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.