Less than a century to go.

Well, if I live for 125 years, I've just passed the century mark on my expiration date.

I'm living life in the fast lane lately.

A friend of mine left on Thursday, I bought his bike for $360 and sold it on Tuesday for $440, it was a fair price to sell at and I said I'd give the first guy 1/2 my profit, but I had to put a little over $40 into it to get it fixed up nicely. He got a job in Japan and had 30 hours notice. I went to his place, bought his bike and a flat screen 24" monitor that was less than 2 months old for a killer price and he gave me all his crap that he couldn't take. Good deal for me.

I've been studying Chinese for about 45 minutes a day now, pretty good as the world is my classroom. I've just been hitting my book for 45 mins to get new vocabulary and grammar and then trying to use it in my daily life. It's been working.

Candy called me on Sunday for a date, sounds promising. I was sick on Monday, but this weekend looks ok.

Shing Yi has been asking about me to Cherie (good friend and her co-worker), also promising. For some reason, Shing Yi is always smiling, always willing, and always trying to help. She will swim in the ocean, jump off a cliff, even after watching someone fall from the sky, throw out their reserve chute, land on a mountainside in the trees and wait to be cut out of the trees... she never even took off her harness! This person was the only person she had ever seen paragliding.
She has three faults: she likes me, doesn't speak English and she can't stop smiling. She's spunky, too, the instructor that took her paragliding asked her out and she told him to quit dreaming, not a chance. She told me to take it slow because she was concerned with communication but she wants to know me more. This pic is form a couple weeks ago.
Shing Yi, above.


This weekend I went paragliding, it rained and Jaco made a rushed last minute jump and it started pouring 30 seconds after. A bunch of us went out for dinner and I tried to pick up the beer girl (like a hostess, she sold beer, but she would come pour our beer for us and stuff) and got shot down. I told her that she had a magic smile and she said that her boyfriend thinks so, too. Not really trying to pick her up, just flirting a little. She didn't speak English, but she was really shy and poured me beer all night.

It was raining, we'd been drinking, we were tired, so we grabbed more beer and Dorito's and I stayed at Jaco's house as we were in a different city and he offered his bike to drive home in the pouring rain...no thanks. I crashed on his 5 foot long couch, unfortunately, I'm 6 feet tall... I finally got to sleep and got rocked awake by a 5-Richter scale earthquake, we've been getting +6.0 earthquakes about once a week. I think we're going to have front page news within the month.

I've been taking some great photos and I started a photo site at http://canuckeyes.blogspot.com/ Try it out, the girl with the black curly hair is Shing Yi. I had great captions for all my photos, but the program I am using didn't include them, whatever. The photo site will be redone and stuff, yes, I have doubles.

What else? My afternoon kids are writing their level 2 tests on Thursday and I'm taking them to the zoo on Friday, maybe I can leave one of them there.

I've been dissatisfied with my computer desk, a big sturdy desk, 4 feet by 2 and a half. Simple. I've managed to get a couple other desks, the high tech space aged desks with moving pieces and stuff... nah, they both have spots for a monitor, I have a flat screen and they just don't do it for me. One was given to me, the other I traded a toaster oven for, my friend who went to Japan gave me the toaster oven.

Oh yeah, this photo is me carrying the desk on the back of my scooter for about 10km, from one town to my city. I thought I was going to lose it on every bump. It was held on by 3 bungie cords and the great Bhudda smiling down upon me.

If you look at the photo very carefully, there IS a scooter below, the giveaway is the tire and the plate.

Other things? I've been cooking and cleaning alot. This weekend, I will go to see my friend Andrew, he's leaving Taiwan to go to Thailand due to visa/diploma problems. Monday is my birthday, I think my kids are planning something so I have to go practice acting surprised.

On a sadder note, my grandfather passed away on Friday night, he's been waiting to go for a while, not really sick or anything, but he's been racking up travel miles on his health card, I guess he finally collected enough to make his trip. Grandma died about 15 years ago, since then, he's been trying to fill his life with various quests, people and adventures. The last couple years, his body had been running down but not his mind, he had been living fairly well and not really holding back, occasionally he'd make an important visit to the hospital when he wasn't traveling the globe. He got tired of the patch jobs on his body and the recovery times following so he decided no more scissors and thread. The last few times, he had made it without getting poked, sliced and taped, a little bed rest and fluids were enough. He cashed in the last of his travel points on Friday, but he only had enough for a one way ticket, good for him. I do miss him, I wish I could have made it to Calgary, but too many things were in my way. I got to spend a week with him at Christmas, for that, I am thankful. He's back in a place where his body won't get in his way anymore.

Well I haven't been posting much, I've been doing other things.

In class today, someone was doing something they shouldn't have and I asked the class who saw the person do it. Kevin put up his hand and said, "I saw her!" Kevin was late today and had to sit in the desk in the middle of the room, about 4 feet infornt of the girl in question. "Kevin, how the heck could you have seen her?!?!?! You're sitting in front of her!!! Do you have eyes in the back of your head?!?!?!"
The students laughed as I started checking the back of his head for extra eyes. Kevin, a fairly smart kid and a class clown, stood up, bent over and slapped his ass, "Right here, teacher, in my bum I have an eye, it saw her!"
The class lost it, as well as I.

In Chinese, your "ass hole" is "Pee Yen." "Pee," is "ass" and "yen" is "eye" meaning "Ass Eye"
(it could be Pee Yen or Yen Pee, I'm not sure and I wasn't going to ask the class to refresh my Chinese on this one.)

Shaked n' Baked

I'm not dead, just busy... a good busy.
This is a saved post that I haven't posted yet, I'll update soon.

Well, I'm ready to be served.

Today, I got a good Shake n' Baking, I was in the sun all day and got burnt, then I felt 3 huge earthquakes, 6.4, 4.7 and 4.8 on the R-scale. Where I was, I felt 5, 4 and 3 on the ground I was standing on, waaaaaayyyy cool! More about this later.

My day.
My power went out and I missed my 8:00AM alarm, but I woke up at 8:45 and rocketed off on my bike to the town of Nanzih to meet someone whose gonna show me the launch site, we drove for a bit and met up with another guy. We parked our bikes and hopped in his SUV and drove the 30 mins out to the mountain. We arrived and someone asked if I wanted to try, sure! I handed over CAN$40 and jumped into the van to go to the top.

I geared up with the instructor and left the launch site, 300m above the landing site. We did a tandem jump and rode the updrafts to 600m, wow. When I wasn't taking pictures, the instructor let me fly, pretty cool. There was a "Variometer" that beeped when we ascended, faster and faster with a higher rate of ascent and made a terrible noise when we dropped. It made it easy to tell when I was in the thermal and helped me stay out of the sink holes. I was up for a little under an hour when the sun went behind the clouds and the thermals stopped, the other flyers weren't far behind us. After a terrible landing (wasn't me), we sat in the field and drank lots of beer, had some BBQ Chicken and talked. What a rush, eagles were soaring with us, above and below, I think I'll be going back on Wednesday since it's a national holiday.

We drove back to the bikes and went to the washroom, on my way back to the SUV, I started feeling a little unsteady and summed it up to the beer and the sun. I thought that I'd have to take the bus back to the city because I didn't think I could drive, my coordination was all off and I was having trouble walking. Jaco (the guy who took me) said that he was feeling the same way... then stuff started falling over and smashing, the jeep was bouncing and a scooter fell over. It was an earthquake, it lasted more than 5 minutes, sooo cool. I wished I was at home with my Jenga set though.

This picture is of a little 24 hour convenient store about 15km from where I was standing.

Hanging out

Well, there aren't any comments on the last couple posts, you guys must be busy.

This weekend... tomorrow morning (Saturday), I'm meeting someone at McDonald's at 9:00AM to go for a drive to the mountains. Then, we're going to drive to the top of a hill/cliff and I might try to convince someone to jump off of a cliff with me.

Dad, you finally get your wish, it's taken me 25 years, but I might finally "Go jump off a cliff." Hopefully, the other guy brings a kite, more specifically, a hang glider.

Tomorrow I'll go to the mountain and see what's going on. The guy who's showing me where it is jumps every weekend using a paraglider, it's like a parachute, but too damn big to put into a pack. You set it out on the hill and run like hell over the edge of the cliff, then you can ride thermals and stay up there till the sun goes down... if things are good.

I'm psyched, but I'm not sure what opportunities I'll have, hopefully there's an instructor to take me out or to make arrangements for another day. My skydiving stint lasted about 4 minutes, this will be fun for hours if it ever 'gets off the ground'.

Last thing, check out the video link on my last post, what an awesome toy, just click on the link.