team tyrie: January 2007

20. The Princess' birthday

Just celebrated Em's 31st. Had a weekend in Mammoth where she was presented with this glorious tiara, which she refused to take off all week.

Just surprised her with her last birthday gift - we're off to Hawaii first thing in the morning for 4 nights! Woo Hoo! Watch this space for some Hawaii pics next week...

19. The long-awaited pics of the apartment

Well it's not really pictures, more of a little video. We should probably have tidied up a bit, and we have a few more bits to do before it's perfect... but it'll give you an idea.

And there's a not-very-good 'sunset from our balcony' shot there for you too (you could have done better than that Max!). It's much better in person, so you'll just have to come and visit and check it out for yourself.

18. New year, new apartment...

Hello! Sorry to have been so lame over the last month or so, but we haven't just been sitting around playing with our Christmas toys... We had a pretty busy Christmas, followed by a rather hectic New Year and then we finished it off by moving house in the first week of January!

Christmas was spent with friends in Mammoth, our fairly local-ish mountain, mainly eating and snowboarding. We rented a little condo (just like last year) and made it all cosy with a tree and a log fire. Some excellent cooking was done by all (well actually, some of us - Max and I managed to squirm out of that little job to go riding for the day!!) and it was all rather civilized and grown-up.

Then we took advantage of Max's free days off work and headed for wet Vancouver to stay with some recently-emigrated friends for a few days over New Year. Sarah and Steve looked after us excellently (thank you guys!) and we also got to catch up with Tommy G and Mel (Em's uni friends) who have also emigrated to Vancouver. We have to admit we initially doubted Vancouver's appeal (and it's position in the "Top 10 best cities to live in" list) after 4 days of solid rain ;-) But then the sun came out and we saw the city in all its glory (shown below) and finally understood why everyone we know wants to move there! Actually, being able to get from your front door to a piste in 15 mins is pretty attractive too...

And then we hadn't had enough excitement, so we decided to move house. We found a lovely 2 bedroom apartment (oh yes, all you wannabe cross-Atlantic travellers, we have a spare room now!!), closer to the 'cooler' part of town and with a view! We have a roomy balcony with a nice open view towards the ocean - great for those Californian palm-tree-outlined sunsets. We haven't got any photos of the flat yet - we'll post some when we finally find the camera charger!

And so that's us settled here for a little while, awaiting visitors and some warmer weather to make good use of our balcony.

Team Tyrie out.