Long Lost Update
Well my dear Julie has gotten a job working at a spa, and she starts today. On the other hand, I am still at home unemployed. Aside from working on resumes and my portfolio, and trying to update my knowledge on important software, I spent most of my free time either emailing or talking to her. But now that is not an option, so I look to fill my free time with my hobbies again, such as blogging.
I am eager about getting back into graphic design. It's such a fun profession. But now I am seeing that it was erroneous of me to never apportion time to learning web design, for that lack of knowledge threatens to hold me back now. So I need to come up with some kind of project to teach myself both Dreamweaver and Flash. I suppose an online portfolio is as good as anything? Both Dreamweaver and Flash offer 30 day free trials, so I'm thinking I need to do as much of the up-front work as possible before I download them. Which is planning and comps, I suppose.
It would be nice if I could actually design my blog as part of that, too, rather than have to use the blogger template.
hmmmm... lots to do.
Also, I have had an offer to do some freelance work. Yay! And not pro bono! Yay!
But we have yet to negotiate a price. I need to get back to them with what is fair.
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Come to think of it, I haven't done absolutely nothing. I've gotten back on my bike and cycled around to some places, playes some soccer, watched a couple of movies at the theatre, played some settlers, destroyed a small island republic, and I made dinner on Monday. And somehow I've managed to screw up my body clock so that I am now having a hard time getting to sleep before two. ["Somehow" is most likely my reluctance to hang up the phone at a reasonable hour.]
And Canada? It's all the same and different. But more the same than different. Except that I can speak Japanese now.
It's a Saturday, I am finally back in Winnipeg, and I don't know who to call to find out what is going on. It's been more than a week of mostly just sitting at home, and I'm ready to get out of the house. I wish there was something like this where I could look to see what's going down. We used to have one in Tokushima. But then, everyone lived so far apart, we really needed it. And now, though I am closer to the heart of a major city than I have been in years, It seems like it's harder to find the scene my friends are on. Bizarre.
Accused
I'm just back from Carla's cd release party, and I was accused of not ever mentioning on my blog that I have a girlfriend. So I will take the time to mention it now. I am dating this wonderful and beautiful girl by the name of Julie. We went to the same church in Japan for the last two years, but it wasn't until we travelled around Kyushu for a week with Brian and Christine and their friend Lorraine this past April/May that we became so attracted to eachother. Then because school was slow we got to know eachother much better chatting on the google chat while at school. So it was less than a month later that I asked her out, and our first date was June 2nd.
But both of us were finishing up our contracts in Japan, so the last time we saw each other was July 22nd. Phil was here then. He and I left for Tokyo and Fuji that night. Julie went home to Hawaii three days later.
Since then we've just had emails, phone calls, and now that I'm at a home with broadband, skype to talk with. So if I say to you I want to go to Hawaii, now you know that it's for beauty greater than tropical paradise.
Julie looks just as hot with her short hair as she did with her long, but I didn't really have big photos of her with her shorter hair use for this. She only got it cut the day I left for Tokyo, you see. The guy with her by the cactus is her brother Kevin, who lives in Arizona now.
2 minutes to post
at gatwick airport
expensive internet - 50 per minute means 3 dollars for 15 minutes
somehow managed not to pay any excess baggage fees
squeezed my bag into the size check box by loading my pockets
even duty free alcohol seems crazy expensive here
board in an hour or so
will be home in 13 hours or so
will be home at about 5
don't know what to think
but its the right thing
times up
Soon and very soon
Well I'll be on my way home to canada in just a couple of days. one more day in london and then the day after tomorrow i fly home. ill be back in the evingin! \i think im ready to come home. england is so expensive. japan is so over. theres a lot to do and im ready to stop procrastinating and start doing it.
im in a hostel in london and having to pay a pound per 20 minutes!! what the hell kind of hostel charges for internet, and then on top of that charges $2 for 20 mins?! i am not pleased. it would be nice if they had wi fi or something so i could use my own computer at least. booooo-urns. oh well. ill be home soon enough and then maybe ill take the time to blog properly about all the stuff ive been up to the last few weeks. Grapevine, a massive christian conference, northumberland, castles, scotland, whiskey distillery, lake district, and on and on. \it s been fun. i have a bunch of pictures a la dan's digi cam to post. but that will come later. and now im down to just a couple of minutes left. thats whawt i get for leaving bloggin to the very end.
see y'all on the other side of the pond!
My mind seems ready to attempt Canada
i was so disappointed when I woke up this morning. I had been offering my brother a sausage and egg McMuffin in a green melonpan bun, and as I sat up to pass it to him, my vision cleared and I was awake and sitting not in my parents' living room, but in the spare bedroom of Dan's grandma's place in Northumberland.
In the dream I'd had a box of six egg McMuffin melonpan, and my parents had refused them on the grounds that they thought they looked disgusting. My brother, however, said, "I'll try one. Pass one here."
Before that I had been tying a Zorro cape to the power cable outside the house. Because the new Zorro movie was coming out.
"Who's in it this time?" my dad asked.
"Antonio Banderas, of course," I replied.
When I did wake up in reality, the word "Zorro-astrian" was on the tip of my tongue. Funny.
As I tied the cape to the line, I realised that it might be confused with a batman cape. Also, I realised that it wasn't a proper heavy fabric cape, but rather a cheap promotional garbage-bag-with-a-string cut into the shape of a cape. Even though I had taken the cape off of the real Banderas whom I had pulled out of the cover of a movie box or a poster, when he was posing as hard as he could, trying to be sexy. There had been music, too. But when I got him out, he was only about half life-size. And a doll.
It was very windy as I tied the cape. A voice, possibly my own, possibly that of a passerby said, "I love your cape, Zorro-man!"
Before that, I had been talking to Phil from the stairs outside my parents place, though they were like 20 feet high. I was singing a happy tune i made up on the go about how I no longer neeeded the spare power cable to use the microwave. And by power cable, I mean one coming into the house from the outside. But I electrical taped this new power cable to the outside of a larger cable already leading into the house.
Earlier in the dream I had asked Ron MacLean/Ken Peters about which bible verse was the hardest to preach on. And he gave me a reference. I looked it up and it was the one with Jesus about crayons and the end of the world. I laughed, because I could see how that would be difficult. It was pretty confusing. I also asked which line he would rather use, of the many coming to the house. He said the fat one, which was thick like the trunk of a tree, and had bark patterns, but was black like rubber, and though hard like old wood, a power cable. He said he picked it over the thin little one because it was stronger.
So then when Phil came I asked him, and he asked, "Why?" And I told him which the pastor had chosen and why. And he said, "In that case, Derek [Funk] says the thin one."
"Why the thin one?" I inquired.
"Because I didn't have time to think just now." Phil replied.
