Author: doug

The back patio is finished!

Ferrous is using this cat pad incorrectly.

I love these little blue flowers.  They’re so vibrant in early spring (taken April 26)

The “sitting wall” for the patio was the first part to go in. Here are the first few layers.

The good news: I’m planning to restart daily Project 365 posts starting with this year’s Vineyard trip.  But first I want to post the few good photos I took this spring.

First up: We had a back patio put in this spring.  Here are the bricks.

Tuesday was our day off, primarily due to weather.  Here are a few sights from Whistler village.

We saw this unusual (to Easterners) bird.  My initial thought was cowbird, but in consultation with Lis and the Internet I think it’s a brewer’s blackbird.

 
We also saw this cool cloud formation.  I think this is where the alien ship punched through the cloud layer.

 
I took a walk through a local park with Michael & Sabrina.

On Monday, I skied with the big camera.  With smaller crowds and a clear day, it seemed the logical choice.

I awoke before dawn and noticed the holiday lights on our condo playing on the icicles outside our windows.

 
Here’s the view out our condo windows once the sun started to come up. We were near the lower end of the village walk, by the Whistler Olympic Plaza skating rink. I belive this is where they held some of the medal ceremonies at the 2010 Winter Olympics. You can see that we have a little fog / undercast on an otherwise clear day.

 
Here’s that undercast from the other side. The building is the top of the Glacier Express lift on Blackcomb mountain, as seen from near the Horstman hut and the Blackcomb summit.

 
We had lunch at the Horstman hut, and here’s the view in the other direction, from our table on the deck.  You can see some ski slopes on Whistler in the foreground, with the aptly named Black Tusk mountain behind.

 
After lunch Kat, Michael, and I skied Blackcomb Glacier, a 6-mile run that starts with an enormous bowl. That’s Michael to me left in this fisheye shot, and the two specks near the right side of the frame are Kat and an unidentified skier. The boulders jutting in a line into the center of the shot are car-sized.

 
We all stopped for a photo op at the bottom of the bowl section.  Only another 5 miles to the lift!

 
Skiing the glacier was fun. But it wore us out (only the second day, after all — gotta save some for later), and we decided to take the Peak to Peak Gondola over to Whistler for beer.

Yes, it’s now the last day of June and I’m just now getting around to continuing to post photos from Whistler in January. Sorry about that.

On Sunday, I skied with the little camera.  “Welcome to Canada. Have some mountains.”

January 19, 2013 
 
On Saturday we traveled to Whistler resort, 2 hours north of Vancouver, for a week of skiing.  Today’s post is some of the scenery we saw on the journey.

Clearly, there’s some feature kicking up the cloud layer under there.  Also note the circular reflection rainbow.

Mount Baker from the air:

 

From Vancouver, we took the Sea to Sky Highway as the sun went down.

January 5, 2012

During our kitchen remodel, we discovered that there is a hollow beside our chimney. I’m turning this space into a small closet with shelves in our foyer, with a built-in bench below it.

 
In two Saturdays of work so far, I have cut and re-framed the rough opening, patched a hole in the side of the chimney, cut off an old abandoned gas-light pipe, moved some wires out of the way, cased the opening, and built & installed a door.  I also put up new coat hooks since I had to take down the old ones.

Many more steps to come, which I’ll update here as I make progress.