Our World

 Our world is still pretty snowy, with two major snowstorms in April so far.  However the snow is slowly melting, and flowers are starting to poke up!  This is the time of year when my friends in Utah are busy posting photos of their lovely flowers, and we are busy talking about how instead of four feet of snow in our yards, we’re down to 2!  I am excited that all the tulip, crocus, and daffodil bulbs I planted last fall are starting to come up, and we even have flowers in the back yard!  A cute fluffy hare was in the backyard this week, and I angrily glared at his cute fluffy tail, waiting for him to eat my flowers, but he has not (yet).  Good thing I don’t like rabbit, rabbit, ’cause if you eat my flowers, I may seriously consider threating you with the stew pot.  And when I say seriously consider, I mean it!  The hare is very brown now, not much white left, so they must know the snow days are numbered.  The temperature has been much mildly however, with days above freezing.  Althea and I have been getting out for daily walks, if we aren’t busy with other tasks.  She really loves the carrier now, lighting up with smiles when I get ready to put her into it.  She can even sit and look around quietly for a long time before falling asleep, which is a huge change from when she was just a month old – she had to be asleep or she would be screaming!  She can now also sit quietly in the car seat for awhile and look around before falling asleep.  She still screams at times, like when we stop at a red light, but it is  a huge difference from two months ago! 

As the weather warms up, and it’s getting easier to take Althea places, I hope we get out more to do more fun things in the city.  I’m enjoying thinking of all the places we will go for walks, new places we will explore.  And of course when it gets much, much nicer, and the foothills start to melt out, I hope we will be out there taking our walks in the woods. 

Althea got her first shots yesterday, and she was such a brave little girl.  She screamed pretty loudly for a minute, and then quietened right down.  Everyone is always very impressed by her lung power.  She is doing well so far, without any bad reactions other than crying whenever she wakes up, which just breaks your heart.  But it’s a lovely sunny day out there, if still a bit nippy, and once she wakes up from her nap, we’ll head out for our walk, and visit with some neighbours as many people have this day off.  Many cuddles are planned for the baby, which always makes her feel better, and us better as well.

Off we go to the Sheep Farm

About an hour north of Calgary is Pasu Farms, a lovely little spot that is restaurant, sheep, geese, alpaca, chicken farm with some friendly dogs and a cat thrown in for good measure.  The sign warned us not to pet the animals, they might bite, but these dogs and cats were anything but!  Sucky pat lovers would be more like it, rolling over in a shameless way to expose their bellies (the dog not the cat of course).   Lunch was highlighted by apple pie, and ice cream which was pretty fabulous.  We took the opportunity to take some 26.5 week photos:

The white dots in the background are the sheep, who were shy.  I’m very glad I have a good supply of sweaters made in the 80′s and 90′s, with their generous sizing!  This sweater I made in about 1997-1998, before I had really figured out how to measure, block, or even make a gauge swatch.  Its huge!  I still love it however, with its 19 colours of Rowan wool, the original pattern is in an Alice Starmore book.  I kept wondering why I was running out of yarn and having to get more!  I still do wear it, and its warm and cozy on days like today, and now it still fits me!  Its probably going to fit up until the end of the pregnancy. 

And of course, there really were sheep:

This studly boy was being kept separate from the ladies until its time for him to have his fun!

Stampede Memories

I had a good time again at the Stampede, mainly due to sticking with the parts of it that I really like.  Horses, skating shows, mini-donuts, sheep, more horses, knitting expos, and acrobatic skating shows.  Items I really liked repeated for emphasis.  I ended up going twice, the first time to see Glass Tiger and Loverboy, which was tons of fun.  At this age we are able to sing along, act like idiots in public, and not really care what the kids think, as we make more money, and they look rather silly if you ask me with their crazy fashion trends.  I was happy to see 80′s rock hair coming back strongly.  The knitting display is so much fun as each year I know more and more people who have submitted items and won huge prizes!  The level of knitting was elevated this year over the last, and the giant fun fur jacket did not win anything!  Amazing!  The skating show combined 3 excellent skaters plus Elvis Stoiko and his new wife, 3 acrobatic acts, and a live rock and roll band.  The excellent skaters were Vaughn Chipeur from Calgary, and the wonderful Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir who were outstanding as always.  It was a very good show, and a quick half hour to a packed audience, and free with admission no less!  I’ll leave you with my favorite photo of the whole experience, our view for most of the concert:

 Strike a pose!

Olds Fibre Fair

The Olds Fibre Fair was a great day out, made more special by not only seeing old friends, but their new babies as well!  We had a car full this year, which made for some lively conversation on the hour long drive to Olds through the green verdant countryside.  Its officially verdant this year due to all the rain, which is good for us, but bad for farmers.  And by good for us I mean I haven’t had to water the lawn at all, and its actually still green and alive.  I don’t have any photos of the fair itself, due to the unscenic nature of the location, in the mechanical shop at the College.  Its in stark contrast to how lovely the grounds are, but it was filled with beautiful goods.  I did one good circuit of all the booths, and then went back for items that caught my eye.  I couldn’t resist the Fleece Artist Peter Rabbit again (on the right), and the middle skein of purply/blue was too close to a smashed blueberry to resist.  I found the colours incredibly beautiful, but on this day I really seemed to be in a blue/purple mood n’est pas?  On the left is some hand dyed Twist of Fate lace weight 100% virgin wool.  I was wondering (agonizing) what to do with the two left skeins, when I remembered Miriam’s Lune design.  Viola! 

With the warmer weather, Mr. J went through a package of popsicles in a few days, therefore I got my families old Tupperware popsicle makers out.  I’m not sure how old these are, but older than I am.  I distinctly remember eating multiple popsicles made out of pink lemonade in the Ontario heatwaves.  We made limeade popsicles, and went through the lot in a few days.  These are definitely the best heatbusters around.  Too bad its gotten cold again, but the weekends have been lovely!

Drawing Boxes

The tools of my trade, my pencil, ruler, and stencil.  Back in my very first year of engineering school we had to buy this drawing kit, and learn to make boxes, lines, arrows, which were process flow diagrams.  I still love to sit down and draw my little box membrane systems, round pumps, rectangular tanks.  I’m not very good at Autocad, so this is so much easier for me.  One day I’ll get better, but since at the new job we’ve got a super fast Auto cad guru that can draw everything up for me in 1/20th the time it would take me, there isn’t much point right now.  Then I can get out my favorite red pen and mark up the drawings.  Chemicals engineers tend to think about processes often, and we love breaking those things down into boxes, squares, lines, arrows.  We just have to remember that not everyone gets so excited about them as we do. 

This past week in Calgary was the Global Petroleum show, which rotates every few years between here and Houston.  I didn’t get to go last time it was here, as I was out of town for another conference.  The weather was horrendous, rainy and cold, I was feeling pretty sorry for all those Texans having to suffer through it.  I bet they all flew up here with their company polo shirts, and had to run out and buy jackets.  I felt really sorry for all my old co-workers as well who had to stand outside for 3 days under a tent in the freezing rain all day long.  If I hadn’t of changed jobs I would have joined them!  Shudder.  As it was I just got to visit, with two of my new co-workers and my brother.  We had a good time climbing up on oil rigs, looking at the cut away engines, and other equipment.  There were so many huge toys there, it was incredible!  I’m glad we were there early, after 11 am all the beer came out, but the rain also came out as well.  We went inside and wandered around looking at more things, like flowmeters, pressure transmitters, temperature transmitters, filters, the competition.  You know, lots of fun stuff! 

Believe it or not however, I did find some sheep!  Poor little sheep that were about to be chased around the rodeo ring.  Perhaps by some of the miniature horses that showed up later?

Field Trip: Custom Woolen Mills

Custom Woolen Mills is located in Carstairs Alberta, just an hour north of Calgary, and I had been wanting to go and visit them for quite a while now.  The problem has been that they keep regular working hours, which means that when I’m working they are working, and are closed when I’m not working!  One thing I definitely had to do with my two weeks off was to finally pay them a visit.  Not only do they process and spin their own brand of yarn, but they process fleece from all over western Canada, and into Montana.  Beaverslide gets processed in this facility.  The photo at left is all the raw yarn waiting to get washed, carded, and spun.  It doesn’t seem like CWM gets many visitors this time of year, as everyone was pretty happy to chat with us as we wandered around.  Visiting is free, the men and women working away were very interesting and informative, and pretty darn happy to explain what they were working on.  The only thing to remember is that the spinning area needs to be viewed from an observation deck, you can’t just wander around mucking things up.  Not that I would wander around pushing buttons, no not me, never.

Of course the first step is to wash the fleeces, and coming in from a chilly day outside, to the hot and humid washing room my glasses fogged right up.  The gentleman hand feeding raw fleece into their washing bath was very informative, except he was very tired due to his recent acquisition of a 9 week old kitten.  I know…ahhhhhh.  He showed us the photo on his phone.  I couldn’t help myself however, I seem to have the unstoppable water and wastewater bug.  I started asking where the water was from (obviously well water with high iron and presumably high hardness as well, I know this from a bathroom inspection, dirty water in toilet, red iron stain on sink) and where their waste went.  The wasted water goes into a lagoon treatment system somewhere over there (waves hand in general direction).  They use chemicals to wash the fleece like soap, and a few other harmless things.  If they cleaned up their raw water they could see benefits such as lower soap and chemical usage, and increased fleece cleanliness.  They also use water to rinse the fleeces, I would love to get a wastewater treatment system in there so that they can recycle all the water and use it for rinsing purposes.  I’m not so sure the cost saved would outweigh the cost of the equipment, or benefit to their process however, and may be unjustifiable.  I would love however to build an old fashioned water treatment filter utilizing gravel, sand, and a layers of fleece.  HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE?  Okay, down water engineer, down.

The carding and spinning machines are over 100 years old, moved from another older mill to this location.  It was a purple and red day at the mill!  I asked the fellow doing the dying if peoples moods change depending on which colours they dye, bad moods with black, good moods with red.  He looked at me weird and said he had never thought about it.  Funny how often I hear that…

Not only do they spin yarn here, but they also make woolen batting for quilts which you can buy already made, or if you send them your finished quilt they will put the wool inside and stitch it up.  They also knit socks!

The quilting machine was built in the forties, and is very interesting.  On top is a wooden guide that moves the sewing apparatus around in a pre-set pattern.  A whole quilt can be sewn up in 8 minutes once its all set up! 

We visited the gift store and dived into the sale bin, I bought a sweater amount of deep brown 3 ply wool, Joce picked up some more Beaverslide, and off we went home, very happy to have finally seen Mule Spinners!

Winter Wonderland

What a sight out the front door this morning, more snow!  At least the temperature was hovering just above zero, and nothing had frozen too badly.  As it was our bus was having trouble getting going after each stop.  What is worse I think is calling a person in Saskatchewan and finding out it was lovely and sunny over there still, and they are expecting this storm to just be rain by the time it gets to them.  While I am happy that I get to wear my new heavy sweater again, I was also enjoying wearing my pretty spring skirts and shoes for the first time.  Come back spring!

Long Weekends

Around here it doesn’t seem like spring is moving very fast, but there are signs.  There is less ice in the river:

And there are rumours of crocus sightings, but I haven’t seen any.  I’m keeping a sharp eye out for robins, as are the cats.  We have had three sunny blustery days, which have meant good road bike riding conditions, as long as you are prepared for the sideways gusts, and the pain of riding right into the wind.  This generally happens on your way home, no matter which direction you are riding. 

I feel like I’m “getting stuff done” beginning with the latest WCOBB blanket, Yummy Cupcake:

I wanted something simple for the my section, and when I found a stitch pattern called “Sugarcube’ that fit the bill as it was nothing more than purled squares.  This blanket is so peaceful and soothing so far, I hope the next knitters keep it up!

After vowing not to start any sweaters until the end of April, I immediately started a new sweater.

Green sock yarn from Sleeping Dragon, and plain old grey Kroy sock yarn bought on sale.  Tempest is a nice easy pattern with waist shaping, thick and thin stripes, and is thin enough to be pretty useful around Calgary all spring, summer and fall long.  The back is already done! 

Now I’m getting prepared to start my taxes, which if I can get those done, the weekend will be a complete success!

Our Backyard…

As last week contained my birthday (I am now very, very old) Mr. J and I planned a little get away to Banff/Lake Louise to celebrate a bit in the great outdoors, that the commercials tell us is our backyard.  On the actual day of my birthday, which was a Tuesday, the local Knit Club agreed to a change of location to The Chocolate Bar for some cake.

That is some chocolate ecstasy! 

Mr. J booked us into a romantic cabin in between Banff and Lake Louise, which he was surprised to discover was where we stayed about a year and half ago!  These little log cabins were built back in the early 1900′s, and contain romantic fireplaces.  The restaurant at Storm Mountain is also extremely delicious, and is good for a once every 1.5 year treat.

On Saturday we skied up the road to Moraine Lake, which was around a 20 km round trip, and today, 3 days later my legs are still in extreme pain.  Must be part of that getting old!  On Sunday we went out to Lake Louise in order to check out the ice castle, and hiked up the 3.5 km to the Lake Agnes Teahouse.  Unfortunately it wasn’t open, we’ll have to come back in the summer.  The weekend weather was magnificent, blue skies, green trees, and white snow everywhere.  It was warm enough to hike in a sweater.

Yup, we have a pretty nice backyard, and I’m sure glad we got outside to enjoy it on such a nice weekend.

Skiing on Olympic Way

Which is actually what one of the trails is called at the Nordic Center in Canmore.  With the nice temperatures on the weekend, we had a lovely day outside in the mountains.

On Valentine’s Day, aren’t we cute in our matching red jackets?  Which we bought before we met each other, we may be cheesy like Whiz sometimes, but we aren’t that bad. 

We figured we skied between 12-15 km this day, and we did it “pretty quickly” at 1.5 hour.  We then went home (after a yummy lunch at a local Canmore bar) and watched the women skate ski 10 km in 20 minutes.  That sure took the wind out of our sails, we have a lot of training to do if we truly want to measure up on Olympic Way. 

(I figure Mr. J will be found first in an emergency in his red jacket and orange shirt, oh boy!)