Mum's birthday

It's Monday morning and we are tired still... What a fun weekend it was! With lots of rain! We went home Friday night and were up fairly late visiting with my mum's cousin Catharina and her husband Jan their two sons Kjartan and Eskil, and Jan's father Nils, all visiting from Denmark. Also, my brother Karl came down from Fort Mack, and my Uncle Wayne and Auntie Agnes came from Edmonton...and it rained all evening. Because my parents had such a full house, we decided to stay in our tent, which we set up close to the swingset and slide...also close to the chickens, which we would be reminded of cheerfully in the morning. All Friday night it thundered and lightninged and rained...and we were safe and dry in our tent. Saturday morning it was not raining. Kalie, Jorgen's girlfriend, came over, and the whole bunch of us set up the house/garage/yard/shop for the party. At two thirty, people starting coming over...mostly dressed up in fifties/sixties fashions and there was old music playing on a speaker set on the roof of the garden shed. All kinds of interesting people came, old friends, new friends. Later in the evening, someone started a fire in the fire pit and we played and sang around the fire for a while. Then, when it was completely dark (around eleven thirty) we played capture the flag. So much fun! (Except I ran into our truck in the dark and gave myself a good bruise). The other team won. The ground was incredibly wet...both with rain and with dew. I had been crawling on the ground most of the game and I was cold and wet by the time we quit. Sunday morning Brent and I were one of the first up, and we made pancakes for the 18 people who had stayed over night. It started raining in the afternoon--pouring! So we played a game inside (Munchkin, which we learned about from Bec and Eric) with Kjartan. Eskil, the younger of the two boys, is five (Kjartan is fourteen). Eskil doesn't seem to understand that we don't speak Danish. So he will spout off to us, telling us all sorts of things which we, unfortunately, don't understand. Brent got a good sample of what Danish should sound like so that when we learn Danish, he'll have a better idea of how he should speak. Such a fun weekend, but waaaaay too short. Jan is a geologist and he and Cat have done a lot of hiking (and Jan a lot of glacier travel). Brent and I felt like we could learn a lot from them and would love to go hiking with them since we share a passion for the outdoors. They told us we are welcome in Denmark anytime...we hope to take them up on that someday. ...Pictures will come when blogspot gets the photos up and working again... --Female 1/2

My cairn!

Brent and I have done a lot of hiking as of late, which some of you may know. Whilst climbing Castle Mountain, a route that involved a fair amount of route-finding--often times in the rock there was no trail to follow. Consequently we had to watch out for the rock cairns that dotted the way and directed us to the best and hopefully easiest trail. When I was growing up, one of the games my family played when traveling long distance in our Astro van was something we liked to call "my horses". The way the game worked was that everyone watched out the windows for horses (this worked especially well in the dusty ranch country of Kamloops area) and when you saw some, you called out "my horses!" and counted how many there were (some artistic estimating license was permissible). Provided you were the first to see them and the first to yell out, these became "your" horses. The same worked with tractors...although we never collected as many tractors as we did horses. When we came across a cemetery, the first person to yell out "graveyard" caused everyone else to lose all their horses and tractors and start from scratch again. It certainly kept us entertained for a while. :) What is the connection you ask? I will tell you. For a while I was leading on the hike down from the summit of Castle mountain. We hadn't really payed attention to the cairns on the way up because mostly we just looked at the summit and took the shortest route to get there. On the way down, however, we figured we should follow the allotted path...with the aid of the cairns. So, it became a contest between the two of us to see who could spot the next cairn first (also it was a distraction from our aching muscles). Ergo, the game "my cairn". The End. --Female 1/2 1st Picture is summit cairn on Castle Mountain. 2nd is a neat diagonal cairn on the way up Indian Ridge. 3rd is on ridge of Wilcox Peak.

In BIG Trouble

My mum sent me this forwarded picture this morning, reminding me of of a time when my younger brothers got into some paint and painted my parents' old International pick up truck...they painted the sides of the truck, the windows, the windshield, the tires, and were just figuring out how to fill up the gas tank with...paint thinner or something I think. Also, I was thinking earlier this week about the phrase my mum always used when she wanted us kids to get to work on our chores: "Quit dinking around!!" Perhaps this is the result of parents not telling their kids to quit dinking around!

Cake!

Brent likes cake. Just the other day he remembered that he liked cake. Cake, not the music group that had a hit song "Short skirt, Long jacket" or something like that when we were in high school. Cake, like the bus-stop bench advertisments show two radio d.j.'s eating. Cake, like Brent didn't get for his birthday (he got birthday lemon merangue pie with a candle on it just on Saturday). Cake, like the scent we could smell wafting in our office window last Saturday during work. So, Brent made cake! Chocolate cake with chocolate coffee almond icing. And it was good.

So long friends

Today I visited some very good friends of ours for a while before they leave for a year to Korea. (That's them in the picture of the picture near the teacup). I am happy and sad all at the same time about their departure. I shall miss them very much...but I am excited to hear about all their adventures there! Happy travels guys! --Female 1/2