I'm headed back on the water!

In four weeks, I will be going on a weekend canoe trip! Or to be more precise, a Paddle-a-thon. On April 19-20 I will paddle down the Fraser river from Hope to Fort Langley. I will be raising money for the Camp Squeah bursary fund, which is given to post-secondary students who volunteer as staff at camp for the summer! So it's a very good cause.

I need to raise a minimum of $500, otherwise I can't go! So if anyone would like to support this marvellous cause, please let me know! I can give you tax receipts, too!

Please help! Thank you very much!

abandon ship

I was riding the bus home in the dark today. I worked until 8:00PM. I was seated in that twilight zone between the front and back doors that's not quite in the bright lights of the back of the bus, and not quite in the front area that's dark so that the driver can see properly. At each stop, all the lights go on so that the passengers can see their way out.

I was quite absorbed in my book, so I hadn't looked up until my neighbour wanted to get off and I needed to swing my knees around to let him out. At that moment, the lights went on, and something caught my eye under the seat in front of me. It was a little, ugly, paper mache boat that looked a lot like a coffin. I knew it was a boat because there were two little, ugly paddles lying next to it. They were made of cardboard paddle blades attached to popsicle sticks with masking tape. The paddles and the coffin-boat were painted brown.

I imagine that it had been part of a school project, maybe something on Canada's First Nations people and their canoes. I wondered if it was the prized creation of a young student, the glowing centerpiece of a shoebox diorama. Or perhaps it had been the half-hearted creation of an older student and deliberately abandoned once the required marks had been collected. Or even worse, what if the young student had forgotten it on the bus on her way to school, and had cried over its loss and the tragedy of having nothing to hand in after having worked so hard.

My neighbour got off the bus, the lights went out, and the bus moved on.

I love the new time

Daylight savings time sucks. Welcome to regular summer time! I love it because now it's still light when I get home. Daylight makes me feel energetic, like I still have time to do lots of things that I want to do before going to bed. Once dusk hits, all I want to do is huddle up on the couch with a book or something to watch, or maybe play computer games.

Hurray for evening daylight!

weekend away

We spent the weekend in Victoria with Aaron's family (2 parents, sister + brother-in-law, and us = 6 total). It was their treat to us for our birthdays/Christmas/Valentine's day. It was an awesome B&B with a famous breakfast (they made a whole cookbook about it), and it was also very relaxing and fun. This was our suite. I loved it! I like the fireplace.

In Victoria we walked around and saw the Empress hotel an did some shopping. Which brings me to my next link. They were on sale! So I bought them. I haven't owned a pair of "dress-up/dress-down" black shoes since I threw my Starbucks-dress-code shoes in the garbage on my last shift there one and a half years ago. So I figured I owed myself.

This post has been brought to you by all those who commented on my "I'm dead" post.

My latest internet addiction

I just...can't....stop.....

I'm not dead yet! ....wait...okay maybe...yeah.

Hello readers! It seems that this blog has passed its golden age of multiple posts per week. But that's okay. I'm not an aspiring writer, and I'm not a professional blogger, so it's not really that disappointing to me. For a while I felt very fulfilled by writing here, and now it just doesn't seem that important to me. But perhaps that's just another passing phase. Who knows?

So, welcome to "Die Stille im Lande II"!

I will not fully abandon this blog, rather, I will simply write here whenever I feel like it--no more, no less. I will feel no burdensome obligation to update, but I will also not eliminate this venue of expression. There will be no further need to check for weekly updates, but I would still appreciate it if you would check on a monthly basis. If you want to read more here, please leave comments! There is nothing quite so encouraging/inspiring as comments!

return to chile

I know some of you have enjoyed reading my friend Adam the Astronomer's web journal about his work in the Atacama desert of Chile. Well, I just popped over to his site for the first time in awhile and discovered that he spent 2 weeks there in December. Read about it.

my other brother is now also famous

You may recall that my youngest brother Karl made a wicked-awesome dance video on YouTube. Not to be outdone, my other brother Tobin has now made the national news by contributing a stunningly insightful commentary on one of this nation's most important cultural events. Watch the video!

return to the jungle

Hi everyone! I'm back from Winnipeg (where I was for much of the Christmas break), and now I'm into a crazy week or two of work, so I'll be updating you all some other time when I have the brain space for it.

Happy New Year!

scandals, virgins, birds and bees...Merry Christmas!

I attended the Peace Mennonite Church Christmas pageant this evening, and it really got me thinking...all these kids are participating in this story and discussing Mary's scandalous pregnancy onstage...how many of them understand exactly what the nature of the scandal is? How many of them went home from rehearsal this month and said, "Mommy, what does it matter that she wasn't married? What does a husband have to do with having a baby anyway? What's a virgin?"

The virgin birth must be a great conversation starter for many a parent looking to educate their children in the manner of birds and bees!

this post has nothing to do with Christmas

I was reading a news report on the death of Oscar Peterson, and there is a brief quote by Hazel McCallion, the mayor of Mississauga. Once again, I found myself exclaiming, "Oh my goodness, she's STILL the mayor of Mississauga?!?!"

Hazel McCallion is on of those people who really has no great significance in my life, but who shows up as this random blip on my radar from time to time. She piques my interest. To sum it up in a nutshell, she is 86 years old and has been the mayor of Mississauga since four years before I was born. Apparently she doesn't really need to campaign anymore, as in her most recent election (her 11th for mayor) she got 91% of the vote.

Upon reading her Wikipedia article today, I learned that she is also a devout Christian and that she has never been labeled a feminist. I think the next time someone asks me who I would have coffee with if I could pick anyone in the world, I will pick her.

houston, we have a problem

I believe my tear ducts have undergone some sort of growth spurt. Or something. Over the past few years, I have noticed myself getting choked up at movies more and more frequently. My crying-at-movies reached an all-time low (high?) while watching Elf this week. That's right, I shed a few tears in a Will Ferrell movie because all the Christmas spirit got to me.

classic snow art

If they're too small to read, just click on them.

think about it

parties and family do's...yup, it's December!

I had a really good weekend...not this most recent weekend but the one before. I've been meaning to post about it, but I've been waiting for my friend to send me pictures, but that hasn't happened yet so I'm going to post about it anyway.

First of all, I had a phone call from a really good friend, and we had some good girl talk about ex-boyfriends and moving on. I don't have a lot of girly friends out here, so it was especially fun for me to chat with her.

Then I made a simple lemon loaf to bring to Aaron's aunt and uncle's Christmas family thing. I got a couple of very flattering compliments about it, which made me feel super-good and very accepted by the in-laws! It was fun.

And finally, I spent about 6 hours on Sunday at a friend's house, experimenting with chocolate. We were trying to make our own liqueur-filled chocolates, and it took a lot of experimentation and sampling! Word to the wise: Caramel Bailey's + dark chocolate = TO DIE FOR. Finally, we made a big batch of hazelnut truffles, and I got my hands COVERED in chocolate and I got to lick them off and wash it down with another shot of Caramel Bailey's. There are pictures, hopefully I'll get to post them soon.

rats & rainbows

Hello everyone! I have finally had a few days that are worth mentioning on this blog!

Sam and Annemarie visited us last weekend, and we did the usual pilgrimage to pay homage to the Swedish furniture gods. Since Aaron and I weren't interested in buying anything, we amused ourselves by hiding stuffed beavers, hedgehogs, and hippos throughout the various furniture displays. My favourite was the hippo that we squashed into a kitchen garbage bin that was labeled "look inside"...he practically jumped out of the bin when you opened it!

So, after a few good laughs, we figured we were finished, so we went downstairs into the huge kitchenwares section to find Sam and Annemarie. But lo and behold! Right at the bottom of the stairs was a huge bin of plush rats, just the perfect size for putting into jars and such! So we gathered up an armful and got busy. My favourites were the rat in the wineglass, the three rats in glass cannisters (they looked like mimes trying to get out of their glass boxes) and the rat that we shoved into a vase that had a very narrow neck but was quite large and round below the neck. I'm sure nobody will ever get it out! Oh, and perhaps my favourite of all was the rat that we flattened in the middle of a stack of clear glass mixing bowls. Pancake rat! My tummy hurt from laughing.

On a different note: There have been several fantastic rainbows in the past few days. It has something to do with clouds getting bunched up against the mountains, but when the sun gets low enough over the ocean to peek under the clouds, everything just lights up like crazy! It's very beautiful, and it makes people on the street smile and comment to one another and take pictures.

being outside

This morning was sunny and chilly. Snow has now fallen on the entire height of the mountains, not just the tops. With the sky being that light, chilly blue and the mountains now being light, dusty grey, you need to do a double-take to determine exactly where the horizon lies. It's very pretty.

I took a walk over lunch, and I re-discovered two things. First of all, I remembered that I really like creative park sculpture. I'm talking about sculpture that takes up a large amount of park space and invites the public to sit, look, interact and ponder. I found a little triangle of land between three roads where someone had installed a number of large, rough, rectangular stones in various horizontal and upright patterns. Almost every one of these stones had some version of a circular hole or hollow in it. I sat, looked, interacted and pondered.

Also, I re-rediscovered this particular kind of white berry. When I was a child in Berlin, we had these berry bushes near our driveway. I hadn't seen them for about 12 years when I first rediscovered them here in Vancouver while taking a walk with Aaron. They instantly triggered this urge in me to pick them, throw them on the ground and step on them. I didn't know why, I just knew that that's what you do with that particular berry. And sure enough, once I stepped on them I rediscovered the delightful popping noise they make! So today, I once again saw these berries and remembered the strange way that memory can work. And I popped some, of course.

kenyan proverb

Treat the earth well.

It was not given to you from your parents,

it was loaned to you by your children.

multi-dimensional Jesus

In last week's adult study (aka Sunday School), we were talking about the resurrection. At one point somebody was emphasizing that Jesus did physically resurrect at Easter with a new physical body and that when we are resurrected we will also have new bodies. They'll be even better than our current ones because they won't get sick and die. Anyway, the question came up about how Jesus could have appeared and disappeared, especially entering rooms with all the doors locked, if he had such a physical body.

And then it struck me: Jesus' new body could move in more dimensions than the common three. You only need one extra dimension (and it doesn't have to be "time") for it all to make sense. Mathematicians and physicists generally accept the probability that our universe contains many extra dimensions, so this isn't even a wacky "out there" idea.

Imagine that the entire world is 2-dimensional like a flat piece of paper. And on this paper you draw a blueprint of a house, and you draw little stick people Christians into a room with all the doors locked. If that sheet of paper is all they know, and they can't comprehend how to look "up" at you because all they know is how to look forwards/backwards and left/right, then the appearance of your fingertip in their locked room (if you poke the paper) will seem like a miraculous appearance!

I'm really hoping this means that our resurrected bodies will have the ability to move through multiple dimensions...maybe we can evade illness bacteria and such by simply sidestepping them via another dimension. Why should we be locked up in a mere three-dimensional universe when there is infinitely more of it to discover?

smart vs. stupid customer service

I have always maintained that the difference between smart customer service people and stupid ones is as obvious as night and day. And you won't get what you need until you find a smart one, the stupid ones just will never do.

Over the past week it has been a great trial to have a number of photos laminated for a certain project at work. Let me demonstrate my aforementioned thesis with the following case studies from this last week. (I'm sorry the gory details are so lengthy. I hope it is entertaining nonetheless. It's a gong show.)

STUPID: I call a UPS store asking if they can laminate such-and-such. The guy sounds ESL, and I have a nagging suspicion that he doesn't quite understand what I need, but he insists he can do it before closing at 6 if I can get there by 5. I arrive at 5:10. Three people (apparently related) turn their blank faces away from the TV and towards me. "Hello!" I venture. Blank stares. Nobody gets up off their seats. I try again: "Hello!" One of them looks at the stuff I'm carrying, figures out I'm the girl from the phone call, and greets me by saying, "You're too late." I explain that I don't mind leaving the job overnight, and THEN he gets up off his arse and walks behind the counter to help. Except then it turns out that he doesn't have the correct equipment to do what I wanted as per our telephone conversation. My nagging suspicion is proven correct.

STUPID: I go to Superstore to have a photo blown up to 11"x14". I inquire if they can do that. The lady says they can. I ask when it will be ready. She says in a few weeks. I say, "You mean a few days?" She says no, a few weeks. They have to send the job to Ontario to have it done there. I leave the store.

STUPID: I take my laminating to Staples. Some guy takes my stuff and says he can have it laminated by 3pm. I can't be there at 3pm, so my boss goes and gets it for me. She reported the following conversation:
My boss: "You've laminated some of these photos so that they're overlapping."
Staples boy: "Is that a problem?"
"Yes, I can't use them if they're stuck together."
"Oh....Do you want me to fix it?"
"Yes!"
"Okay....Right now?"
"Well I'm certainly not coming back here again, so if you'd like to do it later and have it couriered to my office by the end of the day, be my guest."
"Oh. I guess I'll do it now."

STUPID: I go to the mall to see if I can find someone who will blow up my photo to 11"x14". I find a store that is a cross between a 1-hour photo place and Blacks, so the entire store is about photos. I ask the lady if they can make a photo that size. She says yes. I pull out my flash drive. She says they can't do that. I ask her to clarify, there must be a mistake. But no, they do not have a USB port anywhere in the store, but if I can write down the exact file name and give her my entire flash drive to send away somewhere, they can have it in a few days. This is obviously not a 21st century photo shop, and I need to use my flash drive for other things on a daily basis, so I leave.

STUPID: Those laminated photos I mentioned earlier were given to me on Friday. I had glanced at them at the time, but it was not until I took the paper cutter to them today (Monday) that I realized that one third of them were missing. When I called Staples and described what I was missing, the phone girl went to look for them. Sure enough, she found my envelope of missing photos just sitting on top of the laminator. The idiot from Friday must have gotten distracted and just sold my boss half of the job without remembering that he hadn't finished the rest of it.

SMART: (Cue angel choir.) I enter London Drugs with my flash drive. I ask the girl behind the counter about my 11"x14" photo. She says, "Sure!" and guides me to a computer where my order is taken in about 45 seconds.
"When do you need this done by?"
"Oh, anytime in the next few days is good."
"Well, I could have it ready in an hour if you want."
(I get a little choked up.)
"I can't be back here in an hour, but I could be back in three hours."
"Okay, I'll write down that you need in in 2 hours, so you'll be sure to get it."

SMART: (Angel choir reprise.) I arrive at Staples to collect my missing photos. The girl from the phone not only has laminated them all, but has trimmed them perfectly and has them ready in a neat stack. (I had been expecting the big plastic sheet full of laminated photos like we got on Friday.) I ask her to also laminate my newly procured 11"x14" photo, and she does so -- and trims it! -- within a minute. We head to the cash register, where I explain that my boss had already paid enough for the photos we got on Friday (I was not intending to pay for photos that had been forgotten). The girl sincerely says, "Oh, of course!" as if she had never dreamed of asking me to pay for them. No fuss whatsoever. We ring up the single photo I just had laminated, I thank her profusely for her helpfulness, and I leave satisfied. This may sound ridiculous, but I quietly prayed a blessing on her for being such a saint.