Not much happened this month. I’m still taking it a little easy and I’ve started to do some Swift programming. I’m working on a new game called ‘Monkey Maze’. It’s an off shoot of the Japanese game Sokoban (Warehouse Mover). There’s quite a following of this puzzle game, but I’ve never come across any app that tried to extend the user experience and to make it more fun and appealing to the eye. So I’ve decided to start playing with various programming elements to see what I can end up doing in a 3D setting. Once I get it all finished, I’ll talk about it more under my projects.

We did have one serious accident here in Yorba Linda, however.

A small twin engine aircraft took off from Fullerton airport and crashed into a home down the street. It’s not too far from where we go for our walks in the morning and unfortunately, the pilot and a few innocent people on the ground died. This also happened a day or two before I went to Montreal to see my father. Oh Boy…

For those of you wondering why I didn’t contact you, sorry. I just wanted to keep a low profile and spend some time with my father. I had all these grand plans to go visit the various winter carnivals around town, to pop in a see some of you, but the weather also ended up kepping me in most of the time.

I did get play as a spare over at the Valois Bowling Club one afternoon and even got reunited with my soccer coach from 1978. We were one the same bowling team! I remember that year well, because I was playing goalie and during the playoffs we came back from second-to-last place to play in the finals. During the payoffs, we won every game going into the finals. The majority of the wins went into overtime and then shootouts. We won every one of our shootouts but eventually lost the final game 0-1. I did so well that I was approached by the city to do tryouts and ended up getting to play indoors for free until next summer. That was fun!

Okay – enough with the past… back February!

We attended the travel show in Los Angels on the 17th, but there wasn’t much going on. I was hoping to see a few booths promoting Australia, but there just wasn’t anything around. There was one group promoting a trip up to Churchhill Manitoba (Polar Bear country) – to see the Northern Lights in September, but it was a little too expensive for what they were offering and we were focused on going to Austria towards the end of the year. Gotta budget, after all!

Towards the end of the month I had a promotion to stay and the Hotel Indigo in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. So Ayano and I drove down for a couple of days. The hotel is very modern and has a nice roof-top bar with fire pits.

It was actually a lot of fun hanging out in San Diego, walking a long the waterfront, trying out some new restaurants in Gas Town, and even using a motorize razor from Byrd to get around.

And I’ve still got a $6 credit that I’m planning to use the next time we’re back in town!