Showing posts with label firsts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label firsts. Show all posts

Saturday, 27 August 2016

Of Murder And Moonlight

I ran for thirty minutes again, today! Never ran that far in my life, and now I've done it twice. I felt kind of dizzy afterwards, but it soon went away and I did the rest of the workout.

In other sort of "first" news, I was stung by a wasp today while mowing the lawn. I've been stung by bees once or twice, but so far as I know this was the first wasp. It hurt a little, but it's a lot less trouble than a mosquito bite. The mosquito bites itch like crazy and can sometimes get really red and big, but the wasp sting is small and seems to already be fading. Interesting how the immune system reacts differently to various insects.

I reacted to this provocation by unleashing chemical vengeance upon the wasps, both the (presumably) guilty one and its many innocent sisters were all sprayed, and to top that off I jammed a chemically saturated rag into where I think the entrance to the nest is. Have to see tomorrow if they're still around.

It bothers me that so many of my posts on this blog seem to involve killing animals. First mice, now wasps. I hate doing it, but they keep trying to move in on me. I've only got one small patch of land in this world, and if I don't defend it then it will no longer really be mine. The mice come right in the house and make life a misery if they're not killed, and the wasps will apparently sting me if I'm even close to them with a roaring lawn mower. There's literally not enough land for all of us, and since I'm smart enough to have a credit card and know the way to the pest aisle at Canadian Tire, and they don't, that means it's curtains for them,

In better news, here's some recent photos I took of the Moon. One when it was full, and once when it was a crescent. I would love to get into astrophotography, but that takes expensive equipment and darker skies than I can reach. Maybe some day. In the meantime I'm getting better at taking pictures with the point-and-shoot camera I bought for the trip to Mexico. These moon shots look pretty neat.







Wednesday, 24 August 2016

Longest Run To Date

This isn't a full post. It's just a quick note to record something, because I'm kind of proud of it. At the gym today I ran for thirty minutes at five MPH. I'm certain this is the longest I've ever run without stopping in my life. It's twice as long as my usual warmup. Today I thought I'd just see how far I'd could go, and I kept going and going...

Saturday, 14 December 2013

Dream No More

It's been quite a while since I made a post. A lot has happened. A WHOLE lot, probably too much to summarize right now. But here's the important part for now.

I decided to make some changes to my life, to make some plans and actually carry them out. And the first plan was to travel. All my life I've stayed in Edmonton. When I was younger our family went on vacations, but the most exotic place we ever went to was British Columbia. After my Mom died, Dad and I still went on the occasional vacation, but we stayed within the bounds of the earlier trips. Then came my big act of rebellion in my twenties: going to the World Science Fiction convention in Winnipeg with a friend. By Greyhound Bus. It was exciting and wonderful, but world travel it was not. And every night I called my Dad on the phone. It was so good to hear his voice! I worried about him constantly while I was gone.

But now Dad is the one who's gone. He's dead, and it's been nineteen years since that trip. I spent six or seven months crying and wondering if I should still be alive, and eventually I decided the answer to that was Yes. So now it's time to start living, and make one of those childhood dreams come true! I'm typing this right now on a laptop in the departure lounge at the International Airport. In about an hour and fifteen minutes (barring further delays) I should be in the air (for the second time in my life) and on the way to Cancun Mexico for a week long vacation. It's exciting as hell, and absolutely terrifying.

Is this what it's supposed to feel like when dreams turn real?