Hello everyone… I’m so happy that it is Friday today, that I thought I would make a Happy Friday post.

My weekend plans include cooking, reading (finishing up the Wheel of Time series), playing some video games on the Xbox 360, and maybe even snowboarding depending on the conditions. Let’s hope for some new snow! I’m also hoping to do a photo walk, and may try and pop down to the Olympic cauldron before it goes out since I haven’t gotten a picture there yet.

What are your weekend plans?

In other news, everything Olympic is going to come to a close in Vancouver this weekend as the Paralympics Games come to a close as well. In honour of this, I thought I’d post my favourite Olympic “image” yet.

This joyful and fantastic piece of art was created by my good friend Alissa Staples. She is a children’s book illustrator here in Vancouver and you can check out her website and Twitter! It makes me happy about everything Olympics and Paralympics… and I’m so thankful that these wonderful events were hosted in our hometown. Thanks Alissa for letting me use your image!

Lastly, I wanted to let you know about a couple upcoming things I’ll be doing over the next few months…

The next couple weeks: Expect to see a video from our experiences in Golden and Kicking Horse with lots of snowboarding footage. And I’ll also be putting together a snowboarding video of our time at Apex with the outdoor hockey tournament.

End of March: Look out for some spring photo posts and maybe even some spring fashion…

April 2-5: Allan and I will be going CATBOARDING! So excited. We’ll be going to Mustang Powder which is in the Monashees near Revelstoke. Catboarding is basically snowboarding but with a group that uses a snowcat to get up the mountain. This is usually done in remote areas and you end up riding powder all day! I’ve never been catboarding before and this is as good or next to as good as heli-skiing/boarding. Wish me luck! I’ll definitely be doing my squats every day until then…

May 21-24: Allan and I celebrate our 3rd year (dating) together! Our anniversary plans include going to Tofino, getting in some early season surfing and maybe a special dinner out.

Summer 2010: We’ve got all our campsites booked from May through to October and we’ll be going surfing in Tofino just about every other weekend in the summer. Look out for lots of surfing photos and videos!

What are your plans for the spring and summer?

On Monday we watched the Men’s Canada-USA Curling game at the Olympic Curling Centre.  It was an intense game.

Of course, no curling blog post would be complete without a photo of the famous Norway curling pants. They have two different variations… these red ones and also the white ones with blue/red checkers. Awesome.

We had a blast. I honestly think that it’s almost more fun to watching curling live than hockey. *gasp* Yep, I said it.

It was great watching Kevin Martin and his team beat the US, especially after losing the hockey game the previous night to the US team.

Afterwards we headed over to the Hockey House where we spent the entire day with a group of 9 friends.

We managed to take tons of group photos, including this one with the hosts of the Hockey House. Awesome white suits. P.S. Check out my awesome 2010 commemorative hockey stick (I got it signed by a ton of people!)…

Cam Neely was also there… what a legend!

We spent most of the afternoon watching the on-stage entertainment and wandering around the pavilion taking photos of everything.

Oh, and lots of bubble hockey was played.

We made sure to get clappers, and took this group photo…

… which we loved so much that we got them made into 9 souvenir pins! Haha.

I loved getting a photo with the sexy Hockey House babes.

It was so much fun to watch the women’s Canada-Finland semifinal there… we won handily, but every goal was a huge celebration.

And the main event… we got to watch the Triple Gold Club celebration on stage. The Triple Gold Club presentation is for the 22 players who have achieved the three most important accomplishments in hockey… winning the Stanley Cup, winning Olympic gold, and winning the IIHF world championships. As you can imagine, this is an extremely prestigious award and very, very few players ever win this.

I love this photo of Vladislav Tretiak, Rene Fasel, and Gary Bettman. It’s kind of ominous… but cool. They did the presentation to all the players.

Peter Forsberg was there..

… and Alexander Mogilny…

And Joe Sakic!

Sakic is one of my faves. My old bedroom at home still has his posters plastered all over the place.

Rob Blake too..

Here’s Brendan Shanahan, Joe Sakic, and Rob Blake on stage.

Allan and I posed inside of the hockey mask…

At the end of the night, the band Five Alarm Funk took the stage and they seriously blew the roof off the place. They were a lot of run.

We made sure to take lots of photos with them when they came off the stage and partied with us.

DJ Skratch Bastid closed off the night and he was really good. He was great at reading the crowd and reacting accordingly.

The view of our group from the stage.

Yeah, we had a ridiculously good time.