We ate breakfast on the top floor. I modified my coffee with six or seven sugar packets, and it was still quite bitter. My dad drank it nearly straight, though I'm not entirely sure how. After this, we headed out into Old Québec again, just as we'd done yesterday. But before we headed into the heart of Old Québec, we headed slightly south towards the Québec Citadel, a nearly impenetrable fortification that, like the Halifax Citadel, had served many different purposes over the years, and variou
I think I should catch you up on all of the goings-on...
July 11th: Had a fun party for my maternal grandfather's 89th birthday. I decided to try out a floating thing I got for my mom as an early birthday gift. It kept folding up on me, so I got the nickname "The Human Burrito".
Later, two cousins of mine messed with the GarageBand program on my Mac. One did some awesome impressions of Mel Kiper Jr., Lou Holtz, and Harry Caray. He's going to Appalachian State and is very interested in spo
-----The road so far has constituted what is essentially the first leg of the trip: the journey to Milepost 0 of the Alaska Highway. With today we entered what we called "Milepost territory" in that our entire route was contained within the latest volume of the road map collection that prides itself as "The Bible of North Country Travel." -----8:00 AM saw my dad travel to the dealership in Whitecourt for an oil change and routine inspection that we'd had planned since we were well in the State
Sumiki's Dad and Team Farm Animals return to the Comedies forum after a brief hiatus. With an all-new setting and an outrageous supporting cast, Vakama Eats Spam promises to tackle the tough questions, like "why does Vakama eat Spam?" The promised feature of the Blogarithm Contest #9 winner will occur in later chapters, so I decided to begin posting the story in advance of the announcement on the winner.
Welcome to Thursday Thoughts, an all-new category for my weekly Thursday entries.
First, happy thanksgiving.
Bionicle: We've had a lot to be thankful for with Bionicle all of these years. We should spend more time thinking about the length of the line as compared to other themes, and not bashing TLG for getting rid of the sets. Which is all they did, really, since the storyline is still continuing, and in a bit we'll get new sets with new parts, without the Bionicle story. So it's really n
Is it just me, or did IPB Admin show up as pink in the member list? I could still get to its profile, and is still in the administrator group. Perhaps just a board error?
We left the hotel at 11:14 after amusing the valet staff with our rudimentary French, heading for Stade Municipal, looking forward to what we were sure would be a strange pennant collection from the stadium of the independent-league Québec Capitales. After circling around the hotel and working through downtown Québec, we pulled into the parking lot. Armed with a cheat-sheet for the sentences we'd need in order to purchase a pennant exclusively in French, we headed in. Fortunately for us, the l
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWgwPpb42kM Percy Grainger is one of the only Australian composers that people talk about. He wrote a significant number of pieces, including orchestral and vocal works, but his piano output is his only significant contribution to the modern repertoire. He was known for his dislike of Italian musical terms and notations, so instead of using them he often described how his music should be played in explicit English instructions - so explicit that there leaves litt
Here's what my dad thinks about BZP:
"Oh, is that crazy Roa-Toa girl still running around?"
*facepalm*
Of course I had to correct him, mainly by telling him she's not crazy.
-=< >=-
We made a quick exit from Redding and steadily picked up traffic down I-5, although it was not yet the terror it was to become and thus we made steady progress. The most interesting thing about northern California is the fact that it has big cities that simply stop. Cow pastures are located right next to huge shopping centers, unlike other states where there's a more gradual change. We entered Sacramento from the north amidst an increasing amount of traffic. With four lanes, each going a dif
-----A long-awaited sleeping-in session commenced into the morning hours, and upon awakening at around 10:00 we prepared for a day on the town in the Yukon capital. Our first stop was at the Yukon Transportation Museum, which is adjacent to the Whitehorse airport. It's extremely noticeable for the enormous DC-3 perched outside on a pivot, which is their weathervane. We admired it for a while, despite the biting cold wind, before going to the door of the museum. -----To our surprise, it's no
Last night, craziness happened. As we got onto the elevator, a man who was dressed for the haunters convention that was held in the hotel pulled up his oversized cane and shot at us. We had heard this cap gun going off earlier on, when we were eating more maple ice cream, so we knew that it wasn't real ... but if we hadn't heard it earlier, my dad and I probably would have attacked him. We got back to our room and got to sleep ... but around 1:00 in the morning, doors slammed shut and rabid ca
Well, co-host; Pablo and I have launched Comics Contest #3: Crossover in our corner of the forum. The goal of the contest is to combine sprite and hand-drawn elements in the same comic. If you think you have what it takes, head on over to Comics!
The snow here has been strange. The first layer - a good five inches - was a dry snow of the kind I'd never seen before. Around 8:00 on Wednesday the snow turned to sleet, which ceased at around 2:00 Thursday morning. This sleet froze over the soft snow and provided the base for the second layer of snow, which lasted until around 4:00 on Thursday afternoon. Strangely enough, this snow was the wet, thick, packable kind of the kind that I'm used to. Perfect sledding conditions. A few runs down
-----Our alarms went off at our now-usual time of 6:00—10:00 to our Eastern Time-aligned bodies—and we readied and packed and left for the lobby a little before 7:00. Our earliness was a necessity, as the tour van had pulled up before its scheduled arrival at 7:15. We were introduced to our tour guides: the first had moved to Alaska at age 18 and had spent time as a jack-of-all-trades, and the second, who was a dead ringer for Xaeraz's dad, served as a secondary guide when the first needed a bre
My SSC8 entry, "All Our Sins Remembered" was one of six entries to make it to the People's Choice Poll! This is my first SS contest, with only my second published BZP SS, and as far along as I've ever made it in a BZPower contest. I'm very excited to have gotten this far! I encourage you to vote for the best entry, whether you believe it to be mine or another entry. May the best writer win!
We got up today in Zion and got breakfast. It was a chilly morning and it took us a long while to get out of the park due due to the long lines which had so rapidly accumulated. For such a beautiful park, I am surprised that their logistics are not more well thought-out. The pull-off which we were going to pull into and begin our hike around at was slammed - there were no parking spaces, and to park, one would have to park on the street, which we weren't going to do. We instead settles for more
We left St. George at noon and traveled northeast to Springdale, on the doorstep of Zion National Park. Three years ago, we had entered Zion through the infamous Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel, a tunnel hewn from rock through the side of a mountain. Thankfully, we did not have to traverse this tunnel, as we entered the town of Springdale and the Zion Canyon from the other direction. The sheer red cliffs of Zion are as beautiful as I remember, and we got to the hotel at 1:00. Too early to check in, w
