Beautiful Salad

Garden fresh everything; romaine, mustard greens, arugula, nasturtiums, radish, marigolds, and three kinds of peas. Delicious.

Grad -- Ball

Welcome to the grad ball. Long tables of food and drinks, Jazz band followed by a DJ kept us going till late. Of course Pipe, Drums and Highland dancers made an appearance. And once the brass is gone, the dancing queens come out.

Almost like a graduation ceremony...

Today I received my parchment in the mail from Dalhousie. I know that you didn't get official graduation photos, but this is something! They also sent along a program from the ceremony, which I'll forward along to my mom because I think she'd appreciate it more than me. To me it's just a record of a three-hour ceremony that I didn't have to sit through. Unfortunately they gave my hometown as Victoria, BC, but as Jer pointed out, it's as reasonable a choice as any other.

Incidentally, you can see my spinning wheel in the background of the photo, but I'll write more on that another time.

Grad -- Parade time

Not the best day for a parade. It was rainning the whole time. Half way through, they had to split everyone up into their elements (army, navy, air force) and move them inside. The Chief of Maritime Staff (Head of the Navy) then presented all the newly promoted Acting Sub-Lieutenents with their commissions.


Here is Nic finally realizing what he had gotten himself in.


Her Majesty who?

Grad -- Sunset Ceremony

Later that night we attended the Sunset Ceremony which featured highland dancing, martial arts, pipes and drums, brass and reed, military drill, a mock hostage situation and fireworks. good fun all around. Unfortunately the picture of the people dressed up as the Old Eighteen is the only picture that I have. What are the Old Eighteen you say? They were the first cadets to enrolle at the College (Royal Military College).

Grad -- Convocation

Here are some pics from Nic's grad finally. See Nic in his pretty Scarlets and silly Pillbox (the hat) with Cathy (fiancée), Mom and Dad (parents). This was after a three hour of boring/painful/somnambulic/life sucking speches (more like lectures) whether you were hungover or not.

Good Old Bellville

On Thursday we left Newmarket and set of for Bellville where Julia was mostly raised. We stayed at Casey's family's house and had delicious roast beef (on the BBQ) supper. Later that night we went to the Funky Carpeto meet up with friends that Julia hadn't seen since high school. Going around the table from left to right: Matt Dodds, Julia, Matt Gariepy, Jen, Pam, Casey.



Of course, as the night went on, it developed into drunken debauchery and found ourselves at "Matt And Joe's"- a dance club. Here is Pam winning the limbo contest.


We then ended this sucessful night at Denny's for the deep fried sampler (lacking of wings, come on Denny's, same team) . The next morning we left for Kingston for Nicolas's Graduation from RMC.

New Camera

After much pressure from our fans nationwide, we decided to buy our second camera to keep everyone up to date on all the important things in our life such as cooking, knitting and of course The Cat. So, during our sejour in Toronto we decided to buy the cheapest camera we could find at Henry's, which happened to be last year's model of the old camera that we lost. This is the first picture born from our purchase, us standing outside Henry's.

We then went to C'est What? for some food, drink and knitting (for Julia). C'est What? has a fine assortment of beers and ales and some OK pub grub. While there we got stuck in a storm and had to abort most of our downtown Toronto plans, but we did get to see a thunderstorm which we hardly ever see at home. Below, Julia knitting at the pub.

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.