When I Am King

Been a while

2009-11-02T13:47:00.001-08:00

Wow, been a while.

I should write here more often

The Great Gig in the Sky

2008-09-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

September 15th, 2008 the world lost another great.

I am a big fan of the band, Pink Floyd. I have yet to find a way to express how I feel about their music in words. Even most of the titles for my blog entries are lines from their songs. But their music will never be the same again. The bands keyboardist and one of the founding members, Richard Wright has gone to the Great Gig in the Sky. Rest in peace.

Changing subjects, I just want to update people on things for me here in France. Looks like I will be staying after all. I have secured an apartment, although I a taking a bit of a gamble since I won't see a contract until I am home. Part of the reason that I want to do the contract there is because I will have just a little bit more control. Some of the things will include paying for French lessons, having them commit to paying out my apartment lease if I get terminated, and a vehicle. I doubt that I will get a car, but I think that the others I won't have any problem with.

Even with me staying, there are some big changes. Gus, my friend and crew lead has decided not to stay. He has had enough and wants to go home. Actually, I think that he was thinking about his girlfriend, Mary. She has been here with Gus, but without a job for too long and needs something to do. I respect their decision, but they both will be missed.

We will be having another guy from home come to take his place. We have also hired 3 French mechanics, who will be in shock when they find out how this place runs completely differently from the way any other French outfit runs. It will be a complete cluster-fuck for the first 3 months, but hopefully after that it will settle a bit.

I will still be home on October 8th, for at least 2.5 weeks, but I am going to try and stay a wee bit longer since the boss here is being a dick and keeps cutting back my time. I would like to have 3 weeks, but I will have to see how that goes.

So, sometime after October 8th, I will want a lot of sushi! Book me some time!

Geez, it has been a while

2008-09-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like I missed August completely. Been a while since I did that. =)

A little update as to things in France if you didn't already know. I have been asked to stay here, take on a new position, learn French and this offer is open for up to 6 years.

So here are the Pros...Company pays my rent. Company pays me a per diem still.(not too bad!) I have been offered a position as QA manager, so I am hoping that comes with a raise. I finally can get an apartment away from the hotel! I get to live in southern France...that is a big perk.

Here is one that is a pro and a can...I need to learn French. No worries, but I need to know it by January. I wish I had a bit more warning...

Cons...I will lose my seniority with the union back home. I don't know how this will affect me if I go back, but for right now it is a risk that I need to take. I need to get a car/motorcycle. I don't have a bike license yet, so it will probably be a car, which leads to parking issues since my new pad is in town. Since I will be a QA person, this means that I don't get to touch the planes anymore, and therefore I lose my run up privileges. That part sucks.

It has been over two weeks, and I still haven't seen any comp package from the company. This is starting to bug me, since I don't want to say yes to an apartment if the company tries to screw me (they have done that before) with wages and such. There is also rumour that we will be working a French week...35 hours a week. Not so bad, but if I am a salaried employee, this means no more overtime. Also, there is the threat of paying French taxes, which are higher than back home, and I won't be able to reap any benefits from the French social system unless I become French and stay here forever. (I am in an awkward spot for the company. I am still employed with the Canadian side of things, but working for the French division and not employed by the French division. So, I still get paid in Canada and pay the taxes there. This might change.)

So, in a nut shell, that is about all that went on in August. Worked a lot, didn't go anywhere, worked some more. Practised my French as well. Yup, barrel of laughs.

La Tour de France

2008-07-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

Today, the Tour de France came to a town near me.

Jerome, Gus, Mary, Mary's nephew and myself got up fairly early to go and watch the Tour de France in the town of Cavaillon, about a 30 minute drive away from Aix. I knew that it would be a bit anti-climactic, but still, I had a chance to see the Tour de France!

We arrived with about 3 hours to kill before they rode through, so we went searching for some lunch. After stopping at the supermarket, a McDonald's and a restaurant, we finally found a bakery that was open. That is correct, the big stores were all closed so that their staff could go and watch the race live! I couldn't imagine any place in Canada closing down just because a bike race was coming through...think of the lost profit! But here in France, leisure time is more important than working. Someone finally gets it!

We found a place to sit in the shade, as many more people slowly trickled in to find places to sit. Shortly, the sponsor cars started to roll by, with pretty girls tossing trinkets into the crowd. It is amazing how much people will argue over stupid little key chains and bobbles! I actually lucked out and caught something. I was in the middle of taking a photo, when I saw something launched my way. Automatically, my left hand went up, and without actually seeing, I caught it. Yippee! A deck of cards! LOL, stupid trinkets. I think that the catch was more impressive than what I got.

So after a few hours of sponsors, police motorcycles, more sponsors, press cars, and race officials, we finally got word that the racers where on their way. Off in the distance, you could see 4 or 5 helicopters circling like birds of prey looking for a kill.

We were sitting by a traffic circle, and we thought that if we stayed where we were in the shade, then the bikes would be going past on the other side of the road, and we would miss them. So last minute move to the other side, and we were ready.

Finally, we heard that 4 cyclists were in the lead, and when we saw the red car, they would be right behind them. So, armed with the camera on high speed, multi shot mode I prepared myself. The first four came around the corner, and I started snapping photos. The next group was fairly large, and I fired off a ton more shots. I paused, and Gus yelled at me that there were more, so I quickly turned and continued to shoot. Gus ten yelled, that the leader, the one in the yellow had passed us, so I quickly turned, fired off a few more shots toward him.

Thirty seconds later...it was all over. That was it, three hours waiting, thirty seconds of action. I managed one hundred and ninety-two photos, with about 50 or so of the bikes. I did manage a few decent ones, which I will post later on Flickr (when I get through all of my Europe trip photos).

Since we had to work, we left right away. After a few back roads, we got to the Autoroute, and headed back to Aix. No more than 10 kilometres later, we crest a hill and see about 5 kilometres of traffic...not moving. We quickly dodged off on an exit, and went back to the back roads to get home. Our half hour drive ended up being an hour home. At least we managed to get to the pool for 45 minutes before we had to leave.

So, I managed to get to the Tour de France this time around. Short, but pretty cool and I am sure that I have now made my brother Mike jealous. =D

Europe Road Trip: Post III

2008-07-16T02:29:00.000-07:00

Well, Allen should be getting on his plane about now. He left last night on the TGV to Paris, hopefully he got a hotel for the night, and he leaves in about 13 minutes (as of writing this) back to Vancouver. It was quite the whirl-wind trip, but I think that he has found some good memories that will last a life time.

So, we got back to Aix on the 14th, which was Bastille day, and we headed into town to eat. Since it was a bit later in the day, it was getting dark on the way back to the car, and the crowds had gathered for the fireworks show in the middle of town. As we were winding through the crowd, the first of the rockets were launched. So we stood, really close as it was, and watched the rockets and other types of fireworks light up the night. We found it shorter and not quite as nice as the show in St.Julien-en-Genevois, which is weird since it is a much bigger town than St. Julien. Still, it was nice to see.

On the 15th, we headed up to Luberon, looking for Lavender fields, and other places to visit. Our first big stop was Bonnieux, a small medieval town on the side of a hill. Lots of old buildings, and the old church on top. (we stopped going into the churches after Notre-Dame, they are all rather boring!) While looking out over the valley, we saw another town across the way. Turns out that it is Lacoste, and the chateau that is sitting above it was home to the Marquis de Sade! So of course, we had to see that!

A quick, five minute drive and we were parked and hiking up the hill to the top of the town. Seems that all these towns are build on hill sides. The town was very old, and very beautiful, but what struck me was that almost everyone was speaking english! It seems that there is an art and design school there that takes up many of the buildings, and it is full of students from North America. Still, it felt weird having english all around me in a French town.

We got to the top where the chateau was, only to find that it is closed to the public. It appears to be half rebuilt, and that it is now used as a place to put on plays or concerts. It would have been nice to see inside, but I don't think that to be possible.

On the way out of the town, we stopped at a market to find a few last touristy things for Al to bring home. (Al's plane should be pushing back now...have a good flight!) The lady at the market spoke rapid-fire French and I had a hell of a time understanding her. Luckily, there was another girl who spoke a tiny bit of English, so we managed to get what we needed. It was difficult to explain to them that we couldn't take the cheese from the cheese stand back to Canada. I should have bought some for myself, but I already have too much cheese in the fridge.

Next stop was the Fountain of Vaucluse, where I have been before. Last time I was there, the water was almost not visible in the bottom of the spring. A few weeks ago, it was roaring out of the top, over the rocks and boulders that are lying just past the opening. Yesterday, it was about 5-6 meters higher than the last time I was there, but still really low. The river was running much higher though, which made the rapids a little more interesting.

So we walked the tourist path, checking out the shops, taking photos. As we came around the bend, we saw some girls with paint easels, and canvas, painting the river scenes. These were the same girls that we had seen in Lacoste! They had just started when we came by one way, and I was blown away at how much they had done when we came back. And how good they were. Painting is something that I am just not good at, unless it is a barn or something. I will stick to my photos, that I can do.

After Vaucluse, we needed to get back to Aix. Al had his train to catch, and I didn't want him to miss it. We actually got back here earlier than I had though, so we had time to eat and have a nap before heading to the station.

It was nice to have Al here, even if it was a crazy whirl-wind visit. Maybe next time we can take a bit longer, plan a bit better so that we can stay at hostels or in tents so that it won't be quite as expensive. I am scared to look at my bank account, I am sure that there are cobwebs taking hold!

Road Trip Europe: Post II

2008-07-12T23:45:00.000-07:00

Plans change fast on a road trip, and this one worked out nearly the same.

When we got to Interlaken, our memories were jogged about Jungfrau, the tallest mountain in Switzerland, which just happened to be in Interlaken's back yard. We decided that going to the top would be the day's adventure, and set about to hope that the rain would stop long enough to enjoy things that far up.

So, we sat and watch the thunder storm half that evening, then got soaked in a walk around town. We didn't do much, since it was so wet and we were quite tired.

Early the next morning, we got up so that we could go to some of the tourist shops looking for some post cards and souvenirs. After, we headed up toward the mountain, more particularly, Grindelwald, where the the nearest train station to the mountain is located. When we arrived, we saw that we had only five minutes to catch the train, so I rushed into the station, grabbed tickets, nearly passed out from the price of them (over 150 CHF each! That is about $150 CDN each!), then quickly boarded the train.

The way up was kind of boring, the fog was so thick that we really couldn't see much. It was green on the bottom, and white on the top. But we were on a rack railway, so that was kind of exciting for Allen.

About 20 minutes into the trip, we had to switch trains to catch the train that actually went up to the top. As I walked up to the train, I saw only one door open, and just climbed in. Ummm...it was the baggage door and the train crew quickly shooed me along. Oops.

The next leg of the trip was about as exciting as the previous...until we entered the mountain. You see, most of the trip actually takes place inside the Eiger, then through the Monch for about 7km! There are actually two stations inside the Eiger where you can get out and see down the north face toward the valley below...on a clear day. It was mostly a white out when we went to see.

The train station at the top is 3454m up inside Jungfraujoch, where you there are restaurants, an "Ice Palace" (inside a galcier), as well as observation areas and a way outside into the snow. Our fist stop was the Ice Palace, where the Korean and Aussie tourists (well, almost all the tourists) where cold. I was walking around in my sandals, feeling quite warm. =) It was quite interesting inside, and Al and I had fun slipping and sliding around the floors. After one run and slide, I yelled out "Hurry! Hard!" which nearly had us both falling over laughing. For some reason, no one else got it...=P

Next stop was outside, where the snow was blowing sideways. It was -0.5C, and still mostly fogged in, but really cool to be standing so far up. Speaking of far up, we had to be careful not to exert ourselves too much, since we were over the altitude that even aircraft are supposed to be pressurized to keep people safe. We felt light headed if we moved too quickly, and early on there was some poor kid in the washroom chucking his guts from the elevation. Poor guy.

So after a few dozen photos, we went inside, had some good bratwurst and schnitzel for lunch then found our way to the top deck for a look. As luck would have it, the fog moved away, and the sun came out to show of the Jungfrau peak. It was interesting looking at the photos later, to see the young lady in the rock for which the peak is named.

While on the top, we met some girls from Adelaide, and a group from Toronto who was nice enough to take some photos of Al and I together.

Soon we had to leave, we needed to get toward Zürich. Back near at the bottom, we were soon back into the rain again...and slow traffic. I don't know what it is with the Swiss and their desire to go constantly under the speed limit, but it annoys me. At least do the speed limit, and it would be nice to have the speed posted on the motorways. They post to let you know that you need to go slower, like 100, 80 or 60km/h, but they never post what the top speed is. They also like to change speeds constantly, for various reasons. I got hit with a speed camera, not going too fast, but obviously over the limit. The tough part was that I had changed speed about 4 times in a couple of kilometres and really had no idea what the speed was supposed be! I just hope that with the out of country plates on the car, I don't get a bill in the mail.

So, now we are about 20km from Zürich, and it is pouring with rain still. We have decided to make a very short stop here, then drive back to Geneva again today to stay at Leanne and Alex's for the night. Not fun playing tourist in the rain.

Tomorrow we will drive back to Aix and then I can show Al around there and a bit of Provence before he needs to get on a train and leave to catch his plane in Paris. From what I have seen on the weather reports, it is at least nice down south.

Road Trip:Europe

2008-07-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

Allen arrived Monday in Paris, where we spent a couple of days wearing out our feet.

The weather started off kind of crappy, cool and overcast, some rain. I took the train to Charles de Gaul airport, where I met Al as he arrived from Vancouver. We caught a navette to one of the main train stations nearer to our hotel, then took the Metro the rest of the way...well almost. We got out of the Metro station, and because of a poor map and streets that criss-cross each other, we turn the wrong way and instead of walking a block, we walked about 3 kilometres or more! We walked along, walked along, suddenly we were at the Seine! Oops. At least I now had a good landmark and found the hotel after walking all the way back again. Poor Al, he had his heavy suitcase and was VERY jet lagged.

We found our room and went searching for dinner. We checked a few places, and ended up in this little hole-in-the-wall place that turned out to be fantastic! It wasn't cheap, but I will admit that I have never had pasta that tasted that good before. Somehow, we ended up with a really good wine to go with it, plus some amazing appies as well. For dessert, we had home made Tiramisu, which floated down our throats as our taste buds fought to keep the taste going for ever.

So after our meal, we wandered a couple of blocks and saw the Eiffel Tower all lit up blue. One the one side, there was the gold stars of the EU flag, and with the tower blue, it was a nice tribute to France currently holding the presidency of the EU.

Back at the hotel, Al passed out right away, mid conversation. Jet lag sucks.

The next morning, we got up fairly early and went to Notre Dame Cathedral. OMG!!! That place was amazing! I am glad that I don't pay for film anymore, since I would be completely broke processing all those photos! (between Allen and I, over about 48 hours we took over 1300 photos)

After Notre Dame, we made our way a bit north, and wandered toward the Louvre. We didn't have any plans to go, it would just take too long to do, but we did enjoy the exterior of the buildings that house it.

Next was a quick ferris wheel ride, to get some elevation on the city for photos. This kind of started the obsession with the Eiffel Tower that lasted the rest of the time there.

By now, we were getting tired and hungry, and we though that we would head back tot he hotel for a quick rest, shoe change and then get some dinner and go see about getting up the tower at night. Along the way, we thought about taking a short cut through the Hotel d'Invalides. The short cut ended up keeping us a few hours longer. We took some time and went into the museum which houses a lot of old medieval suits of armour, ancient weapons, etc. This took a lot of time, but the highlight was seeing Napoleon's Tomb. Yes, that Napoleon...the short dead dude. He was something of a "local hero" I guess. =P

After seeing the dead, we had some Chinese food (yes, we ate Chinese in Paris...it was cheaper than other places) and then went out with the camera's to see the tower again at night. We managed to get up to the second level of the tower, but we were to late and the top deck was closed. Still, we got some wicked shots and had a great time.

The next morning, we tried to get up early (we were both quite worn out) and get to the tower before the crowds. Ummm...didn't happen. We slept in too late, and then by the time we got to the tower, the line up was hours long. Oh well. So we walked up to the Arch de Triumph instead. It wasn't quite as exciting as the tower, but still fun to watch the madness that is the traffic circle around it. Cars just going everywhere, with no lines, not direction, just madness.

After a walk down the Champs Elysse, we grabbed our bags from the hotel, then went to Gare de Lyon to catch our train to Aix. For some reason, the train was over an hour late to leave the station, so we got home too late to do much that night.

Next day, we took the rented BMW 318 TDI and took the slower, more scenic route to Geneva, with a lunch stop in Annecy. It took most of the day, but the drive was quite pleasant. Annecy is much like every other time I have been there, but this time I managed to get up to the church above the town, and I got at least part of my body in the lake (we cooled our feet for a few minutes there.) Then it was off to Alex and Leanne's for the night.

Today, we made a stop in Geneva for a couple of hours, then went off to Bern. In Bern, we went down and saw the poor bear in the bear pit, the last one out of many that lived there for years. It is sad to see him, stuck in a stone pit, with no friends. We wandered a little bit, Allen bought some touristy things (new Swiss shirt for instance), and we had a nice salad lunch.

Now we are sitting in a hotel room in Interlaken, staying inside from the rain. Tomorrow we changed our plans and are going to be taking the rack railway up Jungfrau, then heading toward Zurich. After that, we are not sure. We might just head back to Alex and Leanne's, or take a run through Italy. Not really sure.

But, we are having a total blast doing all of this!

If we all pull together as a team

2008-06-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

I had some plans last Sunday, nothing too big but plans none the less. I was going to drive around to some of the older villages and towns in the area to do some photography, ending with a stop at a place Martin told me about where there is a really cool waterfall.

Needless to say, I never made it.

I took the company van out on the A8 heading east, all happy with the iPod playing and the sun almost shining. Stuck to the speed limit since I wasn't in a hurry, and even stayed in the right lane most of the way, just enjoying the drive. I hoped off the motorway, went through the toll booth and then it happened.

I was trying to sort out directions, the road signs over here are always that easy to understand, when I realized that I was going to go the wrong way. Instinctively, I turned right to catch the exit, but I had travelled farther than I had realized and had no room. I tried to turn back but the van was now on a bit of loose gravel and I slid into the guard rail. Crunch.

Of of that happened in about 0.5 seconds.

I wasn't going fast to begin with, maybe 60km/h, and by the time I hit, I was probably only about 30, maybe less. I crushed the front end of the van really well (it is all plastic anyway), as well as bending the front left fender enough that the door didn't like to open. Even with all that damage, the airbag didn't deploy, and I hardly felt the impact. Both the guard rail and the crumple zones on the van did their jobs correctly.

I managed to call Martin after Gus and Pedro didn't answer their phones (they were both out of town), and Martin had Jerome call me. Jerome was able to come and get me, but it was going to be an hour or so of a wait. Well, I wasn't going anywhere, so I just sat there feeling a bit upset at myself for crashing the van.

Nearly an hour later, after watching a number of cars do exactly what I had done, minus the impact, the Gendarmerie showed up to say hi. Luckily one spoke English, since I was a bit to messed up to actually try French. We went a half minute down the road to fill out a report and to make sure we had a tow truck coming to get the van. Jerome showed up a few minutes later to help me with the French, and we got things sorted out.

So, last I heard, the van is sitting at a Renault dealership in a place called Tret, and we are not sure if it is fixable. We currently have an ugly rental van (which somehow, I am stuck with...punishment maybe?) and not sure what we are going to do if we can't get the other van fixed.

At least I am okay, no damage done to me.

Easy as the breeze

2008-05-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

I haven't checked to see if the previous post mentioned the weather...it probably did, I tend to like to chat about it.

Anyway, it has gotten weird again. Last night about 11PM, another thunder storm, but not like any normal one, this storm was incredible! First I noticed that there were some flashes outside, then the storm started to go crazy. Lightning went non-stop, flash after flash, with almost no spaces in between! The thunder sounded like a constant drum roll, vibrating the entire building around me.

So, what does one do when faced with a storm like this? Get out the camera and tripod. =)

I snapped off about 50 or so photos, anywhere from 4 to 10 seconds each, some with the zoom lens, and some with wide angle. I got some pretty cool shots out of it! (posted on flickr, go look)

I got to bed late, about 1AM, then woke up before my alarm about 6AM when the thunder started up again! The drive into work was rough, lightning, rain, thunder wind. LOTS of wind. Another thing about the storm was that all the cars were covered with mud after wards. Not on the wheel wells, but all over. The rain was carrying lots of find dust from the Sahara Dessert that blew up over the Mediterranean Sea, which then covered everything in mud. It also has been blowing all over the place today, with really strong winds that made some of the smaller planes seem to just hang in one spot, making slow progress and also dust everywhere! You could see it in the air, a sort of smoky haze. I noticed it mostly on my laptop (which has a black surface) which was covered with a fine powder by the end of the day at work.

I am still hoping for sunshine, the heat was here though, 29C with a huge amount of humidity. I do really want to get into the pool soon!

If the sun don't shine

2008-05-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

Crazy crazy weather!

Yesterday we had a storm that would give the Prairies a run for their money. Thunder, lightning, rain blowing sideways...very impressive!

I stood by the door to the deck watching the lightning strike down and the rain go sideways for a while, glad that I wasn't out in it. Finally, sat down to surf the web for it bit when the entire room light up with this intense blue-white light, a tremendous BOOM shattered my ears and the strange sensation of static crawled all over my body. Lightning had struck just outside my apartment! It scared the crap out of me since I am not used to having them strike so close.

I took a look around outside, hoping to see where it hit but I couldn't see any smoldering relics of past burning anywhere in sight. Not surprisingly, there were complaints at the front desk of Internet outages, electrical problems, etc.

Luckily, as is usual in Aix, the weather is now back to sunny and warm. Only 23C, which is still deathly cold for most French living here, but nice enough to have people in the pool.

W00t! 200th post!

2008-05-17T06:13:00.000-07:00

Wow, 200 posts. Didn't think that I would have ever had that much to say.

So it was a busy two weeks in Vancouver, running around seeing the people that I needed to see, getting taxes done, selling my soul to the Snap-on guy, and eating lots of sushi. The time went by really fast, hardly had time to see Marc and Julie and I was staying at their place!

The best result of my coming back to Vancouver for a visit was my new camera. Nikon D300 baby! What an instrument this is! It has me excited about taking photos again, and I have already fired off about 800 or more in the first three weeks owning it! I actually just got in from a short bike ride (have the bike working again, sort of...at least I can get into all the gears again, even if it misses one down-shifting) where I was out taking photos of fields of poppy's. I can see the fields from my apartment, all brilliant red, so I grabbed the camera and went to find them. Between sneezes (allergies again), I managed to get 55 photos taken of the fields. I just wish the sun was out a bit more to help with the lighting. It hasn't been the nicest weather this week.

It looks like my brother Allen will be able to come and visit me in July for about 10 days! I am really excited by this, since I will be able to show him around a bit. He probably won't have many chances in the future to travel to Europe, so I need to make sure that he sees lots and has a great time.

I am supposed to go to Paris with my friend Audrey in a few weekends, but I haven't seen her since I got back. I think that I could have a lot of fun there, specially with the new camera. Audrey wants to shop, but she also wants to show me around a bit, and since she knows the place really well, it will make it even more fun to avoid all the touristy bits. Now I just need to get a hold of her!

I also am supposed to see Alex, Leanne and the kids some time soon. Alex suggested the weekend of June 21st, but I will be working. Maybe the previous weekend to that.

So many things to do, and not enough time!

See inside there is nothing to hide

2008-04-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

I think that I have gotten over most of the jetlag, although I have been waking up really early in the mornings. =)

So I arrived back in Vancouver on Sunday, pretty boring flight but it was nice to have a bunch of Canadians to talk with. Got in and was talking with a nice Dutch girl (was going to make sure that she got on th right bus for the ferry to Victoria) when I had my name paged on the PA. Funny I said to the cute Dutch girl (I can pronounce her name, but I probably couldn't spell it), my luggage hasn't arrived and I am guess that it won't be now. Sure enough, it was still in Amsterdam and would be arriving on the flight that came in Monday night. Oh well, not the end of the world.

So I made sure that the cute Dutch girl got on her bus, found my rental car and headed out to Marc's. By that time, I was really starting to feel tired since it was now coming up to 24 hours awake (or more, was too groggy to figure it out), and was looking forward to crashing someplace. I got to Marc's and found out that my room was still being painted. =) No rest for the wicked I guess.

So Monday I started running around doing some of the things that I was needing to do. I called up Marc and Al and went to meet them for lunch (SUSHI!) but they weren't ready yet so I walked down to the camera shop and bought a new camera.=D Picked myself up a Nikon D300 with a 18-200mm VR lens and an external battery pack/hand grip. Let's just say, it is VERY nice.

I also managed to get over to see my brother Mike, and to get some new jean's. I really surprised Mike since he was sort of turned and on the phone when I walked into his shop, so when he turned to hang up the phone there I was. It was very good to see him.

My luggage arrived last night fairly late, they delivered it directly to the house which was really nice of them. It was nice to have clean clothing and I was also happy to see that the wine bottles hadn't broken. I broke the seal on the Eau de Vie to celibrate, shame that Marc didn't like it. Hope Al does.

Today's plan includes getting the evil taxes done, finding my Snap-on dealer (almost as bad as a crack dealer, but probably more expensive), and maybe seeing some friends out at the hanger. Wednesday will be spending time with my brother Allen, and hopefully Mike and Ruedy too. Friday is sushi night, Saturday is Rum party, Sunday is gaming night. Next week, not sure what I am doing. Might go see Dad and Grandpa in Penticton, will have to see. I also might go see a Whitecaps game at Swangard if the weather isn't too bad.

I am pretty sure that these two weeks will go by super fast, but I plan on getting as much out of them as I can before heading back to Aix-en-Provence and work.

Staring straight into the shining sun

2008-04-13T09:56:00.000-07:00

Another week, a bit quieter than the past few work wise (actually only had a 40 hour week!), but it had a few events.

Work as I mentioned was a lot slower than it has been the past little while, all of our spring maintenance is done now and other than finishing the propeller overhauls and putting the tank on the second plane, we are ready to fight fires!

The most exciting bit of action this week was Sian's birthday. Bo invited us all over for a BBQ, some champagne, wine, Eau de Vie, and Scotch. Oh, there was also some food in there too just to keep us upright. It was a nice time, with mostly us boys, Sian and her friend Anna from Germany here for a visit. The food was great, stories were fun and we all ended up rather bombed. That Eau de Vie will get you every time!

Today was another hike up on the mountain for me, but just a short one. Only 8 kilometre's today, but done at a fast pace, including the uphill stints. I was proud of myself, I powered up the hills with almost no strain, without being out of breath! I must be getting in shape or something.

I do get a chuckle when I go up there hiking, most others up there (and it is busy) don't really think "hiking" when they go. To them it seems that is a Sunday walk in the country. I have seen leather loafers, knee high boots with 3 inch heals, Sunday-going-to-church clothing and wool cardigans. The few of us that actually are there to hike and get exercise get rather stared at when we pass these other "hikers". I think I got stared at a bit more than normal today since I was wearing my Canadair CL415 shirt, and here EVERYONE knows what the Canadair is. From little kids on up, they are taught that it is the "Amicable Pompier du Ciel" flying his big yellow "Pelican" that saves everyones homes from the ravages of forest fires. So when they see someone wearing clothing that points toward working on those planes, you get a lot of admiration from them. In the end, it is a bit of hero worship that is going on (and it gives me the willies). They really are heroes though, since they do save Provence from burning down to nothing every year due to morons tossing cigarette butts out the car windows.

Two more weeks till I get to go home again. It feels kind of weird in a way, since this is more like home now. It is hard to feel like you are half way around the world when with a quick phone call or email you are right in the mix of what is happening elsewhere. The internet really has changed world travel.

Beneath a clear blue sky

2008-04-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

What a crazy busy month March was!

It was pre-fire season maintenance month here in France, with both of our planes going in for inspections, repairs and a little TLC. With such a small crew as ours, it made for very long hours of work and very tired eyes.

Most of the big stuff is done now, we just have a propeller to swap out with an overhauled one tomorrow, and a bit of sheet metal work then they are ready to fight fires!

So I haven't been up to much other than working seventy hour weeks, eating and trying to get some sleep now and then. Hoping that the next three weeks are a bit slower so that I can get ready for my trip back home. I am so looking forward to being back home, seeing family and friends and eating mass amounts of SUSHI! Yummy=)

This weekend I am hoping to get out and do something other than sitting in my apartment trying to stay awake. Martin and Jerome are taking their motorcycles to Monaco to try out some of the twisty mountain roads along the way. I am a little jealous that I can't go with them, but not having my license and a bike is a good excuse.

I might run off to the mountain to go hiking, get some exercise or something. Or I might head off to Cassis for a day trip, or Nimes or Pont du Gard or something. I have a vehicle and I plan on taking advantage of it!

My French is coming along nicely too. I had another (my fifth) lesson today, and Mary is quite excited that I am doing well. I have started to make up simple sentences on my own to use on the pilots and Gus. It is a very tough language to learn, where the grammar doesn't make sense when translated, and getting the vocal sounds right is also very complex. But I am pulling memories from grade five back out of the dark recesses of my cranium and succeeding in impressing those teaching me! Mary even said that she would get online with me through Skype while she is in Montreal for the next two weeks to help me practise. She rocks!

I think that I am turning French...

2008-03-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

It is happening, I am turning French.

Not only am I in love with the food and the people and the location; not only am I living here...I now have a French bank account!

Holy cow, was that a bit of work. I really must thank Gus for helping me, if it wasn't for him going through all of this for himself before, I probably wouldn't have managed to get one. It is amazing how hard it is. You need to have so much paperwork and documents, a lot of it you need to be renting a place to get, but you can't rent a place without a bank account. Unless you luck out like me.

Gus and I went down there yesterday, with my pile of papers in hand. Luckily, I had things like a phone bill from home (to prove that you have had one at least) and all my visa paperwork. It took about an hour, a mountain of paper signing (of which I mostly can't read, trusting Gus here...)but I have come out of it with a bank account, cheques and a credit card. This is going to be very useful if I ever want to get out of the hotel and find my own place.

The second half to me turning French is that Gus' girlfriend Mary is going to help teach me French! It is actually really hard to learn French doing what I am doing. All the guys on the base speak English, the guys I work with speak English and even the pilots speak English. It is rather important with airplanes to have a common language, and English is the international language of aviation. It would be really bad if the French spoke French, the Danes spoke Danish and the rest of us spoke English! Nothing would get done.

So, Mary has offered to help me learn. I am hoping that with her help, and Gus and Jerome, I will be able to hold simple conversations with people by the time I leave. Or at least understand them a lot better.=)

Other than that, things have been going okay. The boys and I have started to go Karting down at an indoor track about once a week. I like the fact that we are in there so often that the staff gives us special treatment, like free time and the best karts. This past week I did really well, dropped two seconds off my time even though I had some idiot's playing bumper cars and purposely slamming my kart into the tires when I tried to pass. He if I had figured out which guy he was when I got off the track he would have had a broken nose. I am hoping that with a few more runs at it, I will be dropping at least one more second. I see area's where I am making mistakes, and I now know how to improve them. Then I will be ready to try the outdoor track at Paul Ricard. With those 2-stroke engines, and an acceleration that is 0-100km/h in about 3 seconds I think that I will have my hands full!

A couple of weekends ago I flew up to Denmark to see Megan and Hans and the newest addition, Camden. It was a very short time to be going so far, but it was worth every second of it. The flight into Copenhagen was brutal; big storm with lots of wind made for a very bumpy flight where many people where holding the barf bags waiting to let go. Luckily, I think everyone managed to keep lunch down. The Saturday there, we went to Odense to visit the city. It is something like the third largest city in Denmark, but in reality it is quite small. It is also the home to Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote many great stories that we all know from childhood. We wandered around for a while, saw H.C.Anderson's house, looked in shops and just enjoyed the day. In the afternoon we went to meet an ex-coworker of Megan's at his place with his girlfriend and her kids. It was a nice visit, although I don't think that Julie (I think that was her name) spoke much English, so they hopped back and forth between languages. That is something that I am quite used to now. =D Sunday was just a nice quiet day of visiting, playing with Camden and walking around Ringsted. Then Monday, it was all over again as I flew home to France.

I am thinking of taking a weekend to go to Paris. I have never been there, and I can catch a flight on Air France for about 55 Euros and be there in an hour, or pay a bit more to catch the TGV and be there in three hours. The TGV would be a lot more comfy, and I would end up right in the middle of the city, whereas the plane would put me outside at one of the airports and I would have to bus it into the city.

But I think that it would be a good get away to be in Paris, go see the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triumph, Notre Dame, and what ever else I can find. I will have to do it before summer season hits and we are stuck here on fire duty, but I am sure that I will find a weekend.

Upcoming work in about a week is going to keep us busy. We have to do the pre-fire season maintenance on the two planes, which will be about two weeks each in the hanger. The first plane will be good, but the second might be tough since we lose Bo when he goes home to spend time with his kids in Denmark for spring break. At least we will be playing mechanics for a change. We spend so much time in the office these days, waiting for something to happen that my tools are getting lonely.

Fire season looks to be interesting. We are scheduled to be working six days on, two days off for three months. This is what the contractors want, since they want 60 hour weeks, although I would be happy with 40 hour weeks. Oh well, it is money in the bank. I have also managed to get a week off in July, about mid way through the summer that I am hoping I can get Meg and Hans to come and visit then. It would be nice to have them here so that I would have someone to play tourist with.

Well, I guess that is about it.

Laughter echoes in your eyes

2008-02-13T08:18:00.000-08:00

Another glorious day in the Sun!

It has been a busy couple of weeks, work being what it is and having some fun along the way.

Last week we had an inspection on one of the planes that caused it to be grounded for a few days. Problem was, it was needed to fly the next day. So we did an emergency role conversion on the other one into passenger mode so that we had it for a mission to fly some big wig around someplace. Made for a bit of a busy week.

Saturday, Pedro, Bo and myself went out to Paul Ricard's Hight Tech Test Track and Karting Test Track to play on the go-karts there. Well the other guys did, I haven't had a chance to play in the low horsepower karts yet to see how I do to be allowed to advance up to the bigger ones. That and my arm is hurting quite badly and I didn't want to make it worse. Still, it was fun being there. It is more or less and "invite only" place, making it more exclusive than most. That and all the Ferrari's screaming around the place showing off made it trés bonne!

This week has been slow, the air traffic controllers over here are on strike (first the taxi's, then the grocery store, taxi's again and now ATC!) over something that I don't know. Going on strike is a French national pastime, almost as important as coffee breaks. But with ATC on strike, we had a couple of days where there are no flights, so it was mostly walking around, kicking the tires and that was about it.

Today Gus, Mary and myself went down to one of the government agencies that does the medical portion of our visa applications. Mary and I were both due to get x-rayed and examined so that we can get a little card saying that we can stay in the country. The building was in Marseilles, and the directions that we had were a bit foggy, so of course we got lost. There really isn't any order to streets in these old cities, they kind of just go everywhere in any direction. Also, street signs are either not there or they are nailed to the corner of buildings, 10 metres from the street so that you cannot see them as you are driving. We ended up going the wrong direction twice, until Mary recognized one street and guided us to where we needed to go.

Once we were there, then the waiting started. We checked in and were told to sit down and wait. We waited there, then when we were called, we went to another room to wait some more. Next, a little room to remove our shirts for x-rays, waited there, then we got to hug the x-ray machine, back into the little room then outside to wait some more. Once we had our x-rays (I have an x-ray of my chest which I get to keep forever! lol), then we were off to another room to wait for a doctor to see us. Of course, all these rooms were full, and the temperature was way to warm for me. Finally, after another fairly long wait, I got to see the doctor. She was mostly checking for Tuberculosis and other major diseases that I could be bringing into the country. Which leads me to ask, "Why don't we get a medical BEFORE we enter the country?" Wouldn't that make more sense, so that if I did have TB, I could stay out of France and not spread it around? Never will get an answer I guess.

Anyway, I am healthy other than my sore arm. Now I wait for that agency to send my file over to the Prefecture to do the rest of the work. This could take another 6 months I have been told. It took Gus 10 months to get his card, and then one month later he had to re-apply for next years visa! You did notice that I said that they will send my file...it is a paper copy. NOTHING is done with a central computer system here. Everything needs to go through about six or seven agencies, lawyers, etc. and it all gets sent as paper. I was given a bunch of copies of things that I need to give to a bunch of different people here there and everywhere, but some need to be the original, some copies of the original only. The hoops people need to jump through just to get a visa here!

Since I was up early dealing with this crap, I got the afternoon off from work (getting the visa stuff done is considered work.) So I took a nice walk into Aix to go to a couple of book stores and to get myself a banana-Nutella crepe. =) I am trying to work on my French, but it is hard without a good French-English dictionary, so I bought one of those. I also bought a graphic novel (one of the Hellboy series) written in French so that I can practise reading French as well. I was also thinking of asking Mary if she wants to maybe help me with my French once or twice a week, so she can make a couple of euro's and to give her something to do (she tried to get a job before, but no one would take her, and so this time she just got a visitor visa.)

Next weekend, I am taking off to Denmark to visit with Megan, Hans and the newest member of the family, Camden. I have been looking forward to seeing them for some time, since I missed them at Christmas. It is always nice to be in Denmark, a lot more green than here, and with the grey skies, rain and cold weather, it will be like I am at home. =)

All around me golden sunflakes settle on the ground

2008-02-02T07:13:00.000-08:00

I think that I have fallen in love with the Sun again. It is out most days, and if we have a cloudy day, it is usually gone the next. It is still chilly, but only light jacket chilly most of the time. Well, for me anyway; the French are all wearing heavy coats, scarves, and mitts. Must be my Canadian blood keeping me warm. =)

I haven't been up to much lately, work has been slow most of the time, except a trip to Hyères to fix one of the planes so that we could get it home. We had changed a component on one of the engines, and it was bad from overhaul, which made it difficult for the propeller to go into reverse for braking. It is not needed, but when you don't expect it to fail, the trip down the runway becomes a bit less of a straight line.

I was going to go up to the mountain today (still might) and take some photos of the sunset. Originally I was going to go ride my bike up the mountain, but the wind is blowing really good, and it is a bit too chilly to be wearing shorts and no jacket on a bicycle. Also, Pedro asked to use the van to go help a friend move a new TV. It was a bit too big to fit in her car (50" screen, ya a bit to big!) and Pedro is a bit smitten by Chloe so he said he would help her.

I a thinking of taking a trip to Nimes tomorrow for a photo trip. Nimes is another ancient town that was built by the Roman Empire about 2AD. There is a famous old coliseum (that is still used for concerts!)and also a Roman Temple that has been used for many things, including once as a stable for horses! I am sure that it would be more beautiful in the spring, but now there will be less people there now. There is supposedly some beautiful fountains and of course the old architecture that is famous in these old Roman towns.

In a couple of weeks, I am hoping to take a quick trip to Denmark for a weekend to see Meggie, Hans and Camden. It is hard to sit here in Aix all the time, knowing that you are always on call. Being up in Denmark gives me just a little bit of freedom, which is good for the mind. I have also been asking when would be a good time to come home for a visit over the next few months. I was hoping in April, but it looks like Gus has that booked off. Might be end of March or maybe May.

Of course, there still needs to be a trip to Paris for a weekend. I might wait till April for that one so that the weather is a bit nice.

My arm is still sore, all this working without resting it is not helping. Even a weekend away from work doesn't help. Typing, writing, shaking hands (things that I need to do way too often) aggravate it a lot, and even with the brace that I bought and constant ice packs, I am not getting better. I am hoping that I can make it home and see my doctor for his opinion (I know what it will be already). Maybe he could prescribe me some anti-inflammatory to help with the pain for day to day activities.

We will have to wait and see.

Standing alone my senses reeled

2008-01-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

Let me see, how was my weekend. Friday I had the day off, so I drove around for a bit, trying to find out where the trail starts to climb the mountain. (Montaigne Sainte Victoire) After a bit of me doing circles (I wasn't lost, I knew where I was...just wasn't where I wanted to be!), stopping at a little town called Tholonet; I managed to get back to Aix on the opposite side of town and then found the right road up the back side of the mountain. Then, all by blind luck, I found the little road that went to the dam and the start of all the trails. So I wandered around some of the forest service roads, taking pictures of the mountain and the scenery. That took about 2.5 hours of the day, all in 18C sunny weather. Not bad for January. =)

Saturday, I got a phone call from Jerome, asking if I wanted to hike to the top of the mountain with Bo, Bo's friend Shawn and himself. I had said the day before that I was going to wait a bit to get in better shape, but I also wasn't going to miss a chance to go. So we drove up there, and started hiking a bit later in the day than we should have. This was bad, but it was also very good.

The climb started off on the service roads again, but my legs were NOT happy about having to work two days in a row. I had horrible cramps and pain in my calves and around my shins. Jerome stayed with me and I stretched and stretched until they started to loosen up a bit. The first real tough part was a scramble using hands and feet up a fairly steep face. Poor Shawn is afraid of heights, and she had a hard time with this part. I was just hurting and my cardio was also complaining at me. But we made that part, and for the next bit it was a fairly easy go.

Soon though, we started to climb again, and although we stopped often to catch out breath, I was hurting. Jerome got a ways ahead of us, Bo stayed with Shawn since she was struggling too, and I was in the back, gasping and ready to collapse. Eventually though, through a lot of stubbornness on my part, I made it to the little monastery at the top of the mountain.

What a view! Those monks really know how to pick real estate!

A short hike after that was the big cross on the top. The base of the cross is 1010m up, and we had covered about 5 or 6 km (maybe more) to get there. It was worth every stab of pain, every gasp, every pounding heart beat in my chest. What a view. The Sun was getting lower, and with all the pollution, the light was turning golden.

On the way down (which I was nearly running because it is down, easy part), the Sun kept sinking, making the colour of the rocks change, and the sky became very golden in colour. We stopped a little ways down to watch a para-glider floating along on the updraft's from the mountain. I got a couple of amazing shots of him, with the light just perfect.

But we couldn't stay there long,the Sun was just about below the horizon, and we were barely a third of the way. At about two thirds of the way down, we watched the Sun disappear and we made haste in the growing twilight. In the end, we made the hard part in some light, and followed the service roads through near dark...other than the near full moon and the blood red sky for light. I should have stopped and taken a photo of the sunset through the trees. Blood red sky with black trees. It was very beautiful, as well as a bit creepy looking.

Sunday, well I stayed home and gave the legs a break. The calves are a bit stiff still, but not bad. Only time that they hurt me today was when I tried to jump up and look into the engine intake for debris.

I also got something else today to make my life a bit nice. A brace for my sore arm. Jerome went with me to the pharmacy, and after three tries to explain to the lady what I wanted, I got just the perfect thing. Now, I have support for the arm (still hurts, but at least I am not doing more damage) so that it can start healing itself.

BTW, there are a bunch of new photos on my Flickr page, go check them out!

Long Way Round

2008-01-09T03:28:00.000-08:00

Christmas is now officially over here in Aix, the town is taking down all of the lights. I just need to say "doh!" here since I never got around to taking photos of them. That is just my laziness. It was very pretty, and I find it sad that they don't leave them up all winter while the leaves are gone from the trees.

New Years was quiet, I stayed home and got happy with a bottle of champagne. Most of the guys were out of town; Martin was here but he had his friend Fleming and Fleming's kids visiting, so I didn't have any plans. At the last minute, just as I was getting settled into chatting with friends online and playing WoW, they showed up wanting to go into town. By this time, I was happy just to sit here and play so I stayed home. I think that next year if I am here, I am going to try and get to Paris to party under the Eiffel Tower for New Years.

We are all back to work again, slowly ramping up to being busy again. We have to change all the propellers and send them one at a time up to England for overhaul. We get one spare propeller, assemble it, swap it with one on a plane, take the swapped one, disassemble it, send it to England for overhaul, get it back, swap the overhauled one for the loaner, then repeat for the other three props. This should last over a month or more, depending on how fast they ship and overhaul the props. It will be nice to get a bit of overtime too.

One of the guys, Jerome, has this DVD that is a documentary of Ewan McGreggor and Charlie Boorman riding BMW motorcycles around the world, that he is sharing with all of us to watch. This has gotten the guys all excited about doing a road trip around Spain on their bikes, and me wanting badly to get my bike license. Getting the license might not happen for a bit, but if I come home in the spring, I might try and get one done if I have time. If I don't get one done, I might follow the guys as a support team, carrying extra supplies for them in a rented car. At least that way I can be with them and I would have air conditioning. =) If you are interested in the rides that Ewan and Charlie do (they recently road from Scotland down to Cape Town, South Africa), check out their website.

http://www.longwayround.com/html/lwr_dvm.html (or click the title of this article)

Even if you are not a motorcycle nut, it is an amazing journey where you get to see some amazing sights and you get to learn about things that we just don't know about. The documentary is only 10 hours long, but they had over 800 hours of tape (wow!) that they had to go through. I would love to see some of the other footage that never made it to the show. It is pretty powerful stuff.

(BTW, I am now starting my fourth year with this blog! I find that amazing!)

Rode on the steel breeze

2007-12-29T06:39:00.000-08:00

I'm sad.

I just gave back the Mercedes, and now I am driving a Clio. That's like going from eating caviar to eating rotten pig carcass. I guess that I have been spoilt.

I did have fun with it though, got to cruise a few places. Yesterday, I went to Chateauneuf-du-Pape, to see where all the fantastic wine comes from, and to check out the ruined castle. Unfortunately, I got there at lunch time and all the caves where closed, so it looks like I will have to go back to sample some of the better wines on the planet. Still, it was a nice drive in the Rhone Valley.

After that I went over to Fontaine de Vaucluse to see the famous spring that feeds the river Sprogue. I guess someone forgot to turn it on since deep down in the hole in the mountain, there was a little puddle; not the roaring torrent of water that I have heard about. Actually, it is the wrong time of year for the torrent of water, I need to visit in the spring when the mountain run off is flowing. The river was flowing, but since the water level was so low, it was coming out a little downstream from the pool in the hole in the mountain. One bonus though, when I stopped to buy a crépe from a pretty French girl, I got to hold her hands for a minute to warm them up. =)

No, I still had to pay for the crépe.

With friends surrounded

2007-12-26T10:07:00.000-08:00

The past few years, Christmas has been a little bit blah. After all, my brothers and myself are all adults now, only one of us has any kids and she isn't even a year old yet. The parents have moved a ways away from most of us and the commute to see them, or have them come see us in a bit treacherous in the winter. Add in the fact that I am now in France, instead of Canada, and there really isn't much to look forward too.

This year however, has been different. Although I am in France, I had an ace up my sleeve, a way to get back that feeling of family and kids and the wonders of Christmas.

I have friends with kids who allowed me to share time with them over the holidays.

Leanne is a good Canadian girl, who met up with a super French guy named Alex, and moved to a little town on the border of Switzerland called St.Julien-en-Genévois and they have had two sweet children. Not many of us from Canada come and visit them here, so when I can, I pop in to visit. It is about 4-5 hours on the motorway, and a bit less on the TGV, so I would put it as being "in the neighbourhood".

This year, being that I am in France, and I managed to get the week off work since none of the planes are flying and the rest of the guys are going away. I rented a nice Mercedes C-Class (sweet ride!) and drove up for a few days of visiting.

During my stay, we took a trip into Annecy for some shopping, Alex Margaux and I did a quick trip into Geneva, and we ate way too much good food! Christmas Eve was quiet, except for overly tired, but hyper children who didn't want to go to bed. Poor Adrien, just as he was being tucked in, started to worry that he hadn't been good enough this past year and Santa wouldn't make a stop with things for him. It took a few minutes with Dad to assure him that we would chat with the man in red and convince him that Adrien wasn't too bad a little boy.

Come Christmas morning, Margaux was up about 5:30AM, but was told to wait until 7:30AM before she could wake Adrien. At 7:30AM precisely, not only was Adrien woken, but everyone else was too! For the next few hours, through groggy sleep filled eyes, the adults watched and laughed as the kids were allowed to open a present or two at a time. These kids got trucks, Lego, toy animals, new clothes, and other assorted things from Grandparents, Santa, Mom and Dad and me.

Soon enough, Alex's parents and sister arrived for dinner. We sat down to a fantastic meal, prepared by Leanne, of; fois gras, escargot, home made cauliflower soup, turkey with potatoes, carrots, Brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce and dressing, six kinds of cheese with three types of bread and finally a traditional chocolate Busche (cake) that was super rich and yummy!

After dinner, we sat and talked for a bit, then Alex's parents left to avoid driving in the dark and fog. Caroline stayed for a bit and we tried a few games of Jenga to our amusement. After Caroline left, we played with the kids for a bit, watched The Princess Bride and then we all crawled off to our beds sleepily.

All in all, it was one of the best Christmas' that I have had in recent years. Yes it wasn't my family, but in a way I feel like they are family to me. I got to laugh and play with the kids, spend time with Alex and Leanne and I even learnt a bit of French! I also think that having someone from home come and visit makes Leanne a bit happier too.

Now I am back in Aix, I still have my car for a few more days (screwed up the dates, so I have it too Saturday now) and plan on doing a bit of exploring throughout Provence. Not sure what I want to see yet, but I am sure that there is something out there to do!

French Sushi

2007-12-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

So here is the low-down on French sushi.

First of all, it was surprisingly good. I was terrified that it would be dried up crap, but it actually tasted quite good. A couple of things weren't quite right, like the fact that it was actually a Korean restaurant, even though the menu was all Japanese names. (go figure) Next problem was the price, which I did expect but was rather surprised at. For a plate of about 13 pieces of fish (a variety of them), and 8 other assorted nigiri, and some rolls it came out to 39.50 Euros. Can we say "OUCH"!! That translates out to about $58 Canadian, for barely enough to satisfy my hunger. Good thing that I ate a bunch of pizza before I went! Finally, the worst part. Once again, cigarette smoke. I woke up this morning hacking and coughing, my clothing stinking. There were five of us there, and four of us didn't smoke. The one girl that did, was told that none of us smoked, but she lit up anyway. Add that to all the other people smoking and you have a nasty case of lung butter in the morning.

I have also sorted out Christmas a bit. I have to be on 48 hour notice in case something goes wrong, but I can run off for a bit. I talked with Leanne in Geneva today, and I am welcome at their place for the holidays. So now I just need to get a car, plane ticket or train ticket then I will be off! I was thinking that the plane will be the cheapest and easiest, train will be a bit more expensive but relaxing and the car will be pricey, but more flexible if I need to run home in a rush. I have also found a place that has a lot cheaper rentals, and I can get a BMW 3 series or equivalent Mercedes for about 400 Euros. Not a bad price for a week, compared to what I paid last time for a car for three days.

I guess I need to start worrying about Christmas presents for Leanne's kids now. =)

Smoke on the water

2007-12-13T10:43:00.000-08:00

I am a little nervous.

You see, I have been invited out tonight for Sushi. In France.

I don't worry about food in France normally, because the French know how to cook better than most in the world, and food in restaurants is second to none.

But Sushi isn't cooked, and I am not sure how fresh it is being that I am in a place where some of the normal fish used in Sushi isn't found.

Actually, what has me worried the most is the price. After enjoying the relatively cheap Sushi in Vancouver from the past few years, I am scared to think about how pricey dinner will be tonight. Gus says that he dropped 115 Euros there one night! I guess that the expense comes from the fact that it is still a novelty here, and only those with money tend to go out of Sushi in this area. So I guess that I will be one of the posh ones tonight.

Other than that, things are going well. I have been working my butt off, but was rewarded today with a nice bottle of champagne for Christmas from one of our partners out at the airport. I think that will go well later this month...

One thing that has been bothering me a bit is the smoke. Not only the cigarettes that people are smoking everywhere (shops, cafes, restaurants, airport...well, everywhere actually), but more the smoke from chimney's from all of the older houses that use a fireplace to heat. It has been cold around here, -3C this morning and I guess that it is nice to have a roaring fire going to stay warm. But everyone else in the region has the same idea, and there is a thick haze as far as I can see from my deck from the smoke. I sure makes the lungs hurt.

Well, need to get ready for going out tonight.

Mine stufz, I haz it =)

2007-12-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

Yes!

I have had a good day. Other than being awake at 4:20AM to go to work, it has been good. Today was the first day that Gus was back from vacation, he was a bit jet lagged, but looked glad to be back. That was until he saw me in the van when we were to pick him up.

You see, about a year and a half ago, I bought Gus a bottle of champagne for his birthday. He thought that it would be fun to play "The Bird and the Cage". The game is played by placing both the cork (bird) and the wire that holds the cork (cage) behind the back, and the other guy picks one hand. Whatever it is that you pick, you keep, while the other guy keeps the other half. Then, whenever someone produces his half, the other guy must have the other half with him.

I had the cage.

The nice part about the cage is that when twisted up, it fits nicely on a key chain. The cork, it is a pain to carry.

So this morning, Gus saw me and was hoping that after a year and a half I would have forgotten about our little game and he would nail me tomorrow with the "Bird".

How wrong he was.

I waited until all the guys were in the office and pulled out the "Cage", and I got to watch the best expression that I have seen in a long time. He forgot the "Bird" and I am getting a bottle of champagne. =)

The next fun bit was that a crate with all my stuff arrived today! So now I have my monitor, my Playstation, more clothing, power adaptors, chargers for batteries, books, and tools. I am a happy boy! The only thing that I need to do is get an adaptor for plugging the Playstation into the TV.

Tomorrow night I get to go to our staff dinner, which should be fun. I also found out that there is a good chance that I can run off to Geneva for at least part of Christmas. This too makes me very happy!

A good day, feeling good.

Four star daydream

2007-12-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

Here I sit, Saturday night. This is by choice, I am tired from a very long day yesterday, followed by going out with Martin and his girlfriend Audrey to dinner and a nice little Mexican place in Aix.

We spent yesterday taking one of the planes from passenger configuration, and putting it into cargo config. It was a long day, 12 hours of physical work.

Today, Martin and I headed into Aix for brunch at one of the patio cafes, followed by some camera shopping. I think that I will be upgrading to the Nikon D300 in the spring. Martin probably won't wait that long. =) Martin also showed me a few new shops that I didn't know about and we wandered around for a bit window shopping, and checking out all the cute French girls all out in the sunshine.

This evening, we went into work so that Martin could sign out one of the planes, and I could get my passport that I had left there by accident. (don't like leaving that laying around.) When we got to work, Martin opened the door, turn on the light and was freaked out by a rat running across the floor! So we started moving furniture around until we had him cornered in the water cooler, which we took outside and dismantled it. We had it just about fully apart when we managed to chase him out into the night some place. We are hoping he doesn't come back inside!

So we have had a fairly busy week here, with an engine change on Monday and Tuesday (19 hour day on Tuesday), and then the conversion yesterday. The good part is that I will be getting a fair bit of overtime, the bad part is that my arm is in a lot of pain. I think that I strained a ligament in my elbow before I flew over here, but now with all the heavy lifting, and wrench turning, I have really inflamed it a lot. It is so sore that typing this is getting too much, and even shaking hands is painful.

I am not sure what I am going to do, maybe send off an email to my favourite physiotherapist for some advice. I am hoping that things will be slow until the new year now and I will be able to give the arm a rest.

Still not sure what is going to happen for Christmas. The boss would love to give us all time off, but with the French and their lack of ability to plan more than 2 minutes ahead of themselves, our plans need to stay up in the air. I would really love to go to see Leanne and Alex and the kids over Christmas, or fly up to Wales to see Kristen, but until I know for sure, I think I am going to be stuck here.

Now you are all a bit up to date on my life. Hope all of your shopping is done, and party plans are going well!

Day out

2007-12-02T06:01:00.001-08:00

The Church at Saint Cannat
Originally uploaded by travelcedric.

Had a day off and a vehicle, so I thought that I would something that I really haven't been able to do over here much. I went for a drive.

I headed out around the estuary, Etang de Berre, which is right beside the Marseilles/Provence airport. I was actually looking for flamingos, since I have been told that they tend to like the shallows around the estuary, but as I expected, they aren't around this time of year.

Even so, it was a nice day for a drive, and although I have a bit of jet lag still, and a bit of a cold, I still enjoyed myself and took a few photos.

I ended up heading inland a bit, almost to Salon, but I was getting hungry so I headed back to Aix via some of the "D" roads. While driving down one of them, I came across a castle, with a zoo next door. There wasn't any good place to get a photo of the castle, so maybe next week I will take a run over there if I can get a car.

I did find a nice little medieval town called Saint Cannat, with a very pictures perfect church in the middle of it. I have been through the town before, but it is usually when it is late and we wanted to get home. This will be another place to stop and visit one day.

So, now I am killing a bit of time before I make another run to the airport to pick up Martin, one of our maintenance guys who is coming back from his home in Denmark. This will be my third trip there this weekend, twice to drop off or pick up guys, and once to work. I hope not to make this a habit!

Monday we start our engine change; this should take us a couple of days. I am working afternoons, and might be alone in the evening. That is okay though, since I tend to like working alone at night. I will just bring the iPod and enjoy myself.

Jet Lag Blues

2007-12-01T03:13:00.000-08:00

Well, I made it. Here I am in sunny southern France, where the air is full of woodsmoke and my allergies are going crazy.

After a rather uneventful flight to Amsterdam on an Airbus A330 (Airbus seats are the most uncomfortable in the industry...just my opinion), then a bumpy uncomfortably flight to Marseilles on a Fokker 70, I landed and met with Chris who took me too my new home in Aix-en-Provence.

I have already been to work for nearly a 10 hour day, doing a large inspection on one of the planes, and will be going in again today (Saturday) for a quick Line Check on Tanker 74 with Pedro. It is looking like we will be more or less busy for the next week or so, with an engine change starting Monday, and flights continuing all over the place. It also looks like, although there is a schedule, I am going to be on call for the next ten months. That is okay though, since the more hours I get, the more cash I take home, and that all adds up to a nice bit for a down payment on a place when I get home. =)

I have also scored a really nice room at the hotel here in Aix. It was the room that my buddy Claus had when he was here two summer ago, and although I can see the pool and patio from the deck, the bedroom is around the corner so I won't have to listen to the noise. There is the highway that I can hear, but I sleep through that without a problem. Another bonus is that there is now Internet in the rooms! No more lugging the laptop down to the hotel lobby to suffer with bad wireless. This has made me happy.

I am still waiting for my bike, tools and trunk of stuff to arrive, but I don't expect that for a week or so. I have the van this weekend, and although I think today will be a slow day (with a bit of work thrown in), I am going to try and get out and see some things tomorrow.

I still don't know what I have planned for Christmas, I haven't talked to the boss yet about it. Kristen up in Wales has invited me there if I want, but I am not sure yet. I might go to Geneva to see Leanne and Alex and the kids, but Jerome, one of the guys that I work with, suggested Barcelona for Christmas. That would be cool, and if we can maybe convince Gus and Mary to come along, we could have a lot of fun!

So, I am off to a good start. Ten more months to go, and maybe if we can extend things, it might turn into 22 months. =)

D-Day

2007-11-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

Wednesday was a bit crazy, work called the French Consulate to see if the papers for my visa had arrived yet. They had, but they were the wrong ones. Shit. We fired off a haste filled email to our lawyers in Paris, asking them to get on the governments case to get the correct documents sent before my 10:30AM appointment Thursday at the Consulate.

Thursday morning, Judy from HR came in to make sure that things were going well, even though she was really sick. She got in and found an email waiting saying that the correct documents had been faxed, and that they "should" be there. We called the Consulate, just to make sure, but there was no one there. So, we took a gamble, and I headed out to Vancouver to see if luck would be on my side. I arrived with about 30 seconds to spare for my meeting, and luck was with me, they had received the documents about an hour and a half earlier. I now have my visa, and a bit weight has been lifted!

I called work, told them the good news, but had to run back to Abby to give them a scan of the visa so that they could get to work on the plane ticket for me. I just got an email from work stating that I will be leaving probably about 6:30PM Wednesday on a KLM flight to Amsterdam, then switching and heading down to Marseilles.

So, I will be here for a few more days, but am busy getting my apartment cleaned, and sorting my stuff to send over to France. So much still to do, and so little time!

And the sea isn't green

2007-11-17T15:05:00.000-08:00

I haven't had what you would call the best of days today. It was bad enough that I was going into work on a Saturday, but what I found in the parking garage added many a woe.

As I walked up to the car, I noticed that something about the way the light was reflecting off of the front fender didn't look correct. As I got closer, I kind of when "hmph" and went to get my camera. You see, there was a dent in my bumper, which wasn't there when I left my car the night before. The fender was a bit out of sorts as well, but since I was on my way to work, I took a few photos to show where the car had been sitting, and to show the damage done.

Once at work, I found out that the project that I had been asked to come in for was all done, and there wasn't much for me to do with it. I of course wanted to come home to deal with my car, but due to mis-communications (there really is way too much of that at work) the supervisor had me scheduled to work the whole day, and in fact he had me scheduled to be at work for 11.5 hours, today, tomorrow and Monday! So, I explained as to why I was in, and that I needed to deal with my car, and that I was never supposed to stay the entire day and he promptly sent me off across the other side of the airport to work over there.

This really wasn't too bad of an option, since it was a lot work than I had figured on, but while over there, I had a loonie eaten by the pop machine, and my tool box key fell out of my pocket and down a drain in the floor. I managed to get my key back, but lost the loonie.

So when I got home, I talked to the building manager, and I told her about the car and who I thought had done the damage. Turns out that my guess was right, a young fellow was driving his Mom's car, and backed into mine. He was really upset, and apologetic about the whole thing, but his Mom looked like she was gonna kick his butt this side of Tuesday!

Tomorrow I will need to go and find a repair shop to get my car fixed as soon as possible. I have found out a bit more about my visa, it seems that the French lawyer is trying to get the government to FedEx the documents to the consulate here in Vancouver before the end of the week. I really don't think that it will happen, but we are trying to be optimistic and have booked an appointment for Thursday to see if I can get it. If I do get it, that means that I will probably be leaving some time in the next three to five days after that. If I don't get it, then I might still be here in December. I really hope not since I won't have a place to live as of November thirtieth.

Now, I need to get ready to go to Jay's to rock out at Guitar Hero, and maybe karaoke.

The French Connection

2007-11-14T18:30:00.000-08:00

I am still in Canada. Seems that the French have decided to have another labour dispute, and have all gone on strike. So my visa hasn't come through yet and I am left living in my empty apartment still.

I am thinking (hoping) that I hear something in the next week or so, since it is about the right time to be hearing something. Then it will be an insane scramble to finish with the few items that I have here, do one last load of laundry, get my stuff to work so that it can be shipped out, take the insurance off of my car, park it at work, and then find some way back to Ladner to stay with my brother till I catch my flight out. Probably all in about 24 hours.

I will send out a mass email when I know what date and time my flight will be (just in case some of you want to come and see me off at the airport.)

So close, yet so far...

2007-11-04T15:59:00.001-08:00

Here I am, sitting in an empty apartment. Well, empty except dust bunnies, a mattress and a chair. I guess that this will be my life for the next couple of weeks or so until I leave for France.

Early this morning, I had a herd of friends show up to help haul my furniture over to the storage locker. It took about two hours to fill the truck up, then about an hour to empty it again. The locker is VERY full now, although I am sure that I could go up if I need to. Actually, I will need to, I still have a mattress and half my kitchen to put in there.

All said and done, I am glad that part is over. A little cleaning, a little more packing and I will be ready to haul out of here for good. It will be nice to know just when they are planning to ship me out, since I still don't know. I am still hoping that the visa will come through soon, so I can try and be out of here by maybe November 15th or so.

It is funny how, although I find it hard to leave everyone and everything behind, now that my stuff is all away I want to get out of here and get settled in France. Time to move. No fun living in an empty place, with barely a place to sit down.

I am thankful to my friends who all came out and helped me today. It is always nice to know there are people who I can depend on in my life. Hope they all know that they can depend on me too.

Need to go and get rid of some of the dust, before I sneeze all over my laptop. =)

Tanker time

2007-10-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

Yup, France is getting closer, from the sounds of things I will probably be gone some time between November 15th and 20th; although this is not confirmed since we are still waiting on the visa from the French government.

Meanwhile, I am busy packing, cleaning, sorting and slowly going insane. I have already tossed lots of stuff, packed some, moved some to storage, and my place looks like a tornado hit. My place also now looks bare, I took the photos and pictures down.

So, as some might be aware, I will be working on a couple of aerial fire tankers in France, and so I thought that I would find some videos. Well, didn't find ours flying, but I did find some from the current fire in California. The first is a converted DC-10 doing a low drop. Listen to the commentary by a couple of fire fighters who are taping things.

The second clip is of a couple of CL-415's picking up water from a lake. The neat part of this is that there are about 12 of these at the base where I will be stationed, and we even have one being converted from a CL-215 (piston powered) to a CL-415 (turbo-prop) aircraft in our hanger right now. Lots of work is going on with it, lots of structural mods being done. Will be a nice plane when it is done.

So as soon as have a date for departure, I will post and let everyone know. I think that it might be tough living away from everyone for a year (10 and a half months, actually) but it will be an awesome experience in the end.

Pack and sort, pack and sort

2007-10-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

Technically, I am on holidays. Technically.

Not really though, since I am busy sorting out 5 years of junk, previous junk from the last place that I lived and then stuffing it into boxes and running said boxes off to the storage place.

I have already filled a corner of the storage place, and it hardly looks like I have made a dent in my place. After all, I have been cleaning out closets and the storage space that I have here.

I have also made two trips to the local charity shop, and it looks like I will need to make another one. That, and a bunch of garbage and some recycling.

Then there are the dust bunnies. I have been moving things that I don't normally move (book shelves for example) and have found some incredible amounts of dust. I had to beat one dust bunny with a large stick so that it wouldn't eat me before I could vacuum it up!

I am still waiting to hear from work about my visa, I have a feeling that it will be a few more weeks before I will be leaving. I am pretty sure that I will get a phone call and be on a plane a day or two later.

Good news though, my steamer trunk arrived, so now I have a nice solid box to ship stuff to France in. And I have discovered that my PS2 will work on 240v electricity! I will be playing Guitar Hero all year long!

So that is about the long and short of it, packing, waiting, breathing too much dust. I hope that I find out sooner than later when I get to go, I really don't like the idea of sleeping on an air mattress for three weeks. =)

Little of this, little of that

2007-09-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

Another sunny afternoon that I am sitting inside. Good reason though, all my photos from Yahoo! have now been transferred to Flickr! So I have been going through them adding titles, tags, etc., and making sure that they are ready for the general public. They are a bit hard to find though, since they placed them on Flickr by date, this means that they are hidden at the back of the pack. The best way to find them is to go to collections, and look at the Yukon Trip and New York collections. There are some newer New York photos, but if you look at the groups that have been split up into different catagories, you will find the old ones.

I have also signed the contract for my trip to France. It is very official now, I will be gone from some time in November (probably around the 15th to the 19th) and will be working until the end of September 2008. I will make one trip home in the spring for a visit and to fill up on sushi, then I will be running away again.

I have started sorting out what to do with my stuff now, and sort of have come up with a plan. Still need a few people to say yes to things, but I can't see that as a problem. I just have so much crap to find a home for! Storage will definitely be much cheaper than keeping my place though.

There you go, what is happening now in a nut shell!

Planes and automobiles

2007-09-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

Well we had a busy weekend at the racetrack; three days of racing, a lot of on track action and one really big crash.

First of all, it was a "conference" weekend, so we were racing under ICSCC rules and we had a lot more cars here than usual. This lent to bigger groups on track, and a lot more racing action since the ICSCC races offer points which add up to a big championship at the end of the year.

I spent most of the weekend in Race Control watching the computers tick off each car as it went by start/finish or watching the odd car spin out or go off-roading into the grass on turn one. The biggest excitement was during one of the last races, involving a RX-7 and a Porsche 911.

The group that was out racing were some of the big boys, fast cars, highly modified versions of street cars. Lots of time and money have gone into these cars, all for a few minutes screaming around a track at high speeds. It happened almost right in front of us, just down the front straight going into the chicane leading into turn one. Adam, in his yellow 2nd generation RX-7 was ahead and a bit slower than Steve in his highly modified 911 Turbo, and Steve was overtaking Adam VERY quickly. Adam moved as far to the left as possible, and waved Steve by on drivers right. For some reason, maybe he though he had enough room, Steve plowed right into Adam, lifting Adam's car off the ground. Steve's car proceeded to drive up the side of Adam's car and launched itself into the air. Both cars landed, spun a few times and both smacked into the walls on the side of the track. It was amazing that the cars following Steve managed to not get involved in the accident. It was a few tense moments while our Emergency Crew sprang into action and rushed to the cars, hoping that the drivers would both be okay. I saw Adam out first, helmet off yelling at Steve. Shortly afterwards, Steve was out as well, rather quiet avoiding Adam. Both guys were okay, even if their cars weren't.

Adam's RX-7 looks like it should be fairly easy to fix, although it will take a fair bit of time. Steve's Porsche is in a lot worse shape, with the front end all torn up and the steering all crumpled into the firewall. I think that both will fix their cars, Steve has wrecked his a few times before.

We had a couple of video cameras catch the accident, one in race control, one in a Viper following Steve. After seeing the accident in slow motion, we are lucky that only the cars and ego's were badly damaged.

On a more fun note, I found a flight simulator in Google Earth! How cool is it to be able to fly over your house? This guy has a bit more info about it on his blog. If you do try it, go to the Google page with all the control info first, learn what to do and how to do it. I also recommend, after trying it myself, use the mouse control. It is MUCH easier than keyboard controls and will give you a smoother flight. I have already flown around NYC, which is very cool because the buildings are all in 3D and most are textured now. And Andy, flew over your place. Did ya see me? (lol)

Jet setting again

2007-08-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

It's kind of official now. Back to France.

I was in the lunch room at work when our HR director saw me and told me that he wanted to talk with me later about France. He said I was going, just needed to talk about a time frame.

So, after three tries to see him (he talks more than I do, and had a lot of visitors today), we sat down and chatted a bit about what was going on. Looks like my bosses have decided that they can live without me for a year or so, and have given Adam (the boss in France) permission to ask to have me work for him. There are still a bunch of details to work out, like when I am going, pay, per diem, etc. but the ball is rolling and it looks like it will be around mid November that I will be going, maybe as late as December. This will give me time to find a place for my junk (paying $7500 just to store my junk in an apartment for a year is a bit much), get my motorcycle license, cleam off my desk, find a home for my plant, sell or store my car and get a work visa for France.

I have the end of October/begining of November off work on holidays, and was hoping to go some place warm but I think it might end up being a time to pack and get the last of my things done.

So, if you have a place that I can store my car, or my plant please let me know. =)

Numenor Resurection

2007-08-12T16:51:00.000-07:00

Just chatting with Jay on MSN, looks like he has finally resurrected his old blog Numenor.

Numenor is a geek/anime blog with a bit of ranting and raving thrown in for good measure. I think that it is a bit of a hold over from the Science Undergrad Society of UBC's newspaper The 432, where Jay used to (and occasionally still does) write articles of no real importance, but it gave him a place to poke a bit of fun at the world.

The resurrected blog is still under revision, but should soon be full again of geekdom, anime goodness and I am sure the odd complaint about Alliance farmers in WoW.

So go, indulge in geekiness. I shall.

Did it again!

2007-08-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

Well, I got published again on Schmap!!

Schmap!! is a really neat little travel guide that uses photos from photographers who have their photos displayed on Flickr, and this is my second time ata getting photos on their guide.

My first was Marseilles, and although I was short listed for New York, I haven't heard back yet. Now, I have a photo from my home town (well, city actually) of Vancouver. I have even added a little widget on the side bar with a bit of a map of downtown and a link to my photo (it is the little icon near Vanier Park). If you want to browse everyone's photos, click on the photo button on the widget and enjoy the beautiful photos from the people at Flickr.

On another subject, we had Vintage Car racing at Mission last weekend. A whole lot of fun, with some beautiful vintage and antique cars racing (crazy to take those cars on the track imho) and a bit of a show and shine on Sunday. A big highlight for me was getting a ride around the track in a Rousch Mustang driven by on of our favourite drivers, Al. Al has been racing since 1969, and is one hell of a good driver. My face hurt from the smile as we screamed around the track, hitting 150km/h down the front straight and having my body tossed around from the lateral G's of the corners.

Hopefully I will get off my butt soon and get the photos up on Flickr. I have been lazy and am rather back logged in my photo uploads. I still have Bella's wedding on my camera!

On clouds of sunlight floating by

2007-07-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

Just sitting her rocking out to the Dead Kennedy's and realized that I need to let the world know that I am finaly back to work on the floor! I get to play mechanic again, which after nearly 4 months of not being allowed to is a nice feeling. The day went fairly well, got a lot done but it was at a toll. I got home and collapsed in exhaustion. Wow, I knew that I would have a tough time with not being used to be on my feet and all the physical reality of my job, but I wasn't ready for the complete melt-down when I got home. Dang.

At least I had a nice two weeks off before today. First weekend was David and Bella's wedding, which was a blast other than that I got too much sun which gave me a nasty headache and sent me home a bit early.

The following weekend was at Whistler hanging out with Jacob and Nicole. I am not a big fan of Whistler, it is too full of tourists, but Crankworx was on that weekend and I watched some crazy people on mountain bikes trying not to get themselves killed doing biker-X in the pissing down rain. I also did a bit of light hiking and spent time visiting with Nicole and Jacob. It was a nice break.

Last weekend was helping Kira and Elizabeth moving. Kira moved from the mainland to Victoria to be roomie with Elizabeth. Friday was a freaking long day on little sleep, followed by a long day on Saturday as well. Sunday wasn't quite as bad, at least I got some sushi in my belly. =) I am very impressed with the basement suite that Elizabeth found, very nice area, big rooms, hot tub and cool landlords upstairs. It was also very nice to spend some time with both the girls, since I don't see them that much. Hell, I haven't seen Lise in years (more or less since she moved to the island for school) so it was a nice time. Maybe next time I will be able to play instead of work all weekend, let them get me into trouble with all of Elizabeth's naughty nursing student friends. =D

March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream

2007-07-10T21:01:00.000-07:00

Wow, almost a month already since my last post!

Let's see, what has happened since then.

Well, I have been doing well at work, the leg is progressing very well, and with each day I notice an improvement. I am not quite on the floor yet, but after I come back from my two week's off work I will go back to the floor to play mechanic again. Yay me!

Of course, this wasn't super easy, and if it wasn't for the help of my awesome physiotherapist, it probably would have taken longer. Also, WCB didn't help much, I continuously feel that most of what comes out of WCB and HR's mouths is not what is best for the patient, but who is going to pay for what. Even today, WCB called and wanted to know why I was only at work for 4.5 hours on July 5th. Ummm, hello! Check your records dummies, I was at the doctor! Pisses me off to no end.

I also think that work was very good to me (strange as that may be). They accomodated me very well, made sure that I had light duties and wasn't running all over the place.

And, of course, I have done my part...stretching, strengthening, healing. I think that even though this took some time to heal, it has gone well in the end after such a bad start.

So what else have I been up to? Let's see...

There was the Roger Waters concert at GM Place. Wow. What an experience. So close to Pink Floyd, but not quite. Still, un-real. That is going to be a good memory for some time now.

Racing is going again, spent last weekend and two weekends ago at the track in Mission watching cars whizz by. Marc and I went there this past Friday to set up race control and install a new air conditioner to help keep us from melting in the race control building. All was fine at first, then we realized that the mosquitoes were planning a major offensive at us! (the race track is more or less sorrounded by wetlands, and even though they sprayed, it was heavily infested). In the short time that it took to get into my car and get away, I was swarmed by at least 50 skeeters bound and determined to get my blood. Even in my car, they were attacking while I was trying to suck them out the window as I was driving. When I got home, I found that my right leg and foot was covered in bites! The left leg faired a bit better since I was wearing the bandage around my lower leg.

The funniest story from the race track was from the poor turn workers who were out there giving blood so that the racers could play. I guess that one group had been spraying themselves down with bug spray all day and couldn't figure out why they were still getting swarmed. Just before lunch time, one of them looked at the lable on the can only to realize that they were using air freshener...

At least they smelled good!

Finally, the weddings.

Two weeks ago was Nicole and Jake's wedding on the Island, and this weekend Is Bella and David's wedding. Nicole and Jake's nice, simple. But the one day of travelling was brutal! Two hours sleep, followed by a 4:30AM wake up, missing one ferry, catching the next, driving, wedding, eating, rushing out before cake and off to the ferry again to make it home at 1AM. Kinda ruined the rest of the weekend.

Bella and David's will be the complete opposite, formal wedding, big dinner, dancing, etc. I think that it will be more fun in a way since I will know a lot of those in attendance versus Nicole's where I knew almost no one.

Of course, the biggest news of all...I bought air conditioning for my office! It is so nice! Now I will be able to cool the place a bit before going to bed. Nothing quite as bad as laying in a puddle of sweat while trying to sleep.

No more of that for this guy!

Back to the grind

2007-06-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

Wow, I am beat.

My first day back at work today, although my doctor and my physiotherapist weren't too keen on it, WCB more or less mandated me back. They said that "section blah blah blah of the Workers Compensation Act states that if there is light duties made available, I must take them".

Sure, that is fine. But when the companies idea of light duties has me walking about 2km a day just to get to my desk from my car or the cafeteria or the bathroom, that is a problem. I am still not supposed to be on my feet.

So, I get to work today, hobble to the desk that I thought that I was supposed to be at, sat down and waited. An hour later, Danielle showed up with my secondary work (some data entry) and told me that she thought I was supposed to be in the other dock. I thought that I was where I was supposed to be, and went on with my work. A few minutes later, one of the supervisors shows up, saying he was told that I was in the other dock. Now I am getting to wonder if someone has screwed up, or if I screwed up. I do not recall (and my shop steward backed me up on this) being told to go to the other dock. Actually, I literally got no info after our little meeting with WCB on Monday.

Anyway, my Return to Work co-ordinator, Sereeta showed up. The poor lady had her young child barf all over her nice work clothes, so she had to change, shower and then show up late to work. Anyway, I told her the problem, and had her straighten it out.

Coffee time, then I met again with her and we went to the other dock. There was no work station for me, no room for me at any tables, and really no work. Yup, great planning. In the end, I went up stairs into the QA office, where I had asked to be in the first place. Very little walking, I can do my work up there, and I feel useful. I also had a chat with the top manager, explaining in great detail what had gone wrong with my leg, and also why I didn't want to be wandering the floor. He had actually thought that I had had surgery. Once again, no communication.

Then, to add to my day, I had to meet at one of the local pools to do my aquatic physio, which is a lot of fun...unless you are doing leg exercises. As I got out of the water, my poor legs felt like lead. I managed to hobble out of the aquatic center, but I have felt wasted ever since. I will be so happy when I am not broken any more.

You sass that hoopy frood, Douglas Adams?

2007-05-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

Do you know where your towel is?

Today is Towel Day, in honour of the author and visionary Douglas Adams. I spent whatever time I did out of the cave that I have been stuck in, carrying with me a towel and a copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I had a few funny looks in stores, and was questioned by the staff at my favourite eatery. But, I carried my towel with pride, knowing that I know the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. =P

I went to see the doc yesterday. He told me that the report from the ultrasound imaging on my leg showed a 2cm tear in my gastrocnemious muscle, with a 5cm "bubble" of fluid around the tear. So, it was exactly what we thought it was. This was good news in the sense that my physiotherapist can now focus better on getting me well again. We were working in the right direction already, but it is good to back up hunches with fact. The doc also told me that I am off work for another two weeks, just to make sure that it does heal it self. Which leads me to the next paragraph...

I broke down.

I bought a PS2. And a plastic guitar with Guitar Hero 1 & 2. And Grand Tourismo 4. So now, aside from my reading, (been through many books this past two months) and my World of Warcraft, I now have something else to let the hours slip by before I get permission to do any amounts of walking.

Damn it! I want to go hiking!!!

Changing subject again, they are paving the road outside my apartment. Now, being a guy, I like big machines. I have resisted the urge to go out and sit and watch them work; mostly because I don't want to be breathing in the fumes from the asphalt. Most control the urge to resort back to childhood!

Long train running

2007-05-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

So it has been what, almost two months since I tore the muscle in my leg? Ya, a few days shy of two months. Is it better? Ummm, nope. No where near.

Yes, I am sure that two weeks in NYC didn't do much for it, but still, I shouldn't be waking up in the morning in the amount of pain that I am experiencing. I am attending physiotherapy, and my friend Candace is doing all she can for me, but I don't see any progress yet.

A week ago Friday, I had an ultra-sound image done on the damaged muscle, kind of like what they do with pregnant ladies so that you can see what is going on. The technician showed it as a partial tear in the Gastrocnemious / Soleous. Umm, those are two different muscles there dude, which one? I still don't know. I have been calling the doctors office to see if the report has arrived yet, and it hasn't.

One of my fears is that I still might need surgery, even though it has been this long. The doctor would go in and try and reattach the muscle where it is torn. Then, I would be off work for a long time. Ugh. I am bored enough sitting at home. Video games are only exciting for so long. I have also read most of the books that I hadn't read before.

So I sit here, doing the gentle exercises that Candace has given me, while my body slowly gets out of shape. Man, I really want to go for a walk, go for a hike, climb a mountain or ride a bike. Hell, I would be happy climbing stairs!!!

Click, click, BOOM

2007-05-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you think to yourself, "golly, is that person ever stupid". Then there are times when there are times when you think "golly, is that person ever stupid, and not only are they gonna kill themselves, they will probably take me with them!"

This is what I found yesterday while putting some overpriced liquid into the tank of my car.

I was minding my own business, pumping my gas when a little Toyota Echo pulls up on the other side of the pump from me. I glance over and see an arm hanging out of the back window with a lit cigarette in her hand! I quickly mentioned that it was illegal to smoke near a gas pump and the asshat in the front seat got all testy and told me that there wasn't anyone smoking in his car. So, I pointed out the cigarette, but he still kept getting all stupid like telling me that there was nothing wrong with it. Then, he asked me if I was a smoker, which I told him no. He continues to point out that there is nothing wrong, even though right in front of him there is a sign saying no smoking. I tell him, fine, but if they want to smoke near gasoline fumes, do it elsewhere because I have seen fire start from gas fumes (was grinding on the farm, sparks lit a small bucket of fuel even though they were about five feet away). So, dummy opens his mouth again, proving his low level on the IQ scale, and tells me that guys he works with "smoke around chemicals like acetone all the time and nothing every happens to them". That is when I shook my head and left. Arguing with a meat-head like that just won't get you anywhere.

Locked in the trunk of a car

2007-04-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

Sitting at home again. Nice to be back here, even though I had a great time in NYC with Andy and Kathleen.

Been busy all afternoon uploading the rest of my photos, rocking out to The Hip. Since I had nearly 1000 photos to dig through, getting them all online has taken a while. There are still a few that I need to go back and play with a bit, they were taken on a rather dark day and the lighting sucks. Nikon Picture Project will save the day there.

I got home from YVR about noon, woke my brother up and went for food. Of course, the car wouldn't start, I think that the fuel pump is unhappy. The muffler managed to stay on all the way home, which is amazing since a coat hanger is what is holding it on.

Once home, I think I got about 16 hours of sleep. I was beat, being awake for about 36 hours, with only little bits of poor sleep the few nights before. I do feel better now though, all rested up and ready to go to work tomorrow.

I suppose I should try and get outside for a little bit, get some fresh air while the sun is shining.

Leading the blind while I stared out the steel in your eyes

2007-04-28T03:03:00.000-07:00

Damn it! I just got yogurt on my laptop.

So, here I sit at JFK, waiting for my flight. I sort of dozed on and off all day, and then ended back at Kathleen's to watch some video's and wait till I had to head to the airport.

The week was a lot tamer than the weekend, Monday and Tuesday I followed Andy around as he did his school work, Wednesday I ended up seeing the Tragically Hip at a small venue (I have photos, they just aren't online yet), Thursday was wander around aimlessly, did some more of Central Park, tried to get the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it was packed with about 20 buses of kids and I just didn't feel like dealing with that. I ended up on top of the Empire State Building, but the weather wasn't great (really cold up there) and my headache that was small before the elevator was HUGE after the elevator, so I came down, took a pedicab back to Times Square and then went to meet Andy again.

I also got a phone call Thursday from work. They have now decided that they want me back in France. One of the full time guys has quit, and now all of a sudden, they want me. They even have offered to let me go till September 2008. This is a big decision, specially since the package isn't quite as good as what I got last time. And if I were to go till September 2008, there is the chance that I would lose my seniority. That is too much to lose.

So, the last few days have been wrought with thought. I need to talk to work Monday and discuss this a bit. But for now, I have an hour before I fly away back home. I am looking forward to my own bed again.

Once more into the breach

2007-04-22T19:29:00.000-07:00

What a long strange trip it's been this weekend.

Friday night Pale Horse was supposed to play at a show in Hoboken with a two other bands and a solo acoustic act. The show started 1.5 hours late, and being that it was a bit disorganized, the bands that were in front of Pale Horse dragged their sets out a bit long, leaving very little time for the guys to play. Even the band before theirs said that they would play a shorter set, and speed things up a bit. They didn't. In the end, after Andy and the boys played one song, they were told to shut it down. One freaking song!!! So, the snuck in two more, then turned it off. The crowd was quite upset, but there was nothing to do about it. Needless to say, the boys were a might be upset by it. At least the beer was free.

More bad things started Saturday morning when I came out of Andy's to find that we had some more woes to deal with on the truck. The strange noises that we heard in the back, a broken leaf spring. Not just any spring mind you, main the spring. This is the one that does the important job of holding the axle to the truck. Bad news. I spent a little bit of time under the truck, looking to see how bad it was a determined that if we take it easy on the pot holes, which is very impossible in New York, we should be fine for our three hour trip to Atlantic City. It was a bit of a nervous ride, since we had a full load of band gear with us, but we held together.

The drive down was rather uneventful. Andy and I got to the stadium a bit early, figured out what was going on, and waited for the others to arrive. There were some cover bands, some garage bands that sucked, but everyone seemed to be having a good time. The only problem was that they were running late. This is looking familiar.

The others finally got there, we unloaded the gear and waited some more. There was a group on stage that were "older rockers", but they were kicking pretty good. Then some hardcore punk band that wasn't overly good, but they did smash a really nice guitar on the stage. Finally, Pale Horses turn. The guys quickly set up, I got the camera out and started shooting. The boys cranked out "Common Martyr", I quickly started adjusting for the poor lighting, and the crowd started getting into it. It was Paul's last show with the band, he is leaving to spend more time with family and wife, and work and stuff. So, he really got into it. It was fun watching the guys rock, they seemed to be onto a good show. The next song, "Once more into the breach" (one of my favs) got the crowd going, Chris was kicking ass on the guitar, and Barry seemed to just be doing excellent. Andy started hopping of the stage, climbing on the speakers, etc. Good front man stuff.

Then, came the kicker. Once again, the organizers pulled the plug. "One more song, that's it boys." Shit. They played "Downfall", another of my favs, and in my mind, the boys kicked some serious ass up there. Although it was a short set, it was a powerful set.

So, the next band came out, some hardcore punk screamer band. With the nearly naked gyrating dancer on stage. This is were things started to go very wrong. I was up front, shooting photos, having fun when I noticed that the mosh pit was getting a bit violent. Some guy had a axe handle and was cruising the crowd with an very angry look on his face, another guy was wearing an executioners hood, slamming into people, and another had a football helmet on and was headbutting people. I started to make a hasty retreat when a big shin head sucker punched some random guy, knocking him out cold. I grouped up with the band and our group of people, and started to get the hell out. Police were arriving everywhere, police dogs were going at it, and fights were breaking out all over. Not a good way to end a concert.

We all got out alive, no one got touched, but we were all in a little bit of shock. A few bands weren't able to play, since the show got shut down, so they were a bit upset, but at least we got a bit of time for Paul's last show.

After finding our motel, we headed out for a very late (and expensive) dinner at one of the casinos. Each dish could feed a family of five, but because I wasn't that hungry, I just watched everyone getting stuffed. Then we headed into the casino to find Barry's friends, but Andy, Kathleen and I wander off to find our own adventure. We ended up at the penny slots, and since I don't like gambling, I figured that penny slots wouldn't break me. After spending a couple of bucks, and coming out with nothing, I moved to a pirate slot to try my last buck in. Moments after I started, a "Cougar" came over, sat beside me and asked if I had a buck for her to play with. I said no, I was done to my last one. Moments later, her friend arrived to watch over my shoulder. I kinda figured that they were looking for a trick, just the way they were talking, but I stayed polite and kept playing. Then, a strange thing happened, I started to win at the slot games. Suddenly, I was up $.49 over what I had spent so far in my gambling. I was screwing the casino!!! The first Cougar told me I should cash out, take my money and run. I did take her advice, and came out almost fifty cents in the black! Look out Vegas! The first Cougar said that she had brought me luck, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Then the second one asked if I would like some "companionship" for the evening. I told her now, I was with my friends, and the first one then asked if I was interested in a threesome. Money never was mentioned, but it was implied, so I turned them down. I got a little wink and they ran off. Gave me a little chuckle too, and of course Andy and Kathleen thought it was quite funny that I was getting picked up in the casino.

In the end, I got to bed about 3:30AM, but only got a couple of hours of sleep because of all the partying going on around the motel. Come morning, we all got together for a farewell breakfast for Paul, then went down to the beach to take some photos of the band.

The last thing before I left Atlantic City was to hobble over to the ocean, and stick my hand in it. First time touching the Atlantic ocean. Silly, I know, but it had to be done.

We have made it back to Calder, now just catching up on laundry, and playing a little Guitar Hero. Not sure what I plan on doing this week, but I am sure there will be more stories to come!

Just another day

2007-04-21T10:22:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note about Andy's show last night...

After starting the show 1.5 hours late, and sitting through three other bands (the one before Andy's said they would do a short set, but took an hour...), Pale Horse got on stage, did one song and was told they were done. Too late at night and the grumpy old folk who ran the place didn't want the police showing up from noise complaints. Andy and the Boys laid down two more songs, just because they didn't want to have waited all those hours to only play one song.

Tonight, Pale Horse plays a stadium show in Atlantic City, and since they go on first, they are pretty much guaranteed their full set time. I should even get permission to get on stage and shoot photos of the guys rocking out.

Speaking of photos, getting them uploaded might be a bit of a problem, since I can't get my laptop to plug into the network here. Might have to wait till I get home to put them on Flickr.

Well, time to get to Atlantic City!

New York Minute

2007-04-19T20:51:00.000-07:00

Well, it is the second night staying at Kathleen's place in Washington Heights on Manhattan Island. Andy and I were supposed to be back at his place tonight, but due to an unfortunate vehicle problem, we aren't. I will get into that later.

I came into town with Andy yesterday since he was teaching at the Midtown campus, and I didn't have to take the train in. The plan was, (as I thought) that we would be heading back to his place afterwards; but I was wrong. Turns out we ended up staying at Andy's girlfriends place because he has to go up to Long Island for ban practice, I I had to torture my leg some more. Of course, I am ahead of myself again.

Once I got into town, I headed down the subway to Times Square to take some photos. As usual, it was crazy busy with school groups, tourists, and the ever present taxi cabs. I started shooting photos here, and some more photos there, when I spotted him. The Naked Cowboy. He is this guy who plays his country music in Times Square in cowboy boots, a hat and tighty-whities! So, I took a few shots of him, and laughed at some of the women who were getting their photos taken with him. After I wandered a bit, I managed an almost postcard shot of him that I think the girls at home will like.

After Times Square, I jumped on the subway again headed south to Battery Park. I hadn't gone down that far last time I was here, so I took some time to hobble around enjoying the park. Lady Liberty is within sight of the park, as well as Ellesmere Island, tempting me to jump on a boat and go exploring. Maybe next week.

Shortly, I had enough of Battery Park (it isn't that big) and wandered over to the edge of the Financial District to take a few wide angle photos of the sky scrapers. It is a very interesting effect to have three or four giant buildings leaning out over you. I know it is an illusion from the lens, but it is still trippy.

Another subway ride and I was back up at Columbus Circle and the entrance to Central Park. I slowly hobbled around the park a bit, laughing at kids riding their skateboards down a kids slide, landing on their butts on the cement. Glad it wasn't me. Central Park is a busy place around 5PM, full of joggers, and others getting in a bit of nice weather after the big storm on the weekend.

Afterwards, I met with Andy, who informs me that I won't be able to come to band practice because he needs to pick up two others and there isn't room in his truck for all of us. So, he drops me off at 56th and 5th Ave, both of us thinking that the Rockefeller Center is close by. We were wrong and seven blocks of hobbling later...I get to the Rock, and go up to the Top of the Rock, an amazing observation deck looking out over the city without the wait of the Empire State Building. And besides, this way I can take photos of the Empire State building...=)

Knowing that Andy wouldn't be back for a long time, I spent about 2.5 hours sitting on top of the city gazing down in wonder and taking photos. There was a slight problem though, seems that they weren't happy with my little clamp/tripod/thingy to keep my camera steady during night shots. They also wouldn't allow full sized tripods for "safety reasons". I think more that they just are scared of lawsuits. So, I became rather creative with my camera holding. I hope they turn out. It is such a lovely feeling looking down on all those people and buildings, etc., but all good things come to an end. So, off to find food.

By this time it was almost ten at night, and I still hadn't had dinner. Usually you can do okay at diners in the city, but I found a not so good one. I am still alive, so it wasn't that terrible, but I won't go back.

Finally, Andy showed up, but his truck was being bad. After flooding it out last week in the storm, he now had a parking brake stuck on. The back right brake was really jammed up, cause the wheel to stop randomly, and when we got to Kathleen's, it was smoking really good. So, we called AAA and got it towed. (that is the reason we are at Kathleen's again tonight, the truck is still in the shop although something this simple should have been fixed already)

So, today was another day in the city.

We went for a late breakfast, or lunch as some people call it. Andy went off to teach again, and Kathleen and I jumped on the subway and headed south again. This time over to Brooklyn so that we could hobble across the Brooklyn Bridge. Sunny day, fresh air and lots of room on my camera's flashcard. After a nice walk on the bridge, Kathleen left to get home to show an empty room in search of a new room mate, and I slowly walked down to the waterfront to take more photos. I managed some really nice ones of the bridge and across the water at Brooklyn itself. The area that I was exploring was an old Pier for unloading the boats, but is now museums, and shops. Kind of a nice out of the way, almost not for tourists but is, little space.

Which brings me back to Columbus Circle for a while waiting for Andy, them off to meet Kathleen for food, and finally back here for the night. Hopefully Andy will get his truck back tomorrow, and then we can go back to his place so that we can finally change our clothes. =)

BTW, since my laptop is at Andy's, and all my photos are still in my camera, I haven't been able to get them on Flickr yet. And the way things are going, I probably won't get them online for a few days. Hopefully soon.

Bright lights, big city

2007-04-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

So yes, I made it to New York in one (partially swollen) piece after a
rather boring flight. Problem with going on normal flights after test
flights is that they are boring. And sitting in cattle car class on an Air Canada flight, you sure feel less than human. I was sitting in the very front row of economy, so I got to watch how the better class gets treated. We didn't get meals, we had to spend money on dried up sandwiches, while the special people got china bowls, and wine, etc. The tragic, yet funniest bit was when someone wanted to use the forward lav, but since it was meant for Business Class people, us in cattle were supposed to be up there. The line up for the ones in the back were really long, so one brave lady snuck forward to ask. She was quickly shooed back to the curtain separating the two sections, told to wait there, and then had the curtain drawn right in her face.

I got into JFK, my buddy Andy's truck was in the shop and I needed to
take a cab to Grand Central Station to meet him and take a train
north. But I didn't take a cab, I took a limo! Well, a Lincoln
Towncar, which was almost a limo, had a ton of room in the back seat so that I could stretch out the leg. Once we got to Manhattan, the driver pulls up in front of the Hyatt, which is right next to the station, and the door man opens the door and lets me out. Talk about feeling important! The doorman asked if he could take my bags upstairs for me, thinking that I was staying at the Hyatt (uber nice hotel BTW), and when I told him that I was going to the station, he scolded the driver for not taking me the extra half block because he didn't want me to walk too far with my leg. (I am almost getting sick of people being nice to me because I am limping around with a cane) So, back in the car and down the block to the station.

Grand Central is a neat old building, with a beautiful ceiling in it. I plan on taking a good wide angle shot of it before go. I was supposed to meet Andy there, but he was a little ways away, waiting for me to call. He thought that I would call from the airport, giving him time to get to the station, but I called from the station. So, I got to sit and watch the people walking by, the few homeless that were milling about and the half dozen cops that were patrolling the place. There were some National Guard patrolling when I go there, but they left shortly afterwards.

Eventually, we made it to North White Plains, were I got to sit and wait for Andy to get his truck from the shop. It was a long walk, and being that I was really sore, Andy ran off and left me to go and get it. While waiting there, some poor guy got of the next train and was looking a bit upset. Turns out that he had slept through his stop, and couldn't get the taxi place to answer the phone. Hope he made it home.

After arriving at Andy's, I took a look at my leg. Whoa! It was really swollen. So, I ingested a bunch of drugs, and off to bed. Figure that it was the best thing to do. Today, it is feeling a lot better, and I am walking a little better.

I don't have any big plans for tonight, we were going to go to Andy's bands practice, but the drummer, who owns the house that they practice in, is really sick. So, I have just been hanging out and learning about the research that Andy is doing here.

Tomorrow I will go into Manhattan, Andy has a class to teach in Midtown, and I can go and shoot photos for a while.

Late night edit...Andy and I came home after our little bit of running around today (we went and watched "300" in IMAX), we found ourselves with a herd of deer munching on the grass next to his house. I tried to get a photo, but it was too dark. Then, just now while walking over to the library to check email, we found that the deer were still there! A little hard to see, but their eyes glow nicely from the flashlight, so it was easy to spot them. I am hoping that they will be around a bit over the next few days so that I can get a photo or two.

Polysorbate 60

2007-04-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what is in a Twinkie?

We all have heard the urban legends, that Twinkie's have a half-life, not a shelf life and that they could survive a nuclear war so that the cockroaches have something to eat.

In a way, you are right. Twinkie's aren't really food per say, more a chemical mix of stuff mined out of the ground, petroleum and coal tar. Sounds yummy, doesn't it? And it isn't just Twinkie's that have this crap in it, a lot of North American foods are made with it too. It is no wonder I lost so much weight in Southern France last summer, they don't use a lot of crap in their food. It is just that, food.

So, do you want to know more? Click on the title from this blog entry and be transported to a web page belonging to the Toronto Star telling you all about the little golden hunk of "cake".

On a different note, I am off to NYC tomorrow to hang out with Andy and take a lot of photos. I am hoping that my torn leg muscle doesn't do me in and force me to sit at Andy's for a week playing video games or something. I have already come up with a couple of things to do that don't require much walking. I also figure that me photo's will be from me sitting in one place and watching the world go by instead of me going looking for interesting things. This is not something that I am good at doing, sitting still. But, I have no choice right now.

Andy has also informed me that I will be rocking out a fair bit as well. I get to see his band play twice, but also most likely will be seeing the Tragically Hip play a small venue! Just no dancing for me.

I am going to be trying something different and new too. I am getting myself a 10-20mm wide angle lens for my camera today. I figure that NYC not only looks good in grey scale, but good in wide angle as well. I hope they turn out well.

Anyway, gotta go and do laundry, pack, etc. and get over to the parents place where I will be staying tonight so that it will be easier to get to the airport. I will be trying to keep this up to date while I am traveling, Andy has internet, and hopefully I will be able to upload my photos to Flickr as I go. If not, then I guess that there will be a lot of uploading when I get home.

The 432

2007-04-09T01:38:00.000-07:00

Sitting at home this afternoon, icing my wounded leg, I was wondering what is my buddy Andy is doing. I knew he was in Vancouver, (and probably bored of Easter stuff) so I sent him and email asking of his doings. Turns out he was out at his old stomping grounds, UBC, trying to come up with the next issue of The Science Undergrad Society's newspaper called The 432. Although he doesn't go to school there anymore, and hasn't been the editor for some time, the current editor is busy with exams and needed a bit of help getting the issue out.

So, after a phone call where I was bribed with food, I packed up the laptop and have headed out to give him a hand, as well as get some visiting time in.

I show up at the university and another SUS alumni is there as well, my buddy Jay. So, after watching a few video clips on Jays iBook, and me showing off pictures of my new niece we got down to a little bit of writing and layout work. So far, between difficult layout software and lack of anyone elses input, the latest issue is taking it's time.

Eventually hunger pangs took over, and we ran off to Elwoods for some beer and burgers and a little UFC on the TV, chatted a bit, reminisced a bit then finally decided to get back to UBC to get some more done. Looking over Andy's shoulder, I see that one of the little features will include "Mothra Stewart", and bit of Photoshop of Martha Stewart's head attached to a giant moth body. The 432 is not your regular paper.

In the past, there have been some interesting issues, with photos of John on the front cover naked playing poker with some of the girls, and other nifty articles.

This issue looks to be about the same. Click on the title of this entry to take yourseelf to the UBC libraries archives of the back issues and enjoy the humour of it all.

It is now 1:30AM, and I need to be up at 6AM to go to my first day back at work on light duties. I knew that the trip into UBC would end this way, but I went willingly. I hope that I don't fall asleep at work, that would be emberassing!

Welcome Ayla Maria!

2007-03-28T17:59:00.000-07:00

Some time in the middle of the night, little Ayla Maria was born. What makes her special to me is that she is my first niece.

My brother Allen's girlfriend Jenelle is the mom, and of course, Allen is the dad and although little Ayla was a difficult birth (over 24 hours of labour, emergency c-section) she came out at a healthy 6lbs 15 oz.

Mom had called the morning before, telling me that they were in labour and that she figured the baby would be born by noon, but I think she was born closer to 3AM the following day.

Welcome to the world little one, keep your daddy in line!

World of hurt

2007-03-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

Oh boy, do I ever hurt.

I was at work tonight, trucking along feeling good about life, when something bad happened.

My job at that moment was to check the nitrogen charge in the nose landing gear oleo (the shock strut on the landing gear), but to do so, I needed to straighten out the gear (the steering was turned to the right). So, I grabbed the tow bar, hooked it up and started to use the tow bar as a lever to turn the gear. Done this many times before.

But this time, things went wrong. I was just about at the end of my travel, when I felt my calf muscle "pop". It literally popped. A little yelp of pain, a quick sit down and I was in a world of hurt. Luckily someone saw me sitting in pain and came over to investigate.

I was wheeled over to the first aid room in an office chair and had someone send for a first aider (funny, me being a first aider and looking for another one). A little self exam, and I determined that I have either done a major strain or a tear. Shawn came over and came up with the same conclusion. So, off to the clinic.

The doctor gave me the bad news, torn muscle. So, I get some drugs from the pharmacy, an injection of some stuff called Meperidine and some Tylenol 3's, the doctor give me the shot and tells me to go home, ice and elevate and take two of the T3's. So, I have them and now am flying pretty high, but damn drowsy.

It looks like I will be off my feet for a few days, want to try and get onto light duties at work asap, but I need to wait for a little bit first.

I just hope that this won't screw up my trip to NYC at the end of April, since there was going to be a lot of walking planned.

Looking for a place to happen

2007-03-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

Coming home from a walk today out in the rain, I wandered up to the front door of my building, sheltered under the hood of my jacket. Usually I am pretty observant, but today I missed a big one. The manager of my building was in a fluster, and pointed out the car parked through our hedge. Ummm, ya, guess I missed that.

Seems that a couple of elderly gentlemen were trying to back out of the fire lane between the two buildings of our complex, missed the turn in the road and drove down the front lawn and through the hedge. Then, they couldn't even get out of the car, since they were wedged between two trees!

So, the firefighters showed up, determined that everyone was okay and figured out what we already knew, they couldn't get out. By then the police had arrived, and everyone was having a good laugh, except the guys stuck in the car.

I am guessing that they got a tow truck to pull them out, since I just went and looked and the car is gone. I posted some photos over on Flickr for your amusement.

Every year is getting shorter

2007-03-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

Wow, has it been a month already since the my last post? Oops, sorry.

I guess it can be said, that I have been busy. First of all, I managed to get the new position at work, which has proved to be a very busy one. I went from a crew where everyone had experience and new how to get the job done, to a rather green crew, were most of the staff are new apprentices, and there is even more work than the last group that I was with. My shifts are flying by now, answering many questions, being in fifteen places at once, playing crew lead when my crew lead is away (that usually makes an eight hour day turn into a ten hour day) and somewhere in that mess I need to get my own work done. Last night I was even crew lead for my crew and another crew on a plane that I have had nothing to do with. Work has become very busy.

I also had our yearly winter camp for Scouts. Known as Rovent, it is a camp that takes place in the mountains of Manning Park in the snow. This year, attendance was down a bit, but we still had 430 people there. We also had a lot of very wet snow. Thirty centimeters of the stuff. It made for a rather miserable experience. We also had a few incidences as well. The first and the stupidest was the brain dead 22-year old twit who figured that he would be cool to drive his truck out into the field, through about a meter and a half deep snow. Not only did he get stuck, he nearly ran over a bunch of people, me included. He came very close to having my Mag light go through his window. We gave him a choice, get himself out in about half hour, and he could stay, but if he couldn't, I would pull him out with the five tonne truck and he would be going home. He managed to get out, but we made him park two kilometers away and then made him walk back to camp. The part that bothers me the most was that he could not see what he had done wrong. Not only did he endanger people, but the field is out of bounds for all vehicles; this is a BC Parks rule. It is an old gravel pit, but it is also being reclaimed and that makes it a place of some ecological sensitivity. I still think that he should have been sent home. We also had the the usual dumb kids who think that they can get drunk at camp and get away with it. Nope, busted them. Also had the kids that were firing off bottle rockets. Busted. I was busy. =) I think we had a good time all the same, even though I come home sick from it.

And speaking of snow, three times this past month there has been snow in Abbotsford. The last snowfall was about 25 centimeters on February 28th. I don't remember the last time we had snow that late into the winter.

I just found out the other day that I won't be going back to France any time soon. The boss over there let me know (in a rather "form letter" kind of email) that I won't be needed this summer. Maybe September, but not before then. So, I will have to think things over. I still want to go, but am now thinking about buying a place, get settled in over the summer and see what life will bring me. I also need to start thinking about getting my motorcycle license. That is something that I have wanted for a while, and now I will have the time to get it.

And finally, the biggest bummer of the month, my iPod died. Haven't even had it 10 months, and the battery quit. Probably less than 100 hours of play time too. I am not to happy about it, since I have to send it away to get a new one (they don't change the batteries, they just toss you a new one). I was thinking of getting the extended warranty, but I think I will take the risk and not get it. The local Apple store says that they will be carrying the batteries starting soon since most of the warranties are running out and it will be cheaper for people to just get the battery changed by them. But for now I have a very expensive paper weight sitting on my desk.

Good things come in threes...

2007-02-03T01:33:00.001-08:00

Vancouver sunset #11 (Wayne's Weather Window Winner)
Originally uploaded by travelcedric.

Oh boy, did I have a good day.

First, Bert wakes me up to go for lunch, well breakie for me. It was a nice visit, I don't get to see him quite as often as I would like, since we both have busy schedules and crazy busy jobs at times. We chatted for an hour or so, then off we went, but it was nice.

Then, before I ran off to work, I emailed the above photo off to Global TV's weatherman, Wayne Cox as a submission to his "Weather Window" photo contest. It was the idea of one of the guys at work, and I figured what could it hurt? Well, my grandfather was watching the news, and he was kind of surprised to see my name on the TV with this photo of Vancouver. So, he called my Mom, and let her know, and in turn she called me (I was at work) and left me a voice mail telling me that Grandpa had seen my name on the news. I was a little surprised, but wasn't a 100% sure that it was what I thought it was yet. Sure enough, I get home and there is an email from Wayne telling me that "the astute panel of judges" had decided that my photo was the Weather Window's photo of the week! I am still a little in shock from it, but think it is really cool too. I am getting a "Global Gift Pack" (whatever that is) and hopefully when I get another good picture like this one I will post it again and see how I do.

Finally, the third cool thing that happened was getting called into the manpower office at work.

I have applied for a senior engineer position at work, and it looks like I have got it. I don't have the official word yet, but Trina says that she is sure that I have it (which translates into a congratulations), and since she is the one that does the scheduling when you have a new position...ya, I got the job. =)

This means that I will be doing more or less what I have been doing for the past few years, but now I get paid better (more in line with what I do) and will get a bit more responsiblity out of it. The sad part is that after working with my buddy Shawn for over 5 years, I will now be moving onto another crew. Kind of a happy sorrow. At least I will be on the same shift as my old crew, just on a different plane, and working on a different area of the plane. I mostly work on the fuselage and engines, but now I get to do most of my work on wings and landing gear.

A new challenge awaits!

Vancouver Sunset #13

2007-01-28T09:53:00.001-08:00

Vancouver sunset #13
Originally uploaded by travelcedric.

Got a phone call yesterday from my friend Al.

"Whatcha doing today?"

"Not much"

"I was thinking of hiking out to Dog Mountain to take some photos of the sunset over Vancouver tonight."

"I'm in!"

Dog Mountain is attached to Mount Seymour, and is about a half hour snowshoe in from the ski area. It should be called Dog Point, because it really isn't much of a mountain. But the view is spectacular!

We got there just about the time that the sun was dipping below the horizon (partially traffic's fault, partially my fault, I am out of shape!) but what an amazing sight awaited for us. Fog rolling in from the Georgia Straight, gold rays of sunshine, pinks and purples dancing around the mountain peaks; it was breathtaking. We quickly got to shooting some freehand shots before it got too dark, then I dragged out the tripod to start shooting long exposure. Al forgot to grab his tripod, so we took turns shooting with mine. I fired off 107 shots all together, and have posted the best on my Flickr page.

The hike out was a bit more relaxing, less of a death march since we weren't in a rush. We stopped and enjoyed the stars and just being up in the mountains with the snow and the trees and the serenity of it all. Then off to the Raven to celebrate a good evening of photos with a pint of Sorrento Stout and a Raven Burger.

What a perfect evening!

Something fishy is going on...

2007-01-27T02:53:00.001-08:00

That is one big fish
Originally uploaded by travelcedric.

Please don't eat me Mr. Fish!

Got some photos of the 737 painted up to look like a sockeye salmon now over on Flickr, so go take a look. I even remembered to take my fishing rod in and got some photos of myself and some of the guys trying to reel it in. The fishing rod made for a few good laughs, as many of the guys wanted to take pictures with it and the fish.

Go take a look at the photos, it is an amazing paint job. Thirty people over 24 days to paint it at a cost of about $500,000! All to adverstise Alaska seafood products. I think they got their moneys worth on this flying billboard!

Today's fish is salmon

2007-01-26T00:59:00.000-08:00

Something fishy is going on at work.

Big and fishy.

We currently have a big salmon in the hanger, a "salmon-thiry-salmon" to be exact. Alaska Airlines has a plane that has an airbrushed sockeye salmon painted on it to advertise Alaska seafood, and it is currently in our hanger getting a bit of work done. It is a really neat paint job, really well done too. It looks like a freaky big salmon!

So, I am bringing my fishing rod into work tomorrow, and will be taking photos of someone trying to reel it in. I am sure that it has been done before, but not by me. Look for the photos on my Flickr account in a day or so, I will post them there.

(If you are too eager to wait for my photos, click on the title of the post and go to see someone elses photo of the plane)

W00t!

2007-01-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

First aid exam: written 96%; practical 100%.

I rock!

Although I have struggled with this course, having difficulty with the way the instructor's teaching method worked against me, and also the mnemonics she used, I guess I have done well. A lot of what I did has come from past courses and personal experience which in the end made things a bit easier for me.

Some of the scenarios that I did involved a broken, avulsed arm; puncture wound from a hypodermic needle; CPR/AR and someone knocked down from an explosion who was having difficulty breathing. The only mistake that I might have made (but really I didn't make it, it was just something that was missed by the person acting as the patient) was with the broken arm, I wasn't told that there was point tenderness when I was palpating, but I still did everything correctly.

It is nice to have this out of the way for another two years, it is very mentally draining, and a very physical course. My knees, arms and back are going to need a few days to recover from all the kneeling, rolling people, lifting people, etc. Even CPR is physically exhausting. Imagine pumping someones chest for 30 minutes straight, could you do it? We are trained to teach a helper in how to do it, but even then you are still going to be very worn out and switching every few minutes to let someone rest a bit.

And as I tell all my patients, I like doing first aid, but I don't like to HAVE to do first aid. Be careful out there.

Oh by the way, which one's Pink?

2007-01-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

SNOW????????

WTF? I thought this was Vancouver, lotus land, home of rain and mild winters? What is this white stuff doing back here again?

We had about 8 inches out here in the Ford, only 2 or so in Vancouver proper. The Wack got even more than us in the Ford! This global warming things is a bit confused around here.

I'm exhausted, I have been doing my OFA2 (Occupational First Aid) course this week, and being that it is very physically and mentally draining, I am lucky if I make it to 8PM before collapsing into bed. Last night I even fell asleep fully clothed!

The course has been challenging, not that I don't know what to do, but more that the instructor's teaching style is very confusing for me (and others) because we have been doing it for a long time and are used to doing things certain ways. There have been changes to procedures, but not enough to cause as much grief as what we are feeling. I have talked to the instructor about her teaching, and because she thinks that others are learning from her way, she won't change. Great, I suffer.

The biggest problem is that she likes to use pnumonics (letters that make familiar words to help remember things). I don't learn this way, and am very confused when she uses one of these pnumonics, and not the real steps. For example, she uses the pnumonic "CLASS", and even after a few days, I still don't have a clue what it means. It is probably important, but I haven't a clue.

I just hope I do well on the test even after all this confusion. I am going to try and practice a bit with some of my co-workers tonight to try and figure a few of these out.

I have also applied for a posting at YVR with my company, which if I get it means that I will probably be moving back out towards YVR so that I don't have to drive so much. This also means that I will probably be buying a place out that direction. Richmond, Ladner or something. It will be nice to be close to all my family and friends again (other than Bonnie, she is going to be upset). We will have to see, the posting closes tomorrow, and I am sure that I will have an interview next week.

Fingers crossed!

Things you say and the things you do

2007-01-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

First and foremost, Happy New Year all!

The holidays have been busy as to be expected, running off to be with my brothers over Christmas, and then working out at YVR for the rest of the week. Followed up by First Night in Surrey watching Spirit of the West with Andy, it has been a good time.

Christmas Eve was with my brothers and my Oma, eating too much, having a few drinks, having a few laughs. It was fun, and since we don't get together as often as we should, it is a much cherished event. Christmas day was again at Allen's, but with his girlfriends family. Once again, too much food and more good times.

Boxing day was work for me, out at YVR covering some shifts for another guy. Two 12 hour days, then two 12 hour nights. The days weren't too bad, typical running around saying hi to planes, sending them on their ways. The nights, well they were long a busy. The first night shift was me spending a cold night out on an engine changing a fuel line. It was below freezing that night, so there were problems of cold fingers, cold me and of course exhaustion. But I managed to get it done a bit sooner than expected, and when the morning crew got there, they did the runs and the line had no leaks, and the engine performed correctly. Yeah me!

The second night shift was a bit easier, not such big jobs to do, but still a bunch of finicky things to worry about. Some poor passenger on one of the planes had gotten ill as well, and chucked all over the lav, the galley area and then first class (on the carpet yet!). Ummm, yuck! The groomers weren't too happy about that. Then the rest of the night was fixing cabin snags, and a much deserved break where we sat in the cockpit munching on leftovers from the galley. I found a box of home made shortbread, which I ate too much of, but I did manage to leave some for the other guys and even the other shift. The highlight of that night was when I was grabbing a coffee from the terminal, I ran into my old friend and ex-vice president of my company. He was on his way to Vegas for New Years with the family, and was boarding one of the planes that I was doing a turn around on. He was joking that he hoped the plane was good with Me and Amex working on it, and that he did not want to see us up in the cabin. As it was, the Captain of the plane was late departing, and we were sitting in the van joking that maybe Mike was going to see us up in the cabin. I thought that it would have been funny to just go up there, walk into the cabin and just look at Mike and smile. I am sure that he would get a chuckle out of that.

So, along comes New Years Eve. My good buddy Andy heard that Spirit of the West was playing at Surrey's First Night celebration, which is impressive since he lives in New York, and he suggested that we go see it. Since I really couldn't think of a better thing to do, I agreed. I got there about 10PM, and watched an up and coming band playing. They were pretty good, played to a younger audience, but I still enjoyed them. Wish I knew their name. Then, while waiting for SOTW to play, I ran into Vince, the drummer from SOTW. I like it when the band feels comfortable enough to wander around the crowd before a show. I didn't bother him, just smiled and went on my way in search of mini donuts.

It has been a long time since I last saw SOTW play, and to think that I had seen every show over a ten year period but now keep missing them. It was a fun show, directed more towards the family end of things, but the guys played well, even if Geoff screwed up the lyrics to The Crawl, and Vince nearly lost it laughing when trying to sing That's Amore to the young daughter of one of his friends. ONe of the fun parts for me was Andy and I singing to all of the songs, and having a pretty young lady standing in front of us keep looking back at us and smiling because she was enjoying singing coming from both sides.

The show finished with fireworks, really good ones too. Andy and I wanted to get to Tim Hortons, but somewhere along the way I lost him, and the Timmy's was closed anyway. So, home I came, tired but happy.

And now, time to prepare for another new year. Hello 2007.

Why can't we blow the years away?

2006-12-19T21:18:00.000-08:00

Ugh.

I really should be wrapping presents. I hate wrapping presents. Seems like such a waste of time, wrap them, then they get torn open with no one appriciating the work that went into making the present look nice. I suppose that you can always do gift bags, but the price adds up after a few presents. At least the bags are re-useable.

I guess I can be thankful for one thing...I finished my shopping over a month ago, so don't have to spend any time in the dizzying madness that is the mall. Ya, Christmas, the quasi-holiday made possible by Hallmark, crass commercialism and some dude in a red and white suit. I am sure that Santa arrived in the stable just after the Three Wise Men had gone out for a bite to eat.

I am not completely grumpy about the holidays, I do get to see friends that I haven't seem much of in recent months. Andy is in town, and I want to try and see him some time over the next couple of weeks. Maybe go for beer, and try to make it to First Night to see SOTW.

Last weekend was a blast too, going down to Portland to meet with members of my guild on WoW. After chatting with some of them for almost two years, I finally put faces to names and voices. We did have a blast, with sushi night, pub night, breakie, and thrown in the middle, we actually got together to play a bit. I found it really amazing how comfortable I was meeting these people, and how the relationships that we have in the game translated into real life. Makes me happy to know that I have even more people in my life that I can call friends.

Next week, I will be working out at YVR covering one of the guys shifts. It will be a nice break from the hanger, to be outside again, doing line maintenance. I am sure that I will get addicted to that life again, it is a very rewarding job. Instant gratificaton, fixing the plane, watching the passengers and crew get on board, knowing that you did good work and that they will be safe on their flight. If I don't get to go back to France, I want to try and get out to YVR full time. Then I can move closer to Vancouver, and see friends a bit more often. So many variables in my life!

Well, think I will go start wrapping. Probably won't get far, but at least I can say I tried. =)

Leading the blind while I stared out the steel in your eyes

2006-12-10T22:20:00.000-08:00

It has been an interesting week.

First, I actually had a good week at work, other than crashing my knee into a sharp metal object. I got to be a mechanic for a change, instead of a wash boy, or interior technician. Hydraulic pumps, lube units, pressure checks, and other fun mechanical kind of things made the week go by fast. We even had fun with Bob's tool box, that will teach him to take a sick day. =)

Saturday was the companies kids Christmas party, where I took the photos of the kids with Santa. I don't have my own kids, but I like helping and the guys really appreciate the photos I take. This year, the pics turned out pretty good. Having a new speed light for the camera helped, and the digital camera makes checking and correcting the photos easy, which helped make this year a success. It was also kind of nice to hang with some of my friends from work in a not-really-work kind of atmosphere to. And I got to see a few friends that have left the company, but still are dating or married to other co-workers. And of course, there are the new kids that showed up, including sweet little Brooklyn. She is the daughter of our receptionist, Tammy, and is only 4.5 months old. Cutest little thing!

Today was spent marching around the George C. Reifel Bird Sanctuary out on Westham Island with my buddy Al and our cameras. It was crappy weather, with crappy lighting; some clouds and some rain, but a lot of fun. I don't know what it is about flocks of ducks following you around looking for the bag of seed that you are carrying around with you that is so much fun, but I had a blast. We managed to get a few decent shots, but the lighting wasn't helping. Birds that are normally grey (sandhill cranes, pigeons) kind of turned out blue. I did get some great shots of the cranes, they walked right up to us and said hi. They posed nice and then got fed as a reward. But, then the rain came, and we headed out. Stopped being fun really quick.

There were some bad things though this week, other than the sore knee. Twice I was at my favourite restaurant when someone tried a dine and dash. The first guy was successful, I wasn't fast enough to catch him before he got away. The second guy I was able to corral, with the help of the owner. In the end, he was taken down by the police (they were called when he didn't have any money on him, and said that "he would be back"...ya right). After the second incident, as I was walking home, I saw another transient type of guy trying to break into an empty automotive shop, probably looking for a place to sleep. I scared him off, but I am sure that he probably came back. Then this morning, there were two people huddled in a doorway of an apartment building shooting heroin or something. I thought this was supposed to be a nice town that I am living in!

Oh, one last thing. At the kids party, our HR director was talking to me about France. Looks like our contract over there has been solidified until at least September 2008, and it is looking promising in me going back over there for 18 months. I just hope they get on the ball and let me know soon so that I can start looking for a place to keep my stuff, get my affairs in order and then sell my car. It is kind of scary moving away like this, but I know that I have a job to come back to, and that I will be better off with the experience that I will get in France.

Well, new week starts in seven hours, better get to bed.

Go to sleep

2006-12-07T03:13:00.000-08:00

Hans, I still can't make comments in your blog. This is very disappointing.

Please fix this. =)

I also just noticed that I do not have a link from my blog to yours, I will have to remedy this.

But probably at a better time then at 3:22AM.

As you look around this room

2006-12-05T01:29:00.000-08:00

Wow, I am pretty excited. And just so you know, it doesn't take much.

I just passed my 5000th view on Flickr!

Ya, ya, BORING!!! Well, for me it is a milestone. It has been just over a year since I joined Flickr, have uploaded 1756 photos (out of a possible 5000 or so, not including photos taken before joining Flickr), I have a whopping 14 contacts (six of which are just random people) and the top viewed photo has currently 179 views.

I have also managed to snag a showing in a travel guide, had offers to paint some of my Times Square photos and was asked to send in some photos and a story to a fire fighting webzine (never got around to that one). And of course all the nifty comments that I get from strangers too!

The coolest thing though is knowing that my friends and family can see how my life is going, and can explore the things that I do from the comfort of their computer desk. Of course, I would like them to come with me and experience these things with me, but not everyone can run off to France when ever they want.

Hopefully in the next year, I can improve my photo skills, maybe upgrade the camera to improve final image, and maybe even sell some of my shots for calenders or magazines. I would love to make a living at this.

Thunder in the Earth, the course of Heaven

2006-11-28T01:34:00.000-08:00

Holy crap did we ever get a lot of snow! The official amount was about 44cm (about 17 inches) out here in Abbotsford. The roads are still a mess, and the highway is all packed snow and ice. Now the wind has picked up again and the snow is blowing into big drifts.

I love it!!!

I went out walking before work today, and it was fun watching the wind blow the snow around. It was nice and quiet too, with the snow acting as a sound dampner, and less cars than usual on the roads. I took some photos and have them on Flickr.

Not many people showed up to work today, there was only about 20 of us there this afternoon. Over 80 people had called in saying they wouldn't be there because of the snow. And we were supposed to go out and do a high power run on a plane, but the taxiway was so icy, that we decided that it would be safer if we didn't. I could just imagine seeing a 737 sliding down the taxiway with the brakes locked!

The weatherman is saying that we are supposed to be cold for a few more days, with more snow on Thursday. I say bring it on! I love this white stuff!

My skin is cold

2006-11-25T20:58:00.000-08:00

Winter is here!

It is a bit early this year, with such a lovely Autumn, followed by a couple of really nasty storms that knocked power out and turned most of Vancouvers drinking water brown, and now...SNOW!!(that sentence kind of didn't make sense, but I am going to leave it anyway)

I just came back from a walk in it, and there is probably 4-5cm down already. I have heard rumours that there will be 24-30cm over the next couple of days. I was supposed to go into Vancouver tonight, but I am glad that common sense prevailed and I stayed home. I probably would have made it, but coming home would have been a challenge.

I might go out late tonight with the camera and take some photos of the snow on the trees in the light from the streetlamps. I like the way the light sparkles on the snow, very pretty.

Gazing through trees in sorrow hardly a sound till tomorrow

2006-11-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

I had a bit of really bad news when I got to work this morning. Two co-workers and good friends were killed over the weekend when their vehicle rolled over and embankment in the mountains.

It seems that Lyle and Denise (Daisy) had gone up to some hotsprings up above Harrison lake, and were coming home when something happened to cause the vehicle to go over the embankment. The weather this past weekend wasn't overly good; there was a lot of snow and rain to contend with, and from what I have heard, it might even have been dark when they were driving down.

I am not exactly sure when they were up there, but we were told that they were originally reported missing, and Search and Rescue had been up looking for them. Lyle's a very resourceful guy, and Daisy was a tough cookie too, so those that knew what was going on were hoping that they had just broken down. When Search and Rescue said they found a vehicle at the bottom of a cliff that looked like theirs, there wasn't much hope left. We were told that it didn't look like they had survived the fall, and that they perished quickly, not suffering for the two days that they had been looked for.

My heart goes out to their families, specially Daisy's young kids and new husband. They will be both missed terribly.

A crater in the Sun

2006-11-10T00:29:00.000-08:00

Two days done, and I have had enough.

The first two days back at work haven't been all that great. I managed two minutes of enjoyment before I found the new dent in my tool box, and the damaged wheels from trying to move it with the brakes on. (I had those wheels replaced just before I left last spring for the same reason) Too many new people who don't care about other peoples personal property there now.

My biggest let down is the drop in brain usage. In France, I was making important decisions, running aircraft, signing log books, taking on a lot of responsibility. Here, I feel like I am in kindergarden, being told what to do, not allowed to make decisions anymore, have to get approval from everybody, then you still get it wrong. And I am also babysitting apprentices again, which I don't mind a bit, but some of these new ones seem that they have no idea what a day of work is and you need to hold their hands all the time.

I also found out that I won't be going to France at Christmas, seems that they took to long to get things organized, and so getting a visa in time is out of the question. I still have a chance to go next year, but I probably won't find out till just before I go, which will really screw me around again. Nothing new there.

I am going to see about getting out to YVR again, there were supposedly two guys quit out there, and the boss at YVR wants me back. That would be a good job to have, and then I could move a bit closer to the city again.

And my new shoes hurt, the $40 insoles that were supposed to be the best out there SUCK!! They have these stupid hard plastic ridges around the heal that dig in and leave very tender feet. The shoes aren't really that bad with better insoles, but I am not happy that I wasted $40 for these things.

Blown on the steel breeze

2006-11-06T18:03:00.000-08:00

Last day of freedom, work beckons and I will be there tomorrow for my first shift in over 7 weeks. I just hope my tools have arrived from France, otherwise it will be a long day.

Looking back, I haven't completed all that I had set out to do, not that I was completely lazy, just moderately so. I got new work boots, saw tons of friends, got my Christmas shopping done (na-na, I am done and you aren't!), did a bunch of photography, Geo-cached a fair bit, looked into motorcycle lessons (will probably go for them in February or March), looked into a Swiss Passport (Dad will have to get his again first), got the brakes done on my car, and spent too many late nights surfing the net (found Top Gear videos...w00t!) and playing Warcraft.

There were a few things that I should have done, like working on my French lessons, and replacing my windshield, but those aren't the end of the world.

I am kind of looking forward to being back at work, a person needs a bit of structure to their lives, and work helps give them that. On the other side, I really am not looking forward to being back in the barn, after working the ramp all summer.

I also haven't found out if I will be going back to France for Christmas, or if I will be there next year for an 18 month stint. It would be nice to know so that I can plan my life, instead of rushing around all over the place like a chicken with my head cut off. There are lots of things to get done if I go away for 18 months, like finding a place to store my stuff, and selling my car. Those aren't things that take a day or so and I would like to get going on them if it is the case.

It has been good, but all good things must come to an end. Back to the grind.

[Edit] Hehe, just got a call, looks like I am not back to work for another night, they are short one airplane, which means no work. Such a tough life...

Waiting for a place to happen

2006-11-01T13:10:00.000-08:00

Walking through downtown Vancouver last night after seeing the movie "Flags of our Fathers", we passed the big construction hole that is Granville street and couldn't help but notice this band, that was inside the security fence with lights and all their gear, playing a Tragically Hip song. I really couldn't tell if it was the Hip, they were all in costume and make-up for Hallowe'en, but they sure sounded like the Hip. Was it? Does anyone know the answer for me? I do know that they are going to be doing 4 shows the next few nights, but would they be so cool as to play right in the street?

Either way, it was cool to see a band playing right on Granville, but it was also too cold and we were too hungry to stay and listen. Too bad, would have been a good show.

Out from behind these eyes

2006-10-29T15:33:00.000-08:00

W00t!! I have been published!

Well sort of, I have eight of my photo being used by Schmap for their travel guide to Marseilles! This is very exciting stuff, there will be many more people seeing my photos, and the best part is that they will be linked to my Flickr site, so that even more of my photos will be seen. I am a happy boy!

Speaking of photos, I am in the middle of making a Powerpoint slide show up that will show off a small portion of my photos from Europe and give them little stories or anecdotes about what was going on. This will save people from going through all 2000+ photos with me trying to talk about each one. There is still Flickr, with the 1000+ photos, each with a caption, but that is still a lot to go through. I am hoping to have the slide show done before I go back to work again.

Meanwhile, I have using the time off to go and take more photos, do a little Geocaching, as well as visit with friends that I have been missing while I was out of the country.

One more week, then back to the grind.

Dream yourself away

2006-10-20T22:11:00.000-07:00

Another beautiful day in the Lower Mainland, sun was out, the leaves are changing colour and I had a new lens to play with!

Al let me borrow his 10-20mm wide angle lens for a few days, and I took it out to try a few shots. I went to a local park (also to geocache) and took some photos of the trees in their autumn colours, and some ducks, and a heron. Used the wide angle for some of it, and I have decided that I need to get myself one. Nice lens!

I also have gone out and bought a new computer monitor, my old CRT is slowly dieing, and has become a bit hard to look at, so I found a great deal on a 22" LCD widescreen. What a huge difference it makes! I have a conversation going on with Kira on MSN Messenger, I am writing this and uploading photos at the same time, and I can watch all three! And of course, there is also the gaming aspect of it, whoa, is that sweet.

I also need to ask, when did I get really old? I was listening to a classic rock station on the radio the other day, when they announced "and now, more classic rock from Greenday". When the hell did Greenday become "classic" rock? Led Zepplin, The Stones or The Who, they are classic rock, not Greenday.

Maybe I am getting old...

A ragged band that followed in our footsteps

2006-10-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Oh.

My.

Gawd.

Google Earth has finally updated the satellite photos over the Fraser Valley. I can finally see my house!!

Actually, I have also downloaded the newest version of Google Earth, and it is decidedly better than the older version that I had. Better 3D drawing of mountains (still not perfect, Divide Lake in the Yukon was plastered to the side of a mountain), and I like the controls a bit better, that was after I found them of course.

I have also been using GE to find Geocaches. Once you have logged onto Geocaching.com, and you go to your accounts page there is a link to download the plug in that will show the caches on GE. Pretty spiffy!

Speaking of Geocaching, I have spent all week in the sun chasing caches around the Lower Mainland. Did pretty good to, probably found about 9 or 10 caches, dropped of one Travelbug that I had picked up in Denmark, found and left another Travelbug, and got some good photos out in Ladner. Hoping that the rain dies down and I will be able to go and find on elusive cache that I have been working on for ages.

If you own a GPS, go Geocaching! You can thank me later.

Rebuilding the classics

2006-10-10T17:29:00.000-07:00

I was surfing around YouTube when I found this kid playing Pachebel's Canon...on the electric guitar. Wow, is he good. Go listen, you will like it. (this entries title is the link)

And every day is the right day

2006-10-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

I just went shopping, looking for a bit of a taste of the last four months...namely good cheese.

At first, it was the price that made me choke. For the price of a couple of grams of good brie here, I could have half a ton of the stuff in France. And this isn't even very good cheese here.

The next shock was when I got home and opened the package. First there was the carboard box, then the hermetically sealed plastic cup. Finally, the plastic wrap. Holy over packaging Batman!! In France, you get a piece of cheese wrapped in some wax paper and that is good enough!

When I was in Geneva, Alex and I were discussing how Europeans and North Americans view cheese differently. He was saying that in Europe, it is advertised by how it tastes, what it tastes best with, and how it improves the taste of certain wines, etc. In North America it is all about how nicely packaged it is. Case in point, there was a French company trying to market their cheese in the States, but they failed badly. Looking back after loosing lots of money on it, they discovered that the North Americans want everything plastic wrapped and sterile, not realizing that cheese needs to breathe, and be alive. So, their advertising showing cheese all nice with fruits and wine and stuff didn't go over as well in North America as Europe.

Another point that Alex made was a quote from some author and his opinion on the different attitudes about cheese. I don't remember the exact quote, but I will paraphrase it the best that I can.

"In Europe, cheese is allowed to live. It is left out on the counter, allowed to breathe, grow, and evolve into something better. This in the end gives it a better flavour, and the flavour will change over time. In North America, cheese is dead. It is kept in a plastic bag and then kept cold like a corpse in a morgue. It can't grow, it can't become something better. It is dead and that is it."

So, I guess that I will have to suffer with crappy cheese, or travel until I find a good import cheese shop.

For long you live and high you fly

2006-10-08T13:55:00.001-07:00

I made it home, although it hardly feels that way. I have been living out of a backpack for so long, that I still feel like I am only here for a weeke then I will be moving on again.

Bonnie was the only one that made it to the airport to see me, which was a bit disappointing. Being away for so long, it would have been nice to see a few more familiar faces waiting for me. Thanks Bonn!

I was lucky enough to find an insurance office open today, so that I can get insurance put back on my car again. I tired to get it to start, but the battery is very dead and I am not waiting for Bonnie to come so that I can get a jump start. You should see the layer of dust on it! It is incredible how much dirt flies around the valley over four months. I should go and take a photo of it.

Speaking of photos, I have just uploaded the last of my photos from Europe on to Flickr. I have also re-arranged things a bit to break things up. There is now a Denmark set and a Berlin set to make viewing a little easier. There should be a bit or a decline of photos being added for a while, unless I got travelling again. I will probably go through some of my old photos and upload them as well, like from my trip to the Yukon, etc.

So, although I am home, the travel bug is still with me. I need to talk with work on Tuesday and find out about my time off. I might take another trip to see Andy in New York for a week. I wouldn't mind doing some more photography over there.

But, inthe mean time, here I am, no longer living on the road. I had fun, saw lots of places and was very happy to see long lost friends again. Leanne, Alex, Megan and Hans, thanks for putting up with me at your homes, it was wonderful!

Above the planet on a wing and a prayer

2006-10-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

So here I am, geeking out again at 36,000 ft (about 10,000+ meters) with high speed internet. I have about 4 hours and 15 minutes left in the flight, we are over Baffin Island, and I thought that I would see how well the internet was on this flight. Turns out, much better than the last flight with internet. This internet is FREE today!!! I have heard that Connexions is shutting down the inflight internet service, maybe the last few days will be for free?? Who knows.

Anyway, I have a little more than 4 hours to go on the flight, then I get to say hi to my little home town of Vancouver! It seems so odd to be coming home, but I am a little excited, even though I am a lot tired.

I took a sleeper train from Ringsted to Frankfurt Flughaven, but the rail car that I was supposed to be on had an electical problem, so I got bumped down to a 2nd class sleeper with two really smelly guys (stale beer, cigarettes and oh-so-wonderful B.O.). I didn't get a whole lot of sleep on the train, between the smell and the warmth of the room and the train noises, I woke up fairly often, with probably only a stretch of 45 minutes of decent sleep. Then 5 hours in the airport, waiting for my flight. Lufthansa has adopted this new style of "fast" check-in, where you go to a terminal and check in there. Doesn't make it any faster though, you still have to wait in line to check your luggage, then in line for security, then in line to get through German customs to get into the gate. It is a good thing that I had those 5 hours!!

Ad now, here I am getting a sore butt from sitting in cattle class in the back of the plane. Oooohh!! Here comes Toblerone! Goody goody!

Three hours, fifty-eight minutes to go...

Bringing sounds of yesterday

2006-10-06T00:42:00.000-07:00

I have about 8 hours before I need to get onto a train for Frankfurt, leaving behind Meg, Hans and Scott again. It has been a fantastic week of visiting with my friends, exploring Denmark, and drinking fine beer (thanks Hans!)

I spent yesterday exploring castles, three of them actually, including the castle that was the inspiration for Hamlet. Most of the time was spent running between them on the trains, (six trains in total), but I did get to go inside Frederiksborg Slot and take a ton of photos. Frederiksborg was built by Christian the Fourth, the king that nearly bankrupted Denmark for his building projects. It burnt down and the Royal family couldn't afford to rebuild, so beer baron, Jacobsen (Carlsberg beer) helped fund the rebuilding and it became a museum. Fredensborg, the second castle I visited, is the Royal families home. It isn't open for the public this time of year, but it has beautiful gardens that are open to the public, and you can see the palace from outside. I was even there for the changing of the guards, not as grand as in London, but still cool. The third castle was Kronborg, Hamlets castle. It was never a real castle per say, it was actually an eloborate fort for taking taxes from ships passing through the narrows at that point. The Royal family never really lived there, like in Hamlet, but have stayed there and use it for special occasions. Unfortunately, I was too late to get in the doors, and it had closed for the evening by the time I got there. But I did wander outside for a bit till the light got to bad to take anymore photos.

It's raining again...

Today, as soon as this latest batch of photos is uploaded, I am off to Copenhagen again, just to go to the Carlsberg brewery. The trip is partially for the tour, but also to pick up a soccer jersey for Morgans boyfriend Mike. Then, home to visit one last time with Meg, and to pack. On a train at 19h33, and off to Frankfurt!

And, once again, if any of my friends want to pull themselves away from Molten Core and come see their long lost friend at the airport, I would really like that. If not, I guess you can wait a bit longer to see me.

Outside the rain fell dark and slow

2006-10-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Two more days in Denmark, then off to Frankfurt, then a plane trip home.

Hoy crap, I am going to be home soon!

I took a day of rest today, after three days of being rather active. Sunday saw Megan, Hans and I off to visit the town of Soro, about 15km away on our bikes with an 8 km ride around the lake there, then Monday I took the bike out again and did a bit of Geocaching which turned into about a 35km ride and yesterday I spent the day running around Copenhagen, which turned out to be about 18km of walking. I needed a break. =)

I have come to really like Denmark, it is a wonderful country, with beautiful people, and good beer. It has also been so nice to spend time with Megan, Hans and Scott (and Morgan and Mike), I have really missed them so it has made me feel a lot happier to have this time to spend with them.

I have my train ticket to Frankfurt, I leave Friday night, but I still want to try and get to see a castle or two up north, and of course a stop at the Carlsberg brewery. Mmmm, beer.

From morning to night I stayed out of sight

2006-09-28T12:41:00.002-07:00

I am back in Denmark, back with Hans, Megan and Scott. It was a long day of waiting for my flight, getting screwed by EasyJet, and followed by a very quick flight to Copenhagen.

I have found out how EasyJet manages to keep fares down. It is not from using cheaper airplanes (actually was impressed with the plane I was on, really nice shape), or by using secondary airports, which is another good idea, but it is by charging the shit out of you for every little thing that you want extra. They state that you get an allowance of one hold bag, at 20kg. So I paid the extra 7.50Euros for the extra bag which is cheaper than the 15 Euros at the airport, but that wasn't enough. When I got to the airport, I find out that the payment for the second bag wasn't enough, they wanted money for the extra weight. The way the wording is on the website (I have checked again) it makes you think that when you pay for a second bag, you get another 20kilos. No no silly, you only get 20 kilos, they charge the shit out of you for the extra weight, at 7.50 Euro a kilo. So, in the end I might as well have bought another ticket, since it cost me another 75 Euros to get my bag on the plane. They have you over a barrel when you get to the airport. Seems like a bit of a scam to me. (I expect some lawyer from Easyjet to send me an email asking me to remove the company name, but if they are a good company, maybe they will take the critisism n stride)

Sigh, enough bitching. I had a nice dinner with Hans at a local pizza place, and now I am waiting to see Megan when she gets home. I get to meet up with her tomorrow for lunch, then we could maybe plan some things to do over the weekend, and something for me to do next week.

Wow, only about a week till I head to Frankfurt for my flight home. It is getting exciting, thinking about being able to order dinner in my native language, answering questions in English, and just not travelling. I am tired of living out of a bag, not having all the things that I am used to having at my home.

I am also looking forward to seeing people that I miss. I am very happy to have had a chance to see my friends over here in Europe. A week with Leanne and Alex and the kids, and now with Megan and Hans and Scott. It has been a good trip.

Leaving all and changing sides

2006-09-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

It is about 19h16 and I am about to go out again to take more photos of Berlin. I had a busy day today, saw the Tiergarten, Siegessaule, the Kaiser-Wilhem Gedachtniskircher, Brandenburg Gate, and the Bundestag (although not in that order). I plan on trying to get a few night shots of the city, in particular the Brandenburg Gate, and the Bundestag.

Berlin is an amazingly beautiful city, with so much history to it. So much that we in North America just aren't taught about. (another good reason to explore the world) Just by going to look at a simple monument, you learn a ton of history!

Anyay, just wanted to leave a quick note, hopefully tomorrow I will get a chance to see a few other things, like Checkpoint Charlie, and the Fernsehturm (which was at one time in East Germany and was built to showcase how great the East Germans were, only it was designed by a Swede). I would love to see the Wall, but there are only two placs left and one is now an art exhibition and the other is a ways out of town. I might have to settle for the art exhibition, and not the original piece.

Barely define the shape of this moment in time

2006-09-25T22:29:00.000-07:00

Just a warning, this is kinda long, I wrote most of it on a 10 hour train ride to Berlin.

Here it is, Monday morning, and I am off to a bad start. We hit a bit of traffic on the way to the train station, and I missed my train. I watched it rolling off down the track as I ran down the stairs. Damn Swiss rail and their perfect schedules!!!

I was luck enough though to be able to get a second train, about an hour and a half later, so I am not completely in panic mode yet. I really didn’t want to call the hotel in Berlin and tell them that I wasn’t going to show up, although I am sure that the kids would be very happy if I had come back to the house.

I am going to miss the kids, they where very unhappy about me going, poor little Adrien was in tears last night going to sleep because I made sure I said my good byes then. They even got up early to make sure that they got their final hugs in before I left. It was quite funny, both of them still mostly asleep, wandering in to the room like Night of the Living Dead or something. But, they got one more good bye from me, and that made me feel better.

So now I sit and wait, after all that rushing around this morning, I could have just slept in a bit and let Leanne sleep a bit longer too. She is still on Indian time, so it wasn’t too early for her.

Since I am typing this in the train station, and I really don’t feel like paying for internet right now, I will add this later today, and probably a bit more about my journey to Berlin.

I made it on to the next train, so here I sit on the way to Bassel where Switzerland, France and Germany all meet. If I remember correctly, Bassel is a big station, and it is there that I have to find my train to Berlin. I am taking an ICE train through Germany, something that I have never done before. Well, going to Berlin is something that I have never done before either. =) Last time I was in Europe, there was two Germany’s, something a lot of young people never knew. It is amazing how much the world changes.

It is nice to look out the window of the train and watch the Swiss country-side flying by. Very green, grey and wet; ya it is raining. It is supposed to be nicer in Berlin, just overcast but no rain. That is okay, I don’t mind the rain or the sky being grey, I have had a lot sunshine this summer. Switzerland is so…umm, perfect. Everything has it’s place, and everything is in that place. This is a HUGE change from southern France where everything is a mess.

Something else I will need to remember very soon is my German, it has been 15 years since I was last force to speak it, and I think that I forget most of it. I will be spitting out French when I want to speak German!

Hmmm, just past a castle, nifty!

Well, enough writing for now, I think I will sit and enjoy the scenery for a while.

Next train!

I am now on a German ICE train, traveling about 160km/h through southern Germany, and can I say, what a nice train! Very nice inside, very smooth ride and even some pretty German ladies to chat with. Since I missed the first train (I looked at that a bit more, there was a mix up of the itinerary and the tickets, the itinerary said Geneva, and the ticket said Geneva Airport, so the train that I was supposed to be on was actually already at Geneva Main by the time I got to the airport station.) I am now arriving in Berlin about 19h00 or so. I just hope that the hotel that I am in will have staff available when I get there, unlike the hotel in Aix where they go home at 20h00. It would suck to not have a room when I get there!

We have just stopped at Freiburg, in Deutschland and it is still pouring outside. Autumn is definitely here. I hope that the rest of my trip isn’t going to be wet, I really don’t have the correct clothing for rain. I keep hoping that Berlin isn’t going to be raining, it is still a ways away and we are heading more north than east right now so I am also hoping that the direction change to east will make a difference.

Enough for this leg of the trip, time for a little snooze. Train rides always make me want to sleep.

Cool! I just looked up and the train is doing 250km/h, not to shabby! I am guessing that I am in what was once East Germany, I didn't see any old border crossings or anything. The train stations are a lot more spread out now and this means that we can go faster, which is good because we are running late. I have been told that it is normal for DB trains to be late, while the Swiss trains are never late.

Bit of a jump now, I am in Berlin, survived the multi-level nightmare that is the Berlin Hbf (train station) with it's poor directions and lack of info. Considering all the tourists that come through there yearly, you would think that things would be a bit easier. I saw many with backpacks looking lost in there (me included). another stupid thing was luggage trolley's, you could get one on the train platform where the train arrives, but there was no place to leave it other than that platform, so I lost a Euro when I left it where I had to get my Metro train. Scam??? I think so.

Eventually, thanks to a good Metro system, I made it to the station near my hotel, about 6-8 blocks from the station, which isn't that bad but I am carrying about 60-70 kilos of stuff in three bags. It was a long walk, only to find out that somehow my reservations had been screwed up and I wasn't supposed to be here until tomorrow! Luckily, the girl at the reception siad there was a room available, and that it was now mine.

So, I made it, I am here, and although I am really tired, I am excited to see Berlin. I don't know what I want to see, but I want to see it. =P

On the wall hung a tall mirror

2006-09-24T01:50:00.000-07:00

It is my last day in Geneva, I leave for Berlin early on the morning train. Leanne came home from India yesterday, so we actually had some time to visit this time, which is nice compared to the last time. Maybe my next visit, I will actually get to visit with her longer than a day.

It has been nice getting to know Alex, he is a wonderful guy. His job keeps him busy, so we only got to visit late in the evening, but I think that we have become good friends. And the kids, well, I am really going to miss them. Next time that I will see them, they will have grown so much, that I may not be able to pick up Margaux, and Adrian will be able to pick me up! (well, maybe not, I hope to see them sooner than that!)

Berlin will be interesting, last time I was in Europe, it was still difficult to get to, and the two Germany's were still divided. Places that I want to see are the Vandenberg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust Memorial, and of course, the Wall. I really don't know if I will have time to see it all, three days will go fast, but I am going to try anyway!

On Friday, I find my way to the airport, and get on a EasyJet to Copenhagen, then on to Ringsted to see Megan and Hans again. It looks like Meg has been planning my visit for me, which is good because I wouldn't know what to go see otherwise and she probably knows me well enough to know what I like to do.

Then, my trip is over on October 7th. Back home to my dust bunnies and mountain of mail.

Sitting on a unicorn

2006-09-20T01:03:00.000-07:00

Another day of being worn out from walking. I spent the day wandering around Geneva, taking photos, and feeling very under dressed compared to the business men and bankers in their expensive suits. Geneva is a beautiful city, with lots of walking areas, old history, and of course, the Lake. I found some beautiful fountains as well. It is funny, it has been 15 years since I was last in Geneva, yet it hasn't really changed from what I remember. I even found a really amazing fountain that I have one photo of from 15 years ago, that isn't a very good photo. Fifteen years of practice, and a much better camera, and the photos have become amazing. Go to my Flickr page and check them out.

I am sitting here now, tired from all the walking yesterday, planning the next couple of days. Alex (Leanne's husband) has suggested that I go to Annecy in the French Alps. He grew up there, and from the books and website photos, he is absolutely correct. Good thing that I have a spare flash card and battery form my camera!

I need to figure out what else to do while here. Leanne doesn't get home from India until Saturday, and I leave on Monday, so I need to find stuff to do in the mean time. Today, I will go into Geneva in a bit and take a boat ride around the lake, a nice easy day after all the walking yesterday. I just hope the haze clears a bit, it will make the photos less appealing otherwise.

And soon I will be home, I am actually getting eager to be back in Vancouver, traveling this long is tiring, and I need a week of sleep to recover.

Okay, I didn't make it into Geneva, I ended up playing with the kids all day. And having a nap. I think I really needed the nap part, and the kids were a blast all day. I love kids, and these two are really special, but I still don't want my own. These ones I get to give back later.

Tomorrow I get the car to go to Annecy, where I can take a million photos of the place, and try and not make the same photos as the other 10,000 on Flickr. I am sure that I will take many of the same shots, but at least I will know they are mine.

Friday Alex is having a dinner party in the evening, and then Saturday Leanne comes home, so the kids will be very happy to see their Mom. Then Monday, off to Berlin!

Distant bells

2006-09-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

The minutes are counting down till I jump on the TGV and leave Aix-en-Provence. My bags are packed, the room has been checked a dozen times, and I am about to hand in my key.

First stop will be Geneva, actually St. Julien en Geneve just on the French side of the border to stay with Leanne and Alex, well, mostly Alex as Leanne is in India for a few days. From there I will do some day trips and maybe an over night trip to Paris, since Paris is pretty much booked for the week I wanted to be there.

And I will be able to see Margaux and Adrian, the youngsters that call Alex and Leanne Mom and Dad. They are sweet kids, and I love to play with them.

It is a nice feeling knowing that the end of this trip is near, I miss home, and family and friends. It has been a fun and busy summer, with long days at work, but chances to see things that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. Three more weeks to quickly see a few more things, see friends here one more time then on a plane back to Vancouver. For those who actually care, I will be home on October 7th about 14h10. Come say hi to me when I get there! (some of you live close enough that you shouldn't have any excuses!)

See you all soon

Straight into the shining sun

2006-09-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

My last night at work in France, my visa is up at midnight, and I am going travelling for a few weeks before I get home.

This kind of jumped out at me, the boss wanted me here longer, but he didn't get the visa extended, so I get to leave. Didn't give me much notice, so I am hastely planning my quick trip around Europe, which will include Paris, Geneva, Berlin and Copenhagen (again). Then I will come home, I am really looking forward to seeing everyone and to eating strawberry waffles again.

See you all soon!

Off again

2006-09-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

Sunny day in Denmark, and I am sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight. It has been a very short visit, but a very good one still. Getting to see my ling lost friend and her new hubby was absolutely amazing. It was very soul restoring, somthing that I really needed. Living in Aix, I have a good understanding of what Meg went through when she first got to Denmark, not knowing the language, not knowing anyone, etc., so I can appreciate it when friends make the effort to say hi once in a while.

The wedding party was a blast, we ate lots (fabulous cake) and there were many speeches, and of course dancing. Hans is a dancing machine! I got some great pictures of him working it up on the dance floor, doing his best disco moves.

Today was a trip into Copenhagen with Megs brother (Scott) and sister (Morgan), and Morgans boyfriend Mike. We walked a lot, took lots of pictures and even did a canal tour around the city.

All in all, it was a great weekend trip. I am so looking forward to seeing them again at the end of October.

Over the mountains across the sea

2006-09-08T08:06:00.000-07:00

Geez I feel like a real jet setter. Running off across Europe for a weekend party, what a life!

I am sitting in Amsterdam airport, waiting for my connecting flight (maybe I should invest in a private jet to get me around, less airport lounge time), and watching the other travelers wander by. There is a moving sidewalk here, with a very annoying voice asking people to “mind your step” as every person wanders by. I wouldn’t want to work right here everyday, I would be committed in a week!

It is rather sunny in Amsterdam, I would love to be able to go out and explore, but being that I have already been checked in, I really don’t want to leave the secure area. If I wanted to do some shopping for expensive goodies, this would be the place. Jewelry, tourist trinkets, perfumes and some very nice Scotches. I found a Scotch that I thought about getting, but at 264 Euros, I decided not to. I really can’t afford to drink that well.

So, instead I am enjoying some real landjager and these nifty cheese stick thingies. I used to get the landjager from my Oma and Opa when they came to visit at Christmas as a kid, but finding good landjager back home is tough. So, I will enjoy it when I can.

(Some guy outside on the ramp just dropped his two way radio on the ground…it exploded into little tiny pieces.)

I have been flying on KLM, the Royal Dutch Airline and other than the little Fokker 70 being a bit old and probably in need of a C-check, the flight was good and smooth, and the flight attendants were very nice. The Dutch make some good looking women! I am flying a 737 with KLM for the rest of the trip to Denmark, so I am hoping the service is just as good.

I would also like to comment about the differences between the two airports that I have seen today, Marseille-Provence, and Amsterdam. I will have to add Copenhagen in there later. Marseille is dirty, dark and not at all a pleasant place to hang out. Even in the newer Air France lounge where I was, it wasn’t that appealing to wait. And being that I am working there, I see the outside as being the same or worse. The ramp is untidy, the ramp rats come across as not really caring too much for their jobs. They look un-kempt, and have an air of uncaring. Amsterdam, the ramp is tidy, there are areas of green grass in the middle of the ramp to offset the tons of concrete that is inevitable at an airport.

(Mmmm, cute Dutch girl…sorry, was distracted)

It is true that Amsterdam is a main hub into Europe, much like Heathrow or Frankfurt, and Marseille is a bit of a back water airport, but I think that it is the people that make the difference. The Dutch seem to care about appearances a lot more than the French in Marseille do. Makes for a much more comfortable experience.

Well, I have killed about 20 minutes, an hour and a half to go…

A state of bliss

2006-09-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

Friday is almost here, 1.5 hours to go!

I am catching a ride into the airport with Colin and Pedro, sitting around for a few hours watching them work, then getting on a plane and heading first to Amsterdam for a few hours, then the rest of the way to Copenhagen. After that, a 40 minute train ride to Ringsted and I get to see one of my long lost friends and her new husband.

I have been waiting all summer to see Meg, and I am guessing that she is excited about me coming to her post weding party. I think that I am the only Canadian friend that will be there.

Time to go and pack, I need to get up early.

Now there's a look in your eyes

2006-09-03T14:09:00.000-07:00

Sunday night, and I am back at work.

It has been a very long week, over 80 hours logged at work, with one 18.5 hour day to make things interesting. Tonight will be the last night with the propeller guys here, so that means that I can have tomorrow off, before going back again to three day shifts. It will be nice to have the day shifts, some time to rest.

On Friday, I jump on a plane and head for Denmark to see Megan and Hans. I would say that I am excited, but in reality, I am too tired to feel anything more than sleepy. It will be a good time I am sure, three nights to visit and have fun. I will be going back to see them after I am finished work here in France, then I can visit for a bit longer, with less people around.

I also have been told that I will probably be done as of October 15th, so that means a little more than a month to go. It will be nice to have a few weeks off, then back home to see the family and friends that I miss so much. As much as I like being here, it is a bit hard to be alone. I am really thankful for the internet on this trip, it is so nice to be able to chat with people through email, instant message and using VOIP software. Keeps the loneliness to a minimum.

So the home stretch is in sight, I will survive and will make it home again.

Wondering and dreaming the words have different meanings

2006-08-28T05:18:00.000-07:00

This may be a long one...

I had my usual (well, unusual since I get to work so much O/T) four days of, and I decided that I have had enough of work and living in a hotel so I rented a car to go and see some of Europe. I originally looked into renting a BMW Z4, but when I realized that it was going to cost close to $2000 CDN with gas and mileage, I decided to go with the Mini Cooper, cheaper to rent, cheaper to fill up, etc. But, when I got to the car rental place, they told me that there weren't any Mini's to be had but would I like to take that nice silver/grey Chrysler Crossfire over there?

Ah...yup!!

Not being a big fan of American made vehicles, I have heard that the Crossfire is mostly Mercedes (engine, design team) and that it moves really nicely. So, filled out the papers and headed out. It took a few minutes to get used to it, after driving the little Clio for so long, but I took to the 330 bhp and 310ft/lb of torque with gusto! What a sweet little ride.

Instantly, most of my plans were out the window, this was a driving trip now. I grabbed my stuff, dropped the top and headed up country towards the Alps. I took it easy for the first little while, getting used to it, but as the mountains got closer, the little devil on my shoulder kept telling me "push it".

I was heading towards Italy through the southern reaches of the French Alps, enjoying the scenery stopping for lunch at Lac du Serre-Poncon then continuing into the mountain passes and valleys leading me to the border. Along the way, there were castles, medieval towns and forts, and of course the shear amazement of the Alps.

I was gaining on the border when it popped into my head, "Dumbie! You forgot your jacket!" So, I stopped at a high mountain ski town and found a really sexy black jacket, which of course looks great when driving a convertible around the Alps.

Now the road was starting to get a little twisty and narrow and the car was starting to show it's stuff. It corners like a dream and the handling package wouldn't let the tires break no matter how hard I tried. If I hit a corner hard, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, the spoiler popping up to help with the traction and the tires grew suction cups and we stuck better to the road. (Okay, I made the second part up, but it sure felt like it!)

I finally reached the top of the pass, and a little skiing town with the border running through the middle of it. This is one of the areas that was used for certain events the 2006 Winter Olympics and you can see the bobsled run close to the highway as I passed it.

Continuing along, I thought that I would get off the motorway and follow the non-toll roads (tolls add up to a lot of money). But, just to confuse us drivers, the French signs for the toll highways are in blue, and the non-toll in green; while the Italian road signs are the other way around. I ended up on the toll road. The toll roads, although they are great to get around, you can't see much since they have a ten foot wall on either side of the road, and you drive through a whole lot of tunnels, probably 20km of tunnel overall. Very boring if you are a tourist.

The weather also turned sour, getting overcast, and the odd rain drop on the window, so I put the top up and drove along, listening to Italian radio. (I found it a bit better than French radio, they have better music) I needed to get some gas, so I stopped and had to actually sniff the fuel nozzle because I didn't know what the writing on the pump meant. I also figured that this would be a good spot for a bathroom break, and was a bit amused to find, in a fairly modern looking gas station, the old fashioned hole in the ground with two foot spots type of toilet. Good thing that I was only making a quick stop!

Back on the road, heading toward Turin (Torino) I decided that I wasn't going to stop, since I was having too much fun driving and I wanted to make it to Valle d'Aosta before it was dark. I didn't have any trouble getting there fast, I was playing with an Alfa-Romeo and a BMW for a while, at around 210-215km/h, and they were pulling away from me. I probably could have gone faster, but not knowing the car, and not wanting any jail time, I decided that slower was probably a better idea. Still, what a rush!

The main reason for wanting to get to Valle d'Aosta was to see Cervino, the Matterhorn. But, being that I really don't understand Italian at all, my map wasn't a decent scale to see detail and the road signs aren't very good, I missed the turn off to the mountain and ended up in a little town down the road from where I wanted to be. I found a road that looked promising, but all it brought me to was a small farming village very high in the mountains. It was the wrong place, but getting there was too much fun. Sport cars + winding mountain roads = happy Rick. I drove back down, and getting tired I made the decision to see if I could find the right road and find a camping site to stay at for the night.

I did find the right road, and as with the wrong road, it was a freaking blast. Lots of twist and turns to play on. I found the two camp sites, but they were busy and very noisy, so I continued on and found a gravel road in a mountain field to camp in. I parked the car and fell asleep. About 3AM I woke up rather cold (my sleeping bag isn't meant for camping, it is meant for hostel's and tropical countries), so, being curious, I looked outside at the sky to see if it was clear or not and found the most amazing sight. The sky was like black velvet and the stars looked like amazing little diamonds. I can't remember ever seeing the stars so bright. After a few minutes, I was getting colder, and tucked in with my blanket wrapped around me. 4AM I was awake again, even colder, so I laid there trying to stay warm till 6:30AM when I got up. The tent and car were covered with frost, and although the thermometer in the car said it was 3C, but I am sure that it was colder than that.

After putting my stuff away, I realized that the Sun was coming up very golden on the mountain peaks, so I headed up to the Matterhorn to take some photos. And what a sight that was! I probably shot around 80 photos of the Sun shining on the mountains as the light changed it's angle. I can't explain how amazing it was to see. I will have to go to Zermatt next year to see the other side during sunrise, and maybe even stick around for a sunset.

I probably could have stood there for hours taking pictures, but I knew that I had to make it to St.Julien en Genieve (more or less Geneva, but on the French side of the border) some time that evening, and still not good with knowing distances, I started off looking for the mountain pass that would lead out of Italy. The original plan was to go into Switzerland, but I really didn't feel like dealing with the Swiss customs. So, I ended up heading towards Mont Blanc, stopping to check out some of the many castles that litter the Valle d'Aosta. Eventually I made my way to the Mont Blanc tunnel, which ended up costing me over 30 Euros to go through. As with all the tunnels here in Europe, it is an impressive bit of engineering. Eleven and half kilometers long right through a mountain. And it must be said, the French side of the mountain is nicer looking then the Italian side. Also, you can take a tram right to the top of the mountain! Next time, I will take the time to go to the top and have a look.

I was still thinking of heading over to Switzerland at this point, the temptation to try and get to Zermatt was strong. There was also the urge to play around Chamonix for a bit, maybe grab a tram ride, or find a nice cafe in the town where I could sit and enjoy the mountains for a bit. In the end, I headed north towards Geneva and my next adventure.

Looking at the map, I found a secondary road known as the Routes des Grande Alpes which looked like fun. It actually runs all the way from Monaco up to Lake Geneva. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. This was definitely sports car country, tight winding roads meant for driving hard. It was very exhilarating! I really put the car through it's paces, proving that it can do what I thought it could do and more. And passengers would have killed me. The only downfall to that little drive was the stinky little FIAT's known as the Panda. It is called the Panda because it is slow. It also has a stinky, crappy, worn out diesel that smokes like a old 737-200. I couldn't tell you how many of those that I passed along the way. I wanted to crush them all and make them into beer cans.

The road led me through some very beautiful towns, all looking like the perfect Swiss mountain village, with the brown and white chalet's with the very red geraniums growing in their pots. I even found some cows grazing near the road with their bells dinging away. I could so easily live in a place like this.

Eventually, the road wound down towards Lake Geneva, about half way across on the southern shore. One minute I was in the mountains, next, city street. Very surreal. Then came the hardest part of the trip, navigating all the towns and cities to get to Saint Julien without ending up on a motorway or in Switzerland. I wouldn't have liked that too much. I am sure that it would have been easier if I had actually had a map of the area that was finer detail than the whole country, but with a lot of determination, a dash of luck and a few lucky turns, I made it! Now I had a map of the town so I was sure that I wouldn't get lost.

Ummm, no.

I had zoomed out on the map that I got from Google, and some of the street names had disappeared. And it didn't quite look the same as it had on the computer. But, after a few wrong turns, there I was, standing in front of the white apartment building where the arrow pointed to on the map. But, I was early, so since I had been in the car all day, I thought that maybe I would go for a walk, check out the town. I turned on the iPod, locked the car and went strolling. It is a small town, not much there but being so close to Geneva, you really didn't need much. I found a nice park to sit in to wait for the time when Leanne and Alex would be home from work and spent about an hour just relaxing.

About the time that they were supposed to be home, I walked back to the car to go find them. After allotted time came and went, I started to wonder where they are. I tried to find their names on the mailboxes in the lobby, but no luck. Then I realized, I had forgotten their phone numbers, so I couldn't even call them! I did bring my cell phone, with my Vancouver number on it, just for emergencies, and as a last ditch effort, called Marc back home to get Leanne's number. Fortunately, Marc was near his computer, and was able to give them to me (thanks again buddy!), but for some reason both numbers wouldn't go through. I called him back, seeing if there was some mistake but nope, they were correct. Next step, find a payphone and try from there. Somehow though, the number suddenly went through and I was saved!

Alex answered, and tried to find me as I was telling him that I was outside the apartment. He looked but couldn't find me. Turns out, the map from Google was a little bit off and I was standing in front of the wrong building. Doh!!

After a bit of a wait, Alex and the kids, Margo and Adrian came and found me, Margo all proud of the tooth that she had lost that day, her first one. We got back to the apartment to wait for Leanne who was stuck in traffic herself. I also got to meet Rona, a young lady from Scotland who was nannying for the summer and learning some French at a local language school.

After she got home, and hellos were said, we sat around chatting, having wine and then had dinner of cheese fondu. It was very yummy even though Alex accidentally grabbed the Grappa bottle instead of the Kirsch bottle to add to the cheese. After we finished with some pear schnapps type of liqueur that had a nice kick.

After a very needed sleep, we got up and visited for the morning. I was a bit worried about getting out of there late, and eventually did leave a lot later than I needed to, but it was all because I was enjoying the visit so much. The kids have decided that I make a good jungle gym, and Margo spent over an hour hanging off of me. I finally left Saint Julien at about 1PM, and needing to be at the car rental place at the Marseille airport by five, I aimed for the closest motorway and gave it the gas. I was on the road for about 15 minutes when the rain drops started, and of course, the roof was down.

You know, if you drive fast enough, you stay dry? At least to a point anyway.

So, the first rest area I pulled in and put the roof up. Good thing too, the rain became very heavy not far down the road and I would have been soaked.

My drive home took me through Lyon, which we had determined to be the fastest route. As it turned out, being the last week before the start of school, all the Germans where heading out to Spain for the last chance at vacation. So, from Valence to Orange, it was bumper to bumper traffic, a traffic jam that was something like 100km long. It was painful! Every vehicle with a German plate on it was packed solid with beds, tents, clothing, camp chairs, people, etc. And I had always thought that Germans knew how to drive. Not that day they didn't! Sitting in the passing lane matching the speed of the car next to them was a common occurrence. And the rain would come and then it would go, so the top stayed on for quite some time. After Orange, the road split, one way to Marseille, the other to Barcelona, and all the vehicles with German plates when to Spain and the traffic thinned out enough that we could actually do the speed limit again.

After all of this, I made it to Aix by 5:30PM, still 20 minutes from the airport and half an hour late already. I found Colin and asked if he could come and pick me up after I dropped the car off, but we needed to find a car. Gus had it, and he was cool with us grabbing it, but he was across town at his new flat. So, we got the car, and I raced to the airport, freaked out that they were gonna charge me for an extra day again, and wondering how much more I would have to pay for the 400 or so extra kilometers that I had over the allowed 900km. As it was, it was very busy at the rental place, and they didn't check the mileage, didn't check the time, they just checked for damage and the fuel tank being filled. I will have to see what the cost was when I get my credit card bill, but I am keeping my fingers crossed that it wasn't more than the original bill.

In the end, it was a fast three days, seeing some absolutely amazing country in a really awesome car and being able to see my friends topped it off perfectly.

That had to be the best paycheck that I have ever spent in three days.

(Told you this was a long post! Stand up, walk around, give your eyes a break.)

Rest your aching limbs for a little bit

2006-08-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

This is killing me.

We haven't had a fire in almost a week, and the planes are sitting collecting dust and we are getting bored waiting to put some fires out. I am hoping with the wind changing direction back to the Mistral, we will get some warmer weather, less wet and some fires to go and put out.

Meanwhile, I have booked a car to go driving around the French and Italian country side with. I was planning on renting a BMW Z4 but after taxes, exchange, mileage, and fuel costs it would be about $2000CDN for three days.

I DON'T THINK SO!!!!!

So, I have settle for a Mini Cooper at about a 1/4 the cost. I could have gotten a little Renault or Citroen for even less, but I wanted something a little more sexy then the other two. It should still handle well, and unlike the Beemer, it has a manual transmission, which all cars should have.

The plan is to head east towards the Cote d'Azur, where I can find Cannes, Monaco, and the rest of the French Riviera; then cross the border into Italy, head towards Turin (where the Olympics where not to long ago) and then head north up to Switzerland. In Switzerland, I want to explore the Alps a bit, then head towards Geneva. After that, I will head home through the French Alps back to Marseille and Aix.

I don't have any definite hard in stone plans, but I do have a map and will be getting a Lonely Planet book for Italy! That's good enough, right?

soon there after, I will be heading up to Denmark to hang out with Meggie and Hans for their wedding celebration. I expect that it will be a bit of a wild one, if the stories that I have heard about the Danes and partying are true. And, if I have time, I will stop and see Claus for a bit, maybe grab a coffee with him.

I still don't know when I will be coming home, fire season is still going and Adam wants me here till it is done. I have a feeling that I will be here until at least the end of September then maybe a bit into October. After that, I have my three weeks planned to travel a bit of Europe, and then come home. The interesting thing that I have been told by someone at work is that I must use up the hours in my overtime bank that are more than the Union at work allows, so this means that I may be at home relaxing for a bit longer than I had originally thought. At the rate that I am gaining hours in the O/T bank, I might not be back to work until Christmas!

So, there, you are up to date with my life.

Is this not what you expected to see?

2006-08-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

Almost done. It has been a very long stretch of work, with Colin off in Vancouver packing up his family to come over here top France. I could use a break, I am getting tired now from the extra work.

I have been thinking of renting a BMW Z4 for a few days to go and explore the country. I haven't done much recently, and I think that a nice little roadster would be a blast to travel to the Alps in. It is gonna cost a fair bit, but I haven't done much recently. Maybe Leanne will be home, and I can stay with her in Geneva for a couple of days.

Not much else to say, been so busy at work that my social life has plummeted. It will be September soon, and then I will be going to see Megan and Hans, and then some time after that, my time here will be short then I will be heading home. At least I hope I will be .

In the pipeline, filling in time

2006-08-06T02:40:00.000-07:00

Another crazy day at work, dayshift style.

Yesterday, we had Charlie, one of the pilots snag a bunch of stuff that wasn't really an issue, but that is the way he is. I am sure that he is scared to fly, but he is close to retirement now, and I think that he is trying to keep himself alive until then. Today, it was a tire. The tire was installed last night, after being removed a few days ago. The pilots think that it is bad, but everything that us mechanics know says that it is good. So, small fight later, and I am out there changing a tire in a big hurry because the plane has to fly. I think that I impressed the chief pilot since I did the change in about half an hour, not to shabby at all! The plane left on time, and the pilots were happy. Just another day on the line for me.

Coca-cola Blak...don't do it, it tastes like ass.

A big congratulation to Bella and her Boy, no wait, Fiance. I expect an invite soon, so that I can make planes in case I come back to France again next year. =)

And another big congratulation to Maria and Alex on birth of Charles, (or Lump v2.0 as Alex calls him). He looks like he is gonna be a big boy when he gets older!

I am going to be working a bit of extra shifts the next little while as Colin is heading back to Vancouver to finish packing, and to get his daughter and dog to bring them back here. So, not much time for exploring! I am just hoping that I won't get too burned out, there is one stretch that I am working 4 night shifts then coming back to work in about 5 hours. Adam will start the shift for me, but I am hoping for quiet days to get a bit of rest.

The weather has changed here too, no more 40C+ days, now closer to 30C in the day, and 18C at night. But the big change is the wind. The Mistral has finally shown up, and that brings fires! For those not familiar with the Mistral, it is a wind that blows from the north, at speeds up to 16km/h! Some days, it is hard to stand still on the ramp, as the wind wants to blow you over!

I don't know if I will be able to get out to do any touring the next while, being that I will be working extra, but I hope to go on at least one more tour before the end of August. I was hoping to sneak off to Wales to visit my long lost friend Kristen, but that is looking less likely until September.

As for when I am coming home, we really don't have a clue. Fires are really burning now, and I am here until they stop. Then, some time off, then I come home. I also have found out that all my overtime that I have stored up must be used before I get back to the hanger, so I might get even more time off when I get home! =)

That's about it for today, nothing else to add.

Us and Them

2006-08-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Another day off. Yes I do work! Honest!

Actually, worked a bit of overtime last night, and the next few weeks will be a bit crazy. I will be doing my own shifts, and then covering some of Colin's shifts while he goes back to Vancouver to move some of his stuff here and pick up his daughter and dog. So, Gus and I will be a bit extra busy keeping everything running at the base. Which is fine with me, makes the days go faster.

Had a bit of a scare the other night, I was almost robbed right in the "secure" courtyard of the hotel. This place is a bit weird, there is no one here from the staff from 8PM until 8AM everyday. So these punk-ass kids keep coming in here, and using the pool at night. Recently, they have been getting braver, and coming in the mid day at lunch when the staff closes the place for two hours and using the pool with the guests here.

There was a few guys a week or so ago, walking around the pool stealing room keys, I wonder if these guys are the same guys?

So, anyway, I was coming home late at night, around 2:30AM, feeling good that I didn't get jumped in the parking lot, when I walked into the courtyard and there were three youths sitting waiting for people to come in. I tried to hurry past them, wished them "bonjour" when they said it to me, but then they started demanding money. I just kept on going, and made it to my room with no more hassles.

The next morning, I told the staff about it, and they told me that the manager was talking with the police. I went and told them what happened, and then had a another talk with the manager after the police left. She explained that since they are under 18, the law protects them and the police cannot do anything about it. I suggested that maybe they look into security being here all night as a deterrent. I guess that there is security here, but they only come by a few times in the night. Her answers didn't make me feel much better, so I made sure that I told all the guys from work about it.

Next night, all the guys are at work late doing an inspection with me, and Adam decides to head home early cause he has to be back in the morning. When he gets home, the three punks are waiting again, and demand money from him as well! So, he calls me at work, and warns me. The rest of the guys now are looking to kick the shit out of these guys, teach them a lesson. We decide that wouldn't be a good idea unless they start something. So with a bit of a game plan, we head home, but it was late enough that they had already left.

Adam, this morning, tracks down the manager and demands that they get security here at night, or we all are leaving (that would be 5 rooms empty, at a big loss to them). We now have security here for a few weeks to try and keep the kids away.

I kind of realized that the crime in this area was bad, but I am not used to having people accost me in my home. I can now appreciate how nice we have it back home, and hope that we never get to be this bad.

There'll be no sleep in here tonight

2006-07-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

Well, I survived the night from hell, even though I went home at sunrise.

I had both planes come back with powerplant faults (the planes are
smart, they will tell you if something is wrong with them, what it is
that is wrong, probably fixes and where to find the repair in the
manual), and it looked like I was in way over my head with one of
them. The other plane, 74, I knew what the fix was, but being on
one guy and the Squirrel Cyril, it looked to be a bad night.

I called Colin and Gus back, and then Claus came in a bit later.
Tanker 73 had a very difficult snag that Colin and Gus had been
working on before, while my plane, 74, had a snag that I knew about
before. So, I went about getting ready to change the PEC (propeller
electronic control) unit, a little computer up in the engine nacelle.
It was pretty straight forward, but required a lot of checks and
rigging after the change.

The boys working on 73 came to realize that their fault was leading
them to one of the PEC's on their plane. But we only had one that we
could install, so my plane got it.

We also had to drain the retardant tank on my plane to try and fix
something on it as well, so I towed the plane to the "pelicandrome"
(that is where they load the retardant) and the guys connected up the
fittings and started the drain. Claus and I spent that time trouble
shooting 73 some more, and did an engine run that proved the cause of the fault was indeed the PEC.

Tanker 73, it was decided, was dead for now. There was nothing that
we could do to make it better, we didn't have the part. So, we
cleaned it all up, and focused on 74.

We got 74 back over to the parking area, and readied it for all the
functions that we had to do. We fired up the engines, and started
running through the tests, but when we got to the Overspeed Governor Test, we had a failure. I was sensing something wrong before that, when the propeller torque was wrong on the one engine that I had worked on. We tried a few things, but the fault wouldn't go away.

So, we went back to the office, and found another procedure, went back out and tried again. Still failed.

Then, going back to the original paperwork, there it was, a procedure
that both Claus and I had missed. (we were both very tired by this
point) We had forgotten to tell the PEC that it was on a different
airplane and that it now had to behave differently. So, more messing
around with the computers, and another engine run. This time, magic. We were both very happy.

Then, came the Power Assurance Run. I think I nearly crapped myself.

The Power Assurance run is approximately 4 minutes long, coarsest
pitch on the props (max thrust) and max power on the throttles. If
you have ever seen the videos of the astronauts during take-off of
the space shuttle, this is what it looked like in the cockpit of our
plane. Everything is shaking like crazy like it is about to blow
apart, Claus and I are standing on the brakes as hard as we can trying to keep the plane from taking off. I am hoping that the brakes don't fail, because we will be launching across the tarmac, probably through Cyril (because he doesn't listen and was parked in the wrong place), through a fence and into the hanger down the road. That would be bad.

Needless say, I was sweating badly from the heat and the nerves; that had to be the longest 4 minutes of my life. But it all went well, and the test finally passed, but what a ride!

After that, we finished all the tests, did a large stack of paperwork
and went home about 6AM. I am still tired from the long night, but
satisfied that we did well. Who knew that fixing airplanes could be
so exciting!

Moving forward to today, I got up around 2PM, after the heat of the day was making me melt. I found Colin, feeling the same way, and we decided to get some bread, pop the cork on the bottle of white that I have upstairs, slice up the cheese and relax on the deck. I find that stopping to enjoy the little things makes the day so much better.

So, there we were, Colin and I enjoying some nice wine, yummy cheese and bread, when we look down from the balcony, and there he is, G-string Guy!

He is in his late 50's, he is NOT attractive, and he is wearing a turquise g-string bathingsuit, that is barely keeping his junk covered.

My eyes burned.

After he left, Colin and I figured that it was safe to go for a swim.

We were wrong.

G-String Guy comes back, with a different g-string swimsuit! It was painful from close up, even the ladies were running for shelter.

Needless to say, he cleared the pool. I almost got a photo to share with everyone, but he left before I was able to get a shot.

After seeing that, I think that Speedo's might not be so bad after all.

Try to catch the sun

2006-07-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

I went on my trip today, and yes it was sunny. They get sun for over
300 days a year here, so it is seldom blah. One place that we were,
it was close to 40C!

We started of with a drive to Avignon, the driver, a lady from Taiwan, a couple from Ottawa, and me. We got to know each other, and asalways, people are fascinated by my job. The driver was veryimpressed, fire fighting over here is very important, so much of theirforests are gone because of fire. So, I was feeling a little like the hero that the pilots like to think of themselves. Feels kind of strange.

Anyway, we got to Avignon, and went for a walk on the Pont d'Avignon, or it's proper name, the Benezet Bridge. It was one of the first bridges to be built across the Rhone river, joining the French Empire to the Holy Roman Empire (Provence was one part of the Holy Roman Empire...I learn that today!) but it has been partially knocked down by the river itself about the 13th century (I may have that date wrong). It was originally built by a fisherman who had a vision from
God who told him to build it. On it are two chapels, one that was
Roman in architecture, the other Gothic, one built on top of the
other. The Gothic one was a chapel to protect the fishermen.

After that, we walked up to the Palais du Papes, and actually got to
go inside this time. It is amazing how much money the church spends
on housing one man. There is a lot of restoration going on, and a lot
of frescoes have been destroyed by fire, but it is still an impressive
structure. I kept getting in trouble from the cute staff for trying
to take photos. I managed a few, but there were no signs up, and
others were taking photos. The main reason for the no photo rule is
that the flash damages the ancient paintings and such. I don't use
the flash, but they still stopped me, yet I saw flashed going off
constantly and they never got in trouble.

After we found our way out of the Palais, (it was a bit confusing), we
went for lunch in a little family run seafood restaurant. We had a
nice leisurely lunch, with some yummy fish, salad, a wonderful wine (I must find it!) and desert.

The next stop was Pont du Gard, the worlds largest Roman built
aqueduct. It was incredibly large, and amazingly well built. Two
thousand years old, built with sandstone only, (no cement or mortar),
and still looks like it could stand for another two thousand years. I
was really amazed at the construction, how fine the Romans were at
their building.

Pont du Gard was by far the hottest area that I have seen while over
here in France. 38C+ easily, with no wind. There was a very inviting
river at the bottom, but we didn't bring swim wear and we didn't have
the time. It looks like it would be a really nice place to spend a
hot afternoon playing in the water though.

So, having seen the major attractions, we headed home through the
country, past orchards with peaches, nectarines, cherries and olives.
We past a town that was known for it's olive oil, with old presses on
display on every corner advertising different farms, and countless
fields of olive trees.

The last stop before home was Tarascon and it's fortress castle on theedge of the Rhone. We didn't get far inside, just the courtyard, butwe were told that the rest wasn't worth spending the money on.

One thing of note, we are in a region that the Allies fought to
recover from the Germans in WWII, and a lot of the area has been
damaged from the fighting. On the bridge in Avignon, and on the
fortress in Tarascon, it is very noticeable that there are holes in
the stone from artillery and bullets. It really makes you appreciate
what this region has been through. There have been many wars fought
on this soil.

So, that was my day, it was a nice diversion from sitting at work or
at the apartment all day. Saw some sights, got some sun, ate some
great food, drank some great wine, and had a great visit with some
very nice people.

I don't have my photos up yet, will probably be tomorrow since I don't
want to trust the internet here at the hotel. Better connection at
work.