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The last few days flew by much faster than desired. Every night of the week was filled with a miniature adventure.

Most recently I spent the end of the week attending classes for my Master's Certificate in Project Management, and as usual it was a very educational. This was the fourth session where we learned about Procurement of materials and services, and I found the whole area of 'Contract A' and 'Contract B' and how you go about evaluation of vendors and bids was very interesting. Furthermore, I have discovered that Calgary's weather is on a two week cycle that corresponds to the two week cycle of my course. It seems that whenever the Weather in Calgary is due to be absolutely spectacular for a couple of days, those are the days I'm due to be indoors sacrificing half of my weekend.

Friday night we went out to celebrate Sonja's birthday at Classic Jack's. It was a fun time and a good deal of people cycled through to say hello and wish their best. I definitely had a good time catching up with everyone, but in hindsight a measly six hours of sleep was barely sufficient to keep me alert during Contract Law thankfully my friend caffeine was there to ensure my wakefulness.

Saturday after my class, we met up with the usual gang for another battle involving the Roughnecks. We were triumphant over the Sting, and after a long drought we now face two games in two weeks. Hopefully we can improve on our third place standing.

Today was a nice relaxing day, with a sleep-in, followed by a visit with Peter, and a viewing of TMNT. The movie was just as cheesy as I had expected. It brought me back to my after school cartoon days, and the CGI was phenomenal. I'm not sure if it was worth the big-screen, big-sound price, but it was entertaining. For a PG flick it did have a pretty twisty plot, and they did a pretty faithful job bringing the Turtles back.

Now, I'm standing at the end of another weekend, with another packed week ahead of me. It isn't all stacked on the working side of the coin, as I do have an evening watching Nelly Furtado in the Saddledome. Keeping on this pace, I'm sure I'll be turning around and March will be gone.

My weekend was shorter than most, but still, productivity was high and a lot was taken off the to-do list. On Friday night Sonja and I went out for a bite of sushi at Sakana Grill in the north. The place was packed and we had to wait before being seated. Despite the wait, the food was spectacular, and before long the salmon, tuna and various imitation meats were all gone, and I was happy with my distended belly. After the meal in nice ambiance, we strolled over to the Cineplex to take in the film rendition of Frank Miller's 300

The movie, plainly put, was excellent. I somewhat knew the storyline, and had an idea of what to expect. The thing, I believe, that set this movie apart was the cinematography. As a photographer, I have a bit of an understanding of light and shadow and how it plays on three dimensional bodies, and this movie is just excellent scene after excellent scene. You could stop the movie at any point and have an excellent candidate for a photograph or poster. The movie also make you feel good, and I have been geeking out about it since I've seen it. The one scene where Queen Gordo "gets even" actually made me scream out a 'Hell Yah!' right in the theatre. The visuals along with the wicked story make 300 a movie I would recommend to anyone who is old enough to watch it.

Saturday was a day to get stuff done. The first order of business was to get caught up on sleep, which is something I have been meaning to do for quite some time. Afterwards yard work sucked up the remainder of the day. We managed to pull six bags of leaves, grass and garbage along with three garbage cans full of branches out of the yard. Now there is no piles of fall leaves blown against the buildings, and my crab apple tree in the back yard is under control. I was surprised at the stuff that I found buried in the hedge. The stranger being a mug from the City of Calgary, a comb, a empty box for Huggies and spike for tying a dog to a particular spot. Even though the weather is sure to turn more winterish, I'm glad that the majority of the spring cleanup is done.

Today, I had to make a sacrifice in order to attend classes for my Master's Certificate in Project Management. The class was entertaining, and definitely full of useful information, but being indoors, on a Sunday when it was over sixteen degrees outside was a tough haul. It didn't take much convincing for the class for us to sacrifice a couple breaks and cut our lunch in half so that we could get out almost 45 minutes early. My extra free time was spent on a nice leisurely walk out to the 1127 hectare Nose Hill Park. The weather was nice and there were plenty of people out enjoying the sunshine. On the walk out I came across the fence pictured above. It reminded me of the shambles my own fence used to be in, although; I think with the effort taken to secure all those boards in place with twine probably could have been better used with a hammer and nails.

Tomorrow, I have the second class in this week's module, and then into a four day work week before St. Patrick's Day.

It has almost become expected for me to complain about the weekend being over, and I wouldn't want to disappoint. This weekend was especially short, being that the restful portion of the weekend was only a single day.

I've been attending classes for a Master's Certificate in Project Management which is put on by the University of Lethbridge. The course is very enlightening, and after only two sessions I have already learned a great deal about how to properly run a project. The difficulty around the course is that to accommodate working professionals and weekend lovers, the course straddles weekdays and weekends. So until June, every second weekend is going to be a little shorter.

The course didn't stop me from getting out and enjoying myself. On Friday night, the usual crew attended the Roughnecks game at the Saddledome. We were hosting the Toronto Rock, and they beat us down quite bad at the start, and our come-back wasn't there resulting in a 12-9 score in their favor. At the time I was quite dissapointed, but it turns out that we beat them on their home turf to a final score of 17-13.

Saturday night Sonja and I attended a fund raising benefit for a young man who has been found to have terminal cancer. His wish is to take an Alaskan cruise with his family, so the benefit was to raise funds to have the best damn cruise ever. A silent auction, a long drive contest some appetizers and a Flames game on the big screen all come together at Schank's north for a rather nice evening.

Sunday was my only day off, and I spent most of it getting through my list of things to do. I fixed the house's downspouts so my backyard will no longer be a skating rink, I changed my oil, and replaced some bulbs in the Buick. If you think that changing bulbs is a trivial task, try changing the rear low beams on a 2000 Buick. I wish you all the best. After the outdoors stuff was done, I had Sonja help me out with some Photography, then I edited some pictures while plowing through a massive chunk of laundry. After everything was completed, it was almost time for bed. Just enough time to squeeze in a viewing of Office Space

Scott turned me towards a video that raises an eyebrow. I watched a slighter higher quality version. It falls into the documentary style of Michael Moore, and I hate to compare Dylan like that. Unfortunately there isn't a lot of this kind of thought provoking, investigative movie to even pull up a reference for comparison that anyone would know.

It's good, watch it, take it with a grain of salt.

Larger version here

Another action packed weekend has closed, and now I come to the part of the week where I spend more of my time doing stuff for someone else.

Friday, I meandered down to Bottlescrew's to take in the first game of the Flame's playoff run. With the Edmonton game going into double overtime and the Flames also going into knuckle whitening OT, the night was definitely great for hockey.

Saturday I was up early for my first ever attendance to the Basement Bowl. Chad was nice enought to host the LAN party at his house, and we murdered each other electronically for most of the waking day. The biggest problem with attending something like a LAN party is explaining it, because a good number of people don't really know exactly what one is; Furthermore, once you put the entire debacle of a group of guys people dragging their computers together in order to lower latency doesn't quite make sence to the non-technical. Well, we still did it, and had a blast. I was king of the hill when it came to RTS, being on the winning side most often, and always finishing with the highest of scores. On the FPS side however, I was a walking joke. I was killed so humiliatingly, so many times that I was contimplating better spending my time making a bullseye for my soldier's back. Nevertheless, the fun had to end, and I went out socializing at Peter's place, where I caught the tail end of drama to a scale I have never seen before. Funny and tragic at the same time.

Sunday I managed to get around to some fix-me-ups that I've been putting off for a while. Now my plumbing works a little better, my garage door opens every time, my screen door won't go flying off in the wind and I have proper working chairs in my computer room.

In the evening I went out and took in V for Vendetta. I read the graphic novel, and I would say I liked both the book and the Wachowski brothers shortened it. There really was a whole lot more going on in the novel, as is to be expected, but the writers were really careful about what they took out and what they left in. They did change some key points at the end of the movie, but the overall flavour was preserved.