A little more than 24 hours to go

Today was another busy day in a week of busy days. I did accomplish what I set out to do, and was even early to my meet-ups, so I'm pretty proud of myself.

Everything is just happening so fast, it's hard to take it in. Feels like yesterday I was making a list of activities that I wanted to do this summer, and now, I don't think I accomplished any of them. Which is not to say that I didn't have an awesome summer, it's just that it went by way to fast.

Plus, there were quite a few unexpected surprises over the summer. Some good, some bad. Before I knew it, it's the night before my last day in Winnipeg.

But, alas, I don't even have the time to reflect on it now. Need to get to sleep. Tomorrow's gonna be a long day.

Cross Country Tour

Last Sunday, Kris and I headed out on the road to quickly drive to Calgary to apply for our visas on Monday morning, and then turn around and race back to Winnipeg so that Kris could go to work Tuesday morning.

It was the longest drive we've ever done on our own, and it's not something we would suggest doing. It was fun, and it was some nice together time, but it's still not a recommended drive.

Here's the things I learned while driving across the country:

• Porcupines need to learn how to cross the road
• Saskatchewan is not as boring as people would lead you to believe, but it does smell funny
  
• There is nothing nice to look at between Medicine Hat and Calgary
  
• There are more hills in between Brandon and Winnipeg than there are between Medicine Hat and Calgary
• Apparently a lot of tires break down on the trans-can
• There's a Cost-co in the middle of nowhere just outside of Swift Current
• Winnipeg seems to be the only city not built like every other Canadian city on Hwy 1. These other cities you drive through just enough to get to a hotel, a place for food, maybe a superstore, and lots of places to gas up, and then after a km or 2, you exit out to the bypass. Winnipeg, you either drive through all the way, or you by-pass all the way. We need to work on that.
• There seems to be a country wide gas shortage that no one is talking about.
• Canada, all of it, is really quite pretty. We need to enjoy it more.
  

If you could only bring 5

One of the things we're going to be bringing with us to Japan is a small collection of DVDs. When I say small, I mean like 5 each.

So if you could only bring 5 DVDs, which ones would you bring with you?

Counting Down

As of right now there are 17 days, 16 hours, 11 mins and 39 seconds until I leave for Japan. For anyone keeping count, yeah, that means I'm leaving Aug 23rd. Kris has a few weeks on me since he's leaving Sept 5th.

Still, that's not a lot of time left and there's still alot to do. Nevermind just packing things, but we have to head to Calgary to visit the Japanese Embassy there in order to apply for our visas. We need to apply for our internation driver licenses. We need to convert our money into Yen and get some traveller's cheques. We need to move Mikey to my parents. I still want to put together the photo book of Winnipeg for my students. And we need to pack.

There's also trying to find the time to see all our family and friends before we go. Right now, we're saying that we're hoping to be out there for a year and a half, but you never know how things will work out, so it's important to see people before we go.

Hopefully, we get to see you before we go. After all, I still have a whole 17 days, 16 hours, 3 mins and 12 seconds until I leave for Japan.

Winnipeg Book

One of the teaching tools I'm going to be developing is a book about Winnipeg. Right now, it's not much but a bunch of facts written out in bullet point, but I have some ideas in my head of how I want it to look and what I want it to include. I think I need to do some serious trimming before it ends up being 100 pages.

As part of the book, I'm going around and taking photos of Winnipeg and famous Winnipeg stuff. The good thing about my departure date being so far away is that I have time to get some really good winter shots, which is really important, because, depending on where I am, some of these kids would never have seen the kind of snow that we get in up here. So far, I got some nice Festival related photos, and I took a video of a guy climbing a pillar of ice.

Once the snow melts, I plan on taking photos every weekend. There's a lot of interesting stuff to shot, you just have to look for it.