Anne. Just call her Anne.

Her full name, at this point in time, would legally be Leslie-Anne Ayles Posch Shute, though she's always been Leslie-Anne to me. Yesterday, I found out that she's been trying to get people to stop calling her that for years, but I have to assume that that's not going too well. After all, I still call her Leslie-Anne, and I've known her for a long time. I've known her my entire life, in fact, because she's my aunt. (This word, when pronounced correctly, sounds like the 6-legged house-guests that live in my closet, not like ontology.)

Anne lives in Sackville, New Brunswick, a town with a small university and a large waterfowl preserve. There's not a whole lot to the place, aside from a pile or really happy ducks, but it's her home. She, along with her jovial husband Jon(athan) Shute, is doing her part to contribute to the Ayles clan's accumulated travel mileage by heading first to Toronto, then to New Zealand. It warrants mention that between my trips to Europe and British Columbia, my brother's two months in South America and the collaborative vacation to Honduras that my parents took with my other aunt (ant!) and uncle, we're blowing away all kinds of records for distance travelled in the last 12 months. So Anne and Jon are keeping up with the Joneses, as it were, with a trip spanning several thousand miles and the international dateline, all under the pretext of visiting Anne's two children. They would be my cousins, if you're keeping track, but they're not really relevant to the matter at hand.

So Anne and Jon are on their way from Sackville, New Brunswick to Toronto, Ontario. It just so happens that my parents' house, where I spent approximately 9 years of my life, lies more or less between the two, so a visit was in order. And, since I don't tend to get out to NB very often myself, I decided to go and see them while they were in the neighborhood.

I have to admit that I don't go home very often. It's not that I live very far away from my parents, whose house in Knowlton is only about an hour from the various bridges that connect the island of Montreal to the southern half of the province of Quebec. It's not that I don't get along with them, either; quite the opposite, in fact, as we normally see each other once every week or two. If anything, I think I can say that the problem is that I don't get along terribly well with Knowlton.

The nine years that I spent in Knowlton correspond with the last few years of my elementary schooling and the entirety of my time in high school. Like many people, I don't have particularly fond memories of high school, and I liked elementary school even less. Nothing Earth-shattering, really, but your usual adolescent lack of self-confidence combined with a healthy dose of boredom made for a period of my life that I try not to dwell upon too heavily and that I would happily leave behind me. The only part of going home that particularly appeals to me is seeing my family and eating the food prepared by said family. The rest of the time, I tend to get a little bit too introspective and kinda depressed by the lack of activity. I don't really have any friends in the area and, honestly, there's not a whole lot of what you'd call entertainment in the vicinity.

So you gets to thinkin'. Thinkin' about all the things that you didn't like about yourself back when you were a moody adolescent. Thinkin' about how much you wanted to change and how difficult it was.

But I have changed, really. I mean, it's been 8 years since I left home at the tender age of 16 and there's a lot to learned in the big, scary world outside. Still, while I'm not quite the pile of anxieties now that I was in grade 11, thinking about those days too much can get me down. In order to prevent this from happening, I need distraction. So, whenever I go home to visit my parents, I make sure to bring along some toys to keep me entertained. Before I hopped into my car (see, that's a change, I never had a car in high school), I made myself up a survival kit.

CDs - check
Shiny new Olwell flute - check
Book (Baudolino by Umberto Eco, which I've only even attempted reading at my parents' house) - check
Juggling balls? (Hey, you never know when you'll get the urge to practice) - check

But the real stroke of genius came when I wandered by my software collection. That's when I saw my unopened copy of Railroad Tycoon II.

Next - Michael vs. The Men of Iron