A wee disclaimer.....
My cellphone had all my Edmonton photos on it, but it went walkabout a week or two ago so I'm starting over. These photos are from the few that I had saved elsewhere (should've been a bit quicker off the mark there), and a few more that were taken at our local regatta this weekend.
Snow
February in downtown Edmonton; and outside my house.
(It's on the very right of the frame, under the trees. I promise it is a full sized house, it's just a funny angle.)
There are miles and miles of walking/cycling tracks alongside the river. I did have a relatively nice photo of myself on this track, but.... it's gone.
Edmonton Rowing Club boathouses and our river. Preseason, just as a wee aside.
River ice goin' craaaaazy. It's like cannons when it pops big cracks.
Edmonton dog off-leash area. I put this in more to try to give you an idea of how huge the sky is here than to rant about how everybody here is obsessed with dogs.
They bloody are though. Jeez.
Walking to the rowing club after it snowed.
Food Times
Bought that. Tasted as good as it looked.
Bought that too. After training. I was kinda hungry.
Made that shit though! Ohhh yeah!!!! For Easter dinner at Sheila's.... Easter family dinner is totally a thing here, it's so weird. Sheila is our rowing coach and my friend, and she had a bunch of us who didn't have homes to go to, over to her place for Easter dinner cos she's awesome like that.
Thanks Sheila!
ERC - 'Freeze or Fry' and Friends
Awwwwww.....!!
Me and Jenny - once in a double and once in a pair.
Actually it's the same boat with different riggers. And oars.
Jenny is quiet but very lovely, and she likes to win as much as I do.
We totally owned that pair. A couple of boats from Calgary might've owned it a little more, but we still owned it pretty hard. We beat Beth and Danielle, stoked!!!!!!
This is Beth. She is very lovely too.
I'm very impressed because she's 2 inches taller than me and really good at finding lost stuff.
We still beat her and Danielle in the pair though.
Jenny, Leanne, and the back of Jean's head.
Leanne picks me up every morning and drives me to training.
Luckily she is a lot more reliable than me in terms of getting out of bed, and has been a nice enough friend to wake me up once or twice!
Steve. Also very kind on the driving me around front. Also very tall - he's 6'8".
He is a huge fan of NZ. He rowed in Invercargill a few years ago, staying with Louise Ayling and family, and racing against Nathan Cohen and Mahe Drysdale.
I guess he's an ok rower. Our pair could totally out-tank him.
One third of each of Ryan and Neala. I could talk to either of these two for hours and hours on end.
And I do.
I think this was Ryan getting artistic with my nice camera while I was on the water.
At Freeze or Fry, our little local regatta with Calgary RC yesterday, I pretty much just gave my camera to the crew to look after and got it back at the end of the day! I trust everybody, and there were some great photos that came out of it, which are being sent to the local paper and hitting the ERC website.
Steve, post-race, and Sheila. Note the megaphone. She LOVES that thing.
Sheila is so awesome and I am so sad that she's moving to Ontario at the end of the coming week. She's a fabulous coach, and on a personal level she's funny and very generous and thoughtful (and we really enjoy mocking each other), and on both fronts I will really miss her. However, Henley is in Ontario (Nationals) so hopefully we will be able to hang out for the week following Henley, which Sheila will have off work. And she keeps telling me she's SO coming to NZ. We almost had her convinced to move there and coach at Mum's club!
We 8 it up.
Although I'm not sure that the entire crew enjoyed having a high rating, six-foot tall stroke.
So this is a lovely photo of me instructing the cox on what to say to the crew because otherwise she would've sat there silently for the entire race. And that's Neala behind me, wondering how it is that I can row really hard and be talking at the same time.
Jean, Jenny, Beth, Mallory (I think... that's pretty horrible of me), Leanne, Danielle, Neala, me, Michelle.
Thanks for taking lots of photos of us Ryan!
With Neala and her daughter Alex, who's 6 and losing a lot of teeth really fast.
Neala is unbelievably beautiful and I just adore her. I am glad I came all the way here and got to meet her, as well as others like Sheila and Steve and Jenny and Beth and Ryan and Leanne and Erika (one of my staff) and Jeff (the regional manager).
How much have I changed! I would never have said stuff like this at home.
I have never seen Neala without a smile. She talks an absolute mile a minute, and usually touches on about six different subjects in that minute, and she's one of those people who does everything and looks after everybody and never seems to get tired. She is another one who's been amazing with driving me around the place, and she does things like taking her old bicycle to the shop to have it tuned up just so she can lend it to me for the season.
Steve took our photo, which is why we all look like shrimps.
Alex hamming it up for the camera.
She and her little sister JoJo always invite me over to play on the trampoline with them. It's because I'm better at trampolining than Daddy, and I almost bounced them over the roof of the neighbour's house. No biggie, it's all in a day's work.
