Thank you to everyone for their suggestions! I’ve taken some suggestions and basically shoved them in front of my father (aren’t I a sweetheart? I do try sometimes!). So thank you to everyone’s suggestions! Sadly, my dad’s not much into puzzles (that’s my sister).

From Kelsey, I found 7 different events that he can attend in the area that revolve around the topics of the history of Hong Kong and China (thanks for the links!), “update your resume after losing your job” and some more free events that about various different new exercise programs that they have at a local recreational centre. All to get him out of the house and out of my hair.

From Aimee, after reading your comment about how your dad’s obsessed with his chickens, I remembered that my dad’s talked about having homing pigeons since I was like 3 so I went online and found a few homing pigeon sites (that include buy/sell boards!) and emailed him the links. Maybe he’ll go and get homing pigeons and he can be all up in their business instead of mine.

Remember when I blogged about the gutters falling off the side of my house? Well, it’s only part of the gutter, but my dad went and checked out how much the cost of materials would be to fix it (we can’t refuse the part that fell off as it got mangled when it fell off – thanks snow!). It’d cost about $170 for the materials alone, just to replace the part of the gutter that’s missing. Not too bad, as a DIY project.

So he went and made a few calls and had 3 different companies pop on by (he got them to all come around at 10 minute intervals, so the first and second company knew about each other and the second and third company knew about each other – suddenly the quotes get lowered a little…) to give him so quotes on how much total (labour, materials, etc) would cost.

The lowest quote was $200 (from company #2) and that would include replacing the gutter along the entire length of the side of the house where that portion came off, not just the portion that’s gone. The entire length. Which would be (according to my dad) approximately $325 in materials alone from the local shop that sells stuff like that. So umm, yeah, my parents talked it over and we’re going with company number 2 (who cut under company 1’s quote by $150 and company 3’s quote by about $100). Not sure how they’re going to be making any sort of profit, but they wrote out an official quote, signed and dated and everything.

Perhaps it was a little underhanded on my dad’s part, but it was perfectly legal and, well, worked to our advantage.