Has it only been a week?

It seems like such a long time since I've posted here. Maybe because so much has been happening. We were going to stay a few days in Kamloops last weekend and actually visit Art's sister Echo and her husband Grant (instead of just pass through, like we've been doing for the past year). And then an opportunity dropped in our laps to get involved with setting up/running mining & exploration camps. There is a camp on northern Vancouver Island that was particularly interested in us, so asked us to go to Terrace to take a course. We had 2 days to get there (from Vancouver, as that's where we were at the time), so hopped in our little truck and buzzed on up. They paid our way and our tuition, so we were quite excited. The way fun part for me was that I was the only woman in a room of 15 men. The scary part was that we were learning to be instructors, so had to create and deliver 3 "lessons" to the rest of the class.

Being the only woman, I couldn't just run away (which I sure wanted to do). I'm pretty sure I took them by surprise when I taught satellite phone, GPS and mapping techniques instead of cooking and macrame. Art was hot and made a great impression. Unfortunately though, we may have missed the boat because there was another course the week before, that is crucial to the job (which we didn't know about, so didn't take). The government suddenly dished out a bunch of money, so there's a lot of rushing around to make things happen and thusly a lot of confusion. So, we will just have to trust that things will unfold as they will unfold. No matter what comes of it, we spent 4 days in an absolutely gorgeous town. I never knew Terrace was so beautiful!

We also had a lot of fun and put our names on the map. In the middle of the chaos, I had a birthday. I am a firm believer that no one should have to work on their birthday, so I sort of broke my own rule, but I was having fun too, so it's OK. It was actually a good distraction to keep me from thinking too much about the milestone I had reached. I'll let you guess which milestone that was.