Category: Uncategorized

the backyard at work.
for whatever reason, days that start around 11 a.m. tend to just take longer than days that start earlier. i think i like sleeping in, though lately i am not so happy about sleeping extra time in the morning. it was a nice day though — we had tunes blasting in the warehouse and we took care of business.
last night i met up with greg. we drove aimlessly around nanaimo, driving up streets i had never seen before. after a while we started to find coffee shops. we had aimed to go for coffee, but in nanaimo, after 10 pm, that’s a hard thing to accomplish. we probably drove for about an hour and a half before settling on a place that sells coffee but isn’t a coffee shop.
greg lives in a house with a bunch of roommates [such as p-dawg]. by house i mean.. you know, one of those houses. the ones that everyone who has been there before would refer to as The House, being amongst an elite few which deserve such a title. this particular The House used to have a hole in the wall in one of the [now] bedrooms, through which you could see the outside world. it has been covered up, but, aww yeah, this is The House in nanaimo.

looking across cameron lake. tomorrow i work in port alberni. i enjoy the drive there as it is pretty scenic. in fact, the next 3 days i will be in port alberni for work. i’ll be driving back and forth each day, but that’s cool with me!

this bird is safe.. but am i?
i saw a bird get killed today. i am not sure if the following makes me a morbid person.. but i have seen many birds almost get hit by cars and just narrowly escape. i had always wanted to see the bird get hit, but now that i have seen it, i really wish i had not. it was a car ahead of us that hit the bird and it was really blindsided by the vehicles tires. yuck. i will spare you the image — it was disgusting and it was just awful to see.
i think people are morbid in theory, but when it comes down to reality, it is a different story.
blech.
otherwise it has been great, again, to be in victoria. it is such a pretty city in the spring, and as one columnist put it, it is the only place in canada enjoying spring in winter. it is so true. there are blossoms everywhere.
anyway, back to nanaimo. i have not seen any blossoms there yet.. it’s amazing what an hour and a half of driving will do or wont do for your surroundings. nanaimo definitely has a different climate than victoria.

the shadows of darkness cast a shadowy dark spell over the ant kingdom causing at least several minutes of darkness!
can you guess who these shadows belong to?
[hint: one of them took the picture]

kind of a personal question isn’t it? i spent the day in comox at their ‘home show’. good stuff, it was pretty quiet. the best part was that shaw had a booth set up with the canucks game. i couldn’t quite see from where i was but i got to glimpse every now and then.
on my break i went down to the beach and it was beautiful. got some more shots in, amongst them a really cool one of Some Sand and A Bunch Of Rocks. etc. the break didn’t last long enough.

there were all sorts of businesses at the home show. the drive back at dusk was pretty and relaxing. it was pretty relaxing. there’s something i really really like about driving on highways. i didn’t have a CD player but the radio did just fine with the hockey broadcast keeping me company along the way. steph fell asleep half way through the journey. yep, pretty relaxing.
ahh driving.

the path through cathedral grove
i have always found it pretentious the way bands like oasis compare themselves to the beatles. i mean, i find it so much so that they must be joking. beyond this, they release albums with names such as “standing on the shoulders of giants” and that kind of thing. how could they compare themselves to the beatles when the beatles had no such band to compare themselves to? that by itself seperates them.

giants fallen from a massive wind storm
but mockery of oasis is not the purpose of this post. there’s something bigger than even the beatles and oasis combined.
i would be talking of cathedral grove — the ancient rainforest between port alberni and the east side of the island. some of these trees are over 800 years old. and they’re alive.
they’re over 800 years old.
jeebus.
walking around in that area is just breathtaking. i could have walked around for hours if it were not for the particularly cold weather that day. there’s just something awe inspiring about the scale of all of this. pictures don’t do it justice, but they do make for mighty fine reminders if you’ve been there before.

what the @#$! is this?!
thank you for the feedback on those tennis ball shots. yes, they’re all from the same shot but the cropping and sizing obviously makes a big difference. no one said what i thought they would say, but thats what makes the comments and complications even cooler. i saw the middle image in a different way after considering what jim wrote.
it’s kind of like how it was being in atlin and trying to bring some of it home with you on the camera. i had trouble capturing the scale of the whole thing. it has a lot to do with the composition of the image .. you need to have something to compare all the size to. i think i was able to achieve this in one atlin picture by capturing anastasia in the image with the mountains in the background. compare that to another picture with my face in the foreground and the mountains in the background. neat shot, but you dont get near the sense of the immensity of the mountains.
the last atlin shot brings me to something else that is rather large.

the largest, oldest tree in cathedral grove at 800+ years
i put up a new entry in my (simple) music and mixes blog, which is still all mixes and no music. this entry is for my proton radio featured artist mix which aired january the 8th. there’s a 192k mp3 hosted off of lefty.ca‘s phat pipes
(that means high speed connection), and of course the entry is complete with a CD cover and tracklistings should you choose to burn it. i made the cover for it yesterday out of one of the atlin pictures and a bit of the usual graphic design. there’s also a link to the proton radio featured artist website with a bio and all that kind of stuff. it all clocks in an a giant two hours and fifty minutes. if you haven’t yet heard it, i hope you enjoy it!

4.0 megapixels. mmmm. it always feels like time evaporates faster and faster every time i go back to victoria. there were plenty of plans, but only so much time. when was i going to sleep?

this is more of the same image, shrunk down a bunch. i had plans on monday night. i was going to watch a movie with julie, i was also going to go for coffee with nathan. neither happened. i stayed up until around 11 and then crashed. mmmmm sleep.
i wanted to go swimming with steve but unfortunately the pools aren’t open at 3 am. and i also wanted to go meet up with the ex-experience kru but there was no time for that either. alas!
i also wanted to meet up with some ex-coworkers from last work term at bchydro. getting a bunch of people together for an hour or an hour and a half is a bit difficult on short notice though. i think making plans ahead of time is in order.. i’m getting to this point where i should probably schedule my couple days off in victoria while i am still in nanaimo.

this image is shrunk down to display the entire picture.
today i didn’t get to play tennis because i slept in. i did, however, get to go on a nice walk on the breakwater. there’s something very relaxing about going for walks on the breakwater. nothing quite makes you feel like you’re in victoria like going for a walk on the breakwater, i think.
steph had some car troubles as we were departing for nanaimo again this evening. we drove around to several garages, just as they were closing, and weren’t told anything incredibly helpful. that’s when i phoned jim. we drove over to his place in james bay, he had a quick look at and was able to tell us what the cretins at all the other garages had no time to say. or didn’t know. either way, thank you very much jim! we made it up to nanaimo with confidence — which is important to me. i once had a car break down on the island highway and it was not a pleasurable experience, let me tell you. er, i just told you!
so out of the three above pictures, which would you consider to be ‘the big picture’?

it’s great to be in victoria again, at least for last night, today, and tomorrow until afternoon. i did not hang out with colin and jill in the last couple days, but they are some of my friends who i did recently hang out with in victoria.
i just watched my first episode of american idol tonight. it was definitely entertaining, but more so because I was hanging out with two experienced musicians, chrissie and rich. the best of the worst is on thursday night. i do not think i can miss this.
anyway i am planning on playing tennis tomorrow morning with nathan. that should be good. it has just been awesome. i have a few rad pictures from when we played last week.. plus a whole bunch of others. i will probably post these tomorrow afternoon!

well it’s a gorgeous day once again and i am headed to mill bay for the duration of it. then i’m coming back up to nanaimo and then going to victoria at about 6:30!$#*(%!)*$^)(#)$(~@!#%asdfasdfsdjkvasdnvsd$~$*!@(%@#~(*$!@)(#!@
@!#*(%)(*%)~($)!(#!~)#@~!@~!@#~!#~!@$^$(#)@&#(%!@#
i am in town until wednesday evening. anyone wanna do anything!?

how much sleep i’ll get tonight…….