My brother would like to post On Why I Have a Blog/Our Fishing Excursion

"I'm Hilary and I have a blog"(Thats a fancy term for weblog). That's my impression of Hilary(get it?). I asked her why she has a blog. She tells me she doesn't know. I'm not a very good investigative reporter ;(. I guess I'm forced to make my own deductions.

So it's like this: Hilary has a blog and I like cutting fish open. Or not. I'm not very good at this. I guess thats why she has a blog and I don't. She wants me to say "we are in ontario and having fun". Which is no fun. No one would want to read a blog like that. At least I wouldn't. I would rather burn my own flesh than read crap like that. Anyways I'm in Ontario and having fun.

Peace, James (M.)

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Sometimes visiting a cyber cafe is quite refreshing. Other times it's rather boring, after having spent the day doing interesting stuff you would do at a cottage. I feel a bit of pity for James, because I've spent the time here blogging and sending emails, while he watches. So I let him write something down. Maybe it was a bad idea. I'm not quite sure.

It's surprisingly hard to write about a vacation, especially when you're at a cottage because you're having a lot of fun but nothing really significant or interesting happens. We went on a "fishing" excursion yesterday. It was more of a "ing" excursion, because there weren't any fish involved. The fish we were catching are pickerel, or "Walleye". We weren't really catching them though, because as I mentioned previously there were no fish, therefore no catching. We spent a couple hours in the hot sun, before we came back to the island. After this we went swimming, which was very refreshing because of the heat. I decided to look under the dock with some goggles. I was looking around under there, at the weeds and stuff when I turn to the side and there's a fish staring at me, a few inches from my fish. So I go out with a rod and minnow and catch a Walleye under the dock, in less than thirty seconds. Soon I have another. And there's our supper. Walleye are probably the most tasty freshwater fish in my opinion. I'm a vegetarion. But I'm also a fisheatin' vegetarian, because I can't live without seafood. So we had fish for dinner that night. It was delicious. I caught another one under the dock today, so there's more dinner. This might sound utterly unimportant, but it was actually quite exciting. The moral of the story is: "Don't spend two hours fishing in the blistering heat when you can catch a bunch of perfectly nice Walleye's under the dock".

There we go.
I hope that I'll be able to post some pictures soon, Unfortunatly I haven't got the chance so far.

hilary m.

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Hilary left out a detail. The only reason they were perfectly fine fish is because I'm such a master at filleting them. Actually not really. Too bad she couldn't do any of that work due to an unfortunate emotional attachment to "Sparky" and "Spanky". However, it was a good experience. I got to wack a fish on the head till it was dead (enough), and then cut a big piece of juicy meat off of the side. I swear it didn't make me gag or anything. Actually, if anything it made me hungry.

Peace.

Lack of technology never felt this good!

You might be wondering about the title, considering I'm typing on a computer and I seem to be communicating using this wonderous piece of technology. Really I'm just utilizing the wireless internet at a cyber cafe, so it's all good. I've been spending the past couple of weeks on my lovely little island, in the middle of a lake in Northwestern Ontario.

It's great to spend time totally away from-dare I say it-technology. And in a lovely setting. I can swim every day, listen to music, read or just kind of sit there savouring the precious amount of time I am free to spend. The only connection with the "real" world is the radio, which is on quite a lot. My dad bought Sirius, which is even cooler than I realized. There's a very nice, eclectic variety of stations we get. A lot of them are really good. Unlike this crap that's coming from the speakers in the cyber cafe. Oh, and of course we have our CBC.

I have a morning routine going on now. Wake up at 9. Have a bowl of Froot-Loops (yumyum). Turn Thunder Bay CBC on at 10. Listen to Sounds Like Canada and wish that I had a computer to send numerous emails to Jian Ghomeshi. I spend the rest of the day either lounging or swimming, or a combination of both.

So last week on SLC, I heard that Jian was a big Who fan and wanted to go to one of the concerts on their latest tour. Next time I called my dad, I persuaded him to offer Jian two of the fourth row Who tickets we very luckily scored. He hasn't responded yet! I sent an email to Chris Murphy aka Dr. Shrugs that asked if he could help me with my grief associated with Jian snubbing our offer. I'll be pretty sad if he doesn't reply to that also!

Hope everyone is having a good summer, and listening to music a lot better than this country crap that I have to bear. And I hope no one else is getting rudely ignored by Jian Ghomeshi (I understand he gets myriads of emails, but geee).

hilary m.

My summer so far

I left for camp two weeks ago, and I'm very sure a lot has happened to me since then.
The first week was basically learning to climb and belay well, and to river canoe well. We spent two days at Wasooch and Heart Creek rock climbing. It was something I'd never experienced before and I really liked it. I have to admit that I was a bit afraid of heights so I was kinda scared to get lowered down off the huge rock wall. After that we went on our canoe trip, from Ghost Dam to Cochrane. I love river canoeinng, so this was a lot of fun. We got to stop at a lagoon-y area, with cliffs to jump off. Once we found our camping spot, there was a huge hail storm and I found myself hiding under a drooping tarp with everyone else in my group. Five minutes later the sky was sunny and beautiful, ahh Alberta weather. Here's some pictures from the first week.

The next week we went on our four day hike, which basically was carrying a huge backpack up a mountain pass, and yelling "YO BEAR" every ten seconds. There was a really cool cabin on the second day of our hike, that was abandoned and adopted by the hikers and horseback riders. It had a couple bunks and a whole bunch of old food, that you were free to take. We wrote our names down in the guest book. We walked by a horse ranch the third day, called "Anchor D". I found their website! www.anchord.com. The ranch and the cabin were the only civilization we saw, until we reached the campground on the third night. Which had composting toilets and old people. It was a fun hike though. Unfortunatly, my camera broke *weeps softly* before I left, so I didn't get any pictures at all. I'm crossing my fingers it's fixable. I have such bad luck with camera's.

Tomorrow I'm heading off to my cabin. It's a 15 hour car ride. I'll probably be staying in Moose Jaw tomorrow night, instead of Moosimin at the Bates Hotel. Okay. So it wasn't the Bates Hotel. But it smelt bad. Then we'll drive to Winnipeg, get groceries and stuff you can get in Winnipeg. Then three and a half hours and I'm there! I'll be at my cabin for 3 weeks. I love it there. We have our own island (It's very small, and it's been in the family for years) 1 kilometre from the town. I love the privacy of it. It's not necessarily as outdoors as camp, but we only have electricity at night. Which means no phone, TV, computer..microwave. Our water comes from the lake, and our drinking water comes in bottles. It's not like I'm that much of an outdoors person, but after the stress of the school year it's great to get outside and just be away from everything. I'm really looking forward to it.

Camp Songs

I'm back from camp!

Well, only for today. I have to attend my grannies funeral, she passed away last Sunday. I'll be speaking, so wish me luck!

I've had a lot of fun at camp so far, canoeing, rock climbing, swimming. It's been awesome. Here are some songs I wish I could listen to whilst participating in those activities, at camp:

Hallelujah-Performed by Rufus Wainwright (This was playing in the van on the way back from river canoeing, I was about to cry)
Power Out-Arcade Fire (Appropriatly named)
Blackbird-The Beatles
Redemption Song-Joe Strummer & Johnny Cash
American Pie-Don Mclean (Cliche, but it really does well in a camp environment)
Is It Really So Strange?-The Smiths (This is a funny sing-along, if you're weird like me. I even can do actions)
I Want You-Bob Dylan
Complainte Pour St. Catherine-Kate and Anna McGarrigle (One of my counsellors is from Montreal, so I figured this is appropriate since my french is improving a little)
The Mariner's Revenge-The Decemberists
Music When The Lights Go Out-The Libertines
Reconstruction Site-The Weakerthans

There we go, I have a playlist but no iPod.

best wishes,

hilary m.

Bye for now

Well, I'm heading off to camp for two weeks. So in less I find a sanctuary of beautiful computers, I'm not gonna be blogging anything. Or listening to any music. Listen to some music for me, will ya?

I'm pretty excited about it, meeting new friends and going on trips and stuff. At least I have some books to read. I have some book about a kid in a psychiatric ward in New York, my boating license manuel thingy and 1984. I'll probably start with the kid-in-NY book, then maybe my boating license. 1984 is just an extra that I'll probably read at home or my cottage. I just read a Brave New World, so this is the summer of prophetic, depressing books about the future. So, I'll seeya guess in a couple weeks or so.

much love,

hilary.

Lost in time, Lost in space

LIKE YOUR NECK.

Rocky Horror last night was very excellent, and I have a feeling that this is gonna be another blog with pictures.

I was Columbia-in-pajamas and my friend was Magenta. I basically wore lotsa cosmetics, managed to straighten my hair, had flannel pj's and mouse ears for the final touch. I was pretty proud of my costume.

We compiled all of our participation items that afternoon, and we were ready (pretty much) for whatever hit us. This was the first time either of us had attended, so we weren't able to say any lines, besides yelling "ASSHOLE and SLUT" when we heard Brad Majors or Janet Weiss and making a few cracks at the criminologist's neck, or lack thereof. Some of the people in the audience were very experienced in back lines. Participating in the movie was super fun. Why would you not want to throw toast and toilet paper in a movie theatre? By the end I had toast around my feet, confetti on my lap, rice in my hair and toilet paper and cards all around me. And I think I might've lost my rubber gloves.

During the song "Eddie" I lent the shadowcast Columbia my ears. I think she was pretty grateful. Hilary: "Have my ears" Columbia: "Ohhhh thanks" (wears ears for Eddie song) Columbia: "Thanks Babe" Hilary: "Uhh..Thankyou?". I'm pretty lame. But I was good enough to go up to the stage during the Time Warp and dance, which was awesome. Overall, it was just a great experience and I'd love to go again!