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!

Once I receive my paperwork, I’ll drive back to Toronto (to return the rental car) and then fly home. As I cross the border, I’ll use my paperwork to register as a Permanent Resident; I’ll then receive my greencard and Social Security Number by mail within a few weeks.

As with any bureaucratic process, I spent most of the time waiting; I passed the time chatting with two couples going through the same application and sharing similar personal circumstances – sadly, I forgot to exchange contact info with them before we all went our separate ways. I even exchanged a few jokes with my interviewer – the interview started well when I congratulated him for correctly pronouncing my name over the intercom and it turned out he’s Polish/Ukranian and has a son named Luka.

Anyway, at the end of the day I’m just relieved that everything is approved and anxious to receive my documents and return home to my family!

PEGGY’S COVE

Our flight landed around 7am on Friday, and by 8am we were in the rental and well on our way to our first destination: the famous Peggy’s Cove. There are two routes to the cove, so we came in from the north and made our way back to Halifax from the south. The scenery of each route was quite different, yet equally incredible – both peppered with tiny fishing or industrial villages.

In the cove itself, there is a small information centre, a museum, a few small trinket/treat shops, and of course the lighthouse. Pretty much any time throughout the trip that we found ourselves on a shoreline, we could be heard taking in deep breaths, sighing happily, and seen smiling, but no other part of the trip brought us quite as much peace as sitting and staring out at the ocean from the large rock formation that the lighthouse is built on.

HALIFAX

After about an hour, we tore ourselves away from the view, stopping at the lighthouse giftshop long enough to send some postcards, and made our way to Halifax. We had lunch at the Red Stag Tavern, attached to the Alexander Keith’s brewery, while enjoying the view of the harbour from their rooftop patio (the food here was amazing – it essentially ruined all other fish-n-chips for me). After lunch, we wandered around the harbour area, checking out the local shops and attractions. We spent the night at the Best Western on Chocolate Lake, where we were greeted by a very friendly chocolate lab, and slept like… well, like people who had barely slept on their inbound red-eye flight and spent all day exploring, I guess.

LOUISB(O)URG

We got up early on Saturday morning and drove roughly 5 hours to Louisb(o)urg (we’re not really sure how to spell it, and neither does anyone who lives there, apparently – we saw two signs within a few hundred feet of each other with different spellings). Along the way we passed about a dozen McDonald’s signs advertising McLobster, but we didn’t feel brave enough to stop and try it. The drive was mostly inland, but boy was it worth it. Lesley had found us a great bed & breakfast with their own private beach: Point of View. We were too late to tour the Louisb(o)urg Fort, so we spent most of the evening relaxing on our balcony, knitting, enjoying the view, and drinking twice as much wine and champagne as was really necessary. There is nothing quite as soothing as falling asleep to the sound of ocean waves just a few hundred feet away.

THE LOBSTER EXPERIENCE

While we were in Louisb(o)urg, we had dinner at a small shack on a pier, called The Lobster Kettle, and of course ordered the lobster dinner special! We’ve both had lobster before, but usually in some kind of processed state or, at best, a relatively fresh tail to accompany our steaks. We were not 100% prepared for the experience when the food arrived. It wasn’t until I was tearing open the lobster’s mid-section that it occurred to me that this lobster had been alive just a few minutes ago, and that the dark green guacamole-looking substance¹ now facing me was likely the remains of its last meal.

¹ photos available on request

LOBSTER BENNY?

We both love eggs benny, and we really enjoyed our lobster the night before, so we decided to see if we could find lobster benny for breakfast the next morning. A little googling led us to the Delta in Sydney, whose menu claimed to accept any and all substitutions and modifications to the menu. I asked how much extra it would cost, “to get some lobster on our eggs benedict?”

“$7,” comes the reponse. That seems a bit expensive for some lobster meat to replace the ham in my eggs benny, but I figure what the hell – we’re on vacation! Sadly, we did not have the camera with us – when the eggs benny arrived we understood the price: they had cooked a whole fresh lobster, half for each of us, and simply dropped it on our plates. It was a little more work than we’d expected, digging out our own lobster meat to add to our eggs benny, but it was worth it for the laughs alone – and the lobster benny was pretty good.

THE CABOT TRAIL

After breakfast we hit out on the Cabot Trail, which is easily the greenest and prettiest scenic drive I’ve ever been on. Unfortunately, it rained almost the entire time, so we mostly kept to the car and the occasional roadside giftshop or attraction; hiking and whale-watching are on our to-do list next time around. But, after three long years of fruitless scanning during roadtrips, Lesley’s dream came true and we spotted a moose!

We stopped for dinner in the largest Acadian village of Cape Breton: Chéticamp. After two consecutive meals involving fresh lobster, we opted for something a little tamer, and dined at Le Gabriel. By the time we had finished, the restaurant had filled with locals for the dinner rush, all speaking French – I think Lesley found this moment almost as peaceful as Peggy’s Cove.

It seems like if you blink, several months can just fly right by before you even notice!  Here it is October, and our last post was back in July.  You’ve not missed too much, though there are a few new things going on in the Karpiuk family.

Oliver is still Oliver, and Winston is still Winston.  Oliver has turned six years old today, can you believe it?  Also today happy anniversary wishes go out to my little brother and his wife as well as our friends Joe and Jeri.  Congratulations on your first year of marriage!

Lucas recently switched jobs completely and is now working happily at Shell in web development at their big Shell Canada building downtown.  I’m still teaching; guest teaching full time until a position opens up for me.  I like it well enough — I’m teaching and it’s a new classroom every day, which keeps things fresh and exciting.  They’re really keeping me busy and I’m usually booked solid every single day, which is great! I spend a lot of time explaining especially to the elementary kids that my last name is NOT “car puke” … :groan:  I’ve really gotten to know a lot of teachers and principals as well as been able to get a taste of what each school in the division is like.  One school has already booked me for every opening they have that they know of right now up through May, lol.  I like being in demand when it comes to my work.

On a sad note, we made a trip back to Indy a few weeks ago to be with family during my grandfather’s passing.  I was able to help with the arrangements by getting pictures together, and the video slide show that the funeral home put together was beautiful.  Rest in peace, grandpa.  You will be missed.

Last weekend our little family decided we’d plan a trip out to Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park up in the gorgeous Canadian Rockies so that we could get the boys some fresh mountain air and take photos of the pretty fall colours before they disappear or are covered in snow.  Unfortunately the weather forecast didn’t want to play nice and it rained instead, so we’ve rescheduled our day trip for this coming Saturday.  We’re really looking forward to seeing the beautiful spot Lucas chose to propose among all of the autumn colours.  When we were out there last November it was so cold and the hiking trails were blanketed in several feet of snow. Cross your fingers for better weather this weekend!

So that’s what the Karpiuk family has been up to.  I know it doesn’t seem like a whole lot in the span of  just over two months, but we’ve been busy just the same. I’ve had no troubles updating my craft blog because as my darling sister-in-law pointed out, Christmas is just two months away (eek!) and I need to get cracking on gifts.  Plus I’ve recently been trying my hand at digital art and creating digital scrapbook papers and elements for my digital scrapbooking obsession.  Check out the pages I’ve made for our digital scrapbooks here. That will give you a visual of what we’ve been doing the past couple months instead ;)   But I’ll do my best to keep things updated here a bit better, ok?

Oh and Happy Thanksgiving next week, Canada — take care everyone!

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!

For those of you not able to attend, you’ll be missed! But don’t worry, there will be plenty of photos and even video of the ceremony to share when we get back. It’s even rumoured that you’ll be able to watch the ceremony live on the chapel’s website, (Just click the “View Live Webcast” link at the top of the page during the time of the ceremony), but I’m still looking into that. We for sure will take home a DVD of the ceremony with us that weekend, so you can expect either a copy or a digitally accessible version sometime after we return from our fabulous wedding weekend.

Beyond that, getting ready for the wedding is pretty much the only thing going on right now and occupying a lot of our spare time. What’s scary is that we’re pretty much done with everything, so I don’t know why I still feel like I should be running around like a chicken with its head cut off. If we can manage to finish up all of the tiny details we’ve got left AND not forget or leave anything behind (that’s the key) when we leave for Vegas, I’ll be amazed, haha.

To some of you– see you in Vegas! To everyone else, we’ll see you when we get back! Viva Las Vegas, baby!

-The Soon to Be Mrs. Karpiuk ;)

In my defense, we’ve had a day or two here and there where I’ve thought to myself “Ooh, it’s a little chilly out” as I was leaving for work in the morning, but as of Friday, there have been multiple days now where it’s actually flat out cold in the morning. Not just a little chilly, but actually cold. Friday morning I could actually taste autumn; it was definitely in the air. It may seem a little early considering it’s still August, but then I think back to how I blinked last year and missed fall; it seemed to go straight from summer to winter overnight. Maybe this year we’ll see a little more transition. I blame Global Warming. Regardless of what the weather decides to do here, we’re really hoping the weather holds out in British Columbia for the Labour Day (Note: Look! I spelled it with a ‘u’!) long weekend since Lucas, Oliver, and I are headed to Penticton for a little mini family getaway. We’d like to let Oliver go swimming in Lake Skaha for one thing, especially after seeing how much he enjoyed chasing the waves and actually swimming out as far as his leash would allow with us on the shore last time. We’ll be better prepared this go around and do a little swimming with him to see how he does with it. Pretty funny for a dog that gives off the appearance of being miserable when the bath water is high enough to touch his tummy. Our fingers and paws are crossed for good swimming weather.

So this week is my last official week at my office job. I say that with uncertainty… Thursday is technically and tentatively my last day and then we’re gone for the long weekend and then school starts for the CBE on Tuesday. The reason for the tentativeness is that I don’t actually have my teacher screening interview until this Wednesday. The plan is to interview, get offered a job, and then Thursday is my last day in the office because school will start after the long weekend. However, there are no guarantees until the interview takes place of course. It makes me so nervous! What if I don’t get anything? I’ll be back to the office job then, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not what I want. to be honest, I’ve got my heart set on getting a full time substitute position for this first working school year. Mostly because I don’t know the school system, the schools, or the curriculum, and another part of me is wanting to test out the waters for perhaps teaching younger grades for awhile. With a sub position I’d get a feel for the system and be able to check out a wide variety of schools instead of picking one blind. I’d also get the opportunity to teach a wide variety of grade levels instead of just grade 4, and then maybe the following school year I’d know if I wanted to try for a permanent job teaching grade 1 or 2 instead. I student taught grade 1 and taught grade 4 for four years, and while I love grade 4, variety is the spice of life. I just hate being in an in-between spot not knowing for sure, with the start of a new school year quickly approaching. Hopefully I’ll interview on Wednesday and hear back before the weekend starts so that I feel confident about Thursday really being my last day at the office and allowing me to relax on our long weekend vacation instead of worrying. If I don’t hear anything by the weekend, I’ll come back to a short week the following week and lay low, waiting it out, and hopefully will hear by the end of the week, which will be the first week of school. I’m not expecting much need for subs the first week anyway. If I don’t hear anything by then, I’ll give my boss at my office job a call and get back into the groove there. I’d just really prefer to hear from the school board before it gets to that point. One thing is for sure… I’ll miss my office buddies! As for the teaching interview, here’s hoping!

Enjoy your Labour Day long weekends! :)

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 my family, taking my little brother out to celebrate his 21st birthday (belated, since I wasn’t there when he turned 21 back in September), visiting my grandparents, shopping with my mom, visiting my old work and seeing all of my former students graduate from 5th grade, celebrating my brother’s graduation from college with our entire family, and bowling with friends. We also saw Scott and Amy in Morristown for a party, Somer for lunch in Cincinnati, Kurt who was in town from Pennsylvania with Kimmy (congratulations on your engagement!), and we got to hang out with some friends from high school I’d not seen in nine years. We had a blast! And I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of other things. I of course took several hundred pictures over the course of two weeks, and you can see a large chunk of those in our gallery under Travel -> Indiana Summer 2007.

While there was a lot I missed in Indiana, there was one thing I definitely did not: the humidity. I’d forgotten how sticky and hot Indiana’s weather was. The morning that my plane was due to leave at 7:30am, we’d had a freak snow storm that dumped about 6 inches of thick, wet snow on Calgary overnight. We got to the airport around 5:30am, and my flight was already delayed at least an hour and fifteen minutes. My flight would be delayed by 2 hours by the time they’d de-iced the plane and other technical precautions were taken care of. Which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except it meant I missed my connecting flight in Chicago and I got pushed back yet another hour once I arrived in the Windy City. All in all I was 3 hours late getting home, and I went from experiencing dry, below 0 C weather in the morning to enduring humid 35 C weather all before 7pm that same evening.

While we were on the trip I hit my one-year-in-Canada anniversary, so it seemed fitting that my Permanent Resident card was waiting for me on the coffee table when we got back Thursday evening; the card came in the mail for me while I was gone. Coming back on Thursday meant that we had a nice long weekend to get settled back into routine and relax before it was time to go back to work. We spent Friday during the day running around getting my Social Insurance number and my Alberta driver’s license, among other things. We also met up with Tom and Craig to go see Ocean’s Thirteen on its opening night, which I thought was pretty good. If you liked the other Ocean movies, you’ll like the third one. Now I’m busy browsing the paper and online sources for a summer job to occupy my time until next school year. It’s all so exciting!

I know there was no reason to be nervous, but my stomach was doing flip flops all morning. I kept worrying that I would forget some important piece of ID, or the photos I had to have done wouldn’t be perfectly to spec… I was just worrying that SOMETHING silly would go wrong and they’d reject me. It all went off without a hitch, of course, there was just a lot of waiting.

I took a train downtown and met Lucas at his office and we walked to the government building where we waited for about an hour for my name to be called. We spent more time waiting than the actual “interview” took – I basically went into this tiny room to sign papers and that was it. The woman asked me a couple of simple questions, but they were all things that were listed on the document in front of me anyway, lol. I signed everything and she gave me my copy of the paperwork; this piece of paper I will guard with my life, as it is not only a temporary placeholder for the actual Permanent Resident card that I will receive in the mail in a few weeks, but also something I will need to keep for future dealings with the immigration office. This document doesn’t guarantee anything for travel purposes, but I’m still taking my trip to Indiana next week. The teeeeeny tiny slim chance they’ll give me a hard time once I’m back in Canada on the way home since I don’t physically have the card in my hand doesn’t really worry me; after all, I am legally a permanent resident now. Worst case scenario is I’ll have to spend a little longer in Indiana or they’ll scold me and make going through customs once I’m back in Calgary take a little longer than usual, but it’s really a non-issue. Nothing we can’t handle. It’s been nearly a year now since I’ve seen my family (I hit my year mark just before I leave Indiana to come back), and now that I possess official status, I’ve gotta see them. I miss my little brother the most, but don’t tell him that or I’ll totally deny it. You know how it is.

So ya, it’s been an exciting day! We went to a restaurant called Milestones afterwards; fitting, if you ask me. Lucas took that great picture above of me holding up my Permanent Resident document at the restaurant as we celebrated. We came home and celebrated with Oliver, and now we’re going out for ice cream! Oliver seems a little confused because we kept telling him he was now officially a permanent dog resident of Canada, but he didn’t seem to mind not understanding what we were talking about since he was getting lots of attention over it. “Whatever you say, mom, just keep hugging me!”

In the near future our plans include getting me all packed for my trip to Indiana next week; I leave Thursday. Because it’s a big deadline, black-out-date period for Lucas at work, he has to wait a week before he can come down, but he’ll be joining me in Indiana with my family the following Thursday and staying the full second week with me at my parents’ house. Our itinerary is pretty full, and once Lucas arrives, starts off with Tripoly night with my parents and taking Herm out for a belated 21st birthday celebration and college graduation celebration. I can’t wait to see everyone!

Last week we got good news on the Immigration front; my application for Permanent Residency was approved and I’m able to get a work permit now. The last step was waiting for the Calgary office to set up an appointment with me so I could go in and get my PR card. I was worried it would take forever to get my appointment set, but the letter for it with a date arrived a day or two later. I’ll be picking up my PR card on May 17th! Go me! I think we’re going to have a little “party” on either Friday the 18th or Saturday the 19th to celebrate my official status.

Having a set date meant that we could officially plan a trip to Indiana to see my family, and those flights have also been booked as of today. I fly out on May 24th and am staying for a full 2 weeks with my family. Lucas has some black-out dates at work, so he’ll fly out separately on May 31st and spend the second whole week with me there. Then we’ll fly back together on June 7th. We’ll get back just in time to celebrate my one-year-in-Canada anniversary. I can hardly believe it’s been a whole year! Time really flies when you’re happy, huh?

I think I need to make a new purse just in time for the trip. Yes, good excu… erm, I mean reason to make a new purse.