Lei

When I Close My Eyes

When I close my eyes, the world comes alive. The people and places that I see are far beyond reality. Why can't life be like this? Why must life be like this?

When I close my eyes, I can die. Sometimes it is most frightening. Sometimes it is not to my liking. I try to escape because sometimes life can be like this.

When I close my eyes, everything disappears. Everything disappears before appearing to be near. Numbers that I do not like. Names of no significance. Feelings. Feelings both good and bad blur into more thoughts, all to point somewhere here.

When I close my eyes, I see darkness. Black as night with all the stars inside. Bright and sparkly, they cease to desist. I am the star. I am the night. I am the darkness all around.

I keep Going

My thoughts are filled with things which I can not control. What should I do? Where should I go? Why should I be? Everything seems so confusing at times that I am compelled to just give up and run away. Destiny, fate, purpose and faith, what good are these?

A gust of wind blows and blows me towards somewhere which I can not see. There is no sidewalk or path clearly laid out in front of me. Just the two or three feet, that is all I can see.

The wheels keep going. The ground keeps rolling. And I keep on going.

The Relatives Are Here and The Wedding Is Cancelled!

My relatives were in town last week and being out of work, I took the opportunity to spend as much time with them as I could. I drove them everywhere it seems all to keep them preoccupied with things to see and do. Especially the little ones. A niece and nephew who are both just teenagers. I was surprised to see how tiring it was to do all of this while at the same time continue to take care of daily business. Such activities included driving to Whistler on thursday for a lot of site seeing and a walk arond Lost Lake. Then stops along the highway back towards vancouver only to be late for ballroom dancing lessons which my mother had arranged. We didn't make it and my mother became quit upset because she was not able to show off her dancing abilities to more of her relatives.

Later on we went to the video store to rent some movies. They picked out 'Life Aquatic with Steve Zeuss' and 'Guess Who'. I found out that my two teenage relatives tended to stay up really late like somewhere between two and four in the morning on a regular basis so they stayed up and watched these movies. But after spending a long day on the road to and back from Whistler, they could only get through one of the movies leaving the other one for the next morning.

The following afternoon, I took them to a local indoor batting cage. Christopher, the older of the two teenagers wanted to try it so the other one, Melissa came along having nothing else to do. With the machine set between 55 and 65 mph, we could barely hit the ball. Probably in the neighborhood of 20% for me and 15% for Christopher. When it was Melissa's turn, we slowed the machine down to 25 mph. She had moderate success until she asked me to turn it up. I did and she began to hit the balls with great consistency only missing four or so pitches. Remember, we are using regular fastballs and not softballs. For a young teenage girl who doesn't particularly care for sports, she was pretty good. A few times she hit the ball straight back towards me while I stood behind the handfed pitching machine taking photos through an opening in the safety net. It looks like we have found a new talent for her.

The previous day I also received a somewhat expected call from a former coworker. There was to be a wedding on the recent sunday but the call was to inform me that the wedding was cancelled. Back goes the wedding gifts today. A heavy gauge muffin pan and a pair of fancy silicone oven mitts. Have you ever seen such things? They now have oven mitts and other assorted baking pans made of bendable and soft silicone instead of the traditional coated metal or aluminum. Anyhow, I believe the keg of beer was already purchased and the groom and many of his friends held a drinkfest staying up until 4am saturday morning before deciding to go out to Richmond for a hike by the airport. Saturday evening I joined them at a restaurant for the cancelled wedding dinner.

On the day of the former wedding, we went hiking up Grouse Mountain instead. There is a trail which runs up to the old lift which is shorter, easier and with considerably less people. Not too far away parallel to this trail is the Grouse Grind which has become a standard and tourist attraction as well as a really aweful workout for many. Some like it, many do not.

Here the former groom sits on the right beside his long time friend from highschool. Together, the three of us enjoy the short ride on the new quad chairlift on the ski run known as the 'cut' atop of Grouse Mountain. I am rather surprised at how well the odd photo is coming from a camera phone.

Mysteriously, this person appeared and managed to get into the following photo. Security on these chair lifts is rather poor.

These are my feet. See how they fly in the air just like those cheesy chinese kung fu movies.

My feet approaching the bottom of the chairlift. Unfortunately, my camera phone can not properly show the view of Vancouver because of the sun and high contrast.

On the hike down, we took a slightly different path and found this. When was the last time someone saw a can of diet pepsi like this?

The former groom hiking down as fast as he can. His other friend has disappeared down the trail.

Again, we come across an item of interest. Just like the flight of the wedding came to a crashing halt, this jet engine is all that remains of another plane from long ago.

A closer inspection by the former groom.

Fuz, as we call him, performs some basic tests on the material properties of this engine by hitting the cooling fins with a rock.

We see it in the movies all the time and now it has happened to someone I know. Time to pick up the pieces and move on.

The Headless Hiker

Fear plus opportunity equals regret. That is what was inscribed on a wooden post inside the small hut at the camp site. This phrase sticks in my mind as there were only a few shots which I now wish that I had taken instead of worrying about the result. When Tsubame and I were climbing down the nearly vertical rock face off the side of Fissle Peak, I could have taken a picture of him perfectly in focus with the huge moraine and the Overlord Glacier blurred in the background. It's the type of shot which would have shown well the immense size of the great outdoors compared to one human's attempt to experience it up close. The other picture which I regret not taking thinking that I would be taking too many shots with the similar up close style and blurred background is again of Tsubame as he trudged along slowly on the trail. We were leaving the camp grounds and had to hike back up to the top of a small hill where a large cairn was built with a bunch of rocks. With the trail as a path leading directly to Tsubame, the rocks on the ground in the foreground and the Spearhead mountain range and glaciers behind, Tsubame upper body was just exposed above the foreground horizon. Another perfect picture of the great outdoors which I neglected to take in favour of some photos of mountain bikers in the bike park lower down on Whistler mountain. I only had a few frames left on a twenty four frame roll of film. In the end, I ran out of film and didn't even get a shot of some mountain bikes flying down the trails.

And so Tsubame's photo of me attempting to climb down without a head is right. I made all the wrong decisions in choice of film length and shot selection and now I will be glad if I get even a handfull of descent shots out of this trip that I like. Where was my head at you could ask and maybe I smoked too much of that huge mushroom.

This couldn't have happened given that we did not encounter this mushroom until the end of the trip on the long and painfull hike back down to Whistler village. All is not lost however as we can easily "stage" these photos again simply by going back on another trip however unlikely this may be.

I was slowly starting to feel better after the series of 'liver flushes' the other week. And during the hike, I could at times feel some slight discomforts inside my upper abdominal area. It wasn't my stomach and it wasn't my lungs but near the same spot which has bothered me before. Today I ended up with a headache which made me feel weak at times. It slowly dissipated when I left hot Surrey to go to Jericho Beach and watch some friends in a windsurfing class.

The weather has remained hot and every time I pass the Pacific Boarder store on West Fourth street, I get the urge to go and buy a surf board. MSN's home page recently had a article on the top ten places to go surfing. One of the things which I think I'd like to try is getting close ups of people surfing somehow. Similar in nature to the outdoor action shots which I could have taken on the weekend hike to Russet Lake and Fissle Peak behind Whistler Mountain. Anyhow, the top ten is as follows with number one being the best of course.

10. Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain
9. Kandahar Beach, Mexico
8. Huntington Beach, U.S.A.
7. Isla Ensenada, Panama
6. Surfers Paradise Beach, Gold Coast, Australia
5. Tamarindo, Costa Rica
4. Jeffrey's Bay, South Africa
3. Buzios, Brazil
2. Papara Beach, Tahiti
1. Waikiki, Hawaii

Soooo. All I need is to buy me a board, find some cheap flights and take some lessons... again.

A Picture of the past week

Last wednesday kicked off the first evening of four in the HSBC Celebration of light fireworks competition at English Bay. The weather was perfect and we were able to set our equipment up at a good spot. It was only too bad that my first stab at a fireworks photoshoot was a bit of a flop. There were no problems with focusing or aperture settings but the exposure timing was off or too long in some instances. As a result, I got pictures after a spectacular pattern had just fizzled out into the darkness of the sky or ones which were filled with too many explosions. I will have to go back this coming saturday for the fireworks finale to do another photoshoot. Looking at the website for the event, there are some downloadable photos except that I find them to be not very appealing either. Artistically, the composition and even the content aren't very good as they aren't that much better than mine. Maybe you will see a future entry on what not to do when taking pictures of fireworks.

There were three of us together taking photos with our cameras and tripods. Craig is a fellow budding amateur and Jorge is a studio model photographer from Mexico. I met him at the Photoclub meeting the other week as he was looking to network and get a foot in with a local studio. He had a portfolio with him displaying a collection of his work from back home. There were many young models, middle aged pregnant women and one photo of the Mayor of his small town. They were all very good as many of the other club members remarked. One went so far as to give him advice on how to apply for his own exhibition in September at the same gallery that the photoclub just had theirs. Jorge has been doing professional studio photography for the past six years and being a new person here in Vancouver with sometimes no one else to talk to, he was very happy to make my aquaintance. He has an easier time talking to me than most people and is very open to helping me. So far I haven't come across anyone who has not been open to giving advice.

I received an email asking those interested in a photo contest in London from the club and spent this evening going through all the photos I've taken in the past year from my trips. Many of them good and some bad. The Swan's from London, friends from the San Francisco road trip, candid shots of more friends on the Oosterdam cruise and in Disneyland, and the Maui wedding including the woman that I met and her son. In our backyard, we have planted a number of bamboo plants amongst the other bushes and small trees. When I first saw the bamboo shoots stand up with their leaves sprouting over me, it reminded me of a similar photo of my relatives standing in front of a large group of bamboo plants at a pineapple plantation in Maui. Every so often, my sister n law will bring us a pineapple from the Costco in Washington state. A funny lesson for us after packing a suitcase full of Hawaiian pineapples and other fruit only to find out that they could be purchased locally nearby.

At first I thought my photos were good because of the candid nature of the pictures. The spur of the moment strike a pose shots which I find much more appealing than the standard touristy pose beside a monument, and believe me, I have those as do everyone else. Then I think that maybe I like them because of my personal relationship with the people. Does my empathy towards them bias my opinion of the photos? What would a total stranger think if they saw the pictures which I would show? How would it make them feel and is there a mood to the photo?

After the evening of badminton almost two weeks ago, I decided to buy a Victor Discovery Ti 58 racquet. It was the only thing I could find in the middle price range. Everything else was either really cheap or really expensive. And no sooner than I had made the purchase, I chipped the frame in a clash with my playing partner just hours later. Lets face it, I suck at the game but hey, it's fun. On saturday one of the members held a movie night in the theatre room of his condominium complex downtown. The unnannounced movie which we watched was "A World Without Thieves", winner of last years Hong Kong or Asian film festival. I highly recommend it despite some of the farfetched actions of the characters but being an asian movie production, it is not to be expected. We watched the film in mandarin and I spent most of the time trying to match the speech to the subtitles. After turning down the offer to spend one month with the chinese snowboarding team in Whistler thinking that my mandarin wasn't strong enough, I've decided to work on my mandarin. On my bookshelf I still have the two text books from the mandarin class I took at UBC before my one and only trip to Peking many years ago. I think I was supposed to return those books at the end of the term but that was nine years ago...

Project Red Neck Truck Revival has begun. The appointment with the bodyshop has been made for the back end of the truck to finally be repaired after all these years. I'm surprised that the small dent has only rusted so little. All four tires were replaced with a set of rare Toyo Open country A/T's. I say rare because the 225/70R14 is a rare size and not many tire companies make it. I had the outlined white lettering put on the outside thinking that it would give the truck a more sporty look. Maybe it may have backfired but its done now and I'm stuck with it. There was also some hidden damage from the accident earlier this year. The radiator mount was found separated the other day which means that the whole radiator will probably have to be replaced. I don't mind this little freebie as ICBC will have to pay for most of it I hope. Fingers are crossed...

The free time has been good as it has allowed me work on my health without worrying about planning my alterred meal plan and sleeping pattern around a day job. The pain and discomfort has come back to the extent that I can't take a deep full breath. It's like there's a blockage inside. I decided to do a series of consecutive mild liver flushes last week. Both were successful but another one is needed. Everytime I do it, more stuff comes out and there's an instant relief. Unfortunately, I feel that it is not completedly unobstructed yet requiring further attention. No more crappy post softball pub food. I'm glad this week is the playoffs. The season will finally end and I've turned down further requests to play hockey for the rest of this month.