I am totally exhausted today.  After work, I drove 30 minutes into Surrey to take the Firearm license training.  It is 4 hours of lectures and practice after a long day of work.  In Canada, it is required by law to acquire the firearm license in order to own a gun.  The license exam is on safety and regulations.  It has two parts written exam and partical exam.  In the course, we are not allow to discharge any weapon, but there are lots of disactiviated real gun for us to practice proper handling.  We are taught all the new terminologies used in firearm and hunting, different parts of guns, types of guns and bullets, shooting and carrying position, etc.  Although there are tons of new materials I have to memorize, I found the lecture is very interesting, even the history of guns section.  The instructor even perform a small expreiment, show us the difference between lighting black powder and smokeless powder.  Now I know the real gun powder doesn’t look like anything they use in the movie.  Technically speaking, gun powder is not explosives but propellent, which push the bullet down the bore and shot out from the barrel.

In the pratical exam, we have to demostrate we can handle 5 types of rifle and 4 types of handguns safely by follow the ACTS and PROVE procedure.  So, after the classroom time, the instructor let us play with the guns.  We are not really playing with the guns.  We are just repeatly unloading every gun, inspect all the check points, then load it back, pretend to fire, unload the gun once again before putting it down.  Putting your finger into the trigger or pointing the gun to anyone is an instant fail in the exam.  Gun has to handle with great care.

Contrary to popular beliefs, firearm is actually very safe if you know what you are doing.  In Canada, only 1300 death from firmarm, much lower than the toll of death from automobile or cigerrates.  As a sport, shooting has a much lower death ate than swimming.  Many people’s phobia to guns are unjustified, and it mostly rooted from the myth created by all those Hollywood movies.

This world is full of interesting people.  I just know a guy from Hong Kong, Pazu, open a coffer shop in Tibet.  Well, actually I don’t exactly know him, he is the webmaster of a site I used to visit a lot back in university days.  This guy is quite legendary, after he graduated from university, he became a full time traveler for the past 7 years.  I was following his foot steps on and off from the travel journals posted in his site.  He spent 3 years backpacking the every  in China, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan(!), visiting places I would not even visit in my dreams.  After he come back from his long journey, he begin another even crazier journey in 2004.  He spent another 3 years going back and forth between Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia in bicycles!  Finally, his long journey comes to an end.  He decided to settle down and open a coffee shop in Tibet after biking there all the way from Thailand.  There is a saying that travel ten thousand miles is better than reading ten thousand books.  This guy traveled ten times more roads than I will ever travel in tens of my life time combined.  I can imagine talking to Pazu would be full of eye opening stories.  Too bad that I don’t have the patient to follow his trip day by day in his travel journal.  If he write a book about his years long journal, I will get one at once.  Maybe HK’s television station should interview him and produce a hour long special program.  That would be more interesting than the usual brainless entertainment shows.

I would like to announce to all my good friends that I am now official engaged.  My days of being single is numbered, I am moving on to the next stage of life.  The date of my big day is not yet confirmed.  It depends on the availability of the church, the booking of the restaurant for banquet at night and fortune of day in the Chinese calender.  In Chinese calender, each day is categorized being good for certain events and being bad for some other events.  The pattern of the good days and bad days are pretty random, I wonder how the good day / bad day is determined.  The calender publisher must use some kind of ancient equation.  Today is already in the 21st century, this good day /bad day scheme sounds so superstitious to me, yet the older generation still follows this non-sense rule in the Calendar fortune telling book.

Maybe I should revise that ancient equation to make it suits better of modern civilized way of living.  Then I will publish a new Chinese calender with my new good day / bad day scheme, so setting a day will be much more convenient.  Every weekend is a good day for getting marry.  Every weekday is a good day for opening business.  The scheme should take public holidays and season patterns into accounts.  For example, Christmas day is a bad day for wedding, since your guest will be busy for their own holidays and probably you can not book any church for the ceremony.  Of course, I will steer the good days away from the traditional bad days that everyone knows, like the ghost festival.  Other than those few obvious bad days, who can tell scientifically the difference in effectiveness between my calendar from the old one?