Near the End

On boxing day we went to Cloverdale and had a little mini christmas with my Grandparents. Sara came over and my grandma even gave Sara presents even th0ugh she'd just found out Sara would be there a few hours earlier.



Near the end of the year I got to go skiing once. It was at Seymour, and it was bad conditions. All the days I had free to go skiing seemed to have crappy weather for the local mountains. Miraculously, my parents managed to score the use of my grandma's time share over in Whistler to go skiing for a day. Unfortunately there wasn't enough room there for me...there was a strict person limit. Hopefully I get out for skiing a few more times this season. We shall see.


After that day of skiing at Seymour there was a power outage at my grandma's house in Cloverdale. My sisters, my mom and I ended up playing Blokus by candle light.


Of course there was also the 24 hour 24 marathon spanning from Dec 30th and 31st.

Christmas on Saturna

So, note I will start making more posts here as I'm not doing Photo of the Day this year. I actually have a backlog of things to talk about since I had winter vacation. First, there was Christmas vacation at Saturna with most of my family. There was just 7 of us, as my sister was down in South America and for a brief time Anarctica watching penguins.

Saturna had really good weather most of the 5 days I was there, it was sunny and pretty warm.


It still felt like Christmas though as we went Christmas caroling one night.
Here's Ben and Farley getting along well we walked between houses.


I played a game of monopoly (Star Wars edition) with my siblings which is something that's almost become a tradition for us when we visit Saturna. Apparently I have no photo documenting it so here is one of Farley looking like he is dead on Christmas morning.

We also went on a big hike my first day there...some of it was a bushwhacking
and some of it was following a narrow trail down a cliff. This is my dad,
the fearless leader of the group

For Christmas, I gave my family a game called Blokus which everyone seems to love.

On boxing day we took a ferry to the mainland and hoped to get some skiing in.

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.