It’s been a good trip so far. I spent some time digging through old bits and pieces this morning. I’m bringing a lot of photos home to scan, if I’m ever able to leave. It’ll be nice to have them all backed up on my computer. I could even throw them into my spanking new digital photo frame!

While digging around, I came across some old stories I wrote when I was ten or eleven. I usually had my stories depict terrible things happening to my friends. Here’s one of them (I left the grammar/spelling errors in):

The evil spirit

One day in the land of fortune the king was having a ceramony for his 78th birthday but back at Nemisis, the land of evil, evil was was stirring up. You see a long time ago there were two men and they were lost in a forrest for 4 days and had no food so while one man was sleeping the other man ate him. When he got back the town beheaded him for what he had done so every 40 years he comes back and feasts on someones flesh.

Anyways

The king was celebrating his 78th birthday. When all of a sudden, huge dark clouds apeared over the city and it started to rain. Suddenly a man flew down at Steven and crushed his head. Then Fraser tried to kill him to impress the girls but failed and then Robert the king came and defeated him by stabbing him with a knife.

After Robert killed the spirit he called his servants to clean up the mess of Stevens brain, guts, and body parts and store them for memories.

The End

My writing’s all been downhill since this, I’m afraid.

Look, a dancing robot!

[via]

Lastly, a quick good luck to everyone starting NaNoWriMo this weekend. I won’t be joining you this year, unfortunately, but I’m looking forward to seeing you all sweat!

Anyway, off to play a little Fallout 3 before bed.

My friend Tanya had a baby girl, so I drove down to Kamloops for a visit. I stupidly forgot my camera, but I took a shaky phone video that I’ll be able to show her when she’s 20 and the world communicates via digitally-enabled telepathy, when cellular phones are a thing of ancient history.

I bought some scuba equipment while I was in Kamloops from a good friend of mine. She gave me a great deal. I’m planning on taking lessons in the next few months and then heading to the Bahamas with her for a week on a live-aboard dive ship, so that should be a lot of fun.

I then drove to Vancouver to visit some more friends of mine. It was around 38 degrees Celsius (100.5 Fahrenheit) and my air conditioning was broken, so the trip was a little painful, but we made it alive. Once there, I had a fantastic time. The friends I was staying with had a Canada Day party with great food, drink, and Rock Band, so it was a fun night.

I hope to make it out to Vancouver more often this next year. Living on an island with oppressive ferry rates to get to the mainland can really make you feel trapped at times, but it’s worth the cost for the occasional weekend trip.

Last time I was in Kamloops, most of my friends were gone and I was there strictly for leisure, so I had a lot of downtime. With friends in town, and half the week dedicated to work, time flew by this trip, and I’m actually a little sorry to leave. I had a good time.

The weather was great in Kamloops, which was a pleasant surprise after walking through rain and looking up to grey skies all winter. I never realized how much my mood is affected by weather. I wouldn’t say I was depressed this winter, but I was just generally disinterested in everything around me. Now that we’re having the occasionally sunny day, I find myself going back to my hobbies and wanting to pick up new ones. It might have something to do with spending the winter in wet darkness rather than snow.

At least this trip home had a little excitement in it. When I first arrived at the airport, I walked into the washroom and someone was being yelled at for smoking. He ran out, and they just let him go. I wish I had known you’d only get a stern scolding in this situation back when I smoked. I might have chanced it.

After that, I sat down in a seat facing the tarmac. An aircraft taxied passed, and the air from its jet engines blew a big, metal carry-on luggage cart about fifteen feet into the air, smashing it against the window in front of me. Thankfully, the pane was laminated glass or something and the cart just bounced off of it. If it hadn’t, I may not have had all the proper body parts remaining to type out this post. It was cool in that life-flashing-before-your-eyes sort of way.

It was a refreshing trip away, at least. Maybe I’ll feel a little more energized now.

My trip to Kamloops is going surprisingly well. My taxi driver was friendly and interesting, and the traffic was light. I bypassed the check-in line at the airport by using the self check-in machine. No one was in the security line, so I walked on through to my on-time flight. Arriving in Vancouver, I had a rice bowl and beer before chatting with a friend in town here on my cell.

I’m sure my good luck will run out any minute now. My next plane will probably go up in flames.

..not by me, of course. I’m no terrorist, friendly airport security people…

It’s nice to be home for the holidays. I’ve never missed this town, but there are people here whom I miss dearly while away, so it’s great to see them.

I also got to see my dog again. I missed her. She even recognized me through the beard. My sister brought her Min Pins over for the day. They’re little bundles of concentrated evil. I’ve never understood the attraction of Min Pins, but their owners absolutely love the breed. To me they just seem wiry, cold, and cruel. They constantly act and look like a startled deer. Her dogs pretended to not recognize me, but I know they knew me. They were just using the beard as an excuse to freak out. Concentrated evil.

I forgot I would have to bring gifts back home, and I didn’t really pack accordingly. I received a lot of books this year. I think I’m going to have to carry another suitcase on the plane exclusively for books.

I also received a small briefcase containing a tear-apart golf putter. It’s a putter in three pieces that you screw into each other to make a whole putter, much like a professional billiards player does with his cue stick, but with a putter.

Yeah, it confuses me also.

All in all, it’s been a good trip. I’m here until Sunday, and most of my friends have abandoned me for work and vacations, so I should be able to get a good amount of reading done, at least.

I hope all of you had a good Christmas, if Christmas is your thing.

I’m not a big fan of the Christmas season. I’m a bit of a Scrooge, from his pre-haunting days, and I’m typically sick of all things red and green before December even rolls around. I could conceivably get into the spirit if everyone would wait until the week of Christmas before they started celebrating, but that’s just not going to happen.

I do enjoy visiting with family and friends in Kamloops, but that’s really it. Christmas, to me, is a time of pain and suffering and misery. Suffering through crowds of sweaty, overweight people in the shopping malls, cringing in pain whenever a terrible, high-pitched Christmas carol is blared in my direction, and wallowing in misery as everyone around me tries to hold me down and waterboard me with holiday cheer.

I moved to Victoria, British Columbia’s capital city and tourist haven, at the beginning of this year, and my apartment is close to the downtown core, so as an added bonus I get horse-drawn carriages full of tourists singing Christmas carols outside of my window. Unfortunately, the street is just a little too far away to be able to properly pour boiling water on them as they pass.

I don’t mind Christmas wishes, and even Christmas music, within a week of the holiday, but if you bring it up any earlier than that, I will hurt you. I’ve asked for a taser this year, and I will be using it next winter.

I had to return to Kamloops to attend a close friend’s wedding last weekend (more on that later), and I needed to buy a couple of new all season tires to get me there in one piece. After having the tires installed and balanced, I learned that my entire braking system was trashed. Pads, rotors, capilars, and other stuff I don’t know anything about – everything needed to be replaced. I ended up spending 60% of my car’s worth on repairs.

Today I come home, and I have gutter water draining from a ceiling light fixture onto my new bed.

Some of my friends believe I spent a large part of my youth punching babies in the face, because that’s the only way to explain my horrendous karma. I’d just like to say for the record, and hopefully whatever karma-controlling being or energy that is out there is listening, those babies totally deserved it.