Thanksgiving Weekend 2010

This Thanksgiving weekend was very memorable for many reasons, one of them not good. 10/10/10 was definitely an unlucky day for us, although it could have been much worse.

So for the weekend I went to Saltspring Island to my parents' new house where my two little sisters also live. My brother Farley and his girlfriend Jenny, and my sister Rebecca and her common-law man Eric, and my other brother Ben also went there for the weekend. We had 10 people in a 2-bedroom + cottage/shed place. Ben's girlfriend Kyla and Jenny and Farley's friend Alex also visited during the weekend.

So those of us coming from the mainland were picked up by my dad and sisters on Saturday afternoon and we decided to go play a round of disc golf. I haven't played that much recently so I now suck at it but it's lots of fun and Saltspring has a nice course. Unfortunately it started to rain harder and so we got quite wet. We also had agreed to meet my sister at a certain time because she wanted to wander around town instead of play. So we ran out of time and I only did 15 holes. I found someone's lost disc with no name on it though so that's good because I recently lost a couple discs.

So later that day we celebrated my birthday because I won't see most of my family again until a while after my birthday. Mom made one of my favourite meals, firecracker casserole, and then we had some birthday cake and ice cream.

Some of us also played Robo Rally which is one of my favourite board games. I brought a few boards games with me. We played a lot of board games over the weekend and I won many times.

So the next day the sun was shining and the rain had stopped even though that wasn't in the forecast. We thought this was awesome and a great day to go for a big hike.

It was a beautiful day but the mountain did not like us. The mountain is Mt Maxwell and the lookout gives more than a 180 degree view of south Saltspring Island and Vancouver Island.

We wanted to hike down from here to the valley below and then have my mom come pick us up.


Of course we couldn't hike straight down because it was a cliff. There's my siblings and my mom in the top left corner of the photo. So what we had to do was hike along the cliffs and bluffs until it gradually got easy enough to go down and cut back around to below the cliffs.

Ok, so then my sister saw a lizard.

Anyway, Ben and my mom were going to meet us later at the bottom so we said goodbye to them and started out.

It was a nice hike for a little while. We jumped across some little cracks and at some places we had to use our hands to get up or down over some rocks. Unfortunately the rocks were a little bit wet from the day before.

We came across some parts of rock like this where people had put in clips for rock climbing up them.

It was near one of these that the unfortunate accident happened. Here I was with my sister Natalie and she was taking a photo of the view. Rebecca and Eric were behind us and my dad had gone on a little ahead below us. So then I went down the next little bit and I was out of site of everyone else. At that point Natalie was going to take a photo of my dad who was below her. Then I hear Natalie say "Oh..dad, are you alright? Are you OK?" and my dad started cursing.

So then I came around the corner and my dad was lying on the slope with his head downhill from his legs and he's holding his leg and his binoculars are all twisted and dangling. His leg had a few gashes in it with a nasty one on his knee and one below his knee that went all the way into the bone! There was blood done his leg but it didn't seem to be bleeding much. I was so stunned and I didn't immediately know what to do.

My dad must have been in a lot of pain but one of the first things he said was to get his binoculars off of him so I helped get the strap from those off of his head and his arm while he turned himself right side up.

Then my sister arrived and took charge. She had recently taken a first aid course for her work. She also had a small first aid kit. We poured some water on the wounds and then I took off my shirt and they tied it tight around his leg to put pressure on the wound. He could still feel his toes and he didn't break any bones.

My dad kept apologizing for ruining the hike, and even at one point said we could continue without him, which was ridiculous. So then we started to hike back up to the parking lot because we were much closer to it than the bottom. We helped my dad climb up and down the steep parts while he hobbled along but the path was quite narrow at some places.

My dad suggested a couple of us go ahead and get a ride from someone at the parking lot. Natalie and I hurried ahead and I ran into the parking lot just as my mom was pulling out. It turns out the two of them had sat at the top for a while and then slowly made their way back to the van following a little bird. It was lucky for us because they were able to give us all a ride back down the mountain and over to the hospital.

It is really good my family now lives on an island that has a hospital. My dad used the first aid kit from the car to help his leg a little as we made our way to the hospital. At the hospital we waited for a few hours while the doctor cleaned up the wounds, tried to find the chip of bone that was missing, and did some stitching and then put 38 staples into my dad's leg. I am extremely grateful nothing worse happened to my dad or any of us and that we got to the hospital quickly and they were able to see him right away.

So after my dad was all bandaged up we helped him into the van and then we drove home and my mom tried to keep it slow driving along the twisty roads. At home my dad was able to hobble up the porch stairs by himself. For the rest of my visit my dad slept a lot or watched TV in his recliner but unfortunately my parents bedroom is upstairs but not behind a closed door and there were a lot of us squished into the living room.

So I setup some of the patio furniture on the bluff down the hill from the house to try and give him a little peace and quiet. We played a game of Settlers of Catan and my mom brought us some popcorn and beer. It was not as epic a location as playing Risk on the shores of Galiano and my 13 year old sister won (she had no beer) but it was still lots of fun. It also got our minds off the earlier part of the day. Ben didn't play but took some photos of the game with my camera.

He also took some photos of Triscuit.

Later that night we had a big Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing and two pies for dessert but my dad slept through it. He had some later but it's too bad that he was not able to eat with us. We were all thankful for much the same thing - that nothing worse happened that day.

Monday we mostly stuck around the house because we didn't want to go off on any big adventures without my dad and wanted to make sure he was recovering ok. But, again we didn't want to spend all day being noisy in his space.

So there were some antics with this bird that
Natalie loves so much but who actually belongs to Emily.

The bird went into the basket.

They also put the bird on the clothesline.

So the bird went for a bit of a zipline.

I also spent a little time up on the living roof...
but the door closed on us and Farley wouldn't let us back in for a bit.

Then in the afternoon we decided to give my dad full peace and quiet for a little bit and so we walked over to a farm where they make and sell lots of fancy cheeses. They also sell olives from around the world. I bought some cheese that has hot chilis in the bottom. It was really good!

I had to take another photo of Trisuit because she has so much fun peering in the many windows now from the porch that wraps around most of their house.

Oh yes, and my little sister who is much heavier than she used to be insisted on getting a shoulder ride still. She reminds me of Gollum in this photo. Yikes! I also gave my mom a piggy back ride during the walk back from the farm. She's a lot lighter than Natalie.

Overall the one word to describe the weekend is "memorable". Aside from the injury my dad suffered it was a fun weekend with the family. My dad is currently having a tough time recovering but he's a tough guy and I expect he'll get through it in less time than the average person.

The Near Future - October 2010

First the recent past again, then the future. This week has been pretty busy.

I wrote an outline for my thesis and gave it to my supervisors, although I have already written a bunch of pages in some of the parts. It's crazy that the biggest task left is just the writing of my thesis. I'm also working on some analysis of my study data. It's not good. I don't think the numbers prove anything. I learned a ton watching people use the tool and hopefully that's good enough for a master's thesis.

I also gave a presentation to some first year students about our lab and what we do as grad students in it. It went well, I made some jokes and they laughed and hopefully some of them found the subject interesting.

I also went to one of the Vancouver International Film Festival movies with my brother who bought 20 movie tickets. I used one of his tickets but my birthday is just around the corner and he did stay at my house for a week. We saw End of Animal, a Korean film directed and written by someone just out of film school. It was one of the first times it aired outside of Korea and the director/writer and producer were in the audience. The director introduced the film by warning that it might get boring at times. It really wasn't...it was very intense and quite dark. Afterward, the audience asked him questions through a translator. It was pretty sweet to hear directly from the director.

On Tuesday I went to drop-in ultimate and got a good workout. Tonight I went to the pool for some swimming but the damn deep end was closed again for some water polo practice.

So I have a really busy month ahead of me.

I am continuing work on my thesis and analysis of study results. But I'm also doing an internship with a sub-company of Boeing called AeroInfo so I need to get a lot of work done on our software for this.

On top of that I need to prepare for the VisWeek conferences in Salt Lake City from October 23rd - 29th. We have 3 presentations there of varying lengths and a lot of demoing. I will most likely be doing the medium length presentation of 3 minutes. It's at the start of the workshop we're going to along with all the other people who submitted entries to the challenge. The conference should be awesome. I went last year and this year I am again a student volunteer. I should meet a lot of new people and recognize many from last year. I've managed to schedule all my volunteer hours so I have no hours on the VAST presentation days. The conference location in Utah is pretty much the opposite of Atlantic City where it was last year. Maybe I will get more sleep this time around.

In the short term future of next weekend I'm going to the BC lions football game with some other grad students. Also, there is a LAN party at a friends house. I don't think I've technically ever been to one of those. I will most likely be slaughtered in a variety of games.

In the shorter term future I am traveling on Friday to my parent's new place on Saltspring Island for Thanksgiving weekend and also an early celebration of my birthday. Last time I visited the place was to help them move in so I haven't seen it with them all settled in yet. It will be quite the packed house but it'll be lots of fun. We should go play some disc golf and hopefully the weather will be nice so we can go swimming. Maybe I'm a little delusional about wanting to go swimming in a lake in October. I don't think I've done that for my birthday before.

In the very short term future, the students of my research group are getting together tomorrow to plan some programming and how pieces fit together on version 2 of our software. Development has been moving at a snail's pace but hopefully it will pick up soon. I should get some sleep.

The Recent Past - Sept 2010

September was busy. October will be even busier. I haven't gotten around to posting recently because I'm mostly been doing work instead of play and haven't take photos recently. Here's an update on my recent past.

Back near the start of Sept there was a party at Nate's where everyone dressed up as something starting with the letter A. I came as an addict (to alcohol (beer), drugs (ritalin (tic tacs)) video games, and gambling). We played some A games such as Are you the Traitor? and Apples to Apples and ate a lot of A food. I assume, someday in the future we will have a B party.

I've also gotten together with family and friends a few other times. I went and hung out in Vancouver at Rob and Q's place a couple times and we drank mango juice with mango ice cubes, and slices of mango. My brother Farley stayed with me for a week while he did some writing and he came to the drop in Ultimate. For my sister's birthday we made some sushi at her place and played scrabble. I barely beat her. In the last week I was sick for a few days, but I think I'm better now.

I've been going to Surrey drop-in Ultimate since the Spring and for the fall it's back at Newton Athletic park. Not many of my friends have shown up but it's great exercise and still fun. I've also gone to the aqua recreational goofing hour (ARGH) at the north Surrey rec center pool a couple times. It's simply called that by the grad student who organized it so that there is a time when lots of grad students go there together. Unfortunately this last week the deep end was closed for some people to practice water polo. Normally it's awesome though with a climbing wall coming out of the water, ropes up to monkey bars (called the Skywalker), a rope swing, and low and high diving boards. The pool also has hot and hotter sauna rooms.

At school, I did a couple presentations but spent most of my time running a user study and organizing the results. I managed to get 20 participants over the course of 2 1/2 weeks so I am all done now and onto analyzing the results. I kind of doubt I will prove anything statistically but I have a ton of useful qualitative feedback about what works and what doesn't with my text document visualization technique.

Eric and I presented an update on our work on my research groups software CZSaw to the Boeing guys and people from SFU and UBC at our face-2-face Boeing meeting. We have one every term. This time it was a two day thing but the skytrains were totally gibbled on the Friday so I missed most of the second day. Eric and I also did demos of CZSaw at a mini-conference on visual analytics for public safety at the Justice Institute of BC (JIBC) in New Westminster. I think that went pretty well and maybe some day in the distant future we'll work with the VPD.

This next month is going to be busy as I do a couple more little presentations before the big ones at VisWeek. I'll also be working on my thesis and study data analysis throughout. On top of all that there is Thanksgiving weekend, my birthday and then Halloween. I can't really think of anything planned for November. Perhaps I should just delay all my sleep time until then.

Moving from Saturna

So on Sunday morning we woke up and took the early ferry to Saturna.

The island up ahead is Saturna and there's our moving truck.

They didn't have the right size truck for some reason so they gave us a bigger one at no extra cost. Normally that'd be great, except we had to pay more for the ferry! Also, the back of the truck scrapped the ramp when going on each ferry and the truck was too big to make it up either driveway. On Saturna, the driveway makes a sharp turn and has many trees beside it. We were forced to take loads of stuff down in the van.

Luckily almost everything fit inside the van.
The couch would make a cool new back seat for the van.

Here's their old house on Saturna.We spent the rest of the morning
and all of the afternoon moving loads down to the truck or packing.

While they were packing things into boxes I was carrying more stuff

out of the house and out of the cottage.

The attic of the cottage had a bunch of stuff in it and

walking across these planks is the only way into it.

In the evening we went across the island to their friend's place for a goodbye party. It took place in this shelter which resembled a kitchen and living room with 1 and a half walls. There was plenty of good food people brought and one of the hosts had planned a 5 hole disc golf course. Unfortunately the discs were already on Saltspring, so we played with plastic plates. On hole 3 they kept breaking in half on the trees. I got a very high (bad) score.

After dinner we sat in front of the fire and many people made some speeches about how my parents did some really good things for the island in their 5 years there and everyone is thankful for that and will miss them. Also my dad read some messages my little sisters wanted everyone to hear.

We stayed longer than most people and then got home around 8:30pm. We did some more packing until about 10 and then went to sleep. We kept Triscuit, the cat, inside so that she wouldn't be spooked by the almost empty house and run away. Unfortunately she meowed throughout the night and kept us all from sleeping much.

At 6am Monday we woke up and started more packing. We took one more load down to the van and then went to a friend's house for breakfast. The friend runs the bakery and we ate pancakes, bacon and eggs (fresh from their hens). Then we went right back to packing. Some people came to help including Dave who was driving the truck back to Sidney after. We lugged all the mattresses down the driveway and finished packing the van, while my dad put the kayaks on the car.

We actually got to the ferry dock early for the 10:20am ferry.

We set Triscuit's carrier on a rock by the car and
she kept trying to hide under the blanket.

The ferry showed up almost on time which was a change
from all the other late ferries that weekend.

We left the ferry at Mayne to wait for another ferry to Saltspring which was 45 minutes late. On the 2nd ferry we met my sister Rebecca and my grandma. They squished into the car while my mom and I went in the truck with Dave.

On Saltspring we drove to the new house and Dave walked up the driveway to see if he could turn around at the top of it. After deciding that he could probably do it, he got in the truck, ready to drive forward up it.

Unfortunately the driveway is really steep and Dave did not line up the truck well so when he tried to drive fast from the road one of the wheels missed the driveway. The back of the truck dug into the road with the hitch ball making a big groove across the yellow line.

Then the truck was stuck. It couldn't go forward or backwards. So then we tried unloading everything out of it. We put all the stuff on the side of the road and the side of the driveway. I took a couple turns helping direct traffic since there was only one free lane. After the truck was completely empty it was still stuck. They managed to move it a bit by putting some boards behind the one wheel but in the end they called a tow truck. The tow truck lifted up the back and pulled it back no problem.

After that I helped my dad load the van at the bottom and then unload it at the top a few times. We also moved the really heavy furniture up the stairs and into the house, but then I had to leave. Dave drove the truck to the ferry and I went with him and we caught the quick ferry to Swartz bay. Then I said goodbye and walked onto the big ferry back to the mainland.

It was a pretty ridiculous and tiring weekend. I heard later my sister got a really good workout helping get most stuff into the house before it got really dark. Then they covered the remaining stuff with tarps, which is good because it poured the next day. Also, my parents missed the back to school BBQ they were invited to. I guess there are a lot of worse things that could have happened when moving between islands, like missing the ferry, but it was quite the stressful move. I'm glad it's over and they're all settled into the new place. I'll have to visit them sometime soon.