Bored….
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
Well here we are about a month away from Spring 2012. Time flies doesn’t it? It’s been a cold and dry winter and hopefully we’ll get some wet weather soon. We are both looking forward to an upcoming holiday in Hawaii next month and we’ll certainly try to upload some new Hawaii photos once we get back. Other then that, not much new to write about. Things are pretty boring around here most of the time, which is a good thing.
It’s Almost Fall!
Friday, September 16th, 2011 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
Fall is almost here again. Summer 2011 has been pretty crappy in terms of the weather. I can’t really complain since last year at this time I was walking around crooked and in pain from my messed up back. The good news is that I’ve been feeling great all summer and have no ill side effects from the surgery back in January. As a result, I’ve been playing much more golf this year and really enjoying it. Here’s a quick video of me teeing off on the 10th hole at Big Sky Golf Club in Pemberton BC back on September 9th.
With fall also comes the start of the new NHL season! Looking forward to watching the Sharks go all the way this year!
Find us on Facebook
Friday, September 16th, 2011 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
Lisa and I are both on Facebook which is probably a better place to get more up to date with our happenings. We’re still going to make an effort to update this site once in a while as well, just in case anyone actually reads it.
The latest….
Monday, February 14th, 2011 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
Happy Valentines Day. It’s now been nearly 6 weeks since my surgery and everything feels great. I had my followup appointment with the surgeon a little over a week ago and he said that everything is looking good. I’ll be able to play golf next month and will have to decide if I want to go back to playing hockey this August. I’ll be able to play, it’s just a question of whether or not I should. Many hockey players return to the ice after this surgery but they are also paid millions of $ to risk their bodies like that. Not me…
Lisa and I are heading to Vegas this weekend for a pre 40th birthday weekend. Very much looking forward to that and also looking forward to a visit from the family next week.
Surgery +5 days…
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
We are now 5 days removed from when I had my microdiscectomy surgery and I am happy to say that I can not envision a scenario that would have had results better then what I am currently experiencing. From the moment I was wheeled into the recovery room I felt unquestionably better and did not even require any pain medication. Everything has continued to improve from that point forward and here we are, 5 days later and I was out this morning for a 1 mile walk without any trouble.
Will I play hockey again? Only time will tell. Physically I will easily be able to but the question will become whether or not I want to risk going through all of this again. We’ll cross that bridge in time.
Surgery Time
Monday, January 3rd, 2011 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
This Thursday, January 6th, I’ll be heading into Stanford University Hospital for a lumbar mircodiscectomy. Back in August I herniated the L4-L5 disc in my back and over the following 5 months, gave it every chance to heal on it’s own. I was doing ok for a while but things started to go downhill in late November and over the Christmas holidays I was pretty much immobile and extremely uncomfortable. I had tried all of the possible non-surgical options including epidural steroid injections. Nothing has helped so I’m going in for surgery to have it fixed. The surgery itself is supposed to be fairly routine and simple and I have a great neurosurgeon doing the work. I hope to be back on my feet and 100% soon.
What’s happened in the past year anyway?
Thursday, November 18th, 2010 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
Ok.. I guess after a year or so I should probably bring whoever reads this up to date with what’s happening these days.
As you can see from the post below, we had a sad second half of 2009, losing Daisy and Peanut within three weeks of each other and it didn’t get much better as Peanut’s brother Teddy died of heart failure just a few months later on Halloween. Little did we know that he had the same enlarged heart problem as his sister. We still miss all three of them a lot…
But on to other more happy things… Just after Thanksgiving of 09, our friends Brigitte and Jean-Noel of kirembosavannahs.com allowed us to adopt a new Savannah kitten. She is an F3 and her registered name is Kessie, but she is now known as the Shiny Monster. You can see the monster in those little 1 month old eyes.
The Shiny Monster Kitten
Since that time, she has grown up to be a chubby little growly monster but still one of the softest and cutest little monsters you’ll see. The chubby part is probably due to her taking a peculiar liking to whipped cream. At first, her and Hobbes were mortal enemies but after about a month or two, they became best friends and now he spends most of his time grooming her and eating her whiskers, which she enjoys very much.
Spring of 2010 brought about a lot of changes to the house. We pulled out all of the downstairs carpet and replaced it with wide plank walnut hardwood, put down 18″ Travertine tile in the kitchen, replaced 3 large windows in the downstairs family room and redid the fireplace with a stone hearth built from large individual pieces of slate we found at the rockery and refaced it with a stacked stone facing. While the house was in turmoil for most of the month, the end result is very nice all around. Spring of 2011 will see the remainder of the carpet on the stairs and upstairs get pulled and replaced as well.
In May of 2010 we also got a nice new addition to our family. Again, our friends Brigitte and Jean-Noel blessed us with one of our favorite Savannahs from their cattery, Monkey.
She had provided them with a couple of litters of beautiful kittens (including two rare black Savannahs) and they had decided that it was time for her to retire from being a mommy. We adopted her, got her spayed, and introduced her to Hobbes and Shiny Monster. Despite the fact that Monkey and Shiny Monster have the same mother (a few years apart) the initial introductions did not go well and now, nearly 7 months later, they still are not very happy with each other but the situation has calmed quite a bit from a category 5 hurricane down to a tropical storm. Hobbes is still the king of the castle and enjoys both of his girlfriends quite a lot. The cats have a great life and they are our children. Hopefully all three of them will be with us for a long, long time.
Not much else to write about except that I am currently going through the fun of a herniated disk in my lower back. It happened some time in August and at this point I have to decide if I want surgery to fix it or if I should wait longer and see if it will heal on it’s own. Having never had even so much as a single stitch from a doctor before in my life, surgery is a scary and intimidating process for me. The pain is manageable but annoying. We’ll see. I have a follow-up appointment on December 28th and perhaps I’ll opt for an epidural steroid injection to see if that helps for a while.
I know that when Lisa reads this she’ll say “How come there’s nothing in here about me?”… well.. I guess that’s because everything is pretty much status quo with her, which is good. No news is good news right?
A Sad Few Weeks…
Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | Rob and Lisa | No Comments
It’s not easy to write about things like this. Those of you with pets will understand that they don’t live forever and sometimes when they pass it is expected and sometimes it is sudden and tragic. Within the last three weeks we have had to experience both ends of the spectrum.
On July 15th, our old girl Daisy was put to sleep after a happy long life of 16 years. She had been suffering from respiratory illness for some time and we knew it was time to let her go before things became unbearable for her.
Today we unexpectedly lost our other little girl Peanut. When she was only a year old, an x-ray revealed a slightly enlarged heart but our vet at the time never properly explained what that meant to us and how it may affect her down the road. We found out this morning when she suffered a paralyzing blood clot and a new x-ray revealed that her heart was now enlarged to nearly 3 or 4 times the normal size and may have also had a tumor. With heavy hearts, we had to let her go.
We now just have our two boys left and hopefully they will continue to be with us for a long time.
Rest in peace Daisy and Peanut, we will never forget you.
Italian Food in Calgary
Monday, June 29th, 2009 | Food and Wine, Rob and Lisa, Travel | No Comments
Normally when we visit Calgary, we like to stop by our favorite old Italian restaurant, Vagabondo’s. Unfortunately, we found out when we got there that the owners retired and closed down the place about 18 months ago so we needed something else.
The first night, we tried Bonterra Tratorria and found it to be a great little place with excellent food. I had a nice linguini carbonera and Lisa had some sort of pasta with clams and we both enjoyed the food quite a lot. The bad part is their wine list. While extensive, the markups are outrageous. For example, a simple La Crema Pinot Noir from California, which is normally about $18, was priced at $70!! Even the Italian wines, which is the main feature of their wine list, were marked up 3x over retail at a minimum. As good as the food is, that’s certainly a turnoff to us.
The second night, we went to Gnocchi’s Ristorante (no website, we went to the location on 8th st). I tried their Lasagna al Forna and Lisa had a sun dried tomato, italian sausage risotto. The food was probably just slightly above average but what made up for that was their wine prices. The wine list is not very large but the markups are below what you would expect, which allowed for us to have a nice 04 Fontanafredda Barolo with the meal.
Ideally, it would have been nice to combine the menu and food from the first place, with the wine list prices from the second place. It looks like we’ll have to keep looking for a new favorite when we’re next in Calgary.
On the road again…
Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | Rob and Lisa, Travel | No Comments
We’re back up in Canada for a week, starting out a couple nights in Calgary followed by a few nights in Edmonton and then down to Canmore for a couple nights. For the most part, Lisa is working and I am not but she doesn’t have too many customer visits this time around. Looking forward to see family and spending a couple nights in the mountains.