ME.
    Yep. I'm sure it isn't really necessary to expose myself on the internet like this, although I can imagine worse ways. So this is where I get into my personal history. I was born in Vancouver in 1979 under the sign of Aquarius. My lineage is mostly Celtic. My Grandmother on my Dad's side was born in Ireland, and my Mother's side is almost entirely Scottish. There are also traces of German and Brazilian blood in me. My nationality however, is Canadian. (Born in Vancouver: Duh!? You didn't think I meant that crappy little industrial harbour town in Washington did you?) I consider myself to be very patriotic, which I think is entirely justifiable statistically speaking. (Now where did those numbers on technology, health and education go? Dang, I lost them. Oh, well, take my word for it. Canada rocks.)

    For the first six years of my life I lived in a rancher on Brandy Drive in North Delta. I played with European toys, Lego and Playmobil, as well as following the trends in American toys like Gobots and He-Man. I had a sister for the last two thirds of my time there. So I acted like a regular kid. I played, I fought with my sister, I watched the Muppet Show by the fire after my bath when my pyjamas still stuck to my skin, made snowmen, went trick or treating, went to playschool, the doctor, the dentist, I think I even saw The Return of the Jedi. But it's all very vague in my memory, like I was drunk. I also was registered in all sorts of classes, like swimming, ice skating and piano, but the only one I enjoyed and stuck with was swimming. Then IT happened.

    I started kindergarten. While I had been to preschool, kindergarten was much more than arts and crafts. Here I established three major parts of my personality: 1) being smart; 2) being weird; 3) really liking girls. I never understood the whole Cooties thing, and started proposing marriage when I was 5. But I digress.

    I established being weird by playing with Barbies with another boy, and both of us wondered why it was meant to be just for girls. I also told everyone that Mork from Ork was my uncle. How I established being smart is the clearest memory I have from that age. We were using connecting blocks to learn about patterns, and I think the colours we had were Red, Blue, Yellow, Green and White. Since the other kids were of average intelligence, they made patterns like this:

YBYBYBYBYBYBYBYBYB...

or this

RWRWRWRWRWRWRWRW...

I, on the other hand, made patterns like this:

GGYBBBRGGYBBBRWGGYBBBRGGYBBBRWGGYBBBRGGYBBBRW...

NO - ONE UNDERSTOOD! THEY ALL LAUGHED AT MY CREATION AND CALLED ME A FOOL! BUT I'LL SHOW THEM! ONE DAY THEY WILL ALL REALIZE THE GENIUS OF MY PATTERNS WITHIN PATTERNS, AND THEN I SHALL UNLEASH THEM ON THE WORLD AND RULE ALL BEFORE ME! MWA HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

    To this day I sympathize with mad scientists everywhere.

    My brother was born while I was in kindergarten, so I had to move and change schools. In grade one I started to learn important stuff. I also made several friends, but that number dropped to an average of two by grade three. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

    That was also about the same time that I was enrolled in beavers, and was exposed to camping and hiking. I didn't like it, but I was forced to stay in untill Scouts. Fortunately, by the time I was allowed to choose whether or not to stay, I had learned enough to enjoy the outdoors, and I wound up staying untill I was 18. What, am I off track again? Oh, for crying out loud!

    Grade two I barely remember, outside of the fact that the room was always dark. Apparently I was depressed about something to the point where I had to see a counselor, who established that I hated school because I was smart, not because I was stupid. That's when they enrolled me into explorations, which seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.

    By the end of grade three I had learned how to write cursive, multiply and divide. Those were the basics, and if I really wanted to know something I looked it up before it was ever taught to me, which makes the educational side of grades four through seven seem like a waste.

    In 92 I started high school and it was great. I learned to scuba dive, made new friends, got a girlfriend, went to dances, stopped trick or treating, started being self sufficient, joined the football team, all sorts of cool stuff, and I got good grades without really trying. Grade nine, I learned painful, but still worthwhile lessons. I broke my arm at football practice, broke up with my girlfriend, got back together with her, etc. Grade ten was more of the same. Good grades and dances, broken leg, theatrical productions, the works. I did a little boat cruise to celebrate leaving junior high and moved on to senior high.

    Grade eleven: see grade ten, minus the broken leg. And I quit the football team. Grade twelve was serious. I actually worked to get good grades an succeeded. (93% in physics 12, 91% in chemistry 12, 86% in english 12...) I took four drafting courses and did a career prep program with International Submarine Engineering. I rented a tuxedo and graduated, went back to ISE during the summer and got accepted into engineering at UBC.

    University was expensive and I had squandered most of my money from the summer, so I took out a student loan. The courses were harder and everyone else was at least as smart as I was, so I had to study. And I  took up drinking. I had a great time, but at the end of the first year I failed two major courses and did pitifully in most of the other ones. It was very tough to learn that I wasn't so smart after all, even though I had the rational that I hadn't actually worked very hard to explain away the bad grades. That summer I grossed about $900 working for Sears, was declined for a student loan, and was accepted into Mining and Mineral Processing Engineering. I spent money I didn't have, pledged a fraternity, and once again had a great time, except for the school part of the deal. Around Christmas 98 I realized that I was heading for disaster. I hated all of my classes, didn't like the idea of having to move to kitwanga in order to use the degree that I wasn't interested in getting, and had completely run out of cash. In fact, I hadnt' even gone into engineering because I liked doing math and physics, but because I was good at those courses, and my only reason for staying was the social life. Dropping out seemed like the best solution.

    And the job hunt began. It took me eight months of faxing resumes and searching classifieds before I found part-time work in the meat department of Save on Foods. That was actually a very fun and rewarding job, but I had to have full time, so that October 1999 I found full time at a Petro Canada station. That Job wasn't too bad, I started out as a full serve attendant, then I became a cashier, then a lotperson (translation: joeboy) for the repair shop. I worked there for two years and paid off my student loan, saved up some money and went back to school.

    I learned to dive in '92 and figured it might be fun to do that for a living, so I took a refresher course while working at the gas station and when I left I went to the North Island College in Campbell River to take their commercial diving course. I spent about 2 weeks in the classroom, and about six weeks diving monday to friday on both scuba and surface supply. I found the material really easy, and it felt more like a vacation than going to school.

    I came back home just before Christmas, and enjoyed a couple weeks doing nothing. Then it was time to start looking for work again. I had been hoping to find work in the BC interior, but that doesn't ususally pick up untill the spring, so I sent off a few resumes to some dive companies and got some temp work through Manpower to tide me over untill the end of February. I wound up helping Whirlpool with a recall, just as a grunt to help the repairman, but after a while I started to get a little antsy because I wasn't using my education. So I left that job and started applying to companies that did fish farm diving.

    I wound up getting  a job with a company in Port Hardy, which is quite a long way from where I live; 45 minutes to the ferry, 1.5 - 2 hours
across to Vancouver Island, 4.5 hours driving up the coast. All in all, a pretty long trip. But I was making some decent money, so I bought a car and a cell phone, and to start I was working a week on and a week off. However, that didn't last too long, and eventually I only got the weekends off, which doubled the amount of time I spent on the road and the amount of money I spent on fuel and the ferry. I worked there for about a year, and my expenses kept going up, and it got to the point where the money I was making wasn't worth what I was spending. Couple that with time on the road and away from home, and I decided to quit that.

    So, from March till June I worked here and there with Manpower, and I searched for full time work. I had enough of a cushion saved up that the bills wouldn't overwhelm me for a few months. In the end I was registered with not just Manpower, but also Ranstad and Proactive Personnel, all temp agencies, non leading to full time positions. I had a couple of interviews in warehouses out in Langley, about an hour's drive from where I live, but they didn't lead to anything. But in the beginning of June I got an interview with Seaside Paper Products, and I came away from it with a good feeling. I had a second interview three days later and was hired on the spot, and I started work the next day. The shifts are 12 hours long, but I only work seven days out of fourteen, with the option of more days for overtime. So far it seems pretty good, and I'd like to stick with this and see where it takes me.
The Pictures
Having suffered through all that reading, here's what I look like.
My siblings and I. We decided to turn upside down because we mostly don't like taking normal pictures, they're so boring.
Disco Steve. I got this costume for a themed camp in Ventures. I think that was the year we took home the spirit award. Last time I wore this I was told I looked like a greasy Italian pedophile. That's a scary haloween costume.
The baby-poopoo dance. I am using photoshop to protect the innocent. Okay fine, they aren't innocent, I just didn't bother asking if they minded having their faces on the web.
The captions say it all.
This is what we did at camp in Ventures. Actually, the theme was weddings, and we didn't have enough girls in the group to have a flower girl for the scavenger hunt. That's the drunken uncle beside me. I get the impression floral prints aren't my thing.