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.

Tonight I attended a candidates debate for my riding which was better than I expected and also quite disappointing. Based on an article in the local paper about the debate in Lake Louise last week, I was expecting tonight to be a train wreck - most of the candidates seemed woefully unprepared and uninformed. Tonight I was impressed by the confidence of most of them and the way they expressed their own opinions and their parties platforms. (I was kind of looking forward to a disaster and with the exception of one instance in which the Libertatian candidate was loudly laughed at, there was no major embarrassment.)

However, I do live in Alberta. Wild Rose, the riding that I am currently in, is an odd one because it is comprised of cattle land, farm land, Calgary suburbs, and a national park. The first three areas tend to be Conservative. The last, where I live, leans toward Green and the NDP. Before the debate tonight (and before reading the article about the Lake Louise debate) I was planning to vote Green, because they came in second last time (by about 30,000 votes, granted, but still second), thinking that maybe there was a chance. Now, I don't think there is a chance in hell that this riding will be anything but Conservative, so I am going to vote for the candidate I like best.

I was also disappointed that it was not so much a debate as a panel discussion - the candidates rarely addressed each other's points or challenged the others (with the exception of the NDP candidate who did rib the Conservative guy a bit), nor was the audience allowed to argue with them. Rebuttals are an important part of debate and while the crowd often whispered them to each other, nothing was said out loud. It's not a debate if there's not an argument.

The good news is that my Alberta drivers license finally arrived today, so now I can vote with a minimum of paperwork.

2008/09/05

It has been a while since my last post, mostly due to the fact that I no longer had internet at home. I had been using my former roommate's wireless connection but it broke near the end of July, which she decided to blame on the large number of people (3) using it. So she decided to change the password and not tell anyone, which I didn't learn about until I asked her about it almost two weeks ago. I went and set up my own internet last week, but because of the holiday weekend it didn't start working until today.

Last weekend I went to Calgary to pick up a Silent Brass for my euphonium so I could practice at home. A friend from Toronto has just recently moved out to Calgary to do her PhD so I also spent some time visiting her and assisting with the assembly of Ikea furniture. From my experiences so far, I think I like Calgary, though they really ought to get a C-train (or at least a frequently-running bus) to stop at (or at least near) the Greyhound station. It's really not a city designed for pedestrians.

Anyway, the point of getting the Silent Brass was so that I could play, because I joined a community band this week. It's nothing fancy, mostly grade 2-3 music (while university ensembles tend to play more grade 6-ish stuff, if I remember my music ed stuff right), but it's nice to play with a group again. It meets in Canmore, the next town over from Banff, but there is a group that runs a carpool to rehearsals so I am hopeful that it will all work out.

My Flickr account filled up so I decided I needed a new photo service, so I am giving Picasa a try. All my pictures of wildlife and other Albertan adventures will be available here. The elk are out these days, but I haven't seen one while I have had my camera. They're mostly out at night, anyway, not during the day, but they crap all over the place and it smells worse than the horses.

It snowed here on Sunday. It turned into rain by the afternoon, but I woke up and it was snowing. The trees looked lovely but it was a little surprising. My coworker who has lived here for nine years said that is has snowed in every month at least once while she's been here. It has returned to mostly normal fall-ish weather with random rainfall every few days, which is very normal for Banff.

We discussed Christmas plans at the Thursday meeting at work, and it looks like I will be able to come home for a few days, probably December 24-28. We will also be having a work Christmas dinner, which was at the Indian place last year, which would be awesome because the Indian place is kind of pricy but it smells amazing.

Clearly I am not very good at this whole blogging regularly thing - I get busy or distracted and fail to write anything. I'll try to improve.

For the past week my mother has been visiting. We hit up several tourist-y things that I hadn't done yet, including taking the gondola up and down Sulphur Mountain and walking out to the Cosmic Ray Station once we were up there. (When I first heard about the Cosmic Ray Station, I thought it was a joke name. Turns out, they really used to measure cosmic rays up there.) We also ate a lot of food, made perogies, and went to many concerts.

We saw both operas, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which were both very good. It is really impressive how much work goes into such productions as they each only get two performances. We also attended the end of program brass concert, which was loud and long but very good, and a chamber orchestra concert that included Haydn's trumpet concerto and John Adams' Shaker Loops, which is so cool to actually see performed.

I took the Thursday while my mother was here off work, in lieu of Canada Day, so I had my first three day weekend. Unfortunately she left on Friday around 1, so I have been rather bored since, especially since the internet is broken at home. I have been continuing to use my former roommate's wireless connection, as I am now living directly above my former apartment, but the wireless device is broken. I was able to get on an unsecured network for a few days but now that one has gone secure, so I am currently sitting in a cafe at the Centre because there is free wireless up here.

I have been mostly working on orders and cleaning up authority files at work. Both are interesting and tedious at the same time - there is a lot of copying and pasting involved in entering orders and a lot of inserting date subfields and commas into improperly-formatted authority records. However, I do get to spend thousands of dollars on awesome stuff when doing orders and I end up reading a lot of Wikipedia and New Grove entries to determine if people are dead for the authority files, so it evens out. I am really looking forward to when some of the stuff I ordered last month starts coming in - it won't be all string and piano music, at last!

I attended the Calgary Stampede on Saturday. It was my first time in Calgary (if you don't count the airport), so it was nice to be in a city for a while, though it reminded me quite a bit of San Jose (downtown core of office buildings with some shopping surrounding by parks, parking lots, and houses) but with more cowboy hats. I headed into this downtown core to do a bit of shopping, as I needed some more work clothes, and ended up stopping in the central branch of the Calgary Public Library for a little while. It's a very nice-looking library, at least on the first floor, with low shelving and lots of windows and displays.

I did not get to the rodeo part of the Stampede, as I didn't realize it was the afternoon show. I was thinking of going to the evening show but it was going to be an hour and a half of chuck-wagon racing so I decided to skip that. Chuck-wagon racing, for those of you, like me, who never heard of it until now, is basically a contemporary version of Roman gladiator chariot racing. The equipment is updated but the concept and violence are apparently about the same. Instead I hung out on the grass by one of the music stages where I heard the Stampede Band show, which was pretty awesome. (I do have a soft spot for marching bands.) They marched off playing You Can Call Me Al. Paul Simon for marching band! It was great.

The food was quite impressive - primarily deep-fried (oreos, cheesecake, coke, donuts, bananas, funnel cake, etc.) and meat, but I did have a falafel wrap which was delicious. I have yet to find a falafel place in Banff and am not confident in my ability to make my own so I have been going without. I also had mini-donuts, kettle corn and a slice of deep-fried cheesecake, which was actually very good.

Sunday morning I moved into a new apartment where I have the single room. One of the girls who will be in the shared room moved in then, too, and the other will move in on Tuesday. I slept amazingly well last night. I still need to pick up things to make the apartment fully functional, like dish soap and trash cans but I am very glad that I got to move.

Tomorrow at work I get to go through the orders database and order a lot of stuff, mostly from what the previous music librarian selected but I've put some in too. I'm almost done with the backlog of cataloguing so I've been spending more time cleaning up the authority files and looking up various composers, conductors and performers, which has been both useful and interesting. I expect that I will have to do some more research to figure out what some of the items in the orders database are to determine if we should order them now.

The most exciting thing at work today was the arrival of a Haydn trumpet concerto from a publisher in Germany which smelled like rotten cheese.