Namedropping!

I didn't realize it had been so long since I had written anything here. The past few months have been rather full, actually, though it didn't seem that way when we would have twelve people visit the library all day (the perils of working somewhere where students aren't always around!). I went through the recruitment/hiring process for a summer clerk, attended my first meeting with important people in the field of Canadian music, and cleaned up almost all the music subject headings in our catalogue, which were a mess. Now, people are coming to the Centre and programs are starting up and it's going to be an awesome summer. And I hooked a Canadian playwright who also did an awesome movie with some inter-library loans, and he wrote about it in his blog.

I also found out that Hawksley Workman is coming here at the end of the month for something with the Leadership department, which so far does not seem to include a concert but I remain hopeful.

Following the example of Montifax, I have begun a small indoor vegetable operation - a pot of cherry tomatoes and a pot of beans. I can't find my camera at the moment so I only have pictures of the plants shortly after they sprouted.



And, to finish off, some pictures of how pretty it can be here when it is actually acting like spring.

A few recent photos

Someone built this snowman beside my building. I assumed it was the building manager's kids, but the beer-can hand suggests otherwise.

This picture also shows the lovely evening light over the western mountains.

In other news, I begin my volunteer gig tomorrow with the high school band. I've been looking for ways to get myself involved in the community here, as the town is very disconnected, and this is a great opportunity. The director is a first-year teacher who needs help with the brass and I have the education to be able to help, though I haven't done anything like this in a few years. I'm very hopeful that it will go well.

One of my goals this year is to update this blog more regularly. Starting next month I should have more to say about work, as it will be getting busier. As will the rest of my life, but we'll just see how that goes.

I have been getting up and going out in the mornings recently and the way the rising sun falls on the mountains is just so amazing and always different. Today I remembered to bring my camera with me (another thing I plan to do more regularly) and took this picture from the bridge on the way into town.


The sunlit mountain is really just a big hill compared to what's around it - the fog obscures the ones to the right, which feature a famous ski resort. It just looked so exquisite tucked in there, shining away beyond the fog.

I live in a snowglobe.

Tonight it is lightly snowing and it is astoundingly gorgeous. I think being this high up, the snow is more ice-ish than it is in Ontario and Quebec - that is the only explanation for the sparkliness of everything.

I realize that 9:45pm is not the best time to be photographing anything outdoors, really, but I had to try.



This is a rock outside my building. The little bits that show up sparkling in the picture are like the entire world here. It's crazy.



Tree branch! This is a bit more realistic-looking.



Someone built a snowman down by the river. It was surrounded by snow angels.

It is getting colder here most of the time, but every so often, like last weekend, we will have one day of -13 and the next hovering around 0 causing it to feel comparably warmer. This weekend, however, I will be going to Calgary where it is supposed to be +8. These mountains do all sorts of odd things to the weather, when a place less than two hours away is over 10 degrees warmer.

Work is going well. We recently got an enormous new Apple server to host our iTunes U stuff. It was doing its set-up thing all day yesterday and was only about halfway through the process when I left at 9pm.

My own computer that has seen me through the past four years of university is beginning to die, alas. And computer repair out here is abominable - you have to call the guys in Canmore to come over and pick it up, and then they will take it to Canmore and look at it and call you back within a week and overcharge you like crazy. I have had a roommate and a coworker go through this process and would like to avoid it, myself, so I ordered a shiny new computer this morning! They won't ship to PO boxes so it's going to my parents' and I'll pick it up at Christmas. It will, unfortunately, be running Vista, but one of the work-studies for the archives recently got a new computer and fixed it up so it looks like it's running XP, which is my preferred version of Windows as well, so I will be doing that.

The real reason for this post was to share one of the cooler things that happens at night here. The coyotes start to howl most evenings as the train goes through, blowing its whistle. I wanted to get the train whistle in there, too, because it sounds awesome with the echo in the valley here, but they're freight trains and don't seem to run on any sort of discernable schedule.



Sorry that's there's nothing to see in the video - it's the view out my window around 10:30 at night these days, which means it is black. And I don't have any sort of program that will extract the audio from the video. But the coyotes are cool!

I tend to spend most of my weekends cooking, partly because I like food and partly because there is really not much else to do. Today I have made brownies, macaroni and cheese, and I've got a pot of butternut squash soup on the stove.




I will be going over to my friend Stephanie's tonight to watch non-scary movies with her and one of her co-workers who joined the community band last night. We don't want to hang out downtown with all the drunk morons that populate this town. So we will watch silly movies and eat brownies instead.

(The pan is getting chipped paint on the bottom, hence the waxed paper. I don't want bits of Teflon in my baked goods.)



This is the soup, all finished. I'm not particularly hungry but it smells amazing and looks beautiful so I had to try a bit. I can really taste the roasted garlic and it is delicious.

(No picture of the macaroni and cheese, I ate it for lunch.)

It is still rather fall-ish weather here, which people who have been here longer than me say is quite unusual - last year there was a snowstorm on November 1st, whereas now we are only maybe going to be getting some rain on Sunday.

My dad visited at the beginning of the month and I was able to take a few days off, so we went out to Lake Louise one day. You really don't need more than a day in Lake Louise, it is very small and there's not much there and groceries are so overpriced for the tourists that the local discount (for which Banff apparently qualifies - we stopped in to get drinks) is about 50%.

Anyway, it was pretty but you can't really stare at lakes and mountains all day.

This is the Lake Louise classic postcard picture and though it is kind of cheesy in that regard, the way the mountains and sky reflect in the freakishly blue water is pretty cool.

Some of the white part of the mountains there is actually a huge glacier.

Lake Moraine is around the other side of the mountain on the left in the first picture.



It looked rather gloomy from the water level, but there was a giant pile of rocks you could climb and from the top it looked much nicer.

Actually in this picture it looks more like a freakishly blue river, but it really is a lake. You can rent canoes and paddle around the lake, though there were not a whole lot of people doing this in October.

Two weeks ago I took a hike out to the Hoodoos, which are a rock formation caused by some kinds of stone eroding faster than others. They are not really all that interesting to look at, which is unfortunate, but the walk there is very nice.



Even that early, the very shallow parts of the Bow River are freezing over a bit. There were some areas with large sheets of ice tilted in the water.

Once when I was little, when we were at my great-aunt and -uncle's cottage, I saw Lake Erie like this. My dad and I built an ice house out of the giant sheets of ice. I guess larger bodies of water make larger sheets of ice.

The hike to the Hoodoos takes you around the other side of Cascade Mountain, Mount Rundle and Tunnel Mountain.

This is Cascade from the side where you can't see where the cascade that is was named for used to be, before it dried up.

I thought I took a picture of Rundle, which is very pointy when seen from town but as you go around it it turns into more of a mountain range with lots of little triangular points arising from a giant chunk of rock.

And so ends my experiment with using the Insert Photo function of blogger. It works pretty well, though it always puts the pictures at the top of the post and I have to cut and paste it in where I want it. Also, I am now done eating my soup and it is as delicious as it smelled.