It has been a crazy month. As mentioned in an earlier post, Aaron and Christine came out to visit. It was a great weekend, filled with good food, great friends, and lots of laughs. We did a lot of wandering around Victoria, finding a great diner, a bakery, and some small out of the way bookstores. We saw Percy Jackson that weekend – a fantastic movie which I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend.

We also had the chance to test out a couple of new roleplaying systems: Elemental Axes and Burning Wheel. Eric and Aaron both ran a session for several of us. And it was good to get the dice on again. It has been far too long.

A few weeks later, Kate’s father came out to visit for a few days, with the majority of our stuff that was still sitting in Edmonton. Of course we are still in the process of sorting out everything. The living room/bar area is mostly set up now. We have our books out and sorted, the furniture where we want it, and everything else in the spare room. It is nice to finally get our stuff here – I didn’t realize how much I missed some of my things. We still have a bit of our stuff back in Alberta – but the big things are all here.

It really makes the place feel more like a home.

We went out for coffee tonight, as we did not have time to get downtown for the fireworks. As we were walking I noticed that you could clearly see the lit up dome of the legislature grounds. Once again, we were shocked to relearn how condensed the Victoria area really is. Because of this, we actually got to see the fireworks, vibrantly on the horizon.

This brought up the concept of perception; more specifically the concept of how we see differently. For example, when I look at the fireworks going off, I see the shapes of the fireworks before seeing the colour. I could see these faint smoke-trails that started eating at the negative spaces of the sky. Because of this, I knew how the burst would look well before the colours were there.

This was in direct contrast to how Kate saw the same burst. She could not see those trails without conscious effort. The colours were the first thing she noticed, and that was from the center out. I saw from the edge of the burst into the centre.

Perception is an interesting concept that we have been exploring as of late, odds are there will be more on perception as the days go by.