The fact is, as I lay here trying to fall asleep at 7 in the evening here in Reykjavík (which is 11 pm back home in Vancouver), I probably won't get much blogging done over the next few days.  I'll post when I can, but I think sleep and exploration is the name of the game.  But I will be doing my best to keep uploading new pictures when they come in.  So if you want to keep track of what Lydia and I are doing check out my Flickr photo gallery for our Iceland trip [fkr].

Early Thursday morning Lydia and I left our apartment to head down to Seattle, where we caught a flight on Iceland Air which fly us across North America and then a large portion of the Atlantic Ocean.  We are now beyond tired, and thus I'm not going to go into any great detail at this point.  I'm currently operating on such low levels of sleep that I might actually be writing this in Klingon and not realize it.  

Did I ever learn Klingon?  Have I been speaking it all day?  That might explain why nobody seems to make any sense in Iceland.  Somewhere over the Atlantic a switch flipped in my brain and I'm now talking a made up science fiction language and because I've only had about two hours of sleep in the last 28 I just haven't noticed it.

I tried to sleep on the plane, and caught the previously mentioned two hours of sleep, but an angry Icelandic child in a cowboy hat kept me from sleeping any longer by continually kicking my chair as hard as he could.  I almost turned around and yelled at him, "Today is a good day to die!" but I wasn't sure if Iceland Air has special Icelandic air marshals that would have taseredme at that point.  So instead I just stared at the seat ahead of me and thought of murder.

Because of the time change it's 5:30 in the evening here, and 9:30 in the morning back home.  We've been trying to resist going to bed, to combat jet lag and to shock our systems into the correct time zone, but it's a losing battle.  I'm going to shower now, and if I don't fall asleep standing up in the stall, I'll probably manage to crawl onto the bed and pass out.  Barely.

 QaQ ram.*

* Klingon for "Good night".

I'll be in Iceland for the week. Don't run the country into the ground while I'm gone.

No question this is the movie of 2010 that I'm most looking forward to.

Lydia and I ate at Mr. Kumpir on Denman thebother night. I think we were both a little skeptical that we'd be filled up by a meal consisting only of a baked potato, but there was enough toppings to fill us up.

I stayed fairly traditional, with a potato that had sour cream, bacon and sweet corn on top. The corn was my only deviation from a standard potato. Lydia was more adventurous with a salad stuffed on the top of hers.

Mr. Kumpir isn't exactly destination eating, but I'd eat there again if I were walking around English Bay and got hungry.

Questions need to be asked about where to draw the line with the old 'Arsenal don't like it up 'em' mantra that teams trot out. By all means go in hard and fair, but it shouldn't mean clubs have a free pass to kick us all over the pitch.

- Tobey Moses, Observer reader

Two strong back to back wins either mean that Canada is on a roll or about to be dramatically upset.

Weird.  So very weird.

The Olympics have been great so far.  Despite the number of times I've wanted to commit vehicular homicide because pedestrians no longer bother to stop for oncoming traffic, and getting across downtown Vancouver can take an hour and a half, it's been fun.  I'll do a more complete post on everything in a few days once everything has calmed down.

The big thing that I've been able to do, and this is thanks to Chad who provided Lydia and me with tickets, was I got to go to the Men's Ice Hockey game between Canada and the United States of America.  We lost, but it was a great game and probably the best atmosphere I've seen inside GM Place (temporarily renamed Canada Hockey Place). 

A few days before going to the game I had watched the YouTube video "A Night At The Emirates" [yt] a really beautiful movie of a game between Arsenal and Liverpool recorded from a fan's perspective.  Having just seen that I decided to try the same thing with the Canada versus USA game, and the results are posted above.  Overall there's a lot of things about which I'm really happy with, and a few I'm not.  The original video does a good job of using visual cues to set the scene, a match program for example sets up that Arsenal are facing Liverpool while a newspaper lets a viewer know that Arsenal are in a bit of a slump and need a win.  My video has none of these contextual cues, mostly since I simply did not think to provide them at the time and I wanted all the footage to be from that game.  I didn't want to go back and film additional pickup footage, because this felt natural.

The music is the thing I'm most happy with.  It's called "Terry" and it's by A.C. Newman whose most famous from being one of the front men for The New Pornographers.  The music is used completely without permission or Newman's knowledge, but I think it fits perfectly.