I’ve had a pretty lucky week this week. It started last Saturday when myself and Tom played our first proper round of golf this season at University Golf Club. Despite the fact that it’s almost 1000 yards longer than most of the courses I’d played in Australia, I still managed to shoot 101, which was a five shot improvement on my best ever round. I also managed to shoot 45 for the nine holes from Hole 7 through to Hole 15, so it should only be a matter of time before I break 100 too.

On Tuesday, myself, Tom and Nathan went to play a round at Langara Golf Club after work, teeing off at 5.30pm. I didn’t play that well, shooting an 11 on the par 5 11th which I was pissed off about. However, on the next hole, a par 3, I left my tee shot about 6 feet from the pin but missed the birdie opportunity. Two holes later though, I got my first ever hole-in-one!! It was a 113yd par 3 and my PW shot bounced once and dropped into the cup, winning me $50 each from Tom and Nathan ;-)

As if that wasn’t enough, we had a poker night with friends last night and I won outright, taking home $100 for first place. I was tempted to buy a 3 or 5-wood hybrid with my combined gofl & poker winnings, but I’ve only played two rounds with my new clubs, so I figure I’ll wait a few months until I know what I actually need… and until I start consistently hitting my long irons straight!!

Myself, Jacqui and a Danish friend of ours, Rikke, headed over to Victoria, on Vanouver Island, last weekend to go whale watching. We boarded the ferry from Tsawassen straight from work on Friday evening, arriving in the backpackers in Victoria around 8pm, just in time to get some food and book our place on the whale-watching boat for 9am the next day.

On waking on Saturday morning we were greeted by drizzling rain, which wasn’t what I wanted to see when facing three hours in an open boat. When we arrived at the shop there were loads of great photos of orcas so I was glad I’d brought out my good camera. We got dressed up in all-weather survival suits and boarded our semi-rigid inflatable, ready to cast off. It wasn’t raining too hard, but I still made sure to keep my camera inside the suit.

Once clear of the mouth of the harbour, the twin outboard engines throttled up and we were off. The sea around Victoria is sheltered from the open ocean by Washington State, so it was a nice, calm ride out to the San Juan Islands where we met J-Pod, one of the families which frequent the area.

As you would expect, there are rules that commercial whale-watching operators must obey to minimise the impact on the whales, the main one of which is that the boats are not allowed to approach within 200m. Even with my 200mm zoom lens on the whales were still pretty small, so I wondered who’d taken all the photos in the shop, as they were much closer than 200m. Apparently, if the whales choose to come closer to the boat, that’s OK, but since J-Pod were sleeping when we encountered them, they completely ignored us.

If I get around to doing another trip I’ll make sure to go on an afternoon boat in the hope that they’ll be a little more curious, though with the number of boats visiting them daily I’d say they’re unlikely to be bothered investigating all that often. After 90 minutes with the whales it was time for us to head back to harbour and get some dry clothes on and avoid the crap weather by heading to the movies. Before doing that though, we went to the Bug Zoo which was pretty interesting. I got to hold a Giant African Millipede, which was about 15cm long!

Sunday dawned and it was still raining, throwing our plans into disarray, as all the stuff we wanted had planned to do was outdoors. After a drive around Victoria we decided to head back to Vancouver early, stopping off at the Butterfly Gardens on the way, as it was indoors. We figured we’d be there for 20 minutes or so, but it ended up being closer to tow hours. It was really interesting, as they’d loads of different species of butterflies fluttering about, along with some flamingoes and other smaller birds. Myself and Jacqui took loads of photos, and some of mine came out really well, though I was playing around with my manual settings, so the depth of field was really shallow on a lot of photos. If I’d increased it just a fraction more I would have had some awesome shots. Still, I was pretty happy with a few of them.

Whale Photos

Butterfly Photos

USA Today reports today that 44% of American adults believe that the theory of evolution is ‘probably or definitely false’ and that 66% believe that creationism is ‘probably or definitely true’.

Even more interestingly, 19% appear to believe that both evolution and creationism are ‘probably or definitely true’!!

Via: Stranger Fruit

We’ve just come back from a weekend away to Whistler, for the last weekend of the ski season. Nathan and Tom went snowboarding on Saturday afternoon, Anna and Stef went for a go on the ZipTrek, whereas I went for a leisurely cycle along the Valley Trail with Jacqui. The scenery was great, with excellent views back towards both Whistler & Blackcomb. We also passed a number of lakes and all of Whistler’s major golf courses. I thing myself, Tom and Nathan will have to head up there for a round sometime.

We cooked a huge BBQ on Saturday night then split up for another day of acitivities on Sunday. This time myself and Tom went MTBing on some sweet singletrack near Lost Lake. We only managed two hours though, mainly due to the heat as it was almost 32C! It felt a bit weird being back in Whistler with the temperature 40C+ warmer than the last time. We also had no water with us, being without our Camelbacks and not having suitable water bottle holders on the rental bikes. Still, it was good to get out on the bikes again.

The drive home along the Sea-to-Sky highway was spectacular, surrounded by mountains initially, then slowly giving way to the ocean as we approached Vancouver. As usual, I took some photos, so check them out.

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Yesterday was a public holiday, so we made the most of our time off and headed off to Deep Cove Kayak for a few hours of paddling. We were a bit worried about the possiblity of falling in, since the water here isn’t quite a tropical as Sydney (!!), so we rugged up a bit and headed off. Anna chose a particularly spectacular outfit, leading to suggestions that she’d gotten dressed in the dark ;-)

After a bit of messing around getting organised, we were all on the water by 11.30, with two hours to do as we pleased. We paddled along the coast, surrounded by hills draped in fir trees as far as the could can see. Jacqui braved the risk of dunking and brought her camera along, so I have a few of her photos to show off the scenery.

The two hours passed really quickly, and we were back on dry land without incident. To ensure we replenished our energy levels with a couple of beers and a huge burger at The Raven. We’ll be going back there again!

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Myself, Tom and Nathan have started golfing regularly, playing our local, Stanley Park Par 3 every week. We’ve been slowly getting better, but Nath has pulled out ahead, with a 56 (+2) on Saturday, backing it up with a 57 today. I shot a 62 today, which is my best, but since I went out on a 29 and back on a 33, it was a bit disappointing. Missed a 4ft putt for birdie, and had two other good putts lip out, though on the plus side I did have an 11yd chip in and drained a 15ft putt too, so it wasn’t all bad.

Myself and Tom are in the market for a proper set of clubs, and we’ve been heading down to GolfTown in Richmond for the last few Sundays to try stuff out. Once my bloody pay cheque clears, I’m getting a set of Mizuno MX-19s, three Cleveland CG-11 Black Pearl wedges (a 50°, 54° & 58°) and an Odyssey White Hot XG putter.

These should last me a couple of years!

One thing that drives me nuts about this country is that everyone still uses cheques! We have to pay our rent with a cheque, and employers also pay their employees with cheques. I got paid last Tuesday, went to deposit the cheque in the bank only to be told that it would take up to 9 days to clear! Granted, it’s a public holiday today, but it’s still a huge pain in the arse when you haven’t worked in almost six months. Counting the days…

As of last week, I’m officially an Australian resident. I woke up last Monday to an email from the Dept. of Immigration informing me that I’d been granted permanent residency.

I had applied last August, and had heard nothing for months as my application sat in the queue. An email in February asked me to go and get a medical checkup and a police certificate from Ireland, so I got that organised last month when I arrived in Vancouver, submitting the police cert last Friday week. Three days later, I got the email so it’s all good now and I can forget about Government paperwork for a loooooong time.

In other news, we got ourselves a shitbox car on Thursday, so we’re now mobile. $850 for a Ford Tempo sedan with 215,000km on the clock and badly faded paint. Still, it goes well and it only has to last us six months or so. Our concierge gave us the wrong number parking spot, so when we came down to get the car on Friday, it was gone. Another resident had come home to find us parked in his spot and we’d been towed. $120 to get the car back too! Hopefully we can get the body corporate to refund us for their error!

Great article from the New York Times on what was learned from a study teaching capuchin monkeys to use money;

So, does Chen’s gambling experiment simply reveal the cognitive limitations of his small-brained subjects? Perhaps not. In similar experiments, it turns out that humans tend to make the same type of irrational decision at a nearly identical rate. Documenting this phenomenon, known as loss aversion, is what helped the psychologist Daniel Kahneman win a Nobel Prize in economics. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, ‘’make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.’’

The full article is worth a read to discover the punch-line…

Bevin and Jonny came down from Whistler for the weekend as she was heading back to Ireland. We decided to visit the Vancouver Aquarium and check out what they had in store for us. Highlights were the Beluga whale show and the dolphin show, but they also had some pretty good displays indoors as well.

I signed up as a member, so I can go back as often as I want for free. I’m pretty keen to try out some of the behind-the-scenes tours and meet or feed some of the whales or dolphins.

Anyway, I got some nice photos, so check them out.

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Well Vancouver is certainly nuts about Ice Hockey! Myself, Tom and Nathan headed down to the pub last Monday to watch Game 7 of the first playoff series against Dallas. Vancouver won, putting them through to the next round against Anaheim and the whole town went crazy. Here’s a video I took on my phone (1.3MB) while walking home that night.

The Sun Run, a 10K fun run and Vancouver’s largest annual running race with 53,000 participants this year, kicked off at 9am just up the road from our apartment block. The fitness centre across the road thought it would be a great promotional tool to set up an aerobics class out on the street… complete with pumping tunes and instructor with microphone: “when your heart rate rises, your life goes wheee!”, “Vancouver, you make us proud”, and my favourite “when you say hello to us, you’re saying that you have energy, you have strength!”. They decided to start this around 7.30am, an hour and a half in advance of the race! Wankers!

Since I’d been woken up anyway, I got up and myself and Anna went out to shoot some photos.

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The playoffs started last night, with the Canucks hosting Dallas here in Vancouver. No I know bugger all about the game, but watched a bit of it anyway. The game consistes of 3 * 20min periods, and it finished at 4-4 after regular time, so they go to golden goal…

80, yes EIGHTY, minutes later, the Canucks score to win the game! The golden goal period was 33% longer than the regular time game.

After two weeks of looking, we found a nice apartment in Coal Harbour, which was fully furnished, and didn’t want a one year lease. All bills, including cable TV, high speed internet and apparently limitless downloads are taken care of too! Sweet. The place also has view over to the mountains on the North Shore which gives me something to look at while farting around on my laptop, though since this is my first time living in a high rise I have to remember that there’s probably another 400 apartments who can look in my windows.

Our complex also has a small gym on the third floor, so I’ve been heading down there most morning’s this week just getting back into exercise. Clearly snowboarding in minus temperatures doesn’t require a whole lot of energy, as my gut managed to expand over winter. Then again, it could have been the jellies. On the plus side, my legs seem to be in pretty good shape which is beneficial from a running point of view.

Now it’s time to look for a job and start earning some cash again!

Finally, after 7 days of continuous rain, the sun came out and Vancouver turned on its charms. Myself and Tom made the most of the opportunity and went for a walk around Stanley Park to see the sights and take a few photos.

We came across a pair of swans building a nest, which was a good excuse for me to take out my new Canon EF 70-200 lens and get some close-up shots. I got a great one of a Mallard drake. It’s so sharp, and so crystal clear I find it hard to believe I took it myself ;-)

After strolling around for a bit longer than originally planned, we met up with Lisa’s friend Carole for a few beers. She’d given us valuable help over e-mail before we arrived, and yesterday she gave us the lowdown on Vancouver life and answered all our questions.

There’s a couple of thing I’d noticed about Vancouver:

First, I’ve yet to see an estate agent’s. They’re everywhere in Sydney and in Dublin. Do Vancouverites not sell their houses, or maybe they’ve got some alternative, as-yet-unheard-of way of transacting real estate business?

Second, there are a lot of homeless and mentally disturbed people wandering the streets, more so than Dublin or Sydney. In Stanly Park yesterday we came across a woman standing on the beach shouting abuse at the ocean.

Finally, like Sydney, there’s lots of great, cheap ethnic food. We’ve had something different each night and have yet to have a crap meal. That augurs well!

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First impressions? Will it ever stop fucking raining! It’s rained almost non-stop since we got here, and is forecast to continue until Sunday. I commented to Tom today that this is the most rain I’ve seen in 8 years. I might as well have moved back to Dublin ;-)

While in Whistler, Jonny showed us this monster jump which was built specifically for filming two skiers on. It may not look that huge until you notice the two people standing on the lip of the landing. He reckons they’d need to run in to it at 90km/h to ensure they bridge the ‘detah gap’ as we called the cutout. Unfortunately I didn’t see the skiers jump it as clear skies were too intermittent and I was usually riding at the other side of the mountain when the conditions suddenly became good enough to film. By the time I’d get back over, they’d be crap again and filing would be wound up for the day.

The snowboard tour is over. We’re leaving Whistler tomorrow, driving down to Vancouver to look for a house and job. Back to the real world.

I’ve had a mixed week here in Whistler. It’s been great to catch up with Bevin & Jonny again, but the snow has been a bit sketchy. It had rained heavily before I arrived, and all during my first day, which destroyed the snow quality on the mountain. The temperature then dropped rapidly, freezing the hill into an ice rink.

I wasn’t too fussed about going riding in crap snow, and didn’t hold much hope of getting too much boarding done during the week, but then, thankfully, it started snowing. I did a half day on Tuesday which was OK, but there wasn’t much cover over that ice layer, and with detuned edges on my board I was all over the place.

Wednesday was brilliant as we’d had 30cm of powder in the last 24 hours. We made a couple of loops through the Blackcomb Glacier bowl, finding fresh tracks in knee-deep light powder. I’d also got my board tuned, so my edges were holding on the groomers too. Thursday was awesome too, with myself and Bevin spending all day in the Symphony Bowl.

We awoke on Friday morning bright and early, to 10cm of fresh outside the window and it was still snowing. Myself and Bevin were raring to go and were on the Creekside Gondola by 8.30. Jonny was telling us that there was an inversion and it was raining up top, but we didn’t believe him, figuring he was just jealous because he had to work and couldn’t enjoy the powder. Unfortunately he was right, and while there was lots of new snow, it was really wet, heavy stuff which was really hard to ride in. Plus, it was still raining. We rode around for a couple of hours, but by 11.30 we were through, calling it a day and heading down to meet Tom for coffee.

Still, 53 days riding, usually in great snow, is a huge season for me. My days as a snow bum are over though, unless Project Lotto comes good. Meanwhile it’s back to sitting in front of a computer.

Well, we’ve now made it to the last stop on the snowboard tour. We left Fernie on Saturday and drove first to Revelstoke via Rogers Pass. Rogers Pass is one of the most economically important passes in Canada, as both the Trans-Canada Highway and the railway line pass through it, connecting Vancouver to the rest of the country.

The scenery is amazing, with steep, high mountains, laden with snow on all sides, but this comes at a price. Rogers Pass is prone to massive avalanches and there are approximately 140 slide paths which threaten the highway. Snow sheds have been built in the worst places to protect traffic, and quite a few that we drove through had had avalanches roll over them.

After a quick stop in Revelstoke itself, Tom decided we should continue on to Kamloops, getting more of the drive out of the way on the first day and leaving us only 300km remaining to Whistler itself. That turned out to be a good decision, as the latter part of the journey say us driving on a secondary road which wound its way down an avalanche-prone valley. However, with spring bringing plenty of rain, it was falling/fallen rocks we had to worry about and not snow. We managed to beach our rental car on one rock, having overestimated how much clearance we had, but were able to free ourselves with some judicious back and forth driving. For the next 90km we were confronted with fresh rockfalls around what seemed like every second corner and to make matters worse, it had been raining all day which didn’t bode well for the snow at Whistler.

We’re now crashing on Bevin’s couch for the week before heading to Vancouver next Monday.

Carrying my SLR around on the ski hill plays havoc with my snowboarding as the last thing I want to do is fall over and land on it, so I usually didn’t bother bringing it up the hill. Tom took plenty of photos with his IXUS, so I grabbed a few of them and stuck them up here.

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