Pope and Kepsie: page 1

Here's the crappily drawn first page of Pope and Kepsie. I think I like it overall, even considering the ms paint mix and match graphics. Enjoy.

Pipe Smoking Professor

real and virtual adventures

The other day I stumbled upon what might just be the greatest browser based game ever made: Off-Road Velociraptor Safari...

(Space of about an hour where I play Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and finally achieve my 1000th velociraptor kill (over the last couple of days))

...I became heavily addicted to the game the other day and could not pull myself away from it. the basic premise of the game is that you drive your jeep around killing velociraptors and doing ridiculously awesome stunts... I know... You actually get points for doing awesome things like totally thrashing your jeep, getting killer velociraptor airtime, and jump killing velociraptors from extreme distances.
Anyways, as awesome as it was, I finally tore myself away from the game at about 3:00 in the morning on Saturday and then got up at an indecent hour to go canoeing. definately worth getting up for. We canoed down a 14?km section of the Kettle river (way past big white coming from Kelowna). at first it was pretty lame because the river was pretty shallow and we had to get out into the freezing cold river to push it through some parts. eventually, however, it picked up and then joined with the West Kettle River and got really rolling. A ways later though we were trying to manouver the canoe through a rapidish bit and the river channeled into this turn. we tried to manouver around it, but ended up broadsiding a log, the canoe filling with watter immediately and getting lodged underneath. It took us about 8 minutes alternately standing in the freezing cold water and standing on the ice, so we wouldn't get hypothermia or something, to get the thing out and miraculously we didn't lose anything but the bailer. We had to break out a fire on the shore because we were dead frozen and then we had to do it again an hour or so later down the river. The whole rest of the trip though, we were pretty much all shivering and it started raining and getting windy. it was simultaneously really miserable and a really awesome adventure, but we had chili at the Beukerts house when we got back to Kelowna so it was all good.

park ranger

In Limbo with Dylan

Listening to - Maggie's Farm (Bob Dylan)

So I've been having myself a pity party, griping about how much it sucks working for Tim Hortons and about how crappy my manager is and so on and I was planning on finding a job in Kelowna and leaving, but then suddenly my manager is replaced by a really solid person who it would be great to work for and I'm caught flat-footed, it was like a slap in the face it was so quick and because my manager was the main reason why I was planning on leaving and now I don't have a great excuse to leave, but I still want to leave... I just can't think of a good enough reason. Maggie's Farm has pretty much been my anthem the last few days because it fit so well to my situation, but now the rules are changed and I really don't know what to do. I feel like Mr. Jones...

Listening to - Ballad of a Thin man (Bob Dylan)

I was thinking a while back about working at Tim Hortons and the fact that I was no longer being challenged in my work. For the first week it was challenging just learing the ropes and how things worked, but then I had pretty much mastered most of what I had to do and there was no room for expansion and then it just got boring because I wasn't learning and I wasn't being challenged, mentally or physically, I think the only way I was being challenged was learning how to deal with crappy people. In pretty much every job you will encounter and deal with crappy people, but when it is the only challenge in your job and when you have to take the crap they deal out without reacting (which I really have a hard time doing (case in point, losing it with my manager and telling her how crappy she was being)) then something's wrong with the whole situation. I want a job where A: I'm being challenged, and B: there's a healthy amount of respect going around. Tim Hortons, to date, hasn't really been that job at all. So we will see, if having a new manager changes the atmosphere and changes the way the job works, then I may just stick around, but most likely I will be gone by the end of the month... I am a rambler after all.

Park Ranger

die murmeltiere kommen

Listening to Brother Iz - Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World

I hereby declare that winter has been defeated, Aslan is on the move, it's a rocket summer, die murmeltiere kommen. I got off of work today, changed, and walked straight out into this amazing beautiful sunny day with a warm breeze stirring the trees and blowing the last traces of winter away. As I walked back to Aarons house I glanced up at the once snow-covered Giants Head and was surprised to see only patches of snow, as if it was winters last stand and it was dying. Death dies inevitably. It was as if God was reminding us all of the resurection, a metaphor on a colossal scale. Then I walked into the bookstore to buy a comic before the bookstore closed and as I looked around, Brother Iz came on the radio with this medley and the storekeeper opened the door and the wild wind whipped leaves from the sunny street into the store and I stood there and took it in and after I bought my comic I walked back out and strolled down the street, holding my jacket in one hand because it was too hot out to wear it. What a wonderful world. (If you didn't get the rocket summer reference, go get Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and read the first chapter)

fool sitting here typing

behind the scenes on the set of White Trash and Beardo

I failed to finish the ballad of White Trash and Beardo, but rest assured it is currently underway. I've got this really old anthology of the works of Longfellow that I've had for a while, so I decided to start reading it. The first work is Evangaline, a ten page or so poem/prose (I'm really not sure what it would be classified as) about the Acadians. Anyways, it inspired me so I'm writing the ballad of White Trash and Beardo as an epic poem, but I'm still on only the third stanza because I don't have my computer down in the valley (not Happy Valley, the Farmhouse is on a hill). The first characters I'm introducing are the Ballcaps who live in Trashcan Village also known as RVland (there's no comma between Trashcan Village and RVland, it's all one name). Trashcan Village also known as RVland is inspired by the RV park that Sam and I pushed the Jetta into to find some jumper cables, but it's also inspired by the grunge of Penticton (in fact the Ballcaps are inspired by three people standing by the side of the road in Penticton that we laughed at when we were looking for black shirts for Sam's wedding). There is also a garbage can fire that's inspired mostly by our barrel fires out back of the Farmhouse. Essentially the entire epic will draw from my experiences with the white trash aspect the Okanagan, the main characters are even customers in the Summerland Tim Hortons. There, a pretty vague and uninteresting behind the scenes look at the ballad of White Trash and Beardo. Seriously though, if you could actually read it or understand the epic storyline, it would be way more interesting.

zen master

character study

So I was listening to Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" and I noticed the number of random characters thrown into the song that had crazy names like Cinderella, The Phantom of the Opera, and Cassanova. Then I started looking through some of his songs and I noticed that he almost always used pseudonames for the characters in his songs, so I got inspired and started writing up a list of characters that I've had on my mind. My list so far:
White trash
Beardo
Roosvelt
St. Matthew
Soundmime (from a bit of a lyric that I wrote)

This is definately a short blog, but that's all that was on my mind. Next post expect to see the ballad of White Trash and Beardo.

soundmime

memory flooding

Last night I stayed up really late and listened to music and stuff. I started listening to the Beatles, Help, and that brought back a whole bunch of memories, some of my favorites and I just sat around and remembered certain times and places and people. At 2:00am I took a walk through the vinyard above the Mansion. There were no stars because it was clouded over, but because Summerland is mostly a retirement community so there's not a lot of lights and because of our location on the other side of Giants Head on the top of a hill, I could see the whole valley stretched out and the glow off of the surrounding towns lighting up the sky in places, it was pretty breathtaking. Also it was completely silent, no cars screeching, no train, not even the rumble of a highway or the sound of the wind. It was completely silent and I stood in the middle of the vineyard and was just quiet and just stood there, until I could hear the residue from all the sounds in my ears buzzing until it was deafening. It was beautiful. Then I walked over the hill in the vineyard and sat on the road at the base of Giants head and wrote the first verse and the chorus of a song about this one time when I walked on a frozen pond in the dark with some great people, one of my favorite memories of all time. Top 5 definately. Then I walked back and jammed with the night on my harmonica and found this two-note progression that I found on a train this one time and it brought back even more memories. I was recalling moments and people all night it seemed, every little thing I'd do would trigger a new train of them and even though I was living in the moment I was awash with memories. I think I want to go back to the Lower Mainland or move into Kelowna because no matter where you are and what you're doing, no matter how beautiful nature is, no matter how quiet, no matter how majestic, it doesn't matter if you don't have anyone to share it with. I've been wondering what I'm doing up here and I've started thinking of this stage of my life as my time in the wilderness, kindof a formative period where I figure out who I am and what I'm going to do with my life, but I can't wait to see everybody again because I miss you all desperately.

soundmime