Daryl’s Brain

Some of you know that I recently counseled at my Church’s annual summer camp. For those of you who didn’t know that, now you do. My cabin was comprised of 5 kids all around age 9. There was myself and an old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in years (at least for any extended period of time) as the counselors for the cabin. It was a wonderful time full of both challenges and great joys.

I really enjoyed the group of kids who were in my cabin (the White Wizards) and hope to see them next year. (Yes, I had such a good time I think I might do this again next year.) Below are some pictures I took. I didn’t take many because I was too busy having fun…I mean working really hard.

(The following pictures open up in the same window.

My version of “packing light” was apparently a little off.	This became apparent to me when we had to strap the suitcase to the roof of the car.	A classic “surprise” driving shot.
The sign welcoming us to camp.	This is one of the log cabins. Compare this to the actual camper-cabins (you’ll see).	FDK-1 and his family walking around before everyone arrives.
A kid-carrying-clergy member (there were many).	Some campers arrived a bit early.	Most campers, however, arrived all at once.
The Black Mafia. (Only a portion shown here.)	Here all the campers are proceeding to the chapel to officially start camp.	A camp goat.
There were two.	A chuck wagon bearing its colours. These were the “cabins” the campers slept in.	Every night we had a bon fire. They got pretty big at times.
None of my pictures of the chapel turned out that well. This was the best of the lot.	Here the kids wait “patiently” before heading down to the swimming hole.	The swimming hole was really a river. Here the kids are hesitating to go in.
It didn’t take long before they lost their inhibitions.	An accidental shot that didn’t turn out too badly.	For some reason I found the idea of a guitar-playing cook amusing.
Noodles like the one carried here had more purposes then just hitting others.	Here the noodles can be seen acting as an improvised goal.	One of the councilors would often provide us with nice background music.
This is the main hall in which main-type things (like meals) happened.	A nice picture of a wonderful book.	My fellow councilor.

For those of you who know me and would like to visit, I will be on the mainland (all over the mainland actually) soon for work.  While I am there it looks like I am going to have 3 hour lunch breaks (counter balanced by 16 hour days) during which I will be able to visit people (or do whatever, really).  If you want to see me just send me an email and let me know.  Otherwise I will assume you hate me.  Just kidding.

The dates of my “travels” will be February 25th through March 8th.  If no one wants to visit with me I will use the time to sleep.

Here’s the breakdown: I shipped my computer through UPS from Westborough, Massachusetts to Victoria, British Columbia. I paid (a lot) extra for special packaging for both the tower and the monitor. When I arrived I tracked the package online and it told me it had already been delivered. Checking with other people at the same address did not produce a computer so I checked the front door, a door that is never used. Sure enough, there it was in plain view of the road. It had been in the freezing cold all day. I looked at the packaging and saw that it was pretty much ripped apart. When I picked up the box holding the tower, the tower almost fell through the bottom of the box.

I called and filed a complaint while waiting for my computer to thaw out and for any moisture to evaporate. Over the next couple of days I noticed that it was randomly rebooting and randomly freezing the keyboard and mouse.

When I called the second time they told me that this was the standard way to handle such a package, except for the ‘leaving it in plain sight’ part. DO NOT SHIP THROUGH UPS if this is the standard way they treat their packages!!!

I was also told that any claim had to be handled through the office that shipped it, not the people that I called (who I had been directed to by the first person, of course).

I have pictures.

Any bets on how this will end?

First of all, many apologies for not posting sooner. I know that there are a few of you (two, I think) who check my blog regularly and I feel that I let you down by not keeping you up to date like my blog is supposed to. I blame it on my brain. It misses Stella something fierce. Now for the update:

I’m home! Well, half of me is anyway. Stella is still in the Boston area until the end of February. It is a sad joy to be home without my wife. We are not meant to be apart. I have now served as sub-deacon at both a vespers and a liturgy at our home church of All Saints of Alaska in Victoria and both times had to fight back the tears at Stella’s absence. For those of you of the praying persuasion please pray for her as she remains in a foreign country with very little personal support.

In other news, being back home – and living at the same place I lived at while still single – is feeling incredibly, well, weird. Not only are the sights and sounds the exact same, the smells and people are the same (mostly). What is different is that I do not have internet access on my own computer, but rather by using a ‘communal’ computer. So, sadly, my posts may not be more frequent soon. (Although, who knows.)

Well, I’ve got to go and get ready for my day tomorrow. I will try to post more soon. I have lots of pictures of Bear’s trip across the continent (the other way this time) and his encounter with…well, you’ll see. Soon, I promise.

I finally have our New York pictures on-line. Whew.

(This trip was part of the inspiration for my former insomnia.)

We’re coming home.

Home? Where is home? Well, for whatever reason when we first started thinking about this we realized that “home” meant Victoria. Not too sure how that happened seeing as we have no immediate family there. I have a Nana and Papa, some cousins, aunts, and uncles, but my immediate family are all on the mainland. None the less, Stella and I have spent the entire time we were married (except the last three months) living on Vancouver Island. I guess that’s what did it.

So, home, here we come. In addition to this, Stella is able to start her MA in January and catch up to those who started in September, and I have talked with my former employer there and they are very willing to take me back on. It will be almost as if we hadn’t left (except for the added cost).

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I will be heading home two months before Stella; I will be leaving in early January and she will be leaving at the end of February. Two months apart. Wow. It makes me very sad.

Despite the sadness, we are planning on making the most of the time we have. New York City, here we come!

The time has come to speak of things
Like how you worship
And what pickles you eat

Ok, it’s not quite there yet. Not the right number of syllables or something.

It is amazing how comforting brand names are. But not just any brand names, the ones you know and have come to trust. Have you ever thought “I think I’ll try something new today” with regards to a brand that you usually always get? If you’re grocery shopping and you see Hellmann’s Light Mayonnaise right beside Hellmann’s Reduced Fat and you decide to try the reduced fat one for a change, that’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about. You don’t really think too much of it. After all, if you don’t like the new one you can always go back to the one you know – and trust.

Now imagine one trip to the grocery store when you decide to try completely different brands for absolutely everything you normally buy. Everything. How would that make you feel? Now imagine being forced to do that. You no longer have a choice, and you can never go back to your previous brands. Ever.

That’s how it feels for me (and Stella too I think) to do the shopping in a foreign country. And this country isn’t even all that foreign. I stood and stared at the pickles for, probably 10 minutes while I tried to see a brand that resembled Bicks. Even one that said “with garlic” would have stirred me out of my glazed, foreign-brand-induced stare. I was forced to read the ingredients to try to see if they had garlic in them and then it was only garlic oil.

I later did find one (not with the rest of the pickles…grrr) that had pieces of garlic in it. But then it wasn’t the kind of garlic chunks that I’m used to, it was more like garlic flakes. And, while they taste ok, their still no Bicks.

Then there’s the cathedrals in the area. First of all, there are three cathedrals and a smaller church. From what I’ve heard from trusted sources I think I’ll avoid the smaller church for now. I’ve been to two of the cathedrals, St. Mary’s and St. George’s. St. Mary’s is an OCA church that started all English but moved to a mix between that and Albanian due to an influx of immigrants. (Usually it’s the other way around.) St. George’s is, uh, well they refer to themselves as “pan” Orthodox and their services are all in English with the odd exception. So far, my experience has been, different.

Here’s what’s different:

• They have fairly large parishes (500 – 700 people)
• They have the solid Iconostasis
• One of them skips the sermon and does that last
• They both “pass around the offering”
• They have real “alter boys”
• Both use pews and no one bows
• The priests and readers are miked
• The one coffee hour I did go to consisted of just donuts and non-Father-John-approved coffee

I miss All Saints and Bicks.

Not having access to the internet is proving to be quite paralyzing for myself and Stella. We both depend on it more then we realized. As an example, last Saturday we figured we would get a few things done and then locate the Church we were going to go to and then head to bed. When the time came to locate the Church, we realized that, wait a minute, we don’t have internet access and Kinko’s is closed. Not only that, we don’t have a phone book…or even a phone. So, our first Sunday in Shrewsbury and we can’t go to Church. Not a very good start.

We remain partially paralyzed today. While we finally have a phone set up, we don’t have a phone book (it will take one to two weeks for delivery) and still no internet (it will be hooked up on Friday). The good news about our phone is that we are on a plan that has unlimited long distance within North America, so if any of you want to phone us (email me for number) just let us know to call you back and it will be free (or, rather, no additional cost).

As far as how I’m handling the move, the title of this post pretty much sums it up. I’ve been hit with an odd realization. Stella and I are in complete role reversals. She is now the primary “bread winner” and I am the stay-at-home and get-things-sorted-and-cleaned person. While I know what to do, the reality of this dramatic change seems to be scrambling my neurons. Every once in a while I just stand (lack of couch) and stare at everything that needs to be done for an unknown amount of time. Then I get back to whatever it was I thought I was doing (I’m not always right).

I’m sure it will all work out over time, but the present seems almost surreal. Anyway, I’ve got a bunch more stuff to do today so I should get going. If you want to know my new phone number but don’t know my email, it is:

“first name” @ “last name” . “home country suffix”

(Of course, just replace each item inside the quotes with their appropriate values.)

Yesterday we drove from Wawa ON to Hamilton ON. It was quite the drive.

Having arrived in Wawa a little late we also left there later then we were hoping to leave. On the way, Stella’s mother, who had been following our trip on Google Earth, found a shortcut for us. There was a ferry that cut across a part of the lake and could shorten our traveling time by 2-3 hours. It would be just enough to allow us to reach Hamilton when we wanted to.

When we arrived we discovered that the ferry we were aiming for was cancelled and we had a four hour wait. (This was the time we used to do our previous blog entries.) When we did get on the ferry (9:30 PM), we found it to be not quite what we were expecting. First of all, it seemed at first glance to be a smaller version of the ferries we were used to (BC ferries) and so we were expecting something similar. Here’s the list of differences that we noticed:

• Not allowed on the vehicle deck while ferry is in motion
• No pay phones
• Seats and tables seemed to have been bought somewhere and just put in place
• There was a bar (!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!)
• The ferry was very dirty

It was an interesting ride. Two and a half hours later (12:00 AM) we were on our way to Hamilton. We arrived at Stella’s cousin’s house at about 5:00 AM where we promptly KO’d.

We slept.

We got up at around 2:30 PM. Neither of us had slept that long in a very long time.

We have now decided to delay our plans by one day. We spent the rest of the day here just visiting and having a good time. We also inventoried the contents of our car and made sure that we could take our precious jams and coffee across the border. Tomorrow we will leave early (4:00 AM or so) and drive to the border. From there it’s a strait 10-12 hour drive to Boston. Well, not Boston specifically, but rather Shrewsbury (a half hour or so out of Boston).

We are hoping to arrive in Shrewsbury in time to be able to set up a bank account and get a few things like our phone and internet all hooked up. We will see.

I’m sitting in an internet cafe in South Baymouth, Ontario on a computer that does not have MS Word. I say this so that you know that this post will likely be riddled with spelling mistakes as I am without a spell check and can not be bothered to hunt one down at the moment.

A lot has happened since I lasted posted here. I don’t really know where to begin. We have lots of pictures, but I can’t see a USB port to plug into in order to upload them, so I will leave that for later.

Where did I leave off? Oh yes, Edmonton. The documents that we needed for the border arrived in the nick of time, but we had to go a bit out of our way to get them. We’ve been behind in our schedule ever since. From Edmonton we drove to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. One word, “flat”. Oops, make that two words, add “bugs” to that and you have a fairly accurate summary of Saskatchewan.

While driving through Saskatchewan we saw an…uh…interesting site. There were these fields that were covered in clouds of white butterflies. The fields were on both sides of the road. As we drove through the cloud that covered the area we admired the beauty of flittering critters as they both danced arround each other and splattered on our windshield.

The front of our car is a mess of yellow guts and white wings.

That said, there was a kind of majesty in the fields that the pictures just won’t be able to convey. I won’t be able to either so I won’t try. We spent the night at a Sandman Hotel in Saskatoon and headed out again the next day.

Manatoba is not quite as flat, but has just as many bugs.

Ontario is proving to be a very nice place. We are driving Hwy 17 (the one everyone warned us not to, more on that later) and the senary is a lot like that of the west coast, just slightly different foliage. The city I’m in now reminds me a lot of Sidney.

Ok, what was all this garbage talk about needing to avoid Hwy 17 and go below the lakes instead of above them?!? Everyone and their cats (literaly) warned us that this Highway was either too dangerous or too slow. It has been neither for us. We’ve averaged 120…I mean 90 km/hour along it and have not had to deal with the trucks too much at all. The only real danger has been the deer and bears that have run out in front of our car as we drive (someone’s looking out for us). We didn’t even see any meese (plural of moose) which we were constantly being warned about.

The only hickup right now is the fact that a ferry we were going to take was cancelled after we went well out of our way to take this “shortcut”. (And they didn’t even call to let us know, how rude ) So, now we sit by a lake that looks like an ocean but doesn’t have the smell (kinda weird, really) updating our blogs. I will post more later, but I think that this will sufice for now.

Oh yeah, pictures to come soon too.