Swirl Nails

This was my first attempt of swirl nail polish. It came out pretty good! First, you scotch tape around your whole nail and finger. Then, you get a little cup and drop nail polish into room temperature water. After you get circles of polish, you take a tooth pick and gently swirl the polish around until you get a design you like. Then just dip your nail onto the design, clear out the excess polish with your toothpick, and remove from the water. Remove the tape and clean up edges with polish remover, and voila! You've got swirled nail polish! For mine I did only one finger per hand and used four colors, white, purple, light blue, and pink. Not too bad for my first attempt!

Cats make good pillows

Charley and Chester... Awwwww, babies!

Whistler Village

Whistler Village was nestled at the base of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains. In the town was all the restaurants and shopping. On our first day, we spent the morning walking around and shopping. It was such a cute little town!

This is one of my favorite pictures with the Olympic rings and mountain in the background!

At Olympic Plaza, they had all the rings and all the other Olympic symbols

The cute guy is an inukshuk. An inukshuk is a Inuit symbol which means "in the likeness of human." Traditionally it's meaning is that "someone was here", or "you are on the right path." It was the symbol of the Vancouver Olympic games in 2010, to symbolize friendship and welcoming.

This is the paraolympic symbol.

There was much Native American influence every where, including totem poles, inukshuk, and signs in their language.

Standing in front of the rings

This is the cute little gazebo in the center of the village

On either side of the walking path were stores and restaurants, and above there was lodging

When people take their lunch break, they just set their equipment in racks in front of the restaurant they are eating in. This one was right at the bottom on Whistler Mountain and a popular spot to go

When you get to the bottom of the hill, you are right in Whistler Village!

It's the place (only place really) to be night or day in Whistler!

Driving to Whistler

We arrived in Vancouver to sunny blue skies!  We had about a two hour drive to get to Whistler.  

 Vancouver was a very new city.  It seemed like every building was made of entirely windows. 

 We drove through the city then into Stanley Park, which was a beautiful first taste of the Pacific Northwest. There was nothing but all diffferent kinds of pine trees!  My favorite!

 When we crossed over this bridge, we got our first clear gimple of the mountains we were headding into!

 The freeway was just cut into the sides of the mountains.  They did a major renovation for the Olympics, turning it into a 4 lane freeway with pull offs from just a 2 lane road.  Everyone we spoke to loved this as it made the drive into Whistler much smoother and faster.

 It was breathtaking to see these giant mountains coming right out of the ocean!

Here's another view of what we saw just outside Vancouver

 We stopped at this little community park on the way, and saw these skunk weed, one of the official "flowers" of March (I remember this because of my National Geographic books, and being sad that March, my birthday month was a skunk weed flower)

 All the way there, we were wondering how in the world they got these giant power line towers on the tops of these mountains!

 This was the little lake from the park.  It's one of Robb's favorite pictures because you can see the sky better in the water than the actual sky.  

 So, we'd heard of all this snow in Whistler, but still didn't see it for most of our drive.  Then about 1 and a half hours in, finally, we saw snow!

 It was interesting to be able to see the freezing level, the altitude on the mountain where rain turned to snow.  You can see in this picture the trees covered in snow higher up.

And finally, we arrived in Whistler!  

Vegetarian Humor

Happy 6 Month Anniversary!

Today we've been married 6 months! It's still hard to believe that we're halfway to our one year anniversary! We never had an anniversary day, even after all these years, so it's fun for us to celebrate. Today on our six month anniversary we will celebrate by doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, food shopping, working on the basement, cutting the grass, and running errands! See, we sound just like an old married couple! But, later we will take our Charley on a hike for some QT.

Interesting Article

I don't know how, but I've stumbled upon this very interesting article that I very much relate to. Being a "new" 9 month old vegetarian, isn't as easy as you'd think. I've had a good amount of strange carnivore comments, as well as adjusting, and realizing, how sadly (to me) meals are completely centered around dead animals. I became a vegetarian, and was probably destined to become, due to my love for all animals. I had a traumatic experience of eating Emeril's lovely duck, all to walk out of the restaurant to see a mama duck and her ducklings happily swimming around in the lagoon. It totally hit me...I ate daddy! How horrible! Not to mention, I probably didn't eat daddy, but at a duck who spent his whole life overstuffed in a cage, being pumped full of hormones, breaking his legs, unable to ever walk or have fresh air, so he'd be nice and plump and juicy to eat. Soon after that I did my first juice cleanse, which in preparation required the complete elimination of animal products. After that, eating flesh was history. (Not to mention the other highly disturbing Thanksgiving when I was stopped in the road by a beautiful flock of over twenty wild turkeys crossing the road, on the way to Thanksgiving dinner!) So, in this article, I can relate to some of the carnivore comments. My way of responding to vegetarian critique is to say, " I don't eat anything with a face."
http://www.salon.com/2011/08/24/vegetarian_carnivore_conversation/singleton/?mobile.html

So gross

I'm so grossed out. I'm at the grocery store, shopping for tomorrows dinner with our neighbors... Did you know angel food cake has SOAP in it to help it whip! Sodium lauryl sulfate. Nasty. This is why I make food from scratch with ingredients, not soap!

Bobsled!

This is our bobsled run! I'm in the first seat (after the driver, which you can't see), and Robb is behind me. Our time was 42.65 seconds, the best of the day! We were the last run of the entire season. We went 127.1 KPH (78.98 MPH) Our run was on the bottom 2/3rds of the track. It was a really cool feeling to be doing this where Olympians went also! What a rush!