Visiting Seattle

Back on Dec. 18th I spent only 8 hours in Seattle but it was first time seeing Seattle so I tried to soak up as much as I could.

I was dropped off near the Space Needle.

Instead of going up the needle, I decided to check out the science fiction museum and experience music project.

There was one room with many pieces of science fiction props, a timeline of science fiction and many video clips to watch. R2D2 was in the robots section.

An animatronic Donatello was also behind glass.

They had a fan-made borg costume and also this face piece that Patrick Stewart wore when Picard was transformed into a borg in a Star Trek TNG episode.

They also had the model used as the Death Star in Star Wars. It is about a meter wide and the backside of it is not complete. Instead you can see inside it where they put a light bulb to make light shine out of it.

Upstairs they had a Battlestar Galactica exhibit and since I've never seen a full episode this chart was useful.

They had a couple full size ships from the series along with a model of the galactica main ship. They also had some costumes that characters on the show have worn. What was most entertaining to me was an interactive monitor that presented moral choices that occurred in the show. Then I had to pick an action and it told me what percent of people agreed with me and also a clip of what they actually did on the show.

The experience music project was cool too. They had this big sculpture made of nearly 700 instruments stuck together, 40 of which are self-playing instruments. The big exhibit there was for Jimi Hendrix who I'm not really a fan of but it was still interesting. I went into a theater and watched part of a concert of his where he smashed his guitar, poured gasoline on it and then lit it on fire. At the EMP they also had many booths where you could learn to play an instrument and rooms where you could record yourself. I could have spent most of a day in these two places if I had more time.

Back outside I walked around the building to see its crazy architecture. In the area was a closed down carnival with some little rides. There was also a monorail but I wanted to walk across Seattle.

My next stop was the Hurricane Cafe which some friends recommended to me as a place to really fill up - a typical greasy spoon diner. I had a taco salad there that was really good. Then I walked to downtown Seattle and along the waterfront for a while passed many piers until I reached Pike Place market. It's like Granville Island except inside one giant building in many levels going up a hill. Seattle is much steeper than Vancouver.

I went passed the fish market which didn't look too amazing except that everyone was taking photos of it, so I did too.

Then I visited the library which is shaped really weird with an overhang.

The 4th floor is all red.

The escalators are all very green and the stairs are orange.

I sat on the big open 10th floor for a while and read a book.

The walls were sloped inward on two sides.

They were sloped outward on the other two sides. Later I went online with my laptop on the library's free wifi. I talked to Gordon who told me the library was designed to look like a stack of books. Ah, now it makes more sense.

Outside I went back over near Pike Place to visit the original Starbucks because I had a couple more hours until my bus left.

On the way I passed this very odd building that I wouldn't want to work in.

I went south and located the Amtrak station where my bus wasn't going to leave for an hour so I searched for food in the area. There wasn't much around there but I found a place called Samurai Noodles. Upon entering, I was surprised to find all the employees were caucasian. I'm so used to having any asian restaurant in the lower mainland be actually run by asian people. Anyways, the food was still quite good.

My bus trip back was uneventful as I slept almost the whole way but had to wake up to walk through customs at the border. I got home around 1am and collapsed into bed. I had succeeded in visiting all the places my friends suggested. My brother went to Seattle a couple weeks later and saw a lot more of it than I did because he did not restrict himself to just the downtown area. Next time I'm there I definitely want to check out the chocolate factory/shop he went to.

Visiting Boeing

Last week I went on a journey south to the Seattle area to take part in a face to face meeting between people from SFU, UBC, Dalhousie and Boeing. The Dalhousie group is joining our Canadian visual analytics efforts and I went to present a demo of our software CZSaw to them and to people at Boeing. I also got to see the big Boeing factory. I didn't take any photos of any part of it though.

My supervisor originally asked me if I was free Mon - Wed to visit Boeing and then later he wanted me to come down Sunday and return Wednesday. I wanted to go to Brad's sushi birthday dinner on Sunday night so I hoped to go down late Sunday. So he said I could rent a car and drive down late Sunday and I would get reimbursed. Unfortunately, I haven't driven a car in a year and a half. Driving an unfamiliar rented car in the dark in the winter across an international border is not my idea of the best way to begin driving again. Luckily some other people were heading down super early Monday morning.

I was picked up around 6:15am in Surrey. Near Seattle we used the HOV lane to skip most of the traffic and get to the Bellevue Boeing site perfectly on time. We were given special passes to get passed the gate which labeled us as international guests who needed to be escorted. The morning talks were by software engineers at Boeing and they were quite interesting. They provided lunch in the same room and then in the afternoon I gave my presentation.

The only thing I screwed up on during the trip was forgetting to bring my HDMI to VGA adapter to be able to plug my mac into the projector. I still don't know where it is. When I got there in the morning I realized that all the Boeing employees had Dell laptops. Also, all the guests with macs had the new mini ports so they had different adapters. So I was forced to do the presentation on my supervisor's laptop. We were prepared for that as a backup though.

The presentation went great. I was demoing the old version 1 of CZSaw, while we have been working on developing version 2. Progress is slow on the new version and it's not ready for a good demo. By now I am very used to demoing CZSaw 1 as I did it many times at VAST. I went through many different features during my 20 minute presentation. There was some good discussion and questions about it.

After my presentation, a Phd student and a professor from SFU Burnaby gave a presentation on some text analytics that could be added to CZSaw. They were the ones that gave me a ride down to Seattle and they proceeded to give a demo using CZSaw with some data they had crafted. It was awesome that they were able to give a demo after just receiving CZSaw a couple weeks before and with no training and on a different operating system (Mac) then my demo. Woot.. Java! Still, it was hard to watch him accomplish things the long way around instead of the quick ways I use. Apparently a few things need to be more intuitive. The extensions they propose to our tool would be great and I look forward to working with them soon.

After all the presentations we had a break before dinner plans, so I checked into my hotel room and went online. I ended up doing some programming on version 2 before heading out to dinner. We had dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant and the food was pretty good. I had grilled swordfish. After dinner I did a lot more coding to get ready for our internal demo of CZSaw version 2 later that week back at SFU.

The next day I had to wake up early (7am) to head north to the Everett Boeing factory. I caught a ride with some professors at 8am after the continental breakfast. We were given a presentation from some ergonomics Boeing people about reducing injuries that mechanics get. Over the last few months, one of our students used Tableau and helped them very quickly analyze some data to determine what tasks were causing the most injuries. Tableau allowed them to shrink a task that would have taken weeks in Excel down to only a matter of hours in Tableau.

After the presentation we caught a little bus across the Boeing campus to the giant airplane factory. The factory holds many planes being built in 4 bays with huge doors that can be opened to tow a plane out. Inside the bays are open with the ceiling about 6 floors up (there are 6 floors of offices between the bays). We had to wear protective glasses and were driven around on 3 little carts through the streets inside the factory.

We got to go inside two 777 planes at different stages of production. We were in the cargo hold of one and in the passenger cabin of the other. It was before any of the inside lining had covered things up and you could see a huge space above the cabin that I didn't know was there. Apparently on long flights, crew can sleep up there. The planes were part of a moving line as they slowly move forward the whole time across the bay floor. They have to be all finished by the time they reach the end of the bay so that they can then be wheeled out the door. So basically, pieces of planes go in one side and finished planes come out the other. The coolest thing about the factory was just how massive the building is and how big the planes are inside it. Normally you don't really get close to a plane outside of it, you just walk down the enclosed ramp. It was cool to walk under the huge tail wing of a 777 and marvel at how it gets off the ground.

After the tour we caught a bus back to the first building and ate lunch in the cafeteria where they had a huge variety of food. Then we drove back to Bellevue. There were some business meetings in the afternoon which I sat in but mostly because I had no where else to go. I did some coding. That night we had dinner together at a delicious Mexican restaurant. That was after my supervisor and all the professors from Vancouver already left. I failed to get the schedule changes that there was nothing really happening on Wednesday, so while they went back I had another night in the hotel.

Luckily I made up for it by getting a meeting scheduled to demo CZSaw one on one to a software engineer / analyst at Boeing. It was another great meetings as he had some good feedback about the tool and how we might improve it. I think we will take trips to Boeing more often now.

After the early morning meeting I met up with another student and a guy from a Vancouver Boeing subsidiary to catch a ride to downtown Seattle. I spent 8 hours in Seattle seeing the sight before heading home. I took a lot of photos for that part of the trip, so I'll put that in the next blog post.

VisWeek 2010

So, it has been about a week since I returned from VisWeek 2010. This year's conference was just as educational and fun and probably more useful to me than last year's conference. There were many more SIAT students there this year than last year and my research group was attending with a different agenda this year.

I was volunteering once again so we flew in on Saturday the day before the conference. I did some registration bag stuffing which was supposed to be 1:45 but was really only 20 minutes because we finished everything. Then in the evening there was a quick training session where they basically read out the online FAQ's about the volunteer tasks. I wasn't doing anymore shifts until Wednesday after VAST.

This year I began the conference Sunday morning with a 3 minute presentation along with many other 3 minute presentations from award winners involved in the VAST Challenge. It was in this rather small room in front of about 50 people.

Those in my CZSaw research group received an award for Mini Challenge 1 and also along with some other students we were given an award for our Grand Challenge entry too. The workshop was all day Sunday with presentations and a panel in the morning. There were some interesting ideas about how to change the challenge for next year. They might add or edit the data halfway through it or they might have a challenge with less of an absolute answer underneath everything (closer to real life challenges).

At lunch Eric and I went out to lunch with Awalin, another grad student from U of Maryland. She won an award in Mini Challenge 3 by using a plagiarism detector on genetic sequence data. Another Mini Challenge 3 winner came from a research group that came up with many crazy ideas when brainstorming solution methods. One involved each genetic stream being used as the pattern for the levels of a zombie video game. His name was Harshawardhan, but if anyone said his name it was usually just shortened to Harsh.

In the afternoon there was a time for everyone to give demos to everyone else although really everyone was just wandering around to others spots and I was busy giving demos half the time so I didn't talk to everyone else. The other half the time Eric was giving demos.

I demoed for Will, a student from UBC who won a VAST challenge with a team from there 3 years ago. He had seen the very early version of my Semantic Zoom View when it was a class project in a class we both took at UBC last fall. Now it is part of CZSaw and it's my thesis project.

I demoed for John Stasko, the professor at Georgia Tech who created the system CZSaw's data views were inspired by. That was great because we had a conversation about how the two systems are different and the hard problems to tackle. When he saw the SZV (that is my thesis) he was interested enough to say that he must get his student to come talk to me about it, so a little later I was demoing it for the student and explaining the algorithms behind it. I don't worry about them copying my approach. Instead I'd be really happy if they did because it'd mean they also think it's useful to analysts. I suppose this is one large difference between academia and the corporate world.

I demoed for Pascale Proulx, a lady from Oculus Info Inc., the leading Visual Analytics software company in Canada. They make really cool temporal geographical software called GeoTime and a visual analytics environment called nSpace. She was there to receive their award for Mini Challenge 1. They have won an award 4 out of 5 years now. She seemed interest in the SZV too, but unfortunately our demo was cut short because the demo session was over. I failed to remember to give her my card and except for her presentation the next day I never saw her again. I believe after the presentation she must have caught a flight out.

Next there was a short discussion about the future of the challenge and then a conclusion. Most of the main challenge organizers are not going to be directly involved anymore and it will need to be run by volunteers so it may be challenging to put one on next year. One of their biggest tasks is making up the fake data for the challenges.

So Monday and Tuesday there was the Visual Analytics Science & Technology conference (VAST) and I went to almost all the paper sessions for it. There was also a VAST Challenge panel Monday afternoon and my co-supervisor Chris presented for our group. Here's one of the organizers slides announcing our award.

Here's a slide I made for Chris' presentation that shows my Semantic Zoom View. It helped us to solve the challenge. After the VAST Challenge panel, there were fast forward, 30 second long presentations as trailers for the posters and interactive demos. Eric did you fast forward presentation.

The last thing left for Eric and I to do with regards to CZSaw was demo it throughout the week. We had registered it as an interactive demo so we at least needed to demo it during the poster sessions Monday and Wednesday evenings. Originally they put us at the dark end of one of the poster rooms. Not many people came by and got a demo.

Then they moved us to the bright open exhibit room which was packed during the breaks. The reason it was packed was because that's where they put the coffee and the snacks. Here I am with the CZSaw poster, used both during the workshop and the rest of the week in our demo spot.
One of the people I demoed for is Chris Stolte, vice president of Tableau software. Tableau would be an awesome place to work as they make software for data visualization that is so much better than Excel. I am using Tableau for analysis of my data for the study that's part of my thesis. Anyways, he was impressed enough by CZSaw and the SZV that he asked me what I was currently doing and I said I was graduating soon. Then he said Tableau was hiring. I said I would love to work at a company like Tableau and he said Tableau needs people who can make interactive visualizations like the ones I have made. It was awesome! Of course first I have to focus on graduating. He said he's not allowed to tell me to apply before I have graduated. I said I would not throw away 2 years of my life by just dropping out. I've got to finish first. He went to Stanford but he also did his undergrad at SFU. Anyways, I gave him my card.

Throughout the week Eric and I demoed for a variety of students and professors and people from industry. We demoed for Ted Selker, who invented the trackpoint, the little nub in the middle of the IBM thinkpad keyboards that is an isometric joystick for moving the cursor around. I also gave him my card.

When I was volunteering during the second half of the week Eric did much demoing of CZSaw, sometimes to large crowds. CZSaw definitely got a lot of attention between winning the awards and being demoed throughout the week.

With the fun of being a student volunteer I connected with many more students than I otherwise would. However the more useful part of the conference was the demoing of CZSaw that really helped me show my work and skills to some key people in industry. They not only gave us some useful feedback for further development of our tool, but also now hopefully they remember who I am.

Salt Lake City

So before I make a post about the actual conference, I wanted to post about Salt Lake City and the fun times I had outside of the actual conference.

The conference was held in the building on the left which is the Grand America hotel that was created for the Olympics. The building on the right is the Little America hotel where I stayed along with all the other student volunteers.

The two hotels were across the street from each other. The UTA train ran down the center of the street and also there were flags provided to use to cross the street and make yourself more visible.

There was snow on the mountains around the city. The city itself is at a high elevation of 1288 m, so none of the mountains around it have any trees on them. It's quite different from the Vancouver area.

On the third night there (Monday) some other students and I checked out a place called the Bayou. It was a cajun restaurant (think New Orleans) with a huge beer menu (Beervana they called it) with 255 beers from around the world. The only strict drinking law left in Utah is that you can't have a double shot. I tried some local beer and some Czech beer and Andrew bought me a beer for my birthday. We all split a slice of alligator cheesecake which was an appetizer, not a dessert. It was not that great - it just tasted and felt like cornbread.

On Tuesday at lunch time I went to check out the University of Utah disc golf course. Unfortunately I missed the train and unlike the skytrain they only run every 15 minutes. I decided to walk and it took me about 50 minutes.

The disc golf course had a great view of the city and I could see the conference hotel waaaay off in the distance. The baskets on the course looked almost brand new but I was the only one on the course the whole time I was there.

I really sucked at the course but it was still lots of fun. I played through it quickly, jogging up to my disc so I could head back to the conference at the end of the lunch break.

The park it was in was right next to the last train station so it was easy to just catch the train after I finished playing.

After I got off the train I took some photos of the city-county building which was a block from our hotel. There were many buildings in the city that looked like castles (most of them churches or temples).

That night I went back to the Bayou, but this time with some professors and a guy from Boeing who we work with. When we left the restaurant it was snowing! Here's the view from the balcony of my hotel room. The snow melted over the next couple days.

On Wednesday morning I got up a little earlier than I needed so I went and took some photos in the courtyard of the Grand America. The hotel was very fancy!

That night a huge group of mostly students went out to a bar called the Beerhive. It had a decently big selection of beers and there were pool tables and a foosball table. We played many games of foosball and I improved a little bit on defense, but ultimately let in a very weak goal and then decided to retire.

When the bar was about to close up, the only three students left, Alex, Andrew and I decided to walk a few blocks north to see the big temple since I hadn't seen it yet. This is the train going by as we walked.

Here's the temple all lit up and looking like a disney castle. It's pretty intense.

When we got back to the hotels Andrew decided to be very safe in walking out onto the street. I'm not sure why, since we didn't even need to cross!

The next morning I took a photo from the balcony of the 2nd floor of the Grand America.

Thursday evening was the student volunteer party. It was on the 9th floor of the Grand America and this is facing north from its balcony towards the rest of downtown SLC.

The party was a really good time as they gave us lots of pizza, wings and beer, and of course we had the good company. There was much mingling and meeting new people.

There was also a little bit of dancing but it never really picked up. It was always just a few people dancing with everyone else watching.

Before the party I went in the pool of the Little America which was half indoors and half outdoors. You could swim under a divider to get to the other half. It was quite chilly outside but the pool was on the 2nd floor and I watched the sun set. I also went in again the next morning really early. The pool hours were 4am-11pm.

After the conference ended in the early afternoon we got a taxi to the airport and then a flight back to Seattle. Overall the week was a lot of fun. Next I'll have to post about the work and school portion of the week, which was the reason I was there!

I am 27!

I had my birthday a couple days ago and now I'm older. Also, I had some new experiences last weekend.

First, on Saturday I went to a football game with some other grad students, but I forgot my camera. It was a BC Lions game at the temporary Empire field. I think I may have seen one of their games before but it was a long time ago. The other grad students were mostly international students who had never watched a football game before.

The game was rather boring. They were playing Edmonton, one of the only teams in the league that had a worse record then them. Edmonton managed to pull ahead and it got exciting at the end when BC managed to tie it up. Then it went into overtime and BC lost. There were some weird calls by the refs that we couldn't figure out which sucked.

During the game there were a lot of little orange footballs thrown into the crowd. Some people took these and threw them at the cheerleaders and lots of people threw them on the field at the end of the game. Also, there were 2 and a half streakers that ran onto the field. One guy made it all the way from one end to the other dodging many security guys and an Eskimos player before he was tackled in the far corner. Another guy knocked down a couple of the security guards before he was grabbed. They announced a few times that any fans running onto the field would be arrested whether they're wearing clothes or not.

So another thing I had on Saturday night which was actually scheduled to start at the exact same time was a LAN party. My friend Nate hosted one and I showed up really late - after the football game and transit back to Surrey. I've never been to a LAN party and I suck at computer games but it was still lots of fun. We played Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. I also played a little Portal at the end of the night. It was a really late night!

On Monday I went over to my grandmas to celebrate my birthday with a few relatives. My brother, grandma, cousins and aunt were there and we had some ice cream cake with a smilie face on it.

I went there on Monday because Tuesday (my actual birthday) was quite busy. I usually have a few meetings at school plus ultimate in the evening. My research group is busy preparing for a conference that I leave for on Friday. We needed to spend our group meeting looking at our poster and our slides to get them in good shape, but everyone was taking forever showing up and getting ready to go. Finally everyone was there and then they brought in a cake and sang Happy Birthday! By that point I kind of guessed that was going on, but that didn't make it any less awesome. It was a lemon meringue cake and very good. We ate it while having our meeting.

That night I went to ultimate and got the usual hardcore workout. My friend Adam showed up who hasn't come in forever. I had tried to get people to come out to ultimate and/or the pub afterwards to celebrate. So, after ultimate Gordon drove us to the pub where a bunch of my friends were waiting and we hung out for a bit. They bought me a King Kong shot, a dirty martini, and a flaming lamborghini. The shots were quite good when I expected them to be strong, they instead tasted great. It was a fun time and a good casual celebration of my birthday.

I've been busy pretty continuously since then, getting ready for the conference and my normal routine. I went to indoor soccer again this week and some people showed up. We played a couple games of 3 on 3 and hopefully more people show up in the future. Also, I went to the documentary night some grad students organized and we watched Man on Wire about the guy who walked on a wire between the world trade center towers. It was very dramatically done and entertaining. I also went to the swim night and this time we had it at the Newton Wave pool. I swear it used to have a big rectangular pool as part of it but now it's gone...replaced with gyms. Also, the bit of the waterslide that goes outside, that you see from the bus station, is now a lie. It's not part of a functional waterslide anymore, although there are still 2 waterslides.

Yeah, so life has been crazy with me fitting in time for these things around my thesis writing time and my prep time for this conference. Friday we drive across the border and stay in Seattle and then Saturday morning we fly to Salt Lake City where the conference is. I am a student volunteer at the conference putting in 22 hours of my time. Also, I will be making a short 3-minute presentation on Sunday morning, and then demoing our software many times throughout the week. I'm excited.

Thanksgiving Weekend 2010

This Thanksgiving weekend was very memorable for many reasons, one of them not good. 10/10/10 was definitely an unlucky day for us, although it could have been much worse.

So for the weekend I went to Saltspring Island to my parents' new house where my two little sisters also live. My brother Farley and his girlfriend Jenny, and my sister Rebecca and her common-law man Eric, and my other brother Ben also went there for the weekend. We had 10 people in a 2-bedroom + cottage/shed place. Ben's girlfriend Kyla and Jenny and Farley's friend Alex also visited during the weekend.

So those of us coming from the mainland were picked up by my dad and sisters on Saturday afternoon and we decided to go play a round of disc golf. I haven't played that much recently so I now suck at it but it's lots of fun and Saltspring has a nice course. Unfortunately it started to rain harder and so we got quite wet. We also had agreed to meet my sister at a certain time because she wanted to wander around town instead of play. So we ran out of time and I only did 15 holes. I found someone's lost disc with no name on it though so that's good because I recently lost a couple discs.

So later that day we celebrated my birthday because I won't see most of my family again until a while after my birthday. Mom made one of my favourite meals, firecracker casserole, and then we had some birthday cake and ice cream.

Some of us also played Robo Rally which is one of my favourite board games. I brought a few boards games with me. We played a lot of board games over the weekend and I won many times.

So the next day the sun was shining and the rain had stopped even though that wasn't in the forecast. We thought this was awesome and a great day to go for a big hike.

It was a beautiful day but the mountain did not like us. The mountain is Mt Maxwell and the lookout gives more than a 180 degree view of south Saltspring Island and Vancouver Island.

We wanted to hike down from here to the valley below and then have my mom come pick us up.


Of course we couldn't hike straight down because it was a cliff. There's my siblings and my mom in the top left corner of the photo. So what we had to do was hike along the cliffs and bluffs until it gradually got easy enough to go down and cut back around to below the cliffs.

Ok, so then my sister saw a lizard.

Anyway, Ben and my mom were going to meet us later at the bottom so we said goodbye to them and started out.

It was a nice hike for a little while. We jumped across some little cracks and at some places we had to use our hands to get up or down over some rocks. Unfortunately the rocks were a little bit wet from the day before.

We came across some parts of rock like this where people had put in clips for rock climbing up them.

It was near one of these that the unfortunate accident happened. Here I was with my sister Natalie and she was taking a photo of the view. Rebecca and Eric were behind us and my dad had gone on a little ahead below us. So then I went down the next little bit and I was out of site of everyone else. At that point Natalie was going to take a photo of my dad who was below her. Then I hear Natalie say "Oh..dad, are you alright? Are you OK?" and my dad started cursing.

So then I came around the corner and my dad was lying on the slope with his head downhill from his legs and he's holding his leg and his binoculars are all twisted and dangling. His leg had a few gashes in it with a nasty one on his knee and one below his knee that went all the way into the bone! There was blood done his leg but it didn't seem to be bleeding much. I was so stunned and I didn't immediately know what to do.

My dad must have been in a lot of pain but one of the first things he said was to get his binoculars off of him so I helped get the strap from those off of his head and his arm while he turned himself right side up.

Then my sister arrived and took charge. She had recently taken a first aid course for her work. She also had a small first aid kit. We poured some water on the wounds and then I took off my shirt and they tied it tight around his leg to put pressure on the wound. He could still feel his toes and he didn't break any bones.

My dad kept apologizing for ruining the hike, and even at one point said we could continue without him, which was ridiculous. So then we started to hike back up to the parking lot because we were much closer to it than the bottom. We helped my dad climb up and down the steep parts while he hobbled along but the path was quite narrow at some places.

My dad suggested a couple of us go ahead and get a ride from someone at the parking lot. Natalie and I hurried ahead and I ran into the parking lot just as my mom was pulling out. It turns out the two of them had sat at the top for a while and then slowly made their way back to the van following a little bird. It was lucky for us because they were able to give us all a ride back down the mountain and over to the hospital.

It is really good my family now lives on an island that has a hospital. My dad used the first aid kit from the car to help his leg a little as we made our way to the hospital. At the hospital we waited for a few hours while the doctor cleaned up the wounds, tried to find the chip of bone that was missing, and did some stitching and then put 38 staples into my dad's leg. I am extremely grateful nothing worse happened to my dad or any of us and that we got to the hospital quickly and they were able to see him right away.

So after my dad was all bandaged up we helped him into the van and then we drove home and my mom tried to keep it slow driving along the twisty roads. At home my dad was able to hobble up the porch stairs by himself. For the rest of my visit my dad slept a lot or watched TV in his recliner but unfortunately my parents bedroom is upstairs but not behind a closed door and there were a lot of us squished into the living room.

So I setup some of the patio furniture on the bluff down the hill from the house to try and give him a little peace and quiet. We played a game of Settlers of Catan and my mom brought us some popcorn and beer. It was not as epic a location as playing Risk on the shores of Galiano and my 13 year old sister won (she had no beer) but it was still lots of fun. It also got our minds off the earlier part of the day. Ben didn't play but took some photos of the game with my camera.

He also took some photos of Triscuit.

Later that night we had a big Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing and two pies for dessert but my dad slept through it. He had some later but it's too bad that he was not able to eat with us. We were all thankful for much the same thing - that nothing worse happened that day.

Monday we mostly stuck around the house because we didn't want to go off on any big adventures without my dad and wanted to make sure he was recovering ok. But, again we didn't want to spend all day being noisy in his space.

So there were some antics with this bird that
Natalie loves so much but who actually belongs to Emily.

The bird went into the basket.

They also put the bird on the clothesline.

So the bird went for a bit of a zipline.

I also spent a little time up on the living roof...
but the door closed on us and Farley wouldn't let us back in for a bit.

Then in the afternoon we decided to give my dad full peace and quiet for a little bit and so we walked over to a farm where they make and sell lots of fancy cheeses. They also sell olives from around the world. I bought some cheese that has hot chilis in the bottom. It was really good!

I had to take another photo of Trisuit because she has so much fun peering in the many windows now from the porch that wraps around most of their house.

Oh yes, and my little sister who is much heavier than she used to be insisted on getting a shoulder ride still. She reminds me of Gollum in this photo. Yikes! I also gave my mom a piggy back ride during the walk back from the farm. She's a lot lighter than Natalie.

Overall the one word to describe the weekend is "memorable". Aside from the injury my dad suffered it was a fun weekend with the family. My dad is currently having a tough time recovering but he's a tough guy and I expect he'll get through it in less time than the average person.