Green Your Life

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Check it - TreeHugger

Do You Remember Having Shrinky Dinks

As Kai was watching a few taped episodes of Pinky Dinky Doo this morning an interesting thing happened. One of the episodes is called Pinky Shrinks. Becky asked me if I remember Shrinky Dinks. Of course everyone knows that most men's mental ages are that of a twelve year old and mine is no exception. I immediately started to laugh. I vaguely remember these little craft projects. The idea behind this craft is that you decorate a piece of plastic and then put it into an oven of some kind and the plastic shrinks. Your Shrinky Dinks will decrease to about one-third it's original size, hehehe.

La Plata

On Saturday I left Boulder to climb La Plata. Of all the 14er's in Colorado it ranks in at number five for elevation (4369m). We started from the trail head at 7:20 am and after much post holing and rout finding we arrived at camp at 2:30pm. After setting up camp I had a nap, ate 2 two serving dinners and drifted off to a restless sleep until 5:30 am. Our plan we to get up at 4:30am so we could summit and hike back to the trail head by dark. As my old friend Mark Abraham told me long ago - Don't ever plan anything because it will never work. As it turns out Mark has been right on many occasions. My watch alarm didn't work in the extreme cold that we experienced on Saturday night and that is why we didn't get up at 4:30am. Instead after having some hot chocolate and some power gels our team headed to the ridge of La Plata at 7:40am. The climb to reach the top of the ridge took an hour and then from there we spent the next four hours slogging up the ridge to the summit. About five minutes before reaching the summit there was a nice patch of blue sky peaking through all of the clouds but it was not to be. At 12:30 we reached the summit of La Plata in a virtual whiteout. The trip back to camp took two hours and a half hours, things go much faster when you can plunge step through snow on the downhill. After helping my tent mate get some water and some food in to him for the hike back to the trail head we left camp at 5:20pm and arrived back at the van at 7:20pm.

It was my first winter ascent of a 14er and now that I know I can do it, it will not be my last as long as I have breath.

Bake me a cake as fast as you can

Nothing makes this four and a half year old happier than to help bake or cook. This morning I finally did something with the old bananas that were sitting on the counter. The recipe that I use makes two nice little loafs of banana bread, one goes on the glass domed cake stand, the other into the freezer for next week (yeah right). Today Kai remembered that he has a little apron with trucks on it (made by his Grandma Franks) that he needs to wear just as he flipped some of the creamed eggs and sugar out to the bowl. He is generally in charge of the wet ingredients, creaming the butter and sugar and mixing in the eggs. I just add the ingredients and he does almost all of the mixing. As the volume of wet ingredients increases I have to keep reminding him to mix slower and slower and to his credit he listens very well.



Kai - Dad when I grow up I want to be a cook.

Me - Okay buddy, that would be a great job. Did you know that your Grandpa Anderson is a cook, he's a big cook, a chef. And he used be the boss of a big kitchen. If you are a chef you could travel to all sorts of different countries and learn to cook their food.

Kai - No way, that's awesome. I could go to China. Dad, when are we going to have Chinese New Year?

Ah, the wandering imagination.


If I don't keep an eye on him he would eat most of the batter.

Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick

This is for all the Election fans out there.

Super Blueberry Pancake Tuesday

At the Canucks at large household, we like to do things a little differently. May the parading and eating and antioxidizing and voting begin! Of course, we can't actually vote, but we can at least sit by and patiently wait. And we can eat pancakes.

The funniest part about this is that when he was making the pancakes with Kai this morning, Keith didn't actually realize that today is Fat Tuesday. Kai had made the suggestion last night that we should have blueberry pancakes soon, no doubt because of our glorious container of Costco blueberries. Keith decided to go ahead and make them today. Coincidence? Perhaps. But I'm guessing that Pancake Tuesday was discussed at preschool yesterday. (These things aren't always disclosed openly and honestly.)

***edited to add: I've just now realized, though speaking to a couple colleagues at work, that Pancake Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday, is not an American tradition, so perhaps some of my readers from South of the Border may be a little in the dark about the pancake eating. Scott - on Sunday when others were saying "Super Tuesday" and "Fat Tuesday", I said "Pancake Tuesday", and I don't know if you heard me, but I just figured it was the same as "Fat Tuesday". It turns out that it isn't, although they are both related to lent. When asked "why pancakes?" by one of my colleagues, I didn't really have an answer. I found these sites, which shed a little bit of light on the pancake tradition, or rather the pancake races. But then I found the following here, which actually explains WHY pancakes, and how the whole crazy pancake race thingy started.

Aren't traditions fascinating?

Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day

Shrove Tuesday is the last day before Lent. In earlier days there were many foods that observant Christians would not eat during Lent such as meat and fish, eggs, and milky foods. So that no food was wasted, families would have a feast on the shriving Tuesday, and eat up all the foods that wouldn't last the forty days of Lent without going off.

Pancakes became associated with Shrove Tuesday because they were a dish that could use up perishable foodstuffs such as eggs, fats and milk, with just the addition of flour. Pancake races are thought to have begun in 1445. A woman who was busy cooking pancakes in her kitchen lost track of the time on Shrove Tuesday and when she heard the church bell ringing, she woman raced out of her house and ran all the way to church; still holding her frying pan and wearing her apron.

Many Australian groups and communities make and share pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. Selling pancakes to raise money for charity is also a popular activity.

Cold but not too cold

Prior to Becky's prodding it was my intent to post some video and pictures from my winter camping trip. We started hiking into Mammoth Reservoir from a trail head near the town of Rollinsville. The hike took about two hours. After the first hour I donned my snowshoes to avoid sinking up to my waist in snow. Once we arrived at the site for our field trip it was an easy afternoon of digging, digging and more digging. When our snow cave was finished it was time for supper. Nothing beats rehydrated Santa Fe Chicken when it's -5 c outside and the wind is blowing straight into camp. After supper I toured around and checked out the other students' snow caves. All of them were larger than ours but there was a chance that ours would be warmer because it was small. I decided to head to bed around 620pm. Early you say? Why yes it was, but I had been up since 430am and outside in blowing snow at an altitude of about 9800ft for almost the whole day.

It took me about 40 minutes to take off my plastic boots, my jacket, get changed into some spare long underwear, and to adjust my sleeping pads (two are needed for extra insulation from the snow). Finally comfortable, I laid down and had a conversation with my cave mate about things that I can't remember now. When we were done with our chat I put on some music and around 830pm I fell asleep listening to Weezer. I was awake from 1030pm until 1230pm, again listening to music and in a very creative way going to the bathroom. There was nothing but sound sleep until 545am when I noticed sunlight coming in through our makeshift door (a big block of snow and my pack).

Breakfast was lukewarm oatmeal - my stove didn't work very well and so the snow I was melting for water didn't get very hot. Lucky for me though the tea I had made the night before (when the stove was working a bit better) was still warm and I had a warm/hot breakfast. Once everyone was packed up we headed for home. The nice thing about going uphill on a trip is that the descent is much faster. I was the third guy back to the trail head in one hour and twenty minutes.

We have one an ice climbing field trip next weekend and then our class ends with a big climb on the weekend of Feb. 16-18. That is going to be a long long couple of days.

Climbing v. Adventuring

Wow... this is our 250th post. That's a bit of a milestone, no?

I've had a fairly busy week... I think. It's really all a blur. A definite highlight was when my dear friend Megan took me to her bouldering gym (rock climbing sans rope) on Thursday evening. It has been a couple days since we went, but my arms and legs still feel like I picked up a small truck and carried it down the street. Don't get me wrong - it was a blast, and once I can walk around the room and up a flight of stairs without wincing I'm definitely going back. Thankfully I wasn't too intimidated by all the "famous people" who were in town this week and happened to be at the gym at the same time. I just happily clambered up the walls in my own rather awkward and, uh... unique style. I guess it's for the best that I don't instantly recognize the "big names" in rock climbing and bouldering. Anyhow, I might be completely delusional here, but I think I wasn't too terrible considering that it has been over 10 years since I was last on a climbing wall. Most of all, it was nice to do something other than work for a change. Thanks Meg! And check this out: you thought it was crowded on Thursday! I think this photo was taken during the gym's grand opening or something - wow that's a lot of people!


Keith is away for the next 24 hours or so. He's been up since about 5 AM, and he's off on some snowy hill in the mountains building himself a snow cave to sleep in tonight. Have I mentioned that I have a most adventurous husband? He's far more adventurous than I. You see, I have no problem at all donning my capri yoga pants and a pair of climbing shoes and bouldering up an 18 foot wall inside a relatively comfortable temperature-controlled room. But ask me to put a 30 kilo pack on my back, snowshoe through the woods for an hour or so and then sleep in a hole dug out of the snow? Uh, gee. Thanks, but no thanks. I do enjoy camping and all, but I'm a pathetic wimp when there is frost on the ground in the morning. Keith, on the other hand, has the metabolism of a hamster and his feet and his nose never get cold. I think he might be bionic. He's got our camera, so I'll prod him a little when he gets back and he'll tell you all about his snow hole and the cold and his new down jacket.

We love his new down jacket. He loves it because it's going to keep him warm. I love it for, well, for the exact same reason. Stay warm, sweetie. Have fun. See you tomorrow.

Sea World

Bless his heart, at least the travel I do for work presents an opportunity for learning.

I was parked in the hallway outside our bathroom, taking advantage of the bathtime playtime to upgrade a computer program for work and listening to Kai play with his new Target brand Toob-style tube of wee sea creature toys, when I heard the following:

"So, here are the fish. These fish and these crabs live at Christmas Island..."

So now we're discussing who lives at Christmas Island. And the difference between scorpions and crustaceans. And that lobsters live in cooler waters than crabs. And did I see any seahorses when I was at Christmas Island? And what about eels? Or hammerhead sharks? Or stingrays?

Oh, and he thinks that we should all go there for a family vacation to go scuba diving.

Good idea, bub. We'll look into it. In the meantime, maybe I'll get you a goldfish for your birthday.

If I were in a band

... it would apparently be a bluegrass band from somewhere in the deep south. I would likely be the person playing the jug (you know, the person who blows across the mouth of a jug and makes deep hooty noises?) and perhaps adds some other percussion sounds here or there. I've never claimed to be very musical, despite eight+ years of parental investment into piano lessons.

Anyhow, this fun little meme that I found over at Halushki (quite likely one of the funniest blogs out there) is how I spent my lunch hour while working on a day that everyone else seems to be not working. It's technically a holiday, but I'm expecting a guest next week from Ontario, and I thought I'd pay it forward, if you will, with my work attendance.

I'm so happy I have a flexible-hours job.

So the meme basically goes like this:

1. Click on this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. Click on this link: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. Finally, click on this link: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/

The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

You then take the pic and add your band name and the album title to it, then post your pic.

Okay, I admit it. I cheated a little with the picture, because the first one I had just didn't cut it, but the band name and album title are both legit.

Incidentally, our imaginary band would later release a second album titled "Walk in the Sun", which would prove to be significantly less popular than the first, and thus the band would quickly dissolve and we would all go back to our day jobs.

Speaking of which, I need to get back to work. Be sure to leave a comment if you give it a try.