My Life so Far

      So far, I guess that you could say that my life has been rather interesting. I was born in Carlisle, England on January 6th, 1981. My family lived in a town called Penrith, which is found just a little bit North of the Scottish Border in Cumbria. I have an older sister and a younger brother. My grandparents on my mother's side lived on a farm not far from where we lived, where my grandfather was a dairy farmer. My grandmother on my father's side also lived (and still lives) on a farm. My aunt on my father's side recently got married and is still living on the farm with my grandmother, because my grandmother can't get around as well as she used to. My mother's brother and my uncle used to live on the farm with my grandparents in a bungalow, but he has since moved down south near a place called Andover with my aunt and my four cousins, Emma, Lyndsay, Melanie, and Christopher. My grandparents have also moved to a new home in a town called Barnard Castle.

      In 1988 my family decided to move to Canada. I was a little upset, because it meant saying good-bye to all my friends and family, but I was only seven, so I wasn't too upset. We left in August in the morning and when we got off the plane in Vancouver I was very confused, because after a ten hour flight I sort of expected it to be dark, but due to the time differance, it was still light outside in Vancouver.

      We spent the night in a hotel and I had a little adventure, because I tend to wander and managed to lock myself out of the hotel room (oops),but the other people in the hotel managed to wake my dad and I was soon safe inside the room again.

      After this we lived with some friends who had emigrated to Canada before us, then rented a house in the Coquitlam area for a while. I'm not sure exactly how long we were there, all I know is that it seemed as soon as I made friends, we moved. The next place that we lived was in Surrey. I think we must have stayed in this place longer, because I can remember the name of the school I attended there, A.H.P. Matthews. Then my dad saw a show on t.v. that took place in Nelson (a town about a thirty minute drive from where we now live). He liked the look of the town and surrounding area so much that he and my mom decided to take the whole family up there on the next vacation that we took. My parents had already decided that they wanted to own a motel so we went up there looking for a motel for sale. As luck would have it, (though I didn't think that it was terribly lucky at the time, since it meant losing more friends) we found a couple that were for sale in a little town called Salmo. My parents that the area was safer than Surrey, which was proved when we went back to Surrey by a murder being committed just a couple blocks from our house.

      We moved to Salmo in the October of 1989, meaning that we started school after everyone else, and, to make things worse, it was picture day, meaning that my sister, brother and I were readjusting to a new school, and having class and individual photographs taken on the same day. It wasn't fun, believe me. Since I was only 8 (grade 3) at the time, though, so it was relatively easy for me to readjust, and I soon made friends with some people, even though I'll admit I'm not at all easy to get along with, and I don't find it easy to make friends.

      I have now lived in Salmo for about 9 years and I really like it here. A lot of my friends think that it's boring, but I like "boring" after living in Vancouver and the surrounding area for my first few months in Canada. I personally find Salmo very peaceful and stable after moving around so much in my early life, and I think that's what I really need at this time in my life.

      Salmo has it's own elementary school (kindergarden to Grade 6) and a junior/senior high school (Grade 7 to Grade 12). My school life has had various ups and downs,for instance, in Grade 10 I missed the first part of the year because I had to go into hospital to have my gallbladder removed. It was only supposed to be a one day deal, but there were "complications" that forced the surgeons to have me transported by air ambulance from Trail Hospital to Vancouver General, where I was kept (much to my disgust, I might add) for ten days. Then, to add insult to injury, I wasn't allowed to leave my house for 6 weeks!! When I finally did return to school, though my teachers were really nice and only gave me the minimal amount of homework and, as an added bonus, I wasn't able to take PE for the rest of the year (ha ha). Grade 10 also the year that my friends discovered my complete inability to handle alcohol of any kind. What happened was this: in Home Ec. class we were told to come up with and create our own menus (all recipes approved of by the teacher, of course). One of our recipes involved wine, but since alcohol is not allowed in the school for any purpose, one of our group mentioned that his mom had some de-alcoholized wine, so we asked the teacher if we could use that. She said that she would have to see how much alcohol was actually in tha wine, so on the day of the our menus she checked the label on the unopened bottle of wine. Since the alcohol content was something like 0.000005% alcohol, she allowed us to use it. Now I take after my mother when it comes to alcohol, so I knew that I shouldn't have any of food that the wine went with, but I don't think that anyone actually believed me, so after a bit of badgering I agreed to try the food. They realized their mistake right after I took my first taste. My face went bright red and I started to laugh and couldn't stop. I was happy for the rest of the day. No one has tried to get me to drink anything even remotely alcoholic ever since.

      The high point of last year was the trip to France that we took. The trip included going to various tourist attractions, including the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Versailles, and ending up in Italy. The plane rides there were exceedingly boring, because they played the exact same movie on the trip there and back. This would have been okay, if the movie had actually been interesting, but as it turned out, I thought it was one of the most pointless and predictable movies I have ever seen (needless to say I slept most of the way there). Then, when we got to France we waited for ages for our luggage, only to discover that it had been left somewhere and that we would have to wait a possible 2 days to get it! Fortuneatly most of us had spare clothes in our carry-on luggage. Unfortuneatly, our first day in France also turned out to be the day that we went on a walking tour. Then, to make matters worse, on the second day (our luggage still hadn't arrived) we went on a tour of the Louvre, got lost and ended up in a room full of mummified cats!!!! Then at Versaille, we were all standing in a big circle waiting to go into the palace when Colleen decided to sing the hokey-pokey and I joined in and everyone was looking at us as if we were nuts, which I guess was understandable at the time. There was also an interesting incident in one of the restaurants we went to. Our waiter was always smiling, and Pam asked us if "he had Perma-Grin". Unfortueatly he heard her and when he came back to our table he grinned as wide as he could, poor Pam turned bright red and was noticeably quieter for the rest of the night. The rest of the trip was fun, but nothing really sticks out in my mind , except that I used something like 15 rolls of film, and the fact that the beach for the Mediterranean was ROCKS! You know how all the pictures of the Meditterranean show all that nice sand, well don't believe it, because all the places that I saw, the beach was rocks. This made it very easy to get into the water, but exceedingly hard to get out.

      At the moment I am in Grade 12. We just had our graduation ceremonies this weekend and I went to the dry grad celebration right after the dance, even thought there was a wet grad going on somewhere else (I think grad is probably way more fun if you actually remember what you did). Dry grad was so much fun, we rented the pool, had big screen N64, had sumo suits, tons of food and gave away lots of prizes. I won a pair of pliers, but, since I didn't want them I gave them to one of my friends, only to win another pair, exactly the same (except for the colour) a little later on in the night.