A visit from Marie...

Well it's been a long while since the last post, but this is largely because we lost our camera over Easter weekend in Vancouver. Not exactly sure where, but it seems to have disappeared. The last time we had it was in Jenny's apartment, but she hasn't seen it either.

We spent Easter weekend in Vancouver, where we went to meet Marie at the airport, flying in from Korea after 20 months away from Canada. Her brother Marc and his fiancée Mary came into town from Calgary for the weekend as well. We had a great time despite the terrible weather, and Jer and I even got to attend Claudia's third birthday party Saturday morning before Marie's flight arrived. We were also able to have a wonderful supper with Jenny and her boyfriend Leo, who was visiting from Germany, on Thursday night. (They then went to Vancouver Island for the weekend and we had a bit of an apartment swap.) Of course we have no pictures of any of this to post, due to the lost camera. I also ordered a spinning wheel while in Vancouver as there are no dealers on the island. They didn't have it in stock, unfortunately, so I won't actually get it until mid-May. After that, look forward to lots of posts about spinning (assuming we find our camera or get a new one).

Marie came back to Victoria with us Monday evening and stayed until Sunday night. It was just like in Halifax, it seemed so normal having her with us in the spare room with all the same furniture as her old room. We were very sad to see her go, but we spent a great week eating and drinking our way around town.

On the weekend it finally cleared up and we had a gloriously sunny Saturday and Sunday, with the air so clear we could see the mountains in Washington state across the Juan de Fuca Strait more clearly than I've seen them since moving here. We spent Saturday afternoon going for a hike out in East Sooke Regional Park with our friend Gerd, who took the pictures shown here. Unfortunately you can't see the crystal-clear mountains across the water behind us, or the pod of 100 or so orcas who put on a display for us in the channel. I've never seen so many whales in all my life. I was joking that BC was putting on a tourism commercial just for Marie's benefit, and all that we needed was a bald eagle to swoop down now to pick up a salmon and a bear standing over on the next rock. Not ten minutes after saying this a bald eagle really did come swooping down to pick a fish out of the water, which made us all look around nervously for the bear. Thankfully my second prediction did not come true, but this didn't stop Jeremi from asking me to predict that we'd come home to find a pig roasting on a spit in the back yard with barrels of beer waiting for us. Sadly, this prediction failed as well.

We'll see what we can do about finding some camera or other to continue posting things - we had some nice pictures of us digging our new vegetable garden in the back yard, and I'd love to show how the plants are doing, but it will have to wait.

Fools' tour

This Saturday we went on a wild and crazy pub crawl organized by our friend Shannon who we met while she was doing grad school at Dalhousie. She's now moved back out west, and decided that her friends hadn't been going out enough lately, so she organized a pub crawl for a group of 35-50 people she knows here. It was on Saturday night, April fool's day, so she dubbed it the Fool's Tour.

She knows some people at the Vancouver Island Brewery here in town, and they offer a deal for groups with a brewery tour and then some time in their tap room, where you can drink all you like. She pulled some strings so that we got to drink the whole time rather than dividing it between the tour and the beer. Thus, for $25 apiece we got t-shirts, as much beer as we could drink in 2.5 hours, and free cover to the following 5 bars. Not a bad deal, overall.

In addition to the t-shirts and the tour, she organized some props to get people interacting. Here you can see me wearing the "dancing queen" skirt, and Jeremi wearing the "Seargeant Stumbles" hat. As the evening went on and we found someone deserving of the prop, we were to hand it off in exchange for a drink. There were also clown hats and noses, a bib for people who spilt, and cat ears for people who were pussing out, among others. On the whole, she did quite the job. These pictures were taken fairly early in the evening before we got too drunk and forgot about the camera (which is probably for the best).

Then Sunday afternoon we headed over to a friend's place for a whiskey tasting extravaganza. We were a bit slow getting there, especially as Jer didn't make it home until 6:00 am (well, 5:00 am plus the time change), but I'm glad we made it. Our friend Steve has a collection of over 80 bottles of scotch and Irish whiskey, and he wanted to finish off 10 or so near-empty bottles to make room in his cabinet. We managed the task admirably, and he took us on a tour of his cabinet based on which were our favourites. It's very generous of him, but he really loves whiskey and likes to share his enthusiasm. I only wish we'd brought the camera to show you a picture of his whiskey cabinet. It's quite the sight.

How does my garden grow...

Over the past few weeks we've been getting very excited about starting a vegetable garden. Initially we wanted to have a container garden on our balcony and back stairwell, but then I (Julia) went a little nuts buying seeds, so it seemed that we'd have to expand a bit further. We talked to the landlord's son, who looks after the property and lives downstairs, and he's agreed to let us use a patch of the backyard in addition to a variety of containers. Now I'm thinking of asking for a patch in the front yard as well for the herbs, but at least we'll have some ground to work with.

Here's a picture of our spare room, where the bed has been turned into the seeding ground to get things going. We're limited to the spare room as they have to be kept safe from the cat until they're a bit bigger and can survive having a few leaves eaten. I learnt this the hard way when I was growing plants in Montreal - she waited until they were all sprouted and about 3 cm tall, and then she finished them all off in one night. And then of course she threw them all up. I'm not letting her or the other neighbourhood cats near them until I think they've got some chance of survival. And of course I'm growing some catnip to distract them.