Grattis på födelsedagen Roger!

Roger recently celebrated a birthday, and because his birthday follows so closely after mine, it can easily be overshadowed.  So, here's a posting devoted solely to celebrating Roger's birthday.

Here's Roger's present that I hid under my side of the bed the night before to surprise him with it first thing in the morning!

Here's the birthday breakfast that I prepared for him...

Complete with Birthday Cinnamon Bun and sparkler..

Since Roger's birthday was on a weekday, we didn't properly celebrate until the weekend with some west coast guests!  Although the weather wasn't great, we were good hosts, and kept them entertained with the electric wine bottle opener...so easy, such a snap!

  

as well as the hideously tangled ball of yarn...

    

and kept them well fed with kantareller!

    

Now, who dare say that there's nothing exciting to do in Fort McMurray??

Grattis på födelsedagen!!

On my birthday I had lots of surprises.  Gunilla came to visit and she brought this:

Yes, those are chocolate and caramel covered apples, and yes... they were delicious.

Roger bought me this:

Yes, that's a DQ ice cream cake with orange icing, and yes.... it was delicious.

We blew lots of bubbles...

and... the highlight of it all....a 5 year old girl estimated my new age to be 17.

It was a great birthday!  Tack så mycket!

By the way, check out our grass.  Yup, that's our grass.  Exactly one week ago, that was all buried under 50 cm of snow!

Something to boast about...

There's not too much we can boast about living up here in Northern Alberta.  Winters are cold and snowy, summers get pretty hot and buggy, but every once in a while, we see something like this and it makes living up here just a little bit better!

                








I apologize for the blurriness in the photos, and my sensor is dirty too! Oh dear.  Anyways, I hope you get the idea...

Wedding ring

I was fortunate enough to be able to meet up with Jannette and Coby when they breezed through Edmonton about a week ago. It had been more than 4 years since I'd seen them last. Lots has changed since then but not Jannette or Coby. They are still the same great couple I knew before they moved down to Texas. Anyways, Jannette, Coby and Karen are the true reason for setting up this blog account. They almost had me convinced to sign into Facebook again, but after some thought I've decided that having a blogspot is more my speed. So Jannette and Coby, this post is dedicated to you in the hopes that we keep better contact.. and, here's a photo of the ring!  By the way, the jeweler gave us these cool leather pouches with a key ring attached.  He said they didn't give out ring boxes because you can't use a ring box for  much else except storing a ring whereas with these pouches you can keep jewelry, keys, coins etc.  I thought it was a great idea.

A great neighbourhood

This is one of the reasons why we like living where we do (despite all the bad press Fort Mac gets).

Today Roger and I headed out to shovel our driveway again.  After we were done clearing ours, we headed over to clear our neighbour's driveway since they're away in Jamaica.  To be honest, we only meant to clear a small path to their door--that's all we really had energy for.  While we were shoveling, out of the blue, two of our other neighbors drove up with what I was hoping was a snow blower in the back of their truck.  It ended up being shovels instead.  Either way, with the extra muscle power we we able to clear the entire driveway.  We do have some pretty fantastic neighbors.  (here's the evidence)

April snow storm

Yesterday it snowed. It snowed and snowed and snowed and even today it's still snowing. The snow isn't the nice fluffy snowflakes that we've come to expect in Northern Alberta. Instead, it is wet snow that is being whipped wildly around by wind. The wind has been so strong and persistent that even the icicles have frozen crooked. The snow is so heavy that it took us 2 hours to clear our front driveway this morning. April in general is pretty unpredictable when it comes to weather, however what makes this storm so hard to take is that spring was here. It really was here. The last traces of snow had finally disappeared, kids were out on bikes, grass was starting to turn green and I had even started looking for my tulips and crocuses that I had planted last fall. Now those tulips and crocus bulbs are buried under 3 feet of snow. Oh well. I guess we needed this moisture.

By the way, how do you like our sad gnome? You can kind of see his buddy on his left which is grumpy gnome. I picked up this pair at the flower shop that's doing our wedding flowers. I couldn't resist. When I first brought them home Roger didn't like them so much. He said their expressions were too realistic and they made him sad/grumpy too. Since then, he's started to warm up to them more. Anyways, the sad gnome is expressing exactly how I'm feeling about the snow.