Satellite picture of the house

Until recently, Google Maps were using an out of date picture of our local community with lots of bare land awaiting house building. However, upon checking today, they have taken a new shot that shows our house and that of our neighbours. We've also marked the nearby community "beach house" which is our access point to the lake (unless we want to climb over the garden fences of a couple of our near neighbours!) You'll see that those houses backing directly onto the lake each have a little jetty. It is from these, that the locals are making their way out onto the now frozen lake to clear ice hockey rinks and so on.

Wikipedia gives a good little summary of the history and geography of Okotoks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okotoks,_Alberta

It mentions the flooding risk but we're situated way up out of the Sheep River valley and so any future flooding should not directly impact us.

J&E

Christmas Day 2007

So we've made it...our first Christmas as residents of Canada. Whilst it's strange to be away from our families, we are also proud of what we have achieved in making it through the Canadian immigration process and then actually making the move across in October, finding a house and car and getting ourselves settled.

2008 will present us with all sorts of challenges, not least getting financially established as the search for work begins in earnest in January - but with all the hurdles we've jumped to get here, we feel confident about our ability to wrestle to the floor, all the big tasks ahead.

From a very mild Okotoks (it hit 6°C today - with a clear blue sky and lots of sun!), we wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Lots of Love

J&E

Fireman's Santa Parade

Each Christmas Eve evening, the local fire brigade (situated just around the corner from our house) do a tour of Okotoks with a Fire Engine decked out with lights and a santa.

Although this video is not as good as we would like, we wanted to test posting a short movie to the blog and so fingers crossed this works and you can view the mini parade. Try clicking on the triangular "play" button just beneath the picture below.

J&E

Heritage Park - 12 Days of Christmas

A few days back, we took a visit to Heritage Park, a "historical" (in North American terms) village situated in the west of Calgary. We visited in the Summer when we were here on a research trip and really enjoyed our day, so we thought we would pop back to take a look at their "12 Days of Christmas" presentation. A selection of photos follow and we hope you can see what a pretty (and interesting) place it is. Each of the buildings started life elsewhere in Canada and were moved piece by piece to Heritage Park where they were reconstructed. You can go into each of the buildings and speak to well informed guides dressed appropriately for the time period.

It was a fairly cold day (about -6°C) but with the sun shining brightly and the clear blue sky, the wintery scenes were that much more beautiful. The last shot is from the edge of the park, looking across the now frozen Glenmore Resovoir towards the Rockies.

http://www.heritagepark.ca/home.htm





J&E

We've got competition...

A family member was asking us the other day if the Canadian's make much of Christmas. The answer is yes - if the use of Christmas lights is any form of indicator. We previously posted some shots of our first attempt at applying some Christmas lights to our house, but some of the houses down around our local streets have rather left us "in the shade".

We especially love the world's biggest candy cane below...that's a VERY big house and quite where they sourced a candy cane of that size, we have no idea. You'll see what we mean below.

The last one is of our house again...after we've added some lights to the tree outside.




J&E

Watch out for the bears...

...as they are innovative forragers and this bunch have taken up residence on our front porch.
We bought these at Spruce Meadows (a local show-jumping venue) when they held their Christmas Market recently. We spent an age choosing just the right three bears, each of which had a slightly different expression.

http://www.sprucemeadows.com/

Danny, the chap who makes the bears (with a chainsaw!) was selling his wares directly and it was nice to be able to speak to him personally about his work. Here's his website.

http://www.mountainpeak.ca/

J&E

Our Town

So this is where we live. Don't you just love the "Population" figure on the sign...makes us think of one of those western movies where the population figure is crossed through and replaced with a lower number after one of the locals gets killed!

You can see reference to the Okotoks Town website...www.okotoks.ca. There's lots of information on there including maps where you'll be able to see our Crystal Shores area in the north of the town and the lake that our house backs onto.

They seem very keen on sustainable living here and the plan is to cap the growth of the town when the population reaches 30,000, the idea being that they think this is the maximum number of people that can sensibly be serviced by the Sheep River, that flows through the centre of the town. According to the sign above, we're just over half way there at 17,000.

J&E

The overhaul has begun...

Having completed our mini project to raise the level of light in the house by changing out all the lightbulbs, it became apparent just how dreadful some of the paint colours were! So, in the period before Christmas, we have got to work on eliminating the worst of them by re-decorating the 3rd bedroom, the family bathroom and the main floor loo!

The 3rd bedroom was the worst. Before our predecessors moved in 2 years ago, this house was a show-home and unfortunately, the designer that Sterling Homes (the builder) had got in had thought it a good idea to half cover the walls with a dark chocolate brown colour, beneath two other fairly ghastly coloured stripes. This in a room that does not get a tremendous amount of natural light. As the Canadian's would say, "go figure"!

So off we went to Home Depot (the nearest equivalent in the UK being B&Q) to get some stain blocking primer to cover up the dark colours and a top-coat of an off-white (Linen) colour. We have left all the woodwork as is for now and we will tackle that as a job throughout the house at a later stage but we're pleased with the outcome.

Neither the family bathroom or the downstairs washroom have any windows and so the use of fairly dark shades of green paint was inexplicable.

We have changed these out too for the same Linen colour and again, the impact has been fairly striking.

[PHOTOS TO FOLLOW]

The problem, of course, is that the rest of the rooms and open areas now look that much more dreary...oh no, what have we started!

J&E

Christmas is coming...

...and Jan has got into the spirit by getting the decorations up.

First up were the outside lights and the candy canes.

And then she got stuck into the tree.

We sited the tree upstairs in the "bonus room". This left us with the problem of there being no tree downstairs. Jan was also struggling to accomodate all our decorations on the tree (as we tend to collect them as we go along our travels). The only answer was a second tree, a 7.5 feet one that we have sited in the dining area (or the "nook" as the Canadian's call it).

Yes, that's a beaver under the tree!

Throw in an Advent Calendar...

And an emerging yuletide village...

And we're done! Now, bring on the food!

E

Changing of the seasons...

Do you remember that late summer scene of the lake out the back of our house...

Look what a few weeks of cold weather and some snowfall has done to it..

The lake has completely frozen over. It looks stunning. The Canadian's seem an enterprising bunch and they certainly love the outdoors, evidenced by the following...

This is one of maybe 5 different ice rinks that the locals have created for themselves on the lake. You have to admire their determination. It is a significant job to shift that much snow to expose the ice and then they spend an age trying to smooth the surface. Then it snows again and they have to clear the rink again!

It's fascinating to watch them at work and then to see them enjoy the fruits of their labours.

J&E.

Coming out of the dark

If you've ever been in a North American hotel room, you will know they are not big on lights. Rooms are often very dimly lit. This preference for gloom seems to pervade residential addresses too and one of the first projects we have undertaken in the new house is to replace all the light-bulbs. There were a lot of them, most being inappropriate choices for the socket into which they were inserted (which resulted in some very corroded fittings) and almost all having very low wattages. Replacing them with appropriate and brighter bulbs has made a huge difference to the level of light in the house, all for under $50. Here's the old ones...now in the trash!

J&E

So that's what minus 27°C feels like!

How typical of our luck. The weather folk have been going on about how this will be the coldest Canadian winter in years and to underline this "fact", we have been going through an extremely cold spell this past couple of weeks. Until a couple of days ago, we'd had numerous continuous days of "overcast" (it's sort of different here...the sky goes very white) weather with daytime temperatures of -24°C (with a wind-chill factor making it feel like -27°C).

We decided that we weren't going to hide from it and even though we weren't brave enough to venture out for walks, we did make sure we went about our business in terms of going to the shops and so on. You know that brain-freeze feeling you get when you eat too much ice cream at once...well it sort of feels like that, all over your head and body! So, it was out with the hats and thermal gloves and numerous layers of clothing, which all helped to make it manageable.

It's been nice to see the sun again this past couple of days although we had a fairly large dump of snow last night. Quite bizarrely though, we looked out the front door just before lunchtime today and someone (we have absolutely no idea who) has cleared our drive of all the snow. What a saint! It left us completely dumbfounded...we'll let you know if we find out who the Good Samaritan was and why they felt compelled to be so kind!

J&E

Post

A number of people have asked us about the postal system here.

The first thing we should say is that it is a bit flaky. A number of items of post have gone astray (although that could have happened at the UK end) and at least one item has gone to a neighbour because a comma was interpreted as a number 1!

The key difference from the UK is that you don't get the post delivered to your door. Indeed, the doors do not have letterboxes. Instead, you are assigned a box at a nearby postal delivery station and the post-person drives up and pops all the post for the local area into the respective boxes. You're given a key for your box and you pop along each day (or whenever you want) to see if you have mail. You can imagine how our little faces light up when we find mail in our box! Our box is just around the corner from the house, so it's no big deal to walk (or in current weather conditions - more of that later - slide) over there to check. Here's our postal station...our box is on the bottom row of the middle section.

J&E

Thanks

We've been delighted to receive a variety of new home and Christmas cards. They have all been so welcome. One, in particular, really took us by surprise, so much so that we have framed it and it is now hanging on the wall. The author will instantly recognise their handiwork but we wont embarrass them by naming them, but we thought it was excellent to be able to paint such an accurate picture of the house without having seen it "in the flesh". Again though, since thanks to all for the well-wishes.

J&E

Moving

So, after a month of waiting, we took possession of our new house on Wednesday, 14th November. However, we spent that night as our final night at the barn as we had to wait until the following day until our UK furniture (and a number of other items) were delivered.

We were pleasantly surprised to see how much stuff we could fit into our car (we had been stock-piling essential purchases at the barn over the prior few weeks).


On Thursday morning, we arrived at the house bright and early and shortly afterwards, the lorry delivering our goods shipped from the UK, arrived.


There were just two, apparently slightly built chaps on board to shift all our belongings but boy, could they carry heavy loads! They would reach behind their backs and grab the far edges of a package and then run into the house and if necessary, up the steps) with the package (some of which were extremely heavy) behind them. It looked weird but was very effective. They unpacked many of the boxes for us and left us to do others when we told them that was OK. Our driveway was a mass of packing debris when they finished some hours later.
The lads did a pretty professional job on the whole, especially as they had to work around a series of other deliveries from other companies (ie: sofas, TV, etc) the same day. We do have some damage to a small number of items but versus our expectations of moving a house full of things 4,400 miles, we're reasonably satisfied with how things went.

J&E

Weather Update

So we've been here 4 weeks and 1 day now and here's the summary weather report!

In one word..."varied!"

Rain - none at all.
Snow - 3 falls so far...each between 2 and 4 inches ("flurries" or "dustings" they call them!) - each has melted away over the next couple of days.
Sun - immense amount of...it is an exceptionally sunny place...apparently, it runs Arizona close for sunshine hours each year.

Cloud - generally little or none, then occasional days where there is a reasonable sprinkling of cloud and only 2 days so far that have been pretty overcast.

Wind - from calm to what feel (or rather sound) like pretty severe night-time gales whistling around the barn, but then we are in a pretty exposed location here.
Temperatures - Highs in the low 80's F when we first got here, more recent highs have been in the mid to high 50's (so fairly nice with just a t-shirt and tracksuit top on, or similar). Lowest so far is 22F (about -5C) but that was late evening/overnight, so it didn't impact us too much.

Undoubtedly there is much worse to come but we've been surprised how well the weather has held up so far. Well, that's tomorrow's weather done for then!!

J&E

Mmmm Pie!

We went to the Calgary Farmer's Market today, which was really nice. It is an indoor affair.

We stopped off at a pie stall and the stall holder, picked up on our accents immediately. We were drawn to the stall by a sign saying "Melton Mowbray Pies", which you don't expect to see 4,400 miles from the UK and the stall holder advised that the owner of the business had been trained by Melton Mowbray. We got a steak pie for tea, with a tub of extra gravy thrown in and two pork pies (made just yesterday) for our lunch. These were very possibly the finest pork pies we have ever had!

At another pie stall, (honestly, there were more than pies for sale at the market!), they were giving away samples. We tried the Steak and Kidney Pie and we both thought that it would put up a fair fight with the fabled Ye Horns Inn Steak and Kidney Pie (for those of our readers who know that very excellent establishment/fayre).

We also bought organic meat, in the form of Bison Steaks, Chicken, Beef and Sausages. We sampled the sausages while we were there and they were delicious. There seemed to be a good range of organic and non-organic fruit and veg on various stalls, as well as fruit cakes, biscuits and other baked goods, gift items and so on.

It's open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, year 'round and as long as the meat we have bought tastes good when cooked, we would definitely make the Calgary Farmer's Market a regular haunt.

***********

After the farmer's market, we drove to Millarville Christmas Market at the Millarville Race Track.

There seem to be an abundance of Christmas Markets coming up in various locations, so that should be fun. Janet enjoyed some roasted chestnuts as we strolled and there were a number of stall holders that we might consider buying from if we see them at future markets...but for today, we were very disciplined and kept our dollars in our pockets.

J&E

Calgary Hitmen V's Everett Silvertips

We went to our first Ice Hockey match today. It was held at the Pengrowth Saddledome (we have attached a picture of the Pengrowth as we will hopefully be attending lots of events there over the coming months). This was also where we went to see the Brad Paisley concert we mentioned in an earlier post.

We were invited along to the Hockey game by Brian, the teller we end up using most often at the bank we're with here. We don't recall Lloyds TSB ever inviting us to anything at all over 7 years with them in the UK!

Well what of the game. Everett Silvertips are a Washington State based team so there was a good level of USA/Canada rivalry - mostly on the ice - where punch-ups were interuppted by occasional passages of play! Notably, any time the puck went near one goal or the other, it seemed to trigger a mass scramble that would develop into a mass brawl. On occasions players would shed helmets, gloves and sticks and dive into eachother, fists flailing, knocking seven bells out of eachother. What fun!

Seriously though, it was fast and furious and skillful but not without danger to the crowd as, surprisingly we thought, the puck disappeared at speed into the crowd on at least half a dozen occasions, despite there being barriers and nets to mitigate that risk.

Unfortunately, the Calgary Hitmen went down by 4 goals to 2 and played the last several minutes without a Goaltender (goalkeeper in soccer speak) as they threw on an extra attacking player in a desperate attempt to make up the deficit.

One of the joys of going to the Pengrowth (situated just south of Downtown Calgary) is that you seem to be able to drive away from it with ease. We made it from the exit of the building to the car and then to the southern edge of Calgary in about 20 minutes...which encourages you to go and see such events as it's not a major drag to either get there or get home.

A good first experience of Ice Hockey and we think we could well see ourselves going along to a Calgary Flames game (which is sort of at the Premiership level, tonight's game being a sort of Championship level affair...apologies to those that don't know what that means in terms of soccer).

J&E

Preparing for the new house

These past few days, we've been on a controlled (well fairly) spending session, trying to get ourselves geared up for the new house (just 11 days to go now until we take possession). Among the things we've bought so far are:
LG 60" Plasma Screen TV and stand for our bonus room (well, we had to didn't we!)
Panasonic Surround Sound System to go with the above
LG 32" LCD Screen for the Living Room
Sofa (3 seater, 2 seater, chair and ottomoan)...bad picture of which is attached...for the bonus room
LG Washing Machine and LG Dryer - photos attached
King bed for the 2nd bedroom
Twin beds for the 3rd bedroom
Broom for outside sweeping up (because you can sweep the powdery snow with it)
Mop for inside.
Dustbin
Recycling bins
Christmas lights
Shaw Cable/Broadband/Telephone service
Epcor Electricity Service
Direct Energy Gas Service
etc, etc


Honestly, it's not green.









We will still need further sofas for the living room, some study furniture and no doubt a myriad of smaller bits and pieces, but we'll judge all that when we move in as there's no real hurry to get it right.


J&E

New Shoes!

Jan is getting ready for winter with the purchase of these ice skates. All she needs to do now is to learn to skate but apparently, lessons are given at the lake that our new house overlooks...when it ices over of course!



We're still looking for a pair of skates for Eamonn but they might need to be a special order as his size is proving hard to get.

J&E.

Halloween Night

We mentioned in an earlier post how Halloween is taken seriously here. On Halloween night, we went on a stroll up and down Crystal Shores Drive (the road adjacent to the cul-de-sac we are moving to) as all the children, with their parents, went from door to door, Trick or Treating. Jan looked wonderful in a full length Morticia wig (now why haven't we got a photo of that!)

It was a really lovely, family oriented evening. Although some of the shots are a bit dark, these hopefully give you a flavour of the extent of participation among the local community.

J&E