Boxing Day Quading

With the temperatures just around freezing, the sun shining bright, and some nice snow in the fields, Bill got out his quad. When offered the chance to ride, I couldn't pass it up and joined in the fun. This was the first time that I can recall driving a quad and it was a blast, particularly in the snow. I also tested out my new MEC sweat shirt and it performed wonderfully, blocking out most of the wind and keeping my body comfy and warm. The brain monster was also present to protect its source of nurishment.

Christmas at the Martindale's

Christmas! (Brainmonster version)

Christmas at the Martindale's has been very joyful and happy, and I'm sure there'll be more posts soon, but I figured I'd start out with the brain monster! RAWR! Serena knit this awesome hat for me... and I love it :D

 

 

Christmas came early!

Jason and I were surprised by some early Christmas Presents this week! The wonderful AMME Vissers (Aaron, Meghan, Micah, and Elizabeth... it was better than MAME, maybe EMMA is better...) sent us both some very thoughtful and fabulous presents! Jason received an iTunes gift card and he's going to buy "lots of awesome games for my iPod!!!!" I got the best present ever... a sweater (with some assembly required)! For the non knitters... I got 14 of these...

with which I will make one of these... It's just what we wanted :) Thanks so much Family!!!

Job hunt update

But the good news is that Jason has been interviewing for a job as a Technician in one of the labs here at USC... Keep your fingers crossed folks!

Odd power outage...

Yesterday, Sunday the 7th of December, around noon, Rowan and I were sitting in the apartment, happyily watching some Star Trek (the original series!) when we heard the typical screech of a car braking suddenly. Usually, this ends in silence and everyone continues on their way, but this time it ended in a surprisingly loud bang which coincided with the lights flickering once before we lost power. Clearly something fairly major had just occurred. With not much else pressing to do, we ventured out to the street and sure enough, about half a block (~100 m) from us (see attached map) an SUV had slammed into a power pole, shearing it completely off at the base and moving it the entire length of the car through a nearby fence! If you look closely at the last photo, you can see the frayed remains of the base of the power pole. Unfortunately, we didn't get much information from the police that were already all over the scene by the time we were there, but it was obvious that this was something more than just an accident. There were about 10 police cars there and a bunch of officers were approaching a nearby house carefully. Apparently, no one was seriously injured, which is always a good thing. All of this happened around noon, and we didn't get power back until after 6pm. I went to investigate around 5pm, and it looks like they just removed the broken pole and restrung the lines between the nearby poles. Perhaps the pole will be replaced at a later date?

Random Posting

I seem to have this strange aversion to posting something on my own blog when I feel it might out-of-order, not interesting, or just doesn't serve any purpose. Well, unfortunately this leads to me being lazy and not posting about much at all. Perhaps it is a better blog because I try to keep it trim and efficient, but I think a lot of interesting and fun stuff gets left out because of this. Not that every day is a wild adventure filled with mayhem and feats of daring-do, but certainly much more goes on than is posted about here. Anyways, nothing may come of this, especially as Christmas approaches and things tend to be forgotten, but perhaps we'll have a small flurry of posts about flamie-type stuff and things... ya, that's it! Oh, and as a bonus, here's one of my favourite photos from our stay in Vienna this summer.