Chris’ Blog

…well conditionally that is. It’s a small one bedroom apartment across the street from the Bonnie Doon mall. It’s going to be great! You can see the condo listing if you would like more info.

Last night Christine and I were walking around the neighbourhood where we are living and we walked to a park with baseball diamonds. There was a building there with “Duggan” painted on the side and I remembered playing baseball there when I used to go to Allendale school. That was 22 years ago. That frightens me.

This book was a Christmas gift and I recently finished reading it. I had fairly low expectations going in, but my interest was held all the way through. Mr. Herman does indeed make a strong case for Scots leading the way in many aspects of modern society, although I would say that declaring that Scots invented the modern world is rather speculative. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this book and was especially interested in how Scots helped shape the United States and Canada with highlanders generally siding with the monarchy and migrating to Canada as Loyalists after the War of Independence and lowlanders siding with the revolutionaries. An excellent read if you are interested in Scottish or New World history.

See this book in my library here.

★★★★☆

Christine and I spent the weekend at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. This is the second time we have attended. The first was in 1997 and it was amazing. Compared with ‘97, this year was disappointing; however, we had a good time and enjoyed ourselves and the music. We’re already looking forward to next year and hoping for more blues (Chris) and Celtic (Christine) performers.

I have to say I was quite disappointed with this book. After reading through it I was not equipped to write php scripts. It is missing many features that should be present in PHP 4 like constants and objects. There is already a third edition out; hopefully it is more complete and up to date.

★★☆☆☆

Another Heritage Day has come and gone, but not without a trip to the Heritage Festival to sample some world cuisine. We went on Saturday. It was raining all day. Fortunately that meant short lines for food and no dancing or shows to distract us from what the Heritage Festival is all about.

What I ate:

spanakopita from the Greece pavilion - delicious
some kind of beef stew from the Eritrea pavilion - very good
a banana pastry from the Philippines pavilion - very good
a mango shake from some booth - delicious
a beef kebab from the Arab pavilion - dry and disappointing
for dessert, a little doughnut and rice pudding from the Scandinavia pavilion - excellent

And there you have it, an expert opinion from my accomplished palette.