Greetings from Vancouver! I need a break from studying for the FE (fundamentals of engineering...) exam, so here's my first update since moving out here. I'm having a great time out here, there's just so much to do! Its funny to think back to when we visited here for spring break of my freshman year of High School. I remember looking at the Coast Mountains from the parking lot of Mountain Equipment Co-op and thinking of how perfect of a city Vancouver really is: convenience, happy people, good coffee, proximity to the mountains, and most of all, the perfect backdrop for a city. I put it on my list of cool cities I'd love to live in but didn't honestly see myself living here someday. So ever since I've moved here I've been pinching myself. Its quite a place!

Work is going good. I'm the young junior engineer in the office, which means I get the scraps of a majority of the engineering work that goes around. Besides that, I've been getting along great with the other engineers and I can't complain. I've been working on a lot of stuff from the Alberta Oil Sands north of Edmonton. They're moving a lot of dirt and rock up there, so its a geotechnical engineer's playground (and an environmental engineer's nightmare... but I'll save that for another blog post). The mine we do a lot of consulting for is 3-4 km (ha!) wide, maybe 50-60 meters deep at the deepest areas. To put it in perspective, the mine I worked in last summer was just about as wide, but quite a bit deeper. In the oil sands world the mine we work at is a baby. Its really just started and is about 1/8 of the way done.

Besides work I've been playing four square (we call it man square) somewhat regularly with a friend from work and his friends on fridays. Its pretty fun playing a kid's game at an elementary school with a bunch of grown-ups, while enjoying a beer or two. I've also been playing water polo at the University of British Columbia with a club team. There might be 4-5 actual students total on the team, the rest are older guys and gals. Its really challenging compared to Michigan Tech water polo, there's a few former national-level players so it makes it pretty tough to keep up sometimes. I like to think I can hold my own against them, though.

Thats about it for now! Don't want to bore you too much with whats going on, but thats the gist of whats going on in my life!

That pictures are from my hike about a month ago along the Howe Sound Crest Trail. Its a 30 km trail that starts just outside of Vancouver and winds along a ridge over 5-6 mountain peaks. I've been telling people its the most mentally challenging thing I've ever done in my life, but it gave me a perspective not many Vancouverites (or flatlander Michiganders!!!) get of the city and surrounding landscape. Having a hard time seeing the trail? So did we, and that was one of the many reasons that contributed to the difficulty of the hike! If you find the lions, which are the two sharp peaks in the middle of the picture, the trail came between those two peaks, down the ridge and then back up to the point where the picture was taken. I'm not in the picture because I was probably still behind.