EEE I'm so excited, I got up extra early this morning, made a strong cup of tea, and let my fingers head off on the write of a life time!

ok so here are my first 679 words ;D

Focus.

Derek told himself repeatedly. He felt like a little kid at Christmas, too excited to focus an anything else but that big shiny present under the tree, calling to him. Or a student on the last day of school, sitting in their desk waiting for the bell to release them into two months of freedom and glory. Occasionally his mind would drift to other things, like for example the man sitting in front of him, pleading his case as to why he should get the hundred thousand loan he was applying for. Sometimes it would drift to the stained glass picture frame on his desk, the one that sent a riot of color shooting little beams across his desk. But mostly it would stay on the source of the excitement, the trip.

He could hardly wait for this workday to end, to race home, pick up his bags, say goodbye to his wife and kids, and race off to Revelstoke. There he would meet up with his old buddy Richard, and from there they would head down to the river. Richard and he had been friends from Kindergarten, right through to college. When Richard decided that college wasn’t for him, he headed down to the Revelstoke/Nakusp area and started his own river kayaking business. Since then they had made a few visits to each other, but never this type of trip.

Derek could feel it already, his adrenaline pumping as he rushed down a raging river in a small kayak. Swaying from side to side, screaming his lungs out, out of pure joy of course. He could just imagine the trip, everything from toppling over every couple minutes at first, to talking about the good old times during the slow parts of the river, and even the new stuff over the campfire. What he wasn’t thinking about was being here, in the bank, as a loan officer.


The man who sat before him stared at him, with ‘the look’. The look that said, “I’m scared ,” yet trying to look confident at the same time. Derek took his mind out of the water for a minute, and delved into the business plan the man in front of him had put together. After noticing several spelling mistakes, he decided that this was a loan that should not go through. But then he saw that the man before him needed it. He saw the wedding ring that almost cut off the circulation to his finger, the syrup stain that look liked it had been squirted onto his suite. And then of course to top it off, he had pink fluff in his hair that could only come from a little girl’s princess wand. Sighing, he knew that he could not give the man the full loan, so instead of just flat out denying it, he gave him a bit lower loan instead, and let the man go off to his wife and children.

Now it was his turn, Derek Townsby’s turn to go off into the world, to go home for a bit. As he drove down the Transcanada, he could barely wait. He stopped off at home, where his wife was making an early supper.

He walked into the house to a heavenly mixture of scents. He smelt fresh coffee being brewed, lasagna in the stove, and a few other scents he couldn’t quite place. His two children came racing towards the door screaming, “DADDY!” He bent down and caught them in his arms. He started to feel less like a kid at Christmas, and more like an actor on one of those cheesy commercials. commercial. He chuckled as they wrapped their arms around his neck. Four year old Danny was still in his pokeman pajamas, he had obviously not gone to preschool today, and seven year old Katie was in a pink Pocahontas shirt and blue denim pants. As he held his two children in his arms, he could not help but thinking of that man in the syrup stained shirt, was he doing the same thing right now?