Mike’s Family Blog

Hi everyone,

Just a quick note to let you know that there are new pictures of Jonathan in the gallery.

So the old barn is now gone. Making more room for retail space. Just what the doctor ordered, yet more retail space in the already congested Polo Park area. Ah well, it’s still the end of an era. One that I was fortunate enough to experience a few times while attending some Jets hockey games, several concerts and even a couple of Moose games before they moved downtown.

While they are all good memories, two stand out the most. The first was one particular Jets playoff game. Heck, I don’t even remember what year or who they were playing. But what I remember was being way up in the nosebleed section behind one of the goal nets. I went to the game with my good friend Ian and we had been given noisemakers similar to the party favour horns used at New Years parties, only bigger. The noise and the excitement level in the sold out place was amazing. Caught up in the excitement, I blew the quack right out of the horn about five minutes into the game. No more noise from that thing. So, resorting to lung power, I strainged my vocal chords and ended up with almost no voice for the next couple of days.

The other memory was going to a Pittsburgh Penguins game just prior to my wedding in 1995. We were hoping that for once, Mario Lemieux would actually show up and play a game, but alas, he didn’t. We had seats about a dozen rows up from ice level and my friend Steve and I were enjoying the pre-game warm ups. While sitting there, a puck came flying up over the glass, sailed about 6 inches over my head and hit the guy behind me in the chest. Later during the game itself, already relieved at the close call, a slapshot from center ice was deflected and sailed about 3 feet in front of us landing about a dozen seats to our left. To this day, we still joke about how close we came (twice) to me going to my wedding with a black eye from the hockey game.

Anyways, below I’ve pasted a partial article from the Winnipeg Free Press today. Below are some photos, all taken by Winnipeg Free Press photographer Mike Aporius. No significance to that except for the credit being applied to republication purposes.

Lastly, if you click ***HERE***, you can download the video segment I captured from Global News. The segment shows the implosion and later collapse of the old barn.

Enjoy
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The Winnipeg Arena was supposed to go out with a bang at 7:15 this morning.

But almost 200 kilograms of explosives weren’t enough to finish off the partly-demolished arena, and it took a demolition crew nearly four hours and four attempts before the building collapsed in a pile of rubble.

Built in 1955, (the arena) was already considered out of date when the Jets moved to Phoenix in 1996.

The arena’s gently-sloped stands made for poor sightlines and its acoustics often presented a challenge for concert-goers.

About 1,000 people turned out to watch the blast, scheduled for 7:15. When the explosives were detonated, at about 7:25 a.m., a huge boom like rolling thunder shook the ground and shrouded the arena in a cloud of debris. When the dust finally cleared, the sides of the arena were gone but the building was still standing on its four corner supports.

It took crews another 3-and-a-half hours using giant excavators pulling on cables wrapped around the steel-reinforced pillars on the north end of the arena to knock the arena down. The cables snapped twice as the excavators yanked on them but, on the third try at about 10:50 a.m., the crew pulled the legs out from under the structure. It collapsed in a heap to the cheers of about two dozen onlookers who’d been standing around waiting for the moment for almost four hours.

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No picture, but Jonathan got his first fat lip tonight. Wasn’t doing anything spectacular, his hand just happened to slip while he was crawling and he face planted the floor. His upper lip was cut and bled pretty good for a couple of minutes, but fortunately stopped almost as quickly as it started. When we first saw the blood coming out of his mouth and had a look, it looked like a tooth had been knocked around just because of where the blood was pooling. We were quite relieved when we found it was just the lip.

However, a few minutes of crying and then he was no worse for wear. Except you can see that he’s got a bit of a swollen lip when he smiles. Should be gone by morning.

Nothing terribly new to report. It was just nice to hit the weekend after such a busy week. Between work, a computer client, Special Olympics meetings and TV and Youth ministries at church, I wasn’t at home much this week. Of course, it sure beats watching Oprah as the highlight of the day.

In the last couple of days, Jonathan’s started to stand on his own after letting go of something. For the past several weeks, since he’s been standing while supported, he’s tried letting go, but either has to catch himself or fall on his butt. Now he’s able to let go and stand for longer and longer periods. He’s also been trying to push himself up to stand from a sitting position. Hasn’t gotten it yet, but it’ll be soon, I’m sure.

Won’t be long now before we’re really having to chase him around. Not that’s not fast enough on all fours already!

My sister now has her webpage running, the link is on the right. Or you can backtrack to the main page and select her name to view it there.

More pictures added in the gallery.

Well, back to work tomorrow. As some of you know, I was laid off just before Christmas. But it wasn’t a bad thing, not by a long shot. Most importantly, I got to spend a couple of months hanging out with Jonathan almost daily. It’s time I’d never be able to buy back. I didn’t miss any major milestones, but I was able to enjoy his progression from just beginning to crawl to almost walking. Hopefully I don’t miss his first steps, which may come any time.

Other than that, I had time to do a bunch of projects, some big and some small. The two biggest were an email server and this website. I’m very glad I had time to figure out the technical details behind a blog style website. This is much better than a standard website, and much easier to update the daily goings on. Still some small technical issues to work out with it, but all in all, I’m quite pleased. (Though I’m still waiting for anyone to join in on the fun.)

This past Friday, we had Jonathan’s 9 month photos taken at Sears. Once we get them, they’ll be scanned and posted. I think you’ll all enjoy them.

Finally did a bit of capturing video today and turned a bit of it into a 2:45 montage clip of Jonathan just doing his stuff.  Download ** HERE **  and enjoy.  The file is 10.6MB and requires DiVX 5.x or better to view it in your favourite video player.

Okay, for those of you who are wondering… what’s DiVX and why? Well, DiVX is compression / decompression software. (AKA a Codec) it does to video what MP3 compression does for audio. This video file was just over 1GB or 1,000MB. That’s more than a standard CD would hold, or it would take about 900 floppy disks to store it. All for just under 3 minutes of video. So, running it through a DiVX compression, I can make it almost any size I want. However, the more it’s compressed, the more it loses video quality. At 10MB, the quality loss is not too bad and it makes it small enough to be downloaded fairly easily.

I hope that answers a few questions anyone may have wondered.

Created a new album in the photo gallery today. In it, you’ll find some desktop wallpapers. If you like them, feel free to download and use them.

My goal in creating these wallpapers are to create some eye pleasing and less obtrusive wallpapers than are normally out there. Some of those default windows wallpapers can be downright annoying to look at.

Enjoy!

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So what else is going on? Jonathan’s pushing his molars through, yes that’s right, he’s approaching 9 months and his 1 year molars are coming through. He’s got all his front teeth already, so why shouldn’t those be early too? Hasn’t been too comfortable for him, though. A couple of days ago, he threw up a few times. No, not baby ’spit-up’, it was a throw up. The rest of that day and yesterday he didn’t seem all that interested in eating or drinking anything. He wasn’t lethargic for lack of food, however, he was still pretty energetic otherwise. Slept through the night pretty well though.

One day at a time though. Hopefully those molars break through soon. It certainly tugs at the heartstrings to see him going through the discomfort.