It's Christmas Time

Only a few more days until Christmas, excitement is building, the kids are out of school, programs are shutting down until the new year, and the shelves at stores are starting to empty.

Have you gotten your Christmas shopping done? You might want to get onto it...

Remember to remind your friends and family how much you love them, and maybe even give joy to someone who doesn't have any this time of year.

But in all this, let's not forget to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, and remember that hope came to man kind as a baby in a manger because we could not make room for him in the inn.

Merry Christmas.

On Christmas Trees

And so it's December

And the tree's been put up

Another batch of cookies,

And a new one's just begun!

 (Try singing that to the tune of "So This Is Christmas", it kinda works)

 Well, not actually, but I'll get those done sooner or later.

But hey, Christmas season is started!  And that means Christmas trees!

Thompson is the most northern place I have ever lived, and as a result, I'm still not used to how late the sun rises and how early it sets.

But Christmas trees and all the other decorations give us light during these days closest to the winter solstice.

Much like Jesus gives us light in our darkest time.

It's almost as if we were celebrating His birth or something...

The First Black Friday

So I was reading my Bible last night, and I came across something that is a propos to current events.

The passage is 2 Kings 7:17-20.

Context: the Syrians had lain seige to Samaria and there was a famine in the city. The prophet Elisha came to the king and told him that food would soon become common. Two lepers later decided to go to the Syrian camp and discovered it empty. This is where my exerpt starts up.

To paraphrase some more (If you want to know how the verses actually read, look it up), the officer whom the king had stationed at the gate that day had originally scoffed when Elisha had said that food would be abundant. When the people learnt that the Syrians had abandoned their camp with all the food, they rushed out to plunder all the food and trampled the officer to death.

Every year during black friday, store workers get trampled to death by shoppers rushing to get whatever goods it is they want. It's not funny, but at least we know it's not a new thing.

A Match

It's funny how you can know a simple truth yet not understand it.

If you spend time on the internet, then you're familiar with how supposedly "bad" 2016 has been, how the world is falling apart, and so on and so forth.

I don't want to comment on whether the world is coming to an end, I'm not here to analyze the U.S. election, and I won't wax poetic on the lives of all the celebrities who died this year. All I will say is that we've had a rough time and we're in for an interesting time over the next few years.

On a more personal side, my town is not exactly the  happiest place on earth. There is a lot of brokenness, drugs and alcohol are so often a problem, and suicide and murder seem to happen way too often for such a small town.

Sometimes it's hard to see the light. But we need to remember that a match shines brightest the darker the room. No amount of darkness can keep the match from shining, and even if it only lights up one small room, the room cannot be dark.

There will always be darkness, but when you look up at the night sky, the darkness of space cannot stop the stars from shining, the darkness has to disappear: It cannot fight, it can only get out of the way.

Are you a light? Am I a light?

To See His Handiwork

I got to have a bit of fun the other day.

I got called in for overtime, because someone had to come along in a flight to help a disabled passenger get on and off the plane.

I spent about two and a half hours in flight, though unfortunately I didn't get to take the controls. Fortunately, it was a beautiful sunny day here in northern Manitoba, so I did get to see the gorgeous views of the lakes and forest.

Then today I woke up to a dense fog covering town, and it's still here now as the sun sets! I went for a walk in it, and I found it beautiful and haunting.

I think that it is important to look around at the world we live in to see the marks of our creator. Both these little adventures I've written about today are very different. One day I was flying through clear blues skies, admiring the lakes and forests; in the other I was trudging through the mud, slipping on ice, unable to see far because of the fog and trees.

Yet in both, I could see God's creation.

We're blessed here because we are so close to nature, the forests stretch as far as the eye can see out my window, but it's easy for it all to become mundane and I appreciate the reminder that these experiences are to look and see God's handiwork.

I don't know what to say.

So a few weeks ago I said I would post on here every two weeks... I'm at two weeks (sorta, I'm not counting my last post about my thumb), so I sat down in front of my laptop and I have no idea what to write...

Well.

So...

Hmmm...


My thumb is doing better, I can play my violin again, so that's good.

It's kinda funny actually, not having an operational thumb, I have to be creative with how I do various things, it makes you appreciate how good it is to have two opposable thumbs...

Yeah. Sometimes it's hard to write a post every two weeks, sometimes nothing interesting happens, and I don't have any concrete ideas to dump onto here. I guess that that is life!

On the plus side, I went for a nice walk yesterday. The snow is nice.

I Hurt Myself!

So this isn't exactly news, seeing as it happened almost a week ago, but I've been busy.

So, story time (there won't be pictures because it's pretty gross)!

As some people may know, I work for a small airline as a ramp attendant. This means that I have to take carts of bags and take them to the plane (there's a lot more, but that's all that's important to this story).

So, I was at work, and I pulled a cart out of the baggage area. This cart weighed a total of about 600 pounds, and I had to pull it by hand to my vehicle where I was going to attach it to the back of another cart. Now as you can imagine 600 pounds carries a lot of momentum, so what often ends up happening is that we just line up the hitch with the pin of the cart we're attaching it to and let the two carts hit each other. They're very tough so this doesn't damage them.

So I'm pulling this cart towards the other cart, line up the hitch, and somehow fail to get my thumb out of the way before impact. So my thumb took the entire impact of a 600 pound cart going at a reasonable speed (the ground was sloped)... Ouch.

So my boss took me to the hospital. I got an x-ray, and amazingly nothing is broken! There's a fair bit of damage to the blood vessels (more on that in a minute), and some other damage to the tissues, but that's about it.

Now, because of the blood vessels breaking, there was a lot of blood pooling under my nail, so the doctor drilled through it to relieve the pressure. It was honestly the worst part of the whole experience.

Anyways, They gave me t3s for the pain, and I was back at work two days later (probably not the brightest idea, but there you go. My brain was pretty foggy from the drugs anyways).

So why am I writing this?

Well, I'm on my first day of my week off, and it still hurts a lot, and of course it's my right thumb so I can't do pretty much anything I like. I can't hold a pen or pencil, I can't hold my violin bow, I can't operate all the buttons on my camera (another reason why there aren't any pictures), and I can't go sledding (the snow looks great) because I don't want to hurt it any more.

So basically, I wrote this blog post out of extreme boredom.

Shouldn't I be studying or something? Probably.

Well Then...

So it's been two weeks (ish), so here is another blog post!

Last time, I mentioned a simulator evaluation (I think), which I did last Thursday. It was quite the adventure.

So without further ado...

Story Time!

The original plan was that I would fly down to Winnipeg for my eval on Wednesday, do a practice on Thursday, the eval on Friday, and fly home to Thompson on Saturday. It all started to fall apart on Wednesday when the weather was absolutely awful, and my flight was cancelled. Shoot. Fortunately I managed to book a ticket on the Greyhound that left Thompson at 2200, and so I arrived in Winnipeg at 0800 on Thursday morning, ready for my practice sim at noon. That's when I got an e-mail saying that I would be doing my eval Thursday after my practice. Yikes! So I went to the training department, and did my practice sim. It went smoothly, and during the de-brief, my instructor/examiner told me that he would count that practice as the real thing, and so I passed my eval without knowing I was actually doing it.

Plus that meant I had all of Friday to enjoy Winnipeg, which was unacceptable, and so the weather decided that it should rain hard all day.

Well, God is good, I passed and can (sorta) relax now.

Which brings us to today... It snowed quite a bit last night because I wanted to go fishing today. I honestly don't think I can get my car out of the parking lot... When I took these photos I was up to my knees in snow...

Well, It Has Been A While...

Yeah, it has been, hasn't it?

So what's goig on?

Well, I'm still in Thompson working for Perimeter as a Ramp Attendant waiting for a flight-line position.

There are a few steps that I have to complete before I can "get the call" to go flightline: a Metro systems ground school, which I completed at the beginning of August, and a Simulator Evaluation that I will be doing on October 7th.

Wait, did I say October 7th? In two weeks?

Yes, yes I did. Guess what's been occupying a lot of my time lately?






<- Practicing for the sim eval







So besides the panic of this evaluation, we've had fall arrive here in Thompson, and it's actually really nice.

When I'm not working or studying, I've been doing some fishing, reading, and other shenanigans.

We decided that we couldn't drive through that puddle, so we continued on foot, thinking that the lake we wanted to get to was near-by... 3 hours later and we finally made it and still had to hike three hours back...

I also went to Saskatoon to visit my sister, which was nice, and I rented a 172 to do a bit of flying while I was there.

So life here is good, even though it's getting cold again...

But that's neither here nor there.

I've said before that I've been called to mission aviation, that's why I went to Prairie in the first place. Now what I'm doing here is not mission aviation (though of course we are called to witness wherever we are), but I'm not giving up on full-time missions at all.

It takes experience to be a mission pilot, and I'm not just talking about flight experience. Here in Thompson, I am getting the aviation industry experience that I need, but I'm also getting valuable experience in being a witness for Christ in "the real world" while doing everyday chores and while doing my job.

Allow me to recap: I'm sorry I haven't been posting, I'm having a good time, life's good, I'm doing my sim eval soon (Deep breaths!), and I'm always preparing for the mission field.

I'm going to try to get a writing schedule going for this blog, I'm thinking bi-weekly... we'll see how long that lasts.

 Hey mom, guess what we saw at the zoo? ->

An Anticipated Adventure

So I went on an adventure!

You see, about 45 minutes out of town there is a waterfall called Pisew Falls. They're pretty, I've been there a couple times now, but there's also another fall...

Kwasitchewan falls! (10 imaginary points to whoever can pronounce that name on the first try).

Kwasitchewan falls are the tallest waterfalls in Manitoba at 14 meters (Everyone from the mountains, you can stop laughing now; this is a prairie province), and is more than just a bit out of the way. As you can see from the picture, it's a 22 kilometer hike, they say to plan twelve hours, though I think ten hours is plenty.

Anyways, I hiked the loop with a friend of mine. The trail is called "The Upper Track Trail" and follows the Grass River. This is waterway is important because in the late 1700s it was used for fur trading because it led to the Saskatchewan River and finally the Hudson Bay. Of course there was a lot of competition between the Hudson Bay company and the North West Company at the time; something you might have learnt about when you were in highschool, depending on where you live.

But enough about the history.

The trail follows the river all the way to the Kwasitchewan falls before turning back around along Phillips Lake and back to Pisew Falls. The trail is narrow, rough, and challenging, but also very beautiful.

After about four and a half hours we arrived at our campsite. Another twenty minutes brought us to the falls, the main reason I wanted to go on this trip in the first place.

The falls, though not the tallest I have ever seen, were pretty darn amazing. The best part (in my humble opinion) was that, because the falls were so off the beaten track, there was no one there and there were no silly safety fences or signs. The were rocks jutting out over the falls that we could just walk out onto and admire from.

 

But the awesomeness of this trip doesn't end with the waterfalls, because that evening, after a rather strong storm, we got a great sunset.

 

And so, after bearproofing our camp, we went to bed.

The next day we hiked home. The second part of the trail is a bit longer, and much
harder, but after five and a half hours (and two territorial grouses), we were back at the car and on our way home.

So, if you ever want a fun adventure in northern Manitoba, go check out the falls, it'll be worth your while.

Post-Grad

So I went to visit my College this weekend, it was grad so I figured I ought to go say hi. I actually decided that last Tuesday night right before my shift ended, and since I had the next week off, I decided to leave the next morning.

So yeah. I drove ten hours last Wednesday, then another four hours on Thursday to get to Three Hills in time for chapel (it was cancelled).

It was great to see my old friends and celebrate as many of them graduated, but now I'm home in Thompson and have *nothing* to do but think.

Throughout most of the last year or so of my college career I was looking forwards to getting out. I couldn't wait to start my own life, to get a job in industry, and live on my own.

But now that I have  all that, I miss college. I miss getting to just walk into my friend's room and sit down and chat, I miss texting them as soon as we were out of class to go find an abandoned home or a ghost town or a windmill.

But then I remember that I just wanted to leave, and I suppose that it's easiest to remember the good times, especially when the bad times are in the past, and I wonder what I will cherish about this chapter in my life once I move on.

So graduates, remember the good times you had, forget the bad, but don't forget that, as John Green says, "nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed".

Goodness, I sound like I'm old...