THOUGHTS FROM CANADIA

Pete Yorn/Aqualung

2007-02-10T20:35:00.000-08:00

Short post only, gotta help Jay with dinner. Chicken tikka masala - I've introduced him to the delights of Indian food, as well as converted his housemates to the dark side of vegetable pakora.

Saw Pete Yorn and Aqualung on Thursday night, before my birthday. They were both very good. The Fray is next up, in March.

For all you music and event fans who occasionally feel screwed over by artists never coming to your area, check this out: Eventful. You can place "demand" requests for people you want to see come to your city, and if they get enough demands then they contact the performer and tell them about the demand. Some performers even have the Eventful link on their homepages so that they can see where they should be touring next. I think it's a damn good idea....

Laters chickadees!!

Go see Hinder

2007-01-22T20:49:00.000-08:00

Cos they are really good!

Also, I have to share a conversation that I overheard on the bus back from UBC the other day.

Boy: "So what are you going to do when you finish this degree?
Girl: "I'm applying to dentistry."
Boy: "Are you seriously into being a dentist?"
Girl: "Well, I really like doing all the moulds and impressions and stuff."
Short pause.
Boy: "Why don't you just get into pottery then?"

I thought he had a point.

Apologies

2007-01-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

To all who vainly check this blog for updates. There's probably only about three of you now (Dan! Where's my Xmas card?!!) but I can let you know that I am still alive and kicking. I am moving in with Jason here in Vancouver in February and we plan to go to Nova Scotia this summer to look at buying a house. Since I usually only blog when bored or depressed and I have been neither for a while, my silence has been resounding! So apologies to all you virtual people. I'll send you all e-mails soon with gossip - if I can find some.

J xxx

The good, the bad and the free

2006-07-31T23:18:00.000-07:00

The good: I've finally found a one-bedroom place of my own, and it's huge. I move in around three weeks from now. And I plan to go all posh style and convert the ex-pantry room into a walk-in closet, heh heh. Maybe not, but it's a nice thought.

The bad: the RCMP rang up earlier and offered me a 6 month admin job in Homicide, which I had to turn down because of my contract with UBC. Work seems to come in spurts or not at all.....

The also bad: http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/ if you want to be depressed by the exhibits from the World Trade Centre trial against Moussaoui. I had to look - I'm in forensics.

The free: Have just made a foray out to grab free stuff from a back alley, posted on craigslist 15 blocks from me. I was too late for the bike, but I grabbed the free standing lamp and the table on wheels before the next car came around the corner :o)

Two months on

2006-07-06T20:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the prodding, Dan. I hadn't realised that it had been two months since I last posted - although I did recognise that my updating had been less than stellar. Rest assured that I am still alive, although I have been crap at keeping in touch with people and I haven't read anyone else's blog since about March. Apologies to all - I know I'm terrible. You'll just have to allow me some time to wallow in my new-found stability and cut me some slack ;o)

So..... what has been happening over the past two months? Happily, little in the way of drama and lots in the way of settling down. Jason and I have booked flights to Nova Scotia in August to attend his family reunion so I can meet the parents - serious stuff! My parents are coming over here in September so I will get to return the favour. I'm not sure who is the more scared. I have been looking around at one-bedroom suites in a vain attempt to get my own place, but so far things are either too expensive or too grotty for my liking, so for now I'm still here. I seem to have developed an allergic reaction to mosquito bites in the past few weeks, so I am covered in huge red welts which turn into hard lumps and then bruises, looking like I have the plague or something. Jason and I bought a truck on Sunday for $600, which is going to get dismantled over the next few weeks and magically incorporated into another truck. I have now learned the differences between straight 6 and 8 cylinder engines, can explain how fuel is mixed with air to make the car run and know what the alternator does. In addition I have helped install speakers in the front doors of my car and have been junkyard hunting for a wing mirror and a back wiper. I am slowly becoming more mechanically-minded - wonders will never cease. I'm enjoying it all immensely, although Jason can't understand why the hell trailing round a wrecker's yard after him as he pulls vehicles apart is the least bit appealing. All I can say is that for an Oxford girl who went to a public school and grew up not knowing the simplest thing about cars, it's something new and interesting!

I have applied to UBC as an unclassified student so that I can use up some of my staff tuition waiver and do some courses - I'm kind of limited by what still has space left when it's my turn to register and also what takes place in the evening, but at the moment it seems to be a contest between Latin, random Forestry courses and perhaps some Asian architecture modules. Let it never be said that my life is not eclectic :o)

Aside from my personal life, it's nice and hot here and I have managed to lose some of my deathly pallor, although the self-tan may have to be broken out before the trip to Halifax. I need to do more exercise and stop being such a lazy bugger now I have a desk job, so everyone is at liberty to post their fitness tips for me ;o) but for now, I am going to have a Coke (diet), listen to some music (The Fray) and go to bed. Night all xxxx

Springtime in Vancouver

2006-05-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

Since I am currently very slack at posting (I always am when I haven't got anything to moan about), I shall give a quick rundown of my movements over the past month, in the hope that this will somewhat make up for the lack of info that I have been giving out recently.

April heralded various events which I shall detail in chronological order: the acquiring of a bed for free, Christie's dad's birthday dinner, the spending of a weekend in Victoria with Sunshine , Gilles' birthday (a grand old 24!), some eventual cross-border shopping after being stuck in the border queue for three hours, the Easter weekend (bliss to have four days off), Easter dinner with my parents' friends, more dinners, the shower leaking into my wardrobe, a wedding lunch at work, the Stanley Cup playoffs starting, a fantastic day of skiing with Sunshine at Cypress on a boiling hot day, more dinners, final selection meetings at work to decide who gets into medicine, dinner with Mel, Sunshine's swap party, Franz Ferdinand and Death Cab for Cutie at the Pacific Colliseum, some work for SFU, Switchfoot at the Commodore Ballroom, enjoying the run of near 20 degree weather, and finally some spring cleaning.

And the madness isn't over yet. This weekend I have an all-day Emergency Social Services exercise on Saturday and am then looking at two one bedroom suites after finally getting pissed off with the state of our kitchen and the way it is kept. Jason is currently working 13 hour days to get some house foundations put in and we seem to spend most of our life being tired - but everything is good. I just booked two more lots of concert tickets for June (I drag Jason to Snow Patrol, he drags me to Eagles of Death Metal) and in two weeks I finally get to go and see Shaw in Boston (and Dan too, if you're around!!). Woohoo!!!

In an effort to be responsible and plan for the future I have opened a savings account and am sticking some money in every month in the hope that it will somehow procreate like bunnies and turn me into a millionaire overnight. Either this or it will slowly leech out my bank account without me realising. In any case, I get to pretend to be grown-up and think about mortages. Bleugh.

And that, as they say, is all, folks.

Roll on summer.....

2006-04-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

Since spring seems to be the season for breakups (3 pairs of friends and counting.....) and I don't want the karma to hit me!! Gulp.

I can't believe it's April

2006-03-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

And the weather isn't doing much to make it spring-like here. The first day of spring was lovely, and everyone at UBC got all excited and put on their shorts. Since then we've had one or two nice days, and the rest have been rainy. But it's a decent temperature, so I should really stop compaining.

In my past few lunch hours at work I have been watching Storm The Wall in front of the student union, which consists of team or individual challenges involving 9 lengths in the pool, a 445 yard dash, a 3km cycle, a 1km run and then getting over a 12 foot wall without ropes or any other equipment. The team trials are mildly amusing, but the individual 'Super Iron Man' men's heats were very good, with hundreds of students gathered on the hill watching blokes hurling themselves at the wall. Sadly the guys I saw couldn't quite make it over, despite being inches from the top at every try. Apparently someone did it on Sunday by stripping naked - this allegedly gave them "more grip." I hate to think about how that worked....

This week I have also been swimming, helping Sunshine move house, trying to get through an 813 page book on Excel, going for dinner with Christie and her dad, cleaning my room and trying to fit in seeing Jay as well. I seriously need some sleep - I keep waking up at 6am for no reason, even though I'm going to bed at decent hours. I can't wait for Easter in two weeks' time, so that I can have a four day weekend.....

No longer single

2006-03-27T22:10:00.000-08:00

:o)

Been a while.....

2006-03-25T22:12:00.000-08:00

So I guess I should post something, just to prove that I still exist. It's not really that nothing has been happening; more that when my life is going (relatively) smoothly I don't feel much inclination to blog, since it's all boring stuff which fills a day but which doesn't really make for good reading.

I've been carrying on working at UBC, which I'm enjoying, and I'm busy with trying to learn computer-type things and broaden my skills a bit. I saw Hot Hot Heat this week, and they were very good, although I got home at 2am and had to get up for work at 7am, so that kind of sucked. My parents booked a flight over here in September, which I am looking forward to, and I go to Boston for a week in May. My laptop died and was then resurrected. I got a bill for $1,425 from ICBC and had to pay it in one go, the day after my salary went into the bank. I replied to a post from a guy on craiglist and have been on four "dates" with him in the past two weeks - and here's to many more. I am not giving out further details on him, because I don't want to jinx anything. I shall just say that he is extremely nice, he drives a huge monster truck that I laugh at every time I see it, and strangely he seems to be very keen to see me again. Wonders will never cease.

Our hot tub is definitely being fixed in the next couple of weeks. In addition, Roger the Navy housemate and I have decided that we are going to attack the deck and the backyard this summer; sand the deck down and stain/varnish it, clear out the weeds and the crap in the garden and clean all the furniture. This is a large undertaking, since the garden is the size of a small country and the deck will need a good few days of work. But if I'm going to stay in this house, I need to spruce it up a bit.....

Just for Reen

2006-02-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

Who makes me feel guilty by enthusiastically checking my blog to see whether I have updated, and I never have! But the thing is, my blogging is usually inversely proportional to how satisfied I am with life, so no blogging is usually good news. But I'd better write something, even if it's not that exciting.

So, what has happened over the past few weeks? Well, I've reluctantly turned 27, kicking and screaming, and for the entire week before and during my birthday, I had bronchitis or some random chest infection. This was a combination of being in Seattle to see my friends from England and sleeping in a youth hostel with a flu-ridden girl in the bunk above me, my housemate Reen getting bronchitis, and then someone at work also getting bronchitis. People at work went down like ninepins, and I had the day before my birthday off. However, I then resolved not to be in bed for my birthday, so I went to work and brought a big fat chocolate cake with me. Which helped with the pain slightly.

In Seattle I got to see some friends off my masters course and had dinner up the Space Needle, which was an interesting and slightly nauseating experience, as the damn restaurant revolves while you're eating. It was also very pricey, but having done it once at least I don't have to do it again. We crashed a Superbowl party and watched Seattle lose out, but it was a good weekend. Other than that, I've been working hard, have been cross-border shopping with Sunshine, have been to see a band and have been watching the Olympics whenever I have a free moment. From Monday I will be working 12 days straight, since we have the interview event coming up and I'm going to have to do some serious overtime. I'm therefore enjoying my weekends while I can! More details shall not be posted ;o)

Oh, and I'm also feeding Christie's guinea pig for her while she's away in Egypt. It's quite entertaining to watch it chomping on a load of salad before I go to work in the mornings.

Just some thoughts

2006-01-28T22:24:00.000-08:00

That have been kicking around in my head.

1. There are a lot of people in this world who have the emotional maturity of a root vegetable, and many of them seem to cross my path at some point. I'm not sure if this reflects badly on them, or me.

2. Sometimes you realise in hindsight that you read a situation a certain way, but that things were actually completely different. I had one such epiphany the other day, but although I should have been dismayed by the realisation that someone just said a load of stuff because it was obviously what I wanted to hear, it actually didn't bother me that much. Maybe I've finally grown up, apparently before the other person did.

3. I am perpetually dissatisfied with life. Or maybe it is dissatisfied with me?

4. I actually downloaded an entire episode of Supernatural simply to find out how much air time I got on screen. How sad is that!

5. I'm not quite sure how I am going to get over my laziness genes in order to train for this damn half marathon that I have in May. Answers below please.

6. As you can see, I am a list-maker.

In the blogging wilderness

2006-01-23T19:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am still here. It's just been a busy two weeks. That's all I've been back in Vancouver for, but it seems like ages - I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.....

I've been back at UBC, temping in the job I was doing before Christmas. It's been quite interesting, since the application process is onto a new phase now and applicants keep ringing up or e-mailing me. I've also worked at SFU, been ten-pin bowling, helped pack up an entire house, had two interviews, applied for jobs that I'm possibly qualified for and those that I'm not, and been to a Bryan Adams concert. Which was fantastic. There were the usual suspects in terms of songs - he hit the jackpot with 'Summer of '69', then ruined the good work by playing 'Everything I Do' immediately after it. And is it just me, or did everyone else think the damn song was about a year? Call me innocent, but I didn't ever think about the alternative. And yet Bryan Adams prefaced the playing of the song by saying, "I'm often asked whether this next song is about a year..... or a sexual position.... and let me tell you, it isn't about a year...." Thanks for ruining it for me, Bryan.

Anyway, he did his set, and then there was the usual encore, and then he came back and did a couple more songs, and then he went off again. But the crowd refused to leave, since this is his home town and they wanted more, so there was a full five minutes of clapping and cheering, and eventually he appeared again with a guitar and proceeded to play six more songs acoustically. It was a good night.

Tomorrow Sunshine has roped three of us into some sort of consumer panel type night, which seems to involve us going to a hotel, watching a short film and then some commercials, and then rating them. The promise of free food is the basic draw, but it should be fairly interesting as well. Then on Weds I am giving in and getting my eyes tested, since I suspect that I might need reading glasses sometime in the near future. Sob.

And the brief news: my mp3 player won't show me the pictures that I've loaded onto it, and the Conservatives seem to have won the f***ing election. Except here in Vancouver Quadra, where the Liberals kicked their arses.

Still alive

2006-01-11T17:56:00.000-08:00

I suppose I should qualify the last post by reassuring everyone that I am still alive, etc etc. I just got back to Vancouver to find a $1500 bill for car repairs on my desk, sent by my insurance company, after some stupid bint managed to run into me before Christmas. My car has but a scratch on it, and she was playing silly buggers in the road, but since she was on a main road and I only on a side road, and since nobody bothered to stop and be my witness, I have to pay the bill. Or have my insurance go up from -10% to +40%, which will cripple me over the next three years rather than crippling me all at once. Marvellous.

Anyway, I have just about recovered from the stress, after a good old fashioned cry, 12 hours of sleep, and the cancellation of my fitness classes to get some much-needed money back, so let us move on. Thanks to everyone who accommodated me in England, especially Greg for his mattress-lending and Sarah for her cooking. I had a fab time and really wasn't that impressed about coming back here, but at least it gets less heart-wrenching every time I do it. And the parents didn't cry at the airport this time, so it was good. I saw my marvellous ex-boyfriend Oli, who scared me somewhat by initially appearing all grown up and lawyery, but thankfully remaining the same fab person he always was underneath. And of course I have acquired a new reader, so that's always good. I like to inflict my crap on as many people as possible.

I also went through wedding photos from Jeannine and Oli's big day (the friends that I managed to kick up the arse and get together a couple of years ago), met some of my forensic coursemates and had typically ghoulish conversations, and mended bridges with Neil after apologising for being a bitch last year. Christmas is always good for burying hatchets, as long as they're not in anyone's heads. I attempted Trof chocolate cake and the Oriental buffet - failing miserably at both - and bought far too many sale items to bring back in my suitcases without worrying that they were going to explode. But it all worked out fairly well, I think. There were some good times. Now I just need to pay my car bill, earn some money, get over to Boston to see Shaw and Dan, and convince everyone else to come over here and see me. My evil machinations roll on. Or something.

2006-01-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

It is a well known fact that when things seem to start to go right, they then turn around and bite you in the arse. So I suppose I should have planned for the fact that having spent three weeks having a good time in England, the first hour of my being in Vancouver has been one of the worst starts to a year I have ever had. Cheers.

A new year cometh

2005-12-30T08:06:00.000-08:00

And today I broke my resolution of last year. Not bad really, with one day left in 2005, but I was suddenly overcome with Christmas cheer and Christmas-time guilt, so I had to. I was very restrained though, and only broke it moderately. Yes I know, I talk shite. Ignore me. If I only give in once per year, I'll be doing well :o)

Thankfully my MP3 player turned up today, nicely black and shiny and in working order. The journey back on the plane will hopefully not be quite so hellish as the one here was, now that I have music. Some of it is still in Vancouver on my computer, but having left a lot of my cds here I can now rip them onto my dad's laptop (I'm not sure he's that pleased about this) and get them on the MP3 player. I'm like a kid with a new toy - "ooh, look, it's got touchy-feely buttons!"

New Year's Eve threatens tomorrow in its usual way, and I still have nothing to do for it. I've been trying to insinuate to friends that I might be bored at home by myself, without actually telling my parents that I'll be bored staying in with them. The hope that someone somewhere might contact me and invite me out seems to be fading fast! It's not that I mind being at home with my parents, but I'm kind of itching to get down the pub, hang out with some good old fashioned drunk people and watch everyone get shit-faced. Sadly in a little village such as mine, where anyone with any sense has long departed, this isn't going to happen. *Sigh* I have become boring in my old age.....

Holiday update

2005-12-27T10:51:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm still here. Still eating too much, not doing any exercise, feeling the cold of our 300 year old house, and generally watching too much crappy tv. Mind you, it's not really a proper Christmas this year, since none of the irritating old favourites are on; no 'Wonderful Life', no 'Great Escape', only one James Bond and no sign of Julie Andrews in anything musical. What is the world coming to? However, I have done the Christmas thing by buying clothes in the sales with no regard for whether I actually need them or whether they are going to fit in my suitcase when I go back to Vancouver. I've also taken the easy way out and done the mass e-mail to wish people a happy holidays, since I wasn't actually organised enough to send out individual messages. But then at least I said something, right?

We got back from visiting my aunt and some friends in Devon last week, only to find that the mice which inhabit the attic above my head had decided to take the opportunity to eat the poison that my father periodically puts down (humane traps being completely ineffective against the armies that reign in our house) and had decided to get back at us by dying under the floorboards. Actually, under my floorboards. So I've spent the last four or so days going to bed with the lovely smell of rotting mouse lingering in the air. I must say, I've experienced better scents. Happily, it seems to have dissipated now, though I am sure further mice are rising up to replace those that were lost, just waiting for their chance to chew through the beams.

I gave in yesterday and ordered an mp3 player from Dixons. I thought about waiting until I got back to Vancouver, but I would have missed all the decent sales. And with the exchange rate as it is, it was actually cheaper to order it over here. Now I just have to hope that it comes in the next week or so, that it actually works, and that it won't have a spaz the minute I fly 4000 miles away with it. Cross fingers. At least if it does work, I will have something to listen to on the plane. After about an hour and a half of Air Canada radio on the way over here, I felt like strangling someone.

Ok, have a good holiday everyone. It's nearly 2006.....

Back to basics

2005-12-21T01:18:00.000-08:00

So I made it home in one piece, despite screaming children on the plane who shattered any illusions I had of sleep, a large number of airsick people (I've never had any on a flight before) and a pilot who needed 'L' plates on the landing. So far my stay here has not been all happiness and light, since my stomach seems to have reacted negatively to having good food and a change of water type, the weather leaves something to be desired, and I got an e-mail this morning telling me that I didn't get the job I wanted. However, I guess since I've been waiting for a decent job for the past year, I shouldn't be suprised that no-one wants to employ me. Still kind of galling though, since the place I was working at persuaded me to go for the job in the first place, which kind of implies that I should have had a good chance of getting it. I seriously don't understand the Canadian system.

Meanwhile, my housemate Jerome informs me that he has spent the last week sitting on a beach in Reunion, drinking beer and snorkelling with dolphins. 'Jealous' does not cover it.

Never mind. I am hoping that 2006 will be my year. My mother says this every year, but surely one year it has to actually come true? Because mothers never lie....

The good, the bad and the ugly

2005-12-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

So today I got up at 6am to work for Sunshine at SFU, felt like crap, hit another driver on the way home (minor bumper scrape only, she tried to blame me for everything), bought some Ice Wine for my parents, packed frantically for tomorrow's flight home, took Gilles downtown to buy an armchair off someone on craigslist, managed to get the entire thing in the back of my Mazda, went to dinner, played pool and finally received a fantastic Christmas gift from a wonderful person. I don't deserve it! But it's beautiful, so thank you. I hesitate to say more, even though I want to, simply because I am not sure how my sentiments would be received. However, I will just say that I appreciate the friendship, so long may it continue :o)

Thanks also to Sunshine, who gave me the Harry Potter four-volume set, so now I have some reading to do on the plane. And a big list of things to bring back for all my friends, including a large amount of chocolate. Let's hope customs don't go through my suitcase, or they'll have a field day.

Hopefully next time you read this, I will be in England!

A moment of fitness - or madness?

2005-12-09T19:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I signed up for the 2006 Vancouver half marathon, in a vain attempt to inspire myself to get fit and beat my miserable time of last year. And then I went to the Community centre and signed up for the two most different classes I could possibly find - Ryukyu Kobodo and International Style Ballroom Standard and Latin. One deals with nunchucks, clubs and short swords, and the other deals with floaty dresses. Neither of them are things that I would normally do, but I feel that a marshal art is needed in my life at the moment. And learning the tango or the foxtrot would just be fun. I'm sure everyone who reads this has done these sorts of things before, but I am obviously a late bloomer.

In other news, there may be jobs sighted on the horizon. Proper jobs. I shan't say any more for fear of jinxing myself, but I'll keep you all posted. Oh, and the other day on the way back from Sunshine's house a stone lept up and smashed itself against my windscreen, leaving a lovely bullet-shaped shatter mark. I am trying to ignore it and hope that my windscreen doesn't fall out, as I don't have the money to fix it.....

And in more news, I go home for Christmas in a week!!! :o)

Outward appearances

2005-12-05T23:28:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here in our pool room (and by this I mean the room with the pool table in), with the Christmas lights that Gilles hung up the other day around me, and near-darkness. It's strange how such a simple thing as light can affect your mood so much. White Christmas lights + dark room + sofa = relaxation and happiness.

On Saturday night I spent the evening playing pool, listening to music, lying on the pool table at 1am in the dark and talking, enjoying some good company and learning more about other people's lives. Sometimes when you think you know someone, they still manage to surprise you. Not just the way they behave now, but the way they used to behave in the past. Sometimes you can't believe that the person you thought you knew fairly well is actually very different. It always fascinates me to realise how little we really know about people, and how much people can change. Maybe it's just the psychologist in me.

But Saturday night was good because it reminded me of all the nights that I spent with good friends at University, lying around in our rooms and talking crap, sitting in comfortable silence in the darkness and relaxing, venturing onto fire escapes with some alcohol for company, lying on the grass and watching the world go by, debating topics such as cartoon penguins and PhDs in potatoes, running out into a thunderstorm to stand under the torrents of water, or simply appreciating the proximity of another person. I've missed this level of comfort recently - it was nice to have it back for an evening.

All is not well with the world

2005-12-02T22:41:00.000-08:00

And my heart breaks for the person that I can't help.

An aside

2005-12-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

You know something? This blog was much more interesting when I was a depressive, jobless, basement-living newbie to Vancouver. There's something to be said for emotional rollercoasters.

Of course, this doesn't mean that I want to go back to being unemployed, depressed or dark-basement dwelling, but it would be nice to have something interesting happen once in a while....maybe whilst Christmas shopping tomorrow I will bump into a cute young millionaire in Sears. Or maybe not.

Workwise, I have a testing session at the RCMP in Surrey in a couple of weeks (then an interview in January) for a civilian position, and my current temporary employers want me to work for them permanently, which is nice to know. But whilst work is indeed useful for paying the rent and keeping me occupied, I would also like to have some personal life to speak of. My friend Sunshine is trying to get me to go speed dating with her, but I keep assuring her that I would rather eat my own feet, with ketchup. Don't get me wrong - I'm happy being single, dear readers, but I miss the butterflies of attraction fluttering round my stomach :o)

Winter comes to Vancouver - as do Wide Mouth Mason!

2005-12-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

It snowed here on Sunday night/Monday morning, and suddenly it became a white November. Too early for Christmas, but still a nice sight. Driving wasn't good, but then it never is in Vancouver anyway. Some dickhead overtook me on our road on my way to work, round a corner and in the snow. So it's snowing again now, which means that maybe I will be able to lie in tomorrow and struggle to work later! I wish....

Last night I went to see Wide Mouth Mason and The Heck at Richard's on Richard's. I decided to go on a whim on Sunday night, since I had never heard of either band but thought that they might be good. And they were. I spent the entire Heck set staring at the bassist, who was about 6 years too young for me but had my idea of the ideal body for a guy to have. This doesn't mean that he was perfect, since everyone's ideas of a good body differ, but damn, he made me wish that I spent more time in the gym. If you ever see the guy live, or you see a decent full body picture of him on the web, have a look. You'll see that I am easily satisfied, since he really wasn't out of the ordinary in any way. But take a quite skinny guy with good arms but no huge biceps, add a flat stomach and a pair of flares, and it's all over. I should have been a 70s hippy.

After lusting after the bassist's body for most of the set, I also began to appreciate their music. Enthusiasm was boundless and the drum player (who had recently come into the band, and hence is not the girl on the website) was really comical when playing. I can imagine him having done drama at school and having been fantastic at it. And then Wide Mouth Mason came on, and they were even better. Although they opened with two great songs, 'I love not loving you anymore' and 'Smile', it didn't go downhill after that, since they were equally as good throughout. The crowd was jumping up and down, and Richard's on Richard's has a stage that's right next to the floor, so the band was practically in the pit with everyone else. In fact they said that they were having a drink with all the fans afterwards, which I would have stayed for, if it wasn't for the fact that they didn't finish until half past midnight and I had to work today. Anyway, I highly recommend them for their enthusiasm, the lead singer's voice, the bassist's coolness, the drummer's cuteness and the fact that all their songs rocked. Amen to that.

How to win at pool

2005-11-28T21:40:00.000-08:00

So the following conversation sent me into hysterics and made me lose at pool tonight.

Housemate: I was reading about this study, where they were trying to find out if a rubgy ball would move if everyone blew towards it at the same time. Because you know when you take a penalty in rugby, and the wind moves the ball, and it doesn't go over the posts. So the study got lots of people to blow at the ball when it was kicked and they looked at how far it would move.

Pause.

Housemate: Well actually, it didn't do anything.

Pause.

Housemate: But it was a really interesting study.

Hysterical laughter. Jenny promptly pots the black ball and loses.

Just for Jerome

2005-11-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

Who will keep hassling me until I update my blog ;o) good naturedly of course.

And who spent a good couple of hours the other night telling me about Reunion (the island) as seen below, since he is from there. For those of you whose geography is as shite as mine, a map is attached. And now I really want to go and see the beaches there, because they are amazing, and I wouldn't mind seeing Madagascar and all its animals either. So thanks, Jerome, for making me extremely jealous that you're going home to 30 degree temperatures in a week's time!!

Just for good measure, I feel that I should steal some of Jerome's pictures from the island and post them later, especially all the ones where he seems to be eating or drinking beer ;o)

A PS

2005-11-22T22:50:00.000-08:00

Just so I don't forget, I need to ask everyone in England when you're going to be around over the Christmas holidays, so I can try (probably fairly badly) to co-ordinate seeing you all. I shall be flying in on the 17th December and am staying until the 9th Jan, though the time before Christmas is mostly taken up with family stuff (including visits to the wonderful Cornwall and Birmingham). Depending on where people are, I need to work out some sort of running-around-the-UK-with-car schedule to see if I can meet you all. So e-mail me if you know where you're going to be, or even if you don't! Of course I would like to suck everyone into visiting me in Oxford instead, but failing that cunning plan, I will manoeuvre my way to as many of you as I can. I am almost definitely up north on the 27th, in Cornwall from the 21st-23rd, Oxford in the middle, Manchester in the New Year, lord knows where else...... Chip in with your two cents' worth. Gift bribes get first priority ;o)

Pompeii comes to Vancouver

2005-11-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

So Vancouver seems to be degenerating into Armageddon. It's really very freaky. For the past four days we've been suffering under this weird non-shifting fog, which is kind of like the fog that usually surrounds UBC in the morning after it rolls off the ocean, only it's been here for days without a break and shows no sign of abating. You can barely see more than 25m in front of you, and it's damn cold, and driving in it is really not a pleasure. I borrowed someone else's pictures, but this is what it's like here currently.

But the scariest thing was that just now, when I drove downtown to meet Sunshine in a pub, I got off the Granville bridge and suddenly drove into Pompeii. I came around the corner and the entire downtown core around Seymour had no traffic or street lights on. It was completely dark, and extremely foggy, and everywhere there were eerie car lights in the silence, but no other lights. All the cars had to stop at the intersections and let each other through in a random order, because no-one had right of way. And at every intersection there were pedestrians running across the roads so they could cross before the cars came out of the fog and hit them, so there were all these shadows running in front of the car. It was so much like I imagine it being in the midst of Vesuvius erupting, with the ash blinding the air and people running for cover, and darkness. At the same time as it being really rather scary, it was also very surreal and interesting. Luckily I made it through the madness and didn't hit anything, but driving home was equally challenging. I am interested to see what the weather does now, but I'd rather there were no volcanos, or earthquakes, or other such disasters waiting round the corner for us after the fog. Watch this space.

I'm annoyed

2005-11-17T19:41:00.000-08:00

Because my agency phoned me today to ask me to be a forensic lab assistant on a crime show called 'Evidence' for Friday, Monday and regularly until the end of the season in March, and I can't do it because I'm working at UBC! I contemplated phoning in sick tomorrow, but in the end my better judgement prevailed. How annoying is that. Not only a regular appearance, but in a forensics series! I told the agent to snag me any further parts on the show, but I guess I just have to live with not being involved for now..... :o(

Too busy to blog

2005-11-16T21:13:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the lack of decent blogging recently, but life is getting rather hectic. I've just started temping at UBC, where I'll be for the next two and a half weeks (in the Admissions dept at the Dean of Medicine's office) and each of my Saturdays for the next three weeks are also booked up. It's all getting rather hard to fit in. Last Saturday I was invigilating/marking an exam for SFU, this Saturday I am an election official at the Civic Elections for 14 hours straight, and next week I'm back invigilating and marking an exam for SFU again. In the midst of all this I somehow need to get my car aircared (centres not open on Sundays) and insured (not until it's aircared), buy copious numbers of birthday and Xmas cards, go to the doctors, try and book Coldplay tickets, do some washing (becoming increasingly important) and actually sleep. Oh, and I have 7 hours of computer work to do for my company in England as well. And a meeting about the elections tomorrow, line dance, and a trip to the cinema. Oh Saturday night I want to stay with my friend and take him to the airport on Sunday morning to go back to Montreal, but will I be alive after 14 hours of dealing with voters? Who bloody knows.

On Monday Christie, Emily and I went to see Jason Mraz at the Commodore Ballroom. Despite the disappointment of finding out that James Blunt was not playing in support (rude e-mail sent to Ticketmaster) and that some random girl with a guitar was playing instead (hard to sit through without strangling myself), Jason Mraz was extremely good. He was funny without trying too hard, interactive with the crowd, seemed able to improvise at a moment's notice, gave credit to his band when it was due, and had lots of energy when performing. His songs were all good and the show went on for a long enough time that we had thankfully forgotten about the opening act. I recommend going to see him. Even if he does look like a geeky frat boy. His voice is very pure, rather like the lead singer out of Keane. He took the piss on one occasion and did an opera 30 seconds or so of one of his songs, hitting notes that no man should ever be able to get to. It was kind of scary, but very impressive at the same time.

Tomorrow is free ski night at Cypress, but I am probably going to be too busy to go there, which sucks. However, it was trying to snow here on Saturday, so the ski runs are going to be ace soon. Whistler has been open for a couple of weeks already. Let's hope I don't fall over as much as last year, eh Denise?

Au sujet des hommes

2005-11-11T21:27:00.000-08:00

First of all, my cute and angsty housemate has created a blog, so I'm now going to plug it. It's less of a blog and more of a gallery of all his photos (he is a photographer in his spare time) with a comment about why he took each one and what he was thinking about when he took it. He does some good work, so check it occasionally to find out what pics he's posted. He's going to do it gradually, so there should be a couple more posted each day. And he's cunningly written in both French and English, which is impressive in my opinion. I've linked him under the bloggers on my sidebar, but here he is again below.

So check out Gilles....I think he's worth it.

Secondly, I just went on a date with someone - or at least we went to Starbucks for coffee. I think it went well and I hope we can meet up again soon. I hate feeling like that, because then if he doesn't contact me I'll be disappointed! But I'm not going to jinx it by supplying any more details. So cross your fingers for me, dear readers. God knows I have nothing else to fill my social time with..... ;o)

Curiosity made the cat edgy

2005-11-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

I've been quite busy over the past few days, what with my computer work, filming Supernatural (being a religious nut in a revival tent in a field), going to a sex party (ooer), finally managing to start getting some temping work at UBC and doing a Marker certification course at SFU which now allows me to get a $2/hr pay raise and mark the exams once we've invigilated them. I've also been out to dinner twice in two days (with female friends, before anyone gets mildly excited) and have seen Jarhead at the cinema. Despite some mixed reviews, I thought it was a really good film, with the right mixture of funny and upsetting. I've ranted about the lack of available men in Vancouver on a forum and so far received nearly 70 e-mails from guys, although the ones I am contacting will be in single figures. I need to clean my room up and it's shitty weather today. And I've got Jimmy Eat World songs on repeat, though luckily on my headphones so I'm not pissing any of my housemates off.

With the advent of Christmas, and my flight home nearing, I am wondering about people I haven't seen for a long time. Fate has thankfully thrown my vacation in at the same time as Shaw's, so we can meet up in England and see each other, and I've contacted a couple of other people to ask when they're around. The trouble is that I am too soft-hearted and I want to make sure that everyone I know is ok, even when I really shouldn't contact some of them to preserve my sanity. I've been very good this year - after coming back from England in March I vowed not to contact two guys any more in order to save myself more heartache, and since then I haven't e-mailed them, asked for news of them or read their blogs. Not bad for 9 months. But of course now that I'm going to be in the same country as them (I assume, since I don't know where they are) I want to know that they are alive, well, happyish and gainfully occupied. Well actually I'd like one of them to turn up at my door with Christmas presents for me, but whatever ;o)

The point is that I know I should still not contact them, since it probably can't do any good, but I hate not knowing how they are. It's getting harder to resist the urge to contact them..... but then I guess if I manage not to do it even when I'm in England, there must be some sort of completed therapy bonus, right?

An appeal to Jimmy Eat World

2005-11-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

Current listening:

Give Me Everything You Got Now
I don’t feel a single thing
Drag me out into the cold rain
Let it hover over me
Kiss me with your cherry lipstick
Never wash you off my face
Hit me, I can take your cheap shots
Leave you with the love we made

Come back on tour to Vancouver!!

New shoes for Fab

2005-11-04T17:44:00.000-08:00

So Fab now has new brake shoes and boots, plus new rotor drums as well. And I am bereft of $315......

Halloween Masquerade

2005-11-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

I have just returned from downtown, having sorted out some problems with my new cell phone, and have discovered a distressing fact. Despite my trying on size 2 trousers in Old Navy, they are still too big. The next size down? A size zero. Yes, I am officially able to fit into trousers that don't exist, and I am a person worth nothing. Waaahhh!! I'm not sure how this happened, since I have an arse and some hips, which generally size 0 trousers don't cater for, but I think it's just Old Navy being weird. I bought trousers elsewhere and they were a size 4, so I can feel better about that.

However, to cheer me up on the way home, I drove past a doctored sign that used to tell residents about the risk of fires starting here. There are so many wooded and built up areas that when the weather is hot, the risk of fires starting is communicated to people via these boards; there are four options (low risk, moderate, high, extreme) and an arrow is moved along to point to the relevant risk level. However, some cunning person has made their own and stuck it at the side of the road. It now reads "Risk of Alien Invasion" and when I drove past the arrow was pointing to "Extreme........"

So now I will move onto the Halloween Masquerade which I went to on Monday. The first prize for the best costume was an obscene $10,000 - so as you can no doubt infer, people went all out to win this. For my part I merely donned some left-over police stuff from Saturday night when we had our house party, and spent the rest of the night being amazed at what people had come up with. Here are a selection of the best ones, though sadly Z95 (radio station sponsoring the night) didn't take pictures of the most funky ones. Although they did get me in one, so that is below.

First prize winner of $10,000: Family Guy serial killer pile of bodies.

Me in police uniform, Sunshine's friends Bill and Audrey in Viking garb, Sunshine as Superwoman (of course).

The guy who looked and acted SO much like Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Carribbean that I really wouldn't have been suprised if it had turned out to be him. Seriously.

May I introduce Death?
Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson dolls, in original packaging.

The Incredible Hulk, of course.
Sadly, those are the only pictures of the main players on the website at the moment, although I am hoping that Sunshine's pictures turn out to be good. The costumes that didn't get captured and which I thought were worth a mention are as follows: the devil, a transformer who could actually transform into a car (my vote for the winner), a Decepticon, an I-Pod, a mermaid on a rock and the fisherman who caught her, a girl dressed as a blow-up doll, the Pilsbury dough boy, a monkey climbing a palm, a 7 foot rooster, the Mountain Dew spies, Beaker from Sesame Street, a guy carrying himself around in a cardboard box (you had to see it to understand it), a hammer, Elijah Wood's character from Sin City, a Jaigermeister bottle, a gumball machine, a plug and socket combo, a man made up entirely of glow sticks, and the cookie monster off Sesame Street. I love this country........

Another day, another blog.......

2005-10-30T00:06:00.000-07:00

And another round of filming. Spending four hours trapped in a lecture theatre whilst they filmed outside the auditorium, being unable to leave and wishing they would just wrap us, only to have them come back in, film 15 minutes of scene and then tell us we could go. Why they couldn't do this four hours earlier, and then let us go, we don't know.

Anyway, I have come back home to our Halloween party, which started off as quite a small affair and now at midnight is degenerating into involving the hardcore partiers and shows no sign of abating so I can get some much-needed sleep. There are people upstairs dressed as rednecks, robots, Barbie, witches, joggers, truckers, vampires and pirates, to name but a few. One of my housemates has disappeared into the depths of their room with someone that they should really not be in there with, despite my warnings and my stern glances. I wash my hands of the whole thing.......

And I am fairly drunk, but sadly not drunk enough to not really know what I am doing. There are about three girls in the bathroom next door (why can't they go in individually) and I am obviously getting old, because I just wish everyone would bugger off so I can go to bed! Maybe the lack of any male eye candy is the problem. Correction - any unattached or un-emotionally-attached eye candy. Plenty of 'taken' eye candy.

Oh, and the new phone that I bought yesterday hasn't activated or something today, so it doesn't work. I couldn't call anyone today and it sucked. I have to go back to the Bell store tomorrow and shout at them, which is another thing on the to-do list that wasn't really needed. I should stop moaning and try and get some sleep, or at least get in the bathroom before six million people start queuing in there and someone pukes. And lock my door, so that no-one can puke on me......Did I mention that I am getting old?!

Home, home on the range

2005-10-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my dad booked me a ticket back to England for Christmas - so I shan't be repeating the 'Sitting around at home without anyone to celebrate with' spectacle of last year, thank goodness. I couldn't book the ticket myself because the Air Canada website studiously refused to let me do so, and after being on the phone with an annoying woman who was obviously in a call centre over the other side of the world and didn't know anything, I gave up. My dad couldn't do it either, and had to book elsewhere in the end - so Air Canada, sort your website out.

Anyway, I will be in England from the 16th December to the 9th January, so I hope to tootle around the country and see a few people. And get used to driving on the other side of the road again. Hoorah! I plan to come back with chocolate, roll-on deodorant (strangely hard to get here), risotto rice and other random things. If anyone wants anything from Canada, let me know!! :o)

It could have been worse

2005-10-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

So the film guy wrote a very nice e-mail back to me, telling me how flattered he was and how he wants to go out and get to know me as a friend, but that for reasons which I am unable to write here for other people to read, going out with me is a no-go. Which is ok, because at least he wrote back and was nice to me.

*Sigh* back to the drawing board.

In other news, today was my first day of volunteering with the Canadian Music Awards. I met the band BOY (who I am about to dash out and see live) and a Canadian Idol guy. Randy Bachman was somewhere around and there were many producers lurking, so it was quite an interesting day. Viva tomorrow.

There may be hope yet

2005-10-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

After some determined googling, and a good bit of improvisation, I finally found my film guy. I think. It seems too random that there would be another guy with his name, who works in Vancouver on the same projects and does the same jobs, so I am crossing my fingers. I'm also hoping that the e-mail address on his resume still works, that my e-mail gets through the spam filters, and that he's nice about shooting me down in flames. Please, please, please, please, please be nice, please be nice, please, please, please.......

The fates conspire against me

2005-10-19T21:29:00.000-07:00

After the excitement of spending five days filming with one of the most well-known actors in film, I come down to earth with a bump as I realise that I may have missed my chance to ask my favourite film crew guy out on a date. The first two days of filming were disappointing as he wasn't on set, but this was immediately forgotten as I signed in on Monday morning to find him at the table. He got up and shook my hand with a smile, remembering my name thank god, and we spent the next two days chatting in between takes. I was so damn scared to ask him out (fearing that he is not single, and I would therefore embarrass the two of us by asking) that I resolved on Tuesday evening to give him a note at the end of Wednesday's filming, with my phone number and e-mail address, leaving it up to him as to whether to contact me or not. Only to come in this morning and find that he wasn't on set. Gutted is an understatement......

So now I have his full name and the rough location where he lives in Vancouver, and I also checked for a wedding ring. But other than that I am not much further forward, since I don't have his e-mail address, phone number or home address. I am kicking myself for not doing something on Monday or Tuesday, but when there are 449 other people around you you don't get much chance to be private. It wouldn't matter if he was an extra, but an extra asking a film crew guy out is kind of like going above your station in life, and it might be frowned upon if done publically. Not to mention that I'd embarrass the crap out of the guy if he was married or had a girlfriend and had to explain this to me. Or indeed if he didn't like me enough to go on a date with me.

Damn my reticence!!! I am resorting to seeing if he is working with us on Sunday, and if he isn't then I am entrusting the aforementioned note (in envelope, away from prying eyes) to the main wrangler who has been working with us. I don't know her well, but she's a very nice woman with kids, happy and jolly, and the sort of person who would be happy to pass a note on without getting all curious. Indeed she might have the film guy's phone number or e-mail, which would be even better.

It was good to see him for two days, but I'm pissed off that I didn't take my chance to find out once and for all if he is attached. Is it not to be? :o( And can I really be this desperate to ask the guy out after meeting him three times? Answers on a postcard please, addressed to 'Gutted of Vancouver'.

PS. Even though I know his first and last names now, and his rough location in Vancouver, the guy remains stubbornly un-googlable and un-people finderable. Chance and fate suck.

The next week.....

2005-10-16T19:38:00.000-07:00

....looks pretty hideous! Having done two days of filming already, here is my week:
Monday - filming all day
Tuesday - filming all day
Wednesday - filming all day
Thursday - Volunteer for Western Canadian Music Awards 9-4, dance class, England work, awards bands
Friday - Volunteer for Western Canadian Music Awards 9-4, England work, awards bands
Saturday - Volunteer for Western Canadian Music Awards 9-4, England work, awards bands
Sunday - filming all day

I think I may be dead.

Filming doesn't get much better than this!

2005-10-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

Today we filmed the same scene in the same lecture room for 12 hours straight, with only a 45 minute break in the middle for lunch. I and 39 other extras were students, sitting alongside this girl and this guy, who many of you will recognise.

But what made the day was that for 12 hours we watched this guy act, up close and personal. And boy, can he act!!

Just a quick note

2005-10-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

To confirm that I am still alive. I have a load of work to do, so I must be quick. I kind of shot myself in the foot today by asking my extras agency for some work, because they rang my housemate to book her in (and I told her to join them, so I was pissed that they didn't phone me). So then of course they sent my details to the film company, who only took two people from my agency, one of which was me. Eight days of work!!! But of course this means that the day I spent pissing about today instead of doing my England work has now bitten me on the arse and I have to work til god knows when to get this computer stuff done, as we start filming tomorrow.....

I also have to miss a day of work invigilating for my friend at SFU, so she'll kill me. But then she had too many people anyway. I also miss one dance class, one ESS meeting, and a volunteer orientation for the Music Awards, unless we finish filming early. Luckily, filming is at UBC and is 5 mins up the road, and the volunteer people haven't replied to my e-mails, so they can shove it. I can't turn down 8 days of film work.

So, news. Yesterday I had an interview and testing with a temping agency, which took ages. I went to a book sale with my friend Tony and bought 8 books for $7.50. I saw a coyote wandering down a main road and into someone's garden whilst on the bus. Earlier in the week I made Thanksgiving dinner for 15 people and ate it. I got over the flu and I went to the Killers/British Sea Power. The Killers rocked and BSP pretty much were average. Don't see them live, but listen to their music. Anything else? I don't think so.

So the next five days straight I am filming, so I won't be in much or update much. Normal stuff then!!

I'm dreaming of...... my exes?

2005-10-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

Strange as it seems, they keep coming into my dreams and doing random things. None of which I can now remember, because I forget about them not long after I dream about them, but they just keep turning up there and not getting out of my head. Is this my brain telling me that I have had enough of being single? I think I was in a restaurant with one of them, and then there was something about a train, and jumping off it with a newspaper under my arm, but who knows what my brain was doing. I have the flu and a raging fever at the moment, so it might be something to do with that.

Anyway, these strange dreams prompted me to think about my exes, and wonder what they are up to now. I keep in touch with nearly all of them (that sounds like there are tens of them dotted around - there really aren't that many) but there is one who I haven't spoken to for 8 years, not since he dumped me by letter after 2 1/2 years together, 2 days before our holiday to Paris. Actually I wouldn't really care if he'd got run over by a bus soon afterwards, but there are two others who I don't contact for the sake of my sanity, and one who I do contact but who only e-mails me back when he remembers that I exist (which isn't often). I know what he's up to, but not in as much detail as I'd like. The other two I have no idea about; I know they must be alive, otherwise I'd have heard from friends that they were no longer around. But I don't know where they are now or what they're doing, although I can make a few educated guesses. I could just e-mail them and ask, but my pride doesn't let me, and anyway I'd then be really pissed off if they didn't e-mail me back........

I feel like there are a few unresolved issues I need to sort out with some of my exes - and indeed tackle the problem of why a couple of them don't really qualify as exes at all, since in their eyes we never had a proper relationship. I contemplated what it would be like to settle down with a couple of them (well, three of them actually) and came to the conclusion that one of them was never going to be husband material, for the simply reason that I couldn't see how our life would work out together. We weren't too bad as a 'couple', but anything more than that just would have been too much work for the guy. He didn't really do hard work when it came to girls.

The other two I could see myself with in the long term, and sometimes I think I still can. Which is kind of a bummer, since I'm now 4,000 odd miles away from them (I assume) and persuading people to come over to Canada and visit me is hard. It's much easier to see someone in Europe on a whim, since the flights are cheap and if things go horribly wrong you can be home within a couple of hours. But when the flights are a few hundred pounds and 9 hours out of your life, people aren't so willing to take the chance. It would be fantastic if one day in the near future I got an e-mail, saying, "Hey, I'm coming over to Vancouver to see you - get an airbed ready for me and prepare to amuse me for a week" but sadly I don't think that's going to happen. I can but hope.......

I have to stop being bored

2005-10-04T22:44:00.000-07:00

Because I keep booking myself damn concert tickets!! Someone stop me from feeding this addiction :o( I have four possibilities written down, but so far have only succumbed (spelling?) to Jason Mraz. The others are Stars (a distinct possibility), Broken Social Scene (fifty/fifty) and OAR (probably not). Foreigner I have ruled out as being too expensive and like watching my parents being on stage, and Echo and the Bunnymen on the basis of me not liking their early stuff (although I haven't downloaded their more recent stuff, so I can't really judge them). If I search a bit more I'll probably find other things that I want to go to, so I need to get a job so I can't trawl through Ticketmaster!!! If I write that on my resume, do you think someone will employ me? :o)

One year on

2005-10-04T20:55:00.000-07:00

On this day in 2004 I flew into Vancouver, with two huge bags and a stuffed moose to keep me company. One year on and I am in a rented house with 7 other people to keep me company, but still have no job and no significant other. Come to think of it, there haven't really been any insignificant others either, except for one, who I haven't heard from for a while but who I invited to our Halloween party in a few weeks, because he's good eye candy ;o)

So today I went out and bought the biggest chocolate cake I could find to share with my housemates, and we just sat down to devour some of it. It was pretty much heaven. For $9 it didn't really match Gilles' $80 bottle of champagne that we drank last week to celebrate his first month here, but then I'm a cheapskate and I love chocolate, so what can I say. It went down just as well. I woke up this morning to find a cute note on my door wishing me "To find a job you like and a man you love" for the next year, and when someone rang me this evening I thought perhaps the former was coming true, but it was just someone about a volunteer position at the Canadian Music Awards. Which was good, since I get to work with some cool people and hear some good music, but paying me would have been even better! I went to a Latin Funk class and came back with grand plans to get drunk and be silly, but I can't actually be arsed to get drunk now as it's already 9pm. So I'll try and be silly without drink. I'll be interested to see where that goes.....

Apparently, we rock.....

2005-10-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

Vancouver

Athlete

2005-10-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

Last night was the Athlete concert - two gigs in four days is good going by my standards - and it was extremely good. I sat there thinking how much they looked like a band made up of someone's little brother and his friends, who used to practice in the garage on Sundays. Geekiness prevails in that band. But they play damn well, and I was quite glad to realise that actually most of the Athlete songs I have on my computer are the least-good ones, which means that the most-good ones are still to get. Christie and I thoroughly enjoyed the show, and although it looked for a minute as though the lead singer had given away his guitar to someone in the audience at the end of the last song, actually the roadie took it back when the lights came up. Which was kind of rude really, but there you go. I bought myself an Athlete T-shirt and didn't look at it too closely, because it was dark, and when I got it home I found that a drunken blind person had printed the logo on, because it's sloping down the shirt rather than being straight across. But then I guess it adds character to it. Or something.

Anyway, now I've only got one more gig ticket up on my pinboard, the Killers and British Sea Power on the 13th October, so I'd better start booking myself some more gigs or I'll start to get withdrawal symptoms. I'm keeping a look out for things that are coming up, but so far nothing has caught my fancy.

A note of caution: I've just got back from seeing Into The Blue at the cinema. Don't bother - unless you feel satisfied when you come out of movies in which all the bad guys die, all the good guys live, everyone who does die should have been dead 10 minutes before they actually perished but magically have superhuman strength, and where the treasure is found and everyone lives happily ever after. But it was a choice between that and Made In Heaven (or whatever the hell it's called) so it wasn't really much choice at all.

Now I've just eaten a chicken/chilli/basil concoction with rice that my lovely housemate made and left for me in the fridge, because he's nice like that, and apparently there is an ice cream cookie waiting for me as well. So, dear readers, I'm off to scoff my little heart out. Ciao!!

Green Day/Jimmy Eat World

2005-09-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

In response to Shaw's comment on my last post, sadly Christian Slater has not swept me off my feet and taken me away. I am still here, still searching for jobs and getting no responses, trying to enjoy the last days of sunshine before autumn hits us and volunteering for random causes.

Last night was the long-awaited Jimmy Eat World and Green Day gig. I had forgotten how much I like Jimmy Eat World, so their opening act was much appreciated. I'm not entirely sure what I thought of Green Day. They were energetic and able to whip up the crowd as always, generous with their thanks and nice to members of the audience. They brought a young boy on stage to hose down the crowd with water cannons, probably making his year, and they also picked three people to come on stage and play bass, guitar and drums. This seemed to be something that people knew about, as there were many signs being carried which read things like 'Pick Me For Drums'. The kids they eventually picked were damn good, the guitarist running on the stage and hugging Billy for about 15 seconds straight, until I thought they were going to have to get security to rip them apart. So they played a song, and Billy sung to it, and at the end he called the guitarist back and said, "You can keep the guitar." The kid nearly fainted and the crowd went mad. Not a bad thing to come out with at the end of the night.

Apart from that, their songs were of course catchy and high energy, but at times it was like being at a political rally, or an anarchist group meeting twenty years ago, when you felt like you were 'anti-establishment'. Of course George Bush was mentioned a few times, as was Hurricane Katrina, personal freedom, civil liberties etc. Singing 'We Are The Champions' as the last song really made me feel like I should be wearing a pledge badge and swearing in a presidential candidate. But if you took that part out of the night, it was a very entertaining gig. If only the screaming girl behind me hadn't had such an ear-splitting scream.

In other news, I've been called for lots of filming and have always been busy, I volunteered for the Aids Walk for Life and persuaded my housemate to walk around the park just to visit me, I've done a half day course on emergency registration of evacuees, have registered as a Disaster & Rescue volunteer with the Red Cross, have been mega busy with computer work (for once) and have singularly failed to clean my room or do my house chore for this week. I did jump in the swimming pool last Friday with one of my housemates, because we felt like we should, seeing as it was fixed. The photos from that experience are not good! Tonight we are going to a free salsa class as a house (hopefully 5 or 6 of us) and Gilles is giving us champagne because today is his 1 month anniversary of being here. This may seem slightly over the top, but his father works for a champagne company, so the man knows his wine. We drove round town for an hour and a half yesterday looking for it, so it had better be good!

Oh, the trauma

2005-09-23T00:02:00.000-07:00

Of spending two hours proofreading a load of Filemaker Pro forms, then pressing the wrong button due to tiredness and seeing a new, blank, form export itself into your database, magically consigning the 23 non-blank forms you've just proofread into oblivion, never to return. That's two hours of my life I will never recover, and more importantly, won't get paid for..... :o(

Psychology

2005-09-20T22:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes Psychology can really piss you off. I'm not sure whether it's being a student of Psychology, or whether it's a natural psychological thing, but I'm good at spotting things in people before they actually happen. Not only this, but I also spot them in myself. So I find myself getting pissed off at people for little things, because I've seen them coming and I don't understand why other people don't see them coming. Even worse, I get pissed off at myself and then I am able to psychoanalyse myself and realise why I'm pissed off at myself! And that's pretty pointless, since it's not like I can do anything about it just because I realise why I'm pissed off.....

Does that make any sense? I think I'm talking shite. Ignore me!!

Anyway, I've just been to my first Latin Funk dance class with Christie and am now very tired, but nonetheless am trying to do some work and drown out Blair's bloody guitar next door with my music. Grrr!!! Surely something good has to happen in my life soon? Surely? Hello? ;o)

Today's filming......

2005-09-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

....for Hollow Man 2, starring amongst others, this guy. Let's hope he doesn't bring his troubles to set!!

A little queasy

2005-09-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

So last night I planned to go to the baseball, since the Canadians are in the Championship playoffs against Spokane and they are at home Sat, Sun and possibly Mon. Somehow my plans got disrupted by the building of a lot of Ikea furniture for Martha, one of the girls who's just moved into the house, and then another trip to Ikea when one of the drawers didn't fit together properly. This of course led to more purchasing of furniture, then more building after we came home, and then a clearing out of her room so we could move all of it in. Of course the desk that was in there already had to be moved out and downstairs to Gilles' room, which necessitated my removing the doors from each room and Martha, Gilles and I hefting the damn thing down a flight of stairs and along two corridors, before destroying the door frame in an effort to get it into its new home. After all of this, and moving the new furniture into Martha's room, I decided that we needed something alcoholic, and everyone else in the house agreed. Cue three or four hours of serious drinking, which led to the abandoning of the baseball game as I was seriously wasted. And I don't get wasted. There were a few rounds of "I have never" followed by some more alcohol, some of which was hideously strong and homemade, then some music and pool playing, a change of music to salsa and some improvised salsa tutilage. Gilles tried to teach me how to do salsa and mambo steps, and I kept apologising for standing on his feet, but I wasn't too bad. When it got to the stage of me feeling sick and not being able to actually hit the pool balls, I abandoned the night and went to bed, after staying up for a while and watching my tv in an effort to stave off the whirlygigs. I woke up at 4am with the tv still on, turned it off, and finally got up at 10am this morning. I don't feel too bad, except for some tiredness, but I shan't be getting that drunk for a while! *pale smile*

Suing gone mad?

2005-09-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

I came across this via another site that I was reading, and I have to say, it's almost worth turning up at the law courts on Monday to hear this one being filed.....

Madness?

The madness of golf

2005-09-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that I am a lot closer to the Bell Canadian Open golf than I thought, having gone to get in my car to go to the supermarket and come face to face with the 14th green and a couple of golfers, separated only by a small fence. I feel that some rollerblading round the perimeter and some sweet smiling at people on the gate might be on the cards tomorrow or this weekend....

Oh, and I doubt anyone else will be watching the golf, but if you happen to catch the view from the darn blimp that spends its day over my house, look out for me. Big long white house, swimming pool and trampoline in back garden, facing the 14th green on a bend in the road. I'll be waving!

Welcome to my life

2005-09-07T22:25:00.000-07:00

Or at least my music collection. Last night, for the first time in I can't remember how long, I put my headphones on, hooked myself up to my laptop and listened to some music in the dark before I went to sleep. I'd forgotten how nice it is to do that and just chill out for a bit. However, there's always that annoying point in time when the music gets overshadowed by thinking. In this case, I realised why all the songs I was listening to were good for chilling out (a select list of 20 had been chosen). These aren't necessarily my favourite songs ever, but they're damn good for listening to in the dark. There was an overwhelming plethora of acoustic guitar and piano, with classical strings in the background. Just for interests sake, my top twenty 'chilling in the dark' songs were:

Scarlet - Independent Love Song (piano, strings)
Vertical Horizon - Forever (acoustic guitar, strings)
John Mayer - New Deep (acoustic guitar, keyboards)
The Perishers - My Heart (electric guitar, piano/keyboard)
Duncan Sheik - Half Life (acoustic guitar, piano, strings). I'm sure he's nicked some parts from Foreigner!
Vertical Horizon - I'm Still Here (acoustic guitar,electric guitar)
Charlie Mars - White Out (acoustic guitar, strings). Sounds like a Smashing Pumpkins song.
Bryan Adams - I'm Ready (acoustic guitar, strings)
Matt Nathanson - Sad Songs (strings, acoustic guitar, electric guitar). Sounds like Gin Blossoms.
Matt Nathanson - First Time (strings, acoustic guitar)
Duncan Sheik - For You (acoustic guitar, piano)
Ben Folds Five - Magic (piano, strings, keyboard/harpsichord)
Five for Fighting - 100 years (piano, strings)
Jewel - Hands (piano, acoustic guitar)
Simple Plan - How Could This Happen To Me (piano and strings, plus angsty lyrics, which is always good, though there is also some electric guitar in there for ten seconds)
Switchfoot - This Is Your Life (strings, acoustic guitar, keyboards)
Bryan Adams - I Will Always Return (acoustic guitar, strings)
Ryan Adams - The Shadowlands (piano, electric guitar, strings)
Melanie Doane - I Can't Take My Eyes Off You (acoustic guitar, some cheating electric guitar sneaks in)
Switchfoot - Spirit (again, some sneaky electric guitar, but mainly acoustic guitar)

So, quite a random collection of songs, but it's good that I can identify a common thread or two in the madness......

Today I finished signing up for some dance-type classes that Christie, Patty and myself are doing; belly dance, latin dance funk and line dance (my choice, the other two are doing disco instead). I love line dancing, it's the funniest thing I think I've ever done. Shaw will remember the class that we took, with Marlisa and the guys (the guys were pretty bad at it, surprisingly, since they were good dancers otherwise). I love classes where the people don't take themselves too seriously. I also went to the final baseball league game of the season, although the Canadians are in the Championship playoffs so I might go and see them on Saturday. Despite meaning to become a volunteer for Red Cross Disaster Relief, like I've been meaning to do for months, I once again forgot to do it, so that's tomorrow's work. Maybe in the future I'll finally be able to get on a plane and get into some forensic work if needed, rather than sitting here hoping someone would take me! Appropos of nothing, the Bell Canadian Golf Open is on just down the road, so the traffic is horrendous wherever you go - another reason to stop driving and start rollerblading.

Strangely, I just looked up Oasis tickets for tomorrow, since I was on Ticketmaster, and they are still not sold out. Guess they're not as popular as they thought..... the $70 price tag might have something to do with it! I'd go for $20 ;o) or free.....

A sneaking suspicion

2005-09-05T10:02:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else have a sneaking suspicion that the world is falling apart? I mean since last year we seem to have had a multitude of natural disasters; typhoons and earthquakes in China, hurricanes in America, floods in India, a tsunami warning here, even a flipping tornado in Birmingham! And then the plane crashes; today there was another one in Indonesia. I'm starting to wonder when the next thing will come along :o(

The invasion

2005-09-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

Is it spider season? I seem to have to attack more and more of the big bastards as every day passes. I just pulled out my modem accidentally when I saw one out of the corner of my eye scuttling past my feet. And Jesus was it big. After some thrashing about with my slipper I finally managed to smack the hell out of it, only to Google it and find out that it was bloody poisonous. Fantastic! Poisonous spiders are inhabiting my bedroom somewhere. Since I cleaned all of my room today I can only assume that it came from the closet, which I will have to tackle tomorrow. With a big boot in my hand. The joys of living in a basement continue.....

My parents' visit in pictures

2005-08-31T09:46:00.000-07:00

I can't actually remember the last time I posted a picture, so I thought I'd give it a go on the new system. Here are a few pics from when my parents and my aunt were here :o)

I love my city!

Everyone looking manic in Stanley Park.

Very windswept and all looking pretty awful.

Me in the icy waters of Lynn Valley Park, which I highly recommend.

This is my mum, my aunt and me in Stanley Park, looking strangely 'related'.

There are more, but these are mostly the 'people' photos. More 'arty' photos to come, if you're not all bored by now.

The L-Word

2005-08-31T09:35:00.000-07:00

So, Def Leppard was fantastic! The only gig I've been to where everyone was on their feet before the band had even got onto the stage, and everyone was singing along with every song they played. Sad to say, I even knew the ones they sung that weren't actually their songs, but were covers of other people's. It was really interesting to see how the drummer played with one arm, and all the keyboard pedals under the drums that he stamped on (with his bare feet). I admit that it was a little disconcerting to see them all in their 40s, playing songs that I remember from when they were 30, but it was a great concert nevertheless. I was hoarse when I came out, having sung for an hour and a half and cheered in between, but it was worth it....

Sunday afternoon was spent at the PNE in the rain with Sunshine, her two friends and one friend's small children, which frankly was my idea of hell, but I tried to be supportive and went along anyway. The fair at the PNE was full of rides, attractions, random Superdog and pig racing events, and strange parades, which the kids loved and which nearly sent me over the edge, because they played the same music whilst crawling along at a snail's pace. Once I'd heard the song about having fun three times, it was enough to make me throttle someone. But anyway, it was "an experience" as they say.

On Monday I filmed the L-Word with Sunshine's friend Lins, who we'd roped into becoming an extra as well. There were 400 extras there and it was utter chaos, with a lack of food, a lack of time, and absolutely no provision made for everyone wanting to sign out at the same time when we'd finished filming. However, the director was really funny and all the crew were lovely, except for one of the actresses who was a complete drama queen (I don't know which one, cos I don't watch the show, and anyway I wouldn't slander her here for fear that she'd sue me, since she looked the type....). She chewed someone out for something that was completely her fault, whereupon I lost all respect for her. But the day was interesting, if a little lengthy as they tried to get shots right, and I eventually got out of the damn place at 10:15pm, having been waiting for 45 minutes to sign out.

Yesterday brought shopping with Christie, where I ended up with essentials such as an umbrella and toothpaste, as well as a not-so-essential bag, and today I am sitting in front of the tennis. Though I now need to go and have a shower and start work, since I have had 100 forms sent to me to proofread. The weather has been rainy for the past few days, so I think summer has really gone now :o( that sucks!!

Strange.....

2005-08-27T15:47:00.000-07:00

.......the things you learn in the course of a day. Songs that I had previously spent most of my 26 years thinking had been done by Rick Astley (as it sounded like him) were actually done by Michael McDonald, who I had never heard of. Oh, how my illusions have been shattered!

This week

2005-08-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

Just to clarify my last post, when I asked why we sing "Take me out to the ball game" in the seventh inning, I wasn't so much asking why we sung it, but why it was stuck in the middle of the seventh inning. I can see the traditional point of singing it, but why do we disrupt the seventh inning by getting everyone to stand up and sing? It's kind of strange - you would have thought that the beginning of the game would be better.

So since my last post I have been to five baseball games, have done some work for my company, have bought two pairs of shoes and a jumper (total sale $50 thanks to the Army and Navy store), have done one day of filming on a horror movie, one day of invigilating an exam, one night of abortive drinking to celebrate Christie's exams finishing (abandoned due to massive headache), and am preparing to go to Def Leppard tonight, after looking forward to it for months! Tomorrow brings more baseball with Sunshine, possible dinner with Christie and Patty, and Monday brings some filming on The L-Word, though I don't think we have to get involved in the lesbian action. I have also bought more concert tickets (this seems to be my Canadian vice, in the absence of decent chocolate to gorge) and am now going to The Killers with British Sea Power (good recommendation, Denise) and Athlete. In the continuing 'eclectic taste' theme in which Def Leppard tickets were booked, Foreigner are coming to Richmond in November and I am tempted to go, even though they must be Def Leppard's age or older. But when will I ever get the chance to see them again? They may keel over at any minute!

I have applied for two jobs which I actually want, as opposed to ones which I don't want but which I applied for in desperation. I am hoping that at least one will give me an interview, as another winter of no job and basement darkness will probably send me over the edge. Mind you, I still haven't checked my lottery ticket, so I could be a secret millionaire.......

Baseball mark 2

2005-08-20T22:12:00.000-07:00

Well, the Canadians won tonight, by a landslide, but the management decided to go mad and give everyone free tickets for tomorrow afternoon anyway. I may just go.

This evening's match was much more beer-fuelled than last night's, and I was near the token group of guys getting drunk and shouting well mannered abuse. It was very entertaining. I also bought a veggie dog and some mint choc chip ice cream in a plastic baseball helmet, to really get into the spirit of things. Tonight's National Anthem nearly rivalled last night's for sheer stupidity, although it was nowhere near as good musically speaking. However, it takes just as much believing. Hold your breath people. Tonight's anthem was sung by...... Ronald McDonald. I love this country!!

And can anyone tell me why we sing "Take me out to the ballgame" in the middle of the seventh inning? Apart from the fact that we all seem to be totally mad?

Spam

2005-08-20T17:29:00.000-07:00

It's hit a new low..... I just had to remove a spam comment from my blog! How sad that spam can even comment on your life now....

Take me out to the baseball

2005-08-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I decided I would use one of my free baseball tickets that are sitting in my room doing nothing, and took myself off to the Canadians game against the Boise Hawks. After trawling the streets nearby for parking (who wants to pay $4 to park in the car park right next to the stadium, for the prvilege of having your windows shot out by baseballs?) I managed to jam my little car in a spot a block and a half away, finding subsequently that I could actually see the car from my position in the stadium. Useful to call the police if anyone tried to break into it....

Anyway, it was Hawaiian night at the stadium, so lots of people were wearing hideous shirts and grass skirts, and they had hired some Polynesian dancers to perform at various points during the evening. There were random giveaways, strange compeitions, some fairly decently priced food for sale, and some fairly uncomfortable benches, but it was a good night. Apart from the fact that the Canadians lost, owing to the 8th inning score of 5 runs by Boise. However, there were a few highlights during the night; in ascending order of fantasticness.....
5) The opposing team's catcher falling over when jogging to his position.
4) The playing of "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" during one break, which Greg sent me a while ago and which I played to my parents when they were here, resulting in my aunt and my mother both buying Big & Rich's album.
3) The Eddie Izzard-esque bad keyboard four note tune that all baseball stadiums seem to have (Wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah wah [key change] wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah wah [How about I play some Mozart? No, just keep playing that.....] wah wah wah wah.... ad infinitum)
2) The announcement that came in the third inning; "The owner of a gold Mercury Sable, registration number blah blah blah, your car is STILL RUNNING..." Much laughter.
1) The playing of the Canadian National Anthem by, and I kid you not people, the Vancouver Ukelele Circle. It was so funny I almost died of hysterics. I'm sure it's very bad form to be laughing during the National Anthem, but the entire stadium just lost it. Think George Formby with his friends, singing O Canada speeded up. Priceless.

I'm going again tonight, as it's 'Guaranteed Win Night ' - if the Canadians lose, we all get a free ticket to another game. Which could be interesting, given last night. I'm going to sit in a different bit to see if I can catch a baseball though.

Oh, and just for good measure, OUR SWIMMING POOL IS BEING FIXED AS I TYPE.....WOOHOO!!! Party at my place :o)

Rollerblades and Jude Law

2005-08-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

So it's been quite a random day so far. Up at 7am to talk to work via e-mail, as Shaw Internet was cutting off our service from8am-4pm to do some maintenance work. A bit of chatting to people in England and some tennis watching took place, and then the rising gas prices spurred me on to go to Canadian Tire and get some rollerblades, after seeing them advertised for $20. To say that Canadian Tire was chaotic is a gross understatement. It only opened last week, and it was packed with people trying to get good deals. Add to this the fact that the computers lied about how much stock they had, the BC Lions football players meeting people and signing autographs, and the live grand piano player in the foyer, and you have a surreal experience. After an hour and a bit, I finally got hold of some darn rollerblades and came home. And then sat and typed in the skates for two hours, to get my feet used to them.

In other news, there seems to be some debate over Jude Law's 'goods' which were photographed by some cheeky bastard journalist as he got changed into swimming trunks at his mother's place in France. Apparently he is "No Tommy Lee" (for which I can only be thankful) and has been ridiculed for having a small dick. Make your own decisions here. I fail to see why not having a huge penis makes him less attractive, but there you go. I still think he's extremely hot, in a cute-but-secretly-bad-and-not-to-be-trusted way, so if you ever read this Jude, and want to escape from the media frenzy, you're still welcome in Vancouver............

How to enrage me

2005-08-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

Basically, be Todd Bertuzzi. WHAT A DICK.......

For those of you who don't know his name, he's a hockey player. About two years he assaulted a player from the opposing team on the ice, for no apparent reason, breaking three of the guy's neck vertebrae. The camera footage shows him skating up behind the guy and then punching him in the neck with all his might. They didn't know if the guy he assaulted would walk again initially, but eventually he recovered, although he still can't play hockey. And what did Todd Bertuzzi get? A suspended sentence and a fine. Whoopie. He's a hockey player, he could pay the fine with his eyes closed. And what does a suspended sentence do? Are they waiting until he assaults someone a second time to send him to jail? Every time I see him on the news I get worked up. Tonight more than usual though, because he's just been moaning about the fact that the guy he assaulted won't respond to his attempts to contact him, "Some people just won't forgive." Um, hello, but if someone punched me in the back and nearly paralysed me for no reason, I wouldn't exactly return your calls either. The poor guy has only just started exercising again, and still suffers from post-concussion syndrome, whereas Bertuzzi is about to get back into professional hockey and earn shit loads of money per year. Fair? I think not. Grrrr.

Anyway, today I took the car in for a service. They did a 47 point check and the usual fluid/oil changes, then gave me a list of things at the end that they think I should replace. The car's actually in pretty good condition, but in about 6 months I need to replace the back brakes and have the drums looked at, and - sadly for me - the alternator needs replacing :o( The quote? $400. Can't exactly avoid it either, since eventually the car just won't start if the alternator goes. I need a job, people! I went and bought two lottery tickets whilst the car was being fixed, just in case.

After my parents left last week I did laundry and cleaned my room for about two days, as it was gross. I've also had my first 'hip hop fusion' class, which was fab, gained some free baseball tickets, met two friends for brunch, three for dinner and another friend for lunch, invigilated an exam series for Simon Fraser University and taken my belly dance class. Today I went swimming and dragged Christie to Subway, before coming back to more washing. Sadly there hasn't been much work for me this week, as they're going through a quiet period before the madness starts again. The exam invigilation was good though, as it's at least a toe in the door that I've got a Canadian employer. There are five more scheduled invigilation sessions before Christmas, and I'm also going to do a Markers course so I can qualify to mark the exams once they're done.

Oh, and today I got phone interviewed for a new TV show that's coming in October. It's basically Debbie Travis getting 10 people between 19-30 together who are pissed off with where they are in life and their lack of career direction, sticking them in a delapidated house and getting professional electricians, painters, decorators, carpenters, designers etc to give them training and help get the house done up. At the end they decide who's done the best work and made the most improvement, and you can win a large amount of money plus an apprenticeship. I sent my application in a while back and ranted about jobs not being available, and apparently it worked..... They picked some people they thought looked interesting and they're phoning them, before deciding if they want to interview in person. Then if you get picked, you get to travel to Toronto and get into the house... sounds interesting to do anyway. I doubt they'll phone me back, since when they asked what my ideal career was I told the truth and said Forensics, rather than lying and saying Real Estate or Decorating. But I thought that lying now would proably screw me later, so what the hell :o)

PS: Thanks to Patti for this week's interesting news story!!

Just in case you thought I was exaggerating.....

2005-08-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

Here is the review of the Ryan Adams gig from the Georgia Straight, Vancouver's entertainment guide. Thanks to Cassie, who led me to the review by quoting one of the fantastic lines from it....

Ryan Adams and The Cardinals

By adrian mack

Publish Date: 11-Aug-2005
At the Commodore Ballroom on Tuesday, August 9

In spite of his best efforts, Ryan Adams made it out of the Commodore alive on Tuesday. The mercurial and possibly very troubled singer-songwriter has been provoking reams of copy for as long as he’s been making records—in fact, it’s hard to figure out if he’s more prolific as a composer or a loud-mouthed dickhead. He’s a major talent in both respects.

The first two-thirds of his performance was low-key to the point of narcosis. The high drama and spectacle came much, much later and was so exquisitely painful and humiliating that it seemed like a setup. It wasn’t—something just cracked—but an hour of midtempo plod in the Crazy Horse vein established a Mogadon vibe that wasn’t improved by silent longueurs between songs. Adams didn’t say a word during this portion of the set. Most of the interest was provided by his hair and the chance that it might slide off. Hunched over a black SG or a piano, the alt-country veteran displayed the browbeaten mien of a man who spends the day avoiding blows to the head. Not surprising, really, as he habitually fights with band members, critics, and fans. That doesn’t explain the apparent attack of ennui up on-stage, though, especially considering what happened later, but suffice it to say that “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)”, the great faux-Dylan rave-up from Adams’s first solo album, Heartbreaker, was reworked into a tepid slice of gothic country that received a disproportionately generous cheer. And so it went on, the same dirges ending in squalls of unhinged guitar. Adams seemed to be channelling Neil Young from his Tonight’s the Night period, giving us uncompromising sludge peppered with beautiful moments of relief (“What Sin Replaces Love?”, “Mockingbird”), all of it underscored by barely contained psychosis.

And then the container broke.

Adams went visibly and incontestably nuts at the two-thirds mark, first threatening to punch someone in the face, then railing about the Internet, then bargaining with the crowd for a smoke break. He got it, and when he bounded back on-stage the man was reenergized, to say the least. Starting with a cover of “Wonderwall”, the manic version of Ryan Adams complained that the Commodore was filled with snakes (like New Mexico) and was apparently swarmed by invisible aphids during “Sylvia Plath”. He bitch-slapped his sound guy. “Ryan Adams!” he said, baiting the hapless knob-twiddler. “He’s so fucked up! He’s the end of music! It’s not my fault if they forgot to build a house at the end of the street, Mister Man!” This was one of a number of baffling speeches that he would make for the rest of the performance, though his second skirmish with the sound department was a little less equivocal.

“Dave!” he screamed. “What the fuck? Are you taking the night off?!” In fairness, Dave seemed to be doing a fine job while Adams, struggling to stay upright, was more or less engaged in relearning to play guitar. Later, bassist Catherine Popper would tell him to go fuck himself when he melodramatically called a halt to “Let It Ride”. It wasn’t necessary—Adams had already fucked himself quite comprehensively by that point.

So there you have it. I exaggerate not.....

A serious disappointment

2005-08-10T17:12:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten that I was going to post about Ryan Adams until Denise reminded me of the gig. Christie and I went last night, and by the end of the night I was ready to throttle him and demand my money back.

The night started off with a guy who Ryan Adams produces, called something I can't remember, which was vaguely like Jesse Malik. He was good, except for the fact that he put on a cheesy voice to sing. Ryan Adams didn't come on until 10:25pm and then he didn't announce anything or say hello, just walked on and started singing. 'Beautiful Sorta' was the first song, which was ok, and then there were two crap songs I didn't recognise, followed by two more songs I didn't recognise which were ok, and a completely slowed down version of 'To Be Young' which was pretty crappy. It wasn't until the seventh song, 'Please Do Not Let Me Go' that things started to pick up a bit. There was a bit of banter going on, with some strange ramblings, but overall he was pretty sane until the interval, when he decided that he was going to take ten minutes "To have a cigarette" after which he would come back and play until they kicked us out of the club. Sounded good, but whatever he had in the interval was definitely not of the nicotine variety. He was pretty rambling before, but after the break he stopped in the middle of songs and started again, threatened to punch someone in the crowd, went on about America and the bombings with sound effects, had a ramble about marajuana, swore more in three sentences than anyone I have known, and finally made a derogatory comment about his female bassist. She looked as though she was about to walk off the stage and shove the bass up his arse, and the front of the crowd (who had heard precisely what he'd said, as opposed to us at the back who didn't catch it) started booing in her defence. There were a lot of shouts of "Shut up and play some music" which would have been good advice, if only he'd taken it. There were only a few songs that I recognised, along with a few that were actually really good, in amongst the dross and the insults. Christie and I left before the end, so God knows what happened after we left. I wouldn't have been surprised if Ryan Adams had challenged half the crowd to a fist fight and the police had turned up.....

Recommendations: keep listening to the songs, don't bother with the live show....

Just for Denise.....

2005-08-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

I'll post something today. My parents and my aunt are currently at Vancouver airport, where I have just dropped them along with their luggage. Their flight is in a couple of hours, so I hope it goes ok and they aren't sitting next to any screaming children. I was sad to see them go, and they were sad to leave, but at least this means that I can book a flight back to England at some point this winter and have something to look forward to.

We did all the usual touristy things during the time they were here; a week in Victoria (Butchart Gardens, Sooke Harbour House, Witty's Lagoon, Metchosin, Shawnigan Lake, the Malahat, stuff that I can't remember) and then a week and a half in Vancouver (Lynn Canyon, Stanley Park, Van Dusen Gardens, Spanish Bank, a salmon BBQ at the Anthropology museum, and more stuff I can't remember). I've eaten far too much good food and not paid for anything, and my room is a tip because I haven't done any washing or cleaning for two weeks. I'm browner than I was before, although my legs are still bright white. I've bought some Chinese slippers, a lovely Chinese embroidered top and Beck's new CD, whilst receiving the presents my parents brought over with them, including some wonderful UK chocolate. Mmmmm. All in all, it has been a fantastic two weeks, and I am very sorry that it has now ended. Sob......

However, Christie and I are going to see Ryan Adams in a few hours, which I am really looking forward to. So that should make up for the departure of my parents in some measure. I now need to win the lottery so they can move over here for good. Any ideas? :o)

The parents cometh....

2005-07-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to say that my parents and my aunt arrive here in two hours, hoorah!! They will be here for two and a half weeks, the first of which will be spent with me in Victoria, so my posts will be sporadic, perhaps non-existent (what changes?!!). To update you on the past week: the weather has greatly improved and it is now very hot and sunny, Christie and I have got back into our old Subway-followed-by-gelato habits, the swimming pool is still not fixed but the liner is on order, I can't go and see Turin Brakes next week because I'll be in Victoria, and I went on a date yesterday with a very nice man from Langley. It was a strange experience for someone like me who doesn't 'do' dates, but as meetings go, it was good. There will be a second....

Off to finish my work and then go to pick my parents up from the airport - the joy of jamming four people plus luggage in a two-door 1990 Mazda awaits!!

The madness on the roads

2005-07-15T22:23:00.000-07:00

Did I ever blog about nearly running someone over in the car a while back? I don't remember writing about it, so I probably didn't. I thought about this tonight, for reasons that will become clear later, but for now, here's the story.

A few months ago I was driving back from somewhere or other, in the middle of the day, and was coming up the hill towards our house along one of the main roads. After passing through a set of traffic lights in the left hand lane of the two possible southbound lanes, I was merrily trying to get Fab to go at a non-embarrassing pace, when I rounded the left hand corner in the road and straightened the car out. Coming the other way were a few cars and a guy on a motorbike. And as I rounded the corner and started to go straight, I saw the guy on the bike start to slide. It had been raining that day and the road was fairly greasy, and he did this threatening little wobble before starting to topple and slide head first, motorbike and all, right towards my wheels. It's a complete cliche, but it's true; everything was in slow motion. Anyway, as his head was coming towards my left front tyre, I took a deep breath and wrenched the car over to the right, into the other lane, where luckily there was no car. His head whizzed past my tyre with about a foot to spare and he and the bike eventually came to a graceful stop at the side of the road. The guy must have had half his skin taken off, as it was hot and he was wearing a T-shirt, but he seemed to be so shocked and embarrassed that he just pulled himself and the bike up and shot off, after myself and another guy had got out to make sure he was in one piece. And after pulling off into a side road and doing some shaking for a bit, I drove home.

I thought about this earlier, because I have just driven back from New Westminster, after watching Sunshine play baseball, and I missed being caught up in a nasty accident by about a minute. Drivers in Vancouver seem to be notoriously bad at most skills, but generally they just drive too fast and they don't take enough care when changing lanes. So after having been tailgated by quite a few jerks on the way back from New West, I came off Kingsway and onto 41st, went through some lights, came over the top of the hill, and screeched to a halt before the carnage in front of me. God knows what had happened, but there were two wagon cars and a sports car spread across our lanes, with the sports car and one of the cars mushed together in the road, and the other car smashed to the side on the pavement. I pray that no-one was passing on the pavement at the time, because they were probably under the wheels of the car by now. Traffic ground to a halt, and I hesitated, because my instinct was to pull over and get to any people in the cars, but there were already horrified passers-by at the side of the road who obviously lived in the houses and had heard the crash. And as I hesitated, I heard the sirens of the rescue trucks coming down the road*. So after checking that there were no bodies in the road, I skirted round the wreckage and continued home. The two bigger cars weren't too badly damaged, but the sports car didn't have much chance. Neither did any pedestrians.

And after seeing this, you would have thought that drivers on 41st would have slowed down on the drive home, possibly thinking about what could happen to them if they weren't careful. But oh no, that would be too much to ask for....

*In England, the crash couldn't possibly have only happened one minute before I arrived on the scene, as the sirens wouldn't have been heard for at least 10 minutes, with all the trouble with the health service. However, here they have a different approach to the emergency services. Because Vancouver is so hellish to get through at a fast pace, and because there are few ambulance stations compared to fire stations, most of the responses to calls for ambulances are from fire trucks. Firemen are trained in CPR and first aid, and fire trucks also double as rescue trucks, so usually the fire truck will get to a scene within a couple of minutes, and the fireman/paramedic will give interim first aid until the ambulance gets there. It sounded like a bizarre system when I first got here, but it works great....

And just to qualify that....

2005-07-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

Of course it's a man issue. Isn't it always? Well, either that or my lack of a job. No offence to the men out there, but I do find it hard to work you out sometimes, and I'm a bloody Psychology graduate. I'm sure you all have the same problem with me. But I find it slightly confusing that at 26, which you would think is a pretty sensible age, I can't manage to find a guy who isn't a commitment-phobe or doesn't want to just sleep with lots of girls because they can. Sigh. Of course this is free choice, and maybe if I had queues of people lining up to sleep with me then perhaps I would think that it was a good idea to be free and easy, but somehow the idea doesn't appeal to me. Not that having some fun wouldn't be, well - fun - but I have little energy to expend on things that are doomed to go nowhere nowadays. They do say that opposites attract, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.....

On a completely different note, I am often heard by people in Vancouver to be ranting about the inability of the Weather Network to get weather reports right more than a few hours in advance. We'll see how they do with this one - for next Monday, the 18th July, they have the weather down as being sunny and 35 degrees. Yes, you read that right, 35 degrees. Watch this space as that gets revised to 10 degrees and pissing rain over the next week.

I have rediscovered the joys of Vertical Horizon. It seems they've done some damn good stuff since I last bought one of their albums some long time ago. Other more random aquisitions over the last few days include Credence Clearwater's 'Bad Moon Rising', Scarlet with 'Independent Love Song' which I remember buying the single of when I was rather younger, 'Whoa Black Betty Bamalam' (by Lynyrd Skynyrd?) and 'I'd Really Love To See You Tonight' which I never knew was by people called England Dan and John Ford Coley. Well I think there is a Barry Manilow version, but I've steered clear of that.

Oh, I survived the Sea Vancouver festival in once piece. And I saw Burt Reynolds yesterday. The words 'perma-tan' and 'botox' came to mind immediately, as well as 'yellow' and 'plastic'. He can probably sue me for that. But it was true........

I would just like to say

2005-07-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

that I am a fuckwit.

A date with the Rhinos

2005-07-06T14:25:00.000-07:00

So there was a change of plan for the 'date day' and The Guy (henceforth referred to as TG - I think I'd better ask him before I put his name in) couldn't get hold of his brother's car to come over to me. So I trundled over to Coquitlam, which is about an hour away (or an hour and a half through the damn roadworks going on in Vancouver) to watch him play ice hockey with his team. There are Molson Mens hockey leagues here, and the Rhinos are in division three of five. They were playing the Tri-City Ice Hawks, who they seemed to have lost to frequently in the past, but after a tightly fought first half the Rhinos came through 10-5. With a nice assist by TG for one goal, I must say.

After the game I gave him a lift back to Maple Ridge with his kit and assorted hockey sticks, then going on to the place he's staying at whilst he finds somewhere else to rent. We watched most of The Big Lebowski and then I was forced to stay overnight because it was pitch black and torrential rain, which I could hardly see in to drive. Even going from the hockey venue to TG's house I had to follow a slow truck because I couldn't see the road myself. So there was no way I was going to be able to find my way back to Vancouver from some random part of Coquitlam in the rain. No crude thoughts, dear readers, it was an entirely innocent decision, made with regard for my safety!

So today I didn't get home until 11am, and have now been confronted by volunteers dropping out left, right and centre for tomorrow's Sea Vancouver festival. Luckily I still have some die-hard fantasticos who are sticking it out. For the next four days I am going to be an emotional wreck and completely exhausted, as I am meant to be on site from about 9am-10:30pm every day. Ok, so this was the case when filming as well, but then I got paid for that..... If I don't post until Sunday, just believe that I am working hard and falling into bed at night without the time to blog. But I'll be thinking of you all!

In summary then, I am optimistic. Watch this space for developments :o)

The madness

2005-07-03T22:53:00.000-07:00

It continues. After the insanity of filming came a day of relative calm on Thursday and then Canada Day on Friday. The bbq at Mel's house was good, although I ate far too much cake, and the garlic bread that I took turned out (after having been put in the oven for 20 mins and looked forward to by everyone) to be bread, sans garlic butter. Cue a complaint at the IGA on Saturday, which resulted in me being given another garlic bread and some free chocolate cupcakes, which I then ate too many of again and felt rather sick in the night as a result. I never learn.

The weekend has been taken up with trying to track down volunteers who said they'd work at the Sea Vancouver festival next week and are in my department, but who now seem to have gone awol and are refusing to answer my e-mails. If only people would be civil enough to send a reply back, even telling me to bugger off, that would be good. Of course as it's been the holiday weekend ringing people is less than useless, as they're all out. Grrrr!!! I also get the odd person e-mailing with inane requests and suggestions, none of which I can do anything about. But some of my volunteers are lovely and the whole thing should be fine once it gets going. At the moment I seem to be parking captain, joint volunteer check-in captain and dock crew, so my four days of festival are going to be sheer and utter exhaustion.

However, there are things to look forward to. Monday brings some shopping with Christie, as long as I don't have any work. Tuesday brings a date - yes, a date! - with the cute guy I met on my film shoot. Ok, so it's not really a date yet, he's just coming round to my house. Then depending on the weather, we'll decide what to do. Let's hope he's not an axe murderer, seeing as he now has my address. If I don't post in a while, dear reader, make enquiries. I'm giving Christie his description and phone number just in case ;o)

Above all, I need sleep. So I'm off to bed. Night!

Happy Canada Day!

2005-07-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

And for your perusal, whoops...........

2005-06-30T17:42:00.000-07:00

So I have survived the four days of filming on the beach. It was hard, but I managed it ;o) Actually it wasn't as good as we'd expected at first, as there was rain and wind and not much sun. But yesterday the sun came out and everyone seemed to gel, as the 60 or so people we'd had previously had been reduced down to a select 30 who were considered to be good workers. There was volleyball, there was football, there was frisbee, there was a lot of eating, and there was a bit of working in there too. I lay on the grass for an hour and a half watching people play volleyball and got paid for it. So I can't complain.

As an added bonus, I got told when I signed on in the morning that I had been put "on permit" which means that they thought I was good at working and took directions well, and as a thankyou they'd put me on Union wages for the day. So instead of getting $9.50 per hour, I got around $20 per hour. Which is always good!

I also got asked for my phone number by a very cute young man, who hopefully will be phoning me some time in the next few days :o) although he lives in Maple Ridge which is about an hour and a half away, so it might be hard to see him a lot. But hey, no-one's ever asked for my number before until I've known them for months and months, so it's a whole new experience for me.

And now, on to the task of scheduling volunteers for the Sea Vancouver festival next week.... when no-one wants to work.....fun!!

Like Mike - again

2005-06-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

So on Friday I went to the first day of filming for Like Mike 2 - which basically meant that I could spend the day hanging around in the sun eating and get paid for it. Which is always good. Filming started at 9:30am (a decent time for once) and we finished at 9:15pm, so it was quite a long day, but it was entertaining. I was in a summer dress, so it was lovely when the sun was out and slightly cold during the two minor downpours that we had during the course of the day. However Michael Jordan turned up in the morning, and Clyde (spelling?) Drexler in the afternoon, so it was nice to see them. The main child actors were entertaining if slightly annoying, and the main male actor was cute and from a dance show over here called '360' - he was also extremely amusing and we cocked up quite a lot of takes because we were laughing at him so much. Some cunning person put the Kraft services tent right next to the Extras Holding tent and kept supplying it with food, so I spent the whole day eating Strawberry laces, which were meant to be for the kids, and consuming large quantities of granola bars. It was fab. I won't fit in my bikini now though :o)

The minor problem was that despite putting Factor 50 all over me, I managed to miss a small strip across my back, which is now bright red, and strangely in the shape of the Batman symbol. Let's hope that in our bikini filming tomorrow they don't film my back. Good excuse for me to spend the day lying down on the beach....

Yesterday I went to the orientation day for the Sea Vancouver Festival to meet my volunteer crew, although not many of them came. I guess when you get an e-mail saying you're working in the Parking department, you lose heart. Although if they actually read the e-mail, they would see that we have nothing to do with parking, but whatever. I'd be pissed off too! So now I have to spend the next week ringing people, sorting out details and organising schedules for all my volunteers. It's going to be a toughie.

In other excitement, our pool is being fixed as we type!! Apparently it will be filled and cleaned next week and ready for use by the weekend. Roll on summer!!

Off to belly dancing and 'Greek Day' downtown.....

Getting busy

2005-06-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

So it's been a manic past week, and I think the mania shows little sign of stopping. Last week at this time Christie and I went for dinner, then gelato, and then happened to notice a football match over the road, so of course we had to watch that. It was a Richmond Firefighters team against the local team, called - for some reason - Binger's Army. We sat and watched them with our gelato, and had a chat to one of the firefighters, and vowed to go again this week :o) it was like being back in England, with foul language and threats against the ref included!

Friday involved some running around and going to the bank, and some work. Saturday and Sunday saw me working at the Dragon Boat Racing festival. I was in the Racers Services tent, which meant that I was dealing out information on results, scheduling, locations and general stuff. I also then got handed the PA system and became the announcer for the races, calling the teams to the marshalling tent and making general calls for various things. It was strange to hear my English accent being broadcast across the Racers Village, when everyone else around me was speaking with a Canadian accent. People kept coming up and asking if I was the girl on the speakers. It was great fun though, and I got a chance to watch some of the races after my shifts had finished, gaining myself a nice tan in the process. I then went to belly dancing and nearly fell asleep, since my shift had started at 6:30am that morning.

Monday saw a lot of chores taking place, some cleaning of the house and some eating of pecan pie at Granville Island, followed by a trip to the cinema to see Herbie Fully Loaded (don't worry, my friend won free tickets, so we didn't pay to see it) and a trip to get Greek food afterwards. And then yesterday saw some work, a meeting with my bank manager to try and convince them to give me a credit card, a three and a half hour trip around the sites that are going to be used for the Sea Vancouver festival in a few weeks (I am the Captain of Parking Services, so I have to schedule all my volunteers in and make sure they are placed properly to welcome guests and give them information) which was interesting but slightly scary (lots of work to be done by yours truly), a quick trip home to eat and then another meeting with ESS Vancouver. And then some more work. Phew.....

This morning I am watching Wimbledon and am getting annoyed at the fact that TSN is not showing the match between Mirza and Kuznetsova, even though Mirza is ranked a hundred places under Kuznetsova, she won the second set, it seems like a royal battle and it's on Centre Court, seemingly because neither player is American and therefore it doesn't seem to matter. Instead we are watching Lindsey Davenport demolish some poor girl in a really boring match, because they are both American. I have resorted to listening to the BBC radio coverage, which is good but would be better if we had visuals. Bloody biased coverage.

This weekend promises to be another full one. This Friday and next Monday and Tuesday, I am shooting for some film which is the sequel to 'Like Mike' which apparently had Lil Bow Wow in and was some tale about a boy who finds a pair of trainers that make him play like Michael Jordan. Yeah. So the sequel is the same basic premise I think, only with another sport. We have to wear bikinis, though I know not why. I hope it's a beach shoot so we can all get tanned..... anyway, it's three days of money. Saturday brings an orientation day for the Sea Vancouver festival where I get to meet all my volunteers, Sunday brings belly dancing and work, and Monday also brings my friend's birthday and a celebratory baseball match. I hardly have time to breathe.... and yet I still can't find a decent job.....

Tiredness

2005-06-19T20:54:00.000-07:00

Have finished volunteer weekend at the Dragon Boat Racing festival. Woke up at 4:30am this morning, very tired. Going to bed now even though it is only 9pm. Just letting you all know I am still living. More postings when not falling asleep at keyboard.....

I'm still alive....

2005-06-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

Spent two hours at the doctors today, getting various tests done - the usual shebang plus an ECG to measure my heart rate. My dad has a hole in his heart, so I think they wanted to cover all the bases. Anyway, I'm sure nothing will show up, but it's always good to be covered just in case.

In other news, life just gets more random. Today there was a 7.0 earthquake in California, and for a few hours Vancouver was on tsunami warning. Which seemed to consist of no-one actually telling us what to do or where to go, but just the fact that we should be warned. Very useful. Anyway, if one happened it was meant to hit around 11pm, and since it's now 11:30pm, I think we're ok. The warning got cancelled a couple of hours ago, but it's scary to know that if there is an earthquake nearer to home, we might not be so lucky. I worry that my new house is too close to the sea and too low down in terms of sea level to be safe, so if there is a proper warning we're going to have to move to higher ground. I already have my route mapped out..... let's hope that Fab can cope with some serious acceleration.

And this evening, I got confirmation that I am volunteering this weekend for a Dragon Boat Racing festival. I got bored with not having any exciting jobs to do, so I just volunteered for a load of stuff. Sadly I think a couple of my shifts might start at 6:30am, but it should be a fun weekend if the weather holds up. Dragon Boat is great to watch. I am in the Racer Services tent, which apparently is great fun, so we shall see. I also have an appointment with another Extras Agency on Thursday, as my current one seems determined to not give any of us any work. Buggers.

I'm tired, so that's all folks....

A unique experience

2005-06-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

But one that I do not wish to repeat in the near future.

I was sitting here at the computer, minding my own business, when I started to feel a little queasy. Then a lot queasy. I decided to go into the bathroom and splash water on my face, whereupon in the space of two minutes I felt very queasy indeed, started to sweat uncontrollably, lost most of my hearing and nearly all vision, lost the ability to stand up straight and finally woke up on the floor.

The reason? I have no bloody idea. But it was interesting while it lasted, if extremely scary. Answers on a postcard please.

PS My head hurts where I smacked it on the wall :o(

The Perishers and Sarah McLachlan

2005-06-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

So I have finally been to see Sarah McLachlan, after missing her by a week when I got here in October. It was really good. The show was at GM place, which is pretty big, and we had pretty good seats up in the balcony to the left of the stage. After some wandering one way streets trying to get into a decent parking lot, we finally made it ($15 to park!! They really take the piss). The first band on were called The Perishers, and I have to admit that I had never heard of them, even though they seem to have been touring for ever. I guessed they were from Britain and Christie that they were from BC; we were both wrong. Sweden, of all places. Really good band though, I recommend them. Kind of folk/rock/unexplainable. We both bought the CD ($10, I love the price of music here) and went to get it signed, but the queue was so mega long that we had to go back to our seats for fear of missing Sarah McLachlan.

I was impatient for Sarah McLachlan to do my favourite songs, but they came one after the other near the end of the gig (Stupid - Possession - Sweet Surrender). Sadly Stupid sounded worse live than it did on CD, mainly because the drums and crashing bits weren't dramatic enough. Possession was also a disappointment, as it is meant to be just her and a piano, but for the tour they jazzed it up and made it pop-y. However, Sweet Surrender was just as good as it should have been, so one out of three ain't bad. The rest of the set was really good, and the whole thing went on for ages as it was her last show of the last tour for a while, and she comes from BC. There was an encore and then people started leaving, but us cunning buggers noted that the lights hadn't come back on yet and stayed in our seats. And then lo and behold, she came back out for one more song. Cue a lot of silly people trying to get back into the arena after realising the show wasn't over :o)

Today the weather is actually good, with blue sky and sun. In honour of this, I made myself a fab salad after going to Granville Island and loading up with fresh stuff, including nectarines, mmmmm. So now of course I am going to go and buy myself a big fat doughnut to make up for the lack of crap in my diet. See ya!

Highlights of Speaker's Corner

2005-06-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

City TV has this thing here called Speaker's Corner. There are a couple of filming booths located in downtown Vancouver, where you can go and stick a dollar in and get something like 30 seconds on camera. One is in a shopping mall, one on the street and one somewhere else. They have a segment every day where they play back the messages that they have recorded, and most of them are just people being geeky or young kids mouthing off about shopping or dating. But today there was a funny one, and a not so funny one.

Segment number one: drunken English guy on the street at some obscene hour of the morning. "I just want to say to all those guys out there who have girlfriends who are smart, attractive, cool, really wonderful - hang onto them. Don't sit on the fence and wait for something to happen, get out there and tell them how you feel. Otherwise you might find yourself alone and pissed, talking to a camera on the street at 2am, which would be bloody ridiculous."

Segment number two: a youngish guy, again on the street in the middle of the night, obviously homeless. "I just wanted to come on this and tell my daughter, who I haven't seen for four years, how much I love her and think about her. I want you to know that I've never stopped thinking about you, and that your daddy's going through a rough patch right now, but that someday, I will be back in your life. So Naomi, I love you and I promise to see you soon."

And that really got to me, that this guy who probably doesn't have ten bucks in the world, actually put a dollar into a camera in the middle of the night to record a message for his daughter, because he didn't have anyone else to tell. It certainly made me think about things.

I gave in

2005-06-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

And bought a new tv. I just couldn't cope with the pinkness of the tv I got for free off someone any more. It wasn't too bad until I was watching the baseball, when the fact that the field was pink made me feel like I was on drugs. You don't realise how many things on tv are green until you can't see green any more! And today when I was watching CSI and the screen was so dark I couldn't see anything, plus the sound was so bad that I couldn't work out what they were doing, I knew it was time to visit Future Shop.

It's been a while since I saved my pocket money to buy my first tv, and sent my dad out with the only £100 I had in the world, tasking him to buy me one. The only one he could find was a 14" one, being sold at £100 because it was the display model. Today, however, I came away with a 20" tv for $135, or £60. How times have changed....

So although it doesn't look as impressive as the free one, being an unknown manufacturer rather than Toshiba, I can actually see the green green grass of home now :o)

The cable man cometh

2005-06-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

And cable is restored, hoorah! Now I just have to cope with the fact that my tv is pink (I think one of the tubes has gone) so everything is in various shades of pink and maroon. Which is more disturbing than I thought it would be. I guess I have the option of black and white, but it's just not as good. Especially if you ever want to watch snooker. I can't really complain, since it is big and free, but I will probably buy one at some point. At least now when Wimbledon comes on I can wake up at 3am and watch some matches!

It's still raining here. However my social life seems to be good, better than I thought it would be after Denise left. How sad that I made all my friends except one through Denise - although I guess it was to be expected with my lack of outside job. I hereby apologise to her for any neediness displayed over the past few months......... this week brings a pot luck party, a gig at Granville Island with some band that Sunshine chatted up at the airport a few months ago, bellydancing and a Sarah McLachlan concert. And a lot of work, boring work, but it pays. I also signed up as a volunteer for the Sea Vancouver festival in July, since I had nothing else to do. I'm trying to persuade them to give me a paid position, so cross fingers.

Today I fought off fake e-mails from both Ebay and PayPal, so it was an interesting day. Both were forwarded to the actual companies, who then sent me e-mails back saying they were nothing to do with them, and that they had in turn forwarded them on to some law enforcement agency or other. Usually I just delete them, but for some reason I was being proactive today. It is rare.

I have a stomach ache, so I am going to curl up and feel sorry for myself, then watch Jeopardy. Because I can!!!

P.S. Ticketmaster Canada just sent me an e-mail, announcing Tom Jones' presence here next week at GM Place. And for a moment, I was tempted to go and have a good laugh. But then at $70, not that tempted. Sorry Tom.

A quick poll

2005-06-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

So, this came up in conversation last night, and there was some dissent in the ranks. So I put it to you, the readers; when you get someone in your bedroom and things start getting a little.....heated, do you leave the lights on, or turn most of them off? On one side, two of us arguing for turning them off totally or very nearly, and on the other, one person arguing for leaving them on, "So you can see what you're doing." Both sides looked in amazement at the other when this topic came up, neither side quite believing that the other side did the opposite to what they thought was convention. So I ask you all, lights on, or lights off?

Star Wars

2005-06-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

I gave in and went to see it last night at the Oakridge Centre. It was one of those evenings where you need the company of other people, but you can't be arsed to talk to any of them - the cinema is the perfect solution. I spent the day chasing bits of furniture with Christie at Ikea and then constructing them, scoffing ice cream sundaes and marvelling the fact that the car made it home with all our purchases. So in the evening I drove out to the cinema at 10pm and went to see Episode III.

What can I say? I'm not a big fan of the first (second?) trilogy, since I think the original three were vastly superior in almost every way, but this third episode redeemed itself after the crapness of the first and second episodes at least. The love story was slightly less sketchy, and although the first twenty/thirty minutes bored me half to death, when Anakin finally gave in and became Darth Vader things got much better. And thank god we finally found out why the hell Yoda spends his life hiding in a small crappy swamp before Luke Skywalker comes along. Hayden Christiansen seems to have morphed into a pretty good looking bloke now (how young is he, am I cradle snatching?) and he seemed to be more comfortable with this lot of acting than he was in Episode II. All in all, it was a decent way to spend an evening.

Today it's raining like a bugger, I haven't done any work, and I have just bought some cinnamon buns from the IGA. At least I now have all the furniture I need! And we have belly dancing later :o) always good for injecting a bit of mystique into your life....

A final note: the guy next door gets bonus points for putting on "Two Steps Behind" on repeat and working out how to play it on his guitar, singing along as he went. I don't think he knew I was singing to it as well in my room!

My housemates

2005-06-04T20:43:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I like the guy in the room next to mine. Not only does he play the guitar and sing, he currently has Def Leppard's greatest hits on..........

Rashness

2005-06-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

So over the past two days I've had some hideous rash that's slowly been creeping up my body, and is now covering my neck. It kind of itches, but I feel fine otherwise (well, other than last night's stomach ache after going to Surrey, meeting Sunshine and eating far too many stuffed mushrooms with crab and cream cheese). If it starts to blight my face I may well run screaming to the doctors, but otherwise I just assume it's an allergic reaction to something and ignore it.

After being passed the music baton by Dan earlier, I realised that my music collection is piss poor compared to other people's (in part due to the fact that I couldn't be bothered to record all my albums onto the computer before I left England) so I am asking for suggestions of bands/people that my readers would recommend to me, so I can broaden my horizons a bit. Denise introduced me to the Arcade Fire, Death Cab For Cutie, Tegan and Sara and The Postal Service over the past few months; Dan was responsible for The Shins; I have MTV to thank for Switchfoot, I discovered The Music are pretty good and I randomly got more Ben Folds Five, Ryan Adams, Five For Fighting, Embrace and John Mayer songs than I had before. I also accidentally downloaded a Nik Kershaw song from many moons back, but that's another story.

So - suggestions please. I have often been described as having "eclectic" music taste (so basically I have lots of good stuff and lots of crap stuff) so anything you suggest (unless it's that band that eats birds and pukes on stage, who wear masks and whose name I can never remember) will probably be suitable. Give this girl a better music collection!!

I know, I'm crap....

2005-05-31T20:44:00.000-07:00

So I haven't posted for over a week, although I keep meaning to. So while I am meant to be doing some work, I shall take the time to update, as long as I can remember what the hell I've been doing over the past few days.

There has been some more belly dancing, a fantastic indoor barbecue put on by one of Denise's friends (which was the most gourmet barbecue I have ever been to), lots of work, some tv finale watching, another trip to Seattle (purchases: facial cleanser, dinner at the Olive Garden and a ticket to the Experience Music Project), and then on Wednesday Denise's father, stepmother and sister came over. All of whom are really nice, and I felt like I had known them for a long time. Thursday was Denise's graduation (with the fantastic Raffi as honourary graduate - I grew up with 'The Corner Grocery Store') and a very nice dinner at The Keg on Granville Island, washed down with some celebratory champagne and a boat trip across the water to Denise's parents hotel. Friday brought some frantic last-minute packing of Denise's possessions before the movers came, a trip to Lynn Canyon suspension bridge (amazing) and final errands, prior to another wonderful dinner (I owe Denise's parents big time) at A Kettle Of Fish downtown. On Saturday I worked while Denise went to Whistler, then ate gelato when she came back. Sunday brought the departure of Denise's family, more belly dancing, a quick shower, and the last supper with Denise and her friends before she went back to Toronto. And then on Monday...... I lost Denise for the near future, when she departed at 6am to fly home. Sob..... come back Denise!

After going back to bed briefly on Monday after the trauma (well worth it) of getting up at 4:30am, I faced the prospect of moving myself to the new house. The process took me all day, from 10am until 6pm. I made two car trips with my possessions, went to the dump once with 6 garbage bags (they charge you here!) and dropped off some food at the Food Bank, as well as cleaning out the fridge, cupboard and general crap from inside the old house. Talk about traumatic. I was so tired that after some preliminary floor cleaning, I went to bed at 9pm, and slept for over 12 hours, punctuated only by listening to everyone going to work at 7:30am. So now I am in my new pad, although my crap has yet to be fully unpacked as I have no real furniture, other than a huge desk (no chair) a double futon (very comfy) and two two-drawer chests, one of which doesn't actually open. Lots of floor space, but no storage.....

Today I was meant to do work, but the database wouldn't let me in, so instead I did boring stuff like vacuuming, changing my address, going to the bank, unsuccessfully trawling the Salvation Army store for furniture that would fit in my car, and getting back into messenger conversations. None of which are good for my finances. Ikea comes later in the week, as will a TV purchase, as I am getting withdrawal symptoms already! Oh, and I purchased more concert tickets in honour of Denise, to add to the Sarah Mc Lachlan tickets I have for a week and a half's time - Green Day with Jimmy Eat World in September, and Def Leppard (yes, I know, but they have sentimental value) for August. Pretty much a day of slumming, but I just couldn't bring myself to do more cleaning, even though my room is a dust haven. I bought a dustpan and brush, I'm sure that counts for something.............

Pictures of the house to come when a) it's not raining, b) I have furniture and c) I know my housemates well enough for them not to be freaked out when I go around taking pictures.

I love Terry Wogan

2005-05-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

Well I may be a good few thousand miles away, but I just couldn't miss the Eurovision song contest, could I? With the wonders of the Internet, it is now accessible even to us Canadians, so that we too can share in the sheer hideousness of all those countries trying to sing a decent song. For those of you who haven't seen Eurovision before, think of the worst songs you can imagine, dress them up in some skimpy costumes, translate them into a few different languages and then put them together on one night, live and with some really terrible presenters. It's an evening of sheer awfulness, in a really fun and cheesy way. Definitely worth watching.

Anyway, the best thing about the net is that I got to listen to Terry Wogan's commentary, which is fantastic, because he basically gets drunk and is extremely rude about the songs and the contestants. It's actually better than the event itself. Just so you can share some of the atmosphere of the evening, let me treat you to the best of his quotes from the last three and a half hours.........

* "Here is the UK entry, Javine, with 'Touch My Fire' - kids, don't do that at home."
* (On the female host of the show) "Stop shrieking! This woman doesn't need a microphone. She wasn't picked for her voice, was she? Who are those two, Donner and Blitzen? Ant and Dec? Pinky and Perky?"
* "Turkey have gone for the bizarre once too often with that dance."
* (On one of the contestants thanking the crowd after singing) "Please stop shouting, your turn's over. Get your hair cut!"
* "God knows what those semi-finals were like if this made it through."
* "You know what's coming - some saucy lifting of skirts, and this time, as a bonus, some bounding about."
* "I could have sworn I heard a fiddler on the roof in this.....any sign of Topol?"
* "It's an awful shame that Sweden can't get any good looking girls to sing for them, rather than him."
* (Reading a lyric) "Oh for heaven's sake......"
* "Wasn't that awful, everybody?"
* "If half the women here tonight don't go home with a chill in their kidneys, I'll eat my hat - there's a breeze up on that stage that'll cut you in two...."
* "There's a woman in the audience who must have the flag of all nations in her drawers, as she's up for every song with every flag......"
* (On one of the entries) "Two refugees from a boy band........."
* (When Cyprus are voting, having just given four points to a near neighbour) "Don't look now, but there might be an element of tactical voting going on."
* (After Cyprus give five points to the UK) "I will not hear a word against the Cypriots."

Because I'm bored

2005-05-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

Things I love about Vancouver:
- In every bar/club/restaurant I've been in, no matter what time we've been there, there is always toilet paper in the ladies toilets. ALWAYS!!
- Everything is cheap, so you can buy more.
- Although it's annoying, I find it funny that gasoline can be a certain price when you go past a petrol station on the bus, then half an hour later when you go the other direction, it's 10cents cheaper.
- One dollar is called a loonie, and two dollars is a toonie.
- Pedestrians do actually wait for the white man to flash before they cross the road.
- You can get cinnamon buns for 59cents in the IGA, and they're fantastic.
- There are hundreds of cable channels.
- My rent for a room in a house with a hot tub and swimming pool over here is the same as my rent for one crappy room in a dirty student house in Bradford.
- X-Men 3 starts filming here soon, and I think Hugh Jackman is rather attractive.
- Bars are non-smoking.

Things I don't love about Vancouver:
- Everything is cheap, so I buy more of it and don't save any money.
- Pedestrians have the right of way, which is damn annoying when you have to get anywhere in a car.
- When it rains, it rains for days on end.
- No-one wants to look at my resume.
- Even though there are hundreds of cable channels, there is crap on most of them most of the time.
- The minimum wage is $8 in BC, which compared to other provinces is good, but because I still convert everything back to GBP, it seems like nothing to me.
- Getting to other countries is obscenely expensive, and I can't just nip over to Paris for a weekend.
- Football (soccer) is on at stupid times of the morning because the Premiership is 8 hours ahead of us.

I was going to put a Google map of my new house here, but then I thought better of it, since that is basically showing my location and my exact address to anyone who cares to burgle me. But when I send you all my new address, you can Google Map it (I'm sure you can't wait), and even better, Google Satellite it. There is some nice woodland lurking nearby, as well as the Indian reserve down the road. As opposed to the Google Satellite of our current house, where all you can see is the cloud that was around when they took the picture..........

Best thing of the day: The commercial for the new Star Wars film, which consisted of a lot of the best scenes from the film, with the Tagline "SITH HAPPENS.........."

Actions and reactions

2005-05-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

I kep meaning to post, but never actually remember to do so until I've turned my computer off at the end of the day. However, this morning I have been woken up by the builder, who decided to start work on the deck at 7:20am (I think he's behind schedule and panicking) so I am up early.

In brief, my week has been hectic. After Keane last Tuesday night, I had loads of work sent to me the next day, and indeed the one after that. Our landlords went away, so there was a lot of washing of clothes done, since we'd been saving it up for a good few weeks, and then on Friday I went to SFU to meet Sunshine for lunch. My little car barely made it up the mountain (and apparently it is actually classified as a mountain) but it was nice to lok around the Uni and consider it as a possible workplace/further studying place. The weekend was full of more work, handing over a deposit on my new room, checking the car's brakes and duct taping stuff back together, and taking my friends out to dinner for checking the car over and being generally nice people. And my second belly dancing course. I'm getting the hang of it now, and it seems to be doing wonders for my back ache and hopefully will also do wonders for the stomach....

Monday was a bad day - I woke up to a lot of work, and my mouse wouldn't function. Denise and I went to London Drugs to get another one, which promptly refused to work when I got it home, so I had to take it back and get yet another one. Whilst parking my car had a small argument with a concrete pillar (I really need to get a right hand wing mirror....), after which thankfully the car came off as the winner, but the pillar left a small mark of remembrance to really piss me off. That was not an enjoyable day....

On Tuesday I had a meeting with my Emergency Social Services team and an exercise with another team. Our team is on call for the month of June, so if there is a fire, a gas explosion, the end of the world etc. we get called out to support the fire department and the police. No matter what the time of day or night. So I must remember to put my cell phone on at night, since I don't think my new roommates will be happy about answering the house phone at 4am.

Yesterday I had an interview for a job that I didn't want, in a place that I didn't want to work (sales job, in New Westminster) but I went along anyway for the experience. Then I got back to find that while I was out (typical) someone from UBC had phoned to ask me about another job. So I rang her back and she gave me a phone interview, prior to face to face interviews being done next week. She said she'd ring me on Tuesday, so I am keeping my fingers crossed. I seemed to have everything she was looking for, but you never know, so do about ten other people probably. At least I have people finally calling me about my resume, as opposed to chucking it in the bin :o) I then went to the doctor and had a mole taken off my neck - strangely painless, so god knows how they did it. And then more work, and then Denise and I gave in to takeaway Indian food.

So, dear reader, you can see why I haven't been posting - it has all been fairly mundane, apart from the possible job on the horizon. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get dressed and shout at the builder for waking us up so early.....

House 1, job 0

2005-05-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

So first off, Keane were FANTASTIC. I think I've seen more British bands here in Canada than I ever did in England, but that's the way it goes I guess! I liked their lighting, very white and dark, just like their album cover and their general merchandising. The highlights of the evening were the old woman next to Denise falling asleep during the warm-up band (very loud rock), the fact that the Keane lead singer looks about 12, the girl who managed to climb up onto the stage and strangle the singer before the security guard wrestled her off him, and the fact that the drummer had a variety of facial movements which were almost as interesting to watch as the actual gig. Whilst watching the warm-up band, I realised that all drummers have their individual mannerisms, some of which are hilarious and some of which make them look as though they are seriously mental. Anyway, the Keane drummer did this kind of side twitch every time he drummed to the left side. It was an interesting night!

Yesterday I got confirmation that I can have a room in the house I looked round on Monday with Denise. We interrupted some poor girl in the middle of her study session with friends/general pizza fest, but she was graceful enough to show us round. Think two levels, parquet flooring, 8 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, pool table, wicked kitchen, huge airy living room, hot tub/sauna, swimming pool and huge deck. Need I say more? The room for rent was in the lower/basement floor, but it didn't feel basementy, and it was big enough to have a double bed, desk, chest of drawers and closet and still feel ok. The hot tub was not working, and the pool filter was broken so it had gone green, but apparently this is being sorted out. The deck could fit about 30 people on and everything was great. The two/three housemates we met were really nice, and all in all I was glad to find something I actually really liked. My rent will go up from $400 now (about £170) to $530 (about £225) in the new place, but I'll just have to get a shitty job to pay the extra. Screw poverty, I have a pool! Pictures will come, but not for a couple of weeks until I move in there. I meet the landlady on Saturday to sort out details, so hopefully she won't raise the rent or anything horrible. And there should be another room free, as there were only 6 people living there, so perhaps I can get out of the basement floor after all. It's so good to get something sorted out! Now I just need a job, new brakes for my squeaky car, better skin, the winning lottery ticket..... ;o)

Oh, on Monday night we saw Kingdom of Heaven. What can I say? Orlando Bloom wore his usual perpetually perplexed expression throughout, and it was ok. Not great, just ok. And at the end I was just left wondering why they didn't make a truce before thousands of people got slaughtered. But hey, maybe I'm just too simplistic!

As an aside, Denise and I were sitting in our flat about two hours ago, when the tv turned itself on. I assumed it was Denise, she assumed it was me. It was neither of us. Explanations?

Embrace/Snow Patrol

2005-05-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday heralded yet another of the music gigs we had booked for ourselves - this time it was Snow Patrol, supported by Embrace. I have to say that I was equally excited about both, since I remember listening to 'Come Back To What You Know' in my no-doubt depressive teenage angst phase so many years ago when Embrace were on their first album. After eight years of being in the wilderness, they recently recorded another album, which is a different sound from the first, yet still evidently Embrace-ish. And they were damn good live, although the singer needed to turn his mike up so we could hear what he was actually singing (although maybe this was the Manc accent getting in the way?). Snow Patrol, of course, were excellent, bantering with the crowd throughout their set and liberally swearing (in a remarkably non-offensive way), making jokes about a good few things that Canadians appreciate, and injecting a lot of enthusiasm into their performance. I have to say that they overtook The Killers in my view, going on sheer gig enjoyability. A fantastic evening!

The morning of the gig had been marked by the long-awaited Spa visit, with Denise, Christie, Christie's mum, Patty and myself all going along to get some much needed relaxation treatment. I only got a Glycolic facial, but I immediately felt the benefits of it. Hopefully I can afford to do it every month, as it seems to have helped with the sadly termed 'adult acne' that seems determined to blight my face, even if the woman did spend a good ten minutes digging out large portions of my face with some godawful needle-pick thing, which was pretty much hell. But the entire facial was about an hour, and apart from that trauma, it was very relaxing. We then got lunch, and then some gelato, and the entire day seemed to be about indulgence :o) which is always good.

Today has been less successful, though potentially useful. This morning I was meant to see two rooms for rent in two separate houses - the first people were either all out, even though I had scheduled a time to come round, or they couldn't be bothered to open the door. Denise and I trespassed round the back of their house to get a better look - it has potential. Massive deck, what could be a nice pool if they cleaned the cack out of it, lovely hot tub that also needed some serious cleaning, and a very nice kitchen. Sadly we couldn't really see much else, but I left a message on the answer phone of the landlady asking to actually get into the place at some other point in time, so we shall see what happens. On to house number two, which Denise was very taken with but which I still have misgivings over, though it was a possibility. It was Victorian-ish, and the room was fairly nice, but the kitchen was small, the house was dark and there were 11 people living there. Which kind of bodes badly for bathrooms and cooking times. Who knows, I might take it yet, but I am still looking for the perfect place..... I saw another house at 5pm, which was ok, but came in behind the Victoriana house. I have e-mailed about 6 more people with rooms, and am seeing more tomorrow, so hopefully in the next couple of days my prince will come..... please?

I am alive

2005-05-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

Thank goodness. It wasn't a certainty by any means, but I made it through the run alive. I got up at 5am, left the house at 5:30am, drove downtown and spent half an hour trying to get into the car park, then got hassled by some scary squeegee begging person and found out that the pay and display machine wasn't working. You were meant to ring the number provided and type in your credit card details, and it paid electronically for you. But as I cunningly hadn't brought my credit card (I was running a damn race after all) I couldn't do this. So I found a traffic cop and asked him what to do, then just wrote a note and stuck it on my dashboard saying the machine wouldn't accept my credit card and I had to go and race so couldn't pay. It seemed to work - my car was still there when I came out, sans ticket.

So the race wasn't too bad, or at least I don't remember it as too bad now the pain has subsided. I was following the 2hr pace bunny (girl from the Running Room sports store here, with bunny ears on and a suggested time written on them) until about 4.5 miles, when my feet decided to get blisters in a rather unexpected place - think inside of feet, about 2 inches below the big toes, on the side of your foot. This slowed me down considerably, and I dropped off the pace. However, I was still with the main pack, so I wasn't too bothered, until 9.5 miles when my digestive system decided that it had had enough and would like to expel everything possible from inside my body. Cue ten minutes inside a porta-loo, and I dropped even further off the pace. So I struggled through the last 3.5 miles determined that I wasn't going to allow myself the indignity of finishing in over three hours, and finally made it through in 2:54. The good side was that the actual running was quite easy, once I got into it, which gave me hope that without the blisters and the stomach upset, I would have done quite well. Or well by my standards. The scariest thing was that when I was on the last mile, coming into the stadium, the guy who won the marathon ran past me, having started half an hour later than the half-marathoners and done twice as many miles. His time was 2:15 - for 26 miles! That's just over 5 minutes per mile - ouch.

Anyway, I survived (though there were moments in the porta-loo where even this was uncertain) and I am still just about walking, or hobbling. I came home, had a shower, and then went shopping with Denise, Christie and Emily, since keeping active seemed a better bet than stiffening up by sleeping. And I feel ok today, if slightly achey and about 60 years older than in reality. Hoorah!!

This crazy city

2005-04-30T22:08:00.000-07:00

A short post today, as I have to go to bed so I can get up for the dreaded half-marathon. I haven't been jogging in three weeks, so don't expect miracles. In fact, don't expect me to finish! I shall post when I am able, if I live.

Have just got back from seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was good, but not as good as I hoped. In fact there were a couple of bits where I was fairly bored, although other bits were extremely funny. I should read the book, as it is apparently a lot better. On the way back from Surrey (40 mins away - had to meet Sunshine there) I was somewhat peeved to almost run into a dickhead reversing up the freeway merge lane. They'd obviously taken the westbound merge rather than the eastbound merge, and instead of driving the two miles up the freeway to the next exit and turning round, they decided to try and reverse the 100m or so back up the entry ramp. Causing a big near-pile-up in the process. People really can't drive here. Earlier in the day some bastard tried to take my front left wing off by driving onto the wrong side of the road to turn down a side street as I was coming out of another side street and turning left. And didn't even look over at us when we had a mental fit of horn blowing, swearing and hand gestures. I nearly ran into the side of his car just to give him something to think about, but (luckily I suppose) did the instinctive braking thing instead. I have to say I am surprised that my little car is still in one piece (touch wood).

This morning I watched the Kerrisdale carnival procession go through the streets, and it was pretty tame, except that because it was the start of the little league season all the kids were in the parade in their uniforms. It was scary to see how many teams there were. There must have been at least 15 kids in each team, and there were roughly 20 different teams, covering baseball, softball, curveball, swingball, balls I didn't even know existed. All sponsored by a different business in Kerrisdale, all with a different name, and all in a different uniform. It was quite a sight. Then I sat at the Health and Wellness fair for two hours trying to convince people to volunteer with our Emergency Social Services team, which was actually rather fun. And then Denise and I went to Red Onion and got big fat burgers (veggie). At least my last meal before running death was a good one......

Taxes and brakes

2005-04-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

At the moment I am trying to be positive about my little car, since the brakes have been squeaking over the past couple of weeks, and I am hoping that this doesn't mean the pads need to be replaced. My friend has offered to take the wheels off at the weekend and check for dirt in the mechanism, and though I can't help feeling that this is rather beyond the call of duty, it would be nice to know that I will just have to spend $17 on some brake fluid rather than $120 a piece on brake pads. And to add to the trauma, I got a hefty tax bill yesterday, since the government apparently feel that they have the right to screw you over when you come back into the country after having been away for a long time, by taking away nearly all of your personal tax-free allowance. However, I then went and cried on an H&R Block advisor, who looked rather alarmed and recalculated my tax assessment for me, cunningly finding about $450 that hadn't been taken off my net income. And although I think they are meant to charge you for this service, he didn't do this either, probably because he didn't want me to burst into tears again. So today I sent off my reassessment, along with a begging letter asking them to take the new calculation into account, though I don't really have much hope for this.

Yesterday Denise and I went to the Convention Centre downtown to collect my marathon pack, and get some free stuff from the Health & Wellness exhibition. I also bought a water bottle and zipped pocket thing that attaches round your waist, so I can store my inhaler in case I die halfway round the course. After picking up my pack of crap, I came home to discover that the marathon t-shirt you automatically get when you sign up (size guaranteed if you sign up before January 1st, which I did) is in fact not an XS, as I ordered, but an M. Some cheeky bastard has cut out an XS label and glued it over the M label, as I discovered when I peeled it off slightly. Cue a rude e-mail to the organisers, asking what the point is of signing up for a t-shirt if you can't wear the damn thing without looking like a beached whale. Obviously they haven't got back to me yet.....

On the good side, the weather is still continuing to be sunny and hot. Today and tomorrow is the Kerrisdale Carnival, where all the shops bring their wares onto the streets and sell them at half the price (in England the racks would be stolen in seconds), people walk around with balloons, bands play, and there is a big procession through the streets (tomorrow at 10am). It also marks the beginning of the kids' little league baseball season. And tomorrow I have to sit at a desk for the ESS group I'm with and pretend that I know what we do for two hours, so that should be fun!

I have also finally managed to get all my shit together to send to the POW/MIA command centre in Hawaii, asking them for an internship. Now I have to hope that my three referees get their shit together in turn, write me references and send them to America. This could be dicey. Even if they do send off their assessments of me (and I am assuming that they will be good, because they all like me) I still have to fight off a load of other people who are American, since the command centre doesn't really like taking people who don't have US citizenship. I also have to fight off graduates of anthropology degrees, whereas I only have a couple of modules of anthropology and a broad psychology background. It's not going to be easy. But it would be cool to get an internship for a year, move down to Hawaii, get paid to do some fab forensic work and go to places like Laos and Vietnam. I think I argued quite convincingly on the application that they should give me a job, but it just depends whether they want the hassle of having to arrange visas, transport documents, accommodation etc. for someone who isn't American :o( - I wouldn't!