I am a bit overdue on a new update, and while nothing really interesting has happened, there has been a lot of smaller things going on. So I thought I’d try and wrap it all up in one post and share a few photos and some updates. I’m not really sure how this one is going to work out, but let’s get into it and see how it goes…

We’ve had a very off spring, and it’s much too warm. Crocuses are already up and in bloom in early February

Family Day Weekend

Hanging out at one of the Port Moody breweries

Let’s pick this up where I left off after the last post. We had gone up to Squamish for a day of hiking. On the Monday of the long weekend we headed out to Port Moody to meet up with our friends Katie and John.

While Port Moody is a fair distance out from the city center, the Skytrain makes it surprisingly easy for us to get out there. And once the Broadway Subway is completed, it will be even easier! So it’s nice to be able to hop on the train and head out there for the day.

Port Moody has “Brewery Row”, a stretch of 6 breweries in a very small area, right across from the inlet. They are uniformly good - we have our favorites but you can’t go wrong with any of them. Katie’s place is a short walk away as well, so it’s a perfect place for us to meet to catch up.

For this trip, we met at Twin Sales (home of the best raspberry beer in BC) and the weather was nice enough for us to sit outside and enjoy the day. We chatted for a while, before heading next door to Yellow Dog. We didn’t stay long, as there was not available seating and the beer list didn’t seem that interesting.

From there we headed over to Brave Brewing, one of the newer breweries in the area. We really like their stuff and were able to snag a spot by the fire pit, under the tent. It was cooling off but still lovely.

After sitting at Brave for a bit, we moved a little further down the street to Moody Ales for our last stop for the day. It was another great choice, as they had some really interesting beers on offer. It was great to catch up with Katie and John and spend the day relaxing and enjoying a few great pints!

Some very cool displays up on Granville Island. We noticed them as we were out for a walk one night and took a few photos to share.

Playing Hooky

As spring seems to have arrived with full force, I needed to get our garden beds all topped off and ready for planting. So I needed to pick up a load of garden soil from Vancouver and take it over to Galiano. I took a day off work and booked a morning and evening ferry, making it a day trip.

There is a place under the Cambie Street bridge where we buy soil in bulk, so I headed over to be there when they opened up, giving myself about an hour buffer to load and get to the ferry. Much to my dismay, there was a line of trucks out the driveway of the place, some of them massive. I was a little panicked, but help the course and they were actually pretty quick at moving through the line.

The load of garden soil, ready to top up the garden boxes.

That got me to the ferry with enough time to spare and put me at the property around 11:00. I had about 4-5 hours to get the truck unloaded, boxes filled and the early seeds planted.

As it turned out, the truck load of soil did not fill all our boxes! I was only able to do 3 of the 6 boxes, so a second load is going to be needed! Crazy.

It’s a lot of work, shovelling one wheelbarrow load at a time, but I stuck with it and got the truck emptied and the main boxes filled. After doing the soil, I planted the radish seeds and called it a success.

I was also able to wander around and get a good look at how the place was looking after our somewhat difficult winter. We had a lot of snow over a short period and some intense cold that we’re not used to. It does look like a few plants did not survive the winter, but we will see once we get deeper into the spring. I hope I’m wrong.

Topped up boxes. In fairness, they are quite large and we didn’t add anything last year.

Anniversary Celebrations!

February 26th is our wedding anniversary, and for this year Justine surprised me with a pottery class. I have never tried doing pottery, and it seemed like a fun way to spend the afternoon. The studio we went to was tiny, and as it turned out it was just the two of us with an instructor. The instructor was really good, showing us the basics and guiding the work we were doing. It was quite enjoyable, working the clay and shaping our creations.

Ready to give it a try!

After a couple of hours of work, our finished pieces. I think they look pretty good, for a couple of amatures.

Mine ended up being slightly larger, but I think Justine was the winner with her vase.

We have to wait a couple of months to get our finished pieces back. We picked out the glazes we wanted on the pieces. Now they have to dry, be fired, have the glazes applied and then get fired again. I would have liked to go through the whole process, but that would mean taking a whole series of lessons. Maybe when we have a bit more time…

Overall it was a fun afternoon and a good experience. I’d like to do it again. Once we get our pieces back, I’ll take some pictures and post them on the blog.

Vancouver Whitecaps Home Opener

The first weekend of March was also the home opener for the Whitecaps! We’ve been partial season ticket holders for many years now and we always enjoy the games. This one started our season off pretty well - we didn’t win, but we probably should have and a draw was an OK result.

This is also the 50th season for the club, so there’s a lot goig on in celebration, including new jerseys that actually look good for a change!

It was a pretty good crowd for the first match of the year, and the team put on a good show. They look promising - much better than the start of last year.

Record crowd - who knew?

After the game we walked home along the seawall as we usually do. As we were walking, we noticed an odd flashing light on the water. As we got closer, we found this sailboat, sunk in False Creek. They had stuck a light on the top of the mast that was sticking dangerously up out of the water.

First Ski Day - Whistler - March 3rd

This year has been an odd one - unseasonably warm for most of it with very little snow. It’s worrying for what that means for the coming fire season, but it also means that there’s been no reason to go skiing. Earlier this week, the snow had started to come and Whistler got dumped on for days straight. It was a welcome sign, and so we figured we better go up and get a day in while the conditions were good. Our friend Nicole was coming with us, and we had high hopes for the day!

Nicole live sin Squamish, so we drove up to her place after the Whitecaps game on Saturday night so that we would be halfway to Whistler and give us a chance to get ahead of the Vancouver daytrippers. While a sound plan, it did not work out that way. We left Squamish at around 6:30 a.m. (really early), but still ended up in this:

The traffic getting inot Whistler was insane, and we were at least an hour earlier than we would normally have been. It did not bode well for our day on the mountain.

Once we parked, we decided not to rush into the insanely huge line that was already forming for the gondola. Instead we got some breakfast, bars for later in the day and waited. That proved to be a mistake, as the line just kept getting bigger. Eventually it went form the base of the gondola, through the base area, over the bridge over the road, down through the village and looped back out onto the road. I’ve never seen anything like it. It took us about 1 1/2 hours just to get up the gondola.

It was snowy and there seemed to be a lot of fresh snow on the trails. It looked promising!

But you couldn’t see a lot. The visibility was pretty poor.

Selfie time!

The grey jays were out looking for a handout. Don’t feed the birds!

It was a snowy, blustery and cold day.

And as expected, the lift lines were kind of insane.

The good news was that despite the huge crowds, there was a lot of snow! After some warm up laps, we ended up on Harmony and the piece of the ridge that we like to ski. There was a ton of fresh, somewhat untracked knee/thigh deep powder still available. We did a few runs in it, until we were too tired to continue. It was good fun.

After skiing, we managed to snag a table at Dusty’s and had some lunch. We certainly didn’t put in a full day, but the beer was still well earned!

A Few Days on Galiano - March 8-13th

There was still a lot of work that we needed to do to get the gardens ready for the spring. So we picked up another load of garden soil and headed over to Gaiano. It was a busy few days and we tackled many different projects.

Spring had come early - the daffodils are already blooming.

Most of the garden boxes that still needed soil were Justine’s flower boxes. As they are safe within the fence, and under the arbutus trees, we’ve been growing arbutus seedlings that needed to be transplanted. So that was task #1 before we could empty the truck - digging up the little trees and giving them a new home. Earlier in the winter we had cleared a lot of broome, and so we thought we’d fence off an area and see if we could re-plant some of there arbutus seedlings.

The seedlings were doing well in Justine’s flower boxes.

So we fenced off an area, hoping to keep the deer out.

So we moved a bunch of them over. They generally don’t like being transplanted, but we’ll see how they do.

The ones in the orchard grew fast - we’ll see how these ones do.

Once we got the arbutus seedlings transplanted and safely fenced, it was back to moving soil. It took a couple of hours but eventually, all of the garden boxes were refilled. I planted some more of the early seeds, and hopefully some things will have sprouted by the time we get back in a few weeks.

Saturday afternoon was a bit cold and rainy, so we decided ot work on cutting broome. We really wanted to continue the push cutting down some of the big stuff. We worked on it for a few hours and made some pretty good progress. We’ll have a nice pile to burn on the next trip.

We made pretty good progress getting through the broome.

We ended up with 3 good-sized piles.

Our main project for the winter was to build a new deck on the cottage. We’ve been wanting to get this doe for a while. We didn’t really want to do it ourselves, but we couldn’t find anyone to do it for us, so I guess we’ll figure it out. The last trip over, we had dug the holes for our post footings. This trip, I went to the hardware store and bought the concrete so we could pour them and set the post brackets. Our neighbor Steven was kind enough to lend us his cement mixer, which made the job much easier!

Justine riding in the back of the truck protecting the mixer.

Sonotubes all laid out and ready to be filled.

The work site.

Concrete poured - I hope we got it right!

It ended up being a nicer day than we expected.

Our neighbor Tova has access to a wholesale garden center on Vancouver Island and is quite knowledgeable about plants and our little island. So when she offered to take us to buy a few plants to help us fill in all the broome we’ve been cutting, we jumped at the opportunity. Tuesday afternoon we hopped on the noon ferry to Vancouver Island. With the retun ferry at 6:00 p.m., we didn’t have a lot of time, but we crammed a lot in.

Now this is worrisome…

We spent a good couple of hours perusing the plants on offer. We ended up buying 27 plants in total, with an interesting mix of mainly local (and thorny) shrubs.

We have a lot of planting to do.

The big tall one is a flowering cherry. We’ve wanted one for a while, and the price of this one was really good. It’s a good 10-12’ tall.

All the plants got back home safely.

Inspecting the haul.

We did some other running around, getting some fertilizer and soil amendments and stopping at Canadian Tire for a couple of other plants that the nursery didn’t have. We then met our friend Stuart and stopped at Small Gods, a local microbrewery to catch up and gave a drink. We didn’t have long, and far too soon had to head back for our ferry home. It was a very successful trip!

Catching up with Stuart!

Tasty, tasty beer.

All in all, it was a very productive trip to Galiano!

Whistler Ski Day #2 - Blue Skies - March 16th

In looking at our very busy schedule, we were hard pressed to find many days that we might be able to get another day of skiing in. So we decided to head up on Saturday, regardless of the conditions. Nicole was joining us again and while there was no snow in the forecast, it has snowed quite a lot through the week. So we were hopeful. PLus it was the Saturday of St. Patrick’s Day weekend, so there was something of a festive vibe in the air.

We did not stay with Nicole this time, instead meeting her at the mountain. The drive up was much easier and there was almost no traffic. Even the line to get up the gondola was reasonably short. And with it being a warm, blue sky day, it looked like we were in for a treat!

Not a cloud in the sky! What a perfect day.

Heading up the chairlift for our first run.

They were calling for 10C in the alpine, so we were able to dress down a bit (but still ended up way over dressed). We also got a bit burnt as sun was out in full force. As there had been no fresh snow for a few days, we were going to have to be content with groomer runs, which was fine. I didn’t need to trash my legs this time. The snow ended up being mostly quite nice and it softened up quite a bit as the day progressed. Here’s some photos of our amazing day on the slopes!

We had gotten up the mountain by about 9:00 and skied solid until after lunch time. Normally, we ski until we’re done for the day and just ski out and have lunch at Dusty’s at the base of the mountain. Today, since it was such an amazing day we decided to sit on the patio at Roundhouse (top of Whistler) and have some lunch.