"Collected"?

Seriously, "Collected"?

Morale

When we discovered that our 16 combined years of post-secondary education were inadequate training for making a fire from damp wood in the dark, we went to bed cold, wet, and somewhat miserable. The next morning we discovered a magical secret (hint: you can light paper on fire!) that led to a dramatic increase in morale, and the most delicious instant ramen I have ever tasted:As you can see, we had a sort of live-off-the-land approach to cutlery. I had a good feeling about fresh twig chopsticks, but Vinai found more success with the chopsticks he pulled off of one of our logs: We were still in good spirits when we got to Lake Louise, where the typically majestic emerald lake turned out to be covered a more mundane layer of ice and snow.
Still it was worthwhile, since it made for this great snowman shot I took for Steve:
By the time we got to the hot springs things were back to being just plain lovely, thanks in part to sunshine and cucumber sandwiches:
Not to mention road signs advertising extremely bad ideas:
...and idyllic mountain towns like Golden, B.C.:
...home of the first Gurdwara in North America and plenty of intimidating wildlife:
All in all, a great day for morale. Unless you were driving, I guess, in which case it was kind of dangerous and unnerving:

Westward Ho!

Vinai had a grand idea for a vacation: he takes a week and a half off of Doctoring, flies to Edmonton, and drives out to Vancouver with me to see Steve. Our first stop was Jasper, which he'd never seen before.The Jasper Park Lodge was under construction, but they had some pretty cool Canada Geese:

From there we headed down the Icefields Parkway towards our campsite in Banff. As we went, the mountains got snowier and colder looking:
So of course we decided to get out and walk on one:
We pulled off at the trail for the Athabasca Glacier. We naively believed the sign telling us it would take us 20 minutes to get to the glacier, despite the fact that the actual trail was completely hidden by snow, I was wearing my stupidest shoes, and the glacier and its canyon were producing enough wind to generate hundreds of kiloWatts of MADNESS:

Well, anyway, we made it to the glacier (the big white thing behind Vinai here:)... from which it was surprisingly difficult to get a cab.

Lookin' Swell

You would be amazed at the range of anachronistic activities at which Vinai's shirt looked perfectly appropriate.

Hey there, RSS readers.

So many possible interpretations. All of them beautiful.

Worst Outlet Ever

I don't want to know what you're supposed to plug in to this.

I should have known....

... that the most natural place for an orchestra to be is hiding in the basement.

Thanks, Facebook.

It's not like I have a choice. I don't have a Dukedom to fall back on like Jackington does.

The _snow_ is nice, anyway

I know every other Edmonton blog I link to is complaining about it, but I don't mind the winter. I learned last year not to pretend that just because it's 20 degrees for a week doesn't mean we won't have the worst winter storm in spring history a week later.

Cool

Maybe it's because I've never been there this early, but I'd never noticed that Orange Hall used to be a speakeasy.

Oops

I didn't realize until intermission that I had gone on stage in my ratty velcro running shoes, but nobody else seemed to notice either. People might have noticed them if the cell phone in my pocket had gone off though, I'll bet.

Our Lady Needs a Better Job

I like church and everything, but perpetual church?

Yum!

Originally I was going to say something about being a vegetarian, but now I realize that "THE MEAT FORCE" would be a great name for a team of male strippers. I'm in!

At first I thought someone was putting on a play called The Reward. I wasn't going to see it until I saw the description, but it looks fascinating.

MARSBLOG: All Martha, All the Time

Offers to take Martha to The Mall while she was here were met with nothing but eye-rolling, so instead I took her in to see the department. Despite being an engineer by training, Mars almost immediately made my toy helicopter fail to fly:She made up for it, though, by being brave enough to open the door I sure as hell never would have.
I tried to tell her that Timmy's isn't as popular out here, but my claim was undermined almost immediately: Sure, Waterloo has four of them on campus, but you can't stand in the same place and see two of them.
When Martha heard that Edmonton had a Chinatown, she thought she'd like to check it out. I think she didn't think it would be very Chinese. It turns out she was right:
After knitting for a while at a hole-in-the-wall bubble tea place packed floor-to-ceiling with crates of mangoes, we went back to Jasper. Here's Mars at the arboretum, blithely unaware that she is about to be grabbed by a giant cactus monster
Before heading back across the river, we stopped in at the Macdonald for a little repose:
Martha was a little bit confused by this sign:
...but I thought it was pretty self explanatory: "Queen Elizabeth swimming in river: THIS WAY"

Anyway, we met up with a bunch of linguists on our way to dinner. I guess they were excited to see us:

That's Sullay's laugh you hear in the video. He was so impressed, he decided to give it a try for himself:
Eventually we made it to the restaurant, where they served us tasty Indian food by the bucket load:All in all, a great visit.

MARS ATTACKS!!!!

It's hard to sum up how many ways I know Martha, shown here playing Settlers of Catan in the Australian outback, so let's just say she's probably the most regular reader of this blog never to appear on it. (Directly, at least). You can imagine how excited I was to hear that she would be in Edmonton for a few days before flying back down under. Edmonton was excited too: The weather was so warm that it was physically impossible for me to take myself out of it by putting on those headphones:
When Mars (nee Martha) got here we headed to Muddy Watters, where she demonstrated her new ability to knit FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT!!!1
After a thoroughly satisfying stitch 'n bitch session, Tatiana and I tried to show her around our used bookstores, with little success:
She got to see some pretty Edmonton Edmonton anyway, though, including the old-west ghost town stretch of 81st Ave, hitching post and all:
And Whyte Ave, of course, where we met up with Trev for dinner:
On the way back to my place, Trev pointed out a dubious sign of his fame: The class he was scheduled to teach made it on to this sign:
...but not into reality. It was cancelled for lack of students. You should have signed up! Anyone can learn! And he's good!

Anyway, we stopped off at home and grabbed Kitchener-Waterloo On Board! (an "Opoly style game" based on the town Trev, Mars and I grew up in) and took it out to an Edmonton gem for a little cultural exchange:
AMT and Steve joined us for the game, and it got so intense that I stopped taking pictures, even when a crowd of my friends arrived to meet the guest of honor.

The Zone

I hope I'm not the only one who goes a little bit crazy this time of year.

oo.

So, I got the proofs back. Thanks Chris! Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results: