I'm having fun with flipnotes.

It is quite fun.

That was a fun Tanksgiving. I had Shogo over and he really seemed to have a good time.
Saturday we went down to Halifax, Micmac Mall and Dartmouth Crossing to browse all the shopping. It was my first time driving in Halifax, so I got really lost, but Shogo enjoyed seeing the town.
And on Sunday we went down to Peggy's Cove. We spent quite a bit of time simply walking across the granite and watching the waves splash against the shore. And of course in the various gift shops where he got a few things for his family. And then we had a nice Thanksgiving dinner.
And when we weren't out, we were playing video games. Primarily Beatles: Rock Band where I sang almost every song. Shogo says he thinks he's becoming a fan of the Beatles, which is always a good thing in my books.
We went back on the train, but it didn't have the viewing floor on the top. Oh well.
That train station is still out of the way no matter how you cut it. I can't tell if the walk to Bennet from there is shorter or longer than the walk to Harper...

Interesting week. Shogo sure is an interesting guy. He's very busy or something. Except to sleep, he's only ever stayed in our room for a few minutes at a time, and since all he does when he comes in is throw his stuff onto his bed before leaving, which means his bed is always a mess at the end of the day. Which I guess makes sense. It is a new place, I'd want to wander around and/or socialize. Except people are just always coming here looking for him, and I've always got to tell them that he's not in.
At any rate, the Beatles Rock Band is GREAT. I beat the whole story mode in one day, and enjoyed it the entire time. Although it turns out I bought the Value Pack instead of the actual Beatles Rock Band Pack, so my instruments are just Rock Band 1 instruments and not the Beatles' instruments. Which does make me kind of sad, especially since I'm always hearing about how the Rock Band 1 drumset breaks down kind of easily or something like that, but I guess I'll live. Maybe. I wonder if I'll end up getting one of those instruments anyways. The Rock Band 2 Guitar has a mic and camera built into it so you can calibrate lag more efficiently, do the Beatles Rock Band guitars have those, too? I guess that'd be an extra $50-100 onto the price for the premium pack, but I might have been willing to pay that much at the time.
Since I was bringing back the foam from my bed at home for my bed in my dorm, Mom let me use the car again. Although she reiterates that the car's insured in her name, with me listed as a part-time driver because I go to school, so taking the car to and from school doesn't exactly count as part-time, and I've been told it'd cost $1,000 to be able to use the car full-time. And while I have that money, I don't really want to pay it... What if I want to go to Disneyworld for Winter/Spring Break? Actually, Mom recently mentioned the possibility of going to visit Delph for X-mas. I mean, that's North Carolina already, only two more states to go from there!

So I haven't mentioned this before, but for most of the summer I've been following the old newspaper comics Disney has been uploading to D23.While I've already read the Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics, the Scamp newspaper strip was something I hadn't read before. It's really cute.

Anyways, that's led me to look up the comics, specifically those by Al Hubbard, there was another artist's work I found, but I didn't like his artstyle.
With all the doubles from multiple issues, I decided to just go and sort the best scans of all the specific stories (using INDUCKS as a guide to find them), after which it seemed only natural to upload them for people to read.
http://rapidshare.com/files/278384132/Scamp1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/278387918/Scamp2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/278389163/Scamp3.rar

They're generally around that quality, except for the few that were reprinted very recently. Those are all re-inked and on much better quality paper.

Alright, so I forgot to post...
Let's see, Bear River was the last week of our camps, and by far the furthest away. We're talking like a 3 hour drive or something here.
Once again we were staying in cabins, but these were really nice cabins out by a cliff by the water! We had a lovely view of the water, and you could see Digby from where we were on a clear day.
Bear River itself is really hilly. It was interesting to drive around. Mom used to work in Bear River when we lived in Plympton, but still, I was surprised to find I was recognized by the people that worked there... did I ever go down there before? They recognized mom's car, though, so she must go down from time to time.
In Glooscap we had a mix of young and old kids, in Annapolis Valley the kids were all pretty old. In Bear River our kids were really young! And this time we had the entire week to entertain them from 9-3.
Needless to say, it was an interesting experience. One kid in particular was always bored with everything we did, even when I asked him what he wanted to do and did that. Ugh. The kids were also into different things. While Dodgeball and Archery interested the past camps, these kids weren't really into that at all. What they were interested in is the rope we hadn't really used until then. Tug-of-war, jump rope and tying me up were all staples of the day. I didn't really mind being tied up though, it gave them something to do, and it was never anything I couldn't get out of. The kids in particular loved to hang out in the ditch in front of the health centre, or in the Trees by the health centre, which we didn't want them to, but they did anyways. I'm really bad at getting kids to listen to me. Which is where Vanessa proved to be very useful. She seems to give off that more authoritative tone, but I refrained from saying that to her. Although I would go up to her and ask her to yell at the kids for me.
Anyways, I also actually went down to Plympton by myself. I grew up there, and the memories just started coming back to me. I even still recognized our old house by the ravine. Hell, I remember playing in that ravine in the winter time. And being in the back of a truck when the brake was released sending the truck headed towards the ravine, but dad was there and managed to stop it in time. Or was that last part just a dream? Hm... I also drove up to Debbie's house, who was a good family friend that I typically visited frequently. They still live there, and their house is almost exactly the same as it ever was. Except for a little extra room they added on to the back. They were glad to see me, and we ate supper together. A nice visit indeed.
With the extra time, and this being our last camp, Bryan wanted to go all out with the crafts. He went and bought glitter and markers for the medallions, and also encouraged the kids to use all our spare quills to draw a circle inside the circumference of the medallions. They were actually really into said medallions, perhaps even more so than any of the other camps. One of the girls started crying when we didn't let her take hers home because it wasn't done drying. We did let her bring her mom in to see it though, and that satisfied her. I decided to have a go at it, too, and I actually made a nice looking medallion that I ended up giving to mom. After the failure of a medallion I made before the camps started, it's good to know I had actually became qualified to help these kids out with theirs. Gerald Gloade, a man who we shared office space with was down there to do a talk about something, but he also came in to talk about petroglyphs with the kids. He had a big slideshow and all kinds to say about it. He pretty much explained it much more interestingly than any of us ever did. I decided to make one, too, and I remember liking it, but now I don't have it and don't remember what I had put on it... hm...
The bead bracelets were done in bulk. The kids liked to just sit there and make bead bracelets, and even necklaces.
They also had a pool, which we eventually let them swim in, but I wasn't in much mood to do any more swimming, so I just watched. At the end of it all, Bryan actually got a nice presentation for the adults going. I helped him out by creating a 100 slide presentation of all the pictures I had been taking up until then. A lot more of the parents had come than before, and they were all very grateful for us coming and teaching their kids a bit about their culture. It made me feel pretty good about the whole thing.
After that, we still had another week and a half of work. And our only real job left was to type up a report based on our experiences. And since I've been writing my experiences on this blog, it wasn't too hard to just copy, paste, and edit around what I had wrote. I was done of the first day. The rest of that was literally nothing but sitting around, occasionally going to Bryan's aunt's house to swim. They held a little lunch party for us, though, and presented all the Student Workers with $50 gift cards for Staples, which I ended up using towards a 16GB iPod Touch. Which, I must admit, is pretty nifty. It makes me feel like someday I'll get an iPhone.
It had seemed that my University arrangements were falling into question, I kept getting calls from Gerald in the middle of work, but the reception at Bear River is pretty bad. After some discussion, I decided to go down to MtA and actually get proof in person that things were in order. Turns out they weren't. So I paid the fees I had forgotten and met Isobel (who was just on her way out) to talk about my room. It seems that she hadn't given me one yet, because I paid my fee late (although I did e-mail her with preferences). Either way, she mentioned that one of the MASSIE roomates had cancelled out on her, and she was really looking for a replacement. She didn't indicate that there was nothing else available for me, but a MASSIE roommate had been one of those things I thought about doing but never really went through with, so I decided to go for it. So I'll be with Shogo Tachibana in Bennet 309 this Fall. What fun!
The rest of the last week has been spent almost exclusively at Dartmouth Crossing/Mic Mac Mall. Mom wanted me to get new clothes and shoes for the new school year, but I'm not really the best at getting clothes. Eventually I got equipped with some new shirts, jeans, shoes and a new bookbag. I even got a new TV Tuner so I can use my computer as a TV and DVR. Which is good, because my TV is pretty big to lug around. All that, and I still have $2,285.12 left!
The insurance for me on the car is only a part-time insurance, so I don't get to take the car back and forth from home and MtA all the time. Which I suppose is okay, because while I do so enjoy the train. But, of course, I really don't like the bus...
Either way, I get to have the car for the week, since mom is expecting me to come back for the weekend, which I typically do. You know. In case I forget something. Even if I don't, it's the perfect opportunity to buy and play the Beatles: Rock Band. I'm okay with leaving my Wii at home, though. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Track Pack doesn't come out until November, anyways.
I guess I should start packing.

I forgot to post about last week, but Bryan has been making us write daily journals about our camp experience, so specifics I might have forgotten about by now can now be recalled!
In general, the camps run from 9AM-3PM, during which time we have to keep kids 6+ years old entertained. And there were in fact a few teenagers there, too.
We left Sunday (July 26) afternoon for our first camp in Glooscap First Nation. We were staying at the Old Orchard Inn, which is about 20 minutes away from the reserve. It seemed nice, but I guess Bryan got us cabins out in the nearby wooded area. Not really too far out of the way, but we were pretty much the only people there for the first half of the week, so it was kind of spooky at night. I wasn't too impressed with that, the TV didn't even have plugs for plugging my Wii into! But we seemed to manage to keep ourselves entertained.

So Monday we arrived at the Health Centre to start our first camp. It's a pretty small reserve, but they did have a pool, which became a major source of entertainment for the week. We started off the morning with some Dodge ball. Kids really seem to like dodge ball. I was personally getting tired of it, but when asked if they wanted to play another round, the kids were all for it. It was hotter than I expected it was going to be, and we were playing outside since there really wasn't any room inside. I shouldn't have packed as many pairs of jeans as I did...
Bryan wanted plenty of pictures of the camp, and I was all over that. I really like to take pictures. The others complained that I in fact, take too many pictures, but that's just how I work. Take lots of pictures so you'll be sure to have at least something good in the end.
Anyways, after dodge ball, we did some Archery. Since we only had two bows, Bryan decided to make a little game out of it, assigning points and making teams. I think he might have set the goal a bit too high though, because the kids started to get bored, and I don't remember if we ever actually finished.
Bryan didn't really want to start the crafts though, because there were two kids who weren't coming that day. Then I noticed the TV they had, and suggested we play Wii. And that's basically what we did for the rest of the afternoon. The kids were really into the Wii. Some of the kids went outside to play with water guns, but then it started to rain really hard. Irony!

Tuesday we started off again with Dodge ball... except we had fewer balls than last time. Some of them broke or tore apart, and the others got stuck on the roof or otherwise lost. But Bryan said that might happen, so we just bought more balls later. We started our first craft, which was making medallions out of birch bark and porcupine quills. The kids caught on really fast, and were done very quickly! After lunch, we played in the pool, which is pretty much what we did every day after lunch. Naturally the kids brought the water guns into the pool with them, and thus there was a lot of shooting and getting wet. Even if you didn't get into the pool.

Wednesday's craft was making bead bracelets. I forget what order they go in, but they were yellow, red, white and black beads. I just alternated them, but some people put them in groups of several beads, which did look a little nicer. Bryan also put a movie on to help pass the time. I think we watched Nacho Libre. That might have been a different day, though. By Wednesday we had discovered that there was a much bigger town in the other direction of the one we were going to. With actual shopping malls and stuff! It was also pay day, so I decided to pick up Dragon Ball Origins for the DS. There's lots of games I've been wanting to play, but I've resolved to limit my spending to one game per pay day, as to not spend it all too quickly. It's a fun little game, and definitely helped pass the evenings. Bryan also wanted to go see a movie that evening, and we ended up seeing Ice Age 3. I wasn't particularly interested or looking forward to it at that point, so maybe that's why I enjoyed it as much as I did. Fun stuff. Shame we missed being able to see it in 3-D.

Thursday the Health Centre had Breast cancer screening scheduled for the same day, so we couldn't use the same room we had been. So we went to the area near the pool and made petroglyhphs, pictures carved into slate, using nails. They weren't all that into it, but at least we had the usual swimming and water guns to fall back on. We had a little barbecue for them, and I think the kids enjoyed themselves. The worker at the Health Centre told us that one of the kids had told their parents that they were really enjoying their time at camp. Which is always nice to hear. We left early when it started raining pretty hard, but didn't head back home until Friday morning.

During the weekend I was able to fix up Mom's iPod. Apparently the battery didn't really lose it's ability to hold a charge, as it worked just fine once I re set it with iTunes. Although it did take a while before the iPod would stay connected long enough for me to do that. The battery was so empty, it didn't even have enough power to connect to the USB. Which seemed kind of odd to me, but eventually it got charged enough to stay connected. The iPod is much better than my old MP3 player. It's just so much easier and faster to browse through my tunes. I spent a good portion of the weekend rating all the songs I had and digging up album artwork for songs that didn't have them. Because I like having a little picture next to the song name. And being able to play specifically my favourite songs.

Anyways, the next week we went out to our next camp Annapolis Valley First Nation Monday afternoon. This time we stayed at the Wandlyn Inn, which actually did have a way for me to hook up my Wii. Score! New Minas was about a 5 minute drive from where we were staying, so we spent a lot of our evenings eating supper or just passing time there.

Tuesday we met the kids. There were 18 of them, some of them much older than they looked. These kids were being paid to come to our camp (heritage is really important to some people), but despite that, they seemed to be mostly into it. These kids also had a pool, which also became the primary source of entertainment.  I wonder if Bear River also has a pool? Since these kids were older, they took to the Archery much more than they did in Glooscap, so we brought that out several times. We lost an arrow though, we searched the whole field, but couldn't find it!

We also learned that we weren't scheduled for Friday, so we decided to not even try. So it was a really short week! We basically did one craft a day, the Medallions, the Petroglyphs and then the Bracelets. There were a lot of petroglyphs and medallions left over, but Bryan left them there so the kids could get them. If they wanted to.
Tuesday night we went out bowling, which I was pretty bad at in the beginning, but I eventually got a bit better.
Wedsnday night, Jimmy, Vanessa and I played some Mario Party 8. It was good fun, makes me wish I had a 4th controller. We also helped Bryan out with his powerpoint. Apparently all he wanted was slides with pictures on them, and was agonizing over doing that, since the pictures were twice as big as the slides, so he had to resize them manually, so I just went and set the images as backgrounds on the slide and managed to do just as many slides as he did in well over half the time. He was very impressed with my ability.
Thursday night we saw G.I.Joe at Midnight (since it's supposed to open on Friday). We got our tickets super-early and showed up at 11, but in the end, there was only like, 10 people there... Once again, not a movie I was looking forward to big time, so I enjoyed it. Compared to Bryan and Jimmy who were super-hyped for it and came out hating it. Bryan said he would have preferred watching Ice Age 3 again. He really liked that one.

We leave again on Sunday for Bear River, the furthest drive yet, and we actually get the entire week there. We picked up our meal cheques (that Bryan forgot to get before the vacation) on the way back home. I got $600. That's like, $200 a week for eating. I'm pretty sure I spend less than that, though, but I still get to keep the extra. Yay, money!

Man, if last week seemed like we were running out of things to do, this week we literally ran out of things to do.
Monday we spent sorting all the quills into little baggies for the kids. About 25 per bag, and a construction paper circle for them to use as a guide for cutting the birch bark. That took most of the morning, which was a good thing because I was still feeling jittery from the coffee beans I had consumed the day before.
we took a trip to the mall to get supplies for making the crafts. Scissors, beads, stuff like that.
This week we were having our Lunches at Bryan's aunt's house! Even closer to the office, it's a pretty big place. They even have a pool! So most of the week we spent swimming during our longer than 1 hour lunch hours.
Tuesday we actually made the birch bark medallions that the kids would be making. Mine turned out terrible, but I think I get the general idea.
Wednesday Bryan wanted to take us to Parrsboro, but the heavy rain and call for thunder showers kind of left us... uh... sitting around for most of the day.
Thursday we actually did go to Parssboro, to Partridge Island (I think) in order to comb the beach for amethyst rocks. With the only real instruction being to look for green rocks to break open and see what's inside. But there's moss all over the rocks, they're all green! After some mindless rock smashing, I guess we actually did find a small amethyst, but I think Bryan was hoping we'd find a really big one, the kind you might find in a store. I found a few shiny rocks, which turned out to be Quartz. I brought them back with me, I wonder if I could polish them up?  Eventually we came to a point where all the rocks were covered with seaweed or something. Very slippery, so after a bunch of deliberation we decided to turn back. But wait, wasn't there more land before? It seemed the tide was coming in, something Bryan didn't think would be happening so soon, so a mild panic started as we made our way back. We probably weren't in too much danger, and I even stopped to try and break open a really big rock that looked like it could have something inside it, but we just couldn't crack into it. Bryan had parked really close to the island (it's connected by an isthmus that's apparently underwater at high tide) past where the dirt road ends, and over larger rocks. You could hear them hitting the car as we drove over it, and in trying to leave, we got stuck in them. After getting a push, Bryan wasn't in the mood to get stuck again, so he didn't slow down as he ploughed through the rocks. After that, the car was showing obvious signs of damage, the most prominent is the constant sound of rocks falling out of it and onto the road whenever we hit a bump or made a sharp turn, that was pretty consistent through the trip home (which we got lost in, eventually getting to the highway at several exits further away from the one we took to get there). Bryan's concern with his car led him to schedule an immediate appointment at the car shop, so he let us off work early. Looking inside the hood, the whole thing was still filled with rocks when we got to the office. On the way home, I stopped at Wal-Mart and picked up a Wii Zapper with Link's Crossbow Training. Not a bad little game, and it came with a code for more coins on my Club Nintendo account!
I asked Bryan about his car on Friday, and it seems as if all of the performance issues with the car were fixed upon complete (and lengthy) removal of all the rocks in there. So that's good, he said it cost only a few hundred dollars, as opposed to the thousands he was imagining in his head the day before. At this point, we really were all prepared. All we did was pack the cars and work was over at lunch. Our cars are really tightly packed, though, will there really be enough room for us and our luggage?
We leave for Annapolis Valley tomorrow afternoon. Mom has suggested I take the SUV. Perhaps that's a good idea. Notably, I can't seem to find the place we're staying at on my GPS. Not even the street name seems to register any response... I hope I don't lose Bryan and get lost on the way there...
I guess it should be easy to find off of Exit 13. I'll keep that in mind.