canoe day and oversized ducks

well, our internet has been down for while now so we have been unable to post. telus is (hopefully) coming around tomorrow so we should be back online soon. kylie was just commenting on how entrenched highspeed internet access has become in our lives. we used to use phone books, and city maps, and encyclopedias and pen and paper, and photodeveloping shops; however those things have slowly receded from our lives and now that we no longer have internet access we are finding ourselves inconvenienced by simple things like not having an abbotsford phone book, or a readily available map of wherever we happen to want to go.
kylie also mentioned that it felt like a mental wall had been put in place in her head. previously she had access to almost any piece of knowledge she wished, as well as effortless social connections through both email and blogs. we have grown accustomed to having the world's knowledge base at our fingertips and now that it is temporarily unavailable our mental space has been truncated.
it is a wierd modern (post modern? neopost modern? information age?) phenomenon. how can part of my mind be missing when the change that has taken place is external to my skull? i often hear people in medicine talking about their palm pilots as their "peripheral brain" or "external brain" and it is true. we take all the info that we need to know but do not want to memorize (drug dosages, treatment algorithms, due dates) stick it in a portable device and forget about it until we have need to access it again. if i forget my palm pilot when i am on call i too feel like there is a wall in my head and part of my available knowledge is missing. the internet is the same thing but obviously waaaaay bigger. consider how this is similar to my (or your own) memories of grade 3. they are tucked away in my neural networks, unavailable to my conciousness unless stimulated by intentional recollection or a picture or a smell or somebody's speech patterns. i file them there where they do not clutter up my working memory and then dredge them up when they are needed.
soon i will be able to jack my peripheral device directly into my organic neural network (perhaps that is my sci fi influenced wishful thinking, but the technology exists today, it just needs serious refinement) and then the lines will become even fuzzier.

anyways, all of that was just supposed to be a quick reason for our posting absence... the following is the actual reason for this post.

chilliwack just had our annual canoe day (which i planned) at hicks lake near harrison lake in the fraser valley. the weather was gorgeous and the bbq was a huge success (thank you very much - actually thank you matt for helping me out in a pinch) with lots of docs and their families and plenty of residents showing up to splash around in the water. sorry i do not have many pics b/c i feared to take our camera in the canoe with niko, but i needn't have worried. he was calm in the canoe and loved the whole experience. part of the experience kylie did not love was me going off a rickety rope swing that swung out over a nasty rock and dropped you about 35 feet into deep water. the scary part was that there was about a 1 sec window to let go of the rope that would result in you landing in the water. any error on either side equalled falling on bare rock. from kylie's angle my first try looked like i was going to die, and i took the occasion to yell something like "holy shikee!" as i realized how high i really was and that i had to let go or get seriously injured. needless to say this yell did not make her feel any better and my life flashed before her eyes. the second time she was much calmer, although niko was more worried once he realized what i was up to.
i also really enjoyed the opportunity to hang out with the other doc's kids.







in other news, our friends matt and monique and liam came by for a fun dinner and we put the duck towel that julie made for kylie to good use. cute kid eh?






one more thing. our friend lisa recently came back from living in guatemala. while there she had many amazing experiences including living in a heavily political clown collective, living with a women's collective and making a gigantona (giant puppet) from scratch. these are pictures that need to be seen and so i am linking to them.