Saturday, January 3rd

Despite the crazy snow in Vancouver, I managed to see some planets while on Saltspring Island. Venus was nearly overhead and Jupiter and Mars were quite close together near the horizon. I wore my sunglasses at night while we were driving to the ferry so that my nightvision stayed on. It was amusing.

Saltspring has very few streetlights and is great for astronomy.

Home!

And thankful. There was a bitch of a storm starting just before the Coquihalla toll booth and going until Abbotsford. What should have taken about two and a bit hours took me nearly four. It was hellishly scary. I had visibility of about 2 feet for a while there.

Pictures of stuff coming later. I'm waaaaaaaay too tired. Hooray for cool air! I think it averaged around 36 degrees Celsius when I was in Kelowna (105 or so Farenheit.)

To recap: driving=bad, home=good

Because I have absolutely ZERO sense of direction...

When reading yesterday's lightning post, please read "south" as "west" and "north" as "east". Thank you very much.

...

And weirdly, I do solo road trips, usually get where I'm going, and so far also get back home from them. (knock on wood, since I'm actually still in Kelowna for another day.

I can see my fingers reflected in the screen (mental note: laptop with matte screen, and one with a card reader) and, damn, it's weird seeing my fingers just...do stuff. Nifty. I want to keep typing and watching them. Lalalalala....I guess I could watch them do homework.

Meh. :P

One more day of school!!

Safely in Kelowna

Timeline for today so far.
1130-leave Port Coquitlam after the doctor's appointment (whee! a week of the antibiotics that taste like gah!)
1230-Pass through Hope
100-Coquihalla toll booth
130-arrive Merritt, eat at A&W...they've got a decent veggie burger...who knew??
215-leave Merritt (busy at the A&W)
400-arrive in West Bank and try to find my Oma and Opa's old house.
430-find the house by memory (10 years after the last time I was there!), take pictures
500-find where I'm staying, unpack car
515-phone around to let people know I'm here now
534-get off phone, get into swim suit
535- dive into pool...ohhhhhh yeahhhhhhh
538- hear thunder (pretty far away, but why take chances?)
538 and thirty seconds- jump OUT of pool
542-sudden massive rainfall and much closer thunder.
544-get online

Time to figure out where I'm going for class tomorrow...or supper first? Hmmm.

What happened to the sunny Okanagon I've heard rumours about??

Holy crap, the rain is coming down like CRAAAAAAAAZY, and the lights are flickering. HOORAY FOR LAPTOP!!!!

School

Tomorrow I leave for Kelowna to start a one week course. I'll be there from Monday to Saturday, coming home either Saturday or Sunday, then I'll start a two year program on Monday.

*whimper*

Oh, and I'm sick like yikes. I took three days off school in the second last week, then was almost better when I got WHAMMED with illness again. Summer colds are the worst. :P I've got a doctor's appointment on my way out of town. Hee.

Logan Lake

Heading up to Logan Lake (near Kamloops) today to play in the Provincial Disc Golf tournament. I'm excited. :)

I still have to pack some stuff up...and as demonstrated on previous occasions, I really, really hate packing. (I didn't mention hating packing for Pender, but I'm sure I thought it.)

Alsoplus, happy birthday Chris! You get to be older than me until October. :)

Oh, by the way...

I'm back from my trip. Heh...like...a week ago now. I'll do a big post later at some point. It was amazing.

Edmonton-Day Three

After arriving in Calgary Thursday night, I met up with my Oma, aunt, uncle, three cousins and eight second cousins (cousins once removed? My cousins' kids...whatever that definition is). It was really a neat coincidence because one of my cousins lives in the States and only comes up every so often with her kids. The last time I saw her in Calgary, I was watching her pack up her stuff to go to college in Kansas. That must have been twelve or more years ago.

After visiting for a bit, I went down to Vulcan, Alberta. I admit it, I was suckered in by some of the souveniers. Hee.

My Oma lives in Edmonton, and since she was coming up here at about the same time that I was, she came up with me. We stopped briefly in Red Deer to say hi to another aunt and uncle, then continued up to Edmonton. We arrived about 1130 and I crashed pretty hard.

Waking up this morning, I was still pretty tired, and I'm ready for a nap. Not really surprising, since I've done about 20 hours of driving in the last 48. Since the last time I was here was 2000 (!!!!) I'm going to stay another two nights and leave Monday morning. This has nothing to do with the fact that there's a giant mall a couple blocks away...nooooooo... ;) Plans today include visiting with my youngest cousins (6 and 10 years old), resting up and, of course, visiting the Giant Mall of Ultimate DOOM!

Hokay.

Excellent. I can post again.

Anyway, after 12 hours on the road, I'm in Calgary. And exhausted, yet wired. This is going to be fuuuuun!

I'm in ur street, stealing ur internetz

Time stamp: 10:30...off I go!

Crack of dawn, my butt. Crack of ten, more likely.

The Worst Part

I loathe packing. I think I've got pretty much everything packed up now except clothes, the laptop (what I'm typing on right now) and some snack type stuff in a cooler. The plan for tomorrow: get started really, really early and drive basically to Calgary. Yup, I'm nuts. Beyond that? Not really sure. I want to hit Edmonton for the mall, then the choice is north to try and get to the Territories, or east to Saskachewan to surprise Sarah. Hee. Hmmmm...that might only work if I ask her what her address is. Tonic water all around! Maybe both. How many days do I get to do this?

See you all on the flipside. I plan on blogging/posting pics/being in general contact with people.

*SPECIAL LOVE to everyone for being so supportive of this trip*

*grumble*

I'm really crabby and have been for the last little while, on and off. I dunno, man. I think it's the heat. I'm having trouble sleeping and staying on schedule. :P

So, I'm planning a crazy, solo road trip. I've got eight days or so, so I'm planning on hitting Calgary and Edmonton for sure, then maybe swinging north to see if I can hit the Territories. I doubt it, but who knows? Stranger things have happened. I'm looking for a laptop. It'd be really nice to have WiFi, be able to blog (since I do that SO often, heh) email and get articles published at Crafty Crafty. I've found a bunch of places that sell used laptops for really cheap and I'll be wandering over to a few of them tomorrow to see what's going on with them.

Hmmm

I am morose. I've been filling out a "Where have you been" map thingumajiggy on Facebook and I haven't really been very many places. I need to do some traveling.

I wonder how much flights to Asia cost...

Randomness

-I'm feeling better now...gotta cut back on the caffeine though. Yikes.

-I'm spinning yarn on my little drop spindle that I made all by myself. I'm currently working on a bunch of smaller than lace weight. Ummmmm...yeah. It's kind of taking forever. Another name for that is "cobweb". I think I may just keep what I've got and make a doll scarf or something. I'm getting impatient.

-New pics up on Flickr!

-Yesterday was only my second day in two months that I hadn't been called to teach. It was nice to have a relaxed day (aka...going out to MISSION to do a store...) and it was my mom's bday!

-Related to the Mission thing, I have the opportunity to go out to Mission/Abbotsford every so often. When I'm driving on the #1, I almost always get the urge to just keep on driving. Just follow the mountains and keep on going. I don't really want to live anywhere else but BC, but sometimes I just want the adventure and anonymity that starting over in a small prairie town would bring. I think I've been watching too much Corner Gas...

For real this time...

Unless there's a tragic ferry scheduling mishap, Dave and I will be on Vancouver Island, in Campbell River for the weekend. Bye!

PS: WHEE!! YARN SHOP!!!

Soooo...

It's after closing time for government buildings, including school boards.

Looks like I'll be finding out on Monday.

In order to escape from the ARGH! I'll be in Victoria all tomorrow with Dave. :)

Blargh

side note: I wonder how many of my posts here begin with an inarticulate noise...quite a few, I'd imagine.

SO!

My computer is currently broken! Yay! Hopefully Dave will be able to work his computer-fu on it and make things work. Seriously, WTF is up with me and broken computers over the last few weeks? Think happy "please don't lose any of the files" thoughts at my general direction if you please. The first thing I was going to do last night after uploading photos was to do a full back up of everything. DAMMIT. I realized this morning that I had close to 700 photos that I hadn't backed up yet. Eeeeeee... no good... Please oh please...

Today was lousy. Computer broken, angry about no job, etc. ad nauseum.

Then I started getting a really bad headache and my stomach started hurting in that fun, monthly kinda way. "Ah!" I said, raising my finger to the sky, then quickly placing it back on the steering wheel (as I was driving at the time). "This is why I've been so ARGH today, and would've been more ARGH if I hadn't been in Nanaimo." Hooray for PMS. :P At least this time I get to pretend my insanity has a cause.

I've been doing a lot of driving over the Pitt River bridge between my house and Maple Ridge. Several years ago, when I was first going over there regularly, there were bright orange plastic posts, about 4 feet tall, along the centre lane to discourage drivers from changing lanes whilst (mmm...pretentious Englishe writinge.) going over the bridge. I hadn't been that way in a while, and I noticed that every. Single. One. of these posts had been shortened to roughly 1 foot high...about the height of an average car bumper. As they are now, these posts are more of a polite suggestion than any type of deterrent. You know what really would deter people instead of plastic posts? A concrete divider. :D

Or else a PMSing, underemployed teacher using her under-utilized "teacher glare". Man, put one of those every twenty feet...THERE WILL BE NO LANE CHANGING!!!

Greetings From Nanaimo!

This internet terminal doesn't have a very good space bar... $1/ten minutes! Ai-yi-yi! It's in the lobby of our hotel and I'm standing up after seven hours of disc golf.

It's snowing here. It's kind of nice, because we don't have to come home tonight...but I'm not sure when we'll come home tomorrow...maybe early. Auntie J, could you tell Mom if you see her online that we're ok in the snow? Thanks!

Last night we had dinner out at a family restaurant with juke boxes on some of the tables...not ours though. :( Probably just as well because I wouldn't've paid attention to Dave if there had been. "Ooh! They've got FLOYD!!! Huh? What? Yuh huh...ooh! Jewel!" *clicky clicky* I had a rather uninspired seafood soup and "Caesar" salad. Oh well. Then Dave and I went to see Happy Feet, because we would have just been around our room so we figured we'd actually go out.

Disc golfing was pretty awesome. We played in the COOOOOOLD for a lot of the time. Things were warming up a bit and the sun even made a wee brief appearance, but then it started snowing. At one point I had to switch from my white discs because the ground was covered! I slid down a hill on one of my discs. It was amusing, but my hands froze after that. Luckily it was the last hole.

Also! Guess who won Amateur Ladies? Yeah...that'd be me. :D I've got a trophy and twenty bucks to prove it. WOOO!!

Ok, time's up. *love* Talk to everyone later.

Grrrr...

OMG. I hate packing so very much.

Off to the island for a disc golf tourney this weekend. Wish Dave and I the luck!

The Diet Nobody Wants

(aka: Why do I always feel compelled to tell the internet that I've been throwing up?)

Starting around 0800 yesterday morning, I started feeling kind of icky. I blamed the fact that it was 0800 in the morning and I hadn't slept well. I've been yo-yo'ing back and forth between staying up all night, then sleeping most of the day. Rinse and repeat. So yesterday, I was going to a teaching ProD day that I'd been invited to and that I really wanted to go to...the catch being that it was in Abbotsford at 0900. And it was raining. Hard. I don't like driving much at the best of times, and driving out to Abbotsford (unfamiliar roads), in the hard rain (srsly...it was REALLY coming down) and not feeling well...it wasn't high on my list of things that I'd really like to do.

So, I made it out there, largely without incident (found Abbotsford Airport by accident...) and mostly on time (due to aforementioned Abbotsford Airport incident). By this time, I was feeling absolutely foul. I was dizzy, felt nauseated...really fun. I made it through the (very very interesting! I'm glad I went) conference, ate some very nice Greek food that had been provided for us and drove home in the slightly (very slightly) less pounding rain and got home around two. I promptly went to bed, feeling like death, in preparation for date night with Dave.

When I woke up, I felt ok. Not great...just decent. Better than death. Dave arrived and we hung out for a bit while I showed him Evil Genius. Then...then I started feeling really, really bad. REALLY bad.

To make a long story short (all together now: "TOO LATE!!") I was basically getting rid of everything I've ever eaten in the last six years from midnight until six in the morning when my mom's chewable anti-nauseant finally kicked in. I then slept until nearly five pm.

Currently, I feel ok. Not great....but I just had a shower and that seemed to help. Bleah, I say.

Oh, and Dave is my witness in this. Around 1230 or so (after I was sick the first time...first of MANY) I sat up on the couch where I'd been lying with my arm over my face, and in a panicked voice asked, "HAVE I POSTED YET??? IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT!!!" After being assured that yes, indeed I did post after midnight the previous day, I fell back into my couch stupor.

SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU GUYS????