We planned the trip to Vancouver over our wedding anniversary so that we could keep up with our tradition: spending our anniversary at a bed & breakfast on the ocean. Last year we stayed in a fantastic little B&B off the coast of Nova Scota in Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. It was heaven. This year we’re staying in a honeymoon suite of a great little  B&B off of Victoria Island. We’ll spend two days there and explore Victoria before heading over to the mainland. I am seriously pumped! It’ll be great to see family and friends and grab a few of the Canadian things to bring back with us that we miss. Like more Tim Horton’s coffee & some Cadbury 100 cal bars. There are also a few restaurants I want to be sure to hit before we come back, too. I’ve been craving a calamari salad from Moxies and can’t wait to have eggs benny from Shades on Main when we’re in Penticton. Yum!

We’re not the best at keeping up the family blog, which is too bad because we’ve had SO much happen in the past few months and a bunch of stuff coming up! Let me see if I can recap it all briefly:

1. Lucas got a formal job offer and is officially employed! (He just posted about it on our blog here.) He was offered a sweet full-time web development position with Southpoint Media. They’re based in Georgia, so that obviously means Lucas gets to work from home, which is awesome.  So he and the boys code websites for clients all day. I suspect that Oliver and Winston do more sleeping than coding, but they’re all enjoying it very much. :)

2. I started making and selling handmade geeky soap on the internet at http://www.geeksoap.net – it has been a huge hit and is keeping me very busy! Small business and handmade FTW!

3. A good friend and I (and our husbands) recently starting putting together an online geeky crafting community called G33Kmade! It’s going to be a hugely fun project, and together we’re going to be selling at an Exhibitor’s Booth at the biggest 4 days in gaming… Gen Con Indianapolis in August. Lots of geeky handmade goodness (including GEEKSOAP!) will be available from us… stop by and see us on Entrepreneur’s Avenue at booth #2732!

4. The 2009-2010 school year is almost over. Like, we have less than a week left now. I’ve been teaching the computer class at the middle school and it has been fantastic. My position for next year/which building I’ll be in is still up in the air with budget cuts looming, but part of the fun is not knowing what I’ll be teaching next year, right? ;) So the summer is almost here, and I’ll be relaxing and spending it prepping for Gen Con, making lots of geeky soap, trying to stay out of Lucas’ hair since we’ll both be working from home for a few months, and getting ready for vacation time in Canada. Oh, and Michelle is coming to visit us all the way from Calgary! Yay! Cannot WAIT to see her!

Whew! Did I cover it all? Some good things going for the Karpiuks in 2010, and even more good stuff on the horizon. :) Be sure to check our gallery for all of the photos when we return. Take care!

I’m also thankful for our good friends — yesterday we were fortunate enough to be invited to spend Thanksgiving dinner with the Glab family.  The food and company was amazing and it really meant a lot to be treated like family by such wonderful friends.  Mom Glab made the most delicious ham and homemade scalloped potatoes and Michelle’s grandma baked the creamiest pumpkin pie made from real pumpkin.  Yum!  We are looking forward to returning the favour and having them over for American Thanksgiving next month.  I love holidays.

I’m thankful for beautiful fall weather; on Saturday the little Karpiuk family took a trip out into the Canadian Rockies and spent the day hiking around Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park, getting to revisit the exact spot where nearly a year ago Lucas got down on one knee and proposed.  The weather played nice and it was sunny and clear all day.  A little nip from the wind every now and then, but after 2-3 hours of hiking we didn’t notice and the sunshine was nice and warm anyway.  We were able to take some absolutely amazing photos, too!  We have a new family photo taken along the shore of the lake and lots of other gems to remind us of the perfect autumn day together.  You can see all of our new pictures here in the gallery. Aren’t they beautiful?  I am so thankful to be part of such a loving family.

Wishing you and yours a wonderful Thanksgiving!  We’re off to enjoy another pretty fall day rollerblading along the Bow River and then dig in to the yummy leftovers that Mom Glab sent home with us last night. Mmmm!

The rest of the weekend we spent visiting with friends and family.  We had dinner with Lucas’ mom, spent time with Clay and Alyson and met baby Aiden, and had dinner and games with Lucas’ dad & Linda and grandma and grandpa Karpiuk.  It was boys vs. girls in an intense game that seemed to be a mix of a little Aggravation and Sorry.  The girls won, of course!  On Sunday we had a picnic lunch with the game crew on the shores of Okanagan Lake between Penticton and Summerland. It was beautiful.  Afterwards, the boys took a nap and Lucas took me on my first Sea-Doo ride ever.  We rented a 2-seater for a half hour and took turns driving. It was awesome!  We definitely need to get one of those.

So, the moment you’ve read all the way to the end for… of course there are pictures!   And knowing me, there are literally hundreds.  I think by day two of our long weekend I had already taken 237 photos. Mostly of the boys playing on the beach.  Can you imagine how photo happy we’ll be when we have REAL kids?  There’s even a couple little video clips I put together of some of our adventures that you can watch as a six and a half minute long movie HERE.  All of our photos can be found in our gallery under Travel, British Columbia Summer 2008, or via direct link to the HTML version of the gallery HERE.   Enjoy!

So far the week has been busy and eventful, which is good because it’s been a little lonely in the evenings with Lucas in L.A. Thanks to Claire, I’ve been completely obsessed with the crafting forum craftster.org, which has opened me up to 398246948393487 crafting ideas and more inspiration for crafty projects than I know what to do with. I’ve lately grown attached to making “plushies” … basically, making my own stuffed creatures and items. I have let myself start too many projects at once due to the overwhelming resource that is craftster.org, and am working on christmas gifts and some fun stuff for myself all at the same time. Since some of those items on my current project list are “top secret” (soon-to-be-gifted), I can’t go into detail here, but I’ll show them off at a later time. Wow, the craftster.org book and one of those little mini portable sewing machines would be a fabulous Christmas gift! … *hint hint* … sewing all of those things by hand is fairly time consuming. (*hint hint*) ;)

Today I had a meeting downtown with the volunteer program coordinator of Calgary Public Libraries. She was incredibly nice, and has found me a position working with kids and helping them with their homework after school a night or two a week at one of the branches close to us. The meeting went very well, and I really enjoyed the woman’s company. She was very kind and easy to talk to and we had a good chat about immigration (she’s from Ireland) and our pets. She just so happens to have a handsome dog like us, though I was polite enough not to remind her that Oliver is the most handsome dog in the world. I’m totally excited and can’t wait to get started with the volunteer program.

So I get on the train to head back home after the meeting, and as usual, scoured the train for interesting people to watch, which is one of my favorite parts of taking public transit. The train was pretty full for being 2:00 in the afternoon, and there was only one open seat diagonally across from me. We start going, and all is generally quiet. Then suddenly, a man wearing nothing but a pair of short khaki shorts comes and sits down in the open seat. Let’s take a moment to realize that it’s late October. Nearly November. In Canada. Now I will admit it’s a fairly mild day for being October in Calgary, (I didn’t even wear my coat downtown) BUT short shorts and absolutely nothing else is going to the extreme. The man must’ve seen my impossible-to-hide expression of surprise, and began attempting to carry on a conversation with me and the surrounding passengers in jibberish. However, it wasn’t complete jibberish; I caught a few recognizable words amongst the chatter, such as “13-14 years.” Then as quickly as he came, he was up and moved further down the train to stand. I looked around at some of the other passengers to make sure I wasn’t the only one who found this to be incredibly odd, and I was greeted with lots of confused looks, grins, and shrugs … so I guess I didn’t make it up.

In nerdy news, an article guide I wrote for the current in-game event in World of Warcraft has made front page website news on both the official World of Warcraft site (my second front page mention there) and the WoW Stratics website. I warned you this was nerdy news! And speaking of writing articles for World of Warcraft… the company that I write WoW articles for just paid me today for one of the five articles I’ve submitted to them in the past week and a half – I was pleasantly surprised that it was worth double than a typical article. Now I’m looking forward to seeing what the other four are worth on top of that. While it’s not tons and tons of money, it feels good to make a little here and there by just doing what I like to do on the side as a hobby anyway. My gaming website (where my personal, non-paid articles are posted) is www.pinktoque.com.

What else? It’s been a fairly quiet week crafting away while I watch movies, but tonight will be fun; Kali and I are going out to dinner and a movie. Not sure where we’re going to eat, but we’re going to go see Marie Antoinette at Eau Claire. Should be a fun time! And speaking of Kali, I have to thank her for suggesting me to help out with a “job” that Nikki has. Most of the people in Lucas’ office (where Kali and Nikki also work) own dogs, and it’s pretty normal for dogs to be in the office. Next week there will be some people from the L.A. office in for a project (that Lucas is currently working on in L.A. this week), and so no dogs are allowed in the office due to the guests. Nikki has a beautiful Doberman named Mikka who needs someone to walk her, feed her, and let her out during the day next week since Nikki’s boyfriend will be out of town. Yay for me- Oliver and I are going to go over and hang out with Mikka a little bit each day to help out. Oliver and Mikka met a few months ago before Kali and Caley’s wedding at a dog-friendly work party. Mikka was infatuated with Oliver, who wanted nothing to do with her. (He’s so shy and anti-social with other dogs, especially ones bigger than he is.) Maybe next week they’ll get a chance to be better friends :)

I’m all for dressing up like a pirate for International Talk Like a Pirate Day; after all, Lucas and I put on Pirate Pub Crawl 2006 last month where we pub crawled dressed as pirates up and down 17th Ave, but dressing up as a zombie isn’t really my thing. Thankfully our friend, Tom, was into the idea so we had good reason to make the trek downtown with Oliver to check it out and take pictures of the event. Nothing prepared us for the spectacle that we encountered once we caught up with the zombies, though. We figured there’d be 15-25 people or so taking part, but the turnout Calgary’s Zombie Walk received was nothing short of at least 800 – 1,000 participants.

We stood on the corner of 4th and 11th as wave after wave of zombies crossed the street, following traffic signals and signs like good zombie citizens in a busy city should. Just when you thought you’d seen the last group of them cross, another wave would be at the stoplight waiting to cross and bring up the rear. The zombies ended up at a park where they congregated to check out each others’ costumes and give each other slaps on the back and high fives for creativity. They caused quite a scene wherever they went, sometimes surrounding stopped vehicles at a light and groaning in attempt to intimidate the driver. It was a riot!

We’ve put up some of the pictures that we took from Zombie Walk in our gallery, under “miscellaneous.” All and all, there were some really unique outfits amongst the gaggle of undead. If you’d like more information on the event, the official website for the Calgary Zombie Walk is here.

In other news, Jeremy invited us to today’s Calgary Stampeders game with his son, Tyler. I was really excited to get the opportunity to attend my first CFL game. It was a little cold and rained a little bit on and off, but nothing could take away from the experience. The game was really good; both teams played pretty hard, but in the end the Stamps beat the BC Lions 32-25. We were even graced with the presence of a streaker in the last quarter- definitely not something you’re lucky enough to see everyday. GO STAMPS GO!

It’s been nearly 5 full months since I’ve seen my parents; I’m really looking forward to their first visit to Calgary next weekend. :) We’ve got tons of stuff planned to make their first trip fun, including a tour of downtown and some interesting restaurant experiences. On Sunday we’ll spend the day in Banff and take a gondola ride, then sightsee around Lake Louise, weather permitting. I hope to see some snow in the mountains! We’ve also got tickets to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo on Sunday night. I keep telling Oliver that “grandma and grandpa” are coming, and you can tell he knows exactly what I’m talking about. That dog’s way too smart for his own good- he’s even got a special whine just for my parents, and he’s gonna go crazy when he sees them after all this time. I can’t wait for next weekend :)

You’ll find all of the new pictures in our gallery. Oliver’s birthday pictures are under Oliver->Fourth Birthday (2006). Pictures from the Flames game Saturday are under Miscellaneous->Flames Game Oct 7 2006, and Thanksgiving pictures are filed under Miscellaneous->Canadian Thanksgiving 2006. Enjoy, and happy Thanksgiving!

P.s.- For anyone having any troubles accessing and viewing the Flash version of our gallery, you’ll now find a link across the top of it that will take you to an HTML version instead. Let us know if there are any problems!