Month: January 2024

This past weekend I struck luck and got access to the ROC (Restricted Operator’s Certificate) course consists of SOCP. SCOP stands for Ship’s Operative Cooperative Program. During my stay there, I have learned how to properly communicate through the radio, for example, how to call in a distress call:

Mayday Mayday Mayday! This is Raven Raven Raven, Mayday. Located approximately 10 Nautical Miles south of Esquimalt BC. Crashed against a coral reef, boat sunk, 2 people on board 1 injured. Require immediate medical attention, this is Raven, Over.

I also learned that whilst using the radio, there are certain rules to follow: Don’t say repeat (in  the military they take that as strike again), instead say: “Say again?”, don’t say over and out whilst on the radio (Over means you are waiting for a response and out means that your broadcast is over, no response needed. Over the whole course of the weekend, I have also learned how responsibility spreads upon you. If you broadcast on a military/police channel, create a false distress call, or use channel 16 (coast guard channel) as a fool around channel, all the people in charge have to do is calculate where you are (using the method of triangulation) and pinpoint your exact location. Radios also have different purposes: Broadcast/receive messages, radar, even sonar (they all use waves at different frequencies to receive and send signals. To top this all off, I must say that this $300 course (which I got to go to for free) was worth it and now I am an owner of a Radio License which is good for life.

• Iaroslav Serg Pyrozhok

Sometime near the end of December, my mom thought is would be an amazing idea to go up to Mt. Washington. We start to drive up there and like five minutes into the drive I fall asleep with Free Bird playing in my headphones, and I fell asleep for probably about two and a half hours, so I can proudly say that I listened to Free Bird, on loop, for two and a half hours. Once we got up there we were getting dressed in the car, preparing for the cold, and while I was getting dressed, I noticed that I’m missing a glove. I asked my mom where it is and she couldn’t find it either, then she told me that she was opening the back window (where our clothes were stored) throughout the car ride, and the glove must’ve flown out the window. Soon enough I get a new pair of gloves and we gather our ski gear, and we head outside (we had a scheduled private lesson with a guy named Daniel that would just follow us around and give us tips). We started going down some hills for a bit and then we went up the ski lift. I don’t know if any others experience this but when I’m in a very cold place, I can’t breathe, and the wind on the higher part of the mountain was strong, and the snow in the wind was like ice spikes stabbing into your skin. Once we get to the top and we get off the lift, We start heading down the mountain and while heading down, I tumble a bit (Blake you were right it doesn’t hurt, it’s amazing), but then I get to a part where I was meant to turn left but the wind was so strong it was pushing me right. I took off my ski’s to make sure I don’t get pushed down the wrong path but the wind was almost too strong, after a second Daniel showed up, and I swear, with the ice spikes hitting hard on my face, the intense wind, me trying to put my ski’s back on, and trying to breathe, I had a few panic attacks haha. If it wasn’t for Daniel, I probably would’ve been stuck up there hah. After a while I finally reached the bottom and I found out that putting ski’s on, are a pain in my butt. I praised Daniel and then went back inside. Soon my mom came back in and she told me she broke her phone when she tumbled down on the hill (funny thing, I told her not to bring it while on the mountain). She also told me my brother went back up the lift, and I can’t imagine how much that guy likes to stare death in the eye. After that I went inside with my mom, had a burger (it was amazing), and when my brother came back, he said that he might have broken/cracked his rib, and gotten whiplash. Good job Aidan. (Ps. the next day I was not at all sore but everyone else was)

From what I understand, the pandemic was handled very differently in BC than it was in Ontario. Although I cannot speak for the BC experience, I can speak for the Ontario experience. For a full year, school was online and the province was completely locked down. I remember not even being allowed to go on walks at one point, for fear of infection. After the province moved past that point, I used to take some nice long walks. I frequently used to hit the 11km mark. It was a very enjoyable experience at times, the lack of people being peaceful, and quiet. Although it lent itself to some problems, online school was fun and very low-pressure. The ability to be comfy and stay at home during school hours for a full year was amazing to me, and I most definitely enjoyed that aspect. I did, however, hate one thing: the lack of restaurants! I always loved going to a good restaurant, and during the pandemic barely anything was open. Although, all things considered, it helped me learn how to cook good food, which is a plus. So, all in all, the pandemic in Ontario was a strange experience, some good, some bad, some strange.

Over the many years, I have lived in Canada, surprisingly I have never gone skiing or snowboarding. As many of you must have figured out this entire English blog is formerly on the Mount Washington trip happening on Wednesday morning. I’ve never quite been interested in any winter sports besides figure skating when I was very young. This meant my family and I had never had the intention of doing/starting so by going up any famous mountain on the island. I’m greatly excited about this opportunity, and I believe this first trip will bring many more in the future during my time here in Canada.

At first, I considerably dreamt of trying snowboarding for the first time, however, once I started to notice and better grasp how people realistically do so, I got significantly scared for my well-being if I did so as well. Snowboarding is a dangerous sport for countless reasons, nonetheless, the profound reason that had me cross-examining my decision was how you are supposed to put the breaks when you wish to stop. Instead of pushing forward or some other possible way, you must turn your whole body to the side, press the edge of your board, and lift your heels slightly all at the same time while keeping a good distance from anything nearby. With this in mind, I would have never been able to survive on that snowboard and I’m unruly glad to be able to be going ski instead.

On Wednesday I woke up and saw that it was a snow day. The first thing I did when I got up is I completed all my homework in the morning so that I could have the rest of the day to play outside in the snow with my friends and brother. After I finished all my homework I did some cleaning than got into my snow gear, than went outside to go sledding. When my brother and my friends were outside we all went to the hill so we can sled down it, I went first than my brother came right behind me, as he was going down the hill he ended up crashing into me. After sledding for about 2 hours we went inside to eat dinner and than cleaned up. After eating dinner it was about 7 oclock and we wanted to go sledding at night, we were hoping for another snow day but we knew there would be school the next day. We sledded for about an hour and a half, and than had a snow ball fight afterwards, about 10 minutes later my dad yelled at my brother and I to come inside and start getting ready for bed. My brother and I went into the hot tub and than went to sleep.

I love Spiderman.

He’s my favourite superhero.

He shoots webs.. isn’t that cool?

My favourite Spiderman actors are Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland.

Spiderman’s most iconic suit is red, black, blue, a bit of white, and.. yeah.

Here’s his most iconic line ever:

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

He’s so cool.

Can you guess what the #’s mean in the title?

This is a perfect timing for me to have a personal writing assignment because i got banned off roblox for 7 days because i was doing karaoke with my friends in Voice chat, but my volume was loud so their audio was going through my mic and that got me banned. it was so sad, because it was super fun singing Infront of a bunch of random people but then my voice chat suddenly got cut off and i couldn’t hear anyone, so we switched to a snapchat call instead. soon enough we went into another game, it was kind of a puzzle game and we were freaking out a little because we were all so confused, and then after some hours i left because i went to bed, but we were basically just singing really old taylor swift songs. today i woke up and, unlike yesterday, where i had to wait only 2 days for my voice chat to come back, i actually got banned for a week from roblox :’).

Since I’m in Portugal until early February, as everyone knows, there has been a lot of discussion regarding our family history. It was during this discussion that I discovered the “Mund/Mundt family tree,” which shows the family tree all the way down to the Hack family name. None of these struck me as particularly as the pronunciation section, though. This entire book, in German/Deutsche, is devoted only to my grandfather’s side. My great aunt told me that my name is pronounced [Y-ad-een]. However, I’ve since learned that the Js in Deutsche are primarily pronounced as Ys. Consequently, my name is pronounced as [Y-ad-een] but is actually spelled “Jordyn.” I have relinquished my childhood moniker, Jan, which I now know is pronounced [Y-awn]. With this newly discovered part of my family history, I was inspired to re-learn Deutsche so that I could read my grandfather’s old stories and books written by the best authors of the past. Therefore at the moment my grandmother who lives in Luz (Where I am at the moment) has been teaching me everything there is to know about our family here in Luz and has been re-teaching me German.

Over the Christmas Holiday’s I was in the UK, more specifically England. We were visiting my family and had Christmas Day there as well. I have a very large family and everyone except for my parents and I, live in the UK, so we travel there a lot. I have 10 full cousins, and about 11 half cousins. We flew into Heathrow from Vancouver then drove down to Witney where we spent five days there, including Christmas. Afterwards, we drove down to Devon where we spent the rest of our holiday staying at a farm cottage with everyone. There were about 30 family members staying at the farm split into three cottages.     We went back to Witney for a couple of days before we left to flew back home. It had just rained, and we were working at one of my aunts’ farms. We were bringing sheep in to spray the lame ones with disinfectant and afterwards we went back to the truck, but it was stuck in mud. We spent about 45 minutes pushing the truck out of the mud. Using some of the sheep’s straw and sticks, we shoved it under the wheels hoping it would grip onto it. Eventually we managed to get the truck out just in time to make it to the airport and fly home. It was a lot of fun spending the Christmas Holidays there with family.

Have you ever gone on an endeavor by boat? If the answer is yes, you could easily attest to the fact that specific elements can easily make boating a challenge. Assume you are launching a boat on a lake, calm right? Take this relatively easy situation and tack on several elements, such as wind, other boats zooming past with wakeboarders on the back, and the inboard deciding to not start the minute you launch next to the rocks. You proceed to face a moment of disbelief and you say to yourself “It started just fine last weekend, why not now?!” You proceed to float into the rocks along the shore whilst cursing and carrying on. In other words, a frequent experience in my life. Almost every time, on any bigger trip, we carry this family saying: “The trip isn’t complete until there is a thing” You may ask, what is this ‘thing’? For a clearer definition, the ‘thing’ is something that happens on any family trip that is an inconvenience or a “temporary setback” as we call it. However, every trip follows this pattern of having a ‘thing’. The ‘thing’ might be small, or it might be very substantial, but once the ‘thing’ happens on the trip we can all breathe a sigh of relief and realize that there won’t be any other major event that happens on the trip, relatively speaking. It’s been the same every trip, once the ‘thing’ happens, nothing bad happens for the remainder of the trip

For example, when I was flying solo to Smithers in early August during the summer, all seemed to be normal. Since I had a connecting flight through Vancouver (YVR), I had to fly Victoria to Vancouver, and then Vancouver to Smithers. The first leg went as expected, which is Air Canada’s second shortest route in the network, at just 65km. Aboard a dash 8-400 in the old Air Canada livery, which I do prefer over the new 2016 minimalistic version, I left on time, made it to Vancouver early, (yay!), and savored Tim Hortons from the domestic terminal located in Concourse C. I also had the exact same cabin crew on both flights, which came as quite a surprise to me. I board the flight for the next leg, another Dash 8-400 as expected, as I force the person settled on the aisle to get up for me to claim my window seat. Soon enough, we were pushing back. As soon as the doors close and we start the taxi, I have a mini heartattack when I realize: “Where did my passport go?”. For the record, there were a lot more profanities as I was searching the floor for the god given thing. Finally, I find my passport on the floor underneath my bag, but still a little nerve-wracking. The Smithers Airport is rather empty if you will. The flight I was on was the only scheduled flight into the airport for the entire day. The airport is small as you would expect for a small-town airport. I think I was in the parking lot 30 seconds after disembarking the aircraft. Back to the main point, this was the ‘thing’ that happened on that trip, and I am still relieved that I ended up finding my passport in the end.

Let’s rewind further to the Smithers trip a year earlier, in August 2022, where I drove with everyone else for thirteen hours instead of flying. The drive up was uneventful, but the return home was a different story. On the drive south to Victoria, you come across a smaller town 50 kilometres south of Smithers in the first 30 minutes of the drive. This place is called Houston, BC, not to be confused with Houston, Texas. As we are towing our 55-foot monstrosity through this town on the main highway, we are following this smaller beater car through the traffic light on the west side of town at the 7/11, they decided at the last minute that they needed their gas station coffee (or something along those lines). If you have ever been in a vehicle towing a trailer, you know that you can’t exactly stop very easily, as the trailer almost pushes you forward and makes the truck skid from the load. As this person slams on the brakes, my dad thankfully has a quick reaction time and hits the emergency brakes on the trailer as well as the main brakes on the truck. This is the moment when you see black smoke off the tires in the rearview mirror. Fun times, and I still look back on it.

When we first began this excerpt from the bible, I believed that it would be boring, and I even wondered to a certain extent as to why we are even reading it. However, as it was shown in the book, everything has a meaning, and after some thought, I realised that it was 2 things at once: For if a soul commits a sin upon you, ye shall not keep grudge for long, as well as showing that little signs are important in life, so being more interested in the surroundings is and will be one important aspect moving forward. Overall the story was proven to be an effective source of propaganda (I believe this since: A, although I am religious religion itself takes a toll on a lot of the population, as well as it stating stuff along the lines of “I must love my enemy”, which is really unbelievable/ very doubtedly ever going to happen. as well as B, some people close themselves right to answer effectively, especially in today’s standards where we use big words (swears) practically every other sentence.)

The story of Joseph from extremely well written book. Something that I found  extremely interesting is the vocabulary that they had used in the book such as the words they use, like “Brethren,” “thy,” and “whomever,”.