As promised, Richard has had five of his poems published on a Christian poetry site named www.myujamaa.org. He's introduced on the main page and he's also on this page. I especially like the line in "The Same" that says that we rely on the "fate of our friend."
Mike Coutu is leaving tomorrow to teach English in South Korea, as he writes about here. So long, Mike, and thanks for all the fish.
Braeside Camp is an icon for the pentecostal (PAOC) Christians in southern Ontario. When I was younger, I used to go there for kids camp every year. My mom was a camp counselor for several years and my family usually stayed in a cabin on the camp grounds. I still have a scar that I received there from a chain link fence while playing tennis and I remember begging my mom for a few dollars so that I could buy some Christian Archie comics from the book store. (I still have those comics, of course.) We even brought our cat Puffy there one year.
It was at kids camp one year at around the age of 13 that I received my baptism in the Holy Spirit. It was at one of the kids' services and I went up for that purpose during an altar call. I was sitting on the steps of the stage facing towards the crowd of kids at the front and no one was praying for me directly when the Holy Spirit came. I vividly remember that experience.
Braeside Camp usually ends each summer with a weekend conference. This year, there will be services starting on the evening of Thursday September 1 and continuing until the evening of Sunday September 4. Tim Schwindt, the worship leader at my church (GTA), will be leading the worship times. I volunteered to go out there for morning and evening services to play percussion.
So finally, I've come full circle. I was once the kid at the front praying for baptism in the Holy Spirit, and now I'm the guy ministering in music to those people praying for baptism of the Holy Spirit. Cool.
This past Tuesday (August 16) I went to Best Buy to look at Tablet PCs. Tablet PCs are like notebook/laptop computers, but the screen swivels and folds down with the screen facing upwards, allowing you to write directly on the screen with a special pen. Windows XP Tablet Edition's support for ink (hand-writing) recognition is rather impressive, as the first demo on this page shows. The killer app that I want is Microsoft OneNote, which is like a one-in-all piece of software for thing everything from random notes to drawings to song lyrics to basic recordings. I intend to use it as I work on new worship songs.
Tablet PCs are still difficult to find and Best Buy only had one model for sale (this one). Since they have a 14-day return policy with no questions asked, I decided to go ahead and try it out. Unfortunately, at the price of $3050 with a 3-year warranty and taxes, it's more than I want to spend.
Fortunately, Best Buy also has a Price Guarantee. If you can find the same item advertised elsewhere within 30 days of purchase, you can go back to Best Buy and they'll refund you the 110% of the difference so that their price is lower than the competition. When I was researching prices yet again this past week, I also looked at Future Shop online but they didn't have any tablet PCs at all. My dad, bless his heart, looked at Future Shop again after I made my purchase and he found a new listing. The end result is that I got a refund for $434 from Best Buy because Future Shop's price was $300 lower, once the taxes and the lower warranty price were factored in.
As my sister will testify, there just ain't nothing like a tablet pc. Very cool.
Congratulations to Abe and Melissa on the birth of their son Benjamin Roderick Oudshoorn. Isn't he a cutey?
10) The book stores only have one book in English: The latest Harry Potter release.
9) Pizza Hut calls their Canadian-style pizza Le Quebecoise.
8) Les Cinemas (movie theatres) are somewhat behind the times, apparently because they wait for French-dubbed films. Some theatres did have the latest releases, but I don't know if those had subtitles or dubs.
7) French computer keyboards are hard to use. Y'know how the numeric keys on an English keyboard have a second Shift-character listed above them? The French keyboards have allow for three characters from any one button. I never did find the @ symbol.
6) Small church cemetaries have limited occupancy. People in "Pauper's Graves" get to use a plot for one year before they are dug up and moved to a new location and the space is reused. Others have a much longer time span that is still limited at some point.
5) Gas in much more expensive in Quebec compared to Ontario. Tha elevated taxes have something to do with it, but it's around 10 cents more per litre.
4) Everybody is somehow related to everybody in the small farming towns that dot the province.
3) The Appalacian mountains are cool but they can be a little scary to drive sometimes, like going over the top of a coaster.
2) My great (great-great...) grandfather was a French soldier in the 1700's that was given an enormous plot of land, an axe and a saw in lieu of returning to France. And that's how the Boutin part of my family started life here. (Boutin is my grandmother's maiden name.)
1) French people in Ontario corect the French of non-French people. French people in Quebec correct the French of Ontario people. French people in France correct the French of Quebec people. And we wonder why people think that the French are snobs.
Bonjour tout le monde!
I drove to an internet cafe an hour away from where I'm staying in Quebec. The family reunion was fun this past weekend. Apparently we have a goal of visiting as many people as we can before we head back for Ontario, so we have an average of three visits per day.
Here's a weird fact for you all. We went to Pizza Hut yesterday for dinner. I asked for my favourite, a Canadian stuffed-crust large pizza. That's pepperoni, mushrooms and bacon. The server (not "waitress," right Laura?) didn't know what I was talking about. I reviewed the menu and discovered that they call it "Une Pizza Quebecoise" ici. Weird, eh?
Au revoir. I'll be back in London late on Thursday.
I'm leaving right after work today (August 4) to drive my mom et ma grandmama down to Quebec. We're taking a week to go there for a family reunion. Apparently we're aiming for a small town called Saint-Magloire that's about an hour and a half southeast of Quebec City. And when I say small, I mean tiny. It has a population of around 700 people, as this article explains.
I haven't been in Quebec since I went there by train with my mom et ma grandmama when I was a young child. I only have two memories of that trip. My first memory is getting money for a bag of peanuts on the train, which I thought was very cool at the time. And at the family reunion, someone handed me a hat and told me to go around asking my relatives for money, thus encouraging me towards my future career goal of professional panhandling.
Seriously, though, I expect that I will have a lot of fun. Vive la francais! See you in a week.
I've got one more group picture from kids' camp last week. As usual with my pictures, you can click on it to view the original picture.
After a week's delay, I've finally uploaded a few digital photos from last week's Serengeti Trek, as I promised to my group on our last day. I have a new Kids' Camp folder on my photo website. This first picture is the group that I was leading, with the exception of one missing guy. (As I mentioned previously, I won't post their names on the internet for the sake of privacy.)
