtyard as our venue in the first place; it’s a good French restaurant that happens to also be a beautiful, high-ceilinged, wood-raftered, stone-walled tapestry-filled hall. It’s probably easiest to just list the menu to describe the meal:

Cocktail reception
Hors d’oeuvres: Tomato, bocconcini and basil canapés; artichoke and chevre bruschetta; and balsamic marinated vegetables on parmesan toules

Punch: Blackberry liqueur, pomegranate liqueuer and sparkling wine with fruit juices; orange, pineapple and mango juices with grenadine, lime, Perrier and fresh fruit slices

Dinner
Soup: Cream of broccoli and old cheddar

Salad:Mixed baby greens salad with lemon-honey-sunflower emulsion, dried cherries and toasted sunflower seeds, in a cucumber-slice bowl or warm almond crusted chevre over baby spinach with prosciutto, red onion and citrus vinaigrette

Strawberry-basil sorbet

Main course: Cajun-spiced beef tenderloin tips with lavender honey and red wine sauce or pan-seared tilapia with panko-crumb crust and fennel-onion concassé or polenta layered with tomato-onion confit and chevre over ratatouille

Dessert: Caramelized lemon custard tart with red currant coulis or crème caramel or basil and verjus marinated berries with cinnamon-yogurt mousse

Everyone seemed to be really excited about the menu and to really enjoy their meal. After the soup course, my mother and then my father gave short speeches, both of which had us all teary-eyed. Between dinner and dessert, I gave a little speech, thanking our family for their assistance in putting on the wedding and our vendors in pulling it off, thanking Ted and Trudy for welcoming me to their family, and telling the story about how Candice answered when I proposed, and then I got mushy, which I’m happy to quote here in full from my notes, which at least vaguely resemble what I ended up actually saying:

Thank you for taking care of me for the last three years, and putting up with me while we’ve been planning everything for today. I figure if we can make it through planning a wedding we can make it through anything. Thank you for supporting me through all the crazy things I try to do, for being there for me when it seems like I can’t do anything, and for sharing with me all of the wonderful times we’ve had over the last three years and all of times we’ll have from now on.

Candice, you’re my s’ee’ee, my best friend, and now you’re my wife, and there’s nothing I want more than to spend the rest of my life by your side. Thank you for being my wife, sweetie. I love you.

After dessert and coffee, we handed out our “wedding cake”, which was chocolate cupcakes with buttercream icing, and sort of coasted around table to table for the rest of the night while everyone chatted. It felt like we were just hanging out with friends and family, which is pretty much exactly what we wanted. It was about midnight before people started leaving, and then everyone left within about twenty minutes of each other. We gathered up the remaining decorations (we encouraged people to help themselves to bud vases and candles!) and favors (we have a box of a dozen or so cookies and half a dozen cupcakes!) and presents to take them down to the car. The problem: There’s no street that passes by the Courtyard, which faces onto a courtyard. So I parked the car on the sidewalk and put the hazard lights on, but I was still worried about being ticketed or towed. So I enlisted Candice to stand at the car in her wedding dress and look cute while I carried everything out. She did well!

We spent the night at Arc the Hotel (yes, those words go in that order, with a pregnant pause after “Arc”), which is a modern boutique hotel here in downtown Ottawa, straight out of the pages of Dwell. You don’t get any wedding-night details (this is for your own benefit). The next morning we picked up some stuff from our parents’ hotel rooms and then headed back home to open gifts and pack for Paris, details of which will follow soon!

(Also, we received our DVD of wedding photos from the photographer early this week. I’m going to be uploading the watermarked preview pictures to my Flickr account shortly, once I upgrade it to a paid account and find a good way to automate uploading hundreds of pictures. I’ll post to my journal when they’re uploaded, and when the 200 pictures of Paris are up there too.)