"31 bottles of wine on the wall...31 bottles of wine...."

So for the last while, Pammer and I have been making wine at a "U Brew" place in Chilliwack...now this is a very uninvolved process on our part...we give them money and 6 weeks later, we pick up our finished product.

Well recently, Pam's brother-in-law Chad has taken up a new hobby - wine making. He's made a couple of batches for himself, that turned out quite wonderfully, so about 6 months ago, we had him start a batch of red for us. Technically it was ready to be bottled 4 months ago, but as you know with wine, the longer it ages, the better it gets...so we let it sit in the giant glass container thingy until this past weekend.

Here are some of the bottles, ready to go...
The wine was transfered from the big glass container thingy into the giant plastic pail (do you like my technical lingo??!!)

Starting to fill the bottles....

Chad, topping off each bottle

And corking them with this fancy corking contraption

And when all was said and done, here are our 31 bottles of Cabernet Sauvingnon....that will now sit in Pam's storage locker and age for many more months.....

Yay wine!!!!

weekend trip to the Island

So Pammer and I had both had thurs/fri off last week, so we decided to go to the island for 4 days and visit my cousin Karla, her husband Brian and the cutest baby ever, 9 1/2 month old Zander...you've seen some pics of him before, as i visited them about a month ago. and I know that most people aren't interested in seeing many pictures of a cute baby they've never met, but it's my blog and i can post what i want, and you will just have to deal with it. :)

So Pammer and I caught the ferry Thurs. morning and headed to Nanaimo. We then drove to Coombs and met my cousin for lunch, before heading back to Courtenay, where they live. I've never been to Coombs before but have heard a lot about it...cuz they have goats. Now at first you might be thinking "goats? so what! It's just a goat hanging out and eating some grass, big deal!"
but then you might look at this next picture and think "that's a funny angle at which you took this picture, why are those goats up high?"

To which I would reply..."that's because the goats live up on the roof of a building"
And now the building is a marketplace (with AMAZING fresh bread and other wonderful things) and a restaurant).

After lunch, and some shopping at the marketplace, we headed back to Courtenay and hung out at the hostel that Brian and Karla own and Pammer and I entertained Zander for a while

And then we basically spent the rest of the weekend just chillin'...so here are some cute pictures of an adorable baby that probably thinks that I'm the paparatzi and he's somethin' famous based on all the photos i took of him this weekend...lol

a little karaoke in the bathroom while on his throne...
and a good tooth brushin' at night while chillin' with daddy

We made amazing pizza's one night.....we had so many different combo's of ingredients, everyone got to make their own section...mmmm....

And we also spent a lot of time drinking pomegranite martinis.....

We did some scrapbooking....while drinking said martinis...and Zander helped us the next morning by choosing his paper colors

and then eating them...

Karla and Zander

all tuckered out...i wish i could sleep like that!!!

it was tough to leave this cute face after a couple of days!!

good times on the island!!

Mt. Baker!!

The weather on Sunday afternoon was amazing, so Pammer and I decided to tag along with the Esau's (Pam's sister, brother in law and 4 kids!!) and their friends for an adventure at Mt. Baker. Now, Mt. Baker is a big mountain in Washington that I see off in the distance everyday as I drive to and from work...and i must say it's practically a crime that I have never actually BEEN to Mt. Baker since living on the west coast......so it was about freakin' time!!!!

As we wound our way up the switchbacks, the scenery was glorious!! We pulled over part way up to soak in this amazing scene at "picture lake"....I think you can tell why it's called that!! These are some of my most favorite pictures 'rebs' and I have taken together!!!!!!

We hiked the Bagley Lake trail (i'm almost positive that's what it was called!!), one of MANY, MANY hikes up on Baker. The hike we did wasn't terribly taxing, cuz kids with little legs had to keep up...which was fine with me because I could stop and take a lot of pics and not get too far behind!!!

2 of Pam's nephews, Aaron (on the left) and BJ (right)
After the Bagley Lake loop, we ate our picnic dinner and Pammer and I decided we had enough energy to hike a bit more. We decided to tackle "Table Mountain" in an effort to catch the sunset. It wasn't a long hike and we got to the top just in time to see some amazing colours in the sky!

And as you know, when the sun goes down, the moon comes up (and it gets dark....doh!!) We made it back down to the car just fine, though had to make our way carefully with the fading light...it was pretty amazing to watch the moon rise from behind the mountains, though...

A day of fun, family and amazing scenery....a great way to say goodbye to summer and hello to fall!!!

DOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Ok after all my careful planning, 2 of my blogs posted in the wrong order and I can't figure out how to change them, without deleting one, which i'm really not willing to take the time to do!!!! So please forgive the random order....the Alaska Baby blog (now number 2) was supposed to be first, with the Scenic Alaska blog second....so make your way through my postings, ignore some of the sentences with 'lets move on to the scenery pics now'. Ah, you guys are all smart, you'll figure it out....just enjoy the pics!

scenic alaska

Ok there was some amazing scenery on our trip...here's a little peek at what we saw.

First of all, here's Pammer on our deck...did I mention we got upgraded to a suite at the VERY FRONT of the ship?? We could sit in our room or on our deck and take in all the scenery around us...it was amazing!! (more on that later!!)

this was in the Yukon, up at the top of our 4x4 route
Watching for whales...
YAY whale!!!! Ok so we weren't actually THAT close to this whale, but thanks to some good cropping, it make you think i was RIGHT THERE!! But it's still a cool pic, don't you think?? The whales were pretty shy..we saw lots of them from a distance just blowing water into the air and a few poked their noses out, but not much beyond that (except for this guy below, who did a little tail flick). Theresa and I did see one whale come entirely out of the water, breech and disappear again....it happened so fast we didn't get our cameras ready in time...but it was AMAZING!!!
More view from our balcony

A shot of the trees in a bit of fog from the Garden and Glacier tour we did
The glacier - the Mendenhall (I think) glacier referred to above, as part of our garden and glacier tour
A big chunk of blue ice from the Tracy Arm Fjord
more pretty pieces of the glacier out floating
And there you have it...some of the cool stuff we saw!!!

Now for some sights around the ship