Happy New Year!  Hopefully everyone had a relaxing holiday and got to spend plenty of time with family and friends.  As previously mentioned, Lucas and I spent Christmas in Indiana with the Means family.  We had a very nice Christmas and a good time in the Hoosier state with them.  I picked up some sweet new scrapbook software and put together a 13 page album of our adventures over the holidays here in our gallery.  We’d like to do more scrapbook pages and eventually get a digital scrapbook up for easier browsing, but that will require Lucas’ coding genius.  Maybe after he finishes another programming project he’s currently working on we can pull something like that together.
When …

Today Lucas and I took a day trip out into the Canadian Rockies to see how pretty they are now that more snow has fallen. We wanted to see something new, so we went to Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park. It was a really quiet, beautiful lake in the mountains with a small hiking trail and signs everywhere warning us not to feed the mountain goats. We pulled into the parking area and a little family of mountain goats greeted us. We pulled over and got out, and they walked right over to us and started licking the Neon — apparently they love the salt the car has collected from the …

Congratulations again to Herman and Holly! Over the long weekend Lucas and I traveled back to Indiana to be in my little brother’s wedding. We had a blast! It was a really fun time and it was great seeing my little brother all grown up and getting married. And of course, Holly was beautiful. It seems like the weekend went by really fast, but I guess that’s because it was so busy. The newly married couple are now lounging on a beach somewhere in Cancun — I hope they get us a souvenir! We got back on (Canadian) Thanksgiving Day, so happy belated Thanksgiving! We plan to make …

Every morning of the week when I head into work, I spend a good several minutes driving straight at the city. We’re literally 5 minutes from the core of downtown, and there’s this perfect moment that I look forward to, even on the dreariest or most tired of days, when I come over the slight hill around a corner and the Calgary skyline comes fully into view. It’s my zen moment; I see the Rockies off in the distance framed by high-rise buildings of varying heights and designs, and I can’t help but notice the sky.

We’re back home from Indiana and enjoying one last official day of vacation.
I spent two weeks in Indiana visiting my family and friends, and Lucas came down to join me after his deadline at work was over to spend the second week with me. It was non-stop action; I think our itinerary was full every single day. That was fine with me because I’d not seen most of the family and friends back home in about a year, so the more I could cram into the trip, the better! I won’t bore you with every single thing we did each day, but some of the highlights include getting to spend time with …