Carrick to Calgary

Well, here we are only two days to go before the big walk for the Weekend to End Breast Cancer. If you visit my personal page, you'll see that I've reached my fund-raising target, and actually exceeded it by about $100. Thanks to everyone who supported my request for funds - donations ranged from $10 to $500, and every cent is very much appreciated. Of course, if you're reading this and you meant to donate but thought you'd missed the boat, the WTEBC site will stay open after the walk to accept late breaking dollars!

I'm kind of looking forward to taking part in this event, but I'm also approaching it with a little trepidation. I have stocked up with most of the blister treatment products known to man, I have a waist belt to carry my water bottle, I will be wearing my hat, and I've splurged on some functional (but not very attractive) items of clothing that are made completely of synthetic fibres. It sounds a bit mad but they say that for endurance events in hot conditions (Calgary will be 28 degrees on Saturday) cotton is the enemy, because if you sweat (as I most likely will!), cotton doesn't dry out and doesn't wick the moisture away from your skin. So, I took myself off to the Mountain Equipment Co-op and stocked up on coolmax socks, lurid salmon pink teeshirts and a couple of pairs of 'technical' shorts (pictures to come - unless they're too embarrassing!).

So, I head off to Calgary tomorrow morning and I'll go to work at my old office before heading off to register for the walk on Friday evening. Then its up bright and early on Saturday morning to do the first 35km.

More later...

P

Let's see, what's left in the bottom of the Calgary photo-bag? (scrabbles around for a bit)

Ah, yes... Arizona...

Mission bells

The Big A (university of Arizona football team logo built onto a local hill)

Chilis drying in the sun

Fountain in Tucson (at our hotel)

Visiting the San Xavier Mission

Our swimming pool view (for when it's too hot to do anything but swim)

Desert sky

Will the real Jesus please stand up? (Caution: moving statues)

The artists' colony at Tubac

Boot Hill justice, circa 1882

Shootout at the OK Corral (every 2 hours, $ 10 admission)

The Mission again

All the saints (Mission interior)

"mortuus sanctus"

Did you know? The Mission features a replica of a dead saint in a glass coffin with a wooden head on a hinge (that's him under the white sheet at the bottom). The faithful come to offer him prayers and money (which they pin to his clothes). They then try to lift his head up and only the pure of heart are supposed to be able to move it. I tried and it wouldn't budge, but a little old women lifted it up like at was a feather. It's all in the wrist, I suppose! (plus it helps to believe)

Roman Catholic saints + Jesuit priests + slightly weird Spanish-influenced art = the San Xavier Mission

I think we're almost done with the photo round-ups now. Watch this space for the end of Carrick to Calgary and the birth of something completely Different....

Just a little quickie here with a couple of interesting photos from Bragg Creek Provincial Park. As regular readers will know, 2005 was the summer of Simon and Sandy, a.k.a. "bringing the Great Flood with you on your holidays"/"Why does it always rain on me?" There was such an enormous amount of rainfall that people were washed away and the course of many rivers was permanently alerted. For instance, the river channel at Bowness Lagoon was completely silted up (no winter skating there this year) and Allan Bill Pond is no longer a pond at all, having become part of the river again. The Bow River passes through Bragg Creek Prov Park and we had been there in summer '04 with Mum and Dad White and had managed to use the stepping stones to wade across the river. Here's us picking out way across in '04:

And here's the same spot a year after the floods in 2005:

As you can see, the river's completely changed its course and is now all on one side of the sandbar which makes wading a bit of an issue. Also, there was a great deep spot by the bank which the local kids would use of for jumping into the river - this spot has now been replaced by sandy riverbank, which makes jumping in a bit less fun. The power of mother nature, eh?

More piccies from the past, this time documenting the progress of a typical chinook, which is a warm wind which sweeps down off the Rockies over Calgary and brings the temperatures up sharpish. As you can see, it was back in February and we were in the freezer:


Minus 13 and a half outdoors and a bracing +15 indoors, enough to keep you in bed for the day

Snowy outside too

Might have to get the snow shovel out to do the tea!

So along comes Mr Chinook and in no time at all (only a few hours), the IN/OUT thermoclock has changed its tune:

A full 22 DEGREES warmer by tea-time! WOW!

Where did da snow go?

Easy to BBQ now, but a bit wet

The magic of the Chinook, which we will not be getting up in Edmonton (too far north, plus chinooks are for softies, apparently!)

"Life is what happens when you're making other plans"

It's Monday 24th July, 11:19pm, and we've been in Edmonton for almost a month. We've been so busy, so many jobs to do and so many things to sort out that it's flown past like it was only a few days. Which accounts for the lack of blogging - I suppose that it's one thing to be busy with stuff and another thing to find the time and energy to stop and write about doing things. But we promise to try harder! Over the last few days we've been starting to settle into more of a routine, so the blogging should become a little more regular.

All of which leads to the question, why are we still using Carrick to Calgary, when we're in E-Town? Well, there are a few things to tidy up here before we go, mostly photos which we uploaded but never got around to describing, so here goes with the first of the tidy-up posts. More will follow.

The first lot are from a wee while ago, when there was still snow on the ground and we took a trip out to Allan Bill Pond in Kananaskis:

Guess Who?

Stiil mostly frozen pond, perfect for the new sport we invented, ice-skiting, in which you have to skim (or skite) a stone out to the very edge of the ice as close as you possibly can without plopping it into the water. A lot like skimming a stone, except for the water being frozen. Plus it doesn't skim once it hits the ice, it just sort of skites along.

Great skiting surface

Rabbit track central (now we have a squirrel!)

Crazy man tracks

Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it, snow on Tuscarora?

Okay, I gave in - when it got to 34 in the shade and slowly but surely climbed to 28 in the house (probably because I opened the bedroom windows) - I turned it on. So currently we are wrecking the peacefulness of the neighbourhood by having the big box at the side of the house suck in air, funnel it to something in the basement where it gets cooled down and pushed into something else that pushes it up through the vents on the floor. Have to say that its a good job....and if the current forecast is true, it might be on for a few days more...

Here is the weather forecast for the next few days in E-town...might be a bit damp at times, but it just isn't going to get much cooler. Let's keep our fingers (and toes) crossed that its not like this in Calgary next weekend for the big walk for the Weekend to End Breast Cancer.....




More later

P

Really must get he who knows how to do such things to deal with this blog's title - Carrick to Calgary was good, but we're in Edmonton these days, and its just getting confusing...!

Anyway, its blisteringly hot - yesterday we reached the heady heights of 35 degrees C and today we're heading for somewhere around 32 - phew! Its actually really too hot to be outside during the day, and we've found that we can keep the house cooler if we don't open any windows at all. There is very little wind around at the moment, but when a bit of breeze does stir itself, it feels like being blasted by a hairdryer on its hottest setting. Thus the windows will remain closed for the time being, and if it gets much hotter, I might even relent and allow the air conditioning to be turned on. I know it seems mad having a house that is equipped with such a thing, and being reluctant to turn it on, but I kind of feel slightly bad that it uses so much energy to cool us down when most of the year, we're complaining about being too cold.... mind you, being ever so slightly environmentally conscious doesn't stop me from driving (and turning on the car's air conditioning!), and I certainly won't be worrying about excessive fossil fuel consumption in the depths of winter when you can be sure that the heating will be going as much as necessary to keep the house ticking over at a very comfortable 20 degees C.

So, maybe we should steer clear of discussions on that sort of thing and move on to a little bit more of life in Edmonton....

Before we moved in, we had the house inspected as part of our conditions (i.e. if the inspection was unsatisfactory, we were within our rights to pull out of the contract). Despite the fact that most of the property was under a foot of snow at the time the inspection was done, and a lot of the report's pages are full of statements like 'not inspected - snow covered', the inspector did note that a tree at the side of the house was perilously close to the foundations and if left alone, would start to infiltrate the basement. So, when we moved, we engaged an arborist (tree surgeon) to come round and take a look at it and the other trees on the property. He reckoned that the offending tree was of the Manitoba maple variety. His view was that it needed to come out and that the nursery of little trees developing down the side of the house as a result of the prolific seeding needed to go too. So we agreed, and also agreed to get several of the big spruce trees trimmed so that their branches were clear of the electricity wires. I have to say that I was a little shocked when I came home on Monday and saw what a difference the Manitoba maple removal had made...

Here is before...



And here it is after...



It kind of makes us look very close to next door, but that is the way it is, and looking at it now, I can see how close the tree actually was to our house, and I think another growing season would not only have had the roots getting too close to the foundation, but the siding would be under attack as well. Still, it seems a bit bare without it...

We also got round to tackling one of the beds in the garden. It was full of very spiny stemmed roses - I think they might have been wild roses that had come up from next door's garden and while they filled a space, they were pretty poor to look at and I think that, left alone, they would have just spread all over the show. So, last weekend, we took the headstaggers and dug them out. My what deep roots they had... it took two of us most of Saturday afternoon to get the bed cleared and to get some new soil dug in. The existing soil is very heavy and full of clay, so we dug in several bags of soil improver, a bag of potting compost and a bag of steer manure.

This isn't a great picture because it was very bright at the time... but I think you can see the spiky rose things and a couple of lillies that were really struggling...



This is J doing his bit for workplace health and safety - note the bare feet just inches from a sharp spade - still I suppose he doesn't operate with his feet (only kidding!)...



Phew, hard work - here we are half way through...



And here is where the workers have given up...



And this is some of the stuff that came out...



We're not quite sure what to do with the bed in the longer term, as it doesn't get a lot of sun and is very close to a large spruce tree which probably sucks up most of the moisture in the soil. So, for the meantime, we've popped in a couple of bedding plants to not make it look quite so bare and we'll have a think about what we will do with it next spring.




But what about the potatoes I hear you cry...well, they're coming on a treat. This week saw the emergence of flower buds on the tops and they're looking pretty darned healthy...



As is the courgette in a pot (which reminds me, I must go and put some plant food in there this evening)... No sign of any flowers yet on the courgette, but I think we must be in step with the growing season as nobody at the farmer's market is selling courgettes there yet. There are plenty of tomatoes and peppers and early (i.e. really skinny) carrots for sale, but no courgettes...



So, what else can I tell you...? Nothing too exciting - we finally turned up the hems on the faintly ridiculous curtains in the living room and bedroom... Something they don't tell you about this part of Canada (maybe its the same in other provinces - who knows?). You know how at home, you can go into a home furnishings shop and buy ready made curtains... you can buy them in different drops, different widths, lined or unlined, different types of top (pencil pleat tape, tab tops etc etc). Well, it turns out that in this part of the world, there's no such thing (and people look at you like you're a mad woman if you ask for them). Everywhere I've been in home furnishings shops, they have panels of material that they call curtains. Usually, these things are 3 metres long and about a metre wide. If you have big wide windows, you just buy more panels... However, I don't know anybody who has windows that need to be covered with panels that are 3m long. The people who lived here before us didn't bother to shorten their panels (or maybe having large swathes of material kicking around the carpet is stylish and I don't know about such things)... so we spend several hours yesterday with a pair of scissors, a length of wundaweb and the ironing board and finally got the job done. Now, our panels are much more respectable and they just skim the floor - some of them are even straight! You'll have to excuse the big bit of material acting as a tie-back - I promise that 's just a temporary measure until I get out and get a couple of big hooks to attach to the wall.



We also decided that, since we were in a curtain frame of mind, we should put one up at the front door. This isn't to keep out drafts, but to give a little bit of privacy (hence they're a bit sheer). Please note that these were also 3 metres long before we shortened them...



Oh, and I spent yet more money on a new rug yesterday - slightly mental colours, but we think it works...



So, that's about it for now....just one more picture - it was my birthday last week (many thanks to everyone who sent presents, cards and good wishes), and J excelled himself by purchasing a beautiful bouquet of flowers - bestest!

After all the stress of getting all our stuff in one place again, we worked and worked, and carted things about until we were fairly happy with what should be where. One issue was what to do with the fridge magnets? We managed to inherit a fridge with this new house that doesn't have magnetic doors - what sort of a place is this? They ended up on the back door...which some might think a tad odd, but it works for us...



The bed is back in its rightful spot - the blow up thing was fine for a night or two (or was it actually 6 nights?), but I have to say that I was delighted to get back to a proper mattress.



The little bookshelf that came all the way from the front bedroom in Carrick is stuffed with books...



The Denby all got washed and put away...



As did all the glasses, teapots and teaset... (imagine us having a teaset!)...




Here are some views of different rooms in the house.... they're pretty self-explanatory, so I won't bore you with a full commentary...

Family room (with the desk that was originally in the basement)



The other end of the family room, with the TV...




The view from the fridge in the front room...



The view to the fridge in the front room...



Couple of area rugs required here, but that can be sorted pretty easily.

Here is the new leather 'loveseat' - otherwise known as a two seater settee...




This is the view from the front bedroom, which also has a huge ensuite bathroom with double sinks (go figure!)...





The wedding present table and wedding present crystal bowl made it intact, and are now sitting at the front door...need a little lamp here, but its one of the few places in the house that doesn't seem to have an electrical socket (otherwise known as an outlet). Funnily enough, there are outlets on both sides of the front door, on the outside of the house, but none anywhere near the front door on the inside of the house - I wonder why?




So, after sorting all of that, I think we can safely say that J feels like he is at home...




We also had our first visitor - a certain vascular surgeon from Belfast, who also happens to hold a pilot's licence. Ken flew up from Calgary on Sunday, watched the World Cup final, had lunch and then flew off to Fort McMurray on his way to Yellowknife. As far as I know, Ken doesn't usually wear such unusual hats, but it is Stampede in Calgary, and maybe he was just trying to blend in...?



We got the camera to take a pic of the three of us on the front porch - we're all trying to hold our tummies in!





During Ken's visit (and I must confess during the football final), I even found the time to put some plants in pots just to brighten the garden up a bit. We had made a visit to Hole's nursery in St Albert and bought a few bedding plants...



And here they are in their big pots...







Two have gone by the front door, and one is just outside the kitchen window.

And finally, the potato pots got sunk in the ground so that they could be earthed up a bit - they're looking pretty healthy - no flowers yet but I think it won't be too long...



More later...

P