The Scientist

Star Trek

2009-05-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

We went to Vulcan, Alberta last weekend. Here are some of the shots from our trip!Garrett and his co-workers.The Hoeksema Crew and me!Post office in Vulcan. Some of you should get a post card soon!What a good cadet!We had lunch here:They only had one Star Trek-themed burger - the Spock burger. I ordered it. It had salsa, mushrooms, bacon and cheddar. It was pretty good!In the Enterprise Family Restaurant, with my Vulcan ears on!Mmmm...Vulcan eating a Spock burger. Is that wrong?Garrett's a Vulcan, too!Mural of the doctors of Star Trek, on the side of the pharmacy."Dammit, I'm a doctor, not a mural!"Dr. Beverly Crusher, from Star Trek: The Next Generation.Some Klingon words to consider.

The new Tyrrell lab

2009-05-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

Our lab JUST moved into our new building on Friday and Monday of this week. We are mostly settled in, with some minor kinks to work out and supplies to set up still remaining. Here are some pictures of our new lab.

Here is my new desk:The view from my desk:My bench part 1:My bench part 2:Here is my lab bay. My desk is on the left side, Kristen is on the right and Adrian's bench is the closest right side. We call ourselves "Team ZFP":The hallway, looking right:The hallway, looking left:My new locker:The new lunch room:The new ladies washroom:The hallway looking WAAAYYY back to our old building:The atrium, attached to our building:Tim Horton's is down below:

Kathy's babies

2009-04-13T21:10:00.000-07:00

My friend Kathy had twins awhile ago. Here are some photos of them:Paige in on the left and Luke is on the right.They don't really smile for the camera (they see the camera and all smiles are gone).Kathy tickled them in the above photo, so we got some smiles.Here's Paige, looking stony-faced for the camera.Here's Paige and me:Luke and me:Very cute babies!

A little bit of ski, a little bit of snowboard.

2009-04-13T20:39:00.000-07:00

Garrett, Sarah, Chris and I went snowboarding/skiing on Saturday at Sunshine Ski Resort in Banff.
Sarah is Garrett's sister and Chris is her boyfriend. This was during the car ride in the morning.This is at Sunshine Village at the base of the ski hill, although at the top of the gondola ride up to the ski hill.We started the day off on an easy run. This is Garrett and Chris:Garrett's relaxing in the sun before we start off.Sarah was the only skier among three snowboarders.On one of the chair lifts:Same chair lift.View #1 from the chair lift.View #2 from the chair lift.View looking back to the base of the gondola and the parking lot.Garrett, at the top of the hill with the view behind him. Sunshine really has fantastic views all around. All of the next series are photos of Garrett or me (and one with a stranger) with great views behind us.This is the one with the stranger. He was in my way when I took this, but I wasn't patient enough to wait for him to move.After skiing all day, we went to the patio for an apres-ski beer. There was this little bird guy flitting about, stealing food from plates."Beer is good!""Don't notice our helmet hair!"There was a bison inside the pub.After skiing, we tried to go to the hot springs in Banff, but it was crazy-busy. Instead, we went on a tour of the Banff Springs Hotel, since Chris is a tourist.Some cool dudes and dudette on the stairs in the hotel.On the deck of the hotel.View of from the deck.Another shot of the hotel.

Fernie ski trip, 2009

2009-03-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

We went to Fernie on the weekend and had a great ski trip. There was 2 feet of snow in the few days before we arrived. The ski hill was complete with powder up to our knees at places. It was really great conditions! Here we are in some powder:Mel and Bindi on the chair.Getting the gear on at the start of the day.The dark speck in the middle is me.Garrett, in knee-deep powder.It snowed all day.Bindi in the snow.Garrett ski-jumping.Mel skiing.Mel in the snow.Catherine skiing through the trees.

Snowshoeing in Banff

2009-03-03T21:08:00.001-08:00

On Saturday, Garrett and I did a snowshoe hike looping from Moose Meadows upwards and back down through Johnston Canyon. Highlights included a beautiful day, warm weather and sunshine, eating snow, frozen waterfalls and ice climbers.

Bargain!

2009-02-21T16:13:00.000-08:00

Bonnie and I went shopping today for purses, and didn't find much we liked in most stores since the style right now is for quite large bags. I don't want a purse that is larger than my backpack!!! Anyway, we finally found some that we liked at The Bay, for a decent price. Aaaannnnddd, it being The Bay, we both got extra discounts off at the till.

Guess how much my purse cost?$13.50!! It was on sale for $22.50 and then went down to $13.50 at the register. It's actually a deep blue colour, but no matter how I tried to photograh it, it just looked black.

Guess how much Bonnie's purse cost?$10.00!! It was on sale for $19 and went down at the till too. We were quite excited.

Guilty!!

2009-02-18T19:38:00.000-08:00

That's right, I'm guilty of sloth. My dedication (and interest) in blogging has declined, so I think I will take a break from it until I am motivated again. I am thinking of posting pictures occasionally, so my family can check them out if they don't have Facebook. But other than that, I'll go quiet for awhile and will come back when I have lots of energy to do this blog justice!

Some shots from the weekend

2009-02-16T19:42:00.000-08:00

Old-ish pictures

2009-02-15T19:18:00.000-08:00

Some shots from Garrett's staff post-Christmas party in January.

Who's that dapper gentleman?

The lab

2009-01-16T21:49:00.000-08:00

It's now time for a tour of my lab. I've shown you some of it before, but perhaps a more thorough job is in order.

Here is my desk:I would like to claim it's usually more tidy than this, but it isn't. It's a workplace, with papers here and there. My lab book is on the left, open to some relevant page. You can see pens and highlighters, sticky notes and mess all around. It bothers me sometimes, so I clean it up, but inevitably it returns to this state of entropy.
This is my UBC travel mug. Bonnie gave it to me when I moved to Edmonton and I've used it every day since then. I mostly drink water in it, but I also take it down to the coffee shop or Tim Horton's and get tea or coffee in it.This is my new Christmas mug. Garrett's Mom gave it to me from their trip to Niagara Falls. The bottom is signed by the artist. I like it because, some days, it's just the right size for a warm drink.These are my textbooks. On the rightmost side are textbooks from undergrad that are still moderately useful now. I've actually used the orange one numerous times during grad school, so it was worth the money I paid for it, but the other ones - not so much. In the middle are booklets from conferences that I've attended, and on the left are the textbooks I bought during grad school - Field's Virology. It's only the most comprehensive textbook on viruses out there! I know, I'm a nerd.This is my drawer with my files. Mostly journal articles and protocols, but also scholarship applications and random forms. Manuals, certificates...all that junk.This is the top drawer of my desk. Pens, pencils, scissors, tape, paperclips, thumb tacks, comb, etc etc etc.This is the very top shelf of my desk. It holds old posters of my data, textbooks and notebooks from undergrad and grad classes that are relevant to my field and a stack of re-usable paper on the left.This is my snack shelf. I have tea, hot chocolate, popcorn, fruit bars and crackers. The little yellow jar is sugar, to add to my tea or coffee.This is my cartoon cat calendar. I've had this same style of calendar for two years, and just purchased a new one again for this upcoming year. Even though the cartoons don't always make sense to me, I just like them for some reason.Moving out into the lab, here is my lab bench.It's one of the tidier benches in the lab. Even though I can't seem to keep my desk very neat, my bench is always pretty clean, at least at the end of the day. When I'm actually doing bench work, it can be messy as all heck, but I always put everything away at the end of the day. At the end of my bench is a microcentrifuge (for spinning liquids). At the near end of the bench is a vortexer (beige coloured square in the bottom right). The plastic beakers are discard bins for waste and the blue boxes contain plastic tips that go on the end of my pipettors. I'm not sure if non-scientists have any idea of what I'm talking about, but I don't know an easy way to describe all this so I just won't.

These are my pipettors. Also know as pipettes, I suppose. They measure volumes from 1 millilitre down to 0.5 microlitres. You can also see a box latex gloves in the background too.These are my containers of microfuge tubes, along with my tube racks - colourful! Over the last few years, I've collected some great coloured racks. I like them. I guard them from theft from my lab mates.This is just a couple shelves of my bottles of reagents. Most I use on a regular basis, some are used less frequently. I try not to keep stuff around too long if I'm never going to use it again, since other people might need the bottles for themselves.Now onto some of the equipment in my lab. This is a thermocycler. It holds tubes and can be set for a large range of temperatures for different amounts of time. It's mainly used for PCR.This area is our radioactive area. We work with radioisotopes around here. You have to be trained to work with this stuff to make sure it's safe and clean.This bench holds (front to back) our shaker platform, 42 degree C water bath, 37 degree C water bath, microcentrifuge and hybridization oven.This is my shelf in our freezer, with all my boxes of samples.This is one of our biosafety cabinets.Here's our tissue culture room with more biosafety cabinets. That's Rineke!This is our lab microwave. We use it to heat water and agarose. Don't heat your lunch in that sucker!This is our plate reader. Basically a spectrophotometer that reads 96-well plates.This is our warming cabinet (37 degrees C) for warming media or incubating certain reactions.This is our flammables cabinet.This is our Lightcycler for quantitative PCR. It's sadly out of date, but we should be getting a new one soon.This is our desk area. We are cram-packed in there now, since my supervisor hired a bunch of new people and we have two undergrads kicking around too. But we manage and it's nice to have a fun group of people to work with.This is one of our microscopes. It's in the tissue culture room and we mostly use it for looking at cells. It doesn't have high magnification - our other microscopes are better for higher magnification.This is our countertop centrifuge, for larger tubes than the microcentrifuge will hold. It doesn't go past 4000rpm, so if you need to spin faster than that, you'll have to use our large format centrifuge or our ultracentrifuge (very high speeds). Ya, we have a lot of centrifuges.This is our tissue culture cell incubator. It keeps the cells at 37 degrees C with CO2 to buffer the media.And for the grand finale, here's a video of how fun science can be!!

I'm igniting nitrocellulose membranes that are leftover from experiments. Hooray for science!

Snowshoes and Engagements

2009-01-13T21:30:00.000-08:00

Alright, it's time for me to spill the beans. Garrett and I got engaged on New Year's Eve! Since I'm such a modest person, I didn't want to just talk allllll about myself here, so I put off writing an entry. However, I can't avoid it anymore! Well, I could, but I won't.

On New Year's Eve, Garrett and I took our brand new snowshoes out to Kannaskis country for a day hike. The weather was thankfully warmer than usual, with temperatures around minus 7, although the wind was pretty strong. While driving to the trailhead, we were faced with some tricky driving, since the blowing snow completely obscured the car ahead and behind us. We were a little worried a few times when we couldn't tell if we were about to rear end the car in front, or whether we were about to be rear ended by the car behind us! Fortunately, there weren't any morons on the road and we all kept our distance from each other.

Once at the trailhead, we suited up. It took us a few minutes to figure out the bindings of our snowshoes - they were new, after all - but other than that we were ready to go. We were going to hike the Chester Lake Trail, which was approximately 8 km round trip and boasted both snowshoe and cross-country ski trails. The start of the trail is common for both type of trekkers, but shortly we turned off onto the snowshoe trail. Here is Garrett hiking ahead of me:There was a lot of nice fresh snow to hike through and the trail was fun to travel - lots of twists and turns. We hiked up and up for a bit, traversing some steep terrain. Our snowshoes, however, had heel lifts for climbing, so we snapped those into place and had an easier time of it (although we both found our fitness levels to be sadly lacking - haven't been exercising enough lately!). Here's Garrett in nearly the same stance as the above picture! We're just about to leave the trees into a large clearing, where the howling wind ended up giving my face some wind burn.This is near the top in an open meadow.Garrett played in the snow here by going off the trail. It was actually pretty deep out there and he sank down below his knees.I made a movie of him trying to climb back to the trail.

Here's a shot looking down the trail back at me. I always tend to follow Garrett when we hike, since he sets a better pace than I do.Here's a shot of Garrett's head with some snowy mountains in the background. He had his camera along as well, and took some shots of me, but they are at his house and I don't have them for this blog yet. I'll post them later sometime.More snowy mountain.At the top we ran into a lot of people. The trail was quite busy that day, but we managed to find our own spot to sit and have lunch.Although it looks comfy, it was actually quite cold to lay around and eat our lunch. My hands got really really cold, although the hot chocolate thermos Garrett carried up sure did taste good and warmed us up a bit. This is a shot of my feet:I have girly snowshoes, all nice and blue and pretty. Garrett's snowshoes are manly colours, like red and black.

Once we had eaten our lunch, we packed up right away and headed back down the trail. We were just that cold - my fingers took awhile to warm up after lunch, but eventually I got feeling back. After heading partway down the trail, Garrett suddenly turned off the trail and starting walking around a tree. I followed him, not really sure what was up, but it's always fun to wander around in the snow with your snowshoes on, so I thought that was what we were doing. He stopped walking soon, though, and took off his backpack.

"What are we doing?" I asked. "Am I taking a picture of you in the snow?"

"Sure," he replied. So I took this picture of him standing:Right after this shot, he reached into his backpack and pulled out the ring box. After some appropriate words and getting down on one knee (with his snowshoes on, in the snow), he asked me to marry him and I said "Yes!".

Pretty exciting, hey?

So, now we're engaged. I'm not sure how much I'll write here about our wedding plans and whatnot, but eventually we'll have photos up once the big day arrives.

Some of my favorite photos by Garrett

2009-01-11T10:11:00.000-08:00

Green River, Utah.Feather on sand.
Blue Heron flying. Green River, Utah.
Blue heron standing. Green River, Utah.
Frog under canoe. Green River, Utah.
Delicate Arch, Arches National Park, Utah.
Wall Arch, Arches National Park, Utah.
Petroglyphs, Moab, Utah.
Sunset in Moab, Utah.
View in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.
Red slick rock in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.
View from our campsite at Sandflats Recreational Area, Moab, Utah.
Halgreave glacier, near Mount Robson.
Hoary marmot.
Iceberg lake near Mount Robson.
Another hoary marmot.

Flower at Mount Robson.Iceberg lake and glacier at Mount Robson.
View of the valley from Whitehorn campsite.
Waves at Pebbles Beach in Gibsons, BC.
Pebbles beach, looking at Gospel Rock as the sun sets.
Moonlight over Keats Island, seen from Gospel Rock.
Sun through rushes, Gibsons, BC.
Gibsons harbour.
Mallard.
Two eagles in a tree at Porpoise Bay, BC.
Eagle in flight at Porpoise Bay, BC.
Ripples in sand at Porpoise Bay, BC.
Foggy road in Northern California.
Elk sticking out tongue in Northern California.
Looking up at misty redwoods, Northern California.
Whaleshead beach, southern Oregon coast.
Whaleshead beach.
Southern Oregon coast.
Lighthouse at night, Oregon coast.
Lighthouse through the fog, Oregon coast.
Oregon coast.
Oregon coast.
Oregon coast.
Oregon coast near Lincoln City.
Sunset over Georgia Strait, BC.

Truck grill in Rowley, AB.Door on church in Dorothy, AB.

Dislike...

2009-01-10T13:17:00.000-08:00

Recently, there was a list on the whiteboard in our lunch room called "The Christmas Hate List". While I love Christmas and most of the stuff associated with it, there was one item on the list that I could agree with: "people who write Christmas letters from the point of view of their pets". Yes, that IS annoying. But you know what is even more annoying? People who write BLOGS from the point of view of their pets. I found some recently. Sadly enough, they are finalists for the "Best Pet Blog" category of the 2008 weblog awards. Here are links to a few.

Simba King
Daisy the Curly Cat
Boo Casanova

I'm not sure why I am putting the links here, since you will likely be annoyed once you read those blogs. Maybe just check them out briefly to see how inane they are. I hope my blog don't come off sounding as stupid! And if I ever start writing about Pumpkin in the first person and describing myself as "Mommy", please shoot me.

Santa Pumpkin (update!)

2009-01-05T21:42:00.000-08:00

The Santa Pumpkin strikes again!

Christmas snow

2008-12-26T11:56:00.000-08:00

I have never seen so much snow on the west coast as we had this year. I took some photos to chronicle the record. Although it's nice to have a white Christmas, I don't really expect it at home, since we RARELY have any snow over the holidays. In fact, in some ways, it made it seem less like Christmas because it wasn't normal!It sure looked nice when the sun finally popped out, however it made a mess of the roads and sidewalks. Navigation was especially difficult in Gibsons, where you must traverse hills of all sorts to get anywhere.My mom and I were pretty proud that we only managed to get stuck once over the three days of bad driving conditions. We were stuck on the first day, trying to head up to the mall. Our little cul-de-sac doesn't ever get plowed, so we had to push our way through the snow and make it up the small slope at the top of the street. We didn't have enough momentum the first two tries to get up the slope, since we had no traction once we were on the slope. Eventually, on the third try, with me pushing from behind, we achieved enough speed to make it to the top and onto the main street. I just had to run after the car and hop in once we made it.We did a lot of snow shoveling while I was there. I usually get a break from that when I go home, but not this time! Since we kept on it, it wasn't ever too much work at once. Also, the snow was very light for the first few days, since it was so cold, but later in the week it rained on the snow and made it very heavy. Since we had cleared our snow throughout the week, we only had a small layer of heavy snow by the end, rather than several feet like some of our neighbours.The main problem with snow around the Vancouver area is that there aren't enough snow plows to keep the roads in good condition, and people do not clear their sidewalks of snow. Thus, walking around is near impossible unless you trek through deep snow. The other option is to walk on the road itself, which can be darn dangerous, especially with cars driving on icy conditions at times. This meant we were fairly housebound on Christmas and Boxing day, since going for a walk was slightly dangerous. We went for a small jaunt at one point, but gave up after not too long because we felt unsafe on the roads.Luckily, the snow didn't have much effect on my flight to Vancouver, although we were delayed 30 minutes so that passengers from connecting flights could get on our plane. However, the toughest part about my travel through snow was dragging my suitcase through downtown Vancouver to catch the bus to the ferry. As I mentioned, no one clears their sidewalks of snow. The snow was several inches deep at places - deeper than the wheels on my suitcase were tall. So, I ended up plowing my suitcase along the sidewalk, gathering up a goodly amount of snow in front of the suitcase as I went. This added at least 5lbs of drag as I pulled, resulting in a puffing and sweating Kim by the time I reached the bus stop.The above shot is our side yard. Below is looking down our little street.This is the front of the house:And looking up the street, over our huge snow pile from our driveway.I tried to demonstrate how high the snow bank beside our driveway was.To finish up this post, let's change topics and look at pictures of my mom's cat, Muffin. She likes to climb into boxes. At first, she tried to climb into this little thing:Nope, too big! Can't fit! Then, along came a bigger box:That's a little better!Look, it's a Muffin-in-the-box!

MacBook Nerds

2008-12-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

I flew home to Gibsons for Christmas, arriving in Vancouver on Saturday evening. Since it would have been a challenge to catch the last ferry, I met up with Mic and crashed on his couch for the night. We went out for a late dinner at Whitespot, one of my favorite restaurants to visit when on the Lower Mainland.Mic and I had realized awhile ago that we own the exact same computers - 15" MacBook Pros. So, we took some fun pictures with our matching computers.
It actually took us a VERY long time to get the shot below - every time we tried, one computer was bright or the other was dark. I put on a white shirt to try to help with colour balance. I'm not sure if that really made a difference, but eventually we got the shot we wanted.
The only thing we forgot to do was to switch computers (heads) with each other and get another picture.

Geocaching - grass field style

2008-12-18T14:50:00.000-08:00

Garrett and I went geocaching awhile ago (before the snow!). We went to Nose Hill Park in Calgary and tried to find four different caches using Garrett's GPS. Nose Hill Park is quite nice because you get an excellent view of the entire city. This shot is looking east over the city:See the brown smear along the horizon? Pollution!!! This shot is towards the southeast. You can see the X-trail parked there.Although Nose Hill Park has a great view, it really is a big grass hill. Like this:The first cache we found was out in the middle of a field, so Garrett found it without much trouble. This is what it looked like:1.If you looked underneath it, you found this little metal jar hiding there:We wrote our names on the paper inside and moved on to find the next one. We had to walk quite a ways to find the next one, wandering through the grass fields and following the GPS.We found the next one with relative ease.The third cache was the most difficult, since we started traveling cross-country, rather than following pre-made trails like previously. We wandered down into a ravine filled with trees, passing by some deer on the way.Here's Garrett, just before we entered the ravine and searched for our third cache, which we didn't find.We searched in amongst the trees while balancing on the snowy slope for about 5 minutes, then gave up.2.The last cache was in the middle of an open field. We had a hard time finding this one, as well, but after some persistent searching, Garrett discovered it!After our successful (well, 3 out of 4 ain't bad!), we walked allllll the way back to the car and headed home, catching this view of downtown while we were at it.

Ginger

2008-12-15T20:17:00.000-08:00

Bonnie, Sean and I decorated gingerbread houses the other day. We bought these kits:The kits were actually a little tricky to find, but find them we did (at Zeller's). After assembling them, they look like this:And then we decorate them (and eat candy during the process). This is the front of my house - we call it the "bling house". I like the chocolate coins.Here's the roof - more bling! And macaroons. Mmmm, macaroons are my favorite.The front again.All three houses. Sean's on the left, mine in the middle and Bonnie's on the right.Close-up view of Bonnie's house.Close-up view of Sean's house.During the building process. We got icing all over the place.The backside (booty) of my house. I managed to keep from eating any of the candy on my house until three days after building it, which I thought was pretty good!

Welcome winter!

2008-12-14T10:14:00.000-08:00

This was the weather yesterday afternoon:Note the wind chill measurement (bottom right). It's so cold out that we don't want to leave the house unless we absolutely have to. This was the weather this morning:Brrrrrr...
Not only is the outside cold, but the inside of our house is cold too. We have ice along the inside of most of our windows. My bedroom:Kitchen:Living room:Kitchen:This was the temperature in our living room this morning. It's one of the hardest rooms to keep warm, even with the space heater on.Lots of warm clothes, lots of layers - that's how you survive the cold snap.

New Department Website

2008-12-12T19:41:00.000-08:00

My department just launched a new website and asked the graduate students to update their profiles. You can check mine out here (just scroll down a little bit). You may notice that mine is more thorough than many other students. I don't really understand why other students don't include more in their profiles (or for some, anything at all), since we get so little opportunity to brag about our accomplishments, we might as well do it on the website when they ask us to. Anyway, check it out if you are interested!

Wedding!

2008-12-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

On Saturday November 29th, 2008, Joel Hoeksema and Kaylin Ostermeier were married! Garrett was the best man, so I took all of the photos from the church ceremony. I think I got some really great shots, since I got to sit in the front row with the family. I would have had a good shot of their first kiss as husband and wife, too, but the darn official photographer got in my way then!Kaylin looked beautiful and looked very composed, although I'm sure she was a little bit nervous at least.After the rings were exchanged, we sang some songs, listened to a sermon on love and sang some more songs. Below is a picture of Joel and Kaylin kneeling while we sang a song.Next, they signed the marriage registration. First Joel:And then Kaylin:(p.s. Actual events may not have occurred exactly in this order. But it's all mixed up in my head). Joel and Kaylin waited while Garrett and Rhonda, Kaylin's maid of honour, signed as witnesses.During the signing, Kaylin's sister Marieka played the flute.After the marriage certificate was signed, the minister congratulated Joel and Kaylin and gave them their certificate.Then Joel kissed his bride! But I missed that shot. Oh well!! I have lots of smooching pictures from the reception, so I'm satisfied.
After the ceremony was complete, we filed out of the sanctuary and into the foyer, where we walked down the receiving line to congratulate the newlyweds. There's Joel with his Mom and Dad:Family shot! Except for Garrett, who took the picture, so I guess he's there in spirit too.We enjoyed some sandwiches, snacks and drinks in the foyer for the next hour or so, chit chatting with some of the relatives and friends that I knew. Then we had some family photos in the church again, before the wedding party took off for photos at another location. I helped cleanup some of the stuff at the church to take it to the ceremony, then we headed off into town to run a few errands before the reception. Usually when I say "we" I mean Garrett and I, but for this part I actually mean Garrett's sister, Sarah, and I. Garrett was off with the wedding party, being his handsome self in all those photos. Sarah and I changed into our casual wear for the casual reception and then went down to Fort Edmonton early to help set up. However, once we arrived at Iggy's Barn (very rustic! Hence the "casual reception") we saw this:Luckily for us, everything was basically ready to go already! So...we were early and had nothing to do...so...we wandered around Fort Edmonton and had an interesting time. But that's for a follow-up story later, so stay tuned.Here's the head table. Garrett got to sit there.I also had some extra time to take a few shots of the wedding cupcakes (which were YUMMY!).The reception invited guests to arrive early to partake in sleigh rides, however since we've had basically no snow this winter so far, the plan was amended to wagon rides. First, the wedding party arrived and went out on the wagon for some last minute photos. Unfortunately, it made the whole party a little chilly in their light clothes, despite the relatively good weather for the end of November (it was above zero! But windy windy windy!). Here's the wedding party on the wagon:Here are Kaylin and her bridesmaids once they disembarked the wagon.Once that crew finally moved along, the rest of us monkeys got to go on a wagon ride. I went on with Sarah (top) and Heather (bottom):Here are the horses. Their names were Nick (left) and Maggie (right).They're Belgian. Well...Belgian something kind of horse. (not the technical name, no).Here's a movie I made of our wagon ride! It was a little cold actually.
The large building we head towards eventually was Iggy's Barn. The reception was held upstairs and the food buffet was downstairs. They had yummy food, including pulled pork sandwiches! Not your standard wedding food, but I liked it.
After the wagon ride, we headed back inside for the dinner and reception. I got a nice shot of Joel with his top hat:This is Garrett's flower from the wedding - he was very proud of how much it opened up during the course of the day. It was very pretty.Sarah and Joel - the top hat made its way around on many people's heads that night.
Kaylin looks bored here, but really, she was having a great time!This guy was the Master of Ceremony. He's Kaylin's brother-in-law.Instead of running your standard "clinking of the glasses means the bride and groom have to kiss" gig, Kaylin and Joel had a jar where you could put money to see them kiss. All of the proceeds went to the Stollery Children's Hospital. I think they thought this plan would mean less kissing for them, but I think it backfired. People were more than willing to put 5 bucks in to see them kiss! They raised over $120 that night!I made a movie when someone put a twenty dollar bill in the jar, since they had to kiss for longer than the standard five dollar entry.
Here's the bro's, during an intermission:Kaylin's sister ran a little game for them. Joel and Kaylin each had one of each of their shoes. When Kaylin's sister would ask them a question (eg. Who will do all of the cooking?), they would each answer with the appropriate shoe. It was funny.8.Next came some speeches. Garrett did the "toast to the groom" and pulled off his speech marvelously. I think people are surprised at how funny he can be, considering he's such a quiet guy usually. Of course, I know how funny he is!Here's a peak of the first part of his speech:
Next, the maid of honour, Rhonda, gave the "toast to the bride".
Both sets of parents gave a welcoming speech and reminisced about Joel and Kaylin's childhoods.Hey, who's that monkey?Kaylin's family sang a song for her (it was nice).Other than that, Garrett and I ran the slideshow movie he made with old photos of them (which was only two songs long and tasteful, so people actually liked it), Joel and Kaylin said some thank-you's and the whole shindig was done by 8:30pm. We all helped to clean up and pack up the cars, before heading out the Garrett's parent's house for an after party.

Christmas tree 2008

2008-12-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

We decorated my fake Christmas tree on the weekend! It was nice to use both mine and Bonnie's decorations this year, since it makes the tree look less bare than previously. Here is the stand:The tree, with built in lights!Bonnie started the decorating:I'm not sure what Sean is doing here - some dancing? He loves Christmas. It's nice.Good job guys!Who's that handsome guy?Pumpkin likes the tree, too.Here is the completed tree, mid-afternoon:And here is the completed tree in the evening, with some mood lighting.Merry Christmas!

I get too much amusement from this

2008-12-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

The other day I went on a shopping extravaganza, completing a majority of my Christmas shopping. My last stop was at the pet store to pick up kitty litter, where they had TONS of fun Christmas items for pets. I couldn't resist picking up this little darling:
Since I also purchased a nip toy that was in the same bag as the santa hat, Pumpkin had some love for the santa hat at first:
However, she shortly came to dislike the hat, once we stuck in on her head. I did find it surprising (annoying!) that she ripped off a piece of fluff within two seconds of seeing it.
Who couldn't love that face??There's my little baby!After we put her down, she quickly started getting it off of her head.
I felt a little bad when she finally ran around the corner in defeat. I retrieved her to take the hat off, which had become more similar to feed bag than a hat.
After I took the hat off, she was still moderately interested in it.She even played with it afterwards for awhile.
Stay tuned for more pictures. I don't think I'll get tired of this toy for awhile - at least not before Christmas, anyway.

Here she is!

2008-12-01T22:21:00.000-08:00

There she is!The little sneaker kitty. I haven't written a blog entry about Pumpkin in awhile, but she's been pretty cute lately. I thought I would post some pictures of her being cute and snuggly for you all to enjoy. Under the tree, one of her favorite places nowadays:Chilling on the couch.Some more chilling.A belated Hallowe'en picture:Snuggling on the bed!Chillaxin'.Wink wink to you, too, little lady.And lastly, my favorite: the grumpy Santa cat:

Up and coming...

2008-11-30T18:21:00.000-08:00

Now that Kaylin and Joel's wedding is over, I'm anticipating being a little bit less busy (although, really, I didn't do THAT much to help with the wedding!). Upcoming posts include details from the wedding, plus decoration of our Christmas tree. I also have some posts in the works of Pumpkin's antics, so stay tuned!

The transformation

2008-11-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

The other weekend, Garrett and I embarked on a journey of organization. It started with this:
This is Garrett's fancy flat screen TV on a cruddy little Ikea coffee table. It doesn't really do it justice, does it?

Garrett and I agree.

We went to Ikea, although not with the intention of finding exactly what we did find (a flat screen TV stand). Once in Ikea, we wandered around and bought some other organizational items, including a desktop paper tray and a drawer set for his desk. We also saw this little beauty on sale, which Garrett was immediately drawn to to.For the first time ever in all our trips to Ikea, we didn't have to worry about the size of the furniture we bought, since the X-trail is awesome and fits most anything.

We spent the afternoon assembling the furniture, which was actually quite complicated to put together.Here's Garrett, working hard:Once the unit was assembled, Garrett organized all of the technology, cords and other assorted items (dvds, videogames). Here is the finished project:While he was doing this, I tackled our other project for the day: organizing his desk and kitchen table. Garrett's desk is simply a table, so without drawers to store stuff, the surface quickly became cluttered. I assembled the drawer unit we had purchased and moved a lot of his stuff into it. I also sorted through all of the mail and papers he had laying around. Garrett has a bad habit of leaving mail in their envelopes after looking at it, the result of which is an abundance of envelopes all around his house. So, we sorted and tossed and recycled. I took some papers home to shred and filed the other important ones.

After the five hours or so of our cleaning extravaganza, we relaxed by playing one of my most favorite games - Lego Starwars!!Looks good! (Garrett's sock does too).

There's a bum who sleeps in the field beside my house

2008-11-14T22:17:00.000-08:00

While this might not be anything strange in itself, the weird part is that he sleeps right in the MIDDLE of the field. Not under a tree, not near the edge of the field, not somewhere with a bit of privacy. The middle. Not just once. Many times. The first time I saw him, I didn't take a picture, although I did note the occurrence as unusual. The second time I saw him, I snapped a few shots.The last time I noticed him, Garrett was over and we were using a kit to clean up my headlights. The guy isn't napping in this photo (he laid down and started reading a paper first), but eventually he settled into his regular nap in the middle of the field, with his jacket over his head.I doubt I'll see him much now that winter is settling in, but maybe next spring?

Recovering the old foot stool

2008-11-13T22:26:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I inherited my grandpa's old foot stool. We used to play on this all the time when we were children, turning it on its side and rolling along the ground. Anyway, the footstool was functional but not visually appealing, so I bought some cotton batting and fabric to recover it. I forgot to take a picture before starting, but you can see the old colour of the stool below:
I first stapled the cotton batting onto the footstool, to add some cushion.I chose some dark grey corduroy to cover the foot stool - something in a neutral colour.Stapling the corduroy overtop the cotton batting was a bit tricky, since the width of the layers was a bit much for the staple gun. I persisted and pushed hard on that staple gun, strategically placing the staples until the fabric was secure. Voila!Foot stool is now pretty and new!

First snow!

2008-11-12T22:19:00.001-08:00

We had our first snow fall on Monday night. I woke up to this on Tuesday:It was really quite nice out during my walk to school that morning, with the snow coating the branches of the trees and the snow helping to quiet the noise of the morning.
I like it when it snows. If I could choose, I'd want fresh snow every week throughout the winter, so that the city never got very brown and dirty.

Canadian Leagues Conference

2008-11-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

Since I'm the prez of the ultimate association out here, I headed out to Toronto last weekend for a conference with all of the leagues and provincial organizations across Canada. This event was run by the Canadian ultimate association. I wasn't super excited to attend, since I have been pretty busy at school, so I didn't book any extra time in Toronto except that which I needed to attend the conference. However, the conference turned out to be really good and had a lot of useful and valuable information. Some highlights included:

- insight into juniors programs run around the country
- some simple environmental policies that other leagues are promoting
- ways to improve spirit in growing leagues (like ours)
- playing speed point ultimate for the first time (hard work! Tiring! But fun).
- learning that 22 ultimate reps can drink over 200 beer in 1 night

Yes, an inordinate amount of beer was consumed on Saturday evening. Gladly, most of it was not by me, since I was so tired after our ultimate game on Saturday night that the beer didn't sit well in my stomach. I even went to bed before most other people! Say hello to Kim the lame-o! However, I thought that since our league was paying to send me there, I had better be capable the next day for the second half of the conference (which I was). Anyway, it was a good conference and I'm excited to initiate some of the programs in Edmonton! I'll try to tell you more about it once we actually get some of it going!

It's Hallowe'en!

2008-11-04T18:43:00.000-08:00

Well, isn't this a little belated! I know, I know - I go through cycles where I post every day, then I'm a slacker for a couple weeks where I barely post at all. But, that's how life is - busy, not busy, no free time, more free time. So, now I'll try to catch up on what I've been up to, returning wwwaaaaayayyyyy back to Hallowe'en.

I had two costumes on Hallowe'en. The first one was a work costume. Both Rineke (right) and I (left) dressed as one of our co-workers - Mike Joyce. Check us out:Oh ya, three, three, three Mike's in one.He thought our costumes were mildly amusing. We even had matching footwear, although he didn't wear his stereotypical red socks that day like we did.My second costume of the day was for the evening. We had people over to our house for the night. It was a nice, mellow gathering.

Darren, Rineke and I dressed as....THE INCREDIBLES!!
Perhaps you can understand why I didn't want to wear this costume to work? Black underwear over red tights...a little uncomfortable for the work environment. Especially when no one else dresses up around there.Bonnie and Sean dressed up as Sally and Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas.Kim and Bonnie!Sean!Our friends came dressed in style. From left to right: Corpse Bride (Leslie), Napoleon Dynamite (Todd), Violet the Incredible (Kim), Ninja (Mel), Bob the Incredible (Darren).Two Tim Burton costumes (Sally and Corpse Bride).A witch (Catherine) and Medusa (Bindi).A pilot (Randy) and a flight attendant (Deanna).Bonnie and Sean:Todd and Leslie:Raymond and Jessica, as scarecrows:Kim and Pumpkin:The Incredibles, hanging out. You can't tell, but we can be up and fighting evil in 0.32 seconds flat.Garrett arrived from Calgary later that evening. He was dressed as...wait for it...an environmental consultant on casual Friday!Joelle and Ian dressed as a boxer and Don King:Eventually, we all tried on Ian's wig, since it was just so darn fun.We had a late evening, but it was a nice mellow time for a Hallowe'en party. Everyone really had great costumes this year and got into the spirit!

Four minus one minus one plus four

2008-10-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

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.

The mechanical trials of a Precidia MX3

2008-10-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

I've decided that "vehicular mechanical" type sales people are stupid. I formed this opinion last weekend when Garrett and I replaced the battery in my car. My experience so far with car repairs is that most problems that seem to be complicated are actually very simple to solve. Vehicular mechanical sales people, however, seem to want to believe the most difficult solution is the most likely one. Let's call these sales people VMSP. They include those individuals who work at Crappy, I mean Canadian, Tire and Part Source. These VMSP seem to think that all non-VMSP are idiots and could not possibly figure out how a car works on their own. Let's look at some examples.

First of all, Garrett figured my car had a battery problem because it had some trouble starting in general, but these problems were amplified when the weather got colder. As well, my alarm stopped honking when I turned it on or off, unless I drove for a long time before turning it on (eg. if I drove down to Calgary). We thought that replacing the battery would be a good idea before the weather got even colder here, since I don't have a block heater and don't intend to get one (I park on the street so I don't have an outlet to plug in to, anyway). Since my car was having trouble starting when temperatures were in the low positives, its ability to run come double negatives was less likely. So, we headed off to Crappy Tire. Once there, the VMSP was worried for us that it might not be my battery that was the problem.

"Hopefully it's not your alternator (insert correct word instead if I used the wrong one) that is the problem. It might be your alternator," he offered uselessly, considering he hadn't even looked at my car or the old battery.

After purchasing the new battery, which immediately looked WAY LARGER than my old battery, we went home to install it. Once we popped the hood and pulled out the other one, we were immediately aware that the new battery was 1/3 bigger than the old one. Installing the bigger battery caused some difficulty, since we had to loosen some pretty rusty bolts, but with the help of WD-40 and some elbow grease, we got it eventually. When we returned the old battery to Crappy Tire for my ten-dollar refund, the VMSP said "Wow, looks like someone put the wrong battery in last time!" Yea, duh. That's probably why I was having battery problems in the first place. Good thing Garrett and I didn't change the alternator after all!! (Keep in mind that I am not mechanically inclined, so I have no idea if Garrett and I could actually change the alternator ourselves anyway).

So, first problem solved - new battery plus correct size battery = happy car.

The next problem was caused by Garrett and I, and I can admit it was a moronic move. We hooked up the new battery backwards. To our credit, the old battery did not have positive and negative electrodes labeled on the outside casing and we were faced with two black wires attached to either electrode, rather than a black and red like we expected. We quickly figured out our mistake and righted the connections, however the car still didn't start. After some reading of the manual and an attempt at jumping the battery, we finally got a voltmeter and a new fuse. While at the parts store, the VMSP usefully told us that we had probably completely fried the entire wiring system of my car and that I would likely have to take it in to a mechanic to get all the wires replaced. We suggested to him that it might just be a fuse (since fuses are supposed to prevent things like "entire wire-frying" from happening) and he said "Yea, it could be that too. You should check that first."

Duh.

The voltmeter indicated the battery was not dead.
The replaced fuse allowed us to start the car.
Voila!! It took us a bit more time than we expected, but not much extra cost, and we managed to get the little baby running again!

Two problems and two simples solutions:
1. New battery to replace the old, undersized battery (not an alternator problem).
2. New fuse to replace the old fuse (not a complete re-wiring of the car).

And lastly, on the topic of cars, tonight I perfectly parallel parked my car on the left side for the first time. I was very proud of myself.

Thank you for listening. Don't judge me too much for knowing very little about cars. That's why I have Garrett around.

San Francisco!

2008-10-20T20:51:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, Garrett and I took a "day off" by hanging around Amanda and Ray's while they went to work. We slept in, did our laundry, wandered around Davis (had a Starbucks!) and made a quick trip into Sacramento for some shopping.

Amanda was able to get Friday off, so she drove into San Francisco with us for a day of touristing. It was about an hour and a half drive to San Fran, entering over the Bay Bridge and heading into downtown. We got a little lost in the craziness that is a larger metropolitan downtown in the US, but eventually found our way. We drove by Union Square - there it is:There's a streetcar going by near Union Square:We successfully navigated through downtown and drove over the Golden Gate bridge to the tourist viewpoint.There's the bridge on the right:And looking farther to the left, at the downtown and Bay Bridge. Also, you can see Alcatraz Island.We headed back over the bridge and parked at the pier.The pier was really fun and lively! Lively mostly due to the huge tourist burden, but there's always a great feel at piers. Maybe I felt that way because I grew up on the coast and loved wandered along the coastline. In any case, it was fun and the weather was great, so who wouldn't feel great?We were scheduled for a ferry to Alcatraz at 1pm, so we grabbed some sandwiches to go at this neat bakery.The bread travels around the shop in these neat baskets. Mmm, sourdough!We hoofed it over to the pier where our ferry was leaving from. There, we stood in line for the boat.After passing through a super cheesy photo setup (where they took our picture in front of a facade of the island of Alcatraz), we boarded the ferry! And we ate our sandwiches! And they tasted great!!The ferry ride was only about 20 minutes long, but we enjoyed the views as we plugged along through the water. There's Alcatraz in the background!The Bay Bridge:There's downtown San Fran:There's the Golden Gate bridge in the distance:Approaching the island, you see this sign:
Make sure you don't help anyone escape!!Welcome to Alcatraz! The "Indians Welcome" graffiti is residual from a 1964 occupation of the island in protest for Indian rights in the U.S.

We pulled up to the dock to offload and entered Alcatraz. After a brief introduction by a volunteer, we were free to wander around as we wished. We walked up the path towards the jail, stopping briefly to see an informative movie about the island and then continuing on to the entrance to the prison. We passed the water tower on our way up:There's a guard tower:Once inside the building, the ominous atmosphere grips you immediately.We all received audio tours to listen to as we wandered around the jail. I really enjoyed the tour and learned a ton about the prison. Plus, since everyone was walking around in silence, you could really get a feel for the place when you paused the audio tour.We wandered through the jail cells and observed the tiny space the inmates had to live in.We checked out the courtyard and examined the scary fence that kept the criminals in.We saw some caged criminals, but someone let them out of their cell:We wandered into D block to see the solitary confinement cells:We learned about some of the notorious criminals who were held at Alcatraz, including Al Capone, Robert "The Birdman" Stroud and George "Machine Gun" Kelly.We learned about the famous riot in 1946, called the Battle of Alcatraz, where an inmate managed to climb up into the gun gallery, seen below:After overwhelming the guards, the escape attempt was thwarted when the keys the prisoners claimed from the guards didn't actually open the door to the courtyard.

This is what the guard's uniforms looked like:The interesting thing about a lot of the Alcatraz guards was that they lived with their families on the island itself. The children would take a boat every day into San Francisco for school, returning each afternoon to play and live on the island.We took a break from the tour in the courtyard at the top of the island, where the view of San Francisco is fantastic.Some of the buildings on the island have been demolished - you can see some debris in the foreground of the above picture.

Back inside, we finished our audio tours and snapped a few more pictures.We finished our tour in the dining hall, where the menu for the last meal served in the prison was still on the board. The prison was closed in 1963 once costs to run the prison became prohibitive and the Bureau of Prisons' philosophy changed to rehabilitation rather than punishment.While we waited for our return ferry ride to San Fran, we took some shots in front of the Alcatraz sign. We look tough - who would let these thugs leave the island?And now we look normal, so we were allowed to board the ferry and weren't forced to stay there indefinitely.As our ferry drove away, we looked back at the Island to see the courtyard where we had stood on our break (next to the lighthouse).We took some more shots of San Fran downtown and the Golden Gate bridge on our ferry back towards the shore.Once back on land, we headed back towards Pier 39, which is the famous, touristy Pier with lots of shops and of course, the sea lions. Since we didn't have time to ride a street car while we were there, we took a shot of a trolley instead. After walking through the tourist trap to the end of the pier, we took a shot of Alcatraz from land and another one of the Golden Gate bridge. Then we focussed our attention on those sea lion critters.

After all this, we met up with Ray (he bussed into the city after work) and went for a nice dinner at a restaurant called The Palomino. After a great dinner, we packed back into the car and headed for home. After such a long day, it was nice to nap in the car on the drive home. Even though we would have liked to have done a bit more in San Francisco, it was a great day and I know Garrett and I will have time to explore that city more in the future.

400 posts!

2008-10-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Well, including this one, 401 posts! I've been posting things here since May 31, 2006. Over the course of 2.5 years, I've published 400 posts on various things. Here's to many more! Check back soon for the last few updates from our holidays. I'm struggling to finish the entry from our San Francisco adventures, since we did quite a lot that day. I will persevere!

A WWII radar station and a waste of five dollars

2008-10-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday morning, we got up early and loaded the car. We had a long drive to Amanda and Ray's later that day, but we also wanted to see some more of the redwoods in the Southern part of the park. First, we drove for about an hour south past Klamath, where we took a detour onto the Coastal Trail. This was a dirt road that headed off along the coast and passed by an old World War II radar station, which we were interested in seeing. It was till very foggy that day, so we couldn't see much offshore, but the drive was nice and almost spooky.

The World War II radar station on the Klamath River (called B-71) was easy to find after walking down a gentle slope. It consisted of two buildings which, rather than being camouflaged, were built to look like farm buildings, rather than the power and operations buildings that they were.
The buildings consisted of cinder block walls, wooden shingled roofs and false windows. From up close, you could see through the glass of the windows that the wooden frame of the roof was right underneath.
The buildings were built after Pearl Harbour to protect the western coast of America. Since they looked like regular farm buildings, the risk to the men working there was relatively small. This was the view off the coast:
We returned to the car and continued down the road, stopping to take this misty picture:

We drove further south into the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, where we stopped at the Big Tree Wayside. Here it is! It's BIG!A little bit closer now:
A little bit farther now, looking up:
Farther down the road, we stopped briefly at the ranger station, and took pictures of some elk in the field nearby:

The last place that Garrett and I visited in the redwoods was a grove called Lady Bird Johnson Grove, where we walked along the loop for about an hour. Garrett took some fantastic pictures with the fog:
Here I am inside of a burned out redwood - which is still alive, of course!
Looking up at the burned out redwood. About a hundred feet up, the burn damage stops and the tree grows normally. During a forest fire, the fire can burn through cracks into the heartwood, but as long as the outside growing layers are intact, the tree can survive.
Here's another tree with a burned out core.

There was a neat bridge over the road from the parking lot to the grove:
"Hi Garrett!"
Finally, Garrett and I decided we had to DRIVE THROUGH A TREE! That's what people do in the redwoods, right?

We paid five dollars to do this:

We were pretty underwhelmed by the experience.
From there, we continued onwards for our long haul out to Davis and Amanda & Ray's house. During this stretch of our journey, we celebrated the X-trail's birthday! It turned 100,000 kilometers! See 99,999:
And now it is 100,000:
We arrived at Amanda and Ray's around 7pm and ate some dinner while visiting.

From a whaleshead to a whale sized tree

2008-10-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

The next morning rose foggy, but our tummies started off happy with a great pancake breakfast on the camp stove. By 9:30 am we were back on the road. Since it was so foggy, we gained some distance down the coast until we could see something off the shore. We drove through Coos Bay without stopping, except for at a few turnouts where we took some foggy pictures.The coast continued to have neat rocky outcroppings sticking out of the water along the coast.We continued along until we stopped for lunch at a little roadside park called "Arch View". We made some sandwiches and sat at the picnic table, after which we walked along the trail to see the views. Here's the arch after which the park is named:Past the arch there was a line of rocks cutting across the ocean.To the right of the arch, the coast curled into a bay.And some more view of the ocean and coast:Further on the coast, we stopped at a beach called Whaleshead Beach, where we wandered out on the sandbar to enjoy the ocean smells and the splash of the waves.Garrett took some beautiful pictures of the beach.We had to jump over a stream to get to the sand bar, so we were a little nervous that the incoming tide would trap us. After a short while, we jumped back over. I had a harder time getting across the stream - it was really pushing the limits of my jumping distance - but Garrett fared better:
We crossed the state border into California, driving down into Crescent City. Once there, we stopped in at the Ranger's Station to find a good place to camp and get some information on good sites to visit in the Redwood National and State Parks. The advice of the ranger led us to choose the Jedediah Smith campground in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. We arrived quite early in the day and were able to choose a really nice spot. The campsite featured our own set of redwood trees:Garrett hugged the above one, which was at the back of our campsite. We threw some stuff down to keep our site claimed and paid our fees, then headed out to a nearby Stout Memorial Grove to take in the trees. To get to the grove, we cruised along a scenic backroad called Howland Hill road. It was really neat to drive through the windy road, with large trees on either side of us:I made a movie of part of our drive:Here's the X-trail, looking awesome in the forest. I think its where it's supposed to live.Once in the grove, we enjoyed the rare afternoon sunshine to take it all in. The trees, unsurprisingly, were HUGE! It's difficult to show their scale in pictures, but we tried our best:I made a movie trying to show the scale of the trees:We learned a lot about redwoods during our visit in the parks. I'll share some interesting facts with you. The scientific species name for coast redwoods is Sempervirens. It means "everlasting".Redwood trees make tiny one-inch cones that produce thousands of seeds, although they rarely survive to maturity. Their more successful method of reproduction is through massive clusters of bud material in bumpy knobs called root collar burls. The burls can remain inactive for generations until a tree is stressed (due to low rainfall or intense fire), and then the buds will sprout.This is why redwoods are found clustered close to each other.Redwoods can grow up to 360 feet tall, where its foliage can reach the sunlight above the tree canopy. In its first 20 years, it can grow 2 to 3 feet per year, provided drought or fire does not slow it down. By its 200th birthday, it can reach the top of the tree canopy.Once it reaches the canopy, the lower humidity and strong winds slow its upward growth to only 2 to 3 inches per year. At this point, it starts growing outwards. After 400 years, the trunk can average five to seven feet in diameter.Those trees that reach 700 years or more old can have up to 10 to 15 foot trunks!Star Wars: Return of the Jedi was filmed in the redwoods forests. We think this is the log where Princess Leia first meets an Ewok.The root systems of the redwoods are disproportionately small compared to their height. The roots are much wider than they are deep, so that high winds can easily topple even the sturdiest trees. Their roots can be anywhere from just six inches deep to six feet.These falling trees are called "widowmakers", as they plummet to the forest floor.However, these fallen monsters give life to others, as trees and plants grow from the downed trees. A fallen tree creates a momentary wealth of light into the valley floor, which will last only until another tree fills the gap.Redwoods thrive in the fog that we'd been suffering through the past few days. They live at elevations below 2,000 feet, where heavy rains and moderate temperatures help their fast growth.The oldest trees are about 2,000 years of age, and don't seem to show any signs of fading. They resist fire, insects and rot because their thick bark lacks the volatile resin found in other trees. Also, its sap is mainly water, which slows combustion if a fire is raging around the tree.
After our tour of the forest (and after climbing on trees that we weren't supposed to climb on, for some of these pictures), we headed back to our campsite, where we made dinner and played cards before bed. We had pretty poor wood for our fire that night, so we couldn't get very much flames to light our campsite. It was pretty dark, since the redwoods kept out any moonlight and there were no camp lights around. We hit the hay pretty early, ready for an early start the next morning.

Oh what a wonder lighthouses can be!

2008-10-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Garrett and I were keen to get going down the coast! We woke up to a foggy sky and were excited to see the fog on the coast before the sun burned it off. We quickly packed up and headed out, driving only 2 minutes before we saw the broad expanse of sandy beach at Lincoln City.We parked the car and headed out onto the sand, exploring with childlike glee in the misty, magical morning sun. Garrett ran over to touch the ocean:
We walked along the beach for 15 minutes or so, enjoying the peacefulness and the power of the waves.
The seagulls were typical compared to those all over the west coast, but seemed quite wary of humans, suggesting they hadn't really been fed by people (which is good!).
Bird prints:
Finally, we turned back and headed towards the car, admiring the fancy hotels and B&B's on the waterfront along the way.
We climbed back in the car and headed south on Highway 101, the scenic byway along the coast. We didn't make it very far before we stopped to take some more pictures of interesting beaches:

Farther down the coast, we made another stop at a small park to take in the view once more. Here, the cliffs had started to grow taller and we looked down on the coast.
We watched an older couple wander down the beach, enjoying the day as we were.
After this short stop, we continued on to a spectacular viewpoint, called Boiler Bay Viewpoint. The coastline here was fantastically beautiful in the morning sunshine, and we spent a great deal of time taking pictures. This is looking north along the coast:

And this is looking south, towards an ever increasing rocky coast.
In addition to the landscape, Boiler Bay Viewpoint was rife with wildlife. We were so excited to see all the seagulls who had made a home at this location. Look, seagulls!
Just joking - we weren't very excited about seagulls, although I do think they are cute and they are easy to take photos of, since they sit pretty still. Actually, what we were most excited about were the OTHER birds and....the whales!!
Oh wait, this is kelp. Well, the kelp was pretty cool too. Ok, here are the whales!!
Can you see him? He's a grey whale.
Well, at least you can see the spray of water above the grey bump in the water.
Look, there's his tail as he goes under again! Actually, we spent a lot of time watching for whales all along the coast that day, and saw several over the course of the day. However, it's pretty tricky to get a quick shot of them, so those were the best we got (although I WAS impressed that Garrett got some shots at all!).

We also saw cormorants and pelicans. We didn't get any shots of the cormorants, but the pelicans flew around a lot more, so we got some half decent shots of them.

After spending at least 45 minutes there, we finally dragged ourselves onwards. The next viewpoint we stopped at was called Rocky Creek viewpoint. We saw some more whales, but they were farther away from us than at the other viewpoint, so not pictures. We tried to take a picture of us together with the ocean in the background, but this was the best we managed.
Once we set up the camera on a rock and turned on the timer, we did a little better:
After watching the waves for awhile, we headed onwards once more.
We stopped briefly at another viewpoint (unknown name!) that was quite high up, and got some neat shots of the fog over the coast.

There was a neat rock island off the short, too.
The next place we stopped at was called "Devil's Churn". We had to walk down a long ways down a nicely groomed path, but it was worth the walk.
That's where we're going, down there!
And now we've made it! Woosh! Look at those waves! They are big!
Devil's Churn is called such because the waves come rushing into this slit in the rocks and pound the shore, frothing and churning.
We took turns sitting on a rock while the other took a picture with the waves crashing behind. I pulled mine off without a hitch, sitting nice and forward, but when it was Garrett's turn, he turned around to look at the waves. I yelled "Turn around quick!" and he whipped around right as I took the shot. That's why he looks a little funny in the below picture.

After this, we drove more steadily for awhile, gaining some distance. As we drove, however, the fog also got thicker and rolled in closer to shore, so our vision was pretty limited for any further views. We reached Newport just after lunch, grabbing a Starbucks and a few supplies before we continued on our way. Onwards we went, through Florence and just a bit south, where we stopped at the Heceta Head Lighthouse. We had to walk about a mile to get to it. The fog was still every present, but added to the mystery of the lighthouse.

The lighthouse was built in 1892, and continues running at night to this day. It's unique signal projects a white beam every 10 seconds.
The lighthouse is a little rundown from the years it has weathered, but still very picturesque.
We went on a tour of the inside, wandering into the brick interior.
The stairs spiral around the inside, as expected. Here, we learned a lot about the old time lighthouse keepers, and how they would have to carry the fuel all the way to the top all the time. We learned that the glass lenses for the lighthouse are super expensive and the lighthouse keepers would have to be very careful not to scratch them. We also learned that before electricity, the big weight hanging down the middle of the stairs (see below) was what would drive the mechanism to rotate the lenses. The lighthouse keeper would wind it up to the top of the lighthouse, and as it slowly moved down towards the earth, it would power the rotation mechanism.
We also learned that the lights are from from an hour before dark until an hour after dark, and that you can see the beams 22 miles away at a height of 15 feet above sea level.
We climbed to the top and saw the rotation mechanism.
And the lenses. The light is now powered by electricity and is mercury based. I think it generates 80,000 candles, but I can't really remember if that's right.
This was the lighthouse keeper's house, back in the day. Now it is a bed and breakfast.

We continued on after Heceta Head, passing through Dune City and all of the dunes without really stopping. We took some pictures from the car:

We finished our day at the Umpqua Lighthouse, and actually stayed at the campsite right near there. We visited the lighthouse during the day, but headed back that night to check it out.
When we returned to see the lighthouse, we were amazed at how awesome it was at night! It was just beautiful!It lit up the night and the forest like a magical story.
Garrett set up his camera tripod and got some great shots.
Here's a video of the live lighthouse. At the end, I turned out to watch the beams going into the fog, and that didn't show up at all, so once that happens, you can stop the video.

Special people

2008-10-01T20:26:00.000-07:00

As an interlude to the vacation stories, I wanted to write about my activities this evening. Tonight, I taught special people how to play ultimate. By "special", I mean developmentally disabled, but "special" is faster to type. I think it's nicer, too.

A member of our league works for the city and runs evening activities for special people twice a week. She struggles to find new things for them to do, and thought that a demo of ultimate would be interesting and new for them. We had short notice for tonight's event, so we were only able to get seven volunteers out, but it was enough. We set up a small field beside the rec centre where the special people meet, and they watched us play 3-on-3 for about 20 minutes. Our seventh, gregarious volunteer commentated as we played, explaining some of the basics of the game as we demonstrated. He also described one team as "good" and the other team as "evil", which made them more interested in the outcome of the game. Interestingly, they also associated "Oilers" with "good" and "Flames" with "evil", so the two terms for each team were used interchangeably. Once it got a bit darker, we stopped playing and demonstrated some specific throws, like the hammer, the scoober, the thru-the-legs throw. We also threw some hucks and did some layouts.

After awhile, their attention started to wander, so we let the special people throw the discs themselves. I was a little worried that someone would get hurt, since it was fairly dark out by then and there were 40 or so special people milling around, throwing things. In the end, most of the volunteers worked with groups of special people, throwing with them and teaching them to catch. They seemed to really enjoy it and were very well behaved - nothing crazy happened! I threw the disc with 4 people, teaching them how to catch the disc like a pancake. Some of the men could really throw the disc! I had to make sure I didn't get beaned when they threw. Once it was 8pm, they all went inside to swim in the pool and we packed up our stuff to head home. I felt like the whole demo went really well and the special people seemed so happy and interested (for the most part - their attention span wasn't huge), so I'm glad we were able to get enough people out for it.

Mt. St. Helens and onwards to the coast

2008-09-30T22:26:00.000-07:00

Garrett and I made our first camping breakfast the next morning. Again, we were a little unskilled, but figured it out eventually. The main problem we had was that the propane bottle we were using turned out to be almost empty, and we didn't realize it until we had tried to cook for about 20 minutes. After replacing it with a new bottle, our cooking speed improved and we polished off our breakfast of eggs, bacon and hashbrowns.

By 10am, we were packed up and on the road again, on our way to Mt. St. Helens. The Mt. St. Helens National Volcano Monument is found within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The road towards the mountain is long and winding, but quite scenic. We took our first pictures while still quite a distance away from the volcano, but you can clearly see the swath of mud that flowed down from the explosion 28 years ago. This stretch used to be the Toutle River, but it was basically completely buried.Mt. St. Helens was shook by a magnitude 4.5 earthquake on March 20th 1980. This event destabilized the volcano, and steam started pouring out of the mountain. In addition, the north side of the mountain started to bulge over the course of the next month. Almost 2 months after the initial earthquake, on May 18th, a second, magnitude 5.1 earthquake again rocked the volcano, causing a massive collapse of the north face of the mountain. The below pictures shows me to the northwest of the volcano.The collapse of the north side created a huge landslide down the side of the mountain, and was immediately followed by a huge explosion out the side of the volcano. This lateral explosion was a unique event in volcanology, since a lateral explosion had never been documented before. The data and evidence from the Mt. St. Helens' explosion helped explain some bizarre geology around other volcano structures around the world. This explosion caused pyroclastic flows, which consisted of hot gas and rock traveling along at speeds of 80km/hr.The lateral explosion instantly vaporized the glacier that was on the top of Mt. St. Helens, creating millions of tons of water that mixed with the landslide and swept down the mountain and away. This mudflow ran down the Toutle river for miles, as seen in the first picture above.Subsequently, the volcano began pumping millions of tons of rock and gas into the air, creating a plume 20 to 27 km high. The devastation from the explosion was widespread, and 57 people in the proximity of the mountain were killed. As well, it is estimated that 7000 big game and 12 million fish from a hatchery were also killed. Lastly, 200 homes were destroyed or extensively damaged.The landscape was devastated for over 630 square kilometers, and much of it remains barren nowadays.There is a large area of the devastation zone that was repopulated with fir trees, however it is quite unnatural looking because all of the trees are identical in size and type.Before the explosion, Mt. St. Helens was the fifth largest mountain in Washington, at a height of 1525m. After the explosion, it lost 400m of peak and was left with a crated 3.2km wide and 800m deep. This is what the mountain looked like before when it was called "Mount Fuji of America":And here it is after the explosion:It looks like half the mountain was blown away! The crater has even filled in over the years from continual magma spewing. Plus, a whole new glacier has formed within the crater, creating the newest glacier on earth.Garrett and I drove out to the Johnston Ridge Observatory to learn all about the explosion and take in the view. The day was sunny and clear, if a little hazy, but since the volcano creates much of the haze from the steam is pumps out, there wasn't much to be done about it.Within the observatory, we got to see the seismographs that record any seismic activity in the crater:We saw the damage caused by the explosion on trees:We learned that when the volcano is more active than usual, they send in little spider probes to check out what's going on, rather than humans. This is a good idea, since this little guy (below) got exploded during his trip:After touring the observatory, we sat through a brief movie about the explosion and then read some of the survivor's stories. These in themselves were so interesting - some people had truly amazing stories about surviving the explosion. After taking a few more pictures, we ate some lunch in the parking lot before heading back out of the park.The next phase of our trip involved driving through into Portland, Oregon, and then heading towards the western coast. We arrived at Lincoln City on the coast around 6pm, finding a nice campsite at the Devil's Head State Park. We made a hearty dinner of Kraft Diner and hotdogs, as well as some hot chocolate. Pretty good day, after all.

A long day of driving

2008-09-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

In the morning, Bill and Deanna made us an excellent blueberrry pancake breakfast before we hit the road. We had planned our first two days of vacation to have a fair amount of driving, so we set out fairly early from Bill and Deanna's place. We crossed the border just before noon and headed across Washington.Prior to this trip, I had only been on the west coast of Washington, near Seattle, and had assumed all of Washington was green, lush and mountainy. However, we learned that most of Washington is a DESERT!! It was pretty boring.Eventually we made it Yakima, where we stopped in at a Super Walmart to pick up food and supplies. Then we continued on towards the Mt. St. Helen's area, passing by Mt. Rainier on the way.Garrett took a picture of me in front of Mt. Rainier, but you ended up being able to see only me.There was also this rock formation at that viewpoint, called "palisades".Here's a typical picture of Garrett from our trip:I would just hang out while he took all the pictures he liked. I didn't mind, since it meant he got some really great shots that I can use on my blog!

After stopping to see Mt. Rainier, we went on a big of a wild goose chase, trying to find a camp site. Eventually we found one around 8pm in a town called Mossyrock. The campsite was mainly RV based, but had tenting sites in a sloped field. We didn't get a great site - pretty tilted, however we had other problems our first night of camping. First, once we stopped and went to get our jackets to stay warm in the cool evening air, we noticed that they were SOAKED! Smart kids that we are, when we put the ice in the cooler earlier that day, we didn't make sure the plug in the cooler was closed. As the ice melted, the water ran out of the plug opening and onto our jackets. Luckily the seats in the car didn't get wet at least...

Secondly, we arrived at the campsite in the near dark and pulled out our lantern, only to find there were no batteries in it. Apparently Garrett used to keep a box of batteries in the campsite bin, however when I was storing the bin and packing it for our trip, I took the batteries out of the bin. I didn't know why they were there! I found them under my sink when I got home from holidays.

Lastly, when Garrett and I unpacked the tent, we remembered that we hadn't dried it out from our trip up to Floe Lake. When we pulled it out, it smelled sort of fishy, like mold or bacterial growth. It remained smelling like that until we dried it in Amanda and Ray's backyard for a few days.

So, our first night car camping was a little rough. We did decide that backpacking is actually easier than car camping, because you need less stuff when backpacking! However, we had picked up a fire log from Walmart, so we weren't without fire completely. After the first night, we definitely fared better while camping.

The vacation starts! Kim and Garrett drive to Penticton.

2008-09-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

Garrett and I started our holidays by driving down to Penticton, where my friends Bill and Deanna live. I've been friends with Deanna since highschool, and have known Bill nearly as long, since they started dating while we were all still in Gibsons. Now, they're all married up and recently upgraded their condo-style house to this three-bedroom deal:
Don't judge it from its outward appearance - it's a very nice house on the inside. It just needs some updating on the outside. Bill and Deanna have already done a ton of yard work, so it looks better than it did.We arrived in Penticton around 6:00pm on Friday evening and after a brief visit at their house, we walked over to Earl's for dinner. After dinner, we returned to their house and cracked open some beers and some wine. We chit-chatted and played some card games, including the game called Guillotine (borrowed from Garrett's sister). If you haven't tried this card game, you should - it's really fun.In addition to visiting, we were hugely entertained by Bill and Dee's kitties: Keeko and Luna.

This is Luna. She's the newest member of the household and is about 6 months old. She is super playful and quite snuggly, which is part of the reason they got her.Keeko, however, is not so impressed with the new cat.Keeko is a nice cat, although not totally a "people-cat", so Bill and Deanna adopted Luna to fulfill their needs for a snuggly kitty. Here's Luna snuggling:Luna snuggling Garrett:Luna, sleeping in Garrett's suitcase:Here's Keeko, not snuggling:Anyway, we had a delightful time (do I sound British?) visiting with my old pals, and it's really convinced Garrett and I to visit them more often if we can. Not only do we enjoy their company, but Penticton has awesome weather! It's so warm there and everything is still growing - not like old Edmonton out here.

Stay tuned!

2008-09-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

Up and coming new blog entries soon to be revealed!

Garrett and I recently returned from our trip down to the U.S., where we stayed with my sister for a few days and traveled around for a few other days. I am currently uploading all the pictures and video, and will soon start to fill in the stories in all their glory. So stay patient, try not to be too bored with the lack of change here the past week or two. Excitement to come!