Hell on Wheels Twitter Roundup

It's been a busy summer for the Hell on Wheels cast and crew! They're currently filming season 4 around Calgary, and I've JUST started watched season 3. It took forever for the library to stock it, then I had to get in the queue. It started off a bit slow, but it's picking up the pace by episode 4. My favourite thing about it is the Alberta scenery, I think. And Eva is my favourite character. It's fun to keep an eye on Twitter and see what they're up to, even if there are minor spoilers.

The Fourth Season of Hell on Wheels

The Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo was a MONTH ago already! How did that happen? I still want to recap with whole weekend, because it was an epic one, but I'm going to start with a Hell on Wheels roundup.

Hell on Wheels was not only renewed for a fourth season, they're doing 12 episodes instead of just 10. The cast and some assorted behind-the-scenes people did a panel at Comic Expo, and it was about time! Unfortunately it started rather late, and because there were so many people on the panel (which was great, but...) it was logistically complicated and there wasn't as much time to hear them talk as would have been nice to have. There were some spoilers for season three, which I haven't seen because it's not out on DVD yet, but I was kind of expecting that might happen. The cast did a free autograph signing (mostly you pay for autographs at cons) after, but I had to go get in line for Tom Felton so I couldn't go. I hope they come back again next year!

Also, I don't know what it is about Comic Expo lighting, but you're not allowed to use a flash (which makes sense, but...) which means that unless you're a professional or at least a serious photography hobbyist, your photos don't turn out very well. Sigh...

I totally approve of Dohn's Darth Vader shirt.

Anson brought his new dog, Mac, who's basically now the star of Anson's twitter account.

 

I realized as I was sorting through these that I took a disproportionately high number of pictures of Chris...

Feel the bromance!

And most importantly, I give you a massive roundup of tweets going back through March - all about Hell on Wheels! And thanks to Suzette Chan's live-tweeting of the HoW panel, most of the highlights are here too. It's been a busy spring for them. I'm very excited for season four! And to see season three when it FINALLY comes out on DVD in July...

The First Day of Summer, Calgary-Style

Things in Calgary are a bit discombobulated today! I've never seen anything like it - after surviving winters of -40 wind chills where the roads are dangerously icy, the trains can't run, and people still nearly kill themselves to get into downtown, I didn't think anything would just it down, but not-frozen water did it today! Low-lying neighbourhoods are evacuated, including downtown. Train tunnels into downtown are flooded, and most of the bridges are closed, as are government buildings and offices. Everyone who doesn't need to travel is being told to stay home, although of course a lot of people aren't listening...

 

We went for a walk to the top of the ridge, which is a couple of blocks from our house. We're very, very far above the water line, thankfully! There were two choppers circling around the bridges, and another one just flew over our house.



Looking west - you can see the train stopped on the bridge. The clump of trees on the river-side of the building in the top left corner is Bowness Park, which is apparently completely under water.

  

I don't think I've ever seen so many people in our park - there was a steady stream, and the parking lot was full.

 



This house usually has a nice wide lawn between it and the river. We talked about buying in that neighbourhood, but it's too far from the C-Train. VERY thankful we decided to buy at the top of the ridge instead!

 



A little island, completely submerged.

People who are out and about are tweeting lots of interesting photos. The photo of 11th Ave shows floodwaters stopping just a block away from where we used to live! The Stampede grounds are submerged, and the lower levels of the Saddledome are under water. It's all very surreal!

 

Hell on Wheels Twitter Roundup

I've been saving up a whole pile of Tweets that I've favourite, and I just have to share. We'll start with Hell on Wheels... lead Anson Mount is a regular Tweeter (his horse, Quigley, even has his own Twitter...) and has a bunch of pictures of the 'set' this year, which is really just Alberta prairie. Make sure you click on the links to see his photos. I'm not sure why some of them show up here and others don't...





More to come, eventually! I have a whole bunch of blog posts queuing up... :)

Jack the Giant Slayer

So, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Hank 'Beast' McCoy climb a giant beanstalk to rescue Princess Isabelle, King Blackbeard's daughter, from Davy Jones. They think Caesar Flickerman is on their side, but he turns out to have a hidden agenda, and chaos and shenanigans ensue.

Except for the annoying lady next to me who wouldn't stop talking, and for a couple of violent moments I could have done without, I quite enjoyed Jack. It was a good example of a lot of things I enjoy about movies; a fantasy setting, a less than prim and proper princess who has great armor, a charming love story, a wisecracking knight, a noble quest, great one-liners...and a Star Wars reference from McGregor. Classic!

It does, however, require quite a bit of willing suspension of disbelief! Like all fairy tales, there are a few plot holes. And like all fairy tales, you think you know how it's going to end, but when it got to the end, I was totally taken by surprise, and all I could think was "Moriarty!". If you do go see it, let me know if you get that reference. :)

I would not recommend taking small children...there were two particular scenes that were so icky I had to look away, plus the giants snack on people like we snack on baby carrots, so that was a bit icky as well.

I hope there's a sequel, featuring Elmont!

 

 

And in totally unrelated news, the cast of Hell on Wheels is beginning to arrive in Calgary, with season 3 scripts in hand. Eeeeeee! Filming doesn't start until April 24, but I guess they wanted to catch our snowy weather!

(Sorry, it looks like you have to click on the little links to view the photos...I'm just figuring out how to use Storify!)

Faith & Fangirling

(With credit to my friend Erin Erickson for somewhat inspiring the title of this post. :)

 

 

Well, this is coming a day late, which you may or may not have noticed. I did...but I had a German test this morning, so there wasn't much I could do about it. I tried to find a chart on line to show you how darn confusing possessive pronouns are, but I couldn't even! It's so confusing even Google can't help me. :P

 

So, last Sunday, October 28 (and that weekend we were in Red Deer at a conference, but that'll be its own post when I get organized!), was Reformation Sunday, the Sunday when we celebrate Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. It's also Confirmation Sunday at our church, when the youth who are around 14 years old, and who've been taking confirmation classes for two years, publicly express their faith and what they've learned, by presenting papers and essentially making a vow.



 

I don't have any photos from this year, so here's one of Trevor getting confirmed. :)

 

I've seen a lot of confirmation classes come and go, and you can usually tell from their papers which of the kids actually 'get' it, and which of them are just jumping through the hoops so they can 'graduate'. There were 14 this year, and I only knew a couple of them well, but you can tell so much about them from their papers, and even the ones I don't really know I still care about whether or not they get it. I don't really know why - maybe it's just the burden/gift God has given me (?). Anyway, there may have been a few tears, and not because I was over-tired from being at a conference all weekend. :)

 

Then the first weekend in November was our annual fall youth retreat, which I seem to have somehow and totally accidentally ended up becoming chair of. I think it's because I'm kind of bossy and I just like organizing stuff and so I sort of took over organizing meetings, which then just evolved into 'chairing' them (which I use loosely because we've been doing this for so long that we all pretty much just know what to do and how to work together - it's a great team of people!), but I'm also the registrar, which is a TON of work. Add that to homework, two weeks of being sick, and an unusually tempestuous registration process, and by the time Thursday night rolled around I was seriously questioning why I was putting myself through the agony.

 

But by Friday morning, I was fatalistically calm. If anything else went wrong, there wasn't any way to prepare for it, so it would just have to happen as it happened. Then my friend Brittni arrived to help and the kids started coming, and I got excited again. It's so much fun having a church building filled with life and excitement. Things went really well - we had some scheduling issues Saturday night, but I kept calm and changed the schedule, and it worked out well. I was proud of myself for not freaking out...a couple of years ago I wouldn't have been able to function under my schedule not proceeding as planned, but I'm getting more flexible in my old age. :P Pretty sure it's a God Thing!

 

Some of the 75-ish people at the fall youth retreat

 

By the time everyone left on Sunday, I didn't want it to end, which is how I usually feel on the last day of a retreat. You get this sense of community in a small group, living in a building all together for a weekend like that, which you don't really find anywhere else. I always feel like it's a very imperfect but tantalizing glimpse of what heaven will be like - a giant youth retreat, only without all of the logistical work. :)

 

Then on Monday I had this parcel card, so I went to the post office to pick it up. I figured that I must have forgotten to decline last month's movie club offering, and I was still thinking about the youth retreat, so I wasn't really mentally present in the post office when the clerk handed me a large bubble envelope that didn't look anything like a DVD. I stepped away from the counter and looked at the return address, and got very intrigued when I saw that it was from Shelli.

 

I didn't waste any time ripping it open, and found a recycled inter-office mail envelope. Curiouser and curiouser...and then I opened that, and found THIS:

 

 

 

I definitely said "OH MY GOSH" out loud, because I'm pretty sure the lady standing nearby turned around to look at me, but I was to busy processing to care. (For the first time, I did wish I had a smartphone so I could take a photo and post it somewhere right then and there, because fangirling shared is definitely more fun!) When I got home I had to Google the indecipherable signatures to check whose they were, and it is signed by the entire main cast of Hell on Wheels. How awesome is that? It was totally the cherry on top of an already awesome day! Thanks Shelli! I'm definitely a receptive audience! :)



Thanksgiving

This weekend was Thanksgiving here in Canada. I spent most of it doing lots of homework...and I have a history paper proposal due tomorrow, so I have nothing really exciting to blog about. :) I've got a lot going on - an editing contract, school, the fall youth retreat, allergy vaccinations, and the fall youth pizza fundraiser - but none of that is that exciting right now.

I did get this in the mail this week:

This is my 'thank you for making a donation to Sanctuary for Kids' gift. It's very exciting - it's a wine cork from the Sanctuary set. Gillian Horvath, a writer for Sanctuary, among other things, ran a 'Sanctuary Keepsake Campaign' and gave away Sanctuary set dec in exchange for donations to Sanctuary for Kids. I'm now the proud owner of a wine cork, which I have to now figure out a way to display so that it's also autographable by whichever of the cast I can catch... :)

I'm getting into Falling Skies and the BBC Sherlock - finally! And sadly, I was too busy with school to watch ANY of season two of Hell on Wheels, and now it's over, which has made me pretty cross! I'm doing everything I can to avoid spoilers until the season 2 DVD comes out...

Ok, now I really need to write my proposal and do my readings for tomorrow...I'll try to have something more exciting next week! I really am thankful that I get to go to school... :)

Fall in Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park

With the weather being what it is today - e.g. snowy - I want to remember the happier, warmer, times of summer! You may remember that in late July I met up with my new friend Shelli and we went to Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park. Trevor and I had the change to get out there on September 22nd, which feels like YEARS ago already, and I took 100+ photos of the beautiful fall colours. It was about 28 degrees, and it was SO gorgeous.

Looking west!

 

The old post office on what was the townsite.

 

I call this one: "The cattle on a Thousand Hills".

 

Alberta at its best!

 

The Bow River - I kept looking around for scruffy surveyors from Hell on Wheels. :)

 

CP Rail

 

Our Canadian heritage in motion!

 

The old post office from the other side.

 

Fall grasses

The difference in the scenery from when I was there just two months before was incredible - it was like seeing a totally different park. We hiked the same loop that Shelli and I did, but when we go back in the spring we're going to try one of the other ones - because we'll definitely be going back there. I can't believe I've lived here for thirteen years and been half an hour away from this gem of a place and had no idea. Check it out, Calgarians! :)

 

Now, off to make myself a nice mug of Earl Grey, hot...

 

Washington to Montana

Well, I'm quite pleased that my studying on Tuesday paid off and I managed to do quite well on my German test! Now, to keep it up for the rest of the year... :P

 

I'm just going to quickly wrap up the last few days of our road trip - we saw some pretty epic scenery coming through Washington State, Idaho, and Montana.

 

I don't remember where this was - about half-way between Seattle and Spokane. It was very arid and barren, and very beautiful.

 

We spent one night at a KOA in Spokane, which was my favourite of the three we stayed at. Partly because it was almost totally empty, mid-week after the long weekend. Also, it had VERY nice bathrooms. :) The only problem was the Union Pacific train line right across the edge of the property...but at least thanks to Hell on Wheels I knew to totally blame Thomas Durant for my lack of a decent sleep. :)

 

Our KOA in Whitefish was at least free of trains, planes, and automobiles, but the SPIDERS. Oh my, I do so hate spiders. The year that both Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets AND the Lord of the Rings with the giant spider was a traumatic year for me. Blech!

 

Anyway, Whitefish itself wasn't that exciting - we spent most of our time in Kalispell. The hike up the Whitefish ski hill was probably the highlight of our couple of days there - the weather was lovely the day we went (it rained the day before so we went shopping and to see the new Bourne movie...) and I took tons of pictures.

 

You know you're in a ski town when McDonald's feels like they need to put this sign on the door....

 

Using the timer setting on my camera...

  

I had a moment when I felt like we were on Endor...I'm not sure if you can see it in this little photo, but there's a moon in that sky. I'm pretty sure it was a moon and not a battle station, anyway...

 

View of the ski hill from the shore of the lake that was behind us in the photo above.

 

Fearless duck! There was a lady who kept trying to give me bread to feed the duck and lure it closer, but there were also about 40 seagulls lurking in the general vicinity. I was all like 'lady, you want to start a seagull feeding frenzy? Are you crazy?' Oy...

 

Llama at our campground. I think he was an actual llama and not a demon one....although I have this one photo of him where he's literally glowing, so I'm not toally sure...

 (And now I have the urge to watch the 'Llama Llama Duck' song, which I haven't watched in years and years, except I'm in the library at school and I don't have my earbuds. :(
 

Steampunk Buffalo. I have 'Guy on a Buffalo' stuck in my head everytime I see it, but it's more like 'guy on a steampunk buffalooooooooooo!'

 

We drove back on 'Going to the Sun Road' through Glacier National Park. I was pretty cheezed, because we found out after we were stuck in a huge morass of traffic with no signs whatsoever, that unlike Canada, you have to pay to even drive THROUGH a national park. So we had to pay $25 for the pleasure of driving at a snail's pace through a winding, white-knuckling, acrophobia-inducing, two-lane back road. Blergh! Still, it was some of the most impressive scenery I've ever seen in real life - it reminded me a lot of the New Zealand scenery you see in Lord of the Rings.

 

We made it home safely - they let us back in the country - and immediately got back into school. It was only yesterday when I actually finally moved the last of the camping stuff out of the dining room and down to the furnace room! Ooops...

 

Last weekend we went on a beautiful hike, so hopefully that'll be the topic of Tuesday's upcoming post!

Hiking in Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park

Life is funny sometimes. Opportunities come up and you respond to them as you feel appropriate, and I wonder: if we realized the vast consequences tiny decisions can influence, would we be more deliberate in our actions, or would we be paralyzed by indecision, or would we become even more careless when choosing actions? As a fan of scifi, particularly of the Stargate and Star Trek variety, where time travel, temporal paradoxes, and muddled time lines as the result of a moment's hesitation are all in a day's work, I thought I was rather aware of the ripples tiny decisions make, but one of those ripples snuck up and took me by surprise last week. :)

I'm sorry if you're one of the people who's ear I've already talked off about how great Sanctuary was/is, but that's where this ripple started. Last September I discovered my favourite TV show ever (which is really saying something...) and then started following the actors from it as they worked on various other projects, which is how I started watching Hell on Wheels. As the title may suggest, this show is not for the squeamish...it's on AMC, which will probably tell you quite a lot...anyway, the Sanctuary actor I started watching the show for keeps a low internet profile, so I started following the lead actor, Anson Mount, on Twitter. He's an interesting person, and while I don't always agree with him, he's more polite than a lot of Twitter celebrities with whom I don't agree, and he's really great about interacting with his fans.

In April Anson tweeted a blog that someone he knows had written about a visit to the set of Hell on Wheels. Of course I checked it out, and as I was very entertained by Shelli's 'voice', I started at the beginning and caught up on all of her old blog posts, and subscribed to new ones. I have a pretty wide range of blogs I follow, and I'm a fairly regular commenter, because I know how nice it is to know that someone's actually reading what you write. (Insert crickets chirping on my blog here. :) Shelli started chatting back, and eventually she was back in Calgary and emailed me to hang out, which really got me excited, because I really like making new friends, but in person I'm pretty much an introvert when it comes to starting up a conversation, so becoming internet friends first was a good way to get past my initial shyness (which, can you believe, has in the past been taken for snobbery?! :P).

And I figured what better way to introduce someone from LA to my favourite things about Alberta than to take a hike in a place I'd never been! :) Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park is about half an hour from my house, just west of Calgary on the way to Cochrane. It's so close and so beautiful, I can't believe I've never been there before.

CP Rail train and prairie skies!

The paths are mostly paved, and very well maintained. The views were absolutely stunning - we were close enough to Calgary to still glimpse Canada Olympic Park in the east, as well as see the mountains to the west.

Cute little critter!

One of the interpretive signs said that badgers live in the park, and I got really excited, because I didn't know we even had any in Alberta, but the park guide said that they're nocturnal so we wouldn't likely see one anyway. :( Still, we saw enough other things to make the hike worthwhile!

Old general store/post office. The original brick facing is piled up behind and to the left.

I ADORE rural decay. The old store is fenced off so we couldn't get too close, but it was close enough to spark my interest. The park was originally the site of a ranch, and a CP rail town with a brick-making industry. Eventually the town folded and all that's left is this building and a pile of bricks. My minor is in Canadian History, so this is all right up my alley!

It looked like rain!

We walked and talked for hours and hardly even noticed! I tend to get bored fairly easily when doing nothing but walking, because I'm usually multitasking like a crazy person, but when you add in talking about everything under the sun, the time just flew. :) The skies were clouding over and there was a bit of a drizzle by the time we were heading back, but despite faint thunder in the distance, we managed to avoid bad weather. My car needs a bath though...the road into the park is gravel, and very very very dusty!

After leaving the park we headed into Cochrane for some world-famous MacKay's Ice Cream, which you can read about on Shelli's blog...she posts more pictures and isn't as rambley as me... :)

So, thanks to Anson Mount, who I followed because of Hell on Wheels, which I checked out because of Christopher Heyerdahl and Sanctuary, which I first noticed because of Amanda Tapping and Stargate - in short, my fangirling of scifi - I met a friend, hiked, and ate ice cream. And it was a glorious break from a week of helping with Vacation Bible School...which is definitely a story all on its own. :)