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??