The long awaited unveiling of the "material" I collected on Greg during our vacation...

My husband is the ultimate geek. I mean, it is crazy how he just needs to know information and understand how stuff works. Even about things that I think are absolutely irrelevant.

Most recent example: we had noticed this crazy flying grasshopper on our lawn the last couple of weeks. My husband, could not let this go without knowing more about this critter. So, of course, he did research (wikipedia is just not detailed enough, folks), including looking through tons of photographs of different kinds of grasshoppers and learned that our lawn is home to the club horned grasshopper. And, for the record, this grasshopper is not considered a pest, which means that, although they scare the crap out of me when they whiz in front of my face as I walk, we should let them hang around. Stink.

The running joke in our house when Greg sees something that he doesn't know about is I'll expect an email detailing the specifics in about 3 days. Never fails. See a crazy plane in the sky? Email received. What kind of flower is that? Answer found. What's the scoop on the mushrooms growing on our lawn? Research completed. Why is there steam coming out of the man holes in the winter? The answer is not as simple as you think, and after hashing this out with a civil engineer, he figured it out.

On our vacation we drove by Sackville's Relay Station owned by Radio Canada International and people, I am not joking here, I received nothing short of a 500 word essay explaining why this thing is so friggin' cool. In case your interested, they offer tours in July and August (I think I see one of these in my future. Oh dear).

My husband reads manuals and Microsoft help files for fun. Earlier this week we had a meeting with our life insurance consultant, which Greg had thoroughly prepared for by reading and re-reading booklets and websites on the topic. During the meeting our consultant said that most of the adviser's at the company she works for don't even know the stuff Greg knew and she pretty much offered him a job on the spot.

So with that little bit of background info on my dear husband, you won't be surprised to find out the 2 interesting things that were uncovered on our vacation. I just had to share with you all, friends. It's un-freakin'-believable.

If any of you have ever travelled further than 2 minutes outside of town with my husband, you'll know that all trips are mapped out using Microsoft Streets and Trips and monitored using our GPS system. In order to make this process more streamlined (and to let his wife off the hook for having to help with the stupid thing, especially since I can't ever seem to figure out if we're travelling South or North-East or whatever... why can't this "helpful" device just use terms like left and right and straight... you know because since I'm travelling to a city I don't live in, clearly I don't know what direction North is!). Anyways, my clever husband devised the following contraption so he could mount his laptop in our vehicle and monitor our precise location and travel direction himself. On top of that, he took 14 million pictures of the process and of the finished product. Here's a little sampling:

Isn't that unbelievable?!?!

Oh that's not even the best part yet... and then (and then!) one day Greg comes strolling upstairs after having spend a couple hours in the basement. He brings to me, with a little grin on his face I might add, a bunch of little items that he found he had stowed away in a box somewhere. Here's a sampling of what was in there:

Yes, that's a bunch of little gadgets that Greg had from when he was a kid. Included in the lot is: crayons from preschool, his first ruler, little screws, solar panels from calculators, random little metal gizmo's, little rubber numbers he cut from a calculator pad, and, do you see that little book with scribbles at the top? In that book Greg recorded details from his first job picking strawberries. Every day he would write down the hours he worked, how many baskets of berries he picked, and how much money he would make as a result. Isn't that unbelievable?!?! When I asked Greg why he had all these gadgets, his response was that he thought he may need them someday to make something out of.

I don't know what's worse, the fact that Greg actually thought he could use these things, or that he still has them after 20 years.

Yup, that's my husband :)