New photo site is finished

I have finally finished transferring all our old photo albums from .Mac to Flickr. From now on, all our photos will go straight onto Flickr - the old .Mac site is dead. In fact, the old site will disappear mid-April when our .Mac subscription expires, so update your bookmark if you have one!

We made it to the Chinese New Year Parade on Sunday. It was very entertaining. I'll post some photos when I get round to sorting them out.

Birthdays and visitors

Monday (12th) was my birthday. Happy birthday to me! I am now 34 years old. It wasn't particularly eventful. I had to work all day, and then Steph had to work a little late in the evening as she is very busy. We made a nice jambalaya to eat when we got home though, and had a bottle of wine from our trip to the Okanagan last year - a cheeky little Gewurztraminer. Very pleasant.

Steph's parents arrived on Wednesday. They are staying with us for a fortnight. So far the weather hasn't been too great, but it could be worse too - it's not raining all the time :) I don't think they mind too much though - they are here to take it easy. We just got back from a trip to Granville Island where we bought some lovely looking sausages for tomorrow evening - we are making gourmet bangers and mash. Yum. It was John's birthday yesterday (Steph's Dad) so tonight we are going out to Cin Cin for a slap up meal. Food is the best thing, isn't it?

Tomorrow we might watch the Chinese New Year Parade if it isn't raining too much. Failing that, we will put our feet up. Hope you are having a nice weekend too!

Big White Ski Trip

Last weekend (9th-11th) was the annual work ski trip, and this year we went to Big White. That's in the interior of BC, about 50km from Kelowna and close to the Okanagan valley; that's the place we went wine-tasting last year.

There were around 40 people on this year's trip, a substantial increase from last year. As usual the journey on the bus was gruelling - 7.5 hours there and 6.5 back. We got there around 11pm on Friday evening. We were tired, but still squeezed in a little beer before bed ;)

Big White apparently has the nickname "Big White-Out" because its location is often locked in low cloud, making visibility poor. We were lucky on the Saturday to get sunshine and blue skies for several hours. Steph went off skiing with Lauren and Woody who were also on the trip. I tried to get myself onto an organized snowshoe tour, but they couldn't find the guide who was doing it. Great. By 12.30pm I'd still heard nothing, so I thought I'd give up on it and snowshoe by myself.

At Big White, you snowshoe on the cross-country ski trails in the Nordic area. With starting late, I only got an hour and a half on the trails before they closed for the day. A lot of the trails I walked initially were kind of dull - rather like a road through a forest that was covered in snow. Towards the end of my walk though, I discovered a 0.5k cross-country ski trail that was double black diamond difficulty. This was much better - narrow and with plenty of gradient. I really started to enjoy it at that point, and vowed to find more of those trails the next day.

After the snow fun, we had apres-ski put on by the tour company, and then hot-tubbed for a while. The hotel this year was fine but not as luxurious as last year, and the single hot tub was super-crowded, but we squeezed in somehow. Later we went out for some food at a nice restaurant called The Copper Kettle - recommended if you ever go to Big White; it was the best place to eat that we found.

There was more skiing and boarding on Sunday, and I got out early and went straight for the good trails on my snowshoes. The weather was grey and it snowed gently most of the time. I did a good 5km in total over about 2 hours or so, of which about 2.5km was on the hard but fun trails. The last trail I walked called "The Juice Is Loose" was the toughest by far. It climbed steeply up a hillside for about 0.75km and the snow was really deep; it was pretty much like breaking a fresh trail. My shoes would sink a good 20 or 30cm with each step. Heavy going! At some points it got quite hard to follow the trail - it was marked by orange tags on the trees which was fortunate because there was little sign of any other footprints. The only tracks I did see looked like paw prints, but there were no shoe prints accompanying them so maybe it was a wolf? Eeeek. Needless to say, that motivated me to keep going at a reasonable pace :)

All in all, it was a great weekend. A long way to go, but worth it I think as we both had a great time. Now that we have worked at Radical for a while, we know more people which made the whole weekend a little more sociable. I think we preferred Sun Peaks from last year on balance though - maybe they will go back there next year. I've uploaded a few photos of my snowshoeing to Flickr - find them here. I'll try to get together some more photos of other stuff.

Keane love Vancouver

Steph and I went to see Keane on Wednesday evening at the Orpheum Theatre in Downtown. This was the last date of their North American tour, which was supposed to happen in October but got delayed due to some rehab issues.

They put on an excellent live show, right from the beginning where they began with a crescendo of synthesizer and red light - somewhat reminiscent of Muse. The lead singer Tom was pretty manic, and danced and jumped around the stage like a grasshopper on speed. Despite that, his vocals were faultless and as a whole the band sounded great through the Orpheum's sound system. The theatre was a pretty cool venue - inside it is somewhat churchlike in grandeur. They had a good lightshow too to jazz things up.

They played all their best songs from the two recent albums, interspersed with Tom chatting quite a bit to the audience, mainly to tell us how great we were. Things started off fairly subdued, but they soon got into it and pretty soon everyone was cheering and yelling. And singing along of course, as was I. The lead singer let the crowd do the singing a few times (most notably on "Somewhere Only We Know") and we certainly held our end up :) I don't think I've really heard a louder crowd at a gig in Vancouver. The atmosphere was great. I hope it will encourage Keane to come back again soon, because we had a great time.