shawn's homemade christmas pie's

Shawn's homemade apple and cherry pies.. entirely made from scratch and entirely delicious!

We're still eating leftover ham and turkey sandwiches on homemade bread... delicious.

shortest days of the year in la ronge

9:15am... finally a little twilight over lac la ronge (yes, that's the view of the back of the hotel from my balcony)

9:28am... sun blasting right through my bedroom window into my face.. yay!

4:11pm the last spot of sunlight overtop of the post office

North hit by power outage

North hit by power outage

a cold cold lobby

cutting off the fingers of my magic gloves because it was too cold to work without gloves on and too hard to type with gloves on.

Newfie Ingenuity

One morning, three Newfoundlanders and three Albertans were in a ticket Counter line at a train station. The three Albertans each bought a ticket and watched as the three Newfies' bought just one ticket.

"How are the three of you going to travel on only one ticket?" asked one Of the Albertans.

"Watch and learn," answered one of the Newfies'. All six boarded the train where the three Albertans sat down, but the three Newfies' crammed into a toilet together and closed the door.

Shortly after the train departed, the conductor came around to collect tickets. He knocked on the toilet door and said, "Ticket, please." The door opened just a crack and a single arm emerged with a ticket in hand.

The conductor took it and moved on. The Albertans saw this happen and agreed it was quite a clever idea. Indeed, so clever they decided to do the same thing on the return trip and save some money.

That afternoon when they got back to the station, they bought a single ticket for the return trip and watched, while to their astonishment, the three Newfies' didn't buy even one ticket! "How are you going to travel without a ticket?" asked a perplexed Albertan.

"Watch and learn," answered the three Newfie boys in unison.

When they boarded the train, the three Albertans crammed themselves into a toilet and the three Newfies' crammed into another toilet just down the way.

Shortly after the train began to move, one of the Newfies' left the toilet and walked over to the toilet in which the Albertans were hiding.

The Newfie knocked on the door and said, "Ticket, please."



As you can likely tell, it's 5:30am on a Sunday morning... god bless night shift. I'm in the process of training some new staff and lucky for me, I'm getting lots of administrative work done. Dawned on me today, as I'm watching the temperature drop, that I really miss Miami. I think tomorrow we are shooting for a high of -20C. Yipee!!! Luckily, the 14-day forecast shows an upward trend in temperatures.

All my Christmas presents are bought, will drop those in the mail tomorrow so everyone has them in time for Old Man Red's visit on the 25th. Hopefully I selected some good presents.

Love you all.

a night in prince albert

believe it or not, after a full day of work, two hours of driving and another 90 minutes spent in a smoke-filled casino we headed to a bar called belly up in prince albert friday night.
this is my current roommate, shawn


our new food & beverage manager is arriving tomorrow morning, Tracy, and we might also have another girl moving in, Mandy, if she accepts the job of sales & catering coordinator.

so i'm having a very lazy sunday, lots of driving and drinking this weekend... not to mention the hours wait for a car wash in prince albert yesterday afternoon as the car wash in la ronge is closed when it's below freezing outside.

the olympic torch

the olympic torch ran by my house in La Ronge on Saturday Nov 7.. that is Mr. Wallace running there. this is my inspiration for the week. i am very short staffed, working about 10 different shifts this week and tired. enough said.

more pictures to follow soon, promise!

a visit to the gardens at the governor's house in victoria

bonnie in front of rows of roses and rows of roses and rows of roses...

my favourite new bird bath

bonnie and her birds

my regal seagull on the waterfall!!

graduation flowers

yes, this post is a little delayed, by about 14 days.. but anyways, these are the flowers that i received on graduation day in lieu of being there

a walk in lord stanley's park

a beautiful blue heron contrasting the city behind the lost lagoon. he didn't like me making noise taking this picture...

name this flower! it's beautiful.. build sort of like a hollihock but I've never seen it before... I'd love to know what it's called

the view of West Vancouver from the end of the Lovers Trail at Ferguson Point above Third Beach. (Mom, those bushes around the side are all raspberries!!)

baby swans

Stanley Park acquired three new swans this year. That's right, three baby swans in the park at the lost lagoon (a fresh water pond in the middle of the park). Pretty cool, huh? I sat four feet from one baby swan and her mama this morning upon our two hour walk.

Contemplating coming home... I love Vancouver but if it's not going to give me what I want, then why be here? We'll see how that plays out.

Just found out that you can now go to my facebook page without being a facebook member so you can look at what happens there... or look at pictures, etc.

http://www.facebook.com/crystal.tobin

My graduation lilies are opening up. Give them another day or two and I'll get a picture up.

xoxo

happy graduation

believe it or not, after five years i have officially graduated from the College of Management and Economics at the University of Guelph with an Honours Bachelor of Commerce in Hotel and Tourism Management Co-op. (Long-winded, yes?) These are the beautiful flowers Mom and Dad sent me to commemorate my day!

I'll try to put up another picture mom when these lily's open!

25th birthday at the Lift

It was a beautiful night to sit right on Coal Harbour and watch the rowers on the water. This is a fantastic restaurant!!! Afterwards we walked up to another pub on the water called Carderos and had drinks there while listening to a fantastic guitar player.
Mom: you probably can't see but I'm wearing the earrings you sent me and your pearls!!

a job interview

yes, that's right, crystal has a job interview on friday!

progress is imminent

a birthday

another birthday has come and gone... my first quarter-century is officially over.

nostalgic: no... pressured: yes.

tomorrow's my graduation... can i pretend that i don't have to start my own life?

a patio garden

so Bonnie has been very diligent in her pursuit of fresh vegetables on her Balcony so I thought I would show you how fantastically they are coming along. above is her lettuce with parsely on the left and green onions on the right. these were all planted two weeks ago and the lettuce is already 3 inches high and the green onion sprouts are probably about 5 inches... mind you, the pigeons got quite a few of those seeds.

pigeons also like Bonnie's pepper plant but it is about to blossom. the dill is doing fantastically well! Bonnie already cut it right back once. our summer menu is going to consist of a lot of fish.

this is the ginormous tomato plant! the thing never stops growing and I think we have about 8 sets of buds right now.

and five mini tomatoes!!!!

saturday trip to granville island and off to indian arm

waiting at granville island for steve-o. yes, obviously we had consumed a few drinks while we were waiting....

the view of mikey's patio at indian arm.. it was tough to spend time in the mansion on the ocean...

did i mention that the mansion is next to a waterfall? try sleeping next to that!

trapped on the pacific

for further disclosure on the nature of these photos please read my previous post

friday trip to bowen island

friday night steve-o took us out on the maiden voyage of his boat for this year. it was a pretty exciting trip for my first time. this is a shot of how busy english bay was on friday afternoon...

from english bay you can see bonnie's apartment building. it's the building on the right about halfway down... yup, that where's she lives... facing the ocean.

over at bowen island there is a really cool little tree at the base of the inlet.

here is steve-o and bonnie on the public dock at bowen island after dinner. we then proceeded out to go home and ran out of gas... figures that the gas gage was broken. we were saved by a tugboat and took two hours going slowly home in the dark. haha... quite an adventure for a friday night.