This week these are some things that happened:

Brianna took a big test for her international studies course.

Dan tried to be nice by bringing four donuts with him to our renovating couple-friends' house (one for each of them plus Bri and himself) , but found out they had a family visitor and so the donuts would have to be cut up. Very disappointing.

Brianna's been made responsible for organizing the maintenance of a church women's organisation garden near the chapel. It's a box with dirt in it right now but come back soon and it will be awesome.

Dan got some temporary work as a casual legal assistant. Despite only being there for a couple of days he's left his umbrella in just about every office in the building.

Brianna made sticky rice!!! With mangoes and ice cream!!!

Dan did a day's worth of manual labour involving digging a 2-3ft deep trench along one edge of a seafood salesman's house so he could install some new drainage pipes. It was a very rainy day (as many of them are in Vancouver), and the $1.99 plastic poncho that  Dan had bought wasn't up to the challenge. Dan came home with a sore back, deeply stained clothes, and the discouraging realization that if he were consigned to one of those labour camps during the war he probably wouldn't have made it.

We went for a walk to Central Park - a big woody park near our place with a golf course, pond, and lots of nice trails. Here are some things that we saw there:

Pond with mallards and geese

Geese and goslings

Circle of life - tree growing out of a tree stump

The largest horseshoe pitching stadium in the Northern hemisphere

...from a different angle

This guy came up to us because he thought we'd give him an acorn. Brianna tried to grab him and he ran away.

Gazebo