This has been a very busy year for Diane and I (to put it mildly). Any year that you get married or move to another country or score a decisive victory for computers against humans is bound to be a pretty busy year … but these were just a sampling of some of the things that happened to us during the past twelve months. This is my year in review. (You can find my year in review from last year here and Diane’s here).

The outlook on 2008 was pretty exciting. Diane and I had become engaged in May of 2007 and our wedding date was setup as the June 7, 2008. So one thing we would be spending a bunch of time working on for the first half of the year was planning that. I was still working at the university for the computer poker research group. Having come so close to beating some very good poker players the year before in Vancouver, we were itching for a rematch. Finally, two people I knew were already working in a company in Ireland, and I had started to consider what it would be like to do the same.

So lets get started, shall we? Early on in January, a group of us ended up at the museum to do some photographing. With how the busy the year would become, I’m sad that we didn’t get more outings like this because it was a lot of fun! Later on in the month, the annual department ski trip to Jasper was once again a highlight of the year. The people from the CS department at the UofA are a lot of fun to hang out with, and at this point I definitely suspected that this would be my last trip to join the department for the forseeable future.

In February, Sonata Arctica — one of my favourite bands, came to town so I was ecstatic to check that out. Later on that month, we went on a ski trip to Lake Louise and Sunshine with a couple of friends. That was a great trip, and filled with many good photographs.

In March, my grandparents celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary and my grandpa turned 80. To help celebrate, we went down to Rimbey to surprise my grandfather with a big party. My sister played her harp, and it was a lovely time.

April’s big event was going to Dublin to interview at PocketKings. The company generously flew both of us out to Dublin to meet the team I would eventually join. It was a packed 5 days, with two of those days being travel. I spent two days in the office and a third wandering around Dublin with Darse, Xan, Mike, MK, and Aaron. We were out for dinner all three nights we were there, met quite a few people, and saw a lot of things. Not long after we returned home, I was offered a job with them and pretty soon we were not only planning a wedding, but planning moving our lives across the Atlantic ocean to Dublin, Ireland.

In May, we had a packed social schedule which combined with getting ready for the wedding made it a busy month! Nightwish, another one of my favourite bands came to town, we attended dinner parties, brithday parties, and got out on another photoshoot this time in Edmonton’s river valley. I also attended a meetup of Edmonton Flickr people, as well as a separate outing with Edmonton Twitter members. May was a very busy month!

The big highlight of June was our wedding day on the 7th. Thanks to the help of many, many people, we were able to put together a pretty good day I would have to say. Diane was radiant all day, and we both managed to get through the day with no bigger mishaps than us forgetting to write a speech for the dinner. Highlights from the day are in this post, but really the highlight of the whole thing was of course being married to such a wonderful person in Diane.

Because of the computer poker research group’s efforts to have a rematch against some top human players in July, work prevented us from leaving on a honeymoon right away. Instead, we settled in and attempted to get some of the details for moving to Ireland sorted out. We also attempted to see as many people as we could, which meant that one thing we had to do was go see my grandparents in Rimbey. As always, it was quite a pleasant trip. Lots of food, games and good company. I really don’t see them enough!

On July 1st, we left for Las Vegas, where for the next several days we would prepare, run, and eventually win the match against several very good human players including one of the best in the world: Matt “Hoss_TBF” Hawrilenko. It was a lot of work building up to that point, but it was a wonderful bit of closure to get before I left the group. A week after we arrived in Vegas, the work portion of our trip had ended and the vacation/honeymoon part of it started. We spent a few days hanging out with some of the research group members in Las Vegas before flying to San Diego where we spent a day at the San Diego Zoo before getting on our honeymoon cruise.

The cruise was a 5 day affair starting from San Diego and stopping in Cabo San Lucas on the way down the west coast and then in Ensenada on the way back. The highlight of the trip was the excursions, where we did a zipline and climbing wall excursion down a canyon in Cabo, and a kayaking trip in Ensenada. The food on board was pretty good too…

We returned to Edmonton where we had just a week left to pack up all our belongings and spend as much time with our families as we could before heading off to Dublin. It was a pretty surreal experience packing all our stuff up and saying goodbye to everyone. Late in the week we had a party at my parent’s place where we had a huge number of friends and family over to say goodbye to. It was a lot of fun, and I’m glad so many people turned out! Before we knew it, we were packed up and on a plane to Dublin, Ireland!

In our first weeks in Dublin, in late July and early August, we had a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to get the required documents to stay in the country, and find a place to live so we could get a bank account and all those other little details. Thanks to a bunch of help from Darse who had recently made the transition, we got everything sorted through in record time. Within two weeks of our arrival we had an apartment, internet, a bank account, and immigration cleared for our first year.

Also in August, we went on our first road trip with Darse and Xan who took us to the Powerscourt gardens. We would do several more trips with them including exploring Killiney hill right here in Dublin, going to county Wicklow in September, the Southern coast of Ireland and the Irish National Stud in October.

Work got busy in November, which made me feel like not doing too much on the weekends other than relax. But December was an eventful month! It started off with our friend JR coming to visit us for a couple of days. We showed as much of Dublin as we could while he was here, and hope he enjoyed it! Just after he left, we were off to Kilkenny where the company held one heck of a Christmas party. A couple weeks later, Diane and I were at the Dublin airport crazy early for a holiday in Austria. We spent 10 days there over Christmas, and enjoyed ourselves immensely (the posts for the rest of our trip are coming still, I promise!).

This year has been amazing, and it’s hard to imagine that 2009 will top it. I closed one chapter of my life (working at the university), and opened several more (getting hitched, moving to a new country, starting a new job). That said, Diane and I have the opportunity to explore Europe while we’re young and we’re sure planning on doing as much of that as we can in the coming year. Work is going well, and I’m happy with how much I’ve been able to contribute. So we’re excited to see what 2009 will offer us!

To close out, here’s some maybe interesting numbers from this year:

• I took around 10,000 photographs with my camera this year, far surpassing the previous year’s total of less than 7,000. From that selection of photographs, I uploaded 1448 to Flickr for your enjoyment. I hope you’ve gotten a chance to take a look at my work.
• Despite having not had much time to play poker this year, I still did better than 2007 in terms of total profit. I earned $6300 in online poker in 2008, bringing my lifetime earnings to over $12,000.
• My passport has been stamped 11 times, 8 of which happened in 2008.
• We’ve posted 55 times (not including this one) to this blog, and these posts have accrued 33 comments. All but two of those posts happened in 2008.
• Number of countries I’ve been in this year: 6… four of which were knew to me: Mexico, Ireland, Austria, and England (albeit only in the London airport).
• Number of months living abroad: 5.

Any other numbers you can think of that might be interesting that I might be able to rattle off without too much counting? If I get some good suggestions I’ll add them to the post.

Lastly, here’s some of my favourite photos from 2008:

Megan finally let me photograph her for her recital poster.

A beautiful shot of Irish countryside with no one around.

A duck in St Fiachra’s Garden near Kildare, Ireland.

A sight seen on the Hofburg palace grounds in Vienna, Austria.

Beautiful lighting over Pichling lake in Austria.

David Thue is the one in the pipe, and he makes a fun silhouette with his hat.

I took photos of these flamingos for quite awhile before getting this shot.

One of my favourites from the wedding photos that Jason Kasumovic took.

A view of Sunshine mountain village.

A scene from Canmore, Alberta.

I hope everyone had a good 2008. Whether you did or not, I hope that 2009 is a good year for you!

Morgan

This past week was insanely busy. At work, I had a project that needed some help to get it all the way to completion, and it needed to be done by Friday. So I worked pretty hard this week trying to get it all done. As a result, there wasn’t all that much free time to do much else than go home and laze around on the couch a bit before going to bed.

But we did get out a little. On Tuesday night, a bunch of the American employees went out to a bar to watch the election results come in. It had been a stressful day at work, and I thought it’d be a good idea to get out of the house and de-stress a little over a beer or two. So Diane and I joined the party around 11:00pm and hung out with what turned out to be quite a few people! The group of us maxed out at about 25 people or so all with varying interest in the actual live results coming in. After awhile, a game of Chinese poker broke out — a game that I’ve had a little bit of interest in lately. I joined in, and we ended up playing until 2am!

Thursday nights at the office are geeky board game nights, so I stayed late at the office to play some games. This week, one of the guys had just got back from the States with a pile of games eight or so boxes high — many of which I had never seen before. We played Ticket to Ride Germany, the tutorial for Galaxy Trucker (a game I don’t think I’ll really like in full, but it’s kinda neat), and Wizard (a game that looks like it has got some major interest). Dave also explained the rules of a couple of his new games.

It has been a busy week, and in some ways I’m glad it’s done. Not that it’ll get any less busy at work. I’ve got some bugs to fix and I gotta get back to working a project that won’t be released until January, but needs a fair amount of work to get it finished. But even with how busy I’ve been, we’re still making time to do some fun stuff!

Morgan

It’s a little crazy to think that we’re fast approaching three months in Ireland! It’s been a big move, and we totally miss seeing the people we’re used to seeing all the time. Thankfully, with this being the internet age, we’re able to video chat with people. If you’d like to hook up with us on the video chat, we’re on skype and AIM. Give us a shout and we’ll organize a time to meet up. It’s been pretty nice to be able to chat with both Diane and my families back home.

Anyways, back to point form updates (since I’m tired and it’s time for bed):

• Last weekend Darse and Xan got us out of our house to go check out Kildare. The main attraction there is the Irish National Stud which is a thoroughbred horse breeding operation of apparently some fame. (I don’t exactly know much about horse breeding, but I learned some). We did a guided tour of the grounds, and saw some of their stallions. The most expensive one’s stud fee comands €75,000! The grounds there are actually quite lovely, and we got a chance to check out a couple of gardens — a Japanese garden, and Saint Fiachra’s Garden. I got quite a few photos that I’m actually quite happy with, and it was fun to get out of the city!
• Work has started to get busy. Lots of projects are under way now and I’m starting to get into the thick of things. There’s still a few moments where I don’t feel particularly useful, but on the whole it’s starting to feel like I’m settling in okay. Lots of stuff to learn though, that’s for sure! This week, we released a new version of the software which introduced matrix tournaments. They’re a new format of poker sit and go tournaments, but you play 4 tables at once. Not only do you compete for individual prize pools on each table, but how you do at each table contributes to how you rank for the matrix tournament as a whole. I haven’t had a chance to try playing one yet, but it’s a pretty cool new feature.
• There’s been quite a few nights spent late at the office playing games. In addition to playing poker with Chris Ferguson, he’s stuck around a bit longer to play some geeky board games with us. So there’s been a few late nights of Ticket to Ride, Blokus, Medici, Aquaretto, Carcassonne, and other fun board games. Chris really liked quite a few of them, so hopefully he’ll be back soon to play more of them with us.
• Thanksgiving isn’t really celebrated here, so we were a bit envious of the food our families were going to be enjoying this past weekend. It’s a bit weird not spending thanksgiving with the folks. It was nice to be able to chat with family over the weekend though!
• The desk that we ordered from Argos came this week, so our place is getting a little bit better organized. We also got blinds several weeks ago, so our home is starting to feel a lot more like home.
• The weather here has actually been quite good for the past couple weeks. There’s been some rain, but not as much as we might’ve been led to believe. As a result, we’ve had a chance to take in some rather pretty sunsets, and some beautiful weather for walking around a bit.

That’s all I can think about from this update. Be sure to check out the photos from our visit to the Irish National Stud!

Morgan

This past week has been a insanely busy. It’s been a week filled with parties and late nights which has made it a bit hard to keep posting to the blog. There was even a party tonight that Diane and I passed on just to spend a quiet night relaxing a bit for the first time in over a week.

One of the noteworthy events of the week has been that Chris “Jesus” Ferguson has been in town. He played in the WSOPE and had another big tournament in London last Saturday. So he stopped by the office and I got a chance to add another poker pro to a list that’s getting pretty long.

Anyways fast forward to last night which was a scheduled company tournament: a €50 deep stack buyin tournament. Since Chris was in town, he was happy to play, which meant the tournament drew a good crowd. In all, 36 players registered which was a really good turnout. Warning: lots of poker lingo coming your way from this point on.

The tournament started out real slow for me. Apart from picking up one pot a few rotations in, I basically sat and folded a lot of hands while several players at the table spewed chips at each other. After the first break I was starting to get pretty short stacked. I picked up A6o on the button and raised, but the small blind pushed. I didn’t have many chips left so I called and didn’t like seeing my opponent flip over AQ. Luckily for me, I hit a 6 along with an Ace on the flop to double up. Not too much later, The 2nd table broke, and guess who got seated on my left? Chris Ferguson.

The next big hand in my memory happened after we had got down to the final table of 9 players. I picked up KK on the button and make a decent raise. The small blind reraises me and I pushed allin and got called by AJ of diamonds. The flop was rather exciting when two diamonds landed, but thankfully I dodged another diamond and won a monster pot — which made me chip leader by quite a bit.

The tournament got down to three players — Chris, me, and another guy that I didn’t know but who played very well. The stack sizes started to get pretty close to even, although I still had a small chip lead. Chris had a €50 bounty on his head, but unfortunately I was not going to be the one to earn that. The other guy at the table would do that when he flopped trip queens and busted Chris out in 3rd place. I guess that means I can say I beat him!

On the first hand of headsup play, the other guy limps on the button and I check with J4 of diamonds. The flop is 578 with two diamonds. I bet out, get raised, and I decided to push. I get instantly called, and get shown 78 for top two pair. I miss my flush and gutshot outs to lose the hand. So I finished a respectable 2nd place for a payday of €440. Not too bad for a couple hours of play!

So that’s how it went down. It was an honour to play with Chris, and it’s pretty cool to be able to say I beat him. I’m under no illusions that it was anything more than luck that made that the case, but I feel pretty good about most of my plays during the tournament. I probably missed a couple of plays and didn’t play all that well when we got to three handed play, but all in all I can’t feel too bad with my showing.

It’s been a really cool week, but in a way I’m glad it’s over. I’ve been out every night this week until at least midnight and it’s starting to take a toll on my ability to stay sharp.

Oh yeah, there’s new photos up on flickr too if you want to go check them out!

Morgan

I tried to get a blog post written here a few days ago, but I had to restart my computer, and while I though I had saved the draft post I had written, it appears to have disappeared. Whoops! So here’s a quick update of what’s transpired in the past little while.

• Our stuff arrived! Earlier this week, a truck pulled up at our place and delivered a pile of boxes that we had shipped from Canada. Some things we were missing a lot were our box of board games, the kitchen knives we got as wedding presents, and my computer. We haven’t really gotten unpacked yet, but that should happen in the next few weeks.
• Last Saturday, we attended an end-of-the-world themed party. Aaron and Christine threw a really great party at their place. The original theme was based on the LHC warming up to create mini black holes, but it seems it was mistimed for that purpose as the LHC ran into trouble last week delaying the end of the world.
• Darse and Xan are moving, so Diane and I have been helping them a bit with the move. Truth be told, Diane’s been much more helpful than I. All I did was help Darse with a couple of large heavy items.
• Work has been progressing well. I’m slowly getting more comfortable with parts of the codebase, although it’s going to take awhile to get fully immersed. It’s been fun so far, and quite a challenge, but I feel it’s been pretty rewarding and I’m pretty excited about a couple of the coming projects I’ve got to work on.
• The weather here has been gorgeous the past few days. Lots of clear sky and sunshine. It’s starting to cool off at nights though — down to 5 degrees celcius or so at nights.

That’s all I can think of for now. It feels like we’ve been busier than that.

I hope everyone back home is doing well!

Morgan

This past weekend was pretty fun, and now I’m fairly well set up as far as my new household (I have a household!), I can’t pretend I have much excuse for not blogging occasionally.

It was a pleasant weekend all through. We started off on Friday having some supper with our neighbours from upstairs. It was nice to get the skinny on their favourite places to eat and share stories from home and about our experiences in Ireland so far. I’m really glad to have these folks around. So far, they’ve helped us figure out how to work the boiler and the washer/dryer, and provided pleasant company too!

Saturday was a games party at Darse & Xan’s. It was a lot of good old fashioned fun, with all kinds of tasty snacks besides. There was Ra, Medici, Carcasonne, Blokus, and RoboRally (I love to be the “TrundleBot” – I’m so gleeful it exists!), culminating in Taboo and Apples to Apples that were good for the whole group to play together. Oh yes, and we got to see for ourselves that Darts and Xan aren’t kidding about the size of their spiders.

Sunday was glorious – the weather was lovely and warm, and it held the whole day. Morgan and I took ourselves over to Dun Loaghaire harbour. My intention was to enjoy the sights and sounds of the Festival of World Cultures whilst finding the farmers’ market, but neither Morgan nor I anticipated how many folks would be taking advantage of a sunny summer day. Everyone and his dog was out, riding the midway attractions or buying things from stalls or watching the many musical acts on the outdoor stages (or watching the ticketed shows – it sounds as though there was a pretty decent line-up in general). To me, it most closely resembled the Children’s Festival, which graces my hometown of St. Albert every spring.

We found the People’s Park and the farmer’s market and something to munch as we trundled though the crowds. (I told you I love to trundle!) We moseyed (dare I say it) down to the shore taking pictures and kept going down the east pier, the weather inviting us to linger there awhile. There was someone making a perspective painting – if you stood at a particular point of the decorated sidewalk it seemed as though you were standing in a glacial crevasse.

Not only was it perfect weather for festivals and street paintings, it was also a very good day for a hundred sea-bathing junkies to participate in the Annual Harbour Swim. It looked a little chilly with everyone in normal bathing suits, but I must admit I was impressed. I mean, not that bog snorkeling isn’t cool too.

Diane

Sorry for the lack of updates, folks. Diane and I have been pretty busy the last week as we get settled and acclimatized. It’s late here, but I’m wired and still wide awake so I think I’ll try and catch you up with what we’ve been up to this week.

I forgot to mention in my last post that not only did we go to the Powerscourt gardens with Darse and Xan, we also climbed up Killiney hill. I hope to get photos of both the gardens and the hill soon, but that probably won’t be for a day or two at least. Thankfully, that’s all I’ve got for a backlog of photos now so I’m almost caught up!

So what’s happened since then? Well we got a bank account open, and it looks like it was in time to get paid into, which is nice. We’re awfully grateful for Darse and Xan’s help and advice. It’s helped smooth our transition into the country waaay more than we expected. It’s almost been too easy on us.

We’re now mostly settled in our new place, although there’s been some hiccups. We had to go without hot water for a few days until we figured out the system. Apparently if the thermostat is turned off, the boiler doesn’t turn on. It took us a week to figure that out. I don’t know why it’s done that way, but my conclusion is that the Irish don’t like hot showers in the summer (when the heat isn’t on in the house). Weird.

The other couple of things we’re waiting for is our laundry machine doesn’t appear to work, and we could really use some curtains. Our place has some pretty nice big windows, but they aren’t exactly good for privacy when we want it. Other than that, we’ve got internet, and pretty soon we’ll have a bank account with my first month’s pay in it which we’ll use as a time to start picking up things that our place is missing.

The week pretty much flew by. At work, I’ve been tossed in to start working on some features already. The codebase is huge and a little confusing, but I can tell that this job will be pretty rewarding. I feel like I’m learning at a pretty good pace, and hopefully they’re satisfied with how I’m doing so far.

On Wednesday evening, there was a party at a bar one station away from our place. I left work late and met Diane there, and we hung out with a bunch of pocket kings employees, had dinner and a few drinks. It was a pretty fun night. It was trivia night, but the guy asking the questions was from the company. So that was a bit neat. As usual, I was pretty useless for any trivia knowledge, but it was fun to be a part of it.

Thursday night there was an office poker game and geeky-games night. I played in the poker tournament, but got knocked out before the money. I felt I played alright, although I think I made a few errors in a couple places. Diane came by too and played a couple of board games with Darse and some of the other pocket kings guys.

So I think that about catches you up with the activities from my point of view. At some point soon, hopefully Diane gets a chance to share her little adventures.

Before I finish off here, I just wanted to jot down some general notes about our experiences here so far:

• The weather here has been pretty good in general, although there’s been a lot of rain. In fact, record amounts of rain. There was a day where we ventured out of our place and on our way to the mall we got absolutely dumped on. The streets were flooding and people were drenched through.
• The Irish are much more dependent on street markings that Canadians. It’s something I never really thought of, but because of the large amount of snow in Edmonton, the street markings can’t be the sole markings for major roads. But here, where snow is rare and doesn’t stick around, they can afford to put the markings right on the road.
• Also, the roads here all seem in amazingly good repair. What I realized is that Dublin must not suffer from the same pothole problem that Edmonton has to deal with. Since the temperature here is so temperate, and there are days that the temperature drops below freezing, the freeze-thaw cycle that causes pot holes isn’t an issue.
• The LUAS is an amazing transportation system. It is fast, reliable, and they’ve built a tremendous amount in a short time. It opened in 2004, and in just 5 years, it’ll have networked an amazing number of stations. By this time next year or so, they’ll have added another 10 or so stations — which should take me straight to work.
• Speaking of work, I love my job. The work is good, and they treat us very well. The daily lunches are fantastic. Gourmet quality food, and tons of choice and variety every day. Lunches cost all of €0.10, and breakfasts are free. For breakfast, the kitchen bakes fresh croissants that are absolutely amazing.
• My spot in the office is a “cubicle” in the server team area, and I have a very nice view of a small duck pond, and some distant mountain. On the downside, there’s a children’s daycare right underneath my window, so for most of the day I can hear the screams of some very powerful little voices. It is a bit annoying, although I’m told that you stop noticing them after awhile.
• When it rains here, not only do worms wriggle out onto the sidewalks like in Edmonton, but they are joined by snails and slugs — both of which are quite sizable in some cases. It’s a bit weird!
• Everything here is done to a smaller degree it seems. When Diane and I went to the supermarket, it was a bit weird not being able to bulk-buy kleenex, and shampoo, and those sorts of things in the quantity we’re used to. It’s rather interesting to me. Another example is the pop cans here are 330ml instead of 355ml like in north america. Not too sure why the differenece.

That’s enough for now. There’ll be lots more to come as we experience new things. We’re not too sure what’s on for this weekend, but I’m sure we’ll be up to a little bit of fun stuff.

Oh a note about pictures. The gallery link at the top of the page and on the right side of the blog are a link to a cached copy of my flickr photos. If you don’t see new photos that I mention, it’s because I forgot to go click the refresh cache button. You will be able to see photos I mention on my flickr photostream (also linked on the right). There’s probably a better solution that that, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Morgan

It is, in my opinion, a perfectly good time to panic. As teh bridezilla in this particular partnership, I believe it is my prerogative, non? There would, however, be more pure terror in my heart if Morgan wasn’t such a sweetie with such a nice family, or if so many of our friends hadn’t stepped up to help us out and support us. So I just wanted to say, in case I don’t see people in the mad dash to catch good weather and precious photographer time, thanks for helping! Thanks for all those little reply cards, emails, faceplant messages, etc. and a special thank you to all those who were able to fill the spots we needed filled. Whether you volunteered or were volunteered or voluntold, I’m so happy and relieved to have your assistance. So, from Morgan and myself, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Diane

The little countdown meter on the right side of the page has cleverly informed me that there is a scant 15 days to the wedding! Needless to say, we’re pretty excited. A lot of the pieces are falling into place for us, but there’s still lots to do.

The past few weeks have been insanely busy for both of us. Between work and the many extra-curricular activities we’re up to, there hasn’t been a lot of time to sit down and just do nothing for an evening. It’s good in a way, since it can help keep myself from panicking since I’m too busy to panic. On the other hand, every so often I feel like I’m losing a handle on what’s going on. Between organizing the wedding and getting our bots ready for two big competitions in the next two months, AND getting ready to move to Ireland, we’ve got a lot of balls in the air as it were.

But, this is no time to Panic!

We’re going to have to visit Morgan’s grandparents more often, even though they have moved to far away Rimbey. Morgan and I took a sunny drive out there on a Saturday several weeks ago and had a very pleasant time. We’ve been back since for Morgan’s grandpa’s 80^th birthday (!!!) and to help celebrate 55 long years of wedded bliss for him and Morgan’s grandma, but perhaps we ought to make that a special post all its own. This one’s from sometime in February…

We arrived at lunchtime and Morgan’s grandparents took us to a local restaurant called Monterey Jack’s. The owner/chef (whose name really is Jack) did his time at NAIT and has built a menu that is fairly extensive by small town standards and very reasonably priced. Not only did he serve us himself, but he offered various off-the-menu options, like grapefruit-and-something dressing for my salad (I don’t know what was in it, but it was great). The experience was as refreshing as the salad – with the small number of potential customers in his area, I guess Jack has to impress everybody to get repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising. Apparently it’s working. You’ll have to try the crème brulee cheesecake if you are ever in Rimbey!

You’ve got to love grandparents – it seemed that no sooner had we made it back to the house full of chicken cordon sandwiches than Morgan’s grandma sat us down for some of her uber-healthy bran+orange+raisin+cranberry+flax muffins, all pre-cut too. Food was kind of a theme for the day. There were certainly more colours on my plate at dinner than I’ve seen in my days of cooking for one – pot roast, spuds, gravy, corn, spinach salad with all the fixings, fresh grandma-made buns… and ice cream for dessert! Morgan and I are pretty sure we weigh about five pounds more that we did at the beginning of that weekend. We came home with freshly baked cookies and muffins, and if we had stayed the night, a hot batch of cinnamon buns could have found its way into our happily stretched tummies.

We did find time for a few things besides eating. We went over bits of the ceremony and vows with Morgan’s grandpa, who has agreed to marry us and who had to get a special one-day marriage conducting permit just for June seventh. We took the tour of the estate and put some holes in the walls for shelves, and then we played a game of “Murder” which is kind of like “Trouble”, but better. It was pretty tempting to stay and eat cinnamon buns and hide the measuring tapes and see the organ at the church on Sunday morning, but eventually we made our way back along the snowy roads to the familiar anonymity of the big city. We’ll definitely have to go back soon!

Diane