Easter and surrounding weeks

Well it has been quite some time now since the last exciting episode of 'The Blog of Paul Palmer', so I guess now would be a good time to write another update.

There wasn't much going on prior to Easter so I will not dwell on the period of time form the last posting up until Easter, other than to mention that I was quite well health wise. Work has been a little dull and doesn't look like it will improve much before I head home in June. The project I have been working on is in the testing phase at the moment, so no new interesting functionality to work on. On the positive side, the view out of my office is looking particularly nice at the moment, not so much rain.

Any way, I will now move on to more recent events starting with Easter weekend. It was nice to have a day off work on Good Friday, I think it was my first day off other than weekends since February. The weather was fantastic with temperatures reaching 18 degrees. I went for a long walk in the afternoon for about 5 hours (with a few short bus trips in there as well). I went to JJ Bean on Main St to buy a coffee however when I arrived there the line up was ridiculously long and there were no seats available so I turned around and walked back towards home again stopping to buy a gelato on the way. Cousin Ryan was having a BBQ at his place with a bunch of friends from church, so I stopped off at Granville island to pick up a steak on the way there. The steak was particularly nice although I slightly overcooked it so one end of it was bordering on well done. It still tasted pretty good though. It was nice being able to spend the evening outdoors again, I don't think there had been another night since early October that we could have been outside without freezing. Spring must be here at last.

On Sunday my home group had an Easter dinner. Easter dinner over here is remarkably similar to Christmas dinner and thanksgiving dinner. I was asked to bring an appetizer so had a great time looking through my cook books for appetizer ideas. I don't often get the chance to make appetizers, it always seems a bit silly making appetizers for one person. I narrowed down my options to 8 different appetizers and took a trip to Granville island to see which ones I could find the ingredients for. In the end I settled on a pretty simple yet interesting recipe for cantaloupe (rock melon) wrapped in Serrano ham and finished with a spiced vinaigrette. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of it so you will have do with a photo of the photo in my cookbook. When I made it, it looked exactly the same, but I arranged them in a circle on a dinner plate.
Before dinner we all went outside for a giant mini-Easter egg hunt, with over 200 eggs hidden for us to find. I really thought I was doing pretty well so stopped looking so hard so that others could find some, only to find that I was even in the top four.

This week has been pretty good so far. Detour 180 are in town so I took Wednesday off work so I could spend the day with cousin Sarah, Jono and cousin Daniel. Then we met up with Roz and Reuben for dinner. Game one of the Stanley Cup playoffs happened to be on at the same time as dinner, and I struck it lucky and had a seat that faced the big screen TV. Sorry Sarah if I looked as if I was looking straight passed you for much of the evening, I probably was, but I was listening to you. Anyway Vancouver won the game near the end of the 4th overtime, at 12:30 in the morning, the 6th longest NHL playoff game in history.