Dec 12 - Feb 6 in point form

• Before flying out east for the XMas break, Sara and I decided to celebrate an early xmas eve + day so we wouldn't have to bring our gifts for each other across the country and back again. 
• This is our Vancouver Christmas Eve in VanDusen Gardens

• This is our Vancouver Christmas Morning - it actually snowed!

 

• Flew to Ottawa and caught up with friends and Rob's family.

• Drove to Peterborough on Boxing Day and spent a few days with Sara's folk there

• Back at home in Vancouver, we made some delicious Apple Crumble 

• Rob was a victim of Sara's wildnerness first aid course

• Board game night! Rob's coworker + her significant other came over for a fun night of Balderdash, Scattergories, and Boggle

• Aunt Mary + Agnes were in town for 2 days visiting Mary, I was lucky to spend some time with the three of them. We went to dinner at a funky sushi restaurant called Eatery on Broadway Ave.  We picked up some dessert down the street at Calhoun's and ate it back at my place. Spending time with these ladies warms the heart. 

• For Sara's birthday, we went to a ceramics shop and picked out a statue and painted it.  Mine is the bear, Sara's is the vase. 

-Rob

Local Celebrity Spotting

I was on the bus home from work not three blocks from my house, and who did I see crossing the street?  None other than David Suzuki! I quickly rang for the next stop, but unfortunately the bus took me two blocks before it let me off. I started to run towards where I saw David, but he had walked off.

Well, tonight was fun.  After dinner, Sara and me decided to stay away from the computer and TV.  We played  Canasta - a card game we had learned last Christmas but hadn't played since.  Sara beat me hands down, surprise surprise.  But then - world be my witness - I discovered something Sara's much worse at than me - much much worse, and I'm not even very good at it.  Writing upside-down with her left hand.  This quickly evolved into left-handed upside-down mirrored-image writing.  Proudly, I'm also much better than her. But after that, she took me to town at 3D tic-tac-toe.

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.

-Rob 

Welcome to our front yard!

With a big weekend of skiing last week, we decided to stay a little closer to home this weekend. The beach you can see in all of these pictures is less than a block from home, and the water and mountains are our everyday view. Walking to our local Starbucks, you see the mountains. Walking to the grocery store you see the mountains. Going to the library...well, you get the idea!

Even though we stayed in the city, we certainly kept pretty busy this weekend. Friday night we went to my gym's annual Christmas Party. It was held at a club in Yaletown - a really nice thing for the gym to do, to rent the place out and let us all in for free! Once I finally warmed up in the drafty room, it was a great night. Lots of dancing, a fashion show, people of all different ages...all in all, a really nice event!

Saturday we spent the day getting chores done, but wanted to make our place feel a little bit more festive. Without spending a lot of money to really decorate, we decided we would make our own Christmas stockings, so that we can use them to exchange gifts in our pre-Christmas celebration before we go back to Ontario. You can see we were both hard at work getting our little pieces of felt to look just right... Good to get some creative juices flowing though!



Then Saturday evening, a couple of our friends from university came over to our place for a board game night filled with lots of laughs. We played Boggle and Scrabble and did a lot of catching up in between. Definitely something we plan to do again in the near future!

By the time Sunday rolled around it felt like the weekend had already been SOO long. Rob got a massage, we relaxed and read at Starbucks, and we finished up a few chores.

All in all, a weekend filled with good friends, good music, and beautiful mountain views :)

-Sara

Frisbee in November!

And today, Sara and I played frisbee on Kits beach with all sorts of people taking advantage of the break in rain season by taking their dogs out, walking on the beach, jogging along the water, pushing baby strollers, etc.  Vancouver's a city where you can ski one day and go to the beach the next.
-Rob

Skiing in November!!

Sara and I ordered some ski equipment online a few weeks ago. We got a great deal on skis, bindings, poles, and bags for the two of us (<$600 total). There are half a dozen ski & board shops about 7 blocks from our house, so we walked there last weekend to get Sara ski boots (my mom shipped me mine from Ottawa - thanks mom!) and get our skis tuned up.

We picked up our skis from the shop yesterday, and this morning we set off to go skiing. There are 3 hills near Vancouver, the biggest is Cypress (~30 minute drive). We found out there's a shuttle that goes to Cypress with a pickup near our house. So this morning we set out - in the pouring rain - and walked 7 blocks to the pickup location. The bus picked us up at 7:30AM and we were at the hill by 8:30AM.



Until the last 15 minutes of the bus ride, I thought the day would be a writeoff - there was no snow anywhere! None in Vancouver (8 degrees), but also even as we were driving up the mountain there were plenty of trees, but not a trace of snow anywhere. And suddenly - Winter Wonderland. All the trees were covered in white, as was the ground. It was a strange experience - like suddenly transporting into a different world.

The day turned out to be great. We skied from 9:30 AM - 11, ate lunch, were back out from 12 - 1:30, took a break, and finally from 1:45 - 2:30, ending just as we were starting to get tired and cold. The snow was heavy, but there was plenty of it! At the top, things were foggy, and over the course of the day our clothing got soaked (maybe you can see in my pic below at the end of the day - my red jacket is completely soaked).

A successful first downhill ski experience on our new skis - and hopefully the first of many this season.

-Rob

P.S. We were able to buy Olympic Women's Hockey tickets.

VANOC TICKET FAIL - making the most of the day

We were carefully aware of Saturday, November 7's approach, the day was circled on our calendar. At 9:45 AM we stopped all our morning activities and both waited anxiously at the computer as the last 15 minutes to 10AM ticked away. At 9:55 AM, 5 minutes before the start of the final opportunity to purchase Olympic tickets, we started trying to login to our previously-setup online Olympic ticket purchasing account. Finally, the time was upon us. 10 AM. We tried to login, and...the server was busy !

The error message on the computer screen told us to try again later. We interpreted "later" as meaning "right away". And tried again. And again. And again. At 10:30 AM we were still continually trying to login to our account where we could buy tickets. Finally, at 10:38 we got through. Mind you, not all was right - the page was basic HTML, but we didn't care - we could still navigate to the ticket search area. We found the event we wanted (Women's hockey - Canada vs. Sweden - $25/ticket). Almost there! We clicked the tickets and - ... - loading - ... - Error message - the page cannot be found. Crap! Click back - can't do that. Click reload - are you sure you want to reload? - yes - wait..wait.. Error message screen - server is busy. Now it's 10:44 and we've been booted out of the system.

But we're not going to give up. We keep trying to login - server busy error page. At 11:10, I realize there's a phone number to call if you want to book over the phone. I try calling - busy signal. Redial - busy signal. Try calling the hearing impaired number - busy. To optimize our chances, Sara works the computer retrying continually, and I work the phone lines. At 11:30, we switch roles to keep things interesting. At 11:55 - two hours since we started - we're mentally losing steam. At 12:30 - hallelujah - Sara gets through on the phone - it's ringing!! An automated voice informs her that the office is currently closed, and is open on Saturdays from 9AM - 4PM (which means it should be open!!). That was the last straw. We decided to get on with our day.

We had wasted 3 hours of our Saturday NOT getting Olympic tickets. The morning was over. The weekend felt like to was zooming by. What a disaster.

Luckily, the next 9 hours turned out to be really fun and felt long, so by Saturday night we'd felt like it had been a long weekend. After the Olympic ordeal, we ate some lunch and went to pick up some groceries - I wanted to pick up some items to make some home made pasta sauce.

My meat sauce with some spaghetti - a rare cooking venture for me - turned out to be delicious. It was really easy to make too - I'd say the whole dinner took about 35 minutes to prepare - and we had most of the ingredients already: italian sausage, crushed canned tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, basil, red wine, and olive oil.

After dinner, we bussed over the UBC Hockey Arena to watch a game - UBC Thunderbirds vs. University of Alberta Bears. It's the same place that the Olympic Women's Hockey game we want to see will take place. Tickets to the UBC game cost $10 each and the game was fun to watch. It went from 7:30pm to 9:30.

Saturday turned out to be a great day, even if we don't have our Olympic tickets. (Turns out the whole ticket system was a bust and VANOC has postponed the sell date until next weekend! We have to go through the whole thing again, but at least we still have a chance to get our hands on some tickets)


-Rob

Baking bread

Quick update here. I just finished reading the book "The Cure for Death by Lightning" by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. (I've been doing a lot of reading these days). For those of you that haven't read this book, it includes a lot of recipes and remedies, including a cure for death by lightning. And it was really impressive and foreign for me to read about how the family in the book lives mainly off of ingredients grown right on their farm. At age 15, the main character has so much responsibility for keeping the home and farm running and more or less everything they eat was cooked/baked by her or her mom.

So...I decided to try baking some bread. I have made bread once before, while camping in Alaska. We had a break day, so I took the time to bake some bread from scratch - I did that another day and made some cinnamon rolls from scratch too... But I'd never baked bread in an oven, in "normal" circumstances before. I found a great recipe online, and on an evening Rob was actually home early from school, we bought the ingredients I didn't already have (I usually keep yeast in the house...), and I baked some bread.

It was a mix of regular and whole wheat flour. And it was quite the hit. Really delicious if I do say so myself. I can understand why some people are such proponents of fresh, homemade bread! We'll have to try it again sometime, and maybe experiment with some different varieties. We'll let you know about any future bread adventures :)

-Sara