My last day at the farm and my first Hockey game

After my 4.25 hour shift at the gift store this morning, I quickly walked to the Bay Centre in order to find something to eat for lunch There were several fast food stores and in the end, I decided on a greek pita with lamb. It was actually quite good but as I wasn't really feeling full afterwards, so I still had a chocolate chip cookie. Next, I walked to the bakery to buy my usual bread. This time, the salesperson reconized me and asked me directly if I wanted the 'rye with wheat', which I did.

My last shift at the Beacon Hill Children's Farm was supposed to start today at 2:45 PM. However, it was raining a little bit on my way to the farm. Consequently, I wasn't really looking forward to working outside with the animals. Once again I got lucky and the rain stopped just before I arrived at the farm.
My first task today was to clean the water bowls of the ducks and the chickens and to bring them their food. After I was done with that, I could spend the rest of my shift with the goats. As a volunteer, I was supposed to clean up the goat poop while being in the petting area. Since there were also two other people, another volunteer and a staff member, working in the petting area, I mostly just enjoyed my last time with the goats by petting them, letting them climb all over me and letting them try to pretty much eat all of my clothes. There was a little goat which actually managed to jump on the fence and then out of the petting area a few times. This really surprised me as it was my first time seeing a goat 'escape' and I hadn't expected the goats to be able to jump that high. Like so many times before, my last shift ended with the goat stampede. After that I quickly went home.

Katrina had managed to get two cheap tickets for tonights hockey game, the 'Victoria Royals' vs 'Kamloops Blazers'. Going to a hockey game had been a must do on my list of things I wanted to do in Canada, so I was really looking forward to going to this game. After taking a quick shower and eating some dinner at home, we went to the 'Save on Foods Memorial Centre', which the game would take place. There was some kind of beginning ceremony, where the players were introduced. Furthermore, the whole stadium was singing the national anthem 'Oh Canada' again. I felt like I really should try and learn the lyrics to that song as it seemed to be sung around here quite often.
Then the game started and it was really exciting. It was a really fast and violent game, which actually made it very fun to watch. After only about 5 minutes, one of the players of the Royals got hurt by another player, which tempted a few players to fight each other. Katrina told me that this was what usually happened in those situations.
There were two intermissions and we used the first one to get some popcorn. Even though I (like pretty much everyone in the stadium) was rooting for our local team, the Royals, they lost with 2 : 5. Just 3 seconds before the game ended, the players started fighting each other and it seemed to turn into a big brawl. It didn't change anything about the final result, though.

The Corn Maze

After sleeping in, I went Downtown around noon in order to pick up my paycheck and get my rent for next month. I quickly went home after that in order to eat an omlette for lunch. When I was done with that, I already had to leave again.

I was taking a bus to the Camosun College Interurban Campus, where I met with Simone and together, we took another bus going further up North. Both bus rides together took me about 1.5 hours. We got off the bus a little too early and consequently, we had to walk about 1 kilometre until we finally arrived at the corn maze. I had always wanted to go into a maze but until now, I had just never had the chance to do that.
Just before entering the maze, an old lady with a little boy drove past us in her car. She reconized me at once and after a while, I also reconized her - I had met her months ago at some concert in the Victoria Harbour area, where the little boy had danced impressively to the music. I had also met her again a few weeks later, when she happened to come into the gift store. At first I had been thrilled to see her again at the gift store but that had changed when she gave me a flyer of Jehova's Witnesses. Since that day, I just thought that she was a bit creepy. Therefore I wasn't really happy about seeing her again. Luckily, I lost sight of her right after we paid our entrance fees for the maze.
In order to make the maze more interesting, there were 6 game stations all over the maze. We got a map with 12 locations marked and the information that the game stations were located at some of the marked spots. At first it seemed pretty easy to find all of the lacations with the help of our map. Simone had started leading the way and after finding the first two locations, we switched the leading role. The maze actually consisted of two big mazes and we found 3 of the 6 game stations in the first maze. When we started the second maze, it didn't seem much different from the first. It was my turn to lead again. However, after finding game station number 4, the actual path seemed different to me than the one on the map. I still tried leading the way and then suddenly, we were completely lost. We couldn't even find the way back to where we had started and walked disorientedly through the maze until meeting some other people. Unfortunately, they were lost, too. We kept walking random paths until we finally did find someone who knew where we currently where. Apparently, we had skipped two map locations and were close to the location number 10. After arriving there, we got the information that there is no game station at number 11 and thus, we only had three more map locations to check out, which wasn't too hard anymore. We were done with the maze after a bit less than two hours.
Just when we left the maze and walked in the direction of the bus stop, the bus passed that bus stop and drove right past us. As the next bus would be here in about two hours, we decided to try and walk to another bus stop. That other bus stop was located about 3.6 kilometres from us, right at the Victoria Airport. As we would be home an hour earlier that way, we deided to walk to the airport instead of waiting. The walk seemed extremely long and it also wasn't very comfortable as there were no paths for pedestrians. In addition to that, the sun was slowly starting to set and it was getting colder by the minute. By the time we arrived at the airport, we were freezing a bit and so it was really good that we could wait inside the airport for 20 minutes until the bus arrived. We had to transfer buses twice until we were finally in the bus that would bring us straight home.
 

Back at home, I had a salad and some nachos for dinner while watching some tv.

Horror Movie Night

Just like yesterday, I was working from 9 AM to 5:30 PM. We were supposed to keep checking the size stickers of all our t-shirts and to tidy them up. Unfortunately, we were extremely busy today, so that we already spent most of our time helping customers and cleaning up their messes. In addition to that, we got all of the personalized bracelets from another store and were supposed to combine them with our bracelets. As I like doing the name programs, I took care of that. With all these things going on, the store definitely wouldn't be ready for the visual shirt check tomorrow, but I let my coworkers worry about that.
Before and after work I had to run some errands like buying a top up card for my Canadian phone, a bus pass and some groceries.

After getting home, I took a shower and prepared my dinner. I was trying the nacho recipe that Sara had showed to me a few weeks ago.
As soon as my meal was done, I started watching 'The Conjuring 2' with Katrina. I also gave Katrina some of the nachos to try. Even though she ate all of it, she said that the sauce was a bit too sweet for her. Granted, there was brown sugar in it but I didn't really taste the sweetness in combination with the nachos, so I liked my dinner.
The movie wasn't as scary as 'The Conjuring' since a lot of it seemed even less realistic in this sequel. This was actually due to the movie makers embellishing and newly inventing some events. The two movies were both actually based on true stories and Katrina wanted to show me parts of a documentation on these stories after the movie. However, I was suddenly so tired that I almost fell asleep after just a few minutes of one of the documentaries. Thus I quickly went to bed instead.

Chaospiracy

My 8-hour-shift today from 9 AM to 5:30 PM wasn’t too bad since I was busy most of the time. In the morning, I had to recount the food items which I had counted the day before and afterwards, there was a lot of restock to do. Restocking was kind of fun today because I remembered several people who had bought those items from me yesterday. In the afternoon, I had to check and tidy up t-shirts in preparation for another inventory. I will still have to work on that tomorrow, too.
 

After work I had a piece of pizza with a coke for dinner and then went to yellowjacket in order to play some magic. There was a Chaospiracy Draft tonight, which meant that I got to draft magic cards from two or three different booster packs and then play with them. It was a multiplayer duel with 5 people and at first, I didn’t do too bad. In the end, everyone was close to dying and it was really tough to decide what to do. I could have killed a few players with one damage spell but that would have left me vulnerable. Thus I waited, which was a mistake. In the end, I tied for third place and still got another booster pack as a reward. One of the people who were at the magic store also took the same bus as me after the game and we ended up chatting a little bit. He was a student from Norway and had just won the other multiplayer round that had been going on.

Drafting and the game took about 4 hours so that it was around 10:30 PM when I got home. I still watched another episode of ‘Suits’ with Katrina, though.

Another long work day

I got up unusually early this morning even though I only had to start working at 10:30 AM. The reason for that was simply that I needed to wash my hair. I went back to bed after that for about an hour, though. During that one extra hour of sleep, I actually had a weird dream. I dreamed about taking a ferry to Salt Spring Island with some friend a few hours before work as I had planned to just take the next best ferry back. However, when I arrived on the island in my dream, I found out that the next ferry would only leave there in the evening and thus I was stuck and couldn't go to work. When I woke up because of my alarm clock going off, I was happy that this had just been a dream because missing work this way would have been very awkward.
Anyway, I got ready for work and as it was still a bit early, I stopped at the bakery on my way to the gift store.

My first 4 hour shift today wasn't too bad, as we had some restock to do. I was off at 2:30 PM and quickly went home to make some lunch. While eating my califlower with mashed potatoes and eggs, I watched some TV. This was pretty much all the time I had to relax, since I needed to go back to work soon after that.
My second shift today was from 5:30 to 9:15 PM. The first 2.5 hours of that shift were extremely boring, as there were almost no customers and there was nothing to do. After that it got quite stressful as we were supposed to count all food items for an inventory. In addition to that, we were also supposed to vacuum afterwards and in the end we were just done with all of that in time to close the store.
Back at home I made myself some dinner and watched another episode of 'Louie' and 'Suits' with Katrina.

Sunbathing, Mystic Vale and a quick stop at the hostel

The weather was extremely nice this morning. Thus, I decided to go out and read while sunbathing around noon. After about half an hour, I had finally finished the book 'Slaves of the Mastery' and as I really enjoyed the sun, I just kept lying there for a while.
Katrina had given me some leftover califlower that she couldn't finish herself so I cooked some nice califlower with mashed potatoes for lunch.
Afterwards, I joined Margo on a leisurely stroll around Mystic Vale. By now, the clear blue sky had been replaced by grey clouds but we didn't really mind them. The Mystic Vale trail was a little more confusing than I had remembered it so that we more or less walked into two dead ends at the beginning of our walk. They weren't really dead ends though - we probably could have kept walking but I just didn't feel like jumping over a stream, even though it wasn't very wide.
I felt so humbled by the beautiful, huge trees again and I really enjoyed being surrounded by all the nature. On our walk, we saw a big beetle and a big spider. Apart from that, we heard a lot of different birds singing all around us.
After we were done with the walk, we took the next bus back. Margo still wanted to go on to Oak Bay and I quickly went home in order to relax a few minutes and have a snack before work.

My 3.75 hour shift at work this evening went by pretty quickly. As there had been a lot of customers in the afternoon, there were a lot of things to tidy up and when I was done with that, I spent the rest of my shift organizing and counting some abalone shell jewelry.
Before going home, I stopped by the Ocean Island Inn in order to say goodbye to Jay, who would be leaving on a long trip soon. I had expected to find people playing rock-paper-scissors tonight but for some reason, they had abolished that event. Instead it was movie night at the hostel. As I didn't feel like watching some random movie and I also didn't want to disturb anyone by chatting with Jay, I left after a few minutes.
I actually managed to miss my bus stop on my way home. In fact I didn't just miss it... by the time I had realized that I had gone too far, I was already two bus stops further North and by the time I got off the bus, I was three bus stops too far. Thus, I still had to walk for about 15 minutes to get home.
At home, I watched another episode of 'Suits' with Katrina before going to bed.

Lunch at Glo and Jakki's Birthday

It was my turn to clean the bathroom today, which is what I did this morning after getting up, taking a shower and eating breakfast.
I was meeting with Pam and Dave for lunch at Glo today. I was the first one to arrive at the restaurant. In fact, the others were late due to the traffic. Pam and Dave also brought Klaus, another friend of professor Gamst, and Rosa along. It took a while for all of us to decide what to order. In the end, I had some vegetarian pasta with pesto linguine, which was really good. The restaurant offered a nice view as it was right at the water, although there was also some kind of garbage dump. Due to our sitting arrangements, I mostly only got to talk to Pam.
Afterwards, Dave and Pam brought me home.

Katrina was just about to go for a walk with Jakki again. It was Jakki's 16th birthday and Katrina wanted to do something special for her. As I didn't have too much time left before work, Katrina proposed walking to 'Dairy Queen' and getting some ice cream for us and Jakki. This time, I tried a sundae with hot fudge while Jakki had just a cone and Katrina had a dipped cone. It was really fun to watch Jakki eat the ice cream almost like a person.
After the walk, I had just enough time to edit a party hat on a picture of Jakki for Katrina before I had to leave for work again.

When I arrived at work, Grace told me that Amy had tried to get in touch with me since she wanted to switch shifts. I was a bit confused since I hadn't seen any messages from Amy. Nevertheless I agreed to the switch. 
My shift tonight was rather boring as there were almost no customers and pretty much nothing to do.
When I finally arrived back at home, I still watched an episode of 'Louie' and an episode of 'Suits' with Katrina.