Soul Searchings

As everyone in the lower mainland is well aware, we’ve had a solid dump of snow since a couple nights ago. Driving with a destination is no fun, but driving without a destination is very fun.

My driving has changed a lot since I got my license almost nine years ago. Holy crap, have I been driving that long already? I guess I really have been, since I do have 40% discount from ICBC now. I’ve always been an adventurous driver, but I would say my style has gone from a stupid wildness to a more skilled and experienced wildness. In the past, I would break the rules of the road pointlessly, like going down the opposite lane around an island when the roads were bare. Another time, in the summer of grade 11, I was driving home early one rainy morning at about 5am after having stayed out all night. It was already getting light out, and I was going down Knight street and there weren’t any cars around, so I decided to just start swerving between lanes without any real reason. As I turned onto 28th to head home, I suddenly saw some lights behind me. Oh crap, it was the police. This couldn’t be good. So… they checked my license and the registration to make sure it wasn’t a stolen car, and gave me a lecture about my driving. Amazingly, they didn’t issue me a ticket. Wow. Definitely counted my blessings for that one.

Nowadays, I don’t do silly manoeuvres like that anymore, but I still do have my fun sometimes. From a few years ago, I started learning how to control my car doing emergency brake slides, usually when the ground was wet. For awhile I was pretty brazen with it, even doing it on right hand turns in traffic. My most memorable slide was when I busted a huge ass-drag turning left from King Edward onto Knight northbound. There weren’t any cars around for this one, and I must have been going about a full 60kmph in the wet before yanking the e-brake, getting the Camry almost completely sideways and jamming on the throttle to keep the car from over-rotating. Stayed sideways down the three lanes of Knight for just a few moments, before the front end finally straightened out… but those few moments of being sideways while mashing the throttle is such a huge rush. It’s nothing like just sliding sideways to a stop.

Of course, I’ve had my share of fun in the snow as well. In previous years, when there has been snow on the streets, I’ve gone around the neighbourhood late at night to locate the ideal block - one that is surrounded by four fairly wide streets with not many cars parked near the corners, and where I have the right of way on every corner. With this, I just drove around the block time after time, pulling ebrake drifts on each corner. I’ve never had an accident doing this, thankfully, although I’ve had a couple reasonably close calls. It’s just so fun learning how your car handles in adverse conditions.

There really is value in this, actually. Sometimes, pulling an ebrake u-turn is much more effective than trying to do a slow u-turn, and takes much less real estate to perform. Ebrake u-turns can be done very safely, and there is very little danger of losing control. Also, sometimes when the situation arises, I would go in reverse, quickly turn the wheel and whip the front end around and throw it into drive and continue going in the same direction without coming to a stop. That’s fun too, and easily done with snow on the ground. It’s probably best to practice in a big parking lot first. The favorite spots for this are the PNE parking lot, and the Lansdowne Mall parking lot.

With the Vancouver weather continuing to be sub-zero for at least another few days, there will be plenty of time for people to practice their moves. I’ve got to say it’s unfortunate my Yaris isn’t as fun to play with as the Camry was. A longer wheelbase provides a lot more stability while sliding sideways.

Whatever the case, have your fun, but stay safe.

It’s inevitable that my routine will be radically different once Elaine moves out to Kamloops. While my official place of residence is still with my parents, my real home for almost five years now, since February of 2002, has been at Elaine’s place. That is where I spend most of my time, and where I sleep every night. I routinely go days without going back to my house. Of course, in a couple weeks time, I will be back living at home and have a hell of a lot of free time on my hands.

I’m not quite sure what I’ll be doing with all that time, but I’ll probably be playing more poker, both online and live, and I’ll try to get out and play more sports too. I’ll definitely need to clean the computer room, as my parents have been nagging me to do that for years. Even though I haven’t been sleeping at home all this time, I’m still occupying two whole rooms. The first is my own bedroom, where I have all my clothes and bed for the odd time I do sleep at home, and the second is my late brother’s bedroom, where my computer and a lot of other assorted junk is kept. I’m thinking it’ll probably be best for me to consolidate all my stuff into one room, and if I do it, most likely I’ll take over my brother’s room. My current room is right beside my parents room, and my mom used to always complain in the past I was too loud even just talking on the phone, so being one room over will definitely help in that regard.

So yesterday, I took my car to Speedy Glass, and it cost $60 plus tax to repair my windshield. What they actually do is just fill in the hole and cracks, enough to stop it from spreading further. The repair does not make the windshield look flawless - you can still see the hole at the point of impact. Oh well, at the very least the blemish isn’t directly in front of me in my line of vision, otherwise that would bother me a whole lot more.

So for those that are also friends with Elaine (69% of my list), you may already know that at the beginning of December, she will be taking up the position as the Assistant Store Manager of Bell at Aberdeen Mall. No, not the mall in Richmond… that’s Aberdeen Centre. Aberdeen Mall is in Kamloops, which means she will be moving there for at least a year.

This past weekend, we went up to Kamloops to look for a place for her to live. The approximately 350km drive took a little under three hours, which means I was doing some pretty good speed, averaging almost 120km per hour. Fortunately, the snow that they had earlier in the week had been cleared from the highway already, so the drive there was pretty clear. However, my poor car did suffer some damage. A truck in front of me kicked up some pebbles or maybe even just rock salt and pelted my car with them. I got a minor crack on my windshield, and a half dozen pinhead-sized paint chips on the front of my car. Son of a bitch. I was just very unlucky that all the wrong factors aligned to have this happen. There was very little debris on the road the entire trip, and very little traffic as well. It just had to be at the exact moment we got to the stretch with the pebbles or rock salt that this one large truck, like a Dodge Ram, went to pass me. I was going like 140km/h myself, so he was probably going about 150km/h or so. I was in the right lane, and he was passing me in the left lane… and even in this configuration, there were already a few pebbles painfully bouncing off my car. I tried going out wide to the right, but was still being pelted, so then I made the wrong decision to go behind it, thinking maybe it was actually kicking the pebbles out to the side more so than behind it. Wrong. Yeah, that was my bad… and it was when I swung into the left lane that I suffered most of the damage. I wasn’t following that closely… maybe like ten car lengths behind, but I guess going at 140km/h, it’s not enough. I guess I really should have just slowed down to avoid the flying rocks. Oh well, lesson learned. I will be going to get the windshield repaired today at Speedy Glass, and will pick up a touch-up Toyota paint pen when I have time.

Anyways, we got to Kamloops and went to a few appointments to look over some rental properties. Initially, I had a pretty tough time finding my way around. Not used to all the winding streets, instead of the usual grid pattern. Another problem was, the part of the town towards the mountain was actually to the south, and I think my head is just accustomed to associating north with mountains, being from Vancouver and all. Anyways, I found myself heading in the complete wrong direction numerous times. Towards the end of our stay there, I started getting more familiar with the roads, and I can more or less navigate my way around the main parts of Kamloops without a map.

That night, we went to have dinner at Tony Roma’s, and it was gooOOood! Probably aided in part that we were both famished by not having eaten since breakfast, their steak, ribs, and riblets all tasted absolutely delicious. It’s not the cheapest place to eat, but if you have a hankering for some meat, this place is hard to beat. They have all-you-can-eat specials for like $16.99 on Tuesday as well.

We stayed at the Super 8 overnight, and on Sunday morning, we met up with the apartment manager of the place Elaine finally decided on to sign the papers. It was only after all the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed that she brought up the issue of whether it would be okay for her to bring up her rabbit. We had assumed it would be fine, since we saw a cat kennel in the apartment that we had checked out. But, it turns out that no pets are allowed. The apartment manager is a very nice man, and gave us a lot of useful advice and knowledge offhand while chatting, but he was quite adamant about the no pets policy. He said that the only exception at the moment was that cats were allowed, but they were looking to change that in the near future as well. Strangely, the contract actually explicitly states that all pets, including cats, were not allowed. Elaine was actually pretty upset about this, and she actually cried in the car for a good hour about it. In the end, she decided to call the manager up and try to cancel the contract and go for this other basement suite that would allow animals, but at the cost of higher monthly rent and less convenient location. So she called him up, and was just starting her speech by saying how lonely she was going to be without her rabbit, when he relented and said she can bring the rabbit, but only if she promises to take really good care of it and not have any cleanliness issues. She was really happy after that.

Soon afterwards, at about 2:30pm, we started the drive back to Vancouver. It was raining very heavily through some parts of the drive, and it was scary trying to pass the big rigs because they were kicking up so much spray that I couldn’t see a thing. Had to pick my spots to blow past them. Despite the rain, the drive back took just three hours or less as well, and we got home in time for me to watch the end of the Grey Cup game between the BC Lions and the Montreal Allouettes. It wasn’t a very pretty finish to the game, but alas BC held on to capture the championship. Didn’t seem to be a whole lot of buzz about that though.

A few days ago, got another 20% to $100 bonus from PartyPoker, so I set out to do the 1000 raked hands to clear it. I was actually playing six tables of 6-max $25NL, and was able to clear close to 300 hands per hour. In the two sessions I played, I actually finished up about $84 on top as well, so that was pretty decent.

In terms of my hockey pool, I’ve been doing pretty well. I actually opened up a pretty sizeable lead of about 75 points over a week ago, and have maintained that gap since then. As of today, I have 632 points, compared to 556, 554, 528, 508 and 504. I’ve made a lot of changes to my roster, and the current players are: Eric Staal, Rod Brind’Amour, Vincent Lecavalier, Brad Richards, Michael Nylander, Martin Straka, Marc Savard, Patrice Bergeron, Peter Forsberg, Milan Michalek, Bryan McCabe, Tomas Kaberle, Sergei Gonchar, and Dan Boyle. So only three of my original eight forwards remain with me. I traded away Naslund and Drury for Forsberg and Nylander. Currently, I’m losing this trade 17 to 11, but I’ll be keeping track of how that progresses.

I’ve been meaning to write this next installment much earlier, but haven’t had a good chance until now.

As I had mentioned in my very first entry, I started keeping a daily journal in early high school. At the beginning, I didn’t have my own personal computer, so I actually wrote my entries out by hand, sometimes filling up several pages in a night. In October of 1997, my medium changed from a notebook to a computer, when I realized that I’d be able to publish my thoughts much quicker by typing instead of handwriting it. Of course it helped that I was already an extremely fast typer.

I believe that being a good typer requires a number of things. One of those is that you need adept fingers. Playing piano for most of my childhood probably helped me out in this aspect, even though I never considered myself to be a good pianist. Two, I think being a good speller and being able to visualize the words ahead of time is very important. I’ve always been very good at spelling and grammar, so this wasn’t a problem for me either. Even in elementary school, I was a whiz at typing. At McBride, we were one of the few schools that actually had its own computer lab. We originally had Commodore 64’s, but we had replaced them with 386 PC’s while I was in grade 6, I think. I remember refining my typing skills with "All the Right Type", and by grade 7, I was already able to type at over 80 words per minute. For grade 9, it seems like the majority of students took keyboarding class… but of course, I didn’t see any point of doing that, so I chose to take woodworks instead. A couple years later, I was following a group of grade 7 students on a tour of the school, when one of them asked the keyboarding teacher how fast the students type. She replied that some can type about 60 words per minute, and the fastest is about 80 words per minute. By that time, I was already able to type at well over 100 words per minute, so I was pretty smug, but of course I kept quiet. I’ve never taken any "official" tests, but I can definitely type over 100 words per minute, with the upper end being about 125 words per minute. I guess if anything, I’ll always be able to find a job as a data entry clerk!

Getting back to my journal, I actually made a mistake in my Prologue when I wrote that I stopped writing shortly after grade ten. As a matter of fact, I was already in grade 11 when I made the switch to the computer, and because of the added convenience, my entries actually started getting longer. I began elaborating on even the smaller details of my day. I didn’t realize how much I actually wrote until now, and I’m a little astounded myself. I was regularly writing entries that were over 2000 words long. In fact, I peaked during May of 1998, when I averaged 1342 words per daily entry, with my longest single daily entry being an essay-like 3849 words. From that point on, my writing volume made a steady decline, and at the same point one year later, even though I still wrote an entry every night, the amount I wrote had decreased more than 75%, to an average of only 284 words.

I continued to write all the way until February of 2002, when I was already towards the end of third year university. During that last year, my writing habits dropped off dramatically. I would fill in daily entries a day late… then two days late… and then even ten days late, and then all I would say is "Probably nothing special happened today". So, in the end, I probably have about six or seven of the most interesting years of my life pretty well documented. I think that will be pretty cool to read down the road.

In fact, in the last couple weeks, I’ve read about half a year’s worth of entries, starting from my first computer entry, and I’ve got to say it’s been quite the captivating adventure. It’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten from even grade 11. Half of the stuff I wrote, I don’t remember at all… and some of it is pretty significant. I didn’t realize how many people I used to talk to on the phone, how close I was to a number of people, and how often I used to hang out with friends. I was busy almost every single day, with all the extracurricular activities like choir and sports. Of course, there were also some things that I felt very strongly about in the past, but seem so insigificant now.

One thing that I had totally forgotten about was… how did I manage to have two PE classes in one day for grade 11?! By that time, I believe Gladstone had switched to the four blocks per day structure, so every other day, about half of my time at school was comprised of playing sports. That’s just too awesome. I loved PE in high school… those were some great times. I loved playing just about every sport, except basketball. That was, and continues to be, the only sport I actually don’t like playing.

Sometimes I wish I could relive some of my past, especially the latter high school years. I guess with my journal entries, I can do that vicariously.

In my previous entry, by "we", I was referring to myself and my old partner in crime, Steven Christensen. He was my best friend from between grades 7 and 9. It was a strange friendship that somehow developed between us. I don’t really remember how it came to be, but perhaps it was because we only lived a few houses apart, so we started walking home from school together… which eventually led to us hanging out. Asides from playing with fire, another thing we did together was ride our bikes. We would pedal out to Central Park and go through the trails, or go to the skate park by Knight and Broadway and try some jumps, or just cruise around and explore new parts of the city. I tell this story all the time, so you may have already heard this from me in the past. A couple of times, we decided to ride to his grandmother’s place… which was in Port Moody. At 13 years old, we biked over 50km roundtrip from East Vancouver to Port Moody and back in a single afternoon, and I did this with a tiny single-speed BMX with 16" wheels. Your standard BMX has 20" wheels, so I’m talking about a little kid’s BMX that I was riding. We would just ride down to Hastings and then just pedal all the way down the Barnet Highway. Man I must have been in great shape back then. Nowadays, I can’t even make it out of my own neighbourhood with a 18-speed mountain bike without feeling completely beat already. That makes me feel kind of sad.

For highschool, he went to Tupper and I went to Gladstone, but we still found time to hang out with each other, and did so through to near the end of grade 9. Finally, at around that time, I think we both started finding our niche at our own respective schools and found new friends who we had more in common with, and very suddenly, we hardly saw each other anymore. It didn’t help any when he moved away to another house by Kingway and Joyce. In the next few years after that, he did drop by my house or call me on several occasions… but the last time I saw him was many years ago, probably no later than 2001. Wow, I can’t believe it’s been over five years already. When he called me the final time, I jotted down his number and was planning to call him back for a get together the following weekend, but apparently my mom accidentally threw it away… and since that time, I have never heard from him again.

I have no idea where he is or what he’s doing now, but I’m very curious to find out. I hope he is doing alright. Since I don’t know his current phone number, and my home phone number has changed since a few years ago, the only means of getting in contact is if he decides to one day drop by my house again, even though I’m hardly ever there anymore. Unlike some other elementary school friends that I’ve been able to maintain contact with, or at least know their whereabouts via email or Friendster, Steven never was one with computers.

We were two very different people, but found a bond through close proximity and some common interests. We may have gone our separate ways now, but the memories will always remain. Perhaps someday, we will meet again…