The Taelemans´ Blog

I know, it has been a while, and yes, again we have been busy.

But it will get better, tourist season is going to start, so we will be obliged to do some tourist thingies (poor us:))

What have we been busy with lately?
Well first of all, Grizzly got sick last week, we still have no idea what he exactly suffered from, but he’s doing a little bit better right now.

He is still on medication but we are trying to get him used to his normal food again, so let’s hope that works, and that he get’s better really soon.

Grizzly being sick basically meant: constantly driving to the vet, taking him out for a lot of walks and missing out on sleep. (A lot of catching up to do this weekend!).

When we got Grizzly back last weekend we went out for a walk around Deer Lake (the idea came from Jill and Bob, and I have to admit, it was a wonderful idea)

Some pictures of Grizzly, back from the vet, happy to be outside!

(photo credits go to Jill)

In the meantime I celebrated my birthday, which was pretty lonely without my family (:)), but my hubby really surprised me with a fantastic lobster dinner at the Boathouse, so he pampered me quite a lot and it definitely made my day.

I got some nice gifts from some friends too so thanks everyone (and of course also my mom, dad, brother and Kris his parents and sister).

On Tuesday we went to the Old-timer’s Hockey game which was good fun!
Some really famous retired hockey players played against the Vancouver Police.
It was an event organized for charity and although I didn’t really know what to expect, I absolutely enjoyed myself.
Kris even bought me a pink hockey stick signed by Cliff Ronning.

The jumbotron

The Old-Timer’s game

We even participated in the Frisbee toss. You could buy a Frisbee and of course the profit went to charity.
We had to toss the Frisbee to the rink, the closest one to the middle won a prize. Pretty original huh? ( I’m wondering how this would turn out when they would try to organize this at soccer games in Europe…)

Frisbee Toss

Best part of the evening (besides the company) was actually Crazy Claude. He was some kind of mascot for the Heroes. He was a little bit scary and I was actually going to say “but fun to watch”, although I’m not really sure if that is appropriate to say:). I’m sorry but I can’t seem to find a picture I can post. So if you want to see a picture, click here

Enjoying the Old-Timer’s hockey game (photo credits go to Jill)

Tomorrow we’ll try to go for a hike because the weather is going to be great.
Withing two weeks one of our friends is coming over and we’re going to Tofino, really looking forward to that one and the whale watching is coming up too (very quickly).

I know I promised you guys some pictures, and I will try to post them in the next couple of days!

Special thanks goes to Kris his parents, who made sure that the Easter bunny was able to find us this year in Vancouver!

Easter eggs woohoo

Kris also gave me my Easter eggs early this year. Because of that I decided to give him a small gift too: I’ve bought him his favorite whiskey (and Freggels is enjoying it too…)

Ardbeg Whiskey

It has been a while since we wrote something. Obviously we don’t have too much to mention:)

We have been painting our living room and kitchen (pictures will follow soon). So we have been quite busy, but I’m happy that this part is done.
I will paint the fireplace this weekend, after we picked the colour of course. We might go shopping for curtains and stuff so it’s really going to be “home” pretty soon!

Anyway, Grizzly and Freggels are doing great. They can even stand each other. Freggels starts attacking Grizzly so that’s a good sign!

Grizzly is going to daycare during the day. Yeah, you did not misunderstand what I just wrote. They have doggy daycare around here… During the day they play with other dogs, they learn some new skills and they get treated like they’re kings and queens:)

I will take some pictures of the daycare too… It is quite funny to see.

Coming up in the next couple of weeks:
- Whale watching: FINAAAALLLLYYY
- A trip to Tofino, Vancouver Island (and maybe some surfing, who knows).

Our next visitor will be here soon, so we can do some tourist thingies again. Really looking forward to it, it’s going to be great!

Well everybody, enjoy your weekend, hopefully we do some exciting things this weekend, so we have something to talk about on the blog.

We had a really nice weekend!

We did a lot but we do feel good about it. So we picked up Grizzly this weekend (obviously…).
We had to run some errands yesterday morning and decided to take Grizzly with us, so Freggels could have some alone time.

We’ve bought paint to repaint the living room and kitchen, because like I mentioned the white greenish colour of our place isn’t the nicest one.

I know Kris promised some pictures of the new place, but you will have to wait until everything is painted:).

Today we decided to go for a hike to Belcarra. It’s a regional park not far from our place. The weather was nice, and we did want to see Grizzly his hiking skills.

We did the Jug Island Beach trail. It was a small hike of 5,5 km (return), but it had a few steep sections.

Grizzly only learned to walk on stairs just this morning and apparently the hike consisted of a lot of stairs:).

We had to carry him up the really steep parts, but considering he is a pretty young puppy, he did wonderful!
In the beginning of this weekend he wasn’t even used to walking on a leash…

Back to the hike now. It was a really nice hike since it was a little bit adventurous, “climbing” over trees, going uphill, downhill,…

The trail led to a small beach with an overview over Jug Island…

We didn’t stay on the beach too long because what started as a hike on a sunny day, became a hike in a “snowstorm”. It started snowing pretty hard and by the time that we arrived back at the car there was a layer of 4 cm on the ground…

Check out some pictures of our walk:

Grizzly at Buntzen Lake

Grizzly and me on the Jug Island Trail (resting)

Grizzly and me on the beach

Snowfox 3.0 (Grizzly taking a nap)

Snow in belcarra

So, this was it for this weekend. Enjoy your week, and we’ll be back with hopefully some nice stories of our week.

We will go out for a small walk this evening (we already changed to summer time, so we can enjoy walking outside when it isn’t dark…) AND there is snow! Lot’s of it!

As Kris already told you guys, we moved to our new place.

We had quite an exhausting weekend but we’ve been able to move EVERYTHING.
I though we would have to drive back and forth from the storage room this week, but that wasn’t the case.

We were actually able to finish everything this weekend. We even managed to put everything in place again. It looks like it has never been any different than how it is now. We feel like we’ve been living here for ages:).

The only thing that we will need to do is paint everything! The walls are white, but they have a greenish shine and I really hate it. Since Kris isn’t to fond of it either, I got approval and will start painting this weekend.

Anyway, you guys are probably pretty curious about the “new family member part”.
As most of you probably know, we were thinking about getting a dog, we just had to make sure we worked out all the practical stuff before actually getting one…
We were thinking about an Alaskan Malamutte, but they are too big for a townhouse and they require a lot of exercise,… Basically, we would not be able to give the dog what he needs.

So we started looking around for another breed and a while ago (on one of our last snowshoe trips) we’ve met a couple with a very pretty dog. We asked what breed it was and they told us it was a Samoyed.

After some research we finally decided that we would go for it. I started looking for breeders in our neighborhood.
I was starting to get disappointed as I noticed that most of the breeders just had a litter and that they wouldn’t have another one before February 2010…

Thanks to the help of a breeder in Washington, we were actually able to find a really nice couple who had one Samoyed puppy left.

Meet Grizzly, our 3,5 mos old puppy.

We still have to introduce him to Freggels, we hope all goes well, but we can only hope for the best.

We look forward to our hikes together with our little one (for now at least).

Sorry far the lack of updates over the past week, but we’ve been kind of busy move to our new home. I’m sure Ine will do a more extensive blog post with all the news and maybe we’ll take some better pictures of our new place once we get all of the boxes out of the way, so I’ll have to leave you with your curiosity for now.
Instead I’ll just post a picture I took some days ago in out hometown, Port Moody, at Inlet Park.

Port Moody Sunset