Sunday Night Entertainment for both you and I.

Creature of the Night

It's been a while (since my last post, but also since I have seen any of you! boo) and some things have happened in my generally uneventful life. Finished up and performed our last show, Giselle. Started working at a temporary job (just until the end of October) which is a night shift; quite the change from my usual schedule. I have been working from 9pm to 5:30 am and have thus been dubbed the 'Creature of the Night' around here. While it is nice to have a bit of an income, it doesn't really solve the job problem since it is just temporary, so I am still a hunting (bleh).
Le roomies and I had ourselves a thanksgiving feast today, which was quite tasty and a fun collaborative event. Alas the camera decided to conveniently be lacking charged batteries, however I have plans for a leftover setup photoshoot tomorrow...
Also over the weekend, I got coerced into last minute race signup. Eve and Jon signed up to run an 8k race a while back but I opted to forego it figuring I would have dance and not be able to go, but on thursday I mentioned offhand when offering to accompany Eve to pick up her race packet, that it seems I would have been able to do it. Apparently one can sign up for these things super last minute, so I got quasi peer pressured into doing it (although it's not that I didn't want to, just that I was awfully unprepared). Anyways, it has come and gone and I am still alive to tell the tale so all is well! The day was cold and cloudy (it was early in the morning) so I was freezing for most of the run and it was definitely the longest I have ever run before (see aforementioned unpreparedness) also on zero sleep (with this night shift business I have issues getting myself back to normal people hours, and friday night was supposed to be my switchover but I ended up not being able to fall asleep) but all in all a good experience.

Anyways, would love to hear whats going on with all of you!! Hope you had a nice thanksgiving and maybe some of you got to spend it with family.
Hermit

Goodbye Summer

First off, um how is it already September? Summer just started!!

So, it's been a while and I have two updates for my list of new things: riding a tandem bike (granted it was for a very short time, but it was fun and I would definitely do it again, although probably making sure the person in front knows what they are doing!) and driving a tractor! Also very fun and something I would do again.

Aside from that, I haven't been up to a ton, finished the courses I was doing over the summer, we just finished up our summer shows and are now starting rehearsals for our upcoming show (which is coming up super quick-stress!! but also potentially has a live horse in it which I think is exciting times!). I am also on the job hunt which is crap and does wonders for my self esteem. I think this whole experience thing is a bunch of trash- how the heck do you get experience if everyone wants you to already have it!?? Anyways....

I have pretty pictures to leave you with:

The kind of gifts you receive if you come to visit Hermit:

Isn't it glorious looking!?

Actually that is Nomads baggie of gado gado (she came over to teach me how to make it) and we decided she needed to take some of it back with her but we didn't have a good container for her to take it home in, so glorious plastic bag of slime it was! :)

Hiking adventures with friendsles! We went to this lake a bit out of the city and walked around it (and saw many slugs-I have this picture, several pictures of the view, and many pictures of various slugs we encountered-priorities!)

-Hermit

Summer of New Experiences Progress

SO, exciting times! I am making slow progress in adding to my list of new things. I went camping with some dance folks this weekend and now I can add wind surfing, canoing, bushwacking, and camping to my list! It was a lot of fun although I think I need to try wind surfing again because the river we did it in was too shallow so the rudder kept getting stuck, but it was quite spiffy.
Le roomies came along on the bushwacking adventure too, although that wasn't actually the original intent. We were headed out to this local outdoor swimming type place, but opted to forego the normal people trail and instead went climbing up rocks and smashing through the bushes (where I may have been skewered by a bush and ripped the only pair of pants I decided to bring along, well done Hermit!). We ended up separated as a group on either side of the river and uh, the side that Eve, Jon and I opted for failed most excellently as a trail even for bushwacking, but it was a grand adventure regardless!
In case any of you were dying of curiosity about the vegetarian meeting, we went but there was a much smaller group than we had both expected. The speakers were good I thought, however the panel was four women, two of which were politicians, so the conversation tended towards political things. In addition, the group seems like it is largely nonexistant right now, so while the main chap is trying to get things rolling again, right now it's kind of dead. Anyways, the meeting people part kind of failed but maybe if he manages to get the group more active, things will be better in the future.
Hope you are all well and good! :)
Hermit

Randomness 3.0

A rather entertaining site for you to peruse (unless I am the last to know about it, like usual): catalogliving.tumblr.com
In other news, I am much enjoying this roommate business again, makes for a much more active social life (and yes, going grocery shopping counts as a social activity in my head)! However, it is doing wonders for my inclination to engage in schooling....
I had a super random dream last night that involved me wandering around either post or pre-show and running into Rick Nay, which is so random since I kind of forgot about him! The mind works in mysterious ways.
My summer of new experiences hasn't been progressing along too well lately, although I have been doing a bit of running (er jogging, or grampa shuffling as Eve calls it) lately, however I think I really need to acquire new shoes to step it up (but gah, money!!). We are going to a vegetarian meeting tonight though, so I guess that counts. We have great plans of meeting likeminded individuals, shall let you know how that goes.
Hermit

Summer of New Experiences

So I think I have probably spieled about this to most of you, buut I figure by putting it up here I have an easy place to tally up my score aaand a bit of an incentive to not bail out after a few weeks. Basically, my plan is to make this summer be the summer of doing things I don't do often, or have never tried before, thus the summer of new experiences. For those of you in my neck of the woods (the ever growing group of you! :)) I would be more than happy to have you join me in some of my ventures, or suggest things we/I can do.
So far I have taken a ballroom dance class with David (which was an interesting experience, but I have to give him a lot of credit for coming and sticking it out) and I think that is something I would like to do a bit more of, and I have grand plans of forcing other folks to come with me, so beware! Mwahaha
aaaand if all goes well/as planned, tomorrow evening will have added another thing to my list; indoor rock climbing avec le autre brother (well, and likely swimming, but I'm not sure that counts as something particularly new or novel)
Hope you are all well and good and I am pretty pleased with myself having just realized that quite possibly in the span of about a week I may have had the opportunity to see all of you! :)
Hermit

Book List

Jumping on the bandwagon.
Here is a list of 100 books that the BBC estimated average people had only read 6 of. Bold the ones you have read and italicize the ones you are working on, then put a total at the end. Here's mine!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I started this one, not sure if I ever actually finished it or not)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (I've heard this is really good, have been meaning to read it for a while now)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I am at 19, but there are some books that I am not sure if I have read the actual book or some kind of abridged version (The Secret Garden, Oliver Twist, A Little Prince).
On the same lines, I am currently on a reading mission since I have no school at the moment and haven't done any pleasure reading for far too long. So if you have book suggestions, let me know!
-Hermit

Javascript makes my brain bleed

I think I possibly submitted the worst assignment I have ever done, hooray me!

In other news, I am super excited to be finished with my courses and have a bit of free time! :) I also came across this product during my avoidance of studying internet time:

from this website. Clearly I need this in my life to assist with my decision making...

Hermit

Feminism

So I was reading this blog today and came across this article which I am a big fan of (also, can I steal the writing abilities of both the guest writer and the blog writer, thankyouverymuch). I figured you folks would appreciate it aussi but was a bit nervous about posting it lest I come across being super pushy veganism etc.etc. but Wulf is pressuring me into it so blame her. But know that I am not at all trying to do that, I just really like the spiel (veganism aside). Tis from here but I am going to copy and paste the feminist bit here, hopefully that isn't illegal. Please don't turn me in unless you are willing to room with me in jail, I don't wanna be all by myself!

Okay, or not, it won't copy and paste so you have to go over to read. This be the normal blog of the guest poster, in case you are interested. She does post generally informative stuff along with vegan foodstuffs, and she lives in Saudi Arabia which I find incredibly interesting to read about, but I am a dork so yes.
Hope you all are well, I want to hear from some of you, its been faar too long!!
Hermy

Olympics by the seat of my pants

I decided a few days ago that I was going to vamoose over to Vancouver to experience the Olympics first hand. After all, when am I ever going to be this close to them again? So, off I went, largely flying by the seat of my pants the whole way. This venture also marked the first time I have ever really gone on a trip all by myself, ha, I am so grown up now.
So, you get to experience my, somewhat poorly documented, trip. Or glaze over the blabbing, skim the pictures and move onto something more meaningful/useful...
So, transportation, a two hour ferry ride (wherin I miss the bus to take me to the ferry I originally intended to go on courtesy of me staying up too late, er early, the previous night, but anyways...)

Once I got to Vancouver, well Richmond, you take a bus/skytrain (which are super by the way) to Vancouver, which basically got me right downtown. I headed to the nearest free venue, called LiveCity Yaletown, where I got to stand in line to get in (and then be subjected to airport style security) Fortunately they had entertainment for folks waiting in line:

And into LiveCity, which was kind of dead, but I think it was more geared towards people doing stuff in the evening, and I went in the early afternoon. However, note the huge television screens. I saw some speedskating on them, wherein one person bailed quite nicely and another person (who is 20) won, and I felt bad about my life accomplishments.

There was also a Coca-Cola sponsor tent thing within this venue, which I stood in line for a ridiculously long time to get into. A whole lot of spiel about their sponsorship of the games through the years etc. but they did have the walls covered in the signatures of all the people who had been involved in this years Torch Relay which I thought was pretty swell.

This was also the location of 'Vancouver House' (each province had their own house around the City, as well as some countries) which I didn't peer in, but next door they had a Laneway House set up to go walk around in and see which was pretty swell. Basically its a sustainable house that is 800 some square feet and I think you can basically buy it as a package type thing. Anyways, I think they were trying to promote it as a solution to Vancouvers housing problem, regardless, it was spiff but I apparently didn't think to take pictures inside.

I poked around for a bit, taking in all the Canadian pride *grin*

I don't know if you can see, but those lamp-post flags say 'with glowing hearts' and TONS of buildings had Canadian flags on them, although this one was the best that I saw.

I also attempted to see the athletes village, however it was supposedly super secure etc. so I peered at it from this bridge that was supposed to be the best place to actually see it:

And this is the part where it started to get dark and my camera had a hissy fit about not enough light and commenced with the blurry pictures. Enjoy! :)

I meandered over to BC Place, which is where the medal ceremonies happen and the hockey games occur. The day I was there was a game between Canada and Russia. Thats BC Place in the first picture, and the stadium in the second, they are possibly the same building, or just right beside eachother.

Right across the street from BC Place was Alberta House which I also didn't go in to (another big lineup) but it was largely open (under those white draperies) so you could hear the country music (haha, that entertained me far too much-so albertan) from outside, and they had a big TV you could watch outside. The TV was playing the hockey game, surprise surprise, but it was fantastic! There were so many people and everybody was so into it. Every time Canada got a goal, basically all of downtown went crazy! Also, because Alberta House was right across the street from the arena, you could ocassionaly hear stuff from inside the stadium at the same time you saw it on the screen. Thats probably the only time I have ever actually been excited about a hockey game!

A bit down the street from Alberta house was this thing called the Bell Ice Cube, also didn't go in so I'm not sure what they had inside but they did have these huge spotlights outside that they swung around that lit up the sky, alas, camera didn't like my attempts to photograph that.

I came across some more street performers in my meanderings. These folks were having fun playing with burning batons. One girl actually lit herself on fire (by accident, but it got put out pretty quick) but all in all it was spiff. In the second picture, one fellow had this stick with the olympic rings balanced on his nose, and the girl came over and lit them on fire. He vamoosed around with them for a bit longer.

And yes, that pretty much sums it up. On the ferry ride back I found out that they have TVs at one of the seating areas, so they were broadcasting the Olympics, another hockey game, and it was a super ending to my Olympic-filled day, sitting there watching with all these other people. Its amazing the energy you can get just from being around a bunch of people who are super into it!

I am actually plotting about maybe going again, with a girl from dance, but we shall see.

Hope you all are well, and we should talk! I can't wait until I get to see you folks next!

-Hermy

Promotion

Exciting news chez Hermit today. I am officially a company member out here and (drum roll please...) ,were I so inclined to label myself, could utilize 'professional dancer' as my moniker because remuneration appears to have become an accepted concept, how novel! Forgive my sarcasm, I actually am very pleased but I am interested to see what happens after our next show.

Anyways, to make this not an entirely braggy post, here be an illegal nutcracker picture to show off the mice costumes that I kept talking about. I be the mouse second from the right, with the very curved mouse paws.

-Hermit

New Year and a New Decade

Seems like people in internetland have been all gaga about decade lists and new year lists. I don't think my life has been that exciting over the past decade (no marriage, children, degrees, major career changes, etc.) so I am ditching any kind of yearly recap but in thinking back I do think this past decade has had some pretty significant things:
-my dietary habits have changed drastically, and I am pleased that they have, in turn, started to alter those of my family. Granted, nothing huge, but back in the day we had a fairly small repertoire of meals, and since then we have certainly branched out. My mom usually has hummus for lunch these days and I don't think she even knew what it was two years ago. The other day Daniel ate vegan for supper just for fun. David ate gluten and dairy-free for about four days and didn't die! (We were doing an experiment on allergies and how they affected his mood/personality and digestion) etc.etc. Yay progress!
-I met and have kept my six best friends! Here's to plenty more decades together (and maaaybe someday we will live in the same city/house- that is one of my biggest dreams, to have a big happy house of inthewoods folks)
-My life has been enriched by creatures. It's strange to think of a time when we didn't have them and I had no idea that they had such character and personality.
- I have lived away from home and made some progress towards being a real adult, although there is still plenty of that that needs work.

I also decided that I am making myself a list of 10 goals for 2010, not resolutions perse, but things that I would like to do or change or whatever in the year. I'm still finalizing it and I'm not sure I am going to post it here but I thought I would offer this up to Nomad (as per our sushi conversation): methinks we should make an agreement, I will audition for Alberta Ballet and potentially send video off to other places if you will sort out your portfolio and send it off to a few places. Also, enjoy your winter session time (and let me know when your visitor date is, I want to see naramata!)
Anyways, enough splerkety splerg new years crapola. Hope the integration back into normal life hasn't been too tough. And I have a request: Could each of you, at some point, send me a picture of you, profile (can just be your head and shoulders) doesn't have to be amazing quality or anything, but I have grand ideas involving such things.
-Hermy