oh well

The Samuel L Jackson/Fiddy Cent movie that had begun filming in Spokane has been moved to Canada due to Union issues. I've heard that a good deal of exterior and some interior footage was shot, so there will likely be Spokane-ish parts in it. Although, during typing of this entry, I read that it may be coming back to Spokane from Canada. Due to Union issues.
At least Samuel L has time to shoot some more scenes for his surely fantastic movie, Snakes on a Plane. Guess what it's about.

Hint: It may involve both planes and snakes.

oh noes!

Well, it's finally happened. I think I might have some sort of illness. As today is the first day of my Spring Break 2006 and I get to work for six hours this evening, that's just great. Nothing makes idiotic customers with their demands easier to deal with than what feels like a temperature and what threatens to be a terrible hacking cough.
I drank a Cherry Coke given to me in a dorm yesterday. That must be it. I get an illness for hanging out with people.

Lovely.

whale ho!

Reading Moon Tiger has given me a hankering to write my own life story, but not in a James Frey way, in a non-chronological, well, Penelope Lively way. So here, from the somewhat distant past, is an adventure in Canada. It was pretty much the only one we had.

We had given up trying to contact John McFarland, a man my dad works with who --supposedly-- has a large ocean-going boat and who --also supposedly-- was floating somewhere out in the colder reaches of the Pacific Ocean. We (myself, my brother Evan, my sister Erica, my father, my step-mother, and the two step-siblings aged young and younger) glided out of the bay and onto the deeper waters. The sea was calm that day, my friends. A low mist hung to the flat surface, but dissapated farther out. It was even warm, meaning one only needed a single coat to ward off the really biting cold.
Seals were occasionally surfacing, seagulls were occasionally flying overhead. My dad inadvertently caught a sea slug (max. 12 per day) instead of another fish and Evan kissed it, it was slimy and had short throbbing spike-like protrusions. Anyway, the day was lovely, I hadn't even had an urge (that I recall) to throw the step-siblings overboard and drive off laughing.
A couple hundred feet off one of the various bows a humpback whale crested and dove. Then, not a minute later, it came up again a little farther off. The law dictates that you have to stay at least 50 yards away (correct me if I'm wrong) from a whale. Of course, because we were the only vessel in sight, we went closer. We followed it for some time, it cresting and diving, us motoring and then floating.
The boat we were in was a sixteen foot Boston Whaler. They are unsinkable, untippable. You can cut it in half and it will still work. (Scroll down, it got angry when I linked directly.)
The whale continued to go about its business. Its tail was probably twice as wide as the boat was long, white on the bottom, great knots and bumps on the edges. As it would surface, we could see the spray from its blowhole and hear the air being exhaled. Then, when we were about 20 or so feet away, it dove. Because we were so close, my dad had turned off the motor so as not to disturb it.
We watched it swim under the surface and I realized just how enormous it really was. If you have not seen a humpback whale up close, in its natural habitat or perhaps suspended from the ceiling in a museum, there is no way to describe or understand just how huge it is.
Which is why it came as such a shock when, en route to the surface, the whale --this giant whale that in all likelihood carried a prophet or a wooden boy with donkey ears or a mad seacaptain in its cavernous belly-- seemed to decide that it rather liked the little patch of ocean we were currently floating on.
My dad, watching the whale on its journey, made the insightful statement that IT'S UNDER THE BOAT and tried to start the engine. It gave a little putter and started on the second try, by that time I could confirm that humpback whales probably could capsize a Boston Whaler, as their back stretches wider than the boat.
But it surfaced, not under us, but another 20 or so feet away. Then the rubber raft came toward us bearing two offical-looking Canadians.

Not to arrest us, but to tell us about the whales.

Thanks to Dave Barry for suggesting I choose this to write about.

live! from dullsville, washington

Yeah, I haven't been posting much. Things at the store are dull. Things outside the store are dull. Dull, dull, dull.
I do have to write a story for my fiction class though, so I might post it here as I write.

In other news, my brother's email was answered. By the Strong Bad. The name is "Kat" because he had a cat on his lap at the time. Rock rock on.