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Rosemarie and I went white water rafting with Liz and Tom on the Thompson River (near Lytton, BC).

It was lots of fun. It wasn’t that XXXXXXTREME, I was the only one who unintentionally fell out of the raft, but we still had perma-grin the whole time. It was a nice hot day so we jumped in and swam at every opportunity, and took turns sitting right on the front for maximum splashability. There was even one rapid we got to go through in the water hanging on to the rope on the sides of the raft.

Liz gracefully getting back into the raft, probably after Tom pushed her in.

A classic Rosemarie picture on our lunch break. +1000 points for them having dinosours for dessert. :D

Like I said, I was the only person that fell out of the raft… out of the whole group of rafts… hahahha oops. I swear it wasn’t on purpose, I just fell out! It wasn’t too scary, at least I felt like I really got my moneys worth. ;)

We camped at a BC Parks site for the night and then drove home to Vancouver the next day, via the Othello Tunnels near Hope, and Hope Diner. Another very hot drive home with no AC, ack.

Jill and Joe had a long stopover in Vancouver on their way back to Adelaide so we met up with them for dinner downtown at Forage. Everything was super delicious and it was awesome to catch up again. I had seen Jill a few months ago when I went to Adelaide, but I hadn’t seen Joe in a LONG TIME!

The waiter suggested the cheese puff for dessert and it’s a good thing we listened to him because it was SO DANG GOOD. It was a profiterole with neufchâtel cheese filling, with ice cream, gin soaked blueberries and some kind of cordial sauce all around. MMMMMMM. The other dessert there was berry adult jello panna cotta that was also very good, but almost forgotten after the cheese puff.

Forage is cool because ALL their ingredients are locally sourced. We really enjoyed all the dishes we tried… octopus, carbonara, stinging nettle risotto, mushrooms… highly recommend.

Thanks to the Dafoe’s to treating us to a great meal!!

Forage Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

I redeemed by birthday voucher for a Picasso pedicure at Bloom. Those are hand painted lemons!

Lesley, Stephane, Scott and I went camping for one night at Cultus Lake. We played many games of Settlers (of which I lost all of them), and ate tacos and burgers and generally lazed around. We took the party island out for another spin. Cultus Lake is so warm!! Camping is weird when there is a fire ban though, you sort of run out of things to do when it gets dark.

More skeleton push practice at the Oval. Note to self, bring bug spray for twilight sessions because there are SWARMS of mosquitos. Who’s bright idea was it to have so many still water features around the facility, yeesh. I seriously got about 30 bites in half an hour. But this was a useful session, I now have a few new technical things to focus on for a bit.

Other unpictured fun stuff that happened:

  • We went to Charles and Ankie’s wedding at the fancy Terminal City Club downtown. Open bar, woot!! It was a fun wedding, although we couldn’t understand a fair chunk of it because we don’t speak Cantonese.
  • Our board games group tried an escape room, and failed. It was hard!! We got through the first two rooms but ran out of time trying to figure out the half dozen puzzles in the final room. The operator guy did say we got further than average though (does he say that to everyone?). We also came back to our place to play a few games of Seven Wonders.
  • Stephane made bacon wrapped cheddar stuffed burgers for Burger Friday. I thought they would burst into flames on the BBQ but they were fine!
  • Mary Ellen and Paul came over while they were in town for a wedding. Mary Ellen wanted to try purple yam and cheese ice cream but unfortunately Shoppers Drug Mart was out!! They only had plain purple yam, so Scott got that instead. It is Barney purple and tastes like… those cheapy styrofoam cones imo. The debate of the month is what type of cheese it would be in the yam and cheese variety. So far Kraft Singles type is leading. EWWW.
  • Work drinks at Tap & Barrel. We have to make this a more regular event!
  • The worlds smallest blogger meetup. We ate yummy tacos from La Taqueria and then went to Rain or Shine for ice cream. I had malted milk chocolate honeycomb in one of their delicious homemade waffle cones. Yum.

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It stinks to have to work on your birthday, but it’s greatly improved when your (only) coworker has the same birthday too! The day started off shaky though, I couldn’t get the QC on the CT part of the camera to work and we had to call the service guy, who had to take the cover off the camera to investigate… while patients are piling up in the waiting room waiting and waiting and waiting. It was a bit stressful. Birthday cupcakes helped.

We had a bunch of people over after work for my birthday. Rosemarie organized a blind wine tasting. Everyone brought a secret bottle of wine (you can see them in the bags above), then Rosemarie made a list of the variety and the ~flavour notes~ of each of them (plus a few extras) and we had to taste the wine from little shot glasses and match it with the list. Plus say the country we thought it was from (basically a wild guess, haha), and the price ±$5. We had 4 whites and 4 reds, including one $7 bottle and one $30 bottle, hehe.

No one did particularly great but we did make some amusing conclusions. 1. $7 wine doesn’t taste good. 2. No one likes organic wine. 3. Vipi thought he didn’t like wine but turns out he’d just never had one sweet enough. He looooved the Barefoot Moscato, which basically tasted like syrup hahaha. 4. I really do like chardonnay, since I picked it as my overall favourite without actually knowing it was a chardy (for the lardy). 5. Everyone else’s favourite just HAPPENED to be the most expensive one…. after the prices were revealed. :P

Birthday gift headlamp. We ate chicken and vegetable kebabs and seven layer dip and all the rest of the wine, hehe.

Then we spent the weekend on the Sunshine Coast with Lesley and Stephane (Rosemarie and Lauren came too). We played lots of games (including this ultra nerdy version of Settlers!) and bummed around and PLANNED on going swimming at a lake, but then the next morning when we woke up it was suuuuper smokey out and ash was raining down from the sky. That was the first day where the smoke from the crazy forest fires drifted into the Vancouver area. Apparently there was a fire burning pretty close to where the lake was, so we didn’t go.

The smokey view from our balcony. The air quality index went up to 14 (10 is extreme!) in Vancouver. [It went up to 35 in Whistler!!] It was bad for several days. Made us all feel really tired and gross and everyone had a sore throat. Everyone was soooo happy when it finally rained and the air cleared up.

There are still a ton of fires around the province. It’s been a bad summer.

Found at the Shoppers Drug Mart downstairs. Purple yam and cheese. Interesting… interesting… is it worth $6 to try? What if it’s gross then I’ve wasted $6 and 1.5L of ice cream… but why would they even produce it if it wasn’t possibly good?

Celebration of Light fireworks night. I was extremely impressed with the sand couch these guys constructed. I was not impressed with the actual fireworks show. I would give China a 5/10 on fireworks (they lost 2 points for having those corny smiley face fireworks), and a 1/10 on music choices. Whyyyy was it so slow and sad and boring?? And cheesey!!

Other things that happened:

  • Scott and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary. We didn’t go out on the actual day, since we were going out for a fancy-schmancy dinner in the Okanagan a couple days later (another post coming). We ordered sushi and ate it while watching TV from separate couches. ~ROMANCE~
  • Kevin, Lisa, Phil and Lesley came over for dinner and Cards Against Humanity. We drank large amounts of wine. My face hurt from laughing so much. So much inappropriateness.
  • We spent a few days in Penticton with Braz and Lisanne (another post coming).
  • We hosted a Masterchef finale 4 course cooking party at our place (another post coming).

 

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1. FAMJAM/#jornapalooza2015

April helping Uncle Scotty use the computer.


An extremely cute Easter bunny.

I love that the whole family likes games. Simultaneous Wits & Wagers and My First Carcassonne.


Cutest dinosaur ever (Seth).

Jemma and April.

The entire Jorna family together! This hasn’t happened in a long time. It made Pat (Scott’s dad) so happy. :’)

2. SPORTS

We went to a rugby union game. I learned all about weird things like BORING IN THE SCRUM.

Scott’s cousin hooked us up with ultra cheap tickets to the footy. The Hawks demolished the Cats. It’s one of my life goals to go to a full house AFL game at the MCG (100,000 people) (happens about a dozen times a season according to Scott), and this was close, but not quite. There were 72,000 people there, for a FIRST ROUND GAME! Melbournites love their sports.

Hawthorne cheer squad.

We even caught a Canada vs. Fiji Rugby Sevens game on TV, which made me laugh, and made Scott run to his room to put his jersey on. Canada was even winning for most of the game! But then Fiji smashed us. They seemed like they could run twice as fast as the Canadians.

3. AUSSIE FOODS

I ate 5 meat pies in 2 weeks. :D

We went out for dumplings, but they weren’t great. Should have researched a bit more about where is good these days.

At one of the spots on our impromptu pub crawl. We also went to a bar that was a little house right in the middle of the CBD, and Transport, and possibly somewhere else. Hmm.

Really expensive fancy margarita and really expensive piece of pork something. Too tipsy to remember the name of the restaurant. The pork was mega delicious though.

– we also ate lots of lamb, vanilla slices, parmas, flathead, Freddo Frogs, etc etc. And brought back an entire suitcase filled with Savoys, Tim Tams and BBQ Shapes.

 

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After more than 24 hours of travel we finally arrived in Melbourne. Brett and Beau picked us up with packages of Tim Tams, Savoys and BBQ Shapes in hand. They dropped us off in Boronia, and then we headed off with Vicky (Scott’s mum!) to Shannon Bennett’s Piggery Café for lunch in the hills. We had barramundi burgers, pork belly BLT, and lots of salad. It was lovely.

We had a night to adjust and then the next day we drove to Phillip Island to join the rest of the family at the holiday house they rented. Brett, Michelle, Noah, Beau, and Seth were all there, along with Jemma, Damien, and April, and then Scott and I and Vicky. FAMJAM!

Scott and I meet April for the first time! She was pretty aloof with us at the beginning. Lots of side-eye, haha. It was also my first time meeting Seth, who seemed pretty excited to see me, especially since I was carrying a big bag of presents.

It was hot the first day so we spent the day at the beach. Scott played a lot of beach cricket with Noah.


We played a lot of games while we were there. Scott and I got the boys kids Carcassonne, kids Wits & Wagers, and Forbidden Island. Kids Carcassonne is fun, even for adults, although it’s best when you play with people around the same strategy level because I had to sort of restrain myself from SMASHING 4 year olds. Kids Wits & Wagers is pretty much the same as the adult version, except slightly easier questions, and an easier betting system. Everyone liked it, we even played it after the kids went to bed. And Forbidden Island is a cooperative game, similar to Pandemic.

We all went out for dinner at the Cowes RSL.

I think Scott took this picture when he was waking April up from her nap? Pretty dang adorable.

One afternoon Scott and I went for a drive around the island. We ate pies and went out to the Nobbies. We didn’t see any penguins (not the right time of day) but we did see the blowhole blow. And got so blown around by the wind that we felt sick afterwards. It didn’t feel bad as we were walking around but when we got back in the car we both felt awful. So weird, it was like a wind concussion. I do love those pictures though. I look like a troll!

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Dad came to visit us here in Vancouver at the end of January. We planned the whole trip around what was supposed to be an epic family weekend ski trip to Whistler. And then… it rained… A LOT.

Since everything was all prepaid we still tried to ski. The first day we were drenched by the time we got to the top of the mountain. And not just wet… I mean mittens saturated, puddles in elbows, hair dripping. It was gross. Plus it was hard to see because of the fog and the snow was super heavy and sticky. We only lasted until like 1PM and then we went back to the condo for lunch and showers and dry clothes. Poor Scott had chosen this day to pay for a full day snowboarding lesson, but somehow didn’t have as miserable time as we did. He said he learned lots and even took a few extra runs after the lesson was over. Go Scott!!

The next day we just decided to screw it and not ski. It was still pouring rain and all of our gear was still wet despite laying everything out on the heated bathroom floor and in front of the fireplace. Instead we hung around and played games and watched TV and I went to skeleton practice.

Thankfully the last day was a bit better. We were able to stay above the clouds most of the day and got to ski a bit more of the mountain. Dad helped Lauren with his skiing a bit and Scott showed off his sweet new moves. Rosemarie and I went off to ski a bit alone, and then Rosemarie and dad did a few runs alone too while I hung out with the noobs.

Dad and I ended up driving back on Tuesday to use up his last lift ticket since I had the day off work. It wasn’t raining, but it still wasn’t great because the snow was so heavy and the visibility was really bad. Dad fell on a green run and then we pretty much called it a day.

All in all, not the greatest ski vacation, but we still did manage to have lots of fun times. And at least he didn’t come this past weekend… because it’s way worse now. Man all the BC hills are having a terrible season.

Other things we did:

  • teach dad to play Settlers and Carcassonne
  • play lots of Wizard
  • trivia night at Falconetti’s (we dominated)
  • a tour of TRIUMF (dad nerded out!!! I think he should get a job there… so many employees in sweaters)
  • brought dad to watch me skeleton
  • eat sushi

It was nice hanging out with dad so much. Can’t wait until next time!