Just a quick update about Geni. They’ve added some features and the biggest ones that affect me are the increased ability to delete mistakes and an expanded amount of information that can be entered about people. Plus, it’s faster. Still no importing/exporting or printing, but those features are supposed to come. You can see the list of features/fixes here.

Currently, there are 250 people in the tree, spanning over 9 generations (!!!). Thanks to everyone who’s contributed so far.

Not much going on here, life has settled back into a normal routine. Weather’s been moderately awful — cold and snowy, which is entirely unusual for Vancouver. Gwen started teaching some of the toddler and care-giver music and movement classes (check out Flutterby Music) but I’ll leave it to her to tell you about it.

One of the blogs I read pointed me to Geni which is essentially a genealogical site, done up all “Web 2.0”. Which is to say it’s slick. It’s easy to use and I proceeded to add most of the near family to it. It’s one of these viral, social sort of sites too, so you “invite” your relatives to it, and they are supposed to add to it if they so choose. The privacy controls are pretty good … the only people who can see your details are people who are connected to you in your tree. Of course, as more people join and are added to your tree, this can become very large.

In addition to just adding people, you can put in photos, details of where they are, schools they went to, important dates, etc. Unfortunately the site’s in its infancy right now, so it doesn’t do much other than just show you your tree. However, they have indicated that near-future features include:

• Importing family data
• Adding unmarried partners
• A better way to add same sex partners
• Better support for adopted children
• Merging duplicate family trees created independently by relatives in the same family
• Better deletion features for the tree and list view
• Support for people who show up in the tree more than once (multiple marriages between two families)
• Printing family trees
• International keyboard support

You can get some more nifty information by viewing the site as a “List” rather than as a “Tree” (change this by clicking the links in the middle of the screen just above the tree”).

I’ve spammed invited a few family members who I thought would be interested in such a thing, but if I didn’t send you an invite and you want one, let me know and I’ll happily fire one your way.

By the way, I’ve been haphazardly adding photos to the site. If you don’t like the photo I’ve uploaded for you — tough! Upload a different one! :)

Oops, no coincidence that after getting our Wii, the holiday posts dried up. Here’s a summary of how things have been over the past week:

Christmas

Christmas Day was good. Aidan got up around 8:30-ish, and we got a little bit of food and drink into him before showing him the living room. He immediately went to the (set up) train table and began playing with the trains. Now, he hadn’t seen gifts under the tree (we didn’t put them out until Christmas Eve) but their presence didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, I’m willing to be that he would have happily played with the train table all morning! We had the grandparents on the webcam, though, so we had to hurry him along. It took almost 2 hours to work through everything. Not entirely because of the volume of stuff, but more because of the speed. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many pictures. I had the video camera set up and running on a tripod, but frankly things went so slowly that after the tape ran out, I didn’t replace it. We might splice out a bunch of scenes from it, but Aidan didn’t express an over-abundance of excitement. After the excitement of opening the gifts, he actually went down for a nap around 11:30, and slept for 3 or 4 hours. During that time, Gwen and I played Carcassonne. It’s quite a fun tile-laying game. Seems complicated before you play, but it’s actually not. We’ve since played quite a number of games, and neither one of us has dominated, although Gwen absolutely smoked me for the last two we played, beating me by 30 or 40 points (where she had somewhat over 100) each time.

Christmas gifts were light between the two of us. The laptop qualified as a Christmas gift, although two months early. I got a new cell phone (my first non new-to-me cell phone). Gwen got a watch, a couple of sets of earrings and a nifty euro teapot. Although we didn’t know it until Christmas Eve, we also got a new LCD monitor for our desktop computer; the old monitor died earlier that day.

We went to Tammy & Chris’ place that night for Christmas dinner consisting of home made pasta (ravioli in a white sauce). Aidan behaved well with Angus and the two cats in the non-baby-proofed apartment, but we had to leave pretty early after a few failed attempts to get him to go to bed there. Aidan got a nice rain suit from Tammy!

Boxing Day

Boxing Day was our turn for dinner. We had Ali, Tammy and Chris over later that day, but a good portion of the day was spent getting thing ready for it. I made another cranberry-sweet potato dish, and this one tasted better than the Thanksgiving dish. I think it’s a keeper. Gwen made a wonderful turkey … 7 kgs that we’d been thawing for a few days. The turkey was “gratis” from Superstore for spending some outlandish amount of money a few weeks earlier, but frozen more solid than the planet formerly known as Pluto. Even before the dinner, the cats were exhausted (see below). Dinner was great and then Tammy bankrupted us in a friendly game of Halifax-themed Monopoly.

Boxing Day +1

The day after Boxing Day we went out to get Gwen some stuff from The Gap’s Boxing Day sale, and a battery for her watch at Oakridge. While there, we swung by Electronics Boutique (EB) to look at getting a used XBox game and wouldn’t you know it, they were getting a shipment of Wiis at that very time (as Gwen wrote). We ended up picking it up, along with Rayman Raving Rabbids, Zelda: Twiilight Princess, and Trauma Surgeon. And, oh, that night we took custody of Tammy’s two cats (including the 4 month old kitten “Jack”) while they are in Ontario for a short vacation.

then a blur…

The details of the subsequent days are somewhat blurry. Lots of Wii time. We picked up an extra Wiimote, and so we can play most of the Wii Sports together (with the exception of Wii Boxing, for which we need another nunchuck, but they’re much harder to find). I’ve finished the Story Mode of Rayman, but there’s still lots of other things to do. Gwen found Rayman a little frustrating, though. She’s much more into Trauma Surgeon. It’s a nifty concept, and sort of in the style of the old Parasite Eve, but it’s not quite for me. I’ve played an obscene number of hours of Zelda. Although it’s getting rave reviews as “best game ever”, it’s a little too much “on rails” for me. Fable and The Elder Scrolls were a little (or a lot) less linear, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s still a fun game, though. I just wish I could actually spend the rupees I’ve earned (why is it capped at 300 rupees if you can’t spend them?)

Lots of Carcassone too. What a fun game for two people. We have the Traders and Builders expansion too, and I guess we’ll be looking to get some of the other expansions.

The cats have established a pecking order, and are much more interactive than I expected they’d be after a short few days. Keji seems more comfortable after a few days than she did for the whole month she was with us a little over a year ago. She’s actually been up and around instead of hiding underneath the papasan the whole time. The biggest bone of contention seems to be the cat basket. Keji, Jack, and Dianthe have been forcing each other out when given the opportunity. Andromeda has been up and around, but keeps out of the frays. The tree is still up, but Jack has climbed it a few times. All in all, it’s going much smoother than we expected.

Gwen got her hair done on the past Friday. It is quite the stylish cut, and she has quite the arrangements of highlights too. I didn’t get a photo the day she came home, and it hasn’t quite looked the same again, so after she spends some time getting to look “proper”, I’ll be sure to snap a picture.

New Year’s Eve

New Year’s Eve in Vancouver sucks. They don’t have any real public celebration. Certainly nothing like the Grand Parade in Halifax. We stayed at home, watched the CBC comedy specials, and turned in early. Woo-hoo! Party on, Garth! Heh, oh well.

So, that was the end of 2006. Here comes 2007!

On Friday, Paula and Jimmy came down from Fredericton. Oh, and their two cats. For those keeping count, that’s 5 cats, 1 dog, 2 permanent residents, 3 West Coast Visitors, and 2 currently-living-in-NB’ers. The people outnumbered the animals by 1.

Anyway, they came down on Friday, and it was our (the West Coasters) first time meeting Jimmy. He seemed nice! Paula seemed happy, so all was good. I didn’t get a lot of photos of either of them, but here’s one at dinner on Friday:

Saturday was the my cousin Suzanne’s (nee Zinn) wedding. The wedding was held at St. Pat’s. St. Pat’s is a beautiful Catholic Church, and one that the Zinns and Forwoods have been going to for quite some time. It was built between 1883 and 1885. You can find out more about it here.
The ceremony was nice, and the atmosphere was great. Unfortunately the church is pretty dim inside, so I didn’t get any good shots, but a few of the ones that we did get are below.

After the wedding was a reception held at the barracks of the Halifax Citadel. Not the hotel, silly, the fortress. I didn’t know that the National Historic Site was open for wedding receptions, but guess what! It is. Anyway, the reception was spread through the top floor, with several different rooms having different foods and mingling areas. We stayed pretty much in the main mingling area, since it was a little more baby safe. Unfortunately that meant we missed much of the food, but we made up for it by stopping at that Paragon of Fine Food (yes, Wendy’s). It was at the reception that I managed to get a few more pictures of my sister! There were a few toddlers there, and one much younger baby. Aidan’s newest cousin Petranella (Anthony’s cousin Andreana’s 3 month old) was there, as was Sawyer (the “oldest” offspring of the cousins) and a few other young kids. There was one just about Aidan’s age (name now forgotten) with whom he hit it off, following her around a bit, and during the dance, dancing up a storm!

Anyway, it was another one of these times where we’re reminded how much the boy takes from us. We actually left — the boy awake — around 9ish, well before my parents. The boy stayed awake for the ride back to my parents’ (via Wendy’s of course), and luckily, went to bed pretty normally.

Sunday was a bit of a blur. Oh wait, I remember. Thanksgiving dinner. Gwen got things going with the dinner while Dad and I took Paula’s laptop apart. It is a Toshiba, and it would overheat and shut itself down when it got too hot. Coincidentally, Mom’s laptop had the same problem. In fact, they were both Toshibas, and apparently it’s a known problem. So, with the help of some instuctions from the web, we took Paula’s laptop apart. The problem is that the air intake is on the bottom of the laptop, and it sucks up lots of cat/dog/person hair and dust. It then blows this gunk over some cooling fins, but the fins do not allow the gunk through, and it accumulates on the fins. This reduces the effectiveness of the cooler, and then the system overheats. Anyhow, to clean the cooling fins, you have to completely disassemble the laptop … right down to removing the system board from the case. So, with the instuctions from the web, that’s what we did. It took much longer than expected, something around three or four hours. But, when we put it back together, it all worked, and as far as I know, it has solved the problem. After we got done with Paula’s we tackled Mom’s. It took a little less time, but essentially by the time we were done with Mom’s (also a success) it was dinner time.

As usual, Thanksgiving dinner was great. Gwen’s mother, grand-mother, and sister were up to join us too. I don’t think we got any pictures of the event, though.

Next, week 2…