My Weekly Adventures #52

Its Sunday and we’re halfway through the month. We’ve had a really good Halloween marathon run full of events and movie reviews and even managed to finally get a TV Binge out. The second half of the month will hopefully see those dwindling book reviews (for books I’m working hard on finishing right now) as well as wrapping up the Saw franchise and hopefully seeing a ton more movies. I absolutely have another TV binge coming up and maybe two if my second binge works as planned. Things don’t go always as planned here. The first half of the month crossed over with Thanksgiving in Canada as well as the actual Moon Festival. Its been a fun time especially since the last week, my husband and I have been on vacation, or more accurately a staycation, so we’re just chilling out, doing some fall chores to prepare for the season and having fun. Oh right, and we also happened to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary. Anyways, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Moon Festival Dinner

The last Weekly Adventures ended with a look at the Battle of Ingredients which was Moon Festival themed and then even had dinner with my husband and my mom for the first part of Moon Festival. On the day of, I went over to hang out with my mom for Moon Festival. We made chicken and salmon and we had some lovely moon cakes. It was a ton of fun.

Pumpkinferno at Upper Canada Village

Vacation started half day for myself on the Friday before last. I was supposed to have the full day off but I had to wrap up some loose ends. However, that is okay since I felt much better about going on vacation knowing the majority of the stuff was taken care of. There’s still some stuff to work on when I get back and its a huge deadline. However, vacation is always refreshing. The second day of vacation was the weekend and we had plans to meet up with family and friends to head to Upper Canada Village to see PumpkInferno. I had a post for it last week some time. If you missed it,  you can check it out HERE.

Visit from Friends

There’s no pictures but if you all remember, Butterflymumma used to be one of our fellow bloggers. She’s no longer in the blogosphere but she remains in contact with me. Whenever I head into her area, I’ll call her up and for Thanksgiving weekend, she came to Montreal to visit with her family. We had dinner and hung out a little. It was lots of fun. Its always a nice time to hang out with friends.

Theatre Visit: IT

Its always great to have a change in plans sometimes. We ended up losing track of time on Tuesday and ended up postponing hiking for that day and instead caught the matinee Cheap Tuesdays screening at the local theatres for IT. I’ve wanted to see that one for a while and had thought that I’d give it up due to finances but I’m happy to finally have that sorted it out and it work out and we got to see it. We did also see the preview for Jigsaw so we’re debating to see whether we want to see it by the end of the month and maybe add it to the horror marathon. It all depends. Anyways, you can expect the review for both the 80s IT and this new one soon.

2nd Wedding Anniversary

We’ve decided that hiking is our anniversary event. This year, we went out to Thousand Islands National Park to go for a hike. Its a pretty nice area and I’ll be posting about that very soon. It was a pretty flat path so there was no leaves changing colors to see. However, this year is cotton-themed. We gave pretty generic and useful stuff. My husband was great and he gave me a Teeturtle Cat Mom shirt. Here it is!

Belated Thanksgiving Dinner

We had my in-laws come over last week to celebrate a belated Thanksgiving. I’m not great at making turkey and it was a busy day of chores and catching up with the blog and editing so we ended up picking up the food to make from M&M Meat Shops which is a pretty cool place with some delicious food when in need for a quick meal to put together.

Noctambule at Granby Zoo

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#Dinozoo at #Noctambule at #GranbyZoo. #dinosaurs #quebec #granby #zoo #animals #canada

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Granby Zoo is a place we haven’t gone back in a long time. This year, they added a Dinozoo area which is full of animated dinosaurs. Its pretty cool. I actually think its probably more effective at night than in the day.

Cute Kitty Pic

Upcoming:

–> MORE HORROR MARATHON/TV BINGES/FALL ACTIVITIES

That’s it for this Weekly Adventures!
I know it was a little overloaded. Its just because of vacation having more time to do stuff. 
We continue the horror marathon tomorrow!

Whats up with you?

Granby Zoo and Baby Invasions!

Granby Zoo has been around forever.  My first visit was when I was in Grade 2, 8 years old and thats 20 years ago (almost).  It was open before that.  Over the 20 years, I went a few years back as well with my boyfriend and till now, there have been a lot of changes. They’ve been getting a lot of new animals and setting up nice events.  Last summer’s highlights was their acquisition of red pandas. Now, if you’ve been following me since 2012, you might have read about my Hong Kong trip and my love for pandas, giant and red ones.  They both are mega adorable!

Granby Zoo entrance

Back in February, Tuango had this deal on Granby Zoo and my boyfriend and I bought it.  This winter’s theme was Baby Invasions.  During certain times in the afternoons, the visitors would get to watch the feeding of these babies and learn a little bit.  There were obviously 3 very cute red panda babies, baby yaks, baby Amur Tigers and baby snow leopards.

Before we get to that, there were lots of animals to see. First up was the elephant and giraffe pens.

Elephant pen

And then as we walked around, we saw the Snowy Owl perched on the arm of one of the animators.

Snowy Owl

And we had Africa which was pretty much indoors and heated viewing huts.

Baboons

Python

Hippo

This hippo was really hard to capture due my height so I had to stand on the kiddie steps and had my boyfriend keep me from falling.  I’m pretty happy to get a decent shot of it 🙂

Back outside, we saw little llamas walking around.

Black and White Llamas

This is only a fraction of what I saw.  Some of those huts had pretty bad reflection and the pictures weren’t too good. Moving along to our highlight: Asia.  Why? Because thats where all the baby invasion animals were. Honestly, I only managed to catch the red pands really well. The others were all enjoying their naps.

Baby Snow Leopards sleeping in their hut

Adult Snow Leopard getting taunted by a visitor

 

Baby Amur Tigers and parent napping

As for the yaks, I didn’t get a good shot as they were behind high fences.  But, I do have a whole lot of red pandas to offer 🙂

Red Pandas from ground level

Playing in Trees

Baby Red Pandas trying to get to the lower branch

Twisting to find balance

Finally getting there!

Playing on the branches

Still playing

And then during feeding time, we realized that there was supposed to be four but mom was not there. Dad was though and he ate with the kids.

Dad Coco and his kids eating

Can you tell which is dad, called Coco?

Yup! He’s the one with the nice fur.  Coco is 10 years old, which is actually approaching the last few years of a normal red panda’s life cycle which is usually 14 years in habitats, but he is in great health.  Plus, you also have to be very proud of him because apparently female red pandas are fertile one day in a year and he caught that day and had these little three panda cubs 😉

I took a million pictures of them.  Its a different feeling to be watching them in an actual outdoors habitat unlike in Hong Kong where its set indoors. I never knew they loved snow so much.  The cubs especially were running around in the snow and everything.  It was SO CUTE!!!

That was the only feeding we managed to catch because it was really cold and with my constant pulling my hands out to take pictures, it got even more chilly.  I am quite happy that I managed to end the day with some awesome maple taffy.

Maple Taffy

I’m guessing its a pretty Canadian thing so I don’t know how many people actually have tried it.  I totally love it! I usually try to have it once every year. This time was slightly messy, which was actually a somewhat funny story but things worked out and I did manage to eat it without getting frostbite on my hands 😉

That was my day! We couldn’t get to all the feedings sadly because we had to take care of a few things in the afternoon before the stores closed but it was really fun!

Do you like zoos? Which zoos are near where you live? 

The Awesome, the Great and a Bit of the Other Stuff!

I almost didn’t do one of these because of my friend’s wedding recap.  What can I say? That really took a whole lot of energy.  I just feeling revived now and well, something else is up, but we’ll get to that in a little bit! 

Lets start with some awesome, shall we? 🙂

For one, I started and finished the first season of Orange is the New Black!

I didn’t know what to expect from this but man, it was pretty good. I breezed through 13 episodes in the last 2 days or so, on and off between living my life.  Its been bringing on some late nights.  Probably shouldn’t but its just so good.  There are some good laughs and some pretty good twists but I have to say, I saw the season finale, like the last 5 minutes, coming from the beginning of the episode.  There’s a whole lot of foreshadowing in this series.  Still, they have some good characters! I’m looking forward to season 2, at least I believe I read that there will be one 😉

I’m really behind with TV series so I’m slowly catching up! I haven’t quite decided what to watch next yet.  Probably get back to some recommendations first before doing more series watching.  We’re nearing the end of recommendations month and its been pretty shameful.  I haven’t watched as much as I wanted.  Life just got so busy but I’m going to try to make it up in the last week. 

Yesterday (Saturday), I met up with one of my friends to go check out the Expo Manger Santé! Its basically a exposition with stalls from different same and big retailers on healthy foods and just a healthy living and all that. I’ve been meaning to implement that into my life so I felt like it’d be cool to go there.  

Expo Manger Sante

I came home with a bag full of pamphlets and business cards.  Those are my faves all compiled for you 🙂 

For a lot of you, this might not be a big thing but if you don’t know, I’m lactose intolerant (and a pretty serious one that recurred a few years back with my IBS) along with a whole bunch of sensitive dietary limitations.  At this fair, I bring your attention to first L’Ancetre because they have a product which is lactose free cheese.  And second exhibition is Rawesome which allowed to eat my cheesecake.  I haven’t eat either of those things in almost 6 years! I LOVE THAT STUFF! I’m serious, that was one of the happiest and most awesome moments of my life. 

I’m telling you right here! Your health is the most important thing and never take it for granted because you don’t want to be like me.  To cut out the things you love most in life is pretty hard.  I may be simple that food makes me this happy but it does 😉 

I have plans to visit some of these restaurants also.  My friend kept going on about Aux Vivres and they have this super delicious Dragon sauce.  There’s some pretty nice concepts and some cool healthier options for my baking adventures which I’m going to look into. It was an educational and fun expo. 

Oh and well, whats great was that yesterday’s supposed 15cm of snow storm was way less. I’m ready for spring any time. Winter, please get the memo 😉

Today has been really great also! My boyfriend and I had gotten these coupons for Tuango for Granby Zoo to see their Special Babies event.  

Granby Zoo entrance

I have never gone to Granby Zoo in winter and today was pretty chilly especially in the outskirts.  We spent a good few hours and and took a bunch of pictures that I’m going to sort through. I’ll have a post up for that tomorrow 🙂

Something else is that we’re going to sign for the official transfer of our new place this coming week so a lot of it is coming down to figuring out the final details.  Earlier today, after the zoo, we headed to check out some liquidation stores to see if we could get an idea of deals on appliances and stuff we could use.

 

Also, we went to get some paint color combinations and whatnot and spent time putting together what we want to use for the rooms. Those are all of the choices that we have for the house.  We have a good idea what to do but now its just getting the house and seeing if its actually a good match 🙂

Okay, that was my weekend but whats one of my posts without some randomness! 

Friday: Steak night! My mom makes them the best!

Granby Zoo lunch: Hot dogs and fries for me, cheeseburger and pizza for my boyfriend

Sunday dinner: Homemade Garlic Bread

Sunday dinner: Pork, Beans, mashed potatoes

Some funky flowers grew from our old plant

My cat in her spot!

Anyone know what those flowers are called? My mom has tons of plants but we never know what the actual names are.  Its kind of funny.  We’ve had this one for as long as I can remember too.  

Wait, so far we’ve all been in the awesome and great territory so a bit of the bad creeped in.  The ridiculous stye has returned in a mild format and I’m hoping to employ every possible way to get rid of it before it gets worse.  If you don’t remember, I had to go have a small cut/operation to get rid of it back in September and November.  That was REALLY painful, so I’m going to try my best to avoid going through that.  Hopefully a new year also brings some better luck. So I went out and got myself a bunch of stuff including finding back that antibiotic drops my opthamologist prescribed me if this happened again.

Wish me luck… I’m going to stay positive! It sucks but life goes on!

I never leave on a negative note so here’s some music! 🙂

Enjoy! Hope you’ve all had an absolutely awesome weekend!