• My Life

    Drumheller

    After living in Edmonton for over a decade, we finally decided to check out Drumheller. This town sits about three hours drive from us and it is home to loads of dinosaur related stuff, so my kids were pumped to check it out too. Overall we enjoyed the trip. The drive was uneventful. We particularly appreciated it when the flat prairies became badlands, a welcome change of scenery! We spent a couple days in and around Drumheller. What was nice about the location is that you can undertake multiple excursions in a day, pretty much everything is close by. We checked out the Royal Tyrrell Museum and several other smaller…

  • My Life

    San Diego Zoo

    Our final big excursion while in San Diego was a day trip to the zoo. I wasn’t overly looking forward to this… I’ve seen some cool zoos before and I’m not very fond of the whole “watching animals in cages” thing. The Zoo Overall this was a fun day. Though the day was sunny there’s a lot of shade, especially in more heavily treed areas like the rain forest. There’s so much to see and some neat opportunities like the underwater viewing of the hippos and polar bear exhibits. The park got busy (we went on a Monday) but it was only super congested in a couple chokepoints. For the…

  • My Life

    San Diego SeaWorld

    This is part 2 of 3 detailing our recent family vacation. The first entry discussed the great time we had at Legoland. Downtown San Diego The first night after leaving Legoland and arriving in downtown San Diego, we took it easy. Our hotel was located near all the public transportation, so I was a bit nervous about how well we would sleep. Periodically a very loud train (the Coaster, I think) would rumble down and shake the hotel. Luckily enough that first night we were all so exhausted from the Legoland experience, that we slept fairly soundly. The next day though we were up and at them and heading over…

  • My Life

    Vacation – Legoland

    We recently returned from a vacation to San Diego and I figured I’d give a quick overview of our vacation — broken across a couple posts as I’m super busy, catching up on what I’ve missed while I was away. We spent about half our time at Legoland and the rest in downtown San Diego, visiting SeaWorld and the zoo, as well as walking the downtown area. This post will primarily focus on Legoland itself. First Flights This was our youngest kid’s first flight, so that was part of the incentive of going… to give him the chance to be on a plane a few times. Since we had to…

  • Website,  Writing Resources

    I Have a Confession to Make

    I have actually been on vacation the last two weeks. Probably some of you have noticed that my activity online was lowered. Perhaps you did not. The trip was basically to introduce the kids to some great grandmothers they had not met yet as well as some other family and friends. We abandoned Edmonton (and the mosquito horde that had claimed it) a couple weeks ago. Our first stay was in the Okanagan where we had a great time swimming and playing in the sand. And visiting. After that we drove to the coast where we stayed for several days. This was our youngest’s first glimpse of the ocean as…

  • My Life

    Back from Vacation

    Been away for several days visiting family back in the homeland. Very pleased that I had the iPad this time around. In the past I’ve brought one of my laptops and I have to say that the iPad was more useful than they. I had no problems with battery life, maybe not quite getting 10 hrs but close and much of it on borrowed wifi. For draft writing (I finished a good portion of initial planning on the second novel) and semi-formal blog posts, the iPad is more than sufficient. Not certain I’d want to use it for final draft material but on the short vacations I take, that is…