Time is relative.  When I started my vacation, two weeks seemed like forever.  Now that I’m on my last day of vacation, two weeks seems to have been hardly enough to get started.

I had a lot of grandiose plans when I started.  Some of them came to pass: when Chris was here we did pretty much all the things I had hoped we would, except maybe making it to see a movie.  The airshow was once again a great day, and our boat trip was, arguably, the best ever.  Perhaps not as memorable as the time we boated from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo and back in a 15 foot boat…accidentally.  But it was much more fun knowing where we were and not making any serious blunders.  The scenery and sun were a blast. 

As Chris mentions in his blog, we also spent a fair amount of time playing computer games.  I *think* we actually spent less time than usual playing, at least in part because my computers didn’t have any suitable games installed.  I haven’t had anyone around to play first person shooters or what have you on my LAN in a while, so I’ve sort of let things slide a bit.  I could also almost convince myself that its better to not have the “old standards” pre-installed, and to go out and find something new each time Chris visits…an almost believable rationale for my procrastination.  Battlefield 2 was great fun- I even went so far as to install the server on my Linux box, although currently it is still LAN only (firewalled).

We also tried playing a game on the XBox 360 using two controllers in split screen mode.  The game itself was a flop: I can not recommend Armored Core 4 at all.  My opinion: in their effort to appeal to first person “twitch” players, they totally ruined the battle mech genre.  Mechs should be like tanks: huge, powerful machines that deliver incredible firepower.  In Armored Core 4, mechs are like twinkle-toed ballet dancers, fluttering about the battlefield like a spastic on crack.  Add to this the fact that the graphics are…well, pathetic.  Boring, repetitive and mechanical textures with no sense of “place”: many of them have as much appeal as a deactivated holodeck.  I was extremely disappointed.  That said, I think the split screen mode on the XBox 360 shows some promise: a good game could work reasonably well.

The last four or five days of my vacation have been spent playing XBox 360 games and puttering on my computers.  The computer stuff…well, if you read my previous blog entry at the link above, you can understand that I’m not very satisfied with how that turned out.  The XBox games…a bit of Kameo, and a ton of Hitman: Blood Money.  I’ve been playing Hitman on “easy” as is my usual preference, and having a great deal of fun.  Maybe fun is the wrong word for silently and methodically killing dozens of computer-simulated people.  However, it was very satisfying doing so while my computer reformatted/reinstalled for the umpteenth time.

So, the last day of my summer vacation is half-way over.  I’m not looking forward to checking my work email tomorrow, and am even less inclined to log in and check it now.  Ah well, it was good while it lasted …

Today was my last day at work for a couple of weeks.  I still have work to do, but I am no longer on any kind of clock other than one meeting I’m supposed to call in to tomorrow morning.

I don’t take traditional vacations very often.  You know…the kind where you get on a plane/train/boat and go somewhere a long distance from home.  There are lots of reasons why this is the case.  Firstly, we have a house full of cats that are more our children or our demanding house guests than something so crass as a “pet”.  We can’t very well take them with us: most hotels frown on guests with six cats.  And it takes a lot of arranging to find someone trustworthy enough to care for them who has time to do so that just happens to correspond to when we want to take our vacation. 

Secondly, I’m not really that fond of travel in the traditional sense.  If I could basically put my house on wheels, I suppose travel would be okay.  And if I had virtually unlimited time to bumble around, no rush to get home, and plenty of time to recover afterwards: in other words, my next vacation will be retirement.

I’m exaggerating a bit.  Irene and I do occasionally go somewhere for a day or two.  And I expect that we’ll take a couple of longer trips, maybe a cruise or something, in the next decade.  But most of my vacations take place in my own home or the back yard.  I get to sleep in my own bed each night, and I like it that way.

For this vacation, my friend Chris is supposed to be coming out to visit with us.  He and I will definitely go to the airshow (the tickets are already bought).  I expect we’ll probably go out in a boat of some kind (although if it has a sail on it, I’ll be watching from shore), and possibly visit a museum or the like.  Undoubtedly we will go somewhere and walk some vast distance, I will probably get too much sun exposure, and there will almost certainly be some time with me drinking beer and Chris drinking Pepsi talking about the old days.  Those days back when we did adventurous things like roll 20 sided dice and draw maps of dungeons that only existed in each other’s imaginations.  And quite likely there will be some computer games somewhere in there, probably more than Chris wants to play and not enough for me.

To someone who travels the world, parasailing, mountain climbing, and bungee jumping their way to whatever nirvana awaits them, my idea of a great vacation probably sounds pretty dull.  But I am very much looking forward to it.

Cracking open the vaults of time again….Irene and I celebrated our anniversary back in July (July 14, to be exact).  We took a little 2 day vacation for our anniversary this year, heading to the island on Friday and returning on Monday.  We spent the night in Chemanus, at the Castlebury Inn Bed and Breakfast. 

I can heartily recommend the Castlebury to anyone wanting a uniquely enjoyable stay with someone they love.  We were pampered, and the rooms we stayed in were extremely imaginative and comfortable.  Here’s a photo of Irene and I taken at the end of our ride in a horse drawn carriage that night…click it to navigate to the picture gallery for our mini-vacation