Canadian girl out and aboot

I spent last Thursday and Friday in Calgary at the Alberta Farm Writers Association conference. First off, I have to congratulate myself for my success in driving around Calgary. I still don't know the city that well, and in my mind, it is a big mess of urban sprawl. But I was able to drive around and only got lost once!

On Thursday, I drove myself to the hotel to meet up with the other farm writers. There were about 40 of us on the bus, and we took off the Cattleland, a feed yard with about 25,000 cattle. It had rained and snowed a lot, so the feedlot was kind of gross looking and the cattle were walking around in mud. They do a lot of fairly interesting experiments with private companies at Cattleland and we drove around the feedlot on a bus while the owner talked to us about what he does in his operation. It started to rain a bit during this portion, but we were warm and dry. From there, we went to Fieldstone fruit winery where we sampled 4 fruit wines and learned about fruit wine making. Apparently, you have to use 75% Alberta grown fruit in Alberta fruit wineries. This is to protect the Alberta industry and ensure that people are making Alberta made products. Some of the fruit wines were quite delicious. From there, we went to the Strathmore station, which was an old railway station converted to a restaurant. The food there was pretty great and the ambience was fun.

After that, we went to SemBios Systems, which is a biotech firm that is working on genetically modified organisms. They are making safflower plants that can produce insulin. This was a very scientific part of the tour and some of the info went over my head. We did get to look at lots of safflower cultures and bits of plants. We also toured their sister company, Botaneco, which is completely natural. This company extracts safflower oil for cosmetics and the product can be found in Burt's Bees and Spectrogel.

After this, we went back to the hotel for the banquet and got to listen to a speech and have a question and answer session with Ag Minister Jack Hayden. This was pretty interesting, and he's definitely a better speaker than the previous ag minister. The highlight of our meal was definitely the Vodka Caesar soup, which had a great tomatoey taste and was like a Caesar but in soup form. I would definitely have that again.

The whole day was a great opportunity for me to talk to other ag writers, network, meet new people and learn a whole lot of info. This year I will be going to my first Calgary Stampede, and I now know a lot of people on the ag media organizing committee. Networking with others really made this conference valuable for me. I'll write more about the second day of the conference in a bit.

On Saturday (almost a week ago), I drove down to Calgary to spend a few times with A. Since I work from home, I thought I'd take the opportunity to work from his home, which was great. I actually ended up doing a lot of work and got to spend a lot of time with him, which was cool. We actually ended up watching Olympic hockey (a first for me) and Olympic curling (another first), as well as the closing ceremonies, which were absolutely insane until we got to the craptastic music. I actually want to see the Michael Buble dance number again, because it was so over the top. I called my mom during this segment and she was laughing so hard that she could barely speak and was almost crying.

Anyway, A and I spent a lot of time hanging out, watched Olympics, went for sushi, wandered around his neighbourhood and went to see "The Last Station." I also got to finally meet Melanie , my co-blogger, and have lunch with my friend Courtney and her daughter Maren.

On Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, I managed to become somewhat ill and was in a super crabby, sick and tired mood for my last day there and my drive home. However, I was already feeling better by Thursday.

I'm working like a fiend and trying to get a lot of stuff done. My bro and his Fiancee are coming to town for some reason. I think they have some shopping to do, so they'll be staying here. My dad was going to bring my dog next weekend, but my parents decided to send him up this weekend since it didn't make sense for two family members to drive to Edmonton in such a short time period. So I have Fergus for an extra week! I'm looking after him while my parents take their first trip to China. I love having Fergus here and it should work out well, since I'm over most of my crazy driving days. I'm excited for him to be here.

This weekend, I'm teaching a journalism workshop! My friend Mari works at a community newspaper called The Rat Creek Press . I'm going to teach some news writing techniques to their writers :) I'm a little nervous, but excited, and I'm going to spend a great deal of today planning the workshop.

After the massive trip to Ikea, Dad and I returned home to put some of the Ikea stuff together. We easily assembled four chairs, and then made a stir fry and ate dinner. Then we started assembling my new bed, but had to stop because we were convinced we had lost the pieces. I had to call off a breakfast meet-up with Courtney, so that Dad and I could go back to Ikea and get the pieces. We thought they were missing from the box, but it turns out that they were sold separately. Damn you Ikea!

Anyway, so back to the house where we assembled the bed, and the dresser. Then we drove to Calgary as I had to go for a meeting and Dad was going to meet up with his friend Duane. We arrived in Calgary at about 7:30 p.m. and ate some Indian food Duane had ordered from take out.

The next day, Dad, Duane and I went to MEC, where Dad bought me a whole bunch of bike repair gear so that I could keep my bike in good shape. Duane then drove me to [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com]'s mom's, so that we could meet up. She had organized and scheduled the trip so that we could hang out in Calgary.