triple eek!

It has been a crazy pair of days.

First. Yesterday there was a lockdown in my building because someone e-mailed in a threat to do harm to someone in the building. Everyone in the building was either evacuated or told to stay behind locked doors from 2pm onwards. They brought in the SWAT team, there were helicopters circling, and general mayhem ensued. Fortunately, the SWAT team didn't find anyone, no one was hurt, and everyone eventually got to leave their offices (some people as early at 4:30, some as late at 6pm). I was evacuated, went to a meeting in another building, and then went home, after asking the campus police to turn off the little old space heater I had left on beside my desk.

Second. The Canada Immigration website says that they have processed my Irish husband's application, and mailed him his working papers! He's in shock at the thought of having to go back to work. He may have to ease into it, and is considering driving a snow grooming machine on the local ski hill for a while.

Third. I coordinated another big grant application this week. This one is ~42 single-spaced pages long, and has contributions from 6 people, including me. I've finally written my parts, gathered everyone else's parts, and made them all sound like they are part of a single application. Tomorrow I have to finish figuring out the budget and cut and paste it all into ridiculous online forms. Lots of work!

snippets

Life has been busy!!! Mark and Erika visited us for a fabulous week. We ran around Vancouver, showing them the sights, rode our bikes,



and ate lots of sushi.



Then we drove up to Sun Peaks for the icewine festival, went tubing (a first for all of us, and wayyy more fun than we expected - the hills were steep, the curves were sharp, and the snow berms were high - but sometimes we thought we were going to go right over the edge!),



and drank lots of wine. We went to two seminars, one a wine & chocolate tasting that was like a science experiment with food (you tasted 8 wines and 4 chocolates in every possible combination, then drank the wine at the empty tables - lots of folks were too rich and too busy skiing to attend, even though they'd bought tickets),



and another was a progressive wine tasting, where you walked from booth to booth, tasting wine for 3 whole hours. It was SO decadent, and so delicious.

The week was over too soon, and we had to let them go. Two days later, Saira had her toe operation. She's likely got bone cancer in one of her toes, and she had the toe removed last Tuesday. It's been hurting her for months and months, and she is recovering from the surgery amazingly well. We were worried about how she would make it through the anaesthetic, but she was just fine. She's walking around with a cute bandage on her foot, and eating well - probably better than before the operation!

Work is going really well at the new job. It's intense - I'm doing a million things I've never done before - in my first week, I co-wrote a $100,000 grant. Next week there is more grant writing on my plate, and a meeting with the Vice-President of the Properties Trust to talk about the budget. eek! It's fun, and scary. I'm sure it will get less scary as I get a better idea of what my responsibilities are. But for the moment, every time I hear about something that needs to be done and isn't getting done (which, since everything is ramping up for our move in a year, is about every 5 minutes), I feel like maybe *I* should do it - obviously that's ridiculous, but it's how I'm feeling right now.

Douglas is volunteering at the Vancouver Aquarium as a diver, and loving every second of it. Every time he comes home from an orientation session, he tells me about a dozen cool things about local marine organisms. I'm going to have to get a membership so I can go there often and check out everything he's telling me about!

I went to the second Vancouver stitch and bitch meeting today, at my friend Shelley's house, and we made plans for a next meeting, so stitch and bitch lives! hooray! I'm still obsessed with ravelry, too, and have picked out a pattern for my first sweater.

I'll leave you with this vision of Douglas' and my future:



How many llamas will fit in a sprinter??

r-a-v

I've been a bad, bad blogger - I haven't blogged in aaaages. And the longer I leave it, the more stuff there is to mention, so I leave it even longer...

This morning we went cross-country skiing at Cypress Mountain. We drove over the bridge to North Van, along the trans-Canada highway for a bit, and suddenly we were in a winter wonderland. They have a 10-foot base layer of snow, and a foot of new snow. The trees are covered in snow - even their trunks. It was gorgeous up there. And it's such a perfect arrangement - the snow is up on the mountain where it belongs. You don't have to shovel it, or drive in it, but you can go visit it whenever you want.



Here are our friends Yanick and Tina:



The Christmas holidays are over, the days are getting longer. The friends who were in town visiting have gone home, the Christmas parties are over, and the Christmas baking is gone (though I might have to make another batch of shortbread - that stuff is addictive). We both had the flu this year, so the holidays were quiet. I feel rested, ready for the new year.

I have 2 new obsessions, both starting with r-a-v. Ravelry, first - it's facebook for knitters. I can browse patterns, looking for something new to make. Or I can pull a lonely bit of yarn out of my stash, and see what other people have made with it. Or I can check out how a pattern I want to make will turn out in various yarns people have used. I can see friends' projects. It's eating a lot of my time! There are a lot of other obsessed knitters in Vancouver, though - we tried to go to a late boxing day sale at 3 Bags Full on Main Street, and we had to leave because the lineup to pay for yarn was about 60 people long. The store was *packed* and everyone in there was in line with a basket or bag full of yarn.

O, and before I get to my next r-a-v obsession, I've found something else to do with wool - felting without knitting! My brother gave me a book called Felt: Handmade Style (which I can't find on amazon, oddly) about felting straight from unspun wool. It's crazy. You take the unspun wool (called either sliver or roving), lay it out on a sushi mat, wet it, roll up the sushi mat, bash it around a bit, and voila, you have a flat felted fabric. Crazy. You can also make bubble wrap forms, and make hats and bags, you name it. I'll post pictures when I make something other than a flat piece of fabric.

OK, and the next r-a-v obsession - ravioli!! We got a ravioli tray from the Italian market down the road (where everyone speaks Italian all the time), and have been making ravioli non-stop. mmmmmmmmm



Douglas has been working on camperizing the van, and soon, soon, it will be functional!! I can't believe the progress he's making. Here's the inside of the van (and me, looking silly):



I hope everyone is having a good New Year!