This weekend I got to visit the merry old land of Winnipeg. It was a great weekend for being there as well. I had been leery because the previous weekend was apparently snowy, but this weekend was pure goodness weatherwise. Just some of the things the weekend gave to me: Experience in navigating corn mazes, a chance to see District 9 in a theatre for cheap, seeing a building with Louis Riel’s name on it and just generally adding to the number of places in this world that I’ve been lucky enough to see. (Oh, and I got to hang out in the company of two cool people). Not bad.

Having spent my weekend with travel, I didn’t get a chance to make a new Adventure Dennis as I might have done. In its place I’ve dug up Abominable Hairman vs. Thompson, a flash cartoon from Contains2 and put it back on the Internet where it belongs.

So today was a hurricane hitting us day here in Halifax. It didn’t really amount to much of anything more than a typical storm as far as I could see. I went out for a couple of walks, one during the hurricane day and one after at night. I got soaked during the first one (which is of course the point of going for a walk in a hurricane). The second was just about as clement as weather can get. I like rain, but I’d still consider the second walk superior because of all the stars showing through.

The hurricane was named Bill. Every day of work in the few days leading up to the weekend had an article talking about Hurricane Bill and my mind always, just for a second assumed it was about how we’d be paying for the hurricane. Stupid mind.

Haiku!

If Vikings are here,
Who’s to say there ain’t Baboons?
Those types both hang out.

My ability to recognize constellations seems to be kaput. I can find Orion when he’s around (I don’t think he is at the moment) and occasionally I think I can find a Dipper, but that’s it. No wonder I haven’t been accepted into Awesome Space Guy School yet.

I haven’t even noticed if the Popsicles that I have been eating almost exclusively for the last few weeks are actually Popsicle brand or some other brand, but either way, God bless them. With the giraffe days of Summer upon us, the apartment has been sweltering and making it hard for the nocturnal PDR to get his proper amount of sleep during the days (or even to sit comfortably around) but devouring frozen sugar/water nonstop has been getting me through.

According to Wikipedia they were by an eleven year of boy in 1905. That is pretty sweet too. Thank you Frank Epperson.

So it has been about nine months since my last post. The reason being: I was adopted by pirates. That, or it’s been a few weeks and I’ve just been lazy. Though I can use the slowness of my spyware filled browser as part of an excuse…

Now, on a daily basis I come up with fascinating things to write about on my little journal thing (and as you readers know, on a bi-annual basis I actually get around to posting one!) so let’s see if I can’t remember some of the things that occurred to me over the past few weeks, lest this become yet another post in which my only content is a reflection of the lack of content.

Winter has hit us here in Hali-town. We’ve had several snowfalls already. We’ve probably already had a quarter or more of the total snows we had last year, which I don’t remember being quite so busy. I have noted that these days any time it snows is referred to as a
“snowstorm”. It’s never just snowing anymore, it’s always a “snowstorm” and the whole city shuts down and schools are cancelled and people start crashing their cars all over the place and all that. I think back to my childhood and remember us actually getting far more snow and the city not breaking down. My question is: Has the snow actually somehow become more violent even though it usually clears up before we get towering snowbanks, or has the city just become one big collective weather wuss?

It also occurred to me at one point during these weeks that I don’t know my own age as readily as a person is probably supposed to do. I have to think about it longer that I probably should. Is that a bad thing? A plus side is that I’ll be thinking about how I’m twenty-eight and then realize, oh wait, I’m not twenty-eight yet and won’t be for over half of a year and it’s like for a moment I got a free bonus year.

Haiku!

My suicide tooth.
I can break it when I want.
But can it break me?

A few weeks back there was a night when I only three hours of sleep (actually there have been several like that since my last post, but I’m talking of a specific one). The thing is, the dream I had felt like it took at least three hours if not longer. I understand the thing about dreaming actually taking place in a shorter amount of time than it feels, but it really felt like I’d been dreaming longer than I’d been asleep. Anyway, the dream was about me conducting job interviews for some position that doesn’t exist in reality at some business that doesn’t exist in reality. I apparently had two openings and four applicants (three women, one man). Over the course of the interviews it occurred to me that the man was a complete moron and that I’d two of the women would be getting the jobs and I was starting to get worried that people would talk about me filling the business with just women (you know, like “Look at PDR over there building himself a little harem…”) and I was spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to do it tactfully. It wasn’t easy considering I had been conducting the interviews in a crowded cafeteria with each of the applicants sitting at a different crowded table but totally able to hear the other interviews. At any rate, I managed to awake before I actually had to do anything. For the record, the third woman who was interviewed was also a moron.

Also for the record, outside of the dream, my harem is totally hiring.

I was going to do some commentary on Christmas as well while I was here, but this is long enough and why waste the content of a post I could do “tomorrow” right?

I suppose I’ve let the site cool down enough after Marq overused it and risked causing a fire. I guess I should relate some tales of my trip to the Other Side Of The World.

I guess I’ll go chronologically. After a whole bunch of planes and the longest travel time I’ve yet experienced, I ended up in Shanghai. Terry and Buffy still had a day of teaching school left, so I got to see all the little kids they teach, which was cool. I found Shanghai to be quite humid and I totally sweat like a person smuggling nuclear cocaine into a police state. The second day there, though, it poured rain. By the end of that the shoes I’d brought were totally ruined and we had to buy me some new footwear. We also bought me some shorts to sleep in, because it had not occurred to me that what I usually sleep in might be a little not-enough for the trip. The footwear we ended up with turned out to be sandals. I generally am not a big sandal wearer, but these ones worked out pretty darn well, especially considering the amount of time we spent in the desert where full socks and shoes would probably have been way too much. Oh, we also bought a bag for me to carry around which was smaller than the big one I planned to use. Not a bad idea either.

Anyway, as I mentioned we went to the desert. The bulk of the trip was spent in the province of Xinjiang, which is the Westernmost part of China. We totally flew to a place called Urumqi and then another flight to Kashgar and that was where we began our travels.

In Kashgar we totally got to see markets and bazaars and the like. People there really want to sell you stuff. I’m a total sucker for salespeople and in most cases would probably be talked into buying stuff or feeling bad, but Terry and Buffy were much better at handling this. Plus, since I didn’t speak the language I was mostly not the target of anyone’s attempts. Also, haggling is a big thing there and I am totally not used to that. As a self-hating and money-hating person, I’m generally okay with paying ridiculously marked-up prices. It’s how I rid myself of all that currency I neither want nor deserve, y’know?

Referring to my notes, I see that on the Thirtieth of June it was that we took a camel tour. That is to say we rode out into the desert on camels. Now we didn’t ride out very far. We pretty much just went out to the first couple dunes and looked out on the rest. And the ride was shorter than advertised as well. But I was okay with it. I’d never ridden a camel before, so that was neat and I’d never seen desert sand dunes in person so that was neat (and ran my hand through the sand, as well). Though as we were out there the wind kicked up and we got lots of sand blowing into our faces. I couldn’t put my teeth together without chewing sand for hours afterwards.

Another cool plus for that part of the trip is that the three of us went on this camel tour with four other travellers all of whom seemed very nice and gave us companions for various other excursions during the remainder of our days in Xinjiang.

The next significant segment of the journey was a ride up into the mountains to see this cool mountain lake (which I’m afraid I don’t remember the name of). Though an hours-long trip through lovely mountains was there to break it up, I was particularly impressed by seeing snow after having been in the desert so soon before. I was able to appear impressive by simply knowing what a yurt was ahead of time. The way to be a successful idiot is to make it appear as though your idiocy is a ploy to cover some hidden intelligence. Though we did not sleep overnight in the yurt, we all had a good nap before we went back to our hotel.

Sometime later we left Kashgar via rail. We rode a train through the desert to Turfan. I think I slept more than usual on the train, because it was supposed to be twenty-some hours but didn’t really feel that long. We’d opted to pay for sleeper rooms so we’d have beds. Terry and Buffy told me of times they’d just got seats and had to sit there for terribly long and crowded rides. Myself only having experienced this way, I can say kinda like train travel.

Turfan is another nice little desert city. One thing I really liked was the big roads that were trellised by these grapevines to allow for shade (there’s a picture on the Wikipedia page even). While in this town we also saw a mosque with the tallest minaret in China, the remains of a fort that was probably pretty impressive back in the day what with being on this plateau thing and some little village I didn’t catch the name of which seems to have less people left than it once did. Also that village had the remains of some Buddhist temples that had been defaced when the town was invaded. Also in Turfan we used an Internet cafe which looked pretty much as one of those would be expected to look, though dim lighting and air conditioning are pretty nice in the desert. The Internet is not easy to use over there, though. Oh and we ate at a place called Best Food Burger which has my favorite name for a fast food place because of the sheer confidence it exudes.

Oh yeah, speaking of food I forgot to mention that we ate a Pakistani place back (I think) in Kashgar. It was really good and I find myself wishing such a place were around here. It’s not like my street here doesn’t have a million restaurants already. For the most part I enjoyed the Chinese food as well. We ate way more than I generally do. I know more than one meal a day is supposed to be healthy, but it takes some time for me to train myself to manage it. But as I said, I liked the food. And I didn’t seem to embarrass myself with the chopsticks either.

Okay where was I? Right, so we left Turfan and took a bus back to Urumqi. On the bus they played some Bollywood movie which didn’t look all that great but I was amused that when the main character went on a revenge driven quest to kill the criminals who, (I think) killed his wife and an elderly man (his father? his fighting master? I don’t know) he wore a leather jacket with the American Flag on it. That flag will become visual slang for “Gonna Kick Some Ass” before we even know what happened.

We were mere moments too late at Urumqi airport and we missed our flight (overzealous but obviously confused cab company owner leading us on a mad chase for one of his cabs didn’t help with that…) and we ended up spending an hour or two trying to get money off of credit cards and ended up spending the night in a hotel before we were finally able to fly back to Shanghai in the morning.

Since I had to leave the day after we got back to Shanghai (and Terry and Buffy move the day following) there isn’t much else to tell. They apparently didn’t quite feel right putting me to work on my vacation (though I’d not have minded) so I spent most of the time that remained simply relaxing. Then I got back onto a plane and eventually made it back here. I think that’s about it.

All in all I think I had a pretty awesome trip. My next travels can not come soon enough. I have a first batch of pictures up on Facebook for those who can see that. When Terry and Buffy have finally got around to making their own albums I’ll make a second with whatever pictures are left over. We certainly have enough of them.

And once again I must give a sincere Thank You to Terry and Buffy for letting me come with them on that trip. Hopefully I wasn’t much trouble to carry around. Thanks guys.