We got breakfast at Maltby Cafe first then headed to the club and got there about 15 minutes before it opened.  The line went all around the building, apparently curling is really popular during the Winter Olympics.  It took about an hour for us to even get in, but they had snacks and we were able to watch the other groups curl.  Once it was our turn they gave us each one rubber gripper to go over your throwing side shoe.  It helps you stop yourself from slipping on the ice.  The curling ice is bumpy unlike skating ice so it’s a bit less slick.  First we learned how to release the rock, you sort of squat down then push back with your gripper foot then push yourself forward.  Then we learned the sweeping part, which I actually thought was harder.  We ended up playing a game, but had a hard time getting the rocks to even make it to the house.  Our team didn’t do so well, but the rock that I release was one of three that made it in and scored a point, so horray, maybe I can be an Olympic curler. 

After curling we went to the Experience the Music Project and the Science Fiction Museum with our friend.  We liked the Sci-Fi part better, but we were able to take this really cool band picture at the EMP.  We were still in our sweat pants from curling so it’s not so convincing…over all it was a fun outting.

In front of BC Place

The line to the The Bay was ridiculously long

We waited in a HUGE line for about an hour to get into the store to buy official Olympics stuff.  As is the case with all touristy places, things were overpriced.

Angela in front of the Olympic torch

The Olympic logo lit up every time the Canadians got a medal

Not "Starbucks" but "Moonpennies"

Meticulously crafted hot chocolate

Posing in front of the ski jump thing

Angela was pretty nonchalant going down a pretty hard bobsled run

Angela’s always the one that remains calm while I freak out.

You see crazy stuff like this in Canada

Angela: "What would Shaun White do?"

All the onlookers were speechless at Angela’s snowboarding skills.  When asked how she knew it she said, “I just thought, ‘What would Shaun White do?’ and I just did what was natural.”

Snowboarding

Bronze was so disappointing

Proof that we were at the 2010 curling event!

Curling competitors at the opening

This is when the US was doing well

Click here to see a video of our US curling team in action! Apparently WordPress doesn’t have out-of-the-box ability to embed video, so you’ll have to download it to watch it.

Boo! 10-3

Our team got schooled.  Ended in the seventh in, even.  But all in all, going to the Olympics was really fun.  People were really friendly and there was a lot of energy in the air.

The compost we started a year and a half ago actually looks like compost!  The things that decomposed really well were vegetable discards, fruit discards, leaves, and organic bowls.  But you can easily tell the things that didn’t do so well: egg shells, yarn, and spoons.  It doesn’t smell at all any more…but the question is if we want to withstand the gnats and stink again for more.

Our green onions seem to be hanging in there all through winter.  During the winter, we were sad to see that our garlic was all dead, but it looks like they’ve made a re-emergence for the spring!  Yum!  I love garlic!!

I can’t wait for it to get warmer…because that means we’ll be able to plant some basil.  And you know what that means…PESTO!!!!!

Basically, the story is about two high school kids that fall in love, Toffee and Jonny (Jonny rebeliously removed the ’H’ from his name).  Toffee’s parents thing Jonny is unfit for her and makes her break it off.  After learning about the break up Jonny commits suicide by jumping into the town’s nuclear reactor.  Of course, Toffee is distraught and unable to move on.  She pines for Jonny and is mourning the fact that she won’t have a date to the Sr. prom.  Her pining and love somehow bring Jonny back from the dead as her undead lover…but Toffee doesn’t really want an undead lover.  Drama ensues, the media is alerted about the anomoly and Jonny becomes an advocate for undead rights.  In the end love prevails and Toffee decides she wants Jonny even if he’s green and slightly slimely.  Ah true love.   

Saturday night we were able to babysit for a family in the ward.  Their kids were really sweet and we had a pretty good time.  They have two daughters and a infant little boy who is absolutely adorable.  It was good practice for us I think.  Feeding the baby, changing the baby, being thrown up on by the baby…Yeah…poor guy, we were trying to put him down for bed and he got so upset he threw up his entire bottle…all over me.  I think I had baby vomit literally from head to toe.  Strangely enough, I didn’t find it gross at the time, I was more worried about the little baby.  That must have been pretty tramatic for him.  At least after that Jon was able to rock him to sleep while I tried to clean myself up.  Ah…we’re bad babysitters.  Well, at least that was the only major incident of the evening.  The girls were really helpful and helped clean up too.  After the baby was asleep we did puzzles and played Twister and tag.  Now I see why parents are tired all the time.  Well, like I said good training and we had a pretty good time. 

Well, not much besides that going on on the Northwestern front for now.  Jon and I are getting ready for our Olympics trip to Vancouver (maybe we should actually learn the rules to curling so it makes a little sense).  Pixel is doing well too, she’s actually been a lot better behaved these past few weeks besides her new affection towards rubbery items.  We’ve “lost” the remote in her lair several times already .  Overall though, I’d say all is well.  We’ll try to post more often as the spring and summer pick up (come back to us Sun!).

This was the evil carrot

1. While we were in Idaho for the holidays, we went to a Thai restaurant with family. One of the things we ordered was a soup with spiciness rating of 4 (out of 4). I like spicy food so I had Angela scoop me some of it. She asked me if there was anything specific in the soup that I wanted. I saw a baby carrot so I thought “ooh, I really feel like having a carrot.” I ate most of the soup and then got to the carrot. I bit down on it and thought it had a weird texture–kind of hollow with a chewy skin. It had such a weird texture that I spit it out to find that it wasn’t a carrot but a Thai pepper! My mouth was already burning but kept getting increasingly painful. The burning just wouldn’t go away even after drinking 4 glasses of water and eating two plates of rice. I started hyperventilating and I couldn’t see anything around me. I thought I was going to pass out! Or die!
2. 

   On the left is the mysterious cut I had when I woke up. On the right is the bite from ferret at Petco.

   All night last night, my finger was hurting. This morning I woke up to find that I had a cut about 1/4 inch wide on my finger and it was bleeding. What!? Where did that come from? Angela?
3. Today we went to Petco and saw they had a ferret. This one was particularly interested in us. I always stick my finger in the cage because the ferrets like to sniff you. This time was different. The ferret bit down on my finger hard and wouldn’t release it. I tried to shake her off to no avail. So then I tried to pull my finger out of the cage, and she still didn’t let go (even though her face was smashed against the cage). So I took my other finger and started tapping on her nose, which worked. Fifteen seconds and a bloody finger later, I finally had my finger back. Oh yea, and this bite was on the same finger that had the mysterious cut.

She hides flip flops so often that we put them on top of our table so she couldn’t get them. That didn’t work because all she had to do was climb the table. Now we keep flip flops on top of her cage because she hasn’t figured out how to climb it yet.

24 inches of pure High-def recipe enjoyment

About a week ago, we found a 24″ LCD full HD monitor for $170 with free shipping on the Dell Outlet website. Thanks to Twitter, I found a $20 coupon. So we got a humongous 24″ monitor for watching movies and viewing recipes while we’re cooking in the kitchen.

On Black Friday, we left for Old Navy at 2:20am. We bought 13 items including 50% off jeans. We got in the checkout line when there were four people in line and were out of the store in 20 minutes total. By the time we left the store, the checkout line had grown to about 30 people.

After Old Navy, I waited in line to get in to Target while Angela went to Kohl’s (which was already open) to buy a bunch of $3 board games and sweaters. Kohl’s gave us a $10 gift card for shopping there (woohoo!).

Our Black Friday treasures

Target was the best store of the day! As evidence, the line was about 1000 people long by the time the store opened. Since we knew that perfect execution would be critical at Target, we shmoozed with an employee and got a map of the store. We also found out that we didn’t have to waste time grabbing a cart at the entrance because there would be carts spread throughout the store. We planned our route and were able to beat the 50-100 people in front of us in line to the good stuff. We got one of the four piano keyboards they had stocked, a bunch of DVDs, and tons of clothes. As we were leaving the electronics area, there were swarms of shoppers like ants swarming around their kicked anthill. I wanted to snap a picture but was afraid of being trampled, so we fled screaming and clutching our prizes. Finally at checkout, they gave us a $10 gift card!

At Staples, I grabbed four $10 webcams that were normally $50. When people kept taking them, I had to try hard to resist not taking more. My heart sunk when an employee told me that they only allowed one webcam per customer. I decided to try to check out anyways and we were particularly nice to the employee. We found out that she was sick the past week and consequently missed all the Black Friday orientation meetings. And she let us buy our webcams! We also bought some other good stuff like speakers, a GPS, and 8GB USB drives.

We headed over to Half Price Books in hopes of randomly winning a $100 gift card. Unfortunately we didn’t win. But they did give us $10 in gift cards.

Ikea loot

Black Friday was a success! We got every item that we wanted to get that day. But wait! That’s not the end of the good deals! On Saturday, we stopped by Ikea and found a hidden clearance section! We bought 14 plates for 99 cents each (normally $4.99 each). And rubber gloves for 10 cents each.

What a great year for deals!

Monday morning we went to breakfast at this “hippy” place near Chinatown.  It was pretty good, they had these really good pesto potatoes.  After that we just walked around Market Square and Chinatown.  Supposedly, Victoria’s Chinatown is the first Chinatown to be built in Canada.  It seems like winter is downtime in Victoria and there weren’t many people there or many stores open.  After we finished up there we headed to Craigdorrach Castle, which is a mansion that a wealthy family built in the 1800’s.  I wouldn’t call it a “castle”, but it was pretty fancy and it was interesting seeing how people lived back then.  The furnishing are mostly from the original family that built the house, so that was pretty impressive.  Next time we visit Victoria, I’d really like to visit Hatley Park, which is the house built by the oldest son of that family.  The pictures make it look like somewhere Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice would live…After the Castle we headed home for a little break, but headed out again later in the afternoon.  We set off on foot from the time share and saw the Parlament Building, Empress Hotel and walked to Victoria’s downtown which has a lot of little shops and resturants.  We got fish and chips at this little place, they were pretty good.  After exploring a little we headed back to the hotel since it was getting pretty late.  We did a little FHE at the time share then we caught dinner at a Japanese place then went to watch “The Blind Side” (that football movie with Sandra Bullock).  It was a pretty inspiring movie.  Showed that some people still have good hearts and it’s always good to try to help others out when you can. 

Tuesday morning we headed out to catch the morning ferry back to the US of A.  We drove through Port Angeles a little, but then we headed to the center of Twilight-dom and drove to Forks, WA.  Home of the Cullen vampires etc.  Forks was as small and bleak as the books described…I think there were like 20 buildings in the whole town max.  We ate lunch in a little diner, checked out the local high school and some Twilight stores…that was about all there was to do there.  After Forks, we headed back home. 

Overall, the trip was pretty nice and relaxing.  Victoria was very quaint and peaceful and a perfect Christmas town.  Maybe next time we’re up North we’ll visit the National Park and Victoria’s other sites.