This week was pretty uneventful, which is a nice change of pace. I spent 3 days on course for work, for which the 90% of the the subject matter didn’t relate at all to what I do. Regardless, it was one of the most interesting work related courses that I’ve taken, mostly due to the instructor who was not only very knowledgeable and charismatic, but he was also very entertaining.
On Friday, I worked in the morning and took the afternoon off to head over to the passport office. With the trip to France coming up, I noticed that my passport would expire halfway through the honeymoon. Most countries won’t let you in if your passport expires as much as 6 months after the time of entry, so it needed to be renewed. I’ve heard many people’s experiences dealing with the passport office, with wait times of many hours and long lineups. So I prepared myself for a long wait. I printed out a few sudokus, my IPod was fully charged, ready to kill time while I waited.
I get to the passport office and there are only 2 people ahead of me in the first line. For those who have never stepped foot in a Canadian passport office, you first have to line up to see someone who will make sure you filled out the paperwork correctly ad that you have all necessary materials. Once everything checks out they give you a number, and you go sit in another waiting room to see another person who will actually start the process on your application. While waiting in this line, I hear the agent tell the woman in front of me that there’s a 45 minute wait. I thought to myself that 45 minutes wasn’t too bad, considering the stories I heard of 3-6 hour waits.
Information in hand, I step up to the counter once the 2 women in front of me were done. Since I was only renewing my passport, this step was fairly quick, and I was given a ticket with E834. I make my way over to the waiting room where I take a seat, pull out my IPod and soduku, and I see E833 flash up on the board. I’ve barely been there 5 minutes and my number is almost up? I was honestly shocked! It only took 2 more minutes to see an agent, and 2 minutes later I was out the door. It took me about 10 minutes in total. Its nice to see our tax dollars actually amounting to something!
Today my nieces’ dresses came in for the wedding. All 3 are going to be flower girls. They looked so precious in their little white dresses. As of this article, in 9 weeks I’ll be a married man. I can’t believe how soon that will be! We sent out the invitations last week and the responses have been trickling in. I handed out the reception invitations to my coworkers yesterday. Everything is finally coming together! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!
Last night I took 2 of my nieces to meet Antoine Vermette, Chris Kelly and Chris Phillips from the Ottawa Senators. All 3 players were at a local car dealership signing autographs. It was the first time I ever met any Sens players and it was pretty cool. We got there a little late, but luckily that meant there wasn’t much of a lineup. We only had to wait 15 minutes or so in line behind 15-20 groups of people. Katrina, my youngest niece in attendance, was very excited to finally meet some of the players she’s been watching on the ice.
For the last few days the sun has been out, the snow has been melting, the icicles have been dripping. Its been nice and I hope it keeps on going like this. Its not melting too fast as to cause flooding. The house has been a nice 24C degrees in the afternoon when the sun is shining brightly in our windows. I even managed to open up some windows today to get a nice change of air. There’s only 2 days left until spring officially starts, and I will welcome it with open arms.
Over the last few days we’ve also been crunching some numbers and have figured out that our dream honeymoon to Paris is going to happen. Prices for hotel/flight combo have dropped by about 1000$ since we last looked a couple of months ago. We realized that if we didn’t go there for our honeymoon, we probably couldn’t get to go for another 15-20 years. The weekend was spent looking at various hotels and their ratings (