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.

Mini Film Review: Pan's Labyrinth

FOR: The faeries. Evil Captain Vidal. A giant CG toad. Mercedes. Excellent sound.

AGAINST: A bit gory. Lots of symbolism that went right over my head.

FAVOURITE BIT: Mr. Hands-For-Face and his eyes.

VERDICT: Perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but if you like dark fantasy you'll probably like this a lot. We did.

First ski of the season (and other things)

So where was I?

Bodyworlds? Not likely, apparently, as it was far too popular. We turned up on the Thursday evening to find it completely sold out. It had gotten so popular in the last few days that they decided to open Science World 24 hours a day from the Friday morning to the Sunday evening to allow more visitors. We checked online and found that the only times left available were between midnight on Friday and 6.30am Saturday morning. Err... no thanks. That will teach us to go to these things a little sooner next time.

Cypress? Yes! We had a great day. I did some snowshoeing, and Steph skied. We went with our friends Lauren and Woody and got there even before it opened. The morning was quite grey and misty, and visibility was poor. By lunchtime though, it turned into a very nice day. I took the camera and snapped a few photos which you'll find here. We were all shattered by the time we left, and stopped off on the way home for lots of greasy food and some beer. Lovely.

Last Sunday we met up with Ben, our friend who was here in Vancouver for job interviews. He ended up staying with us Monday and Tuesday in the spare room to save him some money on yet another hotel. He found himself a job and even signed on the dotted line before he left. He ought to be back sometime in February to stay. Good luck Ben!

We had our first two functional fitness lessons too, which is proving to be rather good. After the Thursday session we both felt more sore in the bum muscles than we ever have in our life. We are definitely using bits of our bodies that don't usually get to do anything. Today's session was the hardest yet, although our trainer tells us this is still the introductory work - the real exercising is yet to come. I'm starting to get scared.

This week I am going to a conference in San Francisco for work from Wednesday to Friday, and Steph has arranged herself a couple of "girly" nights out while I'm gone. Tsch.

Christmas and New Year photos

They are now up on Flickr at last. I was determined to sort it before the end of January :) Three small sets in all:

• My family Christmas (no pictures of Steph's family this time)
• A few pictures from New Year's Eve (sorry Tamsin and Noel!)
• Our whistle stop in Bristol

Mini Film Review: Children of Men

FOR: Michael Caine. English accents. London looking even dirtier than usual. The unexpected death of a major character. The script. Superb documentary-style camera work. Spotting the kid from the original English version of "Queer As Folk". An awesome 10-minute action shot with no cuts. Pam Ferris! A CG baby.

AGAINST: Why has Britain turned into a fascist state exactly?

FAVOURITE BIT: The low-speed dawn getaway in a car that won't start.

VERDICT: Superb! You must watch this film! Now!

...and a Happy New Year!

Okay, I guess I'm sorry that I didn't post before now. Blame Steph - she was going to post for the first time, but then changed her mind. I realise I am beginning to look like a crazy person with an imaginary girlfriend. Whatever.

Our trip home at Christmas was very enjoyable, although quite tiring. It was lovely to see our families and a few of our friends (you know who you are). Hopefully next year we can make the trip a little longer and get the chance to catch up with more of you.

So what has 2007 brought so far? Well, quite a lot of crazy weather for sure. Before Christmas, storms felled over 3000 trees in Stanley Park, and caused the roof of BC Place stadium to collapse. There's been nothing quite so newsworthy this year so far. Yesterday was actually very mild in the morning, but by the time we left work it had gotten cold and windy, and started to snow. This morning we woke up to snow on the ground, and it has been snowing on and off all day. That makes three snowfalls so far this winter. Vancouverites we have spoken to say it has never happened before. It's either climate change, or perhaps El Nino. I have a feeling its going to be another year of weather weirdness.

Also this morning, something went pop in our apartment and we lost electricity. Or at least some of it. About half our lights and sockets are out and the other half are still working. Fortunately we haven't lost anything vital like the fridge freezer or the internet (!), but tomorrow we're going to be showering in the dark. Looking forward to that.

In other news, one of our friends from England is here in Vancouver this week for job interviews, so we might see another addition to our little ex-pats club in the near future. Steph and I are also both going to try a new fitness programme organised through work. We are kind of bored and fancy a change of our gym routine. It's supposed to be all about functional fitness and developing whole body strength and stamina. That's all very well, but it is also all about an hour of exercise at 8.30am in the morning :/ Stay tuned to find out how long we keep that up.

Tomorrow we're hopefully going to the Bodyworlds 3 exhibition at Science World. The exhibition ends at the weekend so this is our last chance. I saw the original Bodyworlds exhibition in London several years ago and really enjoyed it, as well as finding it to be a real education in anatomy. Hopefully it will be similarly worthwhile this time round.

We're borrowing the work ski passes at the weekend to go to Cypress Mountain. With the weather we've been having, the conditions ought to be great. Steph will be skiing but I hope to snowshoe if I can. It'll be our first winter sports of the season - about time too.

I will try to rustle up some pictures for Christmas 2006 when I get a chance - all this text can get a little tiresome :) I've also been transferring a bunch of old photos from .Mac to Flickr. It's an ongoing process that is likely to take some time.

Here's to a superb 2007!

Merry Christmas!