Movember as many know is a moustache growing charity to raise awareness of men's health.  I'm not one to worry about my health.  I feel healthy and rarely ever go to a doctor.  No Shave November is a similar charity that picks a new cause to support every November.  Regardless of the cause, I use November to grow some facial hair and prove I am a man.

Believe it or not this photo is a whole month of hair growth with not shaving, plucking or otherwise facial hair removal.  I usually shave my upper lip and chin every 2 to 4 days and only shave the fuzzy hair off my cheeks 3 or 4 times a year.

When I was young I was a relatively late bloomer (some may argue that I'm still blooming...).  Kids would pick on me for my lack of manly hair growth.  Well now I realize this is a good thing and not something to be ashamed about.  Compared to the amount of time some people spend shaving their face, I can sleep in another precious couple of minutes every morning.

Who wouldn't want these awesome genes.  :)

For those of you who know me, know that I like to be called Kenny or if you prefer you can call me Kenneth.  I never really liked to be called Ken.  It's not because I don't like the name Ken, I just always thought Kenny suited me better.  I am a Kenny.

Of course my dear wife thinks the name is ridiculous.  My coworkers think I’m beyond psychologically insane.  But what do they know.  Next time you see me on the street, feel free to say 'Hi' and welcome the new kool Keth into this world.

Check out all the awesome photos here (there's a lot of them).

One of the most popular fast food locations in downtown Edmonton is Chicken For Lunch.  Chicken For Lunch or CFL as most abbreviate it to serves up mostly westernized Chinese food.  Its your typical pick 2 or 3 or 4 items loaded into a styrofoam box and you can probably guess that lots of the items consist of chicken.  But the thing that makes this place not so typical is the staff with honorable mention going to the owner Amy.  Amy remembers every single person that visits her restaurant.  Most regular can only remembering ordering once (normal? hot? or spicy?).  After that Amy will commit your order to memory and give you a nickname.  If you want to change up your order, you'd better tell Amy before she starts dishing out your food.

It is not uncommon for the lineup at CFL to be 100 deep at peak lunch hour or even longer during special occasions (Chinese New Year, Easter).  This is pretty uncommon for any downtown food court as most other lunch spots will only have 5 people in line.  Chicken For Lunch has recently been taped for The Food Networks, Family Restaurant which airs January 2009.

If you aren't conveniently located downtown during the lunch hours you can also enjoy Amy's fine Asian cuisine at The Lingnan Restaurant.  This dining lounge has won the Consumer's Choice Award a number of times as well as the World Famous Restaurants International Award.

I frequent Chicken For Lunch so much that Amy has adopted me as one of her many honorary 'sons'.  I had my own Chicken For Lunch t-shirts made and helped design the illuminated sign for her store.

Even if you don't typically like Asian cuisine I recommend everyone to try out Amy's Chicken.  If the food selection intimidates you, just tell Amy if you like hot, spicy or sweet food and she will give you a dish sure to please your palette.

Google maps has enabled a feature for user created maps.  To help some of my directionally challenged friends I started creating some maps that could be useful to all Edmontonians.  Here are my user created maps to locations I frequent in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Edmonton Golf Courses

• Lists public and private, 18 hole, 9 hole, par 3 golf courses.

Edmonton Beach Volleyball Courts

• Community league, public and private sand beach volleyball courts in Edmonton.

Edmonton Recreation, Fitness and Leisure Centres

• The 16 facilities included in the Tier 1 Admission Plan. This is an annual pass to Sports Centres, Leisure Centres, Recreation Centres and Outdoor Pools.

Edmonton Fitness Centres

• A comparison of YMCA, World Health Club and Club Fit locations in Edmonton.

Next time you visit Google Maps, look for user-created content.  Typically it is more accurate than locations automatically generated by google.  There is a reason Google is amazing.  They make applications that are easy to use and benefit the user instead of just wasting time. All of these maps are created by me 'Kenny'.  If you would like to be a collaborator or make changes to any of these maps, please contact me.

It's been a few years since the last time I did the Skyline trail.  I wanted to do it again to better my original time of 12 hours.  The first time Aron and I hiked the Skyline we started on the wrong trailhead which put us 1 hour and 4 km off course.

This time my brave new hiking partner Chris and I set off in the right direction with the proper footware.  My leg was still a little sore from the first hike of the season, but it was nothing Advil couldn't take care of.  By the end of the hike we were feeling good and jogging down the last 9 km.

We managed to finish the hike in 9 hours and 34 min.

Check out all the photos here.

Yesterday Shannon and I along with 8 other friends went to Eden North Parachute Center for our first time solo skydive.  I thought I would have to take Shannon kicking and screaming but she was able to convince herself to come.

The Solo First Jump course is a 4.5 hour class with an exam at the end.  You cover all the equipment and safety aspects, but most of the course is rehearsing the airplane exits.  By the end of the course all you can think of is "ARCH-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand, check canopy".  We all passed the test with flying colours!  Next we were off to get suited up.  Everyone looked excited, some looked nervous, some looked tough, some looked scared and others just looked ready to take on the world.

After doing one more preparation walk-through we headed to the plane.  When the door opens you realize this is for real.  Once you get up there, the jump masters are pretty set on not letting anyone ride the plane back down.  If they have to pry your fingers off the plane or kick you out the door, you signed up for skydiving and skydiving is what you are going to do!

In the end everyone safely made it back to earth.  Shannon was so exillerated she wanted to immedately sign up for the AFF (Advanced Free Fall) classes, where you get 45 seconds of free fall jumping with instructors watching your every move.

Thanks everyone who came out to make this day memorable.  I encourage everyone to try skydiving once!

View all the photos here.

Last weekend Shannon and I invited a group of friends out for a hike.  Greg, Chris, Trista and Tanya came to celebrate Shannon's birthday in the woods.  We looked for an easy hike for novice hikers as we wanted to pack in lots of good food and drink.  Lake of the Falls was recommended by my outdoorsy friend Tys.  The trailhead was just outside Nordegg and according to this map there were a lot of places to camp if we got tired.  According to Google Maps and Tys the trail was a short 16km so we head out to the mountains.  We planned to stay for a single night (hiking in on Saturday and hiking out Sunday) so we packed accordingly.  We carried in big meaty steaks, 4 liters of wine, corn on the cob and all the other items associated with a luxurious backcountry camp.

Well... contrary to what we expected, this crazy hike is not for the faint of heart.  We got to the fork in the trail where one path goes to "Lake of the Falls" and the other to "Landslide Lakes".  We decided to go the Landslide Creek way because it seemed a lot closer on the map.  What the map doesn't tell you is that the hike goes straight up a mountain.  At the top of the steepest incline my knee decided to give out.  It was bugging me for half of the hike but I decided to ignore it.  Well that was a bad idea.  After resting from the intense inclinde my knee seized up. I had severe inflammation and a pinched nerve.  I could bear weight but could not bend my knee.  If it weren't for everyone carrying my entire pack I wouldn't have made it into camp.  It took us 7.5 hours to get to the camp site.  There was still ice on the Lake and snow around the campsites... but it was surprisingly not that cold. 

That night I thought for sure I would have to take a helicopter out of camp but the next morning my leg was still able to bear weight.  My wife carried as much of my gear as she could and with my lightish pack we headed out.  It was pretty difficult to climb up and down hills with a straight leg but I managed to drag myself out of the woods.

Thanks to my friends for getting me out in one piece.  Hope you don't hate me for dragging you into an aggressive hike for the first of the year.

View all the photos here.

Some of you might remember Round 1 of Laser Eye Balls...  Well, round 1 didn't go as well as expected so I headed back for round 2!

When I went in for the first surgery they warned me that with the amount of correction they had to do there was a 20% chance I would need to get an enhancement (touch-up) surgery.  My eyes took a while to heal and it took over 6 months for my eyes to stabilize enough for the doctor to be comfortable to perform the second surgery.

The second surgery is very similar to the first, but instead of using the IntraLas laser to cut the lens again they just use the existing cuts.  Apparently there is usually more discomfort during the healing stage because they tear the lens instead of cutting it.  Fortunately it was the opposite for me!  The next day my eyes were seeing better than before the surgery.  There was little to no discomfort either.

After my one week post-op check-up they were impressed with how fast my eyes were healing.  I was also impressed with the vision.  I'm pretty confident my eyes will be seeing 20/20 this time.

Thanks Gimbel for fixing my eyes!

Well it hasn't even been a year since I got married and my original wedding band has been lost in the wilderness.  Ironically it was lost heading to Vernon, where Shannon and I had our honeymoon.  During the drive between Golden and Revelstoke my intestines were brewing a storm.  Unfortunately I couldn't make it to a facility with running water (I couldn't even find an outhouse) and had to do the nasty in the Mt Revelstoke National Park.  That was when Shannon mentioned I should wash my hands in the small water fall stream at the side of the road.  After a few flicks of the wrist my ring flew into the gushing steam of water and the old young tungsten carbide ring was gone.

Shannon wasn't all too impressed, but I was able to get a speedy replacement ring from tungstenworld.com. They even gave me a discount for being a return customer!  Order has been restored in the Dickie household.  :)

Shannon and I decided that this summer will be the summer of golf.  Of course this won't interfere with beach volleyball and slo-pitch but we are going to try to get out and golf as much as we can.  We hope to shave off 10 stokes on our games.  I plan to do this with my new Taylor Made R7 Superquad and my daily putting regiment at work (I've had a putting green set up at work all winter).

To kick off our summer of golf, Shannon and I headed to Vernon to get an early start to the season.  On the drive out we stopped at the driving range in Golden to warmup then in Vernon we played at Spallumcheen and Salmon Arm Golf Club.  The first day was a perfect day for golf, it was 21C without a cloud in the sky.

View all the photos here.

Shannon and I joined an indoor volleyball league this winter.  Our team, Bumpin' Bricks, went on to win the league with an undefeated season!  We've played in this league twice in the past and did well but this is the first time we've won the league.

We've already registered for the Spring Intermediate Plus league which will be a lot more competitive.  I'm also thinking about joining Beach Volleyball 2v2 this summer.  With all the other sports we play in the summer this should keep us busy and fit.

I'm still trying to retrieve as much lost data as I can from from googles website cache and archive.org.  Apparenly Shannon was really sad when I lost everything because I don't say sweet nice things about her anymore...  :P

I think I was able to find a cached copy of most of my news posts except for the year of 2005.  Next I need to find some kind of news importer for this Community Server.

I've slowly started to import all the photos from our trips but it looks like that might be slow and tedious as well...

Unfortunately I've lost all your touching news and photo comments... awe shucks...  :)

It was the first ski of the season and we couldn't have picked a colder weekend for the trip. The weather forcast said it was between -25C to -28C but up on the glacier it felt more like -35C to -40C.

But we braved the cold and set off to ACC Bow Hut. The initial trail heads out over bow lake which sounded like a big crackling drum. We weren't sure if the lake was going to open up and swallow us but the lake sounded like it was alive with all the beats echoing off the mountains.

On day two we skiied up to Mount St. Nicholas (Wapta Icefield) and tried to climb to the summit. The main summit was pretty sketchy so we settled for the false summit.

In a long tradition of eating well on backcountry trips we packed a savoury meal that included pork tenderloin, bacon wrapped scallops, stuffed portobello mushrooms, spinich salad and chicken fried rice. It was a meal that made the hut meal wonderful and made everyone else envious of our dinner feast.

After that some crazy Quebecer introduced us to table climbing and we spend a good part of the evening climbing the dinner table. The object of the game was to start on top and climb around the table without touching the floor. It provided hours of entertainment for us mountain goers.

After a good midnight ski in freezing cold weather we tried to sleep with the crazy sleep walking/screaming Ryan. Than we packed up our gear and headed back to civilization.

All things said and done it was another wicked trip planned by Tys and enjoyed by many.