Canada Day in Halifax

I meant to post this a bit earlier, but blogger doesn't have the easiest interface for arranging lots of pictures in a post.

Susan and I had a good time on Canada Day, and I thought I'd write about it. I had a full day of activities planned out, so we got up at 6:00am that morning and were out of the door by 7am.

The first thing on our agenda was free pancakes in Dartmouth's Alderney Landing. We made our way to the ferry terminal.

It turns out that the ferry didn't run for another while yet, so we ended up taking the bus across the bridge instead. After standing in line for 45 minutes, we finally got to eat our pancakes! Yum!

Some website said that there'd be a farmers market as well, which is why we went all the way to Dartmouth for the pancakes. Otherwise we would have stayed in downtown Halifax, where they also had free pancakes. There wasn't much of any type of market though. We spent a bit of time on the harbour before catching a bus back. Here are some pictures. You know what they say the best thing about Dartmouth is...right? ;)

Next on our list was to visit the Halifax Citadel, which was free for Canada Day. On our way up the hill, we got a close up view of the clock tower, which I guess had people living in it up until 50 years ago or so.

These pictures were taken on the bridge just before the entrance to the fort.

Every hour they have a changing of the guard. These guys stand guard for one hour, then get a 2 hour break. The real guards had to stand post for 2 hours then got 4 hours off.



Once inside the Citadel, you can walk around and look inside rooms and see how the guards and prisoners lived there. You can walk the walls and get a great view of the city. There's also a military museum which I found very interesting.

We spent a quite bit of time on the walls looking down at the people below. They had the Tattoo Choir and some military band playing.



The view from atop the wall is pretty amazing. Without the buildings blocking the way, the old time guards would have had a perfect view of the harbour, which is the point of the Citadel I guess :P I learned later on in the tour that the Halifax Citadel never actually had to defend the city. Most attackers failed long before, never making it to the Citadel's firing range.



Beware! The Citadel employs an old lady who runs around blowing a whistle and yelling at people who get too close to the edge of the wall.



After our tour of the Citadel, it was lunch time. We picked a spot on the hill and had a little pick nick while watching the Canada Day parade. It wasn't all that interesting, mostly different army divisions marching. No floats.



Even the lingerie store was getting into the Canada Day and Tattoo Festival spirit!



After our lunch, I had planned a surprise event for Susan...



We went to see a musical production of the Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I like musicals and we had a copy of the VHS movie at home when we were kids so I enjoyed the show quite a bit. It's pretty much a live version of the cartoon with a few extra scenes and songs. It was a bit over the top but still lots of fun.

After the show we decided to go home for some rest and supper before the fireworks. Along the way we walked by the Nickelback concert. There were a whole lot of people.



Our day ended with fireworks at the harbour. I thought the show was pretty good. Better than most I've seen, with the exception of the ones at Disneyworld of course :)




Well, that sums what our Canada Day in Halifax. What did you do on July 1st?


Please click here to leave comments and visit my other blog posts.

Summer time!

Whew! It's been since September since I posted anything significant here! There's a bit to catch up on.


School
Well I passed all my courses: 1xA, 1xA-, 4xB+, 2xB, and 2xB-. 5 of my courses I got on par with the class median grade, 4 courses I got 1 above the median and 1 course I got 1 below. I'm pretty happy with that. I am now officially a Meteorologist! Well one that not currently doing meteorology for a living anyway. Soon though...


Work
Back in February I applied for a job at the Meteorological Services of Canada. Well I got the job and it starts September 5th. I'm super pumped! Too bad it didn't start sooner though. Some of my friends got a job with AMEC which started a few weeks ago. The only catch it you have to move to St. John's for 6 months :P So I decided to stick with MSC. In a few years I'd like to go back and work on a Masters degree. We'll see how it goes.
In the meantime I have to work at a sucky job. I'm currently working at a call center answering calls for Rogers Home Phone. It's not really that bad I suppose. It's better than a lot of other jobs. But it doesn't compare to what I'll be doing in September.


Condo
Susan and I decided to buy a Condo. Our reasoning is that renting is a big waste of money, since you never see that money again. Our minimum monthly payment on the condo is less than what we pay now, but we intend to overpay so we can clear out our mortgage faster. We got it for about $10k-15k less than what the other condos were selling for because it's somewhat run down. We intend on repainting, taking out the carpet and putting in laminate flooring. We figure this should bring the price back up to that the other units. Also property value in the area increases approximately 5% per year. So we should make money on this even if we're there for less than 5 years. And even in the off chance that we loose money on the condo, we still won't loose as much as if we had wasted it all on rent during that same time period. Probably.

Let's look at some pictures:

This is the view from outside. Ours is the one with the open door.










Here's the dining room and the kitchen. See how there's two entrances to the kitchen? In all the other units the right entrance doesn't exist. I guess whoever lived here wanted to open it up a bit. Eventually when we have money again, we plan on maybe building a counter there with a few bar stools in the dining room.



The living room. Notice the fireplace :) They use to supply the firewood for free (included in the condo fees) but they don't anymore because the people that didn't take advantage of this didn't like subsidizing everyone else.


The balcony. It's not a bad view. Across the highway there's a walking trail where they used to have railroad tracks. Just left of that walking bridge is a Superstore, but you can't see it in the picture.


The bedrooms. These are upstairs.
This is going to be the visitor/spare bedroom.


This is the main bedroom. It's basically one big bedroom split in two by French doors. We're thinking of making one into a small computer/tv/living room and have our bed in the other room.


From the other side of the French doors:


That's basically it. There's a washroom with a bathtub on both floors. Washer and dryer are a bit old and so we'll probably upgrade those eventually.

We're currently deciding what colours to paint. I might post some more pictures once the renovations are done.


Miscellaneous
What else have I been up to? Well I watch a lot of TV. My favourite shows are Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Lost, Heroes, and The Dresden Files. These are all currently off season though. Right now I'm watching Big Brother Australia, Big Brother US, and Pirate Master (getting kind of boring). I'm also currently going through the second season of Stargate SG1 which I have on DVD.
Recent video games purchase: Final Fantasy XII, Guitar Hero II, and God of War II.
We go to the movies pretty much every week. I recently saw Pirates 3 and The Fountain which I thoroughly enjoyed. Looking forward to Transformers and Harry Potter.
I've been on a reading binge for the past few months. Books that I've recently read which I heavily recommend are: Old Man's War, Accelerando, The Wayfarer Redemption.
I might start posting regular blurbs about recently viewed movies and books.

Well I think this post is long enough. It should be, it took me a good chunk of the day to write. I'll probably have a productive blog posting spurt over the next few weeks, so keep checking back!

Jay

Please click here to leave comments and visit my other blog posts.

Great Comic

http://www.xckd.com/c59.html

So it turns out this comic strip is really good. Check out the rest! Genius!