i hope that no one actually believed that i would spend all of my time on the couch playing video games all weekend! i imagine that no one is really reading this stuff anyway, so i doubt that anyone would draw that conclusion. after all, it would be a waste of all this free time that i have to just play video games all day!

no, i knocked one of the big to-do's off of my list today. i drove all the way out to burlington, ontario (55km away) to visit my old home there. i was surprised to learn that some of my friends didn't know that i spent two years here when i was 8 or so - going to school, trudging through the snow, and becoming the person that i am. it was a very very happy time in my life because i was so young and happy and had good friends and was so full of joy and life.

the old townhouse is exactly the way i remembered it. in fact, after giving it almost no thought, i was surprised to realize that i remembered the exact address of it - which made finding it considerably easier after almost 30 years! i drove out to it and found it right off guelph line where i had left it. it looks almost exactly as i remembered it, with its quaintly landscaped central courtyard, rolling little hills, and brick construction. my mother's house also has brick, so i imagine they must like brick, as i do.

the second photo is significant, because a happy memory of mine is a game that i used to play with my mother when i would go to school. she would always tell me not to climb over the fence at the back of our complex and cross over the neighbouring parking lot (for what reason, i still cannot understand). well, every day, i would sneak around to the back and try and hop the fence, and some of the time, my mom would run around to try and pull me down and make me go out along the street. it was a fun game, and it's a powerfully happy thought to me - something so simple as this little interaction - that can hold such an incredible concentration of love.

my school was a bit of a disappointment. i remember it being larger and friendlier. i think that they have not had to replace the flag in the 27 or so last years since i saw it last. clarksdale public school is frozen in time, like so many other public schools, except that they have taken some of the joy away from it. there is still a convenience store 50m away from it, where i used to go to buy licorice and gum and occasionally hockey cards that i would trade with my friends paul and kevin. but they modified the exterior to discourage one of the other happy memories i have of burlington, "ledgies".

paul and i had developed a game called "ledgies" that i have no idea if is a real game or not. basically, you took a tennis ball and hucked it at a wall with a ledge. the trick was to get the ball to pop off of the ledge, rather than just smacking perpendicularly against the wall. this clearly worked your aiming skill at throws and to a much lesser degree, your ability to run in to catch a pop-up. if your ledgie popped straight up and miraculously hit the ledge a second time, and you caught it, that was the supreme, unbeatable "double-ledgie" - which i think i only got once.

now, they have put some crappy aluminum siding over the concrete walls so that you can't really get a good ledgie game going without popping the ball left or right at random. total crap.

i couldn't remember where paul's house was. i couldn't remember if that house that i think was eleni's was hers, and it didn't look like she still lived there anyway. i think i remember the crescent where we used to play road hockey. and i remember the huge hydro lines that ran in a little greenspace just behind our complex. i remember the other convenience store closer to our house where i would also go to buy hockey cards.

a lot of what i am doing here has to do with figuring out who i am and who i will be going forward from here. part of that has to be a re-evaluation of who i have been. and today was a huge part of that. i still have a lot to do and see and learn before i come to some conclusions about the type of life i want to lead, and i had some very interesting offers for self-discovery later on in the day. i think that the next couple of months will see a great many changes in me.

- g

so i've finally gotten the hang of the superman video game for the xbox... i've beaten one of the harder challenges in the "training" level, and now, i'm in the main game within the city of metropolis.

based on this really really brief scene in the original superman movie, where christopher reeve saves a cat from a tree (i think the cat's name was fluffy or something), the developers of the video game created a hide and seek challenge for the player to locate the 100 missing kittens in the city of metropolis (which is approximately 80 square miles of virtual city - a lot of places to hide).

what i think i like best about this is that the cats are all little orange kitties and they remind me of one half of my two favourite things in the world.

- g

ps. man, i'm so glad that i have this game so that i never need to get off my couch again!!

i know that lake ontario is nothing like a sea - but to a prairie boy like myself, for whom the only significant body of water was a shallow cesspool of a river running through the heart of my hometown - it's pretty close.

i've been working out of the queens quay terminal building in toronto , and my area looks out over the lake. it's been marvelous for me to be able to look out and see waves and ripples and ships - things that i've never really believed in growing up. the problem is that for as long as i can remember (a few weeks), it's been miserably overcast in toronto . i can't remember the last clear day here - and again, for a prairie boy like myself, coming from a place where the sky can fill your view with a blueness beyond compare, it's been challenging living in the “big smoke”.

i think it was tuesday, and a bit of today, that i saw blue in the sky and the sun. i forgot how much i like the sun and how i've missed it. as we enter the winter months, there will be far less of it to enjoy - but then, i'm used to winters where you would get up, go to work, the sun would come up while you were busy in your cubicle staring at artificial light from a monitor, the sun would go down, and you would leave work in utter darkness. for five months.

the other thing the struck me about working near the lake is how comparable it is to being by the ocean. the second picture here is from a trip to vancouver , where i was near the ocean at kitsilano, an artsy, trendy vancouver yuppie-breeding area. i wanted to settle there, but a 500 sq ft. condo apartment would have set me back almost half a million dollars. bullshit.

the air may be cleaner and fresher there, but i don't have no half a million dollars to buy a closet. toronto is not as bad as you all might think. (but it's nowhere near as wonderful as victoria!)

- g