Sofi and I got two of the most fantastic bits of news we'll get all year - my sponsorship application was approved and Sofi received the first letter of acceptance for her application for permanent residence in Canada!!! What this means is that most of the heavy-lifting is over and it won't be long until Sofi is a permanent resident of this country!
My only hope is that The Right Honourable Prime Minister Stephen Harper (doesn't that just roll off the tongue?) not only reduces immigration waiting times (we submitted our application in May and it will still be months before it is finished) but follows through on his promise to lower the fees to $100 (it cost us $2000).
Congratulations to us! Now, which way to the welfare office?!? :)
The Pats game last Friday was a great game, even though they lost. After the game I went to Brad's, where a bunch of us played poker until the week hours of the morning, no matter how hard I tried to go home early.
After the funeral on Saturday, we went home for Spanish class. My parents stayed afterwards to help us open the last of our Christmas presents and we ordered some pizza for supper. After they left, I went to hockey and then met up with Sofi later at Gabbo's for their Saturday "salsa" night, which was a great time. If you like hanging out with hot foreign women, you can't go wrong with that!
On Sunday morning, we got up super early to head to Grainfields for breakfast with Nick and Allison before Allison flew back home.
We said goodbye to Nick on election night Monday at Brewster's South. Nothing unexpected happened there, particularly the media getting the polling off by 30 seats - again. I could frankly give a shit about what went down, because we'll be in minority-land for a little while longer. For the record, I voted for the man, not the party.
It's been a pretty interesting past week at work - nothing I can share here, but interesting nonetheless.
CENSORED BY "THE MAN"!
Since some people apparently can't get enough of me, I feel compelled to write. Not to mention I haven't done so in a good month ;)
Sofi and I had a great trip to Mexico to close out 2005. Aside from some flight delays that results in us spending the night in Dallas on the way down (not to mention missing the David Copperfield show), the trip was fantastic. We spent much of our time in Guzman, but did travel to Guadalajara a few times to do some shopping and see King Kong in the VIP Theatre, complete with leather reclining seats and waitresses with beer. We spent Christmas with the family enjoying great food and great company. We also drove and spent a couple days in and around Morelia checking out neighbouring Patzcuaro and visiting the monarch butterfly sanctuary. We spent New Year's in Manzanillo at Las Hadas, which was awesome. We did some clubbing, some jet skiing, and generally just enjoyed being in paradise with the family. I have to say that the highlight of the entire trip to Mexico was definitely visiting my niece, who is quite possibly the cutest kid in the history of the universe:
Isabel at Las Hadas 2005
It's impossible to sum up a great trip like the one we had with plain words, so I'll try to do it with a picture of my feet:
Think about what you did for New Year's and then go back and look at that picture again :)
I spent the night in Minneapolis on the way home but finally made it back to Regina on Wednesday the 4th. It turns out that Colby was still in town, so I visited with him that afternoon and then went out with the boys that night to watch him referee the gold medal game of the World Under-17 Hockey Challenge. He did a great job and we had fun watching!
I wasn't able to party that night because I was going in for my wisdom teeth surgery the next morning. The surgery itself went fine, mainly because they put me out. When I awoke, I didn't feel any pain but was pretty swollen. My dad picked me up and we joined folks at Brewster's South for a goodbye lunch for Colby, since he was leaving that afternoon. I had to have ice cream, though, which was pretty funny since I had no feeling in my face and was basically disabled. I spent the next 48 hours, give or take, in bed. I wasn't in a lot of pain (thanks to the painkillers), but I definitely wasn't mobile. I took it easy over the following week or so and didn't venture out beyond work, getting groceries, and picking Sofi up from the airport that Monday.
Before we left on our trip, we had supper at my parents' house and exchanged a few of our gifts. I got fantastic presents this year, including all the hardware I needed to build by own PVR built on MythTV. It was a painful process to get everything up and running but dozens of hours later I now have a fully functioning system and hundreds of gigabytes of space to record whatever show I could possibly want, along with a billion other things that the system does, like surf the web, play music, play videogames, etc. It's an amazing addition to our home, to say the least.
Aside from the aforementioned King Kong, though various media, my new PVR, and thanks to the Mexican black market, I've been able to see a ton of movies lately, including: Cinderella Man, Flight Plan, Ali G Indahouse, and Just Like Heaven. None of them were really worth writing home about, but I guess I just did. Beyond films, however, there is television, and the Burt household has been watching a lot of 24 recently, including the Season 5 premiere. That show is pretty much the best thing going right now!
Last weekend Sofi and I spent our Saturday and part of Sunday on a secret project with a number of close associates. I am not allowed to reveal the details of the operation at this point, but sufficed to say someone will get a big surprise in the near future. Don't worry, it's not you ;)
I'd like to take a moment to personally congratulate Jesse Wilson on his recent engagement. Nice work, buddy!
There have been some things going down at my current client site so I could be experiencing a change on that front very soon. Today I picked up Nick at the airport and dropped him off at his folks' house. Sofi and I are going to the Pats game tonight. Tomorrow we're heading to the funeral and then things are pretty open for the weekend at this moment, depending on what Nick's plans are. We had a good skate last week so hopefully hockey will fit in there somewhere!
Nick and Allison will be coming to town on Friday for the funeral on Saturday and will be leaving early next week.