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Round-up
By ruth | June 17, 2008
Bad lazy blogging from me. Once again I am just going to sum up what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks – if I can remember, that is!
Well, I went to Abbotsford for the first time – there’s a new hospital and BC Cancer Agency centre opening there in August, and I volunteered at a staff open house. It’s a very impressive building, and very shiny and new. Hospitals without patients in them are rather weird though!
Dave and I had some friends over for dinner – Anke, Michael, Brigitte, Tim, Kate and Graham. Dave made a range of mezze type food plus mac and cheese especially for Brigitte. Everyone tried some of Dave’s home brew, and seemed to like it (I know I do); and Michael plied us with various delicious types of booze, including bubbly.
Of course we went up to Whistler for the last weekend of (non-glacier) snowboarding on Blackcomb, on June the 7th. Our main aim was to take photos with which to taunt friends back in the UK. We’re mean like that. Unfortunately it was pretty cold and the sun only made 
occasional appearances, during which we stripped off layers, pretended to be warm and took lots of photos. The snowboarding itself was fun in a hilarious kind of a way – the run down to the gondola home was a man-made strip of snow through green meadows, and even as high as we could go the slush was heavy and surfy.
It rained on the Sunday so despite it being the last day of snowboarding, we hung up our boots and went for a walk with Tim, Brigitte and Zach instead. We walked along the Cheakamus River Trail, which is forested and very atmospheric. We saw six bears over the course of the weekend; one at the side of the highway on Friday evening; three from the gondola on Saturday afternoon; one from Tim’s jeep in the Whistler Interpretive Forest on Sunday; and another at the side of the highway on the way home.
Last Saturday Dave went on Graham’s stag do (about which, of course, I know very little except that Dave now wants to take me on a boat up Indian Arm to Granite Falls); and I went on Kate’s hen do. (Brunch; brewery tour; cocktails and dinner at the Dockside patio; TheatreSports improv comedy; at which point I bailed due to inability to keep my eyes open.)
One other thing worthy of note: last night we went swimming in Kits open-air pool for the first time this year. I am not fit. This time last year I was swimming quite regularly and I set off expecting to be able to do the same amount, having not swum for a year. Kits pool is 137.5 metres long, which is 5.5 times the length of a standard 25m pool. They mark the distance on the bottom of the pool, and when I reached 25m and realised I wasn’t even a quarter of the way and flagging fast, I began to panic. By the time I reached 50m I was completely out of steam and had to swim over to the wall for a rest. It took me three pitches to complete the length.
I’m glad we went though, because after three days of sunshine, Vancouver’s summer has disappeared again. Hope it comes back by the time John and Debbie arrive! Less than a month now!
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