Watershed

I love British Columbia. I love the fog and the moss and the ferns. I love the smell of wet leaves on the ground. These photos are from Watershed, a beautiful forested area near my parents' house.

29mm F4.2 1/2 sec

18mm F3.5 1/1.3 sec

95mm F5.3 1/8 sec

Vancouver Harbor

60mm F5 1/250

18mm F 5.6 1/250 sec

Night Light

75mm F 5.3 1.3 Sec

Christmas Dinner

Brian wasn't here this year, so I stepped in.

Market Fresh

Just some photos from the Granville Island Market Place.

Best White Elephant Gift Ever!!!

I've got a little more spring in my step now, thanks to my new moon shoes.

Roommate Christmas Morning

Last night I had Christmas morning around the tree with Amy and Jamie. So fun! Allow me to explain the little dog foot. We have a saying in our little group, "Hard core is never a faux pas." This, my friends, is a hard-core faux paw. I love it. Amy bought a stuffed dog and slowly dismembered it so we could each have a piece.

Amy also bought us all toe socks. I'm not so sure about those, my toes don't like to be isolated.

Graham Crackers... the poor man's gingerbread

Putting our extra-long table to good use again, we hosted FHE the other night and made gingerbread (graham cracker) houses. We gathered up all our stale Halloween candy and put it to good use. Seriously, I'm lucky I got that licorice to bend like that. Most peoples' licorice just shattered.

12 Days of Christmas

My dear friend, seeing how much I adored these hand-painted 12 days of Christmas ornaments, bought them for me for Christmas. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE them. Of course, they don't match the rest of my silver, white and red ornaments, so I had to buy another tree.

4 Calling birds. Ha, I love it!

*Sigh* I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to pack these up after Christmas.

Fancy Schmancy

I have been wanting to host a formal dinner ever since QuicKutz released the letterpress. I had so much fun letterpressing these invitations and then doing the place settings. I LOVE this tool!

The flowers look really yellow in these photos, but they were really green mums.

The dinner was really fun. We have a huge dining room table, which was the other thing that inspired this event. We thought we'd put it to good use and invite 10 guests to join us for dinner. I didn't take any photos during the dinner. Sorry, I was WAY too busy.

Our menu went as follows:

Drinks: pomegranate 7up with real pomegranate seeds (thanks, Scott)

Hors d'oeuvres: spicy chicken dip in tortilla scoops and mini fruit kabobs (thanks, Elisha)

Soup: cheesy cauliflower soup (thanks, some random website)

Salad: spinach salad with apples and caramelized nuts (thanks, Amy)

Palette cleanser: Mango sorbet (thanks, Haagen Daz)

Entrée: Honey Mustard Chicken... sort of (thanks to the creative team work of Amy and Amy), roasted red potatoes and asparagus

Dessert: Raspberry and kiwi trifle (thanks, Sarah) (It looked really festive... wish I had a picture.)

We did get plenty of pictures of the following activity. Blind Christmas Karaoke! To those who have never played, it goes like this. Select a song from your iPod you THINK you know the words to, in my case, Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You (I LOVE that song). Put the ear buds in and crank up the volume until you can't possible hear anything, ESPECIALLY your own voice. Place the blind fold on so you won't be distracted by the people laughing at you, and belt it out. It's actually really fun and quite liberating with the blindfold on... and you're sure to be off key so it's a blast for everyone else to watch too.

Our dinner guests, minus Chris, Scott, and Scott.
"All I want for Christmas..... iiiiiiss Yooooouuuuuuu! (I think I may have been pointing at Jamie)

This duet had us almost in tears we were laughing so hard.

Kalli, doesn't believe in conforming to the dress code requests in invitations. :) Yes, she is dressed as a Christmas tree, and yes, that is a real Christmas tree skirt.

Let the Christmas blogging begin.... Finally!

We'll start with my favorites from the reject pile for the Christmas card photo.

Amy, Jamie, and I have so much fun holding photo shoots. Now Amy just barely bought Jamie's old SLR, which can only mean more Nikon parties. Wahoo!

Friday Night Curling

Ahhh, curling. I haven't been curling since I was a young teenager up in Canada. I guess just the fact that I HAD been curling before gave everyone a false expectation of actual skill. Not so, curling is hard! I finally found my groove toward the end and unleashed the Canadian within.

Some people take it a little more seriously than others.

Canyoneering in November

It's all about having connections, right? Well, Mike is a handy one to have... mostly because he's so good at securing beneficial connections himself. Don't get me wrong, Mike is much more than a sweet connection, he's one of the best brothers a girl could ask for. It's thanks to Mike, that I was able to go on this awesome canyoneering trip. In the past, Mike has been the TA for the BYUI Canyoneering class, so his connections secured us both a free trip. We headed down Thursday night, right after the Pinewood Derby and got in to camp around 1am. The class had already done a couple canyons that day, but we were able to join them for two the following morning and a third one on Saturday. On Friday, we did Lucky Charms (short and simple, but fun) and then Right Fork of Leprechaun. Leprechaun had an awesome slot section. My hips are still bruised from thinking I could fit through parts without turning sideways. Mike got to see some Allosaurus tracks, but I was already halfway down the rappel when we remember to look for them. However, while Mike was busying himself with Allosaurus tracks, I was meeting Tom Jones in a slot Canyon! Tom Jones as in "Tom's Canyoneering Guide". (He's kind of a Canyoneering celebrity.) Leprechaun was pretty, but I didn't take my camera on that one. Most of my photos come from Constrict Nine, which we did Saturday morning. Constrict Nine is definitely in my top three. It has a 190 foot rappel, and too other really big ones. It was SO fun. The weather was great too. Can you believe I didn't totally freeze?! (at least not any more than I do at work everyday). It did start raining on Friday night, so we (me and the three other girls I was sharing a tarp with) took the massive tarp, folded it over ourselves and burritoed ourselves inside. Part way through the night, I woke up to the wet tarp hitting my face. It had stopped raining outside, but the condensation inside got us just about as wet. I was also way too hot and sufficating, so I clawed my way out of the burrito and slept with my head out the rest of the night. The only time it got really cold was just as we started breaking camp on Saturday. A storm came in and it started to snow pretty heavily. I was so glad we weren't staying that night.

That dark crack way down there was our second rappel. 190 ft.

So Mike is kind of a Rock star on these trips (no pun intended). I think it was enhanced by the fact that this particular canyoneering class was ALL GIRLS, but I'm sure, Mike is usually that popular... probably because Mike can do things that most humans can't... like run up a vertical wall... or run across a vertical wall and leap to the other side of the canyon, scramble over some pointy rocks and come full circle. Actually, it very much reminded me of the days when Mike and I used to leap from the counter across the kitchen to the fridge, pull ourselves up on top, and then walk on the counters around the edge until we were across from the fridge again. Mike, do you still do this to keep in shape?

Don't be deceived. He's just pretending to be exhausted. Mike doesn't get tired.

There was a lot of dried cow poop being flung around. Melissa maybe deserved a little in her hair.