Ferry trips are still novel enough to me that they make any trip feel like a *real* holiday. I kept hoping I’d see a pod of dolphins or a
big orca pop out of the water. Alas, no excitement, but I’m taking my grandma to the casino in Victoria, so I guess we’ll have to make our own! My grandma’s so cute. I wish we lived closer.

Hands down my favorite part of the trip was a visit to Miniature World in Victoria, BC. They created all sorts of incredibly detailed miniature displays, from civil war reenactments to historical dollhouses (think Tara from Gone with the Wind) to crazy city scenes depicting the circus coming to town. I could have spent HOURS in there, drooling over the teeny tiny details and snapping photos.

If I ever have enough room for a workshop space, I am so turning into a miniature world of my very own. This guy will definitely want to move into one of my artist studio apartments:

OK and this guy too:

More (and larger) photos on my Flickr page.

I finally caved to the Apple takeover and bought an iPhone to take with me on our roadtrip. So far it’s been great and already proved its worth by allowing me to receive and reply to a few very important emails. Plus it’s just fun!

Assuming this blog post works out, it’ll make posting on the go a possibility too. Awesome!

Speaking of on the go, the mister and I are visiting friends in Portland who took us on a little tour of the gorge and Multnomah
Falls. Of course it started pouring rain and hailing as soon as we arrived, but that just added to the misty raw beautiful sights.

I did take a few more non-iPhone pics, but I’ll have to wait until we’re back home to upload those. And check on if this worked at all!

See you soon!

EDIT: It worked! A little wonky in parts, but nothing a few minutes of HTML tinkering can’t fix. A couple more photos of the falls below.

Why yes, that IS bacon on my doughnut, thankyouverymuch. On my list of places to stop by while in Portland, my mister voted strongly in favor of Voodoo Donughts.

We were not disappointed. Bacon sounds weird on a dessert, but the maple glaze and doughy goodness reminded me of bacon drizzled with syrup, sitting beside your pancakes and eggs on a breakfast plate. Yum!

Last year I doodled some cute little Valentine’s Day cards and put them up on the blog as a PDF file. I’m still smitten with them this year and I hope you will be too!

You just have to download the file and then print it off at home onto some heavy paper or cardstock. Cut them out and voila! Totally free Valentines for you to give to your special someones. Yay!

Download the PDF here

If you’ve never downloaded a PDF before, you may need to install a program to open it. The most common (& free) one is Adobe Acrobat.

printed on card stock & cut out

Happy (early) Valentine’s Day!

I had the loveliest afternoon planned with my mister the other day. First off – skating at the new outdoor ice rink in Robson Square:

photo credit: entheos_fog via Flickr

Now I haven’t skated since I was a kid, but the weather has been nice, the skate rental was only $3 & I figured my hockey-playing mister would find my incredible lack of balance hilariously charming. We were all set to have our romantic comedy movie moment when we arrived at the rink only to find it packed with people taking OFF their skates & the ice being covered with rolls of carpet. Drat! Foiled by a winter fashion show!!

We poked around the shops on Granville for a bit before heading to the second planned location for our date – a showing of the 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland. I’ve never seen the version featuring Cary Grant and W.C. Fields, and it sounded like a great way to boost my creative ideas for a new painting series. We got into line with plenty of time (or so I thought) only to have a very official sounding lady with a clipboard come out a few minutes later to inform the line that the show would sell out and there may not be enough tickets for everyone in line. I tried to keep my hopes up. I couldn’t have my plans dashed twice in one day, could I? Oh yes! Yes, I could indeed.

Clipboard Lady went back into the theatre, then returned a good while later with an official remaining seat count. She started counting off the people in line ahead of us:

You…how many? Two, three…how many? Five, six…single? Seven. And eight!

That’s it! Sorry folks.

The last ticket went to the diminutive lady standing directly in front of us. The show sold out literally right in front of us. *sigh*

We managed to salvage the afternoon by drowning our sorrows in a fantastic eggs Benedict at a local pub, but I can’t help being a little disappointed. The theatre only scheduled that one single showing of Alice, so I’ll have to be content with the DVD releases and clips I find on the interweb. And my imagination, of course.