Shalom Shaolin Monks!
Pardon my posting paucity, I've been busy.

The person you might not know in the picture is Shaela. And yes, she always has that expression on her face. I think the picture was taken by Shenelle.

Like I said, I moved into a new house. Here are some hasty pictures of my room. Note the opaque curtains, which allow me to sleep in baby fashion, not to be confused with baby fashions. Roxanne made them, because she has the mad curtain-making skills!

I quit my pseudo-job, that's a good thing. If you didn't know I had a job, neither did I.

Indoor soccer is going sort of well. It's a lot of fun, but our team has too few players, so usually we have to borrow some. It's OK though, because our name is The Least Organized Team in History.

One thing that makes me happy: Tom DeLay has been indicted.

One thing that makes me the reverse of happy: NYT online is now charging for full access. Why? Whyyy? I mean, besides the obvious. I hate newspapers that charge for their online version, and the NYT was my favourite, a last bastion of freeness.

One thing that makes me the reverse of the reverse of happy, times 1,000: Roxanne and I have been together for 2 months now! It's double plus good. On Sunday we are going to the birthday of Ayden, who is turning 2. His parents are Holly and Sukah, and they rock!

Hockey starts soon, hooray! The Canucks have had a subpar preseason, but that doesn't mean anything. They finally signed Matt Cooke, he's one of my favourites and underrated. I think Brent Johnson will help Cloutier, and they are fine up front of course, it's just the defense I am worried about. Ottawa is looking brilliant with Heatley and Spezza having chemistry and Hasek looking stable. Chris, if I forget to e-mail you, can you send me a copy of the pool please? If you happen to have one on your computer.

OK, just in case this post wasn't shizophrenic enough for you, here is a random Jack Handey quote:

Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaught on the moon and you fear that your partner has been turned into Dracula. The next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham!, you just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, "Think again, bat man."

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Greetings SARS carriers!
Yeah, so I moved to a different house w/ this guy I know from work named Adrian, also a guy from Shenyang named Sunny. It's good because it saves me 80 dollars per month, and Adrian bakes pies.Unfortunately, that house does not have internet at the moment, which is kind of good too, because I just waste lots of time reading things that have nothing to do with anything and then later on I'm like, 'hey! did you know that blah, blah, blah?" and everyone's like, "cease your vocal activity, wanker!" So yeah, my VOIP phone doesn't work either, and I will be MIA on e-mail and IP for a while, but I can be phone-ified at:

562-9501

Otherwise, I'm busy with school: Can Lit, Am Lit, PostColonial Lit, Lit Theory and . . . Creative Writing. I thought Creative Writing 270 would be an easy 'A' because, like, that word is only 8 letters long and I pretty much already know how to spell it, but it turns out I was thinking of 'Writing Creative 270' which is actually not for credit, or in existence at all. Lit Theory is kind of weird since it's a teleconference class, so I just sit in a smallish room with 8 ppl at UNBC and talk to the prof as well as ppl from Quesnel, WL, Terrace, Ft. St. John, Kitimat and other semi-imaginary places.

I met this guy Stew from Tasmania who is doing biology up here for a year for some reason. He's cool, obviously, because he's from Tasmania! We're entering the intramural indoor soccer league with a mishmash of random people who didn't have a team of their own, which will be fun!

OK, now I will stop writing.

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Our jaunt down south was exceptional, although you wouldn't know it from these photos. Maggie's fuelpump wasn't pumping fuel on Friday, so that delayed us a bit. We got in Friday night, said 'hi' to my dad, then went to mom's and conked out. It turned out that my parents sold that house that day, but the move won't be for a while yet. I would have thought it would be weird to stay in my childhood home for the last time, since I lived there for about 15 years, but it wasn't. It seems like time for that house to move on, in a stationary way, since it's a house. Douglas Coupland says people become boring as soon as they buy a house. I don't know if you become interesting if you sell your house, but it seems to follow.

Saturday we slept in, read newspapers, drank coffee and ate sugared food and fruit until noon. To be honest, that was the main goal of the trip. It was a field day for laziness.

I managed to locate the elusive Jessica Fukushima after lunch. She was watching DVDs at the bowling alley which she owns. That's what happens when you graduate with a psych degree. Just kidding, I think it's a terrific and enigmatic thing to do, she's going to grad school in a year or two anyway. It was nice to talk to her for a bit, since we're usually pretty hit-and-miss. Plus she turned on the disco lights in the midafternoon for some kid.

We walked by Sepa lake in the rain with my dad and an epileptic dog named Duke that he was watching for the Sukkels. The dog was pretty big (70lbs or so) and kept jumping up-and-down, as high as it could, for minutes on end. I think it was possessed.

Later we went to Dann and Tanya's and basically relaxed and let Dann embarass himself for our amusement. Well, Dann doesn't actually get embarassed, he just intentionally does things that would embarass other people, for effect. Although he was meeting Roxanne for the first time, it was no exception, nor should it have been. Anyway, he was drinking wildcat, so he can pin it on that. It should be noted that he was drinking it ironically, to prove he is not a beer snob. He's funny that way.

We went to church on Sunday. It was nice to see a bunch of people, although it was pretty empty due to the holiday. The message about Hurricane Katrina was repeatedly problematic, but nevermind. We hung-out with Kryce, Alora and Dr. Preg in the time that comes after noon (they should have a word for that). We ate fudgsicles and make jokes about cloisters. Alora (4) told Roxanne she had morning breath. That was nice though, because she doesn't usually talk to people she doesn't know, although she is becoming more talkative as she gets older. She talked to me a lot more than usual, I guess I seem more plausible with a girlfriend.

We had lunch on the way out with Dad, because he had been busy with a golf tournament all weekend. He came in 3rd or 4th in his division and won a $400 3-wood, so it was time well spent. We ate at that place that looks over that lake. It was one of those nice days with sun, and a perfect trip in general, except that a wasp pooped on my hand. Did you know that wasps poop? Well, they do.

We played air guitar, bass, drums and piano emphatically for most of the trip home, especially at stop lights when cars were beside us. I think people thought: "Hey, check-out that awesome air band!" or at least "Hey, look at those idiots!" Either way, it was fun.

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I might see a view like this while driving down to OHM tomorrow. Hopefully one of us will be watching the road though.

I will be in OHM -- also known as One Hundred Mile House -- from Friday night to Monday sometime. Mon petite amie Roxanne McLeod is coming, ainsi il sera absolument le fun! Tentative plans include: drinking coffee, talking hyperactively, building a weather machine to make the weather nice, hiring Sean Connery to play a supervillain who wants to steal the weather machine, and maybe going to a lake, if the weather machine doesn't get stolen. I'll be at my childhood home throughout, perhaps for the last time before it is sold, so stop by. I'd like to see you, as long as you are you, and you are, trust me. I promise I will say something nonsensical or confusing and then apologize for it.

I don't recommend books to people. Just because I like a book doesn't mean Bob will like it. Rob might like it, because Rob likes everything, but Lob definitely won't, because Lob is a fool. Also, recommending a book implies that the target of the recommendation doesn't have books he wants to read himself. He is just sitting there waiting for someone to recommend a book to him. "This had better be good, I wouldn't bump Heart to Heart, by Britney and Lynne Spears, from my list for just any book!"

Having said that, I will also say that the book I just finished -- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- is first-rate. Normally when someone says 'classic' I think: "This had better involve Cambell's Chunky soup in some way". But The Great Gatsby is better than soup. It is set, and was published, in the 1920s, which to my mind is one of the most fascinating North American decades. A lot of the love-and-hateable things with which we grapple to this day began to sprout at that time. Namely, rapidly increasing technology, mass commercialism, prosperity and prosperity's bedfellows optimism and greed. It also has an interesting narrative structure, with the narrator being a semi-important character, but not necessarily central. The thing which moved me the most, though, was the interaction between the two main characters, who were rivals. Fitzgerald had amazing insight into how they embodied, in polar and similar ways, different perspectives on, and methods to acheive, the American dream. I'd like to talk about it more, but certain IP readers have not yet read the book for our Eng 385 class, so I don't want to spoil anything. Generally, for better or for worse, as a Canadian, I understand America better than Britain. That carries over to Lit, and this could only be an American novel.

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