I Hate this class

Today on the way home from school I saw a blind man walk into the corner of the wall. He was moving his little ball on a stick thing back and forth in front of him but I guess he turned faster than it did and didn't realise where the wall was. It looked painful.


It's about as painful as working on math questions for 12 hours and not really seeming to make any progress on finding the answers. That's what my current math class, The Art and Craft of Problem Solving seems to be all about. I find I can either solve the problem quickly or not at all. Sometimes...rarely can I solve the question after working on it for hours on end. I figure I have to try.

I have a little notebook I take with me to work on some problems on the bus because I find I don't have enough time to find the answers even though I have no other classes (I work the weekdays I don't have class). Today in the math lounge up at Burnaby campus some people were telling me how they had made as little progress as me. That was good to hear....except that they first looked at the problems the night before.

I also found out I'm the only non-math major taking the class. One girl who dropped the class after the first lecture heard me say that I hate the class. She said, "Well, why are you a math major, then?" and was surprised to hear I wasn't.

I just want the term to end ASAP. Thank god the marking scheme is good.

Vacations

So...as usual I haven't posted on here in a LONG time. That's because I've been busy.

In mid August I finished my work at the school and had two weeks off until school started and I went back to my old job. I jammed those 2 weeks full of vacationing. On Aug 22nd, Sara and I took off on a Greyhound to Whistler for two nights on a romantic getaway.

Well there we went up on the gondola and then the peak chair.
There's many more photos on my facebook.

Then I helped Sara's family move across Maple Ridge.
It was a good workout.


After a few days at home it was time to once again head out (on Aug 29th). I took a ferry over to Salt Spring island and met my parents along the way. The next day my mom and I hiked a mountain while my dad was in meetings.

Looking over at Vancouver Island and some northern Gulf Islands.

The mountain had some really small doors on it that appeared to be for little people.

After Salt Spring we spent a short 4 hours on Vancouver Island buying groceries and then headed to Saturna Island for the night. The next day we took the ferry back to Vancouver Island where we dropped my brother and his belongings off at my aunt's place. Then my mom, dad, two little sister's and I went off camping. Above is Natalie. Below if you look at the big version of the photo you can see a guy who must have dyslexic. We were stopped at a light watching him put the letters up.

This is me exhausted after 5 hours of kayaking/dragging a kayak
along rapids in a shallow river.

Coombs, where there are goats living on the roof of the store.

My sister Emily, the book worm.

The end.

Tagged...long ago

So I was actually tagged back in June by Tanya but have been quite lazy about it. Plus there has been more exciting stuff to write about.

- Each player starts with eight random facts about themselves. - Those who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight facts and post these rules. - At the end of the post, choose some people to get tagged and list their names.

1. I like swimming in lakes and oceans. It's much more exciting than swimming in a rectangular boring pool. If the pool has diving boards and water slides or waves then it's better, but swimming in a lake outside, and diving or jumping off cliffs, is pretty awesome. I don't mind the cold water. It's awesome to swim out to an island...a completely separate piece of land that people can't just walk to.

2. I volunteer a lot, of at least I used to. I can't say I've volunteered for much in the last few months. I was in the leadership ground in middle school and then student council for some of high school. At university I've been involved in so much stuff that I've reached the highest student ambassador level the program has and separately has become an inductee into the leadership society. Strangely they stopped inducting people after me. Or at least stopped putting it on their website. Also, through volunteering I met my amazing girlfriend Sara.

3. I have been very slow at getting my education. I am entering my 7th year of post secondary. I don't know if it's fair to say that though considering I have never taken classes in the summer and usually don't take 5 classes or even 4 in a semester. I'm going at it slow and for more than a year now I've kept jobs along the lines of what I want to do after I graduate. So I think it's all good. Still, I'm sure many people I graduated high school with have already graduated from university.

4. I seriously lack knowledge about music. Do not ask me who is in what band or who a song is by or what year it came out or even what the name of a lot of songs are. Hell, you may often catch me singing incorrect lyrics to a song. I didn't really get into music until after high school and before that mostly listened to what my parents had playing at home. I also never learned to play any instruments. This is not to say that I hate music. I don't! I love it, I'm just saying I know very little about it.

5. While we're on the topic of what I don't know about. Let's take cars. I also know nothing about them. Maybe being a guy means I should know all about them and which ones are good and which ones are crap and all the technical stuff about how they work or even the simple stuff that apparently everyone should know (according to my old roommates Rob and Q) but I do not know a lot of this stuff (Big run-on sentence there). So shoot me.

6. Apparently I can travel through time. I'm not sure how it got started (perhaps with a Balderdash game at Whistler when I was sick) but I have a time machine or I'm really from the future or maybe I'm from the distant past. Anyways, I'm reaaaaaly old (at least 30?) and I may be able to unmake you so you don't exist by getting rid of one of your parents before your date of birth. You've been warned! Check out the game at www.sheakoshan.net.

7. I have a really good sense of directions usually. I tend to remember where things are and like to figure out how to get places. Since I don't have a driver's license of car (see 5), it is often on the bus although some of it may involve trails through the woods. I don't like to use the trip planner on the Translink website as that thing can be seriously stupid sometimes and I may be able to come up with a better way than it.

8. I have some sayings that I say. Apparently I say some things with such emphasis that they get remembered and become quite famous. That or a fellow classmate and film maker gave me a few lines to say and chose some odd cuts of me saying them and it will be forever remembered in such a way. Anyways, how would you know, "You weren't even there!"

Now I tag Farley.

Birkenhead Camping

So camping was quite the trip!

We got a pretty good start and after I slept in the car along the way for a good hour we arrived at the campground around 1pm-ish. We being Sara, Tanya, Brad, Nate, Erin and I. Shortly after, Greg, Gordo, Murray, Jon, and Alex showed up. After some problems locating our sites due to Brad Slavin's name being mispelled Slaeir and not Brady, we headed down to the lake to go for a swim.

It turned out the lake had been flooded and the beach was underwater. Also, the picnic tables were floating. We spend most of our swim time out on the raft floating in the lake. I went back there and swan at least once each day except the morning we packed up to leave.


Anyways, the first day dragged on and Rob failed to make an appearance with his truck and most of our supplies and all of our food. You see, he had stayed behind to drive Jess and Adam and didn't have his truck until later in the day in order to load everything up because for some reason it was left in Langley. So he showed up at 1:30am long after the park gates were closed. Many of us didn't eat between 9:30am Friday and 6:30am Saturday except for a rice cracker or cookie or two. Rob, Jess and Adam had help from a park ranger to get some stuff into the campground but ended up at the Brady site until morning.




Complaining over with, the trip was a lot of fun. We had a ton of food aside from that day, continually making more than we needed. It was really good food too. I took a bunch of photos, played a bunch of games, and swam a lot.


Sara had never slept in a tent before when camping, and I think she had a lot of fun. Before the trip we had gone out and bought a tent and sleeping bag and air mattress to share and that was definitely a good idea.

Saturna Canada Day Weekend

So, another weekend, another getaway from the every day routine. Sara and I met up Saturday morning after she picked up her new camera phone. It's pretty sweet with a 2MP camera. I recently bought a new memory card for my phone so I was good to go and take a plethora of photos.


We took a small ferry to Galiano and then Mayne and then an almost as small ferry over to Saturna. My dad picked us up and we ate a late dinner at my parent's place. It turned out both my grandparents were over as my grandpa had come in from his sailboat. He's never missed a Canada Day on Saturna for the last 15 years.

The next day we woke up and headed out to the ball field at the other side of the island where the Canada Day Saturna Island Lamb BBQ always takes place. Here's a quick little panorama of it.

Here's a view of the fire where the lambs were cooked.


Here's a photo of the wooden training sailboat that decided to crash into the reef and may very well have leaked fuel into the ocean.

The next day Sara and I went for a walk to the General Store and the rec center. We also played Fluxx with my sisters and later poker with my brothers. It was a fun chill day.


On Tuesday we watched some home videos from 1986 and 1996 among other years and then Sara and I caught a couple ferries back to the mainland. It was a pretty good relaxing trip.



Next up is camping!

Camping

So the first camping trip of the season was last weekend. It was not planned much. We left town at around 7:30pm and we arrived after dark to our campsite. The campsite was on route to where we really wanted to be which was at Chehalis lake. Apparently the road was washed out plus it was really dark so we decided to camp along the way. In the morning we were all setup and didn't feel like moving. It turned out to be a pretty sweet spot.


There was a nice hill around the place where we could throw frisbees, beach balls, softballs and baseballs...oh and lots of rocks. None of them ended up hitting Rob's truck luckily.


We also went on a few hikes and discovered that we were at the base of a giant tree planter's block (plot of land where they plant new trees). Because that trees weren't very old, we could see all the way to the top of the block. I thought it might be a good idea to hike up to it and get a view, so the next day Greg, Gordo and I made the trek. It took really long because of massive underbrush but it was a really good expedition. You see there was no trail, so it goes beyond the word 'hike'.


We came down from the block by going around the edge in the older growth forest which had very little underbrush. Back near camp we found the other three chopping a log to be able to move it out of the way. Oh, and Rob had chopped his arm with the hatchet.


We also played a lot of board/card games well camping because it rained a lot. We played risk more than one night well huddled under the tarp hanging off the back of Rob's truck.


One night we struggled to find dry pieces of wood everywhere we could to actually make a decent fire to roast marshmallows. It was quite the activity, searching under rocks and large piles of wood using a flashlight. Pulling bark off the underside of logs.

Hike/Relay/Playland Weekend

So last weekend was pretty exhausting and awesome. It started with a hike way over in Lynn Headwaters park in north Van. It was a work retreat thing with a bbq following except that Sara and I were going to have to take off from the place before the bbq. I invited Sara because the idea was that employees could bring their family or friends along, but I guess as it was Friday afternoon lots of people were busy. As it turned out, Sara was the only non-employee there!



One of my coworkers, Simon was nice enough to give Sara and I a ride to the seabus on his way home. He has since flown back to the UK where he is from and I don't know if I'll ever see him again. Sara had never taken the seabus although it's not exactly that exciting.

So then we made it to the Relay for Life just a little bit late. It turned out the ceremonies started at 7pm, not the actually walking/running. This time around was much different than last year. We were all dressed up as Justice League super heroes! I was the Green Lantern and Sara came as Gypsy. It was a lot of fun but quite exhausting after the hike. Sara and I took a nap or two part way through. Around midnight we did a lap around the track in formation with the Justice League theme song playing from a speaker wheeled behind us. It was pretty awesome. This is probably how we won the most spirit and best costumes awards. What we got from it was a bunch of old girly bath and hair products though. We divided these up at the breakfast table the next morning. Oh yes, and when we were doing our final lap the sprinklers came on and started soaking our packed up gear so we had to rescue it.
On Saturday Sara and I chilled and recuperated and then on Sunday we headed out to Playland after buying season passes. We figure that we'll go there a bunch of times this summer (mostly on weekdays when it won't be as busy). This time was a lot of fun, because although it was the weekend it was quite cloudy and looked like it was going to rain. This meant super short (almost non-existant) line up for most of the rides. We would get off one and walk right on to the next one. It was pretty awesome. Afterward Sara took me out to Eastside Mario's. That is one awesome restaurant. Endless bread and salad or soup with your pasta. Yummy.

Checklist

- Backbone

- Wheels

- Education/Career Plan