Tales of a vagrant ant

(edit: I’ve fixed the photos, having uploaded them to flickr instead of using the bogus yahoo links… so yay, pictures!)

Yet again, It’s been a while… I really suck at this whole blogging thing, but yet, I don’t give up. I’m still here, kicking at the dregs of blogdom. It’s not that I haven’t been online, I have been, probably excessively… Applying for jobs, reading blogs (and yes, not writing them), and surfing a buttload. In some ways, I think i’m a bit obsessed with information. There’s so much going on with the world, so many stories of heart-wrenching tragedy, and also of soaring hope, as well as inanity. I’m caught up in the endless sharing of ideas that the internet helps facilitate, and I’m definitely trying to wean myself off of it. It’s just too much information, and what I need to learn to do is synthesize. There must be some way to make use of this knowledge, to harness it, and to share it with the world…

There’s this brilliant tool called del.icio.us… It’s essentially and online bookmarking system, where you can share your links, as well as add useful tags to help you remember or share this information. For anybody who’s interested, you can see what I’ve been surfing here. I’m going to try to make it a sidebar on this blog so that it’s easier to see.
After the cut, I’ll talk about my trip to Alaska (with lots and lots of pictures!), and a little ramble of the thoughts in my head lately…

A cruise ship I saw in the distance


About to board the cruise ship

I went on a trip to Alaska with my family.. my sister, parents, and Grandma. It was on a cruise, and it was a good time. Enough food to feed a small country, pools, a spa, a theatre… it was pretty crazy. They even had a mini/virtual golf thing somewhere on the ship… So pretty much, a gluttonous way to go anywhere, but a way that worked for my grandma and parents, who aren’t quite the type to rough it out in a tent and be outdoorsy. It was good to be able to spend quality time with them, as well as go on some of the shore excursions when the ship was in port.


The main foyer of the ship

The shore excursions were definitely the highlight… Even though we had to pay for them separately, they were definitely a welcome change… There were a couple things that we did… Joyee and I went canoeing in Ketchikan, which was neat. We canoed around a nice lake, then had a nice snack of chowder, crackers, smoked salmon and coffee. It’s interesting to go all the way up the coast of the continent, and realize that really, things aren’t so different up there. You’ve still got the same kinds of geography, flora and fauna.

Me waiting to go canoeing

Clouds hanging out in the foreset

Close up of some Alaskan flora
And some shenanigans in the city of Ketchikan, land of appropriated animals….

Look, i’m a bear!

Look, joyee’s a bear

Ahhhh, an eagle!! Run!!

Our next stop was in Juneau, where the whole family went whale watching, and boy were we in for a treat!! Fantastic weather, and we were lucky enough to get to see pretty much everything the tour could offer us…

An nomadic orca

Sea lions resting on a buoy (was it because they have no ice bergs because of global warming?!)

Humpback Whales that came right up to the boat!! (they got even closer after I took this)

Humpback Whales breaching!!! weee!!

And something called bubble net fishing, an inventive feeding technique used by humpbacks that is apparently most spectacular act of cooperation among marine mammals, and is rarely observed.

We really couldn’t have asked for more… Apparently our guide has never had all of these sightings, all in the span of one trip, in her 2 seasons of being a guide! And seeing truly wild animals, especially huge ones like whales is such a humbling experience…
After that adventure, we went back to Juneau and walked around town…

Alaska had some crazy ass masks!!!

Our 3rd port we stopped at was Skagway. We took this neat trainride through some pretty amazing mountain passes

Train going over a bridge

this old bridge (no longer used) reminds me of Back to the Future!! Anybody remember?

The next two days after that were spent at Glacier Bay, and College Fjord, both places with some breathtaking glaciers.

Glacier Bay

My sister, my dad and I

These glaciers, they’re unstoppable!

The glaciers are merging together

My parents trying not to look like they’re freezing their butts off

Another crazy shot of these amazing behemoths!

Sometimes they had this amazing blue hue to the ice

Haha, alright, that’s enough of the glaciers. They were really cool though.. (pun intended!)

Everyone cheering as the chefs came out to introduce themselves, after their hardwork the past week

Looking out at the open water

That was basically my trip to Alaska… I’ve uploaded a photo gallery here, if you’re interested in seeing all the photos… There’s a lot of really cool shots that I didn’t get a chance to share with y’all. I didn’t show all the eating we did, or how my grandma won 20 bucks on the 2 cent slot machines, but there were definitely some fun moments!! We disembarked in Whittier, and we drove through this two mile long one way tunnel to get to Anchorage… That was pretty rad… And we flew from Anchorage to Seattle, before my family transferred to a flight back home to Vancouver. Being so close to Katie, I decided to stop in Seattle for a few nights, so I could spend time with her, and hang out at Bumbershoot, to watch some good music, and interesting people. Katie was working there, doing her science shows, so I watched her play with liquid nitrogen… that was pretty cool (pun intended, again!), especially when she ate bits of graham cracker dipped in liquid nitrogen, and breathed nitrogen gas out her noise. She’s my heroine, that’s for sure!! We also got to spend some time bumming around, walking around some nice parks by her place. All in all, a good time…

After that, I got back into Vancouver, and started to get busy doing research for the thrive guide , a sustainable living guide to Vancouver, and some job hunting as well.

So here I am now, and today I realized that I arrived back in vancouver from visiting Katie in North Carolina and leaving my life in Guelph, almost exactly one year ago. It really made me think about what I’ve done with myself since then. I’ve talked to some friends who plowed straight through into Grad School, and now they’re a year away from having a Master’s degree. In some ways, I’m a little envious, because it’s THAT much more you have in terms of credentials when you’re trying to find a career. But at the same time, I just don’t know what I want to do with my life to make that kind of time and financial commitment… While on the surface, I’m at the exact same point I was at last year, unemployed, I do feel like I have so much more direction, in terms of where I want to go and end up. Urban Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Environmental Design are all things that my spirit has been aiming towards, and the last year has revealed to me these fascinating subjects that are so crucial to the survival of human society as we know it, and is also this new fertile ground of creativity.
So my goal now is to figure out how it is exactly I want to make my mark on the world, and well, just start doing it. To stop reading about things, and actually trying things out, and learning about things by creating them. I do feel like I’m on the verge of something… not really a new beginning, but more of a germination, with patterns emerging from where the pieces that have fallen into place…