The Sunshine Isle

Click on the photo to see the slideshow.

I love St. Lucia. What's not to love about the Sunshine Isle? It's the best place to do nothing, explore, meet locals, meet tourists, eat fresh fish and tandoori, scuba dive, take a catamaran and see dolphins and sperm whales, drink Piton, and lie on the beach and swim in the sea.

Kevin and I spent two weeks there at the end of May to celebrate Kevin's 40th birthday and our 4th anniversary. If you haven't heard the surprise part of the story, check my last blog post, as they say.

We had a great holiday, the best ever, if I do say so myself! We did so much and so little at the same time. The highlight was the Rainforest Cable Ride. We were high from the exhiliration of it all for hours afterwards. Amazing! I was also mesmerized by the abundant food-bearing trees everywhere, especially in my Dad's backyard. He had an avocado, an almond, a couple of coconut and two mango trees.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. I'm planning on adding captions to the Photo Album over the next couple of weeks so check back every once in a while to catch up. Also they seem to have uploaded in no particular order so I'll do my best to reorganize them when I add the captions.

Happy Photo Gawking!

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Click on the photo to see the slideshow.

Lordy, lordy Kevin's fordy! And boy, was he surprised. Not that he turned forty this year, he knew that was happening, believe me, HE KNEW!

It was the gathering at the hockey rink after his game on Good Friday that surprised him. He was not expecting Murray and Cheryl, the boss and the boss's wife; his good friend Rick and his family, Fiona, Riley and Hayden; Katherine, Brian and Stellan, his sister and brother-in-law and nephew; Liz, his mother-in-law; Chris, well he was expecting Chris but not his wife Nancy; Krista, Kyle and Kylie, and Janelle, his nieces and nephews; Belinda and Jude, his good friends; and Jamie and Jewel from work. (If I've forgetten someone, I apologize.) There's photos from that night and I'll upload them as soon as I find them. Thanks to all who were able make it to surprise Kevin! He was thoroughly caught off guard and ecstatic everyone showed up.

But that's not it! In front of all those people, a slideshow was played displaying Kevin's best moments caught on film, of course, during the last 40 years. He really was the epitome of fashion, especially in the 80's! If I hadn't scanned and taken some of these photos myself I'd think "that can't be the same person" in each one. Take a look at the slideshow. I'm disappointed that I'm not able to add the music to the online slideshow. Just imagine "I want candy" from the Napolean Dynamite soundtrack playing in the background.

To continue with the short story made long by my rambling, that wasn't even the last of it. To top it all off I handed Kevin an envelope with a travel itinerary in it. He was also surprised with 2 weeks in St. Lucia with his lovely, beautiful and thoughtful wife, yours truly. We've just returned from said holiday and I can't wait to tell you all about it. Keep looking for the latest update. I promise the updates will be more frequent in the future.

Stellan is one!

Stellan's photo bloggin'! Katherine and I are helping him build it for the first few years. January 31st was the day and partying was the way. Click on the link and you'll see some photos of Stellan and the Frasers at Christmas, New Years and the BIG number one birthday.

Aural obsession

I've been obsessed with my iPod, U2 20GB version, lately. Mainly because it's been crapping out, ie. I've had to reset and restore and slap it about 12 times in the last month. It's name is now Bubba Ho-Tep, after the dog, heehee, no, after the movie. Basically I revived it so many times it just thinks it's in iPod now. Leave it to me to find something good in something so frustrating though. I found this cool blog that convinced me to slap the damn thing, take a look. This is verging on geek talk, I'll stop now.
More silver-lining: this has forced me to weed out and update my music library. It's amazing how limiting it is listening to the same music over and over for 10 years. I had no idea! Now I'm obsessed with finding new music. The internet has so many beautiful ways of finding anything but especially music. Allofmp3.com is a great, cheap site for downloading and listening to specific artists and albums.
But if you're more into the music coming to you the best Music Internet tool I've found is lastfm.com This is what the Internet was made for. It's a beautiful, collaborative, discover-new-music, community. I urge you to take a look, sign up and share your music. It's all streaming, no downloading so there's no worries. When you go, look for smootie! Do it, I'm telling you, it's going to blow your mind!

I'm trying a new photo blog.

Shutterfly. It's pretty, it's simple, and it's free. It's everything I'm looking for in a photoblog mainly because I tend to look for the impossible.
I've started a new collection that we can all add photos to. Eventually I will migrate all my Flickr photos there.
It turns out Flickr is great for organizing and resizing on the fly but the free service only includes 3 photo albums, the bandwidth (the bytes uploaded or downloaded) is limited per month, and they only allow you to see the last 200 pictures uploaded (the older photos are still there but hidden).
Shutterfly appeals to me because it has unlimited space, with the option to organize your photos in an unlimited number of photo albums. They also have all the cool personalized products and prints you can purchase. It makes sense to me that this is what they are making their money from and not from selling disk space and bandwidth.

Uncle JD has something to say

Link to more photos.
Uncle JD said...

Your doing real well so far... I e-mailed changes of seasons....you guys probably don't miss from Ontario...The Mounstephen's here love it and would like to share it with the rest of the family at this Christmas season... I found all the pictures in your archieves and found them very interesting..I don't know where they were so may be let me know where to find them again..

Sarah had another birthday as well as Blake it would be good to get up to date pictures of both..

Chill out it is the season for Stress and there is no need for stress

enjoy/ Uncle John Aunt Kathryn

Hope you enjoy the pictures of our back yard.

December 12, 2005, 3:57 PM

More Halloween pics

Stellan's lovin' his first Halloween.

I've added the Halloween Stellan pics to the Haloween gallery (who knew you could say Halloween twice in a sentence and get away with it? I guess I just said it 3 times, heehee).

Katherine, Brian and Stellan were here yesterday and we managed to upload pictures from their camera even though my computer decided to go on a half-assed strike.

Don't let your computer get the best of you. If there's something you really want to do and your computer won't let you do it, find another way.

New blog

I've added a new blog chronicling my graphic interests. Take a look.

Doomsday July 29th, 2006

Here's the happy couple, Ryan and Corryn Mounstephen. Ryan just emailed this lovely photo. It looks like it was taken at the local barn dance.

Ostrich jockey?

See more photos.
First Halloween in our new neighbourhood and it was great. Lots of kids, all dressed up. Most of them loved the chicken/turkey/ostrich I was riding. They were hilarious! If they weren't scared by the singing skeleton outside the door then the gigantic chicken got them.
Some of the things I heard:
"Those aren't your real legs . Your legs are those ones (pointing at the wrinkled ostrich legs)!"
"I was going to get that costume."
"Why are you riding a turkey?"
"What are you supposed to be and why are you riding that chicken?"
"Can I have a candy for my cousin? She's too scared of that thing (the skeleton) so she won't come down the stairs. But she really wants a candy."
"Are those your real legs?"
"This is where Sam and Jillian used to live, can I come in?" She was already standing in the middle of the front hall.
"I don't know which candy to take. I can't decide."
"Can I have two candies?"
We had enough candy to supply an entire elementary school. I took the leftovers to work. It'll be gone tomorrow.

Batubba asks do you want a Trick or a Treat

Here's a normal looking dog wearing a prefectly respectable Halloween costume but wait....


What's this? It's Batbubba.

Feedback

Thanks to all who responded. I received some very valuable feedback, from "was that pizza you ate for Thanksgiving?" to what the f___'s a blog? So if you did decide to bookmark this valuable page here's the answers (I know you've all been waiting with baited breath).
No that was not pizza in the baby picture, it was focaccia bread with feta and carmellized red onions from Duso's on Granville Island. Mmmmmm, yummy. Next time I'll only buy three pieces, 5 pieces was way too much.
We also had a scrumptious organic turkey roast from the Turkey Stop and a small Irish ham from one of the butchers at Granville Island. Mom supplied the fresh-baked apple and pumpkin pies, mmmmmmmmmm, and Katherine added her world-famous mashed potatoes (if they're not, they should be, they're fabulous!)
Enough about Thanksgiving.
For those asked about what a blog is there's the official definition on Wikipedia and there's the smoot version. A blog is a blog is a blog. It's whatever the blog you want it to be. Bloggety blogblog blog.
On with it.
Today is Jennifer's birthday. From now until December 11th we're the same age and we both hate that, at least we used to when we were younger, not such a big deal now. Happy birthday Jenn! Hope you had a great day.
Tomorrow is Halloween!
It's going to be fun here in the new complex. There's going to be a gathering at the entrance of "The Complex" where everyone who lives here is going to bring their fireworks and set them off in one big extravaganza. I don't have fireworks but I have enough candy to feed the entire public school up the road for two days. I'm also ready with my costume. It's a doozy and I love it. It scared the shit out of Bubba. I'm glad he was outside and there was a pane of glass between him and I when I put it on because he almost attacked me, heehee. It's the funniest costume I've seen in a long time. I couldn't have planned this one if I tried. You'll have to wait a couple of days for the pictures.

Enter into the abyss

Ryan's announced his engagement to Corryn. Who the hell is Corryn?

Blogger and blogging woes

Wheh!

This blog, Alive and Kicking, is meant to be the place where we share our words. I add entries to the blog and friends and family add their comments. Dad and Bubba have joined in already. I envision people talking to each other about whatever is going on their lives at the moment. It can be thoughtful and insightful. It can be about what I put in the blog but it doesn't have to be. It can be random thoughts, poetry, meditation, prayer, jokes, rants, free-flow thought, whatever you want it to be. Just write something.

I'm spending way too much time trying to make everything just perfect here but I think it's paying off. I have a bit of a template going right now for this blog thing. Now I need to figure out how Flickr's supposed to work. I know what I want it to do. I want to create one space for all my friends and family to share their favourite pictures. I just need to figure out how to get Flickr to do it the way I want. Wish me luck.

Writing is the easy part so I'm going to commit to writing something, anything here at least once a week. Download Firefox, the coolest browser around, and subscribe to this site by clicking on the cute little orange icon in the bottom right corner (I'll put a picture here to show you later).

It's the Mootoo portal of words and pictures connected together. I'm curious to see what we create here. It's going to be great!

Thanksgiving 2005

See more pics.
The Mootoo's hosted this fine dinner at their new abode. 2 dogs, a baby, 2 guys, and 3 girls had a scrumptuous meal. We laughed we argued, no crying, lots of barking. As quickly as it started, it was over and Kevin and Bubba and I were left to enjoy the Canuck's game.

Bubba's in Heaven.

More pics on my photoblog.
Bubba's best summer yet! So what if it was the first one he actually remembers. Spanish Banks is the perfect place for running and running and running and meeting new dogs and people and running and running and chasing birds and running... and when you get to the other side of the big sand bank in the middle of the harbour you can go swimming!

The new place.

Before the Mootoo's moved in there was a lot of beige, very neutral. We decided to jazz it up a little. The result is much warmer. It really is amazing what a little paint will do.

The sofas are reupholstered, the walls are painted (touch-ups pending), a few new light fixtures and it's hard to imagine this is the same place we moved into.

More pics to come.