Do what you love...

Everything with the house is going smoothly. This weekend I will try to muster the courage to put holes in my walls to hang pictures and curtains - they're just so smooth and clean right now! Our long weekend plans also include Jeff and I 'rescuing' lumber from the construction dumpsters nearby to build workbenches for the basement. Their garbage is my treasure! Another exciting house-related event is that I now have a porch and am getting organic fruits and veggies delivered every other Wednesday. Last night I came home to a blue rubbermaid of goodness on my porch. Because you never really know what you are going to get, it actually becomes quite an adventure - anyone have tips on what to do with a dozen radishes?

Spring is starting here in Calgary and I think this weekend's activities pretty much sum it well. Tomorrow (Good Friday) I'm heading up to Lake Louise to go cross-country skiing with a friend visiting from Victoria. Then Saturday, I'm heading out on a reconnaissance 60 km road loop with another woman who has just begun road riding. Maybe Sunday I'll go for a snowball fight, and Monday I'll get a tan!! What a place, this mountain/prairie limbo...

Moving to the edge of town has hopefully opened up a whole new world of good roads for biking. Last summer I didn't use my road bike much as I a) was trying to learn to mountain bike in the mountains, and b) was living downtown and got frustrated trying to get out of traffic. This year I'm excited to go back to my cycling roots and rekindle my love for my road bike. And anyway, my mountain bike and I are having spat, or so it seems. Haha.

On the book front, I recommend 'Being Caribou' by Karsten Heuer. I haven't read it, but on Tuesday night, said friend from Victoria (Kristina) and I went to see him speak at the Public Library and it was seriously inspiring. It wasn't so much that it made me want to hike with the Porcupine Caribou herd for 5 months (his adventure) but that when you do what you love and are passionate about, you will find happiness and success. The book/documentary/talk was about his and his wife's experience with the herd and the journey involved in a calving season. Some of the focus was on the fragility of the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain and why gas extraction and caribou calving just aren't compatible activities. My friend Diana (who works in land reclamation) came out of the talk feeling the need to change jobs; that she hadn't trained in biology to sit behind a desk. Whereas I came out of it really wanting to go back to my desk (with long weekend hiking trips!) to try to devise any possible way of making extraction more sustainable and less disruptive. Not for the Arctic Refuge (that's just too fragile/pristine to even start), but for so many of the stunning systems across Alberta and BC. We are, fundamentally, resource users, and though I am all about reducing our resource use/wastage, we are going to be building, extracting, refining, combining, emitting and we have to be responsible for it to the very best of our abilities. I don't need to go out and experience the majesty of Caribou, I like it at my desk, whittling away tiny tiny chunks, making my little smidge of a difference. I really recommend reading his book, the excerpts he read were very well written.