It's long so get ready.

I am leaving in 8 days to go visit my family for Christmas. I'm hoping that it will be a clear day outside so that I can see the coastal mountains at their finest. Now that I know how to work my camera a little better maybe it will be possible to get a few better pictures this time around. I guess we will see. It's a beautiful view though.



I always enjoy flying, and this time around I'll have someone I know with me so that will be kind of nice. It's only a 55 minute flight which definitely beats the minimum 10 hour drive. But of course that flight only takes me to Prince George and there will be about 2 hours of driving afterwards to get to Fort St. James.

It's been awhile since I've had some extreme weather. I haven't seen more than 6 inches of snow in quite some time and I haven't felt temperatures below -8 in 2 years. I'm going to be a complete wimp when I get there and I know it. I checked out the weather forecast today and it's expected to hit the -20's by the weekend up there in PG and FSJ is usually 5 degrees colder. So I'm almost expecting it to be -30 by the time I'm there. There won't be nearly as much snow as there was the last winter I spent there but there's still a fair amount already.



I'm planning on doing a few things up there already. I have an elk draw so I'm hoping to get that filled. If I end up getting one of those then I will have to do a nasty drive back to PG to drop the meat off at the butchers. I will have to have my dad pick it up for me since they'll hang it for at least a week or two, and then butcher it. I have no idea how I'll get the meat, I suppose I will have to drive up sometime to pick it up or see what it would cost to DHL it. But the DHLing idea just sounds a little weird so we'll see. I might see if anyone I know will be coming down this way with a truck anytime soon and have them bring it down if they can.


Of course with all the snow there's a few things I want to check off my to do list. Outside of visiting of course.

1) Build a snow man.
2) Go sledding.
3) Go snowmobiling if possible.
4) Shoot an elk. (hunting in the snow will be a first for me but it's going to be so hard gutting anything in that type of weather so it should prove interesting)



Already the Christmas plans are getting frustrating. There's still the battle of who wants to see who when. My mom isn't doing Christmas dinner this year, instead her and some friends are doing a sort of pot luck dinner together. She wanted me to join them. Normally I would love to and it'd be a blast, but it's Christmas and to me it's a pretty personal holiday. On top of that I have a few things that are extremely important to me, my sister is my number one concern because I promised her I would be there for Christmas this year. I can deal with not seeing the rest of my family but holidays are still so extremely important to her, especially Christmas.


Normally how Christmas has always worked is we rotate days every year. Christmas morning I always spend at my dads first, and then we go out to moms. Christmas dinner is at dads house one year and moms house the next. Since the last time I was there I had dinner at my dads place, so technically I owe it to my mom to spend dinner with her this year... but it's not even at her house or with just the family. So because of that I've changed plans and told her I would do dinner at dads and then head out to her friends house afterwards. She however replied and told me that was fine but that she gets to have my brother and I on Christmas Eve. Also raising a problem because I already told my stepmom that I would do Christmas Eve with them at dads. So now I don't even know what to do. I'm 21 and should be able to make these decisions a little more easily, and if it wasn't for the fact that my sister is still so young I wouldn't care who's place I was at, but since Hannah's my priority I choose to spend the time with her. Even if I spend Christmas Eve at my moms then I'll still have to come back to my dads later so that I can wake up with the kids in the morning and just ugh. It's like this every year, and every year it feels equally shitty. I know my mom wants to spend time with us because we're her kids so obviously it's just as important to her as it is to my dad to have us, but it's almost as if she forgets Hannah exists.


Ah well. Enough of that. As I was finding pictures of my family, I realized again that I don't have any new pictures taken of my dad and I. And sadly enough when I look through all the family photos, there's very few, and I don't have ANY pictures of my siblings, dad and stepmom together. So I'm making it my goal this Christmas to get a family shot for once. I have no idea how I'm going to do that, maybe I'll see if I can borrow Dario's tripod and just set up the timer or something.

This picture has no relevance I just like it for some reason and I found it while picture searching.

Anyways... I ended up taking a bit of a trip down memory lane and found some gooders. I helped Alicia move Wednesday/Thursday (I even met Papa Quan!!) On Wednesday she asked me if I ever keep stupid things that remind me of Dario. I honestly couldn't think of anything because we aren't big gift givers so I don't have a lot of physical things to keep around, but I am definitely a picture person. I didn't think I had so many but when I when through the album titled "Dario" I realized I have the stupidest pictures saved and I don't even know how long ago he sent them to me. Some of them were sent even before we met.

Like this one for instance:
And somehow I still fell in love with him. I bet you ten bucks he doesn't even remember sending me this picture haha. But oh yes, I kept it. I believe this was taken when he went to Kamloops with Naomi and friends. I could be wrong, I'm not sure, but I THINK that's where it's from.

Dario and I yes, met on the internet. The whole story is long and I'm actually a little embarrassed to tell people the true beginning to it all but I suppose I could share some details. Dario and I started talking probably 3 or more years ago via the stupidest website ever. Yep. Hot or Not. HAH. There. I said it. GAY I know don't even harp on me for it. He had a picture up where he was arm wrestling someone, and I'll be hnest... his arm got my attention haha. It even made me completely disregard his unibrow. And then I realized he had a really nice smile and he was tanned so I thought what the hell, lets talk. So yes, my initial attraction to him was based on his arms and skin colour. WEIRD I know.

So we started talking on msn and nothing ever came of it, he was a nice guy but for some reason we didn't really have much to talk about. In fact he ended up blocking and deleting me. I had two e-mail addresses, and when I decided to quit using the first one, I re-added my old msn list to my new msn addy, I never even noticed he was never online anymore so I couldn't even remember who he was when I found him on my new list. It was approximately a year after we had initially started talking. He accepted it for who knows what reason and we still had the odd conversation. Nothing major. I was dating a guy at the time. And then someone else. And it just seemed like I was pretty much always in a relationship. When I ended the relationship with Andy he had ended up being one of the only people online that night and I guess I needed someone to talk to. He listened. And I don't really know why, he had no idea who I was but it just all seemed like perfect timing.

We sent pictures back and forth and kept talking and eventually the conversations ended up growing longer and longer. Sometimes lasting hours without evening realizing it. So here's a few of at least 50 that he sent that I find amusing to share.

He sent me this one to show me that his friend Sonia was just as white as I was. :) How sweet haha.

Not really any clue why he sent this one. Probably to show me what he looked like clean shaven? And I would say he looks miserable clean shaven. In fact, all three of them look miserable in this picture haha.

I have pictures of Alicia the aussie before I even had a clue who she was!! And a picture of Danielle with highlights... which I gotta say, looks very nice.

I got this picture as a text message one day. Dario's chalk line busted at work and exploded all over his face haha. So he thought he'd prove to me that he does get dirtier than I did when I worked at the sawmill.

Finally Dario and I decided to get ballsy and meet. He flew up to PG and I met him at the airport. He had mad gas and tried to blame it on some guy on the plane, and I pretended to believe him haha. We got along great and he stayed up north with me for 9 days. Everything went even better than we expected I guess. We even had our first measurement argument of whether or not the board was a 2x8 or 2x6. Here's proof that I in fact was right and it was a 2x6. So beat that Dario. I WIN!

I ended up flying down here in May 2007 for a week and we hung out some more. And as crazy as it all sounds, we had only spent those 2 weeks in total together when I decided to move here in July of that year. We weren't even sure what was going to happen but I guess everything worked in our favour. We impacted eachothers lives in very huge ways and have ended up where we are today. So yeah, that's our story summed up, but the embarrassing secret of how we met is officially out. So there you have it.

Oh and Alicia Q. here is the disaster of what I did to Dario's hair... after he'd almost fixed it from the screw up. I gave him a nice big jackass type bald patch at the back! haha

And still my favourite picture of Dario ever :) ...