Yea, a bit of snow a bit late in the year. I blame global warming…somehow.  This is the view from my patio early in the day.

Another 8th Day outing, but this time a bit more “low impact”. I went out to the UK Wolf Conservation Trust for an afternoon of hiking and wolf-on-human interaction. I was really excited about it at first, but then shortly before going out there they sent out a lengthy list of “do not do’s”. One of the first, and more worrying was this little gem:

KEEP ONE HAND FREE (NEAR YOUR FACE) AT ALL TIMES WHEN STROKING A WOLF

Also, as someone who likes to carry fairly expensive camera equipment with him at all times, this rule was a bit unnerving:

YOU MAY TAKE PICTURES OF THE WOLVES, BUT IF THE WOLF GETS HOLD OF YOUR CAMERA WE CANNOT GET IT BACK FOR YOU

There were also a lot of rules about not wearing leather or anything fur lined, which all seemed to make perfect sense to me but I wasn’t sure how to take that camera one. In the end, I decided to take as big a camera as possible and affix the largest lens I own in hopes that they’d be more interested in easier to grab, smaller cameras and not see mine as a sort of challange.

It all worked out for the best and nobody that I know of was left cameraless at the end of the day, and I managed to get a few decent shots as well.

As usual, there’s more in the gallery.

Robert, Marnie and I spent the easter long weekend in Borovets for a bit of skiing and some R&R. Unfortunately, I managed to mangle my back right before touching down and only got in 2 runs the entire trip.

Fortunately, you don’t need a stable back drink beer in any country so the trip wasn’t a total write off.

Due to my bad back I didn’t manage to get any other worthy photos of the area (it’s a heavy camera!). I did however have my little G9 and there are a heap of snapshots here.

My friend Marnie has gone out on a week long ski trip with the 8th Day folks and was kind enough to leave me her car. With nothing to do on Sunday, I fired up the TomTom and told it to take me to Stonehenge. I’ve been wanting to head out there for ages now, but it’s alway been a bit of a hassle to get a train & hire a car in Salisbury. With the car, it was only a 4 hour round trip (including the hour plus I spent at the site).

Definitely not helping my resistance to buy my own transport…

There are a few more photos here.

So I just got back from a quick holiday to Vancouver where I surprised* Elle for Valentines Day. It was nice to be back in the motherland even if it was only for a short visit. I miss things like friendly shop keepers, beef jerky, inexpensive meals, and being able to leave a bag unattended without the police & bomb squad getting called in.

* she emailed me the day I was flying to Canada and got my out of office reply saying I’d be gone for a week, so she was aware that something was up.

The rest of the Vancouver photos are here.