I've decided a while ago that I was going to make a few changes to my lifestyle and habits. The big impetus for all this is to get more energy into me. I hate feeling tired, and I don't like being distracted. Furthermore, I don't like generally being unhealthy. I'm not the worse I ever was, but I think I can be better. So many people have speculated that I survived a serious case of meningitis and made it through intact, because I was a healthy and active person. I can't say I'm that same person I was two years ago.

I just came back from the grocery store. I totally destroyed my little cart by lugging around 2 large backs of topsoil for my soon to be instated daffodil garden. But I also picked up a messload of fruit. I now have a bowl full of bananas, clementines, pears, and a couple of pomegranates. I also have a large handful of lychees in another bowl. I love lychees. On top of that, I picked up some frozen field berries. I always manage to rot fresh berries, so in my world, frozen berries are a genius innovation. I also purchased a single serving blender.

Blender + frozen field berries + soy milk + organic honey = yummy smoothie. I made it as soon as I got home. I think I'm about to become a smoothie person.

So anyway, I know I'm going to be in Toronto for tomorrow and Saturday for a birthday party (and coming back to St. Kitts for New Year's) but until then, I will be subsisting mainly on fruit and fresh vegetables. All this in preparation for a month of no caffeine, no refined sugar, no alcohol. I'm not sure what I'll be giving into first, but I sure as heck am going to try.

Because I've been away, and hadn't expected the internet to be down over at my family's house, I didn't get a chance to finish my wishlist. There's only really 3 more items. One of which is:

#8 The Nintendo Wii

Occasional ventures to the nearby EB and Future Shop has still left me empty handed, but that's alright. I'm not going stress over owning one just yet. I'll wait patiently until it's available with all the bugs (i.e. flimsy wrist straps) have been sorted out. I can't wait to try out the new Zelda though.

Well, I knew that I would be venturing off to my family's house in Mississauga to do the whole Christmas thing, but I didn't quite take their warnings of “we have no internet” quite seriously. So yes, I've been spending my holidays in the dark lonely void of the house with no interwebs. I'm such a trooper.

Despite it all, the holidays were nice. My family is always interesting and I always come back from these things carrying along some deep introspection about my life and how I want to do things. I certainly have some heavy resolutions to look forward to.

The Tofurky was introduced to my relatives this year. Even though I'm the only vegetarian in the lot, aside from my cousin who is a pescatarian. It seemed to hold its own amongst the ham, and the smoked salmon. As always there was pasta ready and available for me. I write that with heavy sarcasm. I'm beginning to think there's a special place in hell for hosts who serve up the plain tomato sauce rigatoni for their vegetarian guests.

I'm back at home now, and while I'm on vacation, I do intend to get a few things done around here. My dad just gave me a box full of tulip bulbs (about three hundred or so), from my uncle who is a landscaper. I guess I'm supposed to find somewhere to plant them. I also need to clean out the basement, move a few heavy items into storage, clean out my closet and do some hard “editting”. Packrats run in my family, and I don't want to be one of those anymore. So I guess it's really not a vacation at all.

#7 iPod Video

Seriously, not like I need another portable gadget. On any given day, I'll have my camera, my Nintendo DS, my iPod Nano, my cell phone on hand, and if I really want to watch movies, I have my portable panasonic DvD player. I'm not hurting for toys. It's definitely not like I find myself stuck in places inconvenient to movie watching. Still, this would be a neat toy. Johnny Depp in his Jack Sparrow costume would be a bonus.

Oh heck, I want this probably equally as much:

Zune Mp3 player

It's already got compatibility with the Vista, it's got pretty much everything the iPod video has, plus it has the ability to share pictures and music through WiFi. That sounds pretty nifty. The only reason I wouldn't have thought of this first is because it's new technology, it's a bit bigger than the iPod and it will probably be released with a new redesign sometime in the future. As it stands right now, I'm not digging on it's looks, though that screen seems nice. And brown? Seriously, wtf.

Well they captured and accidentally killed an Architeuthis. As fascinating as the subject is to me, this fucking sucks.

We live in a world where there are no mysteries left, and yet we keep probing, and interfering because of the human's inherent need to find more information. To this date, I'm not entirely sure why people feel the need to capture a giant squid, being as rare as they are, and take it out of it's natural habitat to study and probe it, subjecting it to uncomfortable tests and experiments. What more information do people need? I think in time, we'll see gamers and poachers going after these animals, hoping for bounties from rogue researchers, and quite possibly gourmets. You know what's odd about people, especially the rich and fancy types… they need to eat everything. The rarer (and i don't mean in terms of how done meat is), the more “exquisite”. That's a whole fucking lot of calamari.

At a point, there must be enough information we need to know about the giant squids. We know where they live, how they live, how big they are, and what they eat. And above all, they're just squids. Just ginormous ones. Bringing scary animals out of the depth is no better than Hannibal forcing elephants up the Alps or people bringing monkeys out of Africa to have them die in cold, northern cages. If we want to see the giant squid survive, the best thing we can do for it is to give it good habitats. And that means we need to stop overfishing, stop whaling, stop fucking up the environment. Trying to catch one to live out the rest of its days in a bright tank isn't helping the world at all.