My Life

I was thinking about life again. I don't know about you, but as a teenager when I think about life, I think about the future. What college I will go to. What job I will get. If I can manage to move back to Canada before the U.S. economy completely explodes. All important things to be sure, but I realized that it isn't often that I think about my early childhood. Except for the occasional wave of nostalgia, I never really try to remember it that often. That is why I am taking this opportunity to write a bit of a record of my life before I moved to Iowa. The real reason for this post is actually not for me to remember right now, though that is nice. No, it's for for the future. I remember many aspects of my childhood fairly clearly now, but will that always be the case? After all, many others are beginning to get fuzzy. I would hate to lose those memories.

I was born in Quito, Ecuador, where my parents were missionaries. We left when I was two years old, so sadly I have no memory of the trip at all. We moved to Pinawa, Manitoba, my dad's hometown. We lived there for a couple of years, and because I was still pretty young I remember very little. Then we moved to Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada. Actually, it is more complicated than that. Technically we lived just outside the Osgoode Township, which (somehow) was part of the city of Ottawa, though we were technically a thirty minute drive away. I still don't really understand all of it though; it was kind of confusing.

As a young child I was actually kind of normal. I enjoyed sports, and I was decent in them. I only played competitively once (little league baseball), but I liked playing pick-up sports with friends. It wasn't until I was 8 years old or so that I started playing video games: a shiny Gameboy Advance. I was a very social person back then, playing with friends whenever possible. Now the thing is that it wasn't always possible, so I didn't actually hang out with friends as often as I would have liked. I wasn't involved in many activities except AWANA and Church, so I was at home a lot. My father had constructed what we called "the play structure" in our back yard. It was a two-story playhouse surrounded by a giant sandbox. The first floor consisted of a counter and a bench. To reach the second floor you had to climb a wooden ladder. At the top there was a deck surrounding an inner room which had shingles and a steering wheel, effectively making the entire structure a giant imaginary ship. To exit the play structure there was a fireman's pole, a yellow slide, and a zip line. The zip line was a later addition, and I can tell you right now it was awesome.

Because we lived in a very rural area, there was a large wood behind our house; a place which I enjoyed exploring. Each of the children in my family: me, my older sister, younger brother found a small section of the wood which we could safely claim as "ours". Mine was a small clearing, perhaps a 12x12 (in feet) square . There was a nice large boulder in my section, which I rested my sticks on. Oh, my sticks. I had two primary ones, I believe. A long thin one (I recall it resembling a spear), and one that was nice and sturdy; yet not too bulky. I loved that stick.

We had dial-up internet, and for some reason we were limited to only using 20 hours a month. This time was usually used to quickly find a game we could download and play offline. Of course, there was one game I played on the internet. It's a little thing called Neopets, an online virtual word where you can take care of virtual pets. The silly thing? It's pretty awesome. It has a fully functional economy with a stock market, various trading centers, an ingenious full-fledged battling system, thousands upon thousands of items, hundreds of games (most of the games were short flash ones, but they do have two RPGs that are each a good 25 hours long). When I had a chance I would sometimes play on library computers. I actually didn't play much when I was young, but I did end up playing that game a lot later in jr. high and early highschool, so it does have significance.

We had relatives, though we hardly ever visited them. The family on my Dad's side lived in the general surrounding area of Pinawa, Manitoba, which if you have good memory skills is where I lived for a few years when I was three and four. This was a three-day drive from where I lived, so I think we only ended up visiting them three or four times (though ironically, after moving to Iowa, we are now only a 1.5 days away, so we visit them every Christmas) . The family on my mom's side live in Oregon, and the last time I visited them was when I was two years old.

Although it wasn't for a few years that I picked a favorite hockey team, when I decided to choose the Toronto Maple Leafs (who are still my favorite team, by the way) it was solely because when I first watched them playing on television, they were wearing white. So I figured that they were the good guys. Now this put me in quite a spot with everyone else I knew. You see, the cities Toronto and Ottawa have always had a bit of a rivalry. For while Ottawa is the capital of Canada, Toronto is the capital of Ontario, the province which both reside in. This rivalry eventually found its way to sports. While Ottawa has the Ottawa Senators, Toronto has the Toronto Maple Leafs. Thus it was quite uncommon for people living in Ottawa (kind of) to be supporting Toronto's hockey team.

I've been homeschooled all my life, but we didn't have much in the way of homeschool assistance programs in Canada. For one year there was a thing called CHEER, but I have almost no memory of it because it was soon discontinued. All I remember is that it was at held at our church for some reason, and that I did some sort of French thing. But I was maybe six years old, so not much was really taught. A few years later a few families would get together once a week and I think we played chess, or something? And I vaguely remember there being some sort of science part of it as well.... But I never really had any real classes ; it was mostly just a few people hanging out.

To come to a climax of this story, when I was 10 we moved to Iowa, and from there I became the boring and pessimistic teenager I am today. So I looked through this post again after the rough draft (hehe, I have time for those now that I'm not in a competition), and I noticed that though the rough draft was filled with some pretty cool stuff, while in the completed version there is tons of boring things added in. Oh well. Also, I found that my writing style was really, really repetitive. But I'm too lazy to correct that.