Early Post for an Early Morning Trek.

Some people out there won't believe how early the sun comes up in Canada; not even I understand it fully as I am at the lowest latitude in the country. This shot was taken in the early morning on a longboarding adventure. How early? Try 5 a.m. on a school day when your school starts 4 hours later (enough time to watch 4 episodes of Dexter... O.o). The endeavor was not simply to go on a longboarding adventure, yet, if I never had a longboard, I would never traverse all that land so early.

Everyone is talking about the Soccer World Cup lately. If for some reason you're ill-informed, listen for the sound of buzzing bees; this will not lead you to a hive, but most likely a T.V. blaring the sounds of the infamous vuvuzela. Yes, I got up at 5 a.m. (Already bright outside) to watch the opening ceremony and eventually longboard just before 6 a.m. in order to get to a friends HD TV in time and add my friend to the convoy on the way.

My friend, Connor, can be seen on the left, exiting his abode with his school bag, a longboard (of course), and a bowl of yogurt (of courser-er). To my understanding, this is the first footage shot of this being at the fresh hours of 6. For those out there that know anything about longboards, YES, that is a Dervish, flex 1 with Sabre trucks and Orangutan wheels O.o . Does it make early morning endeavors easier? I have no idea whatsoever. I suspect so, unless that yogurt packed some galactic punch (I am referring specifically to the milky-way when I say "galactic punch") that got us up the hills of Cordova Bay.

We got to our destination in time, and watched the soccer. If anyone out there that reads this knows me, they know that I do not ever watch soccer. HOWEVER, THIS IS SOUTH AFRICA IN A WORLD CUP ON HOME SOIL AND I AM MISSING OUT ON IT! IF THERE WAS A HIGHER ''CAPS" BUTTON I WOULD PRESS IT! So in an attempt to make a connection between myself and my lifelong chommies back home who are on 5 week vacation to party their asses off where 18 is legal, I am watching the soccer. Longboarding this distance to get the best experience possible (I don't own an HD TV) is not the only odd thing I have done to assume this connection.

Yesterday I found myself glued to a school computer in the career center after I was kicked out of the library for streaming video. I was streaming the opening ceremony, live, from the other side of the world (almost literally - how many people can say that with and edge of truth?) during lunch and my third block when I should have been in class.

Now, for another story, completely separate, but oddly directly related. Centurion Mall, 3 years ago: I happened to be there while a free concert was happening with Prime Circle and an opening band I never had heard of, The Parlatones. I found them odd (The Parlatones), especially with a megaphone blasting away at the mic a metre in front of me. It's taken three years for this band to progress to where they are now, and as I sat in the career center streaming the footage live, they came onto stage and I experienced them from the furthest point imaginable (not really). I'm not a major fan, but it blew me away how much they had progressed since I had seen them a couple of years prior. A career choice in music is a tough choice, but obviously good things do happen. It is still an aspiration of mine; however, we shall see how life progresses in the future. For now, I have 5 DAYS OF SCHOOL LEFT. Let me tackle that first.

Oh, DRAW FOR SOUTH AFRICA? SAY... WHAAAAAT? This means that we're on par with the entire group and still stand a chance of breaking through into the knockout stage. I won't get my hopes up, though. France is a killer team.

Vuvuzela's seem to be a killer South Africans are immune to, not the French.

*chommies - Friends

Exit

This is an exist.
This exit exists at
school.
I will
exit this exit
soon.
Exciting?

Indeed. There are 7 school days left in which I need to finish my classes. 7 DAYS!
DID I SAY 7 DAYS.
For the life of me, I can not imagine how anyone can go through another year of school. Sure, it is great socially, and it expands the mind, blah blah blah. Quite frankly, I have found that the last couple of weeks have not benefited my life much, with respect to knowledge I will need for the rest of my life; However, much has happened in the last hand full of weeks in the social side of school life. Grads - or Matrics, as I once called them (still do, I dare not call a Matric a Grad) - are coming together and some social barriers seem to have been broken down. Maturing? I think yes. Many people are finally coming to terms with how trivial certain things can be.

As for the actual graduation night, I shall see how worth my time it is. I was quite content with receiving my "hypothetical" certificate at the rehearsal. Technically, I have hypthetically graduated. If only the work I still have to finish in these 7 days could be hypothetical.

Right, so that was a pretty dry blog.
My humour will be restored once I hypthetically finish my homework.

-on a side note, I woke up with the song Hakuna Matata stuck in my head this morning. Sick joke, or just my mind reiterating my socio-acedemic ethos?-

Upload Picture. Umm, which one?

I'm Back...

By this I mean that access to internet at my house has been restored. Cyber-life can now continue, however, I will attempt to restrict it as I find it is addicting. Very addicting. I was playing for an hour on Poker Stars today; instead of doing something productive, (I have argued this point however, and I firmly believe Poker is more productive than homework; perhaps poker it will become a future source of income).

Look at me now, rambling on and on. My writing muscles - or typing phylanges in this case - have been dormant for quite some time now, but that does not mean that life has been as empty as my blog. In fact, life has been quite exhilarating lately. Today is the first day since the rainbow cloud that I have had a couple of hours to myself. I will attempt to tell you of all that I ever so vaguely write about, but it will be vague itself, as it will take a tonne of writing to fully exemplify all the experiences I have had lately, and unfortunately I don't have the time.

Starting with the Rainbow Cloud, otherwise known as a circumhorizontal arc, I was quite fortunate to see it. It appears only in certain months of the year, and its rarity is directly proportional to the latitude along which you lie. The cloud itself has to be a cirrus cloud and hovering at a certain level in the sky, at which the sun refracts light through it's ice strands from its 58 degree angle. I didn't know any of this at the time, but the sight itself was certainly enough to keep me at the beach where I was playing football on a sand bar with my Comunity Recreation class, and skip History; a "felony" I've oddly never commited until then.

Since then, I've been incredibly busy with a few main things, namely (in no particular order, I don't choose favourites over these) : longboarding, photography, canoeing, camping, hanging with my friends and girlfriend, partying, exploring, working, and school - although, my mind hasn't particularly been attending school.

The picture I've uploaded was taken at a parking lot in Campbell River, en route to Sayward Lakes. As you may see, it was a bit rainy and mucky, and it escalated up to the point where we finally pitched our tents 20 km's down a stretch of lakes. The toughest part of the day was not actually the 2.5 km portage, but the super-rare steak I specially flame grilled. Now I warned my food buddies that they should check the center of it with a knife, but at that point I'm sure we would all eat through our arms for any form of fleshy sustenance.

Canoeing 46 odd km's in three days was quite a great experience, even though I princessed the 3-man canoe most of the time. We engaged in race walks, wrote messages in the sky (over-exposed photographs and flashlights), dodged killer hacky sacks, bonded, sang german rowing songs, yarrrred the passing canoes and started playing the pen-15 game across the mighty Campbell Lake (where the winner was decided by the contender with the most competant diaphragm when it comes to belting a certain word for "male genitalia" louder then the previous person, until a decibal is reached piercing the ears more so than the silence of the abyssal lakes we traversed). [[I'm too lazy to edit that mouthful... deal with it]]

With regards to any new additions or alterations to my life, I had my orientation at Butchart Gardens and have somewhat "officially" stopped working at Redbarn until the summer is over. I stepped into a uniform for the first time since my Crawford College era in South Africa, sporting two items I haven't worn since I was a wee boy of 11 - a peak hat and vest. I will find a way to make myself unique in the somewhat conformist ideals of a uniform - perhaps a double popped collar, or vest-under-sweater-combo.

With 13 school days left before exams and graduation, I've thought much about the freedom I will be experiencing soon after that with no obligations but the obligations I force upon myself. Come this summer a few things, new and old, will occupy my time more so than they do at the moment: guitar, gaining some muscle (wow - did I just say that?... soon I will be blogging about protein shakes... my valid excuse is that I need some extra toning if I do land the tree planting gig for next year may/june) and a new skill which I haven't yet decided upon. It could be tap dancing or a martial art, specifically Kendo, or even something as simple as cooking as I now have access to Butchart Garden's lend library and their array of cooking books. Soon I wish to get into the poetry slam scene of victoria, even though it dies down in the summer.

Ah, a busy life requires sleep. I need sleep. Right now.
(My next few blogs will be more to one subject, as opposed to a major blab... Let's hope)

Untitled, for now.

Unfortunately,

my iPod does not allow me to post blogs. :(

This means my blogging life is now hell, because we have no internet for the time being.

-life in other active areas has doubled up though,

considering I do not use the computer anymore-

I've just managed to grab my dad's Laptop for a second,

Stick my SD card into it,

Rip some photo's off...

And click upload,

and now I have to go, until I can edit this post,

Or perhaps I will leave it...

There is definitely a LOT to talk about with regards to the RAINBOW CLOUD...

I haven't in fact figured out what it is yet.

As for this speed blogging, I must be off...

(It has just come to my attention, that I was pressing the enter button far too much, perhaps I want it to read like a poem; I have been to too many poetry events lately.)

Matcha

I am coming to you from a strange place... Serious coffee... STRANGE you might ask, well, strange because I'm not drinking coffee at Starbucks like every other person in canada (Let's forget that the alternative to Starbucks is Serious Coffee for now). In fact, I'm not even drinking coffee, or tea, or Matcha - which is a drink you must try - I'm just soaking up the free WiFi on a mac belonging to Carolyn, who is taunting me with the scent of Matcha. So, this blog seems to have mentioned Matcha twice, and now I have found the point of this blog; Matcha (with a capital letter, yes, it's that good).

Matcha is ground up green tea leaves that have been "latte-fied" - for lack of a better word to describe it. It is green. (My mind seems to resound the word FULLSTOP after that statement).

Let's get serious [HA!] here, I'm using their WiFi because I have no internet. A recent wind surge seems to have destroyed the server, so now I'm sitting here in Serious Coffee writing a stupid blog about Matcha because I have no pictures to upload and nothing interesting to say.

Soon I will have internet; perhaps I will blog from a strange place again.

Pun Cred: Carolyn [seriously...]

Photo: Google Images Upload... TEMPORARY!

[Edit: The photo has been changed to one of mine - 1st June 2010]

Conquered.

Recently, or as of the past year or so, I've adopted a sort of... "DO IT!" mentality. Where in many cases I'd just shun an idea away on the thoughts of it being just too much of a schlep, or with regards to my procrastination, I have been forcing myself to do things for the hell of it. It spured me into trying new things, like longboarding, and actually getting around to attempting things that have interested me for years, such as photography. In many ways these experiences turn out great, and some of them bad - atleast then you have experienced the sour.

Now, I have never traversed more then a couple of km's on a bike, also, the last time I actually rode a bike was about 6 years ago. Today, I took part in the cc350; a fundraiser targeted at installing solar panels on top of my school. The aim was to have teams of 5 and complete 350 laps around a 400m track collectively. So that equals out to 70 laps per person, or 28 km's each. Unfortunately not all the members could show up immediately, and one at all, so it was up to me and another Red Barn boy to keep up with the crowd.

At the end of the day, I completed more laps then I thought was possible for me - not knowing how easy 28 km's actually was. Our team finished a total of 312 laps, second to a team who completed the 350 laps - the supercharged, superhuman, Vikes on Dikes. I totalled 110 laps throughout the day, which allots to 44 km's. A crazy experience for myself. My legs are not feeling it, but that's not to say they won't feel it tomorrow.

On another note, today was also the first time I succesfully got a proper panned image, as you can see. Also, "today," in this context, is actually yesterday, as it is already 01:06 am... I'm too scared to sleep and let the lactic acid go rampant on my legs.
Today was definitely a sweet experience, as opposed to sour.

Word of the day: Sizzle.

Canoein'

Another step towards indoctrinating me into the Canadian lifestyle is to force me into a canoe and put me on a lake; a step my Comunity Recreation 12 class has taken. Now, there wasn't much forcing involved, getting in was something I wanted to do... I'll get to the forceful activity later.

"Com Rec" is the oddest thing to a South African. It was not conceivable to me that one could come to school, and in the middle of embracing the academic lifestyle, spend an hour and a half of your day playing pool downtown or doing rock-climbing, lazertag, hot yoga (another new experience inconceivable to africans), dodgeball or in this case - canoeing.

We have a 3 day trip coming up soon involving canoeing/minor hiking/camping and awesomeness (as the awesomeness will be concentrated in sayward lakes, no awesomeness will be concentrated on my blog for that time, aweh). Fortunately, and unfortunately, we have to train for this trip. On the positive side, I get to go out and canoe between a Literature test and a History midterm and revive the braincells that were decimated while writing an essay on metaphysical poetry of the Renaissance. On the flipside however, you have to train for anything that may happen, including capsizing your hull. This is where the force comes in (not in the jedi sense).

If you're wondering why my title is " Canoein' ", I am not trying to be gangsta. I'm trying to emphasize how "Canoe" and "in" are in the same word - "in" to the water that is. Gunning it for the center of the lake, we congregated as the teacher had told us to; in a spread out formation - far from one another. After waiting for commands, I got bored, and as I looked the other way, our teacher signalled to my loyal german buddy, whom I dearly trust, that he should capsize the boat we were in without me noticing. I Turned to ask him, "What happens now?" but before I could do so, I witnessed a titanic showmanship of brute force as he rocked the boat left in a single motion. Needless to say, I was now "in" the ice cold water...but so was he; something which at first I knew not from sight, but from the icy squeels he made as I turned to drown him.

Ofcourse, the "drowning" part is absolute hyperbole, and it wasn't only him squeeling, it was me... as well as squeels of laughter from the rest of the sadistic class who probably thought the sight of my crazy, lush, immaculate, manly, godly (yes, both manly and godly) and tasty hair getting wet was a cruel joke.

I am alive to blog the story though. This picture - and here's the catch - was not taken today. It is today's picture of today, but it was taken on our first canoeing training day. Since then, I now know the intricacies of the J-stroke, and how to capsize a boat - both integral parts in my journey into becoming a member of the Great White North.

Word of the day: I think since I tried to start that trend, I have jinxed my subconscience and this phenomenon does not happen any more.
Location: Claremont Secondary School.