The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2010

In early October this year, 2100 (mostly) women in technology congregated in Atlanta for the 10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. 900 of those girls were students.

ThoughtWorks sent a small troupe of us ladies down to Atlanta for the week mostly for recruiting and networking but also to enjoy the many sessions that were happening throughout the week. I am really grateful for the opportunity to go and to become part of (what I now know) of the Grace Hopper phenomenon. We were a mixed bunch, Julie and Yewe from recruiting, fabulous Tarsha from HR, our CTO Rebecca who had specially come back for the week from her sabbatical in Uganda, that's how much she is a fan, Joanna, April, Smitha and myself. We had a super fun time and worked hard too of course!

Grace Hopper was a remarkable woman, She was a “mathematician, computer scientist, social scientist, corporate politician, marketing whiz, systems designer, and programmer,” and, always, a “visionary. [Howard Bromberg]. In 1953 she invented the compiler... yes you heard... she invented the compiler. This lead on to the development of COBOL. Hopper’s work also foreshadowed or embodied enormous numbers of developments that are still the very bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and symbolic manipulation. [The Anita Borg Institute website] And if that wasn't enough in her spare (!) time she was a Rear Admiral in the Navy. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is about celebrating the achievements of women in computing and to pledge ourselves to extend them. In computing more than other disciplines, women in the right place at the right time have made an enormous difference. If computing has led the way in making space for women’s participation on an equal basis, it is because the discipline was pioneered in large part by women like Grace Murray Hopper. What was true for Hopper is all the more true for women today because of her work. [From the Grace Hopper Celebration website]

Tuesday was mostly the career fair. We had a wee stand and were very busy... (admittedly lots of people thought we were Yahoo! who had the stand next to us, but we chatted to them and told them about ThoughtWorks anyway, whether they liked it or not!). We had had special t-shirts made up with a shoe logo that was made out of a tag cloud, initially we thought maybe this was even sexist, but turns out lots of the attendees spotted our advert and loved the shoe and wanted to come talk to us because of it and we were constantly getting stopped and asked who were were both because of our t-shirts and because we were having a lot of fun and people wanted in!

I have to say that before this career fair I hadn't really given much thought into how to explain what ThoughtWorks does. After the hundreds of times I explained it during the career fair, pretty sure it came out differently every time. How can you explain our special sauce in an elevator pitch without it just sounding like BS. Hard, it turns out, answers on a postcard please.

The career fair was actually probably my highlight of the whole week. It was so energizing to meet so many excited, enthusiastic and extraordinarily bright young ladies looking for a great place to start their careers. I was in their position just two years ago, and it really hit home home much I have grown since I became a ThoughtWorker, it was simply amazing to be in a position where I could give advice and put people at ease.

Us at the ThoughtWorks booth during the Career Fair

Two big things that I have been thinking a lot about recently are:

•  I have been lucky enough to work with lots of amazing people at TW, who have been in the industry for 10/15/20 years. I have learnt an awful lot from these people but you naturally then compare yourself to them thinking "well if they are this good at blah, I should be too, I work alongside them after all", only to be supper frustrated because of course I can't know everything now that I will know when I've been doing this for 15 years. It's madness. What is perhaps just as important is having people who are 1 - 2 years further down the track than you that you can look up to and realistically look at and think "that is where I want to be in a year". For whatever reason I feel that TW are lacking in devs that are in the 2-3 year out of college mark. Being at that career fair it suddenly dawned on me that I could be that person for these girls, there were a standout few that made a great impression (we've since hired two...), and I offered my support to and we're still emailing. It's a great feeling and I'm excited about keeping in touch with them, whether they end up joining TW or not.

•  The other is that women coming out of computer related degress still think that a career as a developer will mean you are locked in a basement with no windows or men that wash, not allowed to speak to the business or heavon forbid a customer. To be honest thats what I thought too at the time. As girl after girl told me they had a PHD in computer science but wanted to be an analyst (no offence), I always asked why, and they all described that they like coding but that it would lead to a life like I described above. Watching their faces and their excitment as I told them that at ThoughtWorks being a developer does NOT involve the above (unless of course you really want to I guess), as I told them about my role and what I did on a daily basis they all started changing their minds and wanted to submit their resumes as devs instead. I feel like the industry as a whole is really missing this education, but from a TW marketing perspective we could really play on that misconception.  I was giving a quick lightening talk about our experience at Grace Hopper on Friday to ThoughtWorks and I was talking about this topic and one of my co-workers mentioned that he believes that it's Agile that's keeping women in technology. He said that many of the women he know wouldn't be in technology if it wasn't for the open communication and collaboration that is at the heart of Agile. I had never thought of it that way but can see that that definitely helps!

On Wednesday the sessions kicked off, getting into full swing on the Thursday and Friday. As a lot of the attendees at Grace Hopper were Academics, there was an interesting mix of content. I was expecting techy, QCon type content, but instead there were lots of topics that people were studying for their PHD's as well as industry tips and tricks for surviving as a women in the IT world. Each Grace Hopper celebration has a theme and this year it was "Collaboration Across Boundaries". I will follow up this blog post with two of the sessions that I particularly liked.

Rebecca Parsons during her Panel Discussion

I am super excited to say that recruiting have been amazing this year at following up with people that we met and loved. We have offers out to a few Hoppers already. We all felt like there wasn't much representation of Agile, or what it means to be a consultant so we are already plotting and planning on how we can make a bigger impact there at next year Grace Hopper Celebration and hopefully I can go again too! 

Where is Anne now?!

Since my Canada vacation my new project has me in New York City!

I'm consulting for a small investment bank here. I have finally become a "real" ThoughtWorker, constantly flying!

Although I must say I don't have it too bad.... ;-) I have a lovely little corporate apartment on E 63rd St, and I'm hoarding airmiles for some emergency ski trip at some stage! And hey, New York  on expenses, Hoorah! Below are some pictures of my apartment:

My life is mostly now, fly from Chicago to La Guardia on Sunday night, work 10 -12 hours each day, attempt to go to the gym (normally fail if I'm honest!), and fly back on Thursday night. It's nice to be home for an extra day and normally I head into the Chicago office to say hello.

My new team are lovely, it's a bit of a boisterous banking environment, so of course I fit right in! And I'm back doing .Net with a tiny bit of Ruby thrown in which is a nice change. Not to mention the fact that I really knew nothing about banking.... Yay for new things.

The other great thing is that I can fly people out to visit me if I want to stay the weekend. So right when I started Danielle and I had a girly weekend here, which was awesome fun, and then Tim came out last weekend, great to have him here. And here are some pics from Danielle's visit.

Finding The Strengths in Your Team

Strengths Finder 2.0

(This picture is taken from their website linked above)

I rolled off my previous engagement with ThoughtWorks in mid-August. I had a brilliant time on that team, which felt like one of the most well bonded team that I, and many others have come across in a while. (admittedly biased). We had gelled well and were pretty productive, but I think that we all also learned a great deal about ourselves and grew enormously throughout the 9 months we were together. On paper we were a pretty mixed bunch of people but I guess we all had a similar goal of work hard, deliver great software to our client and have fun doing it. I could harp on forever about some of the things that we took away from the project but I want to focus on a tool that really helped us work better together.

One of the exercises that we did do as a team was take the Strengths Finder test. Some co-workers had mentioned that they had done it and thought it was great and so one by one each of us gave it a go. At the time also I had started pairing more frequently with one of the others on the dev team, we were also down to 3 people now making pairing that bit harder. The two of us felt like we were worlds apart in our approach and were admittedly driving each other crazy with our dysfunctional pairing. One of the things that really helped was the results of the strengths finder test, once we understood where each others strengths were and where they were coming from it all suddenly seemed to make sense and we've since (through a lot of hard work and honest conversation) become very effective pairing partners and awesome friends.

How does it work?

This book summarizes that as a world we spend far too much time focusing on our own (and other peoples) shortcomings that we are seriously limiting out own growth. "What's more we had discovered that people have several times more potential for growth when they invest energy in developing their strengths instead of correcting their deficiencies". While I don't believe that you should stop working on your weaknesses, this is a great theory.

You have to buy the book (see below) and you get a code that you can take their online test with. You rate a hundred or so questions on how much you agree with the statement, and the strengths finder then comes out with your top 5 strengths, and a personalized action plan, among many other things. There are a total of 34 different themes. You can get a lot out of reading the whole book, but you can also get what you need by taking the test and referring to the sections that apply. 

What did the results show?

Well these were my top 5....

Empathy 

Harmony 

Arranger 

Responsibility 

Restorative

Go figure. I suppose those of you that know me won't be too surprised. Initially I was annoyed at how "fluffy" my strengths were, and was jealous that I didn't have things like Maximizer or Woo (self deprecation is my number one weakness...), but my team mates (and the book) helped me realize that I am lucky to have these strengths, that don't come as easily to a lot of people.

There is a chapter on each strength, there is a description, examples on things that a person which this strength might say or do, some ideas for action, and in my opinion, the most useful three bullet points of them all, "Working with others who have X". By each of us reading about how to work with the strengths that the rest of the team our understanding of each other went up exponentially. This is an extract of the "Working with Others who have" section from one of my strengths, "Responsibility", it certainly explains a lot...

•  This person defines himself by his ability to live up to his commitments. It will be intensely frustrating for him to work with people who don't. 

• This person dislikes sacrificing quality for speed, so be careful not to rush him. In discussing his work, talk about it's quality first.

•  Help this person avoid taking on too much, particularly if he is lacking in the Discipline talents. Help him see that one more burden may result in his dropping the ball - a notion that he will loathe.

This is just one example of the great things this book has to offer. It really helped out team and I help that it can help yours too. Or just for some self reflection.

I have also included a chart that shows all the different strengths across our small team. Quite a mixed bunch, but we almost all shared at least one strength with someone else, which I think is what really helped us gel and gave us such a rounded team.

San Francisco - Anne's Birthday Trip May 2010

For my birthday this year Tim and I headed out to the west coast, to San Francisco. 

We flew out during the day on Friday, it was actually quite nice not to just rush from work to the airport on Thursday night like we normally would for a long weekend, but its does mean you lose most of that day, however we were much more relaxed!

We were staying at The Clift, a hotel that I had found on my latest obsession www.jetsetter.com. Turned out well. We were a few block from Union Square and the Trolleys. Once we got in we set off in hunt of some food for a picnic lunch the next day. We used the Trolleys, which although are a tourist trap and actually pretty handy to get around. We bought 3 day passes which turned out to be pretty worth the money. 

Those trolleys are mad, there is a poor brake guy with and actual giant lever on the back of the trolley, and is the only thing stopping you from flying down the super steep San Francisco hills. Rather him than me. We hopped off near China Town and wandered towards the Italian area, where we found lunch for the next day and a lovely bistro/cafe to sit in the sun and watch the world go by. Good espresso too.

Saturday (birthday day) was jam packed. We took the trolley down to Fisherman's wharf. I love being down by the sea, hanging out with boats and seafood is one of my favourite pastimes. We watched them turn around the trolley at the end of the track, amazing that they still just do it by hand, and then headed off towards the Golden Gate bridge for our picnic. It was an irritatingly hazy day (as I'm told it often is in San Fran), so we couldn't quite see the top of the bridge, but it was awesome to see it anyways.

After the trek there and back we went for a quick walk through Fisherman's wharf, lots of yummy looking crab and seafood stands. And of course the pier 39 Sealions.

We then jumped on the Ferry to Alcatraz Island. There is a great audio tour around the old prison island. It's amazing to imagine what it would of been like to of been there, both as a prisoner or as a guard or their family. You can even hear to sounds from the city from the Island, must of been tortuous on its own. There's a great view of the city from the ferry and from the island. We returned back to the hotel to discover we both were seriously sunburnt.... you would of thought we'd learnt by now. We met a bunch of Thoughtworkers that Tim and I are friends with for a birthday dinner. Awesome to see everyone again, and also to meet new people that I'd heard an awful lot about.

On Sunday I decided that I hadn't eaten enough of the seafood at Fisherman's Wharf so we headed back there for lunch in the Ferry Building. Really good fresh crab cakes and shrimp sandwiches. We then met up with Ian and Suzi and headed towards the Haight district. Forgetting that it was the Bay to Breakers fun run that day, the place was a mad house. Definitely a time to see the more erm eccentric side of San Francisco.

 We had a lovely time in San Francisco. A great place for eating! We didn't go to the Wine Country on this trip as we thought it would be too rushed, so I'm definitely looking forwards to that someday in the not too distant future hopefully.

New City - New Client

I have finally experienced what it's really like to be a consultant.... travel!

For the first 6 weeks of my current client H&R Block I was travelling between their head quarters in Kansas City, Missouri and one of our ThoughtWorks offices, Atlanta. You really feel the grind, and your short weekends at home become very precious.


The view from the TW Atlanta office


It's the smallest team that I've been a part of, just 4 of us. 1 client principal/project manager and 3 devs. Although quite daunting at first to be in such a small team, it also allowed me to shine, and to play a few different roles. Developer / Business Analyst / Quality Assurance depending on the hour.




The Hilton President in KC, viewed from the HR Block HQ


The whole project was a short 6 weeks, at times frustrating we definitely delivered what we and they wanted.

I have now transitioned onto another team with the same client. This time we're based in Chicago. Yay! It's great to actually spend some time in Chicago and I'm more than happy to be able to spend more time with Tim. Hoping to be able to make some proper friends here too.

A gorgeous evening in Chicago, from our space in the TW Chicago office


The team is larger and fully staffed with all roles, and much more rigorous agile. I'm getting the chance to work with some awesome people. Always takes a bit of time for me to find my place in a new team, but hopefully I'm getting there. Should be an exciting project!

Opening Day at Sunshine Village!

This Wednesday was a public holiday in Canada for Remembrance Day, so we had the day off work. The very clever marketing people at Sunshine Village (a ski hill about an hour and a half from Calgary) decided that they should open for the season on this very day....

I made a call out to my ThoughtWorking friends to see who would take up this mid week escape to the mountains, and the four of us embarked on our first ski trip of the year.

Since the first blast of snow in September we've had pretty much no snow in Calgary, yet in the Rockies, an hour up the road it has been a very different story. Tonnes of the stuff. More than I have ever seen for so early in the season. So we were all VERY excited. I've never been a normal visitor on opening day of a ski hill, wasn't sure what to expect but we figured that we weren't going to be the only ones who thought that heading up there yesterday was a good idea. One good run was all going to make it worthwhile we decided.

With our expectations set (thank goodness), we left Calgary at 7.30am ish. As we got further into the mountains it started to snow lightly, and by the time we were 5kms from the turn off to Sunshine they were big fat flakes. And then we hit our first of many line ups of the day. Sunshine has had a very respectable 40 cms in the last 3 days alone. They had to re-sand the road so we all queued up to get up the access road, then crawled on up the access road. One good run and it'll all be worthwhile....

Good job that I had the company I did in the car. Never a dull (or quiet) moment with that lot. As we were nudging up the road a whole herd of mountain goats decided that they wanted to hang out on the road, causing at least some entertainment for us all. About half way along the road, we noticed that people were starting to come back down in the opposite direction, and grinning a lot. Odd. After another 20 mins we reached some parking attendants who told to go back down and park on the road, all the car parks were already full. Honestly have never seen it as busy.

By the time we had kitted up and walked all the way up to road, driven by our need for that one good run, it was 11am. All was forgotten as we headed up the gondola and got some runs in. Such good conditions for so early, gorgeous powder, and a great atmosphere with everyone just ecstatic about being back on the snow.

Our two last runs mad the whole day. The most fun I have had skiing in a long time. Not a care in the world. Now who do I h ave to talk to to get every Wednesday off to go skiing?!

ThoughtWorks Canada Away Day 2009

So bear with me while I post lots of things that I got up to in October...

A lot of October revolved around giving my friend JJ a good send off as he heads back to the UK with ThoughtWorks. Sorely missed.

First up...... ThoughtWorks Canada Away Day 2009

My first Away Day. Was brilliant fun!

The idea of an away day is that, as a company we are all pretty disparate. All on different client sites its often hard to "regroup", catch up with everyone and share ideas. So there is a day when we all go off site, give presentations to each other, get company updates, and generally catch up :-)

We went out to a ranch in Kananaskis Country out towards Banff. As predicted when we started planning the away day back in July, the first snow of the winter arrived just in time for the away day. It was actually really good fun to be surrounded in the snow, for a lot of people traveling this was the first time they had really seen that much snow, and it's always fun to watch their reactions. It wouldn't be the Canada away day if there wasn't ten tonne of snow!

We all had a great day, with all sorts of interesting topics for the presentations from sales skills, to cucumber testing to social responsibility and of course not without a hour long Roy Rant from our fearless leader Roy.

We also got some great TW swagger, in the shape of nice hoodies seen below.

On the move again...

I have a whole heap of blogging to do but firstly I thought I would officially announce...

....That I'm moving to Chicago in December!

32,000 miles of long distance relationship later, it's about time that Tim and I are in the same country at least, so I'm leaving the lovely Canada and heading to join Tim in Chicago.

I'm staying with ThoughtWorks (yay!), which is great, will hopefully make this leap of faith a bit easier. I've met a bunch of people from the Chicago office in different parts of the world, so that will be good. Work wise I'm looking forward to some new challenges, no idea where the next project will take me, I've been told that I should be prepared for traveling so who knows! I've been on my current (and first ever) gig since February, it's been a crazy journey since I started there and I can only thank everyone for their positive encouragement and patience! I can honestly say that I'm petrified about starting on a new project, but must be brave!

I've loved loved my time in Canada, yay for the skiing, yay for the hiking, yay for the lovely people. I didn't think that my ThoughtWorks career would start in Canada but I'm glad that it did, and I'm forever grateful for the opportunity that I had to come over here. The Canada TW office is an awesome place, friendly and cosy, everytime I walk in, I am greeted with hugs, that's my kind of office! I'm sure the experience will be different in the big bad world of the TW headquarters in Chicago...

And finally.... can't believe that I'm all growd up and going to be living with a boyyyy! I'm really looking forward to it, there's now two people to worry about in all my country hoping, but I reckon Chicago for a year or so will be wicked fun. Everyone's welcome to come and visit us!

The plan so far is to roll off my current project in mid December, fly from Calgary to Chicago to move all my things and then had straight off back to the UK for Christmas and a catch up with the faaaaamimly. Tim's coming too god help him ;-) Then back to Chicago on Jan 1st.

The Photo was taken by the Lovely Suzi Edwards at the TW Canada Away Day 2009

My first IPM facilitation!

Today I had the daunting task of facilitating our team's bi-weekly IPM on my client site.

The team had decided that our IPM's were getting a bit stale and it was time to mix it up bit and rotate the facilitation through the team members. (also our poor PM has three IPM's in one day and no one wants to facilitate that many in one day!)

I have had the opportunity to see some of my ThoughtWorks colleagues in facilitating action. A great facilitator is like gold dust. Hopefully one day I can aspire to be up there with them.

I was a little bit nervous about standing up there in front of my co-sourced client and TW team, but once I got going I actually quite enjoyed it. I Made sure that I had all the little things organised like projectors and stickies and pens, and had prepped the night before, so was feeling reasonably ok about the whole thing.

It was really rewarding to look around the room and see engaged and smiling faces. People were having fun! Yay! It was also really great that some of the poeple who don't normally have the confidence to speak up, do so and to give some really on the money comments too.

Some great actionable ideas came out of our retrospective. Which stayed brilliant positive and forward thinking (we've been known as a team to be swallowed by a hole of complaining...). We had some great ideas ranging from Talk like a Pirate at Standup Day, to creating a daily updated dedicated space on our Wall for the QA's to shout about their progress.

I was on a total high afterward, and so pleased at the positive feedback. I can think of many areas to improve in, but chuffed with achieving quite a milestone at my time in TW.

Here are two of my favourite slides from today:

Lake O'Hara Hike 29th Aug '09

Yesterday the ThoughtWorks hike club set off for another adventure.... this time to Lake O'Hara, in British Columbia, Canada.

This was the most amazing hike I have been on so far. To steal JJ's phrase, "Maximum gain for minimum effort". This was certainly true. In a good way.

JJ and Sarah picked me up at 7am in the Kia Ronda partymobile. To my absolute delight I was greeted with a warm bacon sandwhich and a banana! Legend JJ. Went very well with my tea. Whoop.
The base of Lake O'Hara is just under 3 hours from Calgary, about 25 mins past Lake O'Hara. There we met fellow hikers Kim, Kunal and Mike. We all loaded up into a classic yellow school bus that was going to take us up to the lake. Lake O'Hara is in Yoho national park, and access is restricted to 40 or so people a day to preserve the park (see the national park site for more details). There is a private lodge up there and a campsite. Would be a lovely place for a relaxed long weekend.The bus takes you up the 15km to the Lake and drops you off in the area where the lodge and campsite are. Imediatly you are such a beautiful place. Lake O'Hara is a beautiful aqua marine colour and completly clear. We quite enjoyed throwing stones in and watching them go right to the bottom. The six of us trooped off along the edge of the lake and then took a right fork off the lake edge trail through a lovely forest up to Mary Lake. This lake was much greener in colour. The whole valley we were hiking we were surrounded by grey mountain sides and a view behind us out over the rest of Yoho National Park. Due to the restriction on the people allowed up the mountain we were blessed to hardly meet anyone on the trail. Felt very exclusive!

We then started climbing 200m or so up the side of the cliff onto to Opabin plateau. Amazing view on route of Mary Lake, Lake O'hara and the national park. This part was mainly scrambling up a rocky path. Wouldn't suggest going down that route, certainly not if you are scared of heights. Up is much better.
Once up onto the plateau you are greeted with a surreal world. Feels almost crater like, lush green and big boulders. There are a series of smaller lakes that lead up to Opabin lake at the top and the glacier that feeds them all.We were blessed with the most blue skies and lovely sunshine. Not too hot either. Meant that the lakes were super clear and reflecting the mountains in them. Absolutely beautiful. Feel almost spoilt to see that many lovely scenes in the one day!
To see more of the photos from the hike head to my Facebook page here.

While stopping for snacks in Lake Louise on the way home, I mentioned that I had actually been to Lake Louise or Moraine lake near by, so JJ and Sarah declared we were detouring to Lake Moraine and were going to take me there while we were so close. Moraine Lake is also just beautiful and an easy place to visit if you are in Banff. It's a bit of a tourist trap, but as were there in the evening most of the crowds had dispersed. The most striking thing about Moraine Lake is the colour. The photos don't do it justice. It looks as if it has been dyed.
The journey home of course contained the obligitory Anne and JJ roadshow. We sing out hearts out to some sort of cheesy song, accompanied by some awesome dance moves, amusing the hell out of whoever else is in the car. Sarah's tweet sums it up pretty well I feel

rerevisitedHighlight of the amazing hike to Lake O'Hara: couple of Brits singing their little Shania Twain hearts out. Thx @ateabutnoe & @annejsimmons!

The most amazing day had. Next weekend it's off to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia...

Hiking, Stampede, Harry Potter and the Calgary Folk Fest

Stanley Glacier Hike - 11th July 2009

The ThoughtWorks Hike Club headed out on another expedition. This time thankfully in much hotter and sunnier weather than the previous hike to Nihahi Ridge. A pretty decent sized group of us (8 in total) headed out to the Stanley Glacier, which is just in British Columbia, past Banff and towards the Radium Hot Springs.
For a reasonably moderate effort we were awarded with spectacular scenery. We parked the car down on the road and walked up the valley towards the toe(???) of the actual ice flow. The first part of the hike was through a forest that had suffered from a big forest fire a while back, you could still see signs of it today. We crossed the creek and carried on marching up the valley into the more rocky residue of the glacier itself.We didn't make it right up into the ice flow, but we got pretty far up. There were some big waterfalls, many cheeky chipmunks and even a Pika, which is the kind of animal that Pikachu is. Weird looking thing, looks like a cross between a chinchilla and a guinea pig. If thats possible!

It was a really nice day out. Always good to get out into the fresh air and enjoy the beautiful mountains that we are so lucky to have just on our doorstep.

The Calgary Stampede - 12th July 2009

Stampede is a crazy time in Calgary. It seems that for the majority of people living in and around Calgary this is what they look forward for the whole year. Stampede is mostly about the Rodeo competition, but there's also Agricultural displays, dog shows, Chuck wagon racing and a big funfair, all in the heart of downtown Calgary.
Not only do people go to this week long event but all over the city people go Stampede mad. Most workplaces have a mandate of Cowboy attire for the week. Jeans, checked shirts and large belt buckles are mandatory if you don't want to look a muppet. Loads of buildings cover the front of their carefully architectured buildings in hay bales and wooden fences in the Rodeo spirit. There are free breakfasts every day around the city and tonnes of other goings on. To be honest I found the whole thing rather surreal.The food is also pretty bizarre at the Stampede grounds. Deep fried is the order of the day, and deep fried Oreos are considered a Stampede delicacy.

I was pretty excited though at attending my first rodeo competition. The Rodeo heats go on all week and I had managed to get tickets for the final day. They run a very slick operation, having constant entertainment and riders for nearly 3 or 4 hours. There was the steer wrestling, where the rider jumps of his horse and brings the steer to the ground. There was the event where the rider has to lasso the steer, jump of his horse and then tie up the steers feet. Bareback horse Rodeo, Saddle horse Rodeo, bull Rodeo where the riders had to stay on for at least 8 seconds, and were given points based on their style and the craziness of the animal they were riding, and then the Barrel Racing, which I really liked. This was the only women's events and boy could these ladies ride. They had to get round the three barrels and back over the finish line in the shortest amount of time. These cowboys and cowgirls are seriously hardcore. The injuries that they must of obtained over the years must be pretty awful. There's not much that would over get me on one of those bulls let me tell you.Really good day out though and definitely something worth seeing one day of you ever get the chance.


Harry Potter and the Calgary Folk Fest - 26th July 2009
Tim came up to Calgary to visit for the weekend. Wicked as always... We had a lovely weekend of weather so got up to lots of nice things. He arrived nice and early on the Friday, which gave us time to finally go and see the new Harry Potter movie. I quite liked it actually, kind of different to the previous movies, and a little bit too much teenage lovin for my liking but other than that definite thumbs up. We then went to the River Cafe which is a lovely restaurant on Princes Island, where the food is all organic and locally grown and raised and you can eat alfresco in the park. I love the place! The added bonus was that the Calgary Folk fest was going on, in the park so we also had the main stage music to entertain us while we dined.
The Folk Fest - Yes there was very hippy moments but in general the music covered loads of Genres from Jazz to Hip Hop, from Big Band to Gospel and everything in between. It was fun atmosphere and it was a seriously hot and sunny day. There were a bunch of little stages with various people playing and then in the evening there was the Main Stage as well. The main stage has a brilliant concept called the 'Tarp'. First thing in the morning the more dedicated of the festival goers charge to the Main Stage and lay down tarps. Everyone 'respects the tarps' doesn't steal your spot, you can leave your things there all day and they'll still be there when you come back in the evening. Brilliantly one of my work colleagues was great enough to do this and let us all come and share her tarp in the evening. There was a great chilled out atmosphere, and it was just a nice way to spend the evening with a bunch of good friends.
I'm actually currently on a plane on the way to Chicago. Via Minneapolis as the flights were so expensive to go direct. There's some nasty turbulence so as I'm typing this my laptop is moving from side to side!

Good times!!