Futurocity

I know what life has in store for me for the next two weeks. After that, everything is up in the air.
Okay, maybe not everything. But most of the major pieces of the puzzle are still missing. On Friday June 13th, I fly home. As a side note, I am flying on British Airways, and I am going through Heathrow. I don't know if you heard on the news about the trouble they had with their new terminal (they lost something like 5,000 pieces of luggage in a weekend) and had delayed fully opening it until June. I don't know when in June, but pray that my luggage and my plane stay fairly well connected the entire way home.
From there I fly into Calgary for an hour or two, and then back to Regina where I will

And that is the extent of my knowledge. I am drawing a complete blank when it comes to plans...no, not plans, but even ideas for what to do. I just have no desires or interests right now. I feel like I am at a different place in my life, jobwise and just lifewise (I don't even care if that is a word), but I don't know what that place is. And it is hard to figure that out from here.
Most people who come here have a bit more of an idea or plan for where their life is going, and even those who don't generally have more time to think about leaving and what needs to be done when they go home. It is amazingly hard to leave this place and to think about life away from here because the school and the dorm completely fill your life, leaving not much room for much else. But the decision for me to leave was made in February, which sounds to you, I imagine, like a good deal of time, but it really isn't. There are so many emotional attachments and so much pulling on your time and energy that it really hasn't been a great deal of time. It has only been in the past few weeks that I have fully come to accept the thought of not returning, let alone actually coming up with plans for what to do when I am gone.
I am going to miss this place - it has been good to me, even if it has also been very hard. I'm okay with that.
I may have overstated my lack of ideas before. I have some vague notions, but only very vague. I am going to spend a week or two recovering in Regina, but I want to move back to Calgary. As for work, at least for the summer I can probably do something like painting (actually, painting keeps sticking in my mind for some reason) until I figure something else out. I mentioned earlier that I took the Birkman test, and it is very much job/career oriented, so I will be taking time to look through the results of that more thoroughly to see if that gives me any ideas or wakes any passions in me, but, again, I just don't have the time/energy to really deal with that here.
But if you are feeling like helping me, here are a couple of things you can do: I will need a place to live in Calgary, so if you happen to hear of anything, please let me know. And if you hear of work in the area, also let me know. I may not go with your suggestion, but at least I will have something to look at. And I will never complain about being prayed for.
Wellp, until next time, I remain.
Oh yeah, I also plan on purchasing Futurama seasons as well. I saw they had a box set of all four volumes...maybe I'll buy that.

Weekend Musings

I was driving on the autobahn today and it suddenly occurred to me that I was driving extremely fast. Back home I remember getting some of my cars up to high speeds, like 150km/h, and it felt like I was driving really fast - I could feel the speed. But when I drive that fast here it does not feel that fast, which is odd to me. It might just be the different cars I've been in, but that doesn't seem to make much sense because my cars back home were big cars with big engines. I never felt out of control, but I definitely could feel that I was driving fast. But the car I was driving here was a small hatchback, and an old one to boot. Nothing about it says speed or power, but going 140-150 feels fine. I don't know what to think about that.

I made whipped cream for the first time today. I put the cream into our mixer and turned it on. I was watching closely because I had to add sugar and I was told to add it when the cream started rising a little bit, or getting slightly thick or something. I thought it was getting close, and then one of the guys came into the kitchen and asked what we were making. I looked up and told him, pointing out the sauces and pasta on the stove. I looked back at the cream and it had bypassed the slightly thick stage and jumped straight to finished. I couldn't have looked away for more than thirty seconds. I felt a little upset at the cream that it would do that to me.

Yesterday I was at a wedding. Friends that I met at the English camp I worked at were getting married and I managed to snag an extra day off to drive up (near Frankfurt) to see the wedding. It was the first wedding I've been to in a long time that hasn't left me feeling upset and depressed. I think that's a good sign, but a sign of what I'm not sure.

So how was your weekend?

I think I'm getting old and cranky

Okay. This was going to be a posting about me coming home this summer and stuff like that, but then something happened that made me want to rant instead. I often like to have two or three internet windows open at the same time (you say to me: "but Darrell, Internet explorer has these fancy tabs now so that you only need one window actually open at a time." I know that. The computer I am using doesn't have that version of IE yet. And this used to happen all the time before they fancied up with the tabs. Besides, this is my BLOG, so I can rant how I want to. So there. Nyah!). That way one page can be loading while I am looking at the next page. It is useful when I am doing something that requires me to look at various links on a site so there are multiple times of waiting for loading. Plus, I really don't like waiting for internet pages to load. I would die if I had to use dial up.
Anyhoo, sometimes I will type in an address and get the page started loading and then read the next page while I am waiting. But when the first page finishes loading up, it forces itself to the front, covering the other page I was reading. I hate that. I just want the page to load in the background and I will get to it when I get to it. But nooooo, it has to be all impatient and pushy. Sometimes I will hit 'alt-tab' to get back to the second page and it will immediately pop the first page up in front again. It is like a pop-up ad, and nobody likes those.
Why do these pages do this? Are they coded that way for some reason? If so, why? It bugs me, as you can tell.
There, I feel better. Don't you?

Stupid...mutter mutter...actor....

Last night I had a dream. My dad had suddenly gone wild with spending, buying all sorts of stuff for my mom: jewelry, diamond encrusted watches, clothes, and anything else he could think of. And then he went for the coup de grace: a brand new Bentley (he may only have been leasing it, but still -- a BENTLEY!) in any colour she would like. I was with them at the time and as we got to the dealership I looked at the Bentleys and made my dad promise that I would be allowed to drive it, at least from time to time.
And then, out of nowhere, Robert DeNiro gets up and starts lecturing my dad on the unwise financial decisions he was making and how bad an idea buying (or leasing) a new Bentley was. And then he basically forbids dad from getting the car! It was like he was some sort of financial advisor, whether we wanted one or not.
I woke up ticked at Robert DeNiro. Who does he think he is?
I want to drive the Bentley.

My face is cold

So the German word for drive is 'fahrt'. We were at Europa park yesterday (an amusement park in Germany) and there was a ride that featured old style cars (like from the twenties) that went around a track. It didn't go fast or anything, just one of those one you sit in and it goes around slowly and you get off - nice a calm, something the kids can go on if they're too small for the more intense rides. I mention this because the name of the ride was: Oldtimer Fahrt. I have never wished I had a camera more in my life.