camp goodness. camp is going well in case you hadn't guessed. people are great, kids are great and im generally having the time of my life. i have been teaching skiing for about 4 days now and its reaslly fun, its rewarding helping kids get up on skis, correct their posture and even learn a few tricks. their faces are amazing: both hilarious and inspiring. you can really tell when someone is enjoying themselves and when they are just hanging on for their lives. today is rained out, can't ski in the rain: its like bullets shooting at your eyeballs, i tried that yesterday and it wasn't fun.

saturday the kids got here and it was all a bit hectic, i being the awesome athlete that i am managed to break my finger playing basketball within an hour of them being here. go me! its been a while now, i was so depressed at first but now it seems to be healing really well and im at about 60% functionality again. this morning i even played a bit of guitar with no real problems. with any luck i should be skiing again by the end of the week.

tonight there is a bit of a thing in the dining hall: they are making a set and doing deal or no deal. my kids, the saxons (oldest boys) are doing the 'commercial breaks' from the sounds of it, its going to be bloody hilarious. i dont know if they have proacticed it enough not to be an awkward mess but i'll see soon enough. im going to take my camera down and possibly even get a movie or two happening. sweet.

last night was e-tard's birthday so we took him down to the whittier and got him pretty boozed up. i dont know how the fuck he was so chirpy this morning, he is just one of those people, i was fine i just needed a nap so i slept through dinner :( good thing i got my jerky supply.

tomorrow is my first day off, we're going to head into conway and possibly get a hotel room with a decent shower: oh yeah. i dont have to be back on camp until breakfast so that should be a solid day out.

ok i better get ready and head down to the studio. hope to hear from you all soon back home with some news. peace out kiddlets. beast!

hey all, hope everyone is happy and healthy in their respective parts of the world

things at camp are going far beyond my expectations. i will try to be as humble as possible about it but i dont think i can. i can't really describe my elation right now. we just got our bunk assignments (we have just been randomly spread
around so far and tomorrow we move where we'll stay for the summer)
there are experienced counsellors called group leaders who put in
requests for who they want in their bunks. i got put in an excellent bunk and many people are jealous :D. everyone here is so complimentary as
well, no one seems afraid to tell me what they think about me (at least the good things?) and its really a bit overwhelming... i have been getting great responses from the directors about my driving, skiing etc. i am basically
the only international who has managed to crack the tight circle of
americans who have been at this same camp for up to 11years in a row.
11years!

last night was crazy. there is this chinese restaurant in town where
basically everyone went, they dont seem to care about ID unlike the
rest of the country so people young and old basically took over the
whole place and drank ourselves silly. i slept through breakfast and
am now dying of hunger. im starving at meal times at the best of
times! the food here is generally surprisingly good, healthy options
and tasty treats. its great. i have to go now and head into town for a
supply/food run and check out the place. tomorrow i have to take my
boat drivers test. i really need to pass and i need to do more study,
i did pretty well on the practice run (93%) but i hear that the
practice run is a lot easier.

internet is hard to get to because im so busy all the time, any free
time i have i need to take a nap, its really going to be a full on
summer! i thought everyone here would be geeks and not drink but it has been beer beer beer so far. another thing: americans smoke a lot of weed. a lot. a stupid amount in fact.

its all a bit disjointed i know. im going out on the water tomorrow and hopefully sitting my test. kids get here on saturday and then the shit hits the fan, should be fun! speak to you soon kids. james.

hey all. updates are few and far between but its a hectic life i lead you know.

friday didnt exactly go to plan, basically took it easy all day and then headed out. first up we went to a club called hush, a damn long way out of town and we kinda got lost and had to double back a few times. there are freeways everywhere here, so you miss an exit and you're screwed. did i mention they have big trucks?

hush was pretty full on. huge line of cars, valet parking only. inside it was pretty cool, reasonably priced drinks loads of people... but after being there for a while i realised that the crowd were a bunch of knobs. they stood on the dancefloor barely moving; occaisionally sticking their hands in the air like they just dont care. awesome. funny how we only realised it was crap when we were loaded. there was some salsa music outside so we shook our groove thang for about 30 mins and fekked off.

we went to an after hours bar downtown and quickly discovered that you cant get alcohol after 2am! that is completely insane. nuts crazy and generally stupid. matty made some calls and discovered that there was a bar somewhere a ways down the road that sold drinks on the sly. just ask for 'orange juice' and you're good to go. the catch? its a gay bar.

i have the best luck with this kind of thing dont i? dont get me wrong, there were a few girls there. about 2% female. the rest of the crowd have the impression that if you looked at them twice were would be walking home with a distinct difference in your stride. you know me though, a few 'orange juices' and i was dancing up a storm: as long as i had a protective barrier of the 3-4 people i knew i was ok.

sunday was awesome. my first baseball experience and i loved it. beer, peanuts and the baseball song. somehow i managed to know all the words to half the songs, i have no idea how. "the stars in the night, are big and bright *clap clap clap clap* deep in the heart of texas"

not only was it a great game, but the astros (houston) slaughtered the braves. 14-4, and whats more baseball isnt nearly as complicated as it looks. in fact its amazingly simple. the atmostphere is good fun too. sunday night was pretty hilarious. we went to some bar out of the way, had some extremely strong margaritas (the tipping system has its advantages) and before you know it: jessalyn was an absolute mess. im talking in the top ten of all messy people of all time. thrown out of the bar, tried to steal matt's car, tried to leap out of said car on the freeway, broke up with matt, did some crying, kicking and biting. we eventually got her safe and sound to her friends house where she passed out and we kept on drinking, playing poker and watching movies. great stuff.

monday we were supposed to go to schlitterbahn but we were all a bit worse for wear and slept in instead. we opted for the closer but smaller cousin: six flags splashtown. good but not amazing. the tornado was this big funnel thing the you get shot down into and fly all over the place. very cool. we took a couple of pictures with a disposable but i doubt they will turn out, it was all a bit hectic. the day ended with papacitos (the mexican place where matt, jessalyn and john all work) followed by a sports bar, pool and beer. and that was houston. today im having some food with jess and john and then flying out to new york city tonight. rico will join me tomorrow and then its camp on saturday. at camp i will hopefully be able to get some photos online and attach them to this blog. stay tuned.

its been good hearing from everyone back home, keep up the good work, for the non-emailers: shame. actually this trip everyone has been good so its ok.

speak to you soon kiddlets.

hey kids, flew into houston after a very excellent 5 days in vegas. little bit down in the $$ department but overall i think it was value for money. some amazing stories/adventures/pictures

caught up with jessalyn (a texan friend of mine i met in france) yesterday, we went to have lunch at a place called the cheesecake factory, it was very good; i was expecting something crappy, the logo is even the same as the place back home but its actually a really nice restaurant, one of the healthiest meals i have had in a long time: santa fe salad. delicious! she then took me around for about an hour: another restaurant called the aquarium which is more like an aquarium that serves food, we just had a look around there, there is a big cyllinder almost 3 storeys tall with fish in it, i also saw this strange thing that looked like a cross between a swordfish, a shark, a platypus and a stingray. very strange. then i came home for a nap (my flight was delayed and i hadn't really slept at all) then we went to a bar at the other end of town, very very texas. it was pretty dead so we had a few drinks and moved on. went to jessalyn and matt (her boyfriend)'s friend's place where they were playing poker. you would think after a week in vegas i would get away from gambling but no such luck there. i didnt bet much and lost horribly. poker is not my game.

after a quick stop at Whataburger(where the kitchen staff insisted i was someone famous) got back here pretty late (about 5am) and slept until three. i just got in from a stroll down to the imax museum where i saw a couple of exhibitions, one on inuits, one on acient iraq/mesopotamia and then one called bodyworks. that last one was mindblowing. it was an exhibition of a process called plastination: its where they take corpses etc and preserve them so that they are freestanding, they look like plastic models but they are actually the real thing. you werent allow to take photos but i snuck in a few anyway. the most impressive was of a guy riding the biggest horse i have ever seen. i got a snap of it but it wasnt so good because it was on the sly. ill show you anyway. it doesn't capture the size of this thing, standing next to it was quite.. whats the word? belittling? something like that.

the place im staying at is very cheap but kinda dingy. i think i might have to fork out the extra cash and move, besides turns out im not at the best end of town, cost me $40 for a cab out last night. ouch. its the only hostel in town so i might have to switch over to a hotel. im not exactly meeting fantastic people at this place so the main advantage of hostelling isnt really there. everyone is very sombre/shy/quiet. friendly but boring is the best i can do.

tonight im just going to take it easy and read/relax. its so hard to eat well here, there are take out places everywhere and markets etc are all a long way away. ie. need a car. i get my licence back in a few days but i dont think i can afford to be hiring a car, maybe just one day but otherwise ill just have to stick with crap food. the museum i was in had a macdonalds inside. dont see that back home...

tomorrow im headed out to a waterpark called schilterbaan. apparently it is very excellent and worth the 2 hour drive. jessalyn's plan is to stay there from open till close and then head out for friday night. i think that plan is insane but i've never been one to turn down a good dose of insanity.

running out of ideas here so keep in touch ya'll, fire some questions my way im feeling very incongruant here.

check out the photos/videos from a most excellent vegas party i was at. watch the whole video: me and rico are in there a couple of times:

http://vegas.napkinnights.com/mov/view_movie.php?id=6

back in san francisco after a lovely five days in petaluma, northern california. a beautiful town about an hour from San Francisco. partied heartily with some youngins and did a bit of freestyling in the barn. fully sick. sorry, i mean it was so bomb.

tonight i got talking to a guy on the street. i'm starting to get a hang of when someone wants something from you and when they dont. this guy didn't, so i talked to him. he was clearly a little off balance. but only enough to make him interesting yet not scary. we talked about how paramedics smoke, how cheap cigarettes are here compared to australia (about 1/4) and then he said, with a deadly straight face. wait for it... that he was a prophet of god. i wasnt quite sure i heard him right so i played along. he went on to explain that the police had been giving him a hard time because lately he had been making bad things happen: like some very seriously bad weather at the golden gate bridge. "sure they don't mind when you make good things happen, but when bad things happen; that's when they get upset"

i could make some sort of witty remark about this, but i think i speaks for itself on one level or another, so i'll leave it there.