Cheers!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE&feature=youtu.be

Random Acts of Culture
http://www.knightarts.org/random-acts-of-culture

Happy Thanksgiving!

...to all....(I don't have a suitably festive picture, so this will do instead).

First Snow!

We got our first snow of the season in town yesterday. Cypress and Whistler opened early, so you can guess where Mark is right now.....More photos from the beach yesterday here.

Summer and The Bear

I thought you'd all enjoy these. The bear photo not taken by us :)

Stuff I Was Delinquent in Posting

OK, well I'm not going to try to make up for the huge gap with no posts earlier this year. Here are the highlights....

1. May - San Diego rebuilding a fence (no photos posted yet)
2. May - Hawaii to visit Roger, Eden-Lee and Everett. Mainly to go to the Hawaii Book & Music Festival which Roger runs. Favorites: Story-telling and the Youth Poetry Slam. Another highlight: riding from the Kualoa Ranch.
3. August: Queensland trip. Visited our friends Steve and Mandy and their 3 kids in Brisbane, then went sailing in the Whitsundays, then drove back down the coast to Brisbane.
4. Extended our deck:

Before:

After:

Meanwhile Summer......

More importantly, how could I forget. While we were in the Adirondacks Summer went to Marshall Lake with Kirsten (Mark's student), Mark (Kirsten's Mark) and 6 other people, now all Summer's new best friends.....See photo album.

Adirondacks Fall Weekend

Last weekend we went to the Adirondacks for the wedding of Mark's middle school friend, Gary, and Melissa. We flew (a red eye) to Montreal, drove from there, and stayed in Lake Placid at a place with great views.

The wedding was at the Jay covered bridge at 10am on 10/10/10, and the reception at the Boat House on the lake in Lake Placid.

We managed to get in a couple of hikes, I tried out a Zumba class, we were reminded that Vancouver has good food and that that is not true of everywhere else, and we got to go to the top of the 1980 Olympic ski jump towers ...... A beautiful weekend.

Goodnight

Sunset over the Howe Sound during the Olympics.

To paraphrase The Two Ronnies:

"So it's goodnight from us."
"And it's goodnight from them."
"Goodnight."

http://www.vancouver2010.com/olympic-spectator-guide/celebrations-and-ceremonies/ceremonies/closing-ceremonies/

(and.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Ronnies)

Mark's Sat eve downtown

I'm in Houston, wondering whether it will be more risky to wear an Obama t-shirt or a Canada t-shirt during today's hockey game. Mark took these downtown last night. We both were down there the night before - saw the Canada vs. Slovakia hockey game in a pub, then went to see the Cauldron. See Olympics Day 16 photos.

Saturday Sunshine

OK - this posting of Mark by a mural under the Granville Bridge is a week late. Right now I am sitting in a hotel room in The Woodlands, Texas - a hideous shopping mall area north of Houston where the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is held. It's not quite Vancouver during the Olympics, so I'm making up for it by posting some pictures of last Saturday. It was a gorgeous day and we walked over to Granville Island and then downtown. See Olympic Day 9 Photos: Fun in the Sun.


Granville Island had a "rainforest parade" - what fun! All sorts of weird and wonderful creatures on stilts dancing with kids and adults alike!


And I got a new hat, heavily discounted, thanks to Jon Montgomery's Gold for Canada in the Men's skeleton the day before.

Olympics - Day 14: Men's Aerials Final

Everything sounds better in French....especially the descriptions of the sequences in the men's aerials! Still, irrespective of the description it's impressive. Photographs don't do it justice but we took some anyway! See Olympics Day 14 photograph album . As an event though it was actually my least favorite of the ones we attended. Perhaps because it was over too quickly? On the plus side, it was the only event I saw in the evening and was at Cypress Mountain which was very beautiful in the fog and dusk/dark. And of course outdoors at night means hot chocolate...... :)

Cypress Mountain was the subject of some discontent during the first few days of the Games, thanks to a cruddy "shipment" of California buses/coaches to provide transportation up and down the mountain, that instead broke down. Consequently 99 "emergency" coaches from all over N. America were sent to Vancouver ASAP to help out, along with their drivers from New Brunswick, North Carolina, Florida, you name it. Other than that early glitch, the smoothness of the transportation operations has been quite something. When we went up to Whistler we were on Bus #899...... that gives you an idea of the scale of this....

Women's Downhill

We went up to the Women's Downhill today - see the photo album "Olympics Day 6 - Women's Downhill". The weather was amazing and the race was impressive. This is Catherine's favorite run at Whistler (well that's favorite out of the subset that she can actually ski down!) - "Franz's Run". It has spectacular views (not that the 100km/hr racers were looking at the view!). It was a really difficult run - bumpy, funky lighting, fall away turns, big air - there were several wipe-outs but the medal winners all skied incredible runs. We were just behind Julia Mancuso's (silver medal) Mom - we have a couple of good photos of what it's like when your daughter skis for silver.

The British Press

So, the British Press have been slamming Vancouver and the Olympics: the transportation, the small percentage of things that have gone wrong, the weather,..... I have 3 words for them "Wait for London".

Opening Ceremonies: Friday Feb 12, 2010

We walked ...and walked... and walked....from our house to Granville Island ... then to BC Place... then afterwards to downtown.... The Olympic flame arrived at Granville Island on foot and left by canoe. Photo album: Day 1.






The Opening Ceremonies were indescribably amazing. OK, so the whole world knows that the 4th leg of the cauldron didn't "rise up". But most people in BC place barely noticed - the atmosphere was so incredible. It was really fun being there 3 hours beforehand - see the pictures of the preparations. Photo Album - Opening Ceremonies.

The Beginning

Well, we don't have kids, we don't FB, and I'm not making my way through 365 days of Julia Child's recipes, but we do have a dog and we do have the Olympics. So the time has come.....here's the blog.

First things first, the Olympics. Well, what an amazing thing to experience in your home town. And I mean town, because Vancouver is pretty small by city standards. The plus side of this is even in Olympic mayhem it's not so far to anything. So we've been walking our home town. And yes... in the rain....


The Olympic Flame: this is quite something. The Vancouver segment of the route really covered the city. We could easily have seen it many times over the course of last week. As it was Mark saw it outside our department on the UBC campus on Thursday at 6pm, jumped on his bike and came down to Kitsilano where we saw it outside our gym.