Four minus one minus one plus four

Bonnie, Sean and I carved pumpkins the other night.

At first we had four pumpkins, but one rotted on our mantle. So then we had three.

Then, we brought in the two from the garage and one was rotted. So we only had two.

Next, we drove to Safeway, and bought four more. In the end, we had six. This is the story of the six pumpkin carvings.We each had a large pumpkin and a small pumpkin.You'll notice that mine was larger than Bonnie's or Sean's. Heh.

I wanted to do a cat of some sort on my large pumpkin, so I found a template on the internet and printed it out. I chose "Cat on a Broom". I pinned the template onto my pumpkin and used a pushpin to mark the outline of the template. You can kindof see the marks below (especially if you click on the picture for the zoom in):Since we didn't have any "professional" fancy pumpkin carving tools, we used what we found around the house. The most effective tools by far were a set of steak knives. All of the amazing pumpkins you'll see below were carved using only steak knives. Now that, truly, is skill.

Here is my completed cat pumpkin, before tea light insertion.Sean chose to use a template for his large pumpkin too, creating a skull and cross bones.The green marks are from the sharpie he used to help follow the design.

Bonnie went free-style and made a scary face in her pumpkin, in the traditional style:Here is the completed project:
After finishing our large pumpkins, we moved onto our smaller pumpkins. We had chosen three stencils of a related theme - the Wizard of Oz. I had the template for the lion, Bonnie for the scarecrow and Sean for the tin man. Here is an example of the template stuck to the pumpkin. I used a pushpin to mark the edges of the cutouts.This was actually a pretty tricky design, since some of the lines were quite thin. I decided not to cut the eyes right out because they were very small and I thought I would break it instead, so I just shaved the skin off the eyes so some light would come through. Here is my completed lion:Sean worked away at the tin man, happy to have an easier design than the skull and crossbones he had just finished.My kitty cat, Pumpkin, wandered around abjectly throughout the evening. She was a little unhappy not being the centre of attention, but once she realized that pumpkin tasted good, she didn't leave the kitchen. She just wandered around eating up little bits of pumpkin that we had dropped. Is it weird when Pumpkin eats pumpkin? Hehe.Here are all of the completed pumpkins:And lit up:Yes, I know, you can't see the lions eyes very well in the picture. Oh well.Here are the close-ups: Bonnie's scary face - Sean's pirate - Kim's Cat on Broom - Bonnie's scarecrow - Sean's tin man - Kim's lion - Not bad, hey?

And finally:Pumpkin with pumpkins.

Masque party

Almost a month ago now, I attended a masquerade gala in honour of my supervisor, Dr. Lorne Tyrrell. The party was a fundraiser for the Canadian Liver Foundation in honour of the research Lorne has accomplished over the years to fight hepatitis B and C viruses.Although seats at a table were $75, Lorne decided to invite the entire lab, so we all dressed in our best to attend the event. I wore my new dress, purchased in California during our holidays.The party was held at the Petroleum Club - nothing if not typically named here in Alberta. We were given masks at our seats, although I had borrowed one from Bonnie for the evening myself. Here's Kristen (left - my summer student and now project student) and Rineke (post-doc):Here's Rineke, me and Nikki. My mask didn't sit totally straight on my face, so it looks a little funny.See! Crooked.Despite the offset of the mask, other people wanted to try it on too. Here is Nikki:And Kristen:I also have a few pictures from other lab members. This is Ran, our newest graduate student:And Darci, one of our techs, looking slightly stunned.We sat at our tables for a nice fancy meal, enjoying all the servings including the CHOCOLATE dessert. Yum.After dessert, Lorne was awarded and gave a speech.Not only was he brave enough to wear his mask on stage (at least for a few minutes - it's hard to wear a mask and glasses at the same time), he was not shy about bringing politics into the fray during his speech.He spoke about the disproportionate amount of funding that goes to diseases like HIV, which has 35 million people infected, compared to diseases like hepatitis B and C viruses, which infects up to 700 million people worldwide. He also talked about how the Canadian government has put an emphasis on making research technologically marketable, instead of just basic research, and how this approach is backwards. His discovering of a drug treatment for hepatitis B virus 25 years ago, would never have happened if the basic research had not been in place. Anyway...I liked that Lorne didn't shy away from telling the elite of Edmonton "how it is".After dinner, there was a dance and a silent auction. I didn't dance too much, but did enjoy the live band. We also took some group shots of the lab:In addition, there were several faculty members from our department at the party, so we gathered them up and took some pictures too.The evening was pleasant, if a little formal. We didn't stay too late, since it all winded down around 11pm.

The return trip - the last two days were boring

On our drive home from Davis, we didn't do or see anything too interesting. We left Davis around 8:30 am on Sunday morning and drove all day, getting a hotel in the Tri-cities area in Washington late that night. We finished our drive home on Monday, reaching Calgary around 5pm. On our drive home, we helped pass the time by listening to a couple audio books we got from Ray. One was "Into the Wild" and the other was the "Vinyl Cafe", which some of you may recognize. Audio books definitely make the time go by quicker. Once home, it was nice to unpack and relax finally after all of that driving.

The farm

After our whirlwind day in San Francisco, we planned a more relaxed one around Davis for Saturday. In the morning, we slept in and slowly got ready for the day. We walked several blocks over to the Farmers Market and enjoyed the liveliness of it, while selecting some fruits for our drive back and some vegetables for our dinner that night. Next, we found a nice coffee place and sat on the sidewalk with our snacks, enjoying the warm air. It was a very hot day - in fact, it was unbearably hot if you sat in the sun.

After our stroll through town, we returned home only to load up into the car and go for a drive. We drove out to the farm to see some animals. There, we saw my favourite donkey named "Action Jackson". Action Jackson is a prize stud donkey. His main job is to, you know, be a stud. Look at him woo the ladies:He was pretty excited too, since there was a special lady friend at the farm.In fact, he was so excited that he put on a braying performance for us.

It's a lot of work to generate that sort of noise!

We also visited the horses at the farm. There were a few foals still around with the mamas.These guys were kicking around too.There was also this big draft horse there. He was huge!After visiting these animals, we headed over to another part of the farm where the beef cattle and water buffalo were kept. We also stopped into their large barn there, to search for an owl family that had been living there earlier in the summer. Unfortunately, the owls were gone, but it was a neat barn and had some cool, old equipment inside it.This was the best shot I took of the inside of the barn. Garrett has some better ones, but I don't have copies.Outside the barn, we saw this little baby wandering around. He was a bit afraid of us, but I think he looked just darling with his fancy earrings.We saw some other cows too, lining up for their pictures to be taken.The most interesting (or maybe, intimidating?) part about the farm were the water buffalo. These are animals that are not domesticatable, and you can tell that they do not like people when they look at you.Ray was brave enough to try to pet them, but I didn't want to get too close. They have huge horns, angry eyes and require stronger fencing to protect people from them.Who you lookin' at?Look at those horns - yikes!The animals slowly wandered over towards us. At first, I thought that they were just interested in us, but then Amanda pointed out that they had formed a defensive wall against us.I don't think they liked us. For me, the feeling was mutual.

The last thing of note at the farm were the olive trees! Here's one:
There were a number of these suckers around. Must be fun when the olives are ripe.

After a quick stop at the grocery store, we spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in the shade with some icy drinks, reading our books or chatting. We had a great dinner and then continued our relaxing day by vegetating on the couch for the evening. We didn't stay up too late, since Garrett and I intended to start our drive back early the next morning.