Blair's Blog

Christmas is fast approaching and one of the sure signs that there just aren’t enough shopping days left is the annual “Cousins Christmas Bash”.   Just as we did last year, all of the Langendoen side of the family met for a weekend-long pre-Christmas get together to coincide with the Dutch Sinterklaas.  In years past, we would gather at one of our houses (usually on Christmas Eve) but recently the crowd has grown too large.  This year we were 22 in all, with 13 children.

We all met at the Banff Gate Resort at Dead Man’s Flats, rented 4 chalets for two nights and took over the resort’s lodge for our meals and activities.  Unlike last year we had no snow – it was completely bare.  Not very Christmassy, but a lot easier not to be dealing with boots, snowpants and jackets for all the kids.  It was also nice to see some of the scenery!

The big highlight of the weekend for the kids was placing their wooden shoes all in a row by the lodge fireplace in hopes that Sinterklaas might fill them with chocolates, pepernoten and dropje.  The kids even left out carrots for Sinterklaas’ horse to nibble on.  Sure enough, the next morning the shoes were filled and, while the kids were trying to induce diabetes with all the candy, Sinterklass came walking up the hill with his helper Zwarte Piet.

The kids were pretty excited!  Sinterklaas had his red book with him and looked up each child by name and had a few words of correction and praise for each one according the the naughty and nice deeds he had recorded.  Zwarte Piet looked all too eager to stuff some of the naughty children into a big sack in order to take them to Spain to work in the pepper mines!  Fortunately, all of the kids measured up in Sinterklaas’s eyes and each received a nice gift rather than forced labour in Spain!

We were all pleased to see that this year, unlike last year, the steamship porters hadn’t lost Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet’s luggage.  This year their outfits were resplendent and looked just as if they had been newly made by the most talented seamstresses!

The weekend was a lot of fun, but not without a few unexpected turns.  The kids were disappointed when it turned out that the resort’s pool was closed for maintenance.  The management had made arrangements for guests to use another hotel’s pool. When we turned up at that other hotel in Canmore (10 minutes away), their pool was also closed because the unusually large number of swimmers had messed up the pH balance.  The Banff Gate manager was very good about it and told us all to just head for the Upper Hot Springs in Banff  – at his expense.  With park entrance fees for three carloads of us and 17 swimmers at the hot springs it wasn’t a cheap swim, but I guess they hope we’ll keep coming back as repeat customers!

It was another great weekend together with all of the cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, lots of fun and good food was had by all.  You can also check out my sister-in-law Carla’s blog for another description of all the fun.

Tags: Langendoens

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The little princess had her birthday the other day – it was quite the event.  Alyssa turned 6 on the 21st of November and a few weeks ahead of the day, we asked her what she’d like to do to celebrate.  Her answer?  Alyssa wanted to drive to Banff, buy some fudge, build a stuffed animal, have lunch at the Old Spaghetti Factory and then have a swim at the Upper Hot Springs!  She was very definite about it all.

Fortunately, the weather cooperated and Alyssa’s birthday was a fine, sunny day.  The roads were bare and dry and the temperature reasonable for the time of year.  We picked up Gram and Gramps and were in Banff just at mid-day.  We got started right in on Alyssa’s to-do list and, once fueled with some candy from the fudge shop, got busy with the shopping.

There were only two flaws in the day, the first was the van devouring its own front brakes while driving about town (Alyssa managed to soldier on, but I had a stabbing pain in the wallet for the rest of the day!).  The second was that the Old Spaghetti Factory was closed for renovations and we had to substitute Chili’s instead.  After we had our late lunch, we headed for the hot springs and had a nice soak in the mineral waters before heading back home.

Interestingly enough, it turns out to be possible to go from the last traffic light in Banff, through Calgary and on to Chestermere and use the brakes just half-a-dozen times!  Hooray for downshifting and the emergency brake!

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Well, after much angst we’ve taken the plunge and bought ourselves a MacBook Pro.

The kids computer tanked about 6 weeks ago and we’ve been nursing it along trying to decide whether to buy bits and pieces to fix their computer or to buy ourselves a new computer and hand down our old one.  The never-ending cycle of building and rebuilding and repairing our PCs has become quite wearing.  It always seems to be one of those time and money pits scenarios that is just annoying after a while.

So, while we were looking at the various options we considered buying an Apple of some sort.  However the desktops, with the integrated screen, just seem impractical (or gutless, for the miniMac).  The decent Macs are the notebooks, but they are quite expensive – particularly compared to, say, a Dell notebook with similar specs.  During October or November each year, though you can sometimes find last year’s Macs on clearance for prices approaching that of a Windoze notebook.

In the end we found a good deal on one of last year’s MacBook Pro notebooks and picked it up yesterday.  The kids will get our old Windows PC (and finally be able to run the games they want!).  We are hoping that the great reviews of the MacBook, the more stable operating system and the ability to run Windows in a virtual machine, when required,  will have made this a good choice.  If this machine can be run for 2 or 3 years without me feeling compelled to do a rebuild, it will have been worth the extra few hundred dollars.

… I hope.

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A couple of posts ago I wrote about our visit to the Calgary Tower in September.  When my Dad saw the post he mentioned that he had just come across some similar pictures as he was scanning old slides into digital format.  I was curious to see just how much the Calgary skyline has changed over the years, so I got Dad to email me some of his pictures.

Dad sent a few pictures from 1969 and some from the early 80s (1980 and 1981).  Have a look at this gallery to see how drastic the changes have been in the past 30 years.  It is interesting to note that Calgary’s population was about 370,000 in 1969, with a total of about 1.5 million in the province of Alberta.  By 1981 Calgary had grown to about 593,000 population.  Today Calgary has a population of 1,043,000 and the province has grown to over 3.5 million people.

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