Finally, last week we left Santiago and it’s oppresive heat for northern Chile in the two motorhomes made by dad. The trip was rushed mostly because dad wanted to be in Antofagasta as quickly as possible, and we all felt the strain. It was still fun though, my aunt and grandma travelled in one with me as helper, and dad with my half-brother in the other. The motorhomes behaved wonderfully, and we went listening to all types of music. I did sleep prolly more than any of the rest but I slept less than I’m used to on long trips like this one.

The trip took a total of two days, we left Santiago early, around 10am, and arrived the next day close to midnight to Antofagasta, stopping to sleep to one side of the road (and too close to a train track) during the night. We stopped at Bruce Trench’s place before lunch on the second day and I had quite a bit of ostiones (scallops) straight out of the water with a bit of lemon. Mmh, just thinking of it makes my mouth water XD

Once we arrived to Antofagasta it was a bit crowded till this morning. Since my dad’s place is too small, we slept in the motorhomes for the few days my aunt and grandma were with us. Yesterday things began calming down and falling back into routine and I was even able to work on Atacamaexpedition.com, uploading more images of the motorhomes and changing the layout.

I want to work on my art now, since I have a commission to draw a bunch of pet images for Espers.net.

With end of year speeding up to meet me, time seems to fly by at an accelerated rate, that makes me realize just how much time I let go by in idle things. It’s not that I’ve been totally unproductive but more like I’ve been idle in things a bit more geared towards moving on in life. I’ve been giving the excuse that I don’t want to tie myself down here and want to move to Canada, but even the steps towards that goal have been slow in coming.

I’ve been getting very hyped up by working for petsites and with a few friends are outlining possible ideas for our own. It’s a big undertaking but if it succeeds I could be that much closer to becoming independent and working for what I like to do the most. Right now I’m active at a fansite called Leopets, which isn’t paid, thus there isn’t much to be gained in financial terms. But… I see it as a playground for development for when we move on to our own, 100% original site. Wish me luck there, I’d really like to see it succeed, specially since I would be expanding the work I’ve put into the Niflheim/Valhalla worlds.

My countdown for end of year and the Start of my Life is two weeks.

Wish me luck!

Since I work all week I haven’t been able to actually have a good vacation-like time lately, but this weekend was spent relaxing by the pool, mostly not doing anything except some Sudoku puzzles, and sleeping a while in the afternoon. I took some pictures today, since my grandma came along too, and we pased them to the computer. I uploaded them to my flickr account, so you can head over there to see them, or to the blog mini gallery version.

I finally classified and uploaded pictures I took since I left Santiago in December for vacations. You can see the newest in my gallery, or head over to my flickr gallery to see them all. Here’s three links to ’set’ galleries, these are orgnized by theme.

Journey North
Christmas 2005
New Years 2006

So I’m finally working at an actual office, with a 7 hour work schedule and I’ve already done some things I’ve been asked to do. Not incredibly much, but it’s fun seeing stuff you make actually get printed and given out to a client (even if I didn’t see that last part happen). So far I’ve been helping out with graphic work, since these guys don’t actually offer webpages (since they don’t have a webpage designer) but I am supposed to be working on their own webpage once we get control over it (since right now they don’t even have ftp access to it). I hope the server it’s on has php and mysql support, or else I’ll have to do a crash course on aspx and database handling for that language. I do have some knowledge of asp so that should help some, but since I haven’t used it for over a year, I have a lot of brushing up to do.

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