Birthdays X 2

For my birthday this year, Roger made me a delicious supper of spicy spaghetti, a green onion cake and DQ ice cream cake of course!  

I got some lovely presents.

A stunning portrait from Erin:

An intricate, but perhaps not entirely birthday appropriate, drawing from Brendan:

A composter!

And.... a 400 litre collapsible rain barrel! 

For Roger's birthday, he asked for the usual...

Smörgås torta

I must say, I think this is my nicest smörgås torta yet.  I was inspired by all the food magazines Mamma G had shown me from Sweden.

He also got some lovely gifts:

A handmade Chu Totoro

I had a little trouble with his eyes!

Another lovely portrait by Erin

Look at all those teeth!

We were also lucky to have Hans and Dianne visit--especially because Handy Hans helped us set up the rain barrel and composter (even though it may look like Roger's doing most of the work in the photos).

Easter 2012

For Easter, Roger and I headed down to Camrose to celebrate with Mama G. 

When we arrived we found these 4 little bunnies on our bed.  Despite how pretty they looked... they didn't last very long at all.

The wizardress in the kitchen.

We were also lucky enough to catch up with some other family members

And got to visit with Baby Pebbles.

Some other Spring photos from around Mama G's House

Powderface

Although we did some powdering of our faces, some time ago, Megan and I also headed out to Powderface in K-country to do some snowshoeing.  Unfortunately, the snow was hard to come by, but we managed to find some, and although snowshoes may have been overkill, it was fun regardless.

Here, we are playing Man Tracker.

 And here is the fence to keep out the man eating cows.

Luckily we didn't see any man eating cows because as you can see above, Megan's brute strength DESTROYED the fence so that we could get through.

By the way, look what I did with Megan's hair!

Spring so far has been a bit spastic.  There's been warm days punctuated with cold snowy days which is good because it allowed us to ski all the way until the end of March.  I think it was the first time since coming to Fort Mac. that I've been able to ski past daylight savings which meant being able to ski after dinner without a headlamp!

I promise, that's the end of the ski photos for the season.

Happy Spring!

Yesterday Roger and I went out for a walk.  We may have done better to have brought our skates--many of the sidewalks were covered in ice.

But today, we woke up to this!

Which allowed us another ski.  The snow was pretty powdery, but at -4'C the glide was surprisingly great.  So great, that a short little ski ended becoming 2 1/2 hours and without food and water I became a VERY grouchy and VERY tired skier.  Luckily Roger saved the day by taking me to McDonald's right afterwards for a Fish Filet (as it's known by my family), french fries and iced tea!

Here's what he made for supper since the McMeal only filled me up for a couple of hours.

Sk-alking

It is with great sadness that Roger and I are announcing the end of the cross country ski season here in Fort Mac.    There have been a few false alarms, but with the +7 degree celsius temperatures that this weekend brought, we feel this is the true end.  Since January we've managed to ski at least 188km (at least these are the times we remembered to record our distances).  

It was almost a perfect winter for skiing, we didn't get a ton of snow, but it was enough and it was relatively warm with temperatures usually between -5 to -15'C.  

This season, Roger turned into a skate skiing fiend.  He clipped into those new skis, went into turbo mode and left me far, far behind.  I'll be hard pressed to convince him to put his classic skis on ever again.

Last weekend, we did quite a lot of exploring in the Birchwood Trails.  The snow was almost perfect, but somehow not a lot of people were out and about.

This past Saturday, we headed out for our last ski.  It was warm, and at times I felt like we were cross-country water skiing.  Roger called it sk-alking, as we did a lot of walking in our skis.  

These were the only pictures I took as I was grumpy because of the snow and made Roger carry the camera bag which he obligingly did.

The rest of the photos were taken by Roger.

So that's it, I guess when we really start missing the snow, we'll have to resort to watching this.