These make Crocs look like the epitome of fashion and elegance.

My inability to go more than a day without being bitten by some sort of insect does not auger well for my chances of not contracting dengue fever.

I may never see my father again. He and mom have just headed off east to visit my brother. Who has just gotten a Wii, and is planning to get a large flat screen tv in the next week or so. Assuming mom manages to convince dad not to move in, I'm guessing my next visit to Vanderhoof will be graced with either a Wii or a shiny new tv.

I got an early birthday present today in the form of a padded pay envelope. Woot!

The weather has been cool and breezy for a whole week now, but I still don't trust it not to get stupidly hot again before fall strikes for good. Everyone else is relaxing and enjoying it, and I'm sitting here glaring at the sky, daring it to heat up. The only downside is that the cooler weather is making it much much harder to get out of bed in the morning, as I'm not driven panting from the futon in search of ice water and air conditioning.

Three weeks plus a few days until Laos! I shocked my Japanese instructor the other week by admitting that I didn't know how much the trip was going to cost me, on account of I haven't booked any hotels yet. I further shocked her by telling her I didn't even know my itinerary yet, which is not entirely true, but "Go north. Ride an elephant." is not the sort of detail you get on a package tour.

Brides of Christ to battle for beauty crown

By Europe Correspondent Emma Alberici

Posted 7 hours 57 minutes ago

Audio: Nuns compete in beauty pageant (AM)
A Catholic priest in Italy has come up with a novel way of enticing young people back to the church - by holding a beauty pageant for nuns.

The Sister Italia contest is to be run online, but Father Antonio Rungi is hopeful that one day it will take off in the real world along the same lines as the all-singing, all-dancing Miss Italia competition.

Father Rungi says around 1,000 nuns have already expressed an interest in taking part.

"First and foremost there is a spiritual basis for this initiative - to introduce Italian nuns to the world, nuns that belong to many different orders of the Catholic Church, who have devoted their lives to the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience," he said through a translator.

"The criteria is clearly related to the internal beauty of the nun, the spiritual beauty, how they carry out their pastoral work both in the parish and when they are out teaching.

"Another criteria, while not fundamental to the competition but also important, will be their visual appeal. So part of the criteria for entry is that they be only between 18 and 40."

Photos of the contestants will appear on Fr Rungi's blog next week so that readers can vote for their favourites.

Nuns can choose to wear their full habits and veils or let their hair down.

But Fr Rungi does not expect to see any photos of nuns in swimsuits.

"Absolutely not," he said.

"We're talking about nuns here.

"I doubt any nun in the world would have a photo of themselves in swimsuits. We believe it's the face that expresses a person's spiritual life."

From the comments section on this story:

Personally - I hope that there's a praying contest. Each nun sets a goal and then prays to make it happen. They could line up some ill children on the stage and whichever nun cures the most through the power of faith could win.

Four weeks to go!

I was looking at travel insurance online, and if I say I'm from Japan, I get two weeks for $28. If I say I'm from Canada, I get two weeks for $80. Um...what? Is it because Canada is further away from Laos and so would cost more to rush me to a hospital in Vancouver? Canadians are more high-risk than Japanese?

Andrew was kind enough to lend me a backpack, but there's one drawback. It's huge. On the bright side, this means I can fit more shopping in (Laos is known for its textiles, and we all know how I feel about textiles. Plus, several people have requested that I bring them back an elephant.), but I think I will also try fitting everything into my old university backpack and see how that goes. For someone who changes clothes several times a day during the hot weather here, it always amazes me how I can actually get by with two pairs of pants for as many weeks.

Speaking of weather...I think the good times are over. Starting from Friday, the temperature plummeted and the skies clouded over, and yesterday never made it above 24 degrees. I wore jeans for the first time in months and had to find long pajama bottoms for maximum lounging comfort. But now the sun is peeking back out and the temperature is slowly crawling up...still only 26, but I've turned the fan back on.

Still, it was nice sleeping in this morning instead of waking up far too early, drenched in sweat and dehydrated.

I have a huge long break on Wednesdays this month, so I was trolling the internet earlier today for printable nationalities/flags flash cards for one of my classes. I was opening page after page and not finding just what I needed. Finally I clicked on one page that took a while to start loading, so I went off to grab something else I needed. When I returned, I was faced with a screenful of nubile, scantily-clad teenaged girls grabbing each other's asses and a notice telling me I was about to enter an adult site and was I of age?

Yup, that's right....I have inadvertently joined the ranks of those who look at porn while at work.

This is a famous park just outside of Vientiane. I know it looks like a lake now, but that's because the Mekong has been flooding. Luckily, the waters seem to be receding, so I might not have to travel the streets by canoe.

Meanwhile, the weather continues hot and sunny here. Both yesterday and today the sky teased us with the possibility of rain and then withheld it. Tease!

My long weekend was, indeed, long. There is a reason I usually leave town for those. Not that it was boring, just...long. I didn't do much, as is usual for a Japanese summer weekend. Occasionally I would look out the window and think about doing something productive or at least active, and then I would step out of my air conditioned cocoon to go get a drink or something, and remembered why I stay indoors until at least mid-September.

Summer holidays are almost over for the kids and despite having spent the past month complaining about how bored they were, no one is looking forward to the return to school. (Except for, presumably, the parents.)

And now I have nothing to finish with, so I leave you with the chickens:

I think this is the first long weekend in years that I've actually stayed home. Andy invited me over to Tokyo, but I actually managed to resist the siren call (due partly to the fact that I want to save some cash, but if I'm being honest, if he had AC in the living room where I sleep, I'd have been over there so fast....) So far the only thing I've done differently is gone to yoga instead of work. Then I drank some wine rather earlier in the evening than I otherwise would have done.

Do I know how to have a good time or what?

Yum.

Inflatable dog turd sculpture escapes Swiss museum, wreaks havoc
Last Updated: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 | 11:54 AM ET Comments48Recommend141
CBC News
A powerful gust of wind recently swept a house-sized sculpture of dog feces from its display outside a Swiss museum, an art official in Berne said Monday.

The incident took place on the night of July 31, but details of the artwork's escape — and the havoc it caused before its eventual landing — emerged just this week.

The massive inflatable sculpture, created by U.S. contemporary artist Paul McCarthy and titled Complex Shit, is part of the Paul Klee Centre's exhibit East of Eden: A Garden Show.

McCarthy's piece was displayed outdoors, among "weird and wonderful objects [forming] an animated kind of front garden," according to the museum website.

The sculpture is usually contained by a safety system that deflates it during instances of bad weather. However, the system failed on this occasion and the work escaped from the Klee Centre's garden, museum director Juri Steiner told Agence France-Presse.

The wind carried the work away, knocking down a power line and breaking a window at a nearby orphanage before falling to the ground about 200 metres from the centre.

The museum had yet to contact McCarthy about the incident, Steiner said. Officials are also contemplating whether to return the piece to display.

Neil Patrick Harris is a shoe fairy. No, really.

I would like to be in this lady's shoes (or flip flops, as the case may be.) I will call my elephant Stompy, and we will have such fun together!

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

I've been watching the Planet Earth series, and I just finished the one about caves. I really, really could have lived without knowing what the sound of hundreds of thousands of cockroaches feasting on a mountain of guano sounds like. And if there's a more horrible way to die than drowning in said mountain of (your own) guano and being eaten by cockroaches, I really don't want to know about it.

Some fireworks photos.

Meet Captain Obvious.

*banging blocks together*

"Wow, this is very noisy!"

Well, yes. Yes it is.

Captain Obvious' superpowers include the ability to find any food in a room, no matter how well it may be hidden, and the ability to quote entire episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine at will. They do not, however, include bravery, as the good Captain is deathly afraid of cicada husks.

This excerpt is taken from the Times Colonist article on the BC Day ceremonies:

The legislature lawn was a sea of bikinis, short sleeves and hats as more than 2,000 braved the 23 C heat to fill the shade-less grounds.

*speechless*

Sweet merciful heavens, the temperature dropped to under 30 tonight. Ok, so it's still 29, but it's amazing the difference a couple of degrees can make. AND it's raining out, so it might get cooler yet, although I dare not dream that big.

From time to time we get students who are moving overseas. It's kind of stressful teaching them, as the pressure is a lot higher. About four years ago I had two children and their mother for a few months before they moved to America, and now that they've moved back, the daughter has joined my returnee class. This is heartening on many levels, not least of which is the relief that my lessons didn't actually get them killed in their first month.

Today we played a board game that required them to talk about the future. They'd land on a square that would say something like "your breakfast tomorrow" or "outer space", and they had to talk about that. The eight year old boy landed on "school in the future" and decided that he hoped that in the future, there would be robots to do his homework for him. I told him that he wouldn't actually learn anything that way, and he just shrugged that he'd look at the answers when the homeworkbot was done. To which I spluttered "You know, education doesn't actually work like that!"

When I landed on the same square, I wished out loud that in the future, teachers would be equipped with laser eyeglasses, so that when students were misbehaving, their teacher could literally shoot lasers from their eyes and zap them into compliance. The boys especially seemed torn between the personal inconvenience this would cause and the sheer coolness aspect of it.

Ooh, rumbly flashes in the sky. I suppose the sensible thing to do would be to turn this off and go read a book.

We ditched the jazz festival in favour of eating Coldstone Creamery ice cream in an air-conditioned department store. On the whole, one of the smarter things I've done in my lifetime.

I bought an ice scarf today and am very much looking forward to trying it out. It is 9 pm, the sun has been down for a full two hours, it's still 32 degrees, and I don't want to even discuss the humidity index.

Message from SkyMail

At outdoor jazz festival. Slowly losing will to live. Damn you, summer.

My nail lady created this by adding drops of polish to a bowl of water & dipping the nail in. I am SO experimenting at home.

I think Andy is looking to take up a part-time weather forecasting job. His last few messages to me have been all about various high and low pressure systems. The gist of it is, the lovely cooler (well, non-blazingly hot) weather and rain we have been getting this week is due to come to an end and soon we will be back to setting record high temperatures for the next (SIGH) two months.

And so of course the stores are marking down all their summer goods and bringing in the fall stuff. Because who doesn't love trying on cashmere sweaters and knee high boots when it's 35 degrees out?