Friday was my birthday, rounding out our 3 week stretch of birthdays. For my birthday, Gwen got me a GPS receiver: a fancy Garmin eTrex Vista CX. We intend to use it to do geocaching and for hikes. But that’s not what I want to talk about. On Friday night, Gwen took me to see “Hockey Mom, Hockey Dad” at the Arts Club Theatre. Tammy came over to babysit for us, and brought her two cats Keji and Jack — she and The Brit are going to Mexico for a week and we agreed to look after them again. At any rate, Hockey Mom, Hockey Dad is a two-actor play starring Cailin Stadnyk and Jackson Davies (you know, Constable Constable from The Beachcombers). It was written by a Caper, Michael Melski. It’s billed as a romantic comedy.

So, the play starts with a completely unrecognizable Jackson Davies (see pic from the play, below). Mind you, he looks 30 years younger. His character, “Teddy”, is a divorced custodian with a young son playing hockey in house league. In Trail, B.C. (apparently a departure from the original). Cailin Stadnyk’s character, “Donna”, is a divorced school teacher also with a young son playing hockey in the house league, on the same team (“The Leafs”). Teddy is one of those over-bearing, over-competitive, loud-mouthed hockey dads. Donna is a meek mother who’s never been to a kid’s hockey game. Right from the start, Teddy pursues Donna, and over the next 90 minutes (yes, it’s a short play) we find out more about Donna, but not that much about Teddy. As it turns out, Donna came from an abusive relationship.

Once we find that out, the play gets uncomfortable. Frankly, Teddy comes across as the same sort of abusive personality as her ex-husband. At one point, he incites the kids not to shake hands at the end of a game and instead to start a fight. Donna is predictably aghast at this urging to use violence.

Eventually, the two feed off each other. As the play wraps up, Teddy becomes a little less extreme and Donna become a little less meek, and they live happily every after.

The acting was great: both actors were quite convincing in their roles. The writing, however, was weak. Not awful, but we’ve definitely seen better plays. If you’re considering seeing it, consider giving it a pass. We had fun, though.

So, apparently Paramount’s filming something near by. We don’t know what — “The L Word” often films in the block beside ours — but they are sure lighting up the night. The photos below don’t do it justice.

These lights are shining in our dining room and our bedroom windows. When we put Aidan to bed tonight (or more correctly, when he put himself to bed) and turned off the light, there was a beam of bright white light shining on his wall. Apparently it didn’t keep him awake, though.

It also didn’t seem to interfere with Gwen’s Wii time.

Hallowe’en! Trick-or-treating! Lavish costumes! Lots of candy.

Oh wait. Not in Vancouver. And what’s with the fireworks?
Well, at least some of the units in our place were done up. And Aidan went trick-or-treating. Two whole units opened their doors!

Both Aidan and Tristan were simians of some sort:

And Gwen had fun carving some pumpkins: a scary Tyrone (from The Backyardigans!) and an even scarier owl:

As usual, more pictures are on the Picture Barn.

Welcome to the new site! We’re moving away from Blogger, due to many reasons. We’ve made this move after returning from our Halifax vacation, so all the posts about our vacation will be the “test drive” of this Word Press site. Update date your bookmarks and blog readers. The new site address is www.leftcoastfloyds.net.

We took over 700 pictures while back East. One of them has been used for the mast-head. Here’s the unmodified (mostly) version: