Since we can't afford a new house

After 5 years of service, our old MEC Wanderer tent has started to show its age. Its also started to show its weight and size on some of our backpacking trips. We're not very big, we don't need a 3 man unless we are treking around with our four legged friend.

So we decided to upgrade, and this summer we will be spending our wilderness nights in the Exped Venus II. Since our lawn is a lot soggy and a little poopy, we did the first set up in our living room just to make sure we'd gotten all the pieces.

Its going to take us a little while, but I'm sure we'll get faster at set up. It will also help when we have a little more space, and the dog is not laying on the tent. We have one piece that we're still not sure where it goes, its supposed to be a gear sling for one of the vestibules, but we haven't figured out how it attaches.

Initial tent review (based on living room set up):

• Set up should be easy since you set the tent and the fly up together
• Lots of room for us, even sitting up
• Two vestibules, a must for Jon
• Lovely yellow color on the inside makes us happy
• Not sure how we feel about the exoskeleton design (poles sleeves are on the outside)
• It looks huge, but that could just be our living room

I'll be re-evaluating how I feel about it once we try it out. If the weather ever improves, perhapps we'll get to use it!

Finally Friday!

The sun came up this morning with quite a nice display of colors. I popped out in my bathrobe to try and snap a few photos before heading off for my dog walk.

Bow Valley Provincial Park

Jon and I took advantage of the nice weather on Saturday to do a bit of exploring near Kananaskis. The original plan had been to drive to Crowsnest Pass to see the Frank Slide, but a late start made us reconsider. Instead we drove to Bow Valley Provincial Park, which is just north of the highway right before Canmore.

The park has a series of self guided interpretive trails which take the visitor to several small features withing the park including a moraine lake, some bubbling springs and a walk along a moraine. While I wouldn't consider any of the them hikes, it was certainly a nice walk around the park. We saw only a few people while we were there, and that was confined to the parking lots.

Barking

I've started a new Flickr account to upload photos from our new camera to. I can't promise they will be of exciting things, but perhaps you'll find some artistic merit in them.

Seagulls, at night?

What was up with the birds last night? It was almost scary the number of seagulls flying over our house after 10pm. And they were loud, we could hear them even while we were safely tucked in bed (out of the way of seagull droppings). Before falling asleep we asked ourselves: why are they flying at night? Where are they going?

Using Google this morning I came across mostly irrelevant pages on a Spanish horror film called "Night of the Seagulls" (which got poor reviews in case you were interested and doesn't seem to have anything to do with seagulls but instead involves zombie knights of some sort).

After trying a few better search terms (not involving "seagulls" and "night") I came across several pages explaining the migration habits of birds. The USGS has this publication here about when birds migrate which explains why they are flying at night.

So at least I know what they were up to now, althought I'm still not clear on where they were all headed.

Midweek Post

I really have nothing new that is blog-worthly. But blogging beats working on my thesis. Not that my thesis is going badly, its just boring. I think the sunshine is the problem today. Like Patches, I want to go outside and frolic. Sadly, my thesis is not on frolicing in the sunshine and doing such an activity would be make no closer to getting out of here. But its nice to dream.

New Toys

Jon and I bought a new SLR camera this weekend (I think we buy something new every weekend). After much deliberation, and a reality check with the budget, we settled on the Pentax K10D instead of the Cannon EOS 30D. We've got a compact Pentax already, and its give us good results so we thought we'd give one of their fancier models a go.

After only 1 afternoon testing out the new gear, I'd have to say we're pretty happy with it. We're mostly shooting in dummy mode still, but have moved on to playing with aperture and shutter speed a little. Its a pretty easy camera to get the hang of and with 10 megapixals, the images are going to look alright regardless of what we do.

The downside to such a camera is the large bag that I am required to carry since Jon thinks it looks silly on him. I think it looks silly too, but it is practical for carrying things in.

For now we are mostly photographing our neighborhood and our dog. Patches seems to enjoy modeling and will probably learn to get very exited by the sound of the shutter clicking. But the images are beautiful and we can't wait to take it out into the mountains on our adventures this summer.

An Update

Its been a pretty typical week at the MacDonald house. Monday we ran, tuesday was Spanish, wednesday was mac and cheese night with Carole and thursday I worked until 8pm.

My stocks went up $0.70 (in total), that about at 0.02% increase in value. I''ll probably be able to retire and live off them real soon.

After a couple of unsuccessful weeks I have finally been able to secure a place to stay for our first few nights in Granada. With only 4 weeks to go, I don't think I actually have that much left to arrange or find.

Jon has been busy brewing beer and we will be bottling the cerveza this weekend along with the vino blanco. We sampled the red wine on Saturday and since no one has come down with an mystery illnesses and between Mike and Jon the bottle got finished, I'll have to declare it a success.

In other news, our neighbor, Mr. Sunshine Car, has upgraded. He seems to have replace his custom detailed camry for a mint green honda CRV. At first we weren't sure if he'd simply moved out but after observing how the CRV has been parked (he can't park), and peeking into the windows to see that it is indeed filled with junk we concluded that he had simply bought a new car. It was confirmed this morning when I saw him get in and start the new car. As for the sunshine car, my theory is that is got a few flat tires and without his trusty bicycle pump handy to pump them up, Mr. Sunshine Car simply had to abandon it.

Out with the Old

After 8 years of service to me, and several more before that for my parents, I have retired my trusty old down sleeping bag and upgraded. I'll be spending the summer snuggled in my new Diamond Spring bag. I'd wavered about buying the bag, not sure if I wanted another down bag given one disastrous night on the Westcoast Trail where I slept cold and damp. But since it was still 25% off 3 months after first looking at it, I took that as a sign that I was meant to own it and bought it yesterday. Plus, down is just so snuggly! I then had to go celebrate by eating french fries dipped in a frosty dairy dessert from the Wendys across the road.

Weekend Rush

Another busy weekend has come and gone. It amazing how much and how little you can get done in two days.

We shopped (and I got a great pair of shoes), we enjoyed the nice weather and we ate takeout. We watched "Niagara Motel", which made us both laugh and then watched "Accepted", which also made us laugh.

We did our taxes, and thanks to new government legislation, I actually made less than the minimum taxable income.

We bought new shelves and organized our spare room (for about the 3rd or 4th time since we moved in).

Patches got what seems to be an ingrown whisker. If its not one thing, its another.