two years later... and more has changed!

holy smokes. another year has flown by!

my blog has been running for 2 years now! can you believe it people of the innerweb?

it seems like only yesterday... well okay, a few weeks ago at most... since i was doing a review of everything that had happened to me in that first year of blogging.

things certainly have been different this year compared to the start of my blog. back then i was regrouping from the loss of my life as i'd known it. since that time i've been trying to define a new life for myself. i may not have it totally sorted yet, but at least i'm a lot closer!

i'll take you on a quick stroll down memory lane blog style.

1 YEAR AGO

i of course had just finished posting a similar recap post... immediately after which i received...

AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

just when i thought i'd left my past back in canada by moving to new zealand a very large part of it showed up on my doorstep (well forest edge as i of course still live in a forest). by large i mean quite literally large in size, as my fully grown cousin larry the tyrannosaur popped in for a visit.

though at first larry seemed to have overcome his typical JERK!ness it was too good to last, and in reality larry's reason for coming half way around the world to see me was somewhat ominous in the end...

RUINING MY LIFE

he managed to cover it up well, but larry was on a mission to wreck everything i'd accomplished since leaving canada. up until he'd showed up my life was settling in just fine. i had friends, a cool job, and best of all i wasn't on people's minds. immediately larry set about scaring all my friends and other key people in an effort to isolate me.

he succeeded on most fronts. in one particular case he accomplished more than i think even a JERK! like larry could aim for...

THE FALLING OUT

when my guardian craig stepped in to try and protect me from larry's influence i played right into my cousin's mind game and turned on the only family i'd ever known... craig promptly disappeared from new zealand altogether, and i have no idea where he is now...

though larry achieved this one key victory in trying to destroy my links to the human world he made one key mistake.

THE BOSS TAKES NOTICE

my boss ms. rhonwyn has always been big on experiencing things from the past. so she decided when my cousin came into town this would be the chance of a lifetime. though she'd met me, how often do you get to meet a "real" tyrannosaurus rex? (which kind of hurts my feelings. just because i'm tiny doesn't make me not real!)

unlike many of my other friends who held me accountable for larry's actions ms. rhonwyn held him solely responsible! rather than get blamed instead i got respect i hadn't been getting before. if i could deal with my unusual and terrifying cousin than there probably wasn't much i couldn't handlein the museum world (after all no matter how bad your family members are... their not living relics from 65 million years ago!) ... or at least that was ms. rhonwyn's theory.

ms. rhonwyn gave me a promotion that wouldn't amount to much till halfway through the year, but man did it have implications!!! i'll get to that in a second.

the reason larry was here trying to ruin my life...

MY "PEOPLE"

larry was trying to recruit me into the pack of the primordial feather. a secret organization made up of all (well okay MOST) of the currently alive coelurosaurs around the world. its goals and purpose are pretty hush hush, and i don't know what their up to.

the only thing i know for sure is that they require all coelurosaurs to join. whether they want to or not... needless to say larry was not at all happy when i declined his invitation. he vowed the pack would make me regret my decision and that it'd force me to join one way or the other...

PROBLEMS ON THE HORIZON

though i haven't seen any evidence of it, i can't help but worry the pack may be planning something against me...

speaking of bird LIKE relatives i've been making some progress to making connections with my descendants the actual birds!

A NEW LANGUAGE

though i haven't mastered it yet i've begun to learn some basics of bird speak. whether its with my feathered neighbors in the dunedin botanic garden or now those i meet aboard (like this ostrich i chatted with, in invercargill) i am starting to get a grasp on how to speak to CERTAIN kinds of birds. sadly their mode of communication has derived a great deal from their saurian roots, but a few commonalities exist that make speaking to each other possible.

again i haven't got it down yet, but i'm making progress. which something no other dinosaur has tried before

as cool as this hobby is, i've got another that has been even more productive...

TREASURE

i've begun looking for artifacts (well i accidentally found the first to be fair), and have had some success at it. though nothing has come of it at work yet, i hope it might lead to something beyond my being stuck a security guard...

sadly not all has been good in my life post larry's visit.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

of course as you'll remember people of the innerweb i leave on the edge of a rumoured labyrinth maze in the dunedin botanic garden. it was showing signs of being haunted even a year ago. well as of this year i can say it most definitely is!

what started out as a bet between and the germ-man as to whether i was scarred of the dark or not, turned into a full on paranormal encounter!!!

the long and short of it i was confronted by a ghost in the cemetery not so far from my home. meaning i sleep a mere walk (or is that float for a ghost?) from where the undead still dwell!

THE MOST VALUABLE THINGS I'VE EVER HANDLED

just when i was starting to urn for something exciting to happen, it did. man i've really got to remember to be careful for what i wish for!

ms. rhonwyn activated my long dormant promotion while she was out of the country. a set of very mysterious circumstances occurred at the otago museum leading ms. rhonwyn to believe key artifacts in her care were in danger. she ordered me to take them on a new zealand wide trip in an attempt to get "rid" of them.

i thought they were just three dumb old flax woven maori baskets or kete as they call them. man i couldn't have been wrong!

I REALLY SHOULD LEARN TO READ

so ms. rhonwyn included some very clear cut (apart from being extremely cryptic!) instructions. the most important of which was DO NOT OPEN the baskets... so guess what i did first thing in my whole quest... yeah not my best move ever. if the picture doesn't tell you the story, i opened one of the baskets of course.

it was than i found out the true nature of the baskets. they weren't just some dusty old artifacts. rather they were among the most important mythical items to the maori people! these were the kete te wananga, the vessels of all maori magics and mythical knowledge.

opening the basket had so many effects on me and my job of taking the baskets across the country it hurts my tiny brain thinking about them all!

the first really big thing was it exposed me to all the pure undiluted magic inside (at least i think magic comes in more diluted forms than this?). turns out magic is something people in the know call mystical gradient radiation. ms. rhonwyn says it comes from outside our world (through some sort of stringed theory i think she said?).

point is i completely saturated myself in it. which has turned out to make me a permanent magic magnet and detector. i seriously can tell when something magical or mystic is going on around me now, and it sucks.

as if that weren't bad enough it also made my quest a lot harder for what it attracted to me and the baskets...

MORE POWERFUL THAN I COULD POSSIBLE IMAGINE

not only did opening the basket expose me to an unhealthy dose of magic, but it was like turning on a big come over to me sign for every evil maori mythical critter across the country. in particular this one called whiro, maori god of darkness and suffering, a guy who just based on his job title you can tell you don't want to mess with.

so everywhere i turned and went i had this thing (ref pic about now) behind me. NOT fun, let me assure you. after tons of way too many too close for comfort escapes, i did manage to accomplish my mission of getting rid of the baskets, and making sure that whiro didn't get his claws on them. turns out in maori mythology whiro has always wanted to get them, and would stop at nothing to get them. naturally he was really annoyed when i pulled off the task of denying him them. had it not been for the intervention of another maori god i'd have bought the farm on this my first mission.

at the conclusion of the quest even more crazy things happened. i was flown to australia of all places where i a bunch more weird stuff occurred.

MYSTERIES UNFOLD

here in australia i re-met a mysterious figure from my distant past... professor paradigm. oh and his dinosaur assistant you see in this picture, lance the lambeosaur. i'll get to the duck-bill in a minute.

what little i remember of my first encounter with paradigm (though there may be more. i do have such a terrible memory people of the innerweb) was he did the first check up on me as a hatchling. of course i only remember not caring so much for the procedure, and nothing about him as a person (incidentally i STILL don't care for medical check ups!).

dr. paradigm is the world's leading expert in vivus-fossils, these are us prehistoric critters who are technically extinct overall, but yet still have living representatives that mysteriously have survived the fossilization process. making me one such type of fossil, and thus paradigm an expert on me...

perhaps more interesting, is his possible involvement with the rumoured organization palaeo-central. according to some of my new dinosaur friends (boom and rang specifically) palaeo-central is a secret initiative dedicated to the protection of fossils from the various elements and forces that threaten them. including us vivus-fossils. meaning that this organization might be keeping an eye on all of us still living dinosaurs! if boom and rang were right, than paradigm would be the head of this group... i'm aiming to find out much more about him this year if i can for these reasons!

as for his dinosaur assistant lance, i can't say as much. he is almost as big a JERK! as my cousin larry... though he does appear to have had some rather nasty run ins with theropods over the years, which might explain why he wasn't very nice to me. at the same time i don't like him, and he doesn't like me more!

though these last few weeks have had my first major dinosaur contacts in a long time (besides larry... was almost two years ago back in canada) the most significant JUST happened...

THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS

lillian the albertosaurus, like the heading for this flashback says, the tyrannosaurid of my dreams has reappeared in my life out of the blue! after losing her job at the tyrrell too, just like me, she took to the road as a travelling exhibit. by coincidence we both ended up here in australia at the same time!

coolest all, after all my dreaming and planning about it, i am about to finally go on my first real date with lillian ever!!!

which speaking of which i need to get ready for!

so there that's what's been happening in my life this last year. hopefully the next year's recap will be all about my new happy life with lillian, my mate for life!

[Production Note: So begins Traumador: Year 3... Prehistoric Insanity]