Okanagon Camping

Emily and I went for a camping trip in the Okanagon, BC this weekend. We've uploaded a bunch of photos on Picasa already, so take a look. We also took some short videos of our tent decorations, the cute wildlife, and kite flying at Lightning Lake (not as dangerous as that sounds).

It honestly surprised me how similar the Okanagon is to home. The Okanagon is very dry, with rolling hills of brown-ish grass, spotted with wineries, horse studs, etc. The only difference is that the landscape is around 5 times taller, they have some beautiful big inland lakes, and some of the mountains are so high they have sub-alpine meadows on their side. Have a look through our photos to see them.

And a HUGE thanks to Tom from work who lent us his car. It's going to get a very good clean before he gets back from his overseas trip. :)

Back Again

I forgot to mention - at the start of this month I managed to injure my back again. I was just helping a friend move a second-hand fridge - no problems until we reached a particular steep set of stairs. It initially felt like a monstrous, horrible cramp all over my left torso, then turned into sharp pain around my lower left back. That completely faded in about 3 days of rest, anti-inflammatories, ice, and light exercises.

I think this was just a good reminder to do my exercises... :\

Lost Futon, Gained Beanbag

To reduce the amount of stuff Emily and her family would need to buy, we moved my futon to her new apartment. I then filled the empty space in my apartment with severely contrasting Sumo beanbags.

I deliberately chose the colours to contrast, and to take attention away from the plain grey-glass work furniture I have. They're very comfortable, particularly as a crash mat. Each bag can fit one couple together, or can be carefully arranged to give one person a rather comfy seat (as shown). Either form is perfect for watching movies. :)

LiveCD For The Win

My laptop harddrive has been away for repairs, probably caused by chronic overheating in the laptop. This is now the 3rd time my laptop has successfully baked a drive. My laptop DVD drive also died many moons ago for unknown reasons. Just to make this clear, my computer currently has no internal harddrive, and no internal DVD drive. However, it does have an external DVD drive, and I do possess a Ubuntu Linux installation DVD.

Until the drive comes back (tomorrow?), I've been forced to run Ubuntu in 'live' or 'demo' mode, permanently mounted in the external DVD drive. This has resulted in my system being... less than stable. Every reboot requires a reinstall of various applications (Skype, Flash) and settings (chat clients, website passwords, etc). It's somewhat painful, but also somehow reassuring to know this can be done.

Litte Bird House

I like it when wildlife comes by to visit. My sister used to have possums visit her, and we regularly had lizards visiting us in Wollongong. Now that I'm in my new apartment, I've started feeding the local birds by filling a stone "bird bath" on my back patio with seeds. More recently, I bought a little house-shaped feeder for the front patio, and hung it on the end of the hammock. So far, they seem to like it, as you can see.

I'm going to slowly get them used to the idea of me lying on the hammock while they eat. It would be nice to just watch them fly in, eat a bit, make a mess of the seeds, eat their mess, and fly off again. That would be a good afternoon.

The Seattle Tattle

About 10 days ago I went for a trip down to Seattle with Emily, her cousin, and her cousin's boyfriend. Quick summary:

• I got fingerprinted, photographed, and charged $US6 for the privilege. Australian's are still presumed to be criminals in the US apparently.
• We got quite lost by following an under-programmed GPS system. It contained decent maps for Vancouver, but didn't contain any maps for Seattle. It successfully delivered us to an intersection in the middle of nowhere, notable only for a nearby Subway store. Perhaps it was hungry? :)
• We had a very nice lunch at a seafood restaurant called McCormick & Schmick's. Everyone seemed very happy with their food, and the prices were very good. Highly recommended.
• We came across a combined sci-fi and music museum and (subject to some mild protestations) did a little tour of it during our trip. Very cool.
• We visited Pike Place Market. More importantly, we visited the first ever Starbucks store, and a picked up a nice big mug as a souvenir. It will live at Emily's place so that I don't break any of her mugs by accident (her mugs are all special gifts she has received over the years...).
• We visited the duty-free outlet shopping on the highway between Vancouver and Seattle. Scored myself a lot of random stuff (unisex perfume/cologne, a couple of shirts, some metal mixing/steaming bowls, a $15 pair of shoes, etc). I think we shopped for almost 5 hours...
• We visited a Red Robin restaurant on the way home... and left behind 2 watches and a mobile phone. We didn't realise they were missing until we needed to use the phone back in Canada. Oops! Luckily, the Red Robin staff were very helpful and posted them back up for us. Ended up costing under $12 for the postage, plus $35 for deactivating/activating a replacement SIM card.

I think I'm looking forward to making another trip down into the US, though much more likely to go camping next time.

P.S. With a few exceptions, I don't post other people's names on here. So technically this post isn't a tattle, except perhaps it can be called 'aimless chatter'. :)