2011

Well ,the first week of January 2011 was rather surreal.

We had the stomach flu that we caught from Dave and Corrie and the girls when we had a late Christmas celebration on Jan 1st.

 We had a final acceptance on the sale of my Dad's house in Penticton, after dealing with some home inspection issues and a late deposit cheque. I'm the Power of Attorney who was making the sale happen, so having it finalized is wonderful! the closing date is Feb 28th. 

 On Thursday, my Dad had the fourth fall in two weeks , two of which involved paramedics. A spot became vacant in Complex Care at the Hamlets in Penticton and Rick and I dropped everything and went to Penticton and got him moved on Friday and Saturday. It was tremendously emotional, because my Dad knew enough to know he didn't want to move, but his dementia had gotten sooo bad that he didn't even remember the last fall a day later. The staff at the Hamlets were glad that he could move back on the same floor he was on this summer, but Dad does not remember any of the care-aids or the friend that he made from before. He has 3 ladies in the same little group with him and he did seem to be enjoying their company.  Even if he starts to complain now, we all know that this is the right place for him and he will have to stay.

We came home on Sunday to collapse and hope everything is smooth sailing for the rest of 2011!

Christmas day walk by the airport

We took advantage an unusually mild, sunny Christmas day to go for a long walk on the dike by the airport. The sand flats were beautiful and one place had numerous bear tracks preserved in the mud. The dogs had a great time and we found about 4 interesting caches. Katie went to dinner with her boy-friends family and Mike didn't feel like coming on the walk.

Tree series of caches

On Dec 23rd we went for a beautiful, snowy winter walk on the horse and hiker trails ,to place a series of 6 caches. These caches will be published for the Pink Mug event on Jan 11th. This is an area where our family has traditionally gone on a Christmas eve walk. It's alwaysa special place in the winter.

December birthday

Turning 3

Dec fun

December pictures from our house and a trip to Wildlights on my birthday.

Lorax series of caches

To celebrate our year of geocaching and 500 finds, we decided to put some caches out in Barnhartvale. The first series we did was 2 kid caches and a micro in a series based on the Lorax book. We hid them in an area that was devastated by the pine beetle and then by overly aggressive slavage logging, so the story of the Lorax seemed to really fit. Even though we put them out in the mist of very cold (-20C) weather and even though they were aimed at children we've had a lot of response from the geocaching community. We've had 16 people find them already and a local cacher, Couloir has added to the series. He also did a write up about them on the Interior Geocaching Blog

.Lorax Caches

Interior Geocaching blog

Katie at " at the far end of town"

Katie and Muffy looking for Couloir's cache.

We took Katie out to do our caches and we all found Couloir's

Caching in Nov.

Near the end of November, we went on a beautiful winter walk above Rosehill to finish off a puzzle cache that we had started. It was snowy, but sunny and it turned out to be a great walk. The puzzle cache was amazing and our favourite of all that we have done this year. It turned out to be almost our 500th find.

Rick at the final stage of  "4 Elements"