Someone I know sometimes posts pictures (on Facebook, so I can’t really link you to them) of her walks through the graveyard near her home, which makes me feel a little jealous that she has a graveyard. I still don’t know where the graveyards in this city are. But I have an ocean, so I shouldn’t complain too much.
There is something excellent about being able to walk to the beach and look at the giant ships (and the kayaks and sailboats and standing paddle-surfers) from your home. And while I’m sure the graveyard has fewer people, that just means there’d be so many fewer people out having interesting conversations like there were by the seawall tonight. Talking about the weirdest day they’d just had, or complaining loudly about their teeth or talking slow and braying about Luongo or Toronto.
These tulips placed in the bronze (or whatever) handbag of a statue aren’t always there. Over in the laughing people sculptures I saw more flowers placed in their hands. I kind of like that flower arrangements as a form of graffiti. I also like the benches in Stanley Park that have little memorial plaques to make me feel less jealous.
The Dubious Monk
chinese curses since twenty aught two
Filed under photography …
the last paragraph is the informative one
Today I finally changed the tire on my bicycle. You may recall, I got a flat coming home from my last class of the term. I got the bike home on the bus then and haven’t been able to use it to take advantage of Vancouver’s nice weather. So today when it was raining and I’m feeling a little sick, I got that fixed.
Now, I am not a handy man. I haven’t ever changed a tire on a car; I wouldn’t be able to build a fence (I mean I’d be able to build a terrible fence, or a fence from Lego, but a real life “keep the cows where they should be” fence? not gonna happen). But I have changed bike tires before.
Bicycles are the one area where I feel like I can handle the difficulties involved. They’re at a good scale of machinery, and each little bit you do doesn’t have to be replicated again and again. There are only two wheels. My bike only has one brake (and no gears). I can see what everything needs to do and understand the physics involved.
My big problem going into this tire change (the first on my favourite bike I’ve owned) was a lack of tools. I had an allen key multitool thing that had a makeshift wrench for dealing with my brakes (which I’ve used before) but I discovered when I went downstairs, new bike tube in hand, that I had no wrench to get my tire off the frame.
This is the problem of living with other people and being able to scavenge what I need off of them. My roommate does not have a wrench set (and since I don’t have even one wrench I don’t even get the satisfaction of saying “How can you not have wrenches?” like I’m sure many of my friends are thinking right now). I had to go out and find a wrench. When I got to Sears I realized I had no idea what size the nut on my wheel was. I’d just wanted a small adjustable crescent wrench, but those only came in gigantic sets. So I went off to find a bike shop.
At the first bike shop they had a very cool wrench that had a bottle opener on the other side, but $30 was just too much. Eventually I found a double headed wrench that I figured one of the heads would be about the right size…
Oh man. I’m sorry. this is terribly boring. My mom is back from France now, so I feel like I should keep people up to date with the minutiae of my days a bit better.
Anyway. I fixed my bike! And I like my little handful of tools in the picture above. That’s what I’ve got for you today. I’m presenting a paper at a children’s literature conference this weekend and blogged the North Shore Writers Festival last weekend. And I’m checking in on and feeding Jamie’s cat while he’s at Ebertfest. That all would have been much more exciting to write about.
the sky was blue and the birds sang pretty
Last night Jamie’s four-day Trivia Blitz ended with our team (team name: Neal and the Unemployed Librarians) answering the most questions correctly and thus receiving a pitcher of beer. We missed out on the $50 gift certificate because of the way that prize is randomly allocated. Selah. The real challenge of the evening was paying the bill. After everyone had paid, many with cards, some with cash, the manager came back and said we were $10 short. Careful examination of his copy of the bill and the receipts the people with cards had gotten showed consistent discrepancies. There was a slight argument over what those discrepancies meant, but Alex did a fine job of resolving it in the end, making him the Applied Knowledge champion.
Today was 420 day and there was a huge event on the steps of the art gallery. So much selling of weed and weed-food. With banners advertising prices and varieties and such. It was odd seeing it all so concentratedly open. There were biker-types and hippies and a bunch of high-school students wearing Portland NBA hats. After I realized stuff was happening, walking around downtown was fun. It was easy to spot people who were obviously going to the square, but it was more fun to watch people avoiding the 420ers.
I’d gotten some books from the library so I went down to the harbour to read comics in the sun. I hadn’t been to the square where the Olympic cauldron before, and though I’d seen the Digital Orca from a distance today was the first time I got up close. It was made by Douglas Coupland. Maybe if I’d paid better attention to the Olympics I’d have known that already, but there’s a handy plaque I read it from.
Tomorrow I’ll head up to the North Shore Writers Festival to blog it up. We had a meeting yesterday and it is not as intense as it might have been. It’ll be a longish day, but fun. There will be wine and cheese I was told to eat a lot of. I plan to comply.
i am a big fat dynamo
Today I did my taxes, got some more Lego out of storage, bought minor bits of recording equipment, dropped off my Emerald City film to be developed, got new passport pictures taken and purchased inner tubes for my bike (because I got a flat the other day coming home from school). That was all before 4pm and watching baseball (on TV in a bar).
The home opener for the Jays season was spoiled by our exceedingly handsome closer, who was unable to not blow the save. Le sigh. At least Colby Rasmus made an excellent diving catch and hit a triple (which, even though it’s illogical, is a feat I respect way more than a home run, no offense to Mister Bautista), and I watched the game in good company.
One of the things I really enjoyed about our Easter dinner yesterday was one of my friends being a little drunk and really wanting to take us all to a goth night. Her pitch to me was “Goth girls are all hot and they love librarians so you should completely come.” While I agree that goth girls are hot, and that their librarian preferences are probably a bit higher than the general population, I didn’t go to that part of the evening. And it turns out that was just as well, because the bar they ended up at was doing a lesbian night as opposed to goth, which would have hurt my chances for love far more than my lack of ink and paleness.
Remember how I talked about the cherry blossoms being awesome here? This is my fucking bus stop/skytrain station:
Spring here is great. I don’t care if you’ve already hit 20 degrees for weeks on end in Winnipeg because the planet is boiling.
springing
While watching/listening to baseball on the internet is the part of my daily routine that’s changed the most with spring beginning, amazingly enough the out of doors are also getting seasonally appropriate.
I enjoy the sheer number of cherry blossoms when I’m out walking. At the SkyTrain station closest to my apartment it’s this huge fragrant canopy of white (and a bit of pink) with people happily gawking and taking pictures in it all. Very neat.
At our Easter dinner at the Little House from the Prairies yesterday we were talking about the absence of seasons here and how we might romanticize the cold back in Alberta and Manitoba (I do not romanticize such horrors, just to be clear). We were also talking about living in a place where tour buses come to visit, which is kind of weird. But the not exactly closest (but close enough to be the first one I think of) park to my house is Stanley Park, all huge and treed and full of totem poles and aquaria and such.
I like living near water and being able to go to the park and watch seaplanes and people messing about with boats. Now that it’s actually getting warm enough to sit outside and read, you’ll probably see more pictures from me that could be taken by a busload of tourists. But it’s where I am. I think I like it.
plastic people buckling their swashes
I have had a busy weekend making stuff, which is a pretty good way to spend my time, even if it is technically for homework.
I’m doing a video booktalk/trailer for an excellent YA pirate novel (A.S. King’s The Dust of 100 Dogs), and I own a bunch of pirate Lego, so using that Lego to illustrate the trailer seemed like a great idea. A few weeks ago I supplemented my Lego collection with extra hairpieces and some less masculine torsos and I was good to go.
Now, everybody in class has to make a video, but you can also just do a video booktalk. Getting out the Lego and building sets and taking umpty million macro shots isn’t a course requirement. But I’ve realized this term that what I’m really excited about in librarianship is doing cool stuff with young people. Playing with Lego and making something cool to show people is something I’d actually like to do professionally (and doing media-creation YA programs is something libraries can get into). This was completely the kind of project I can get lost in. If only all homework was like this (I’m sorry to my friends in cataloguing this term).
As of now I’ve got 30 pictures for my 90 second trailer and I’ve figured out exactly what gaps need filling. I need to do at least one more action sequence, a leaving home sequence that’ll recall the one already shot in the other timeline and a handful more Lego dogs (so I can turn them into 100).
I also appear to have left my phone in my jacket pocket with the ringer off since Friday night and never even thought about looking for it, so engrossed was I in Lego. Apologies to the person who tried to call me.
being in vancouver
My new place here is very different from living at Brenda and Marlis’. It feels more like what I think of Vancouver being like from the outside. I’ve got all that City of Glass stuff surrounding me now (that’d be the Douglas Coupland book, not the Paul Auster one, which is about New York).
This afternoon as I was wandering around getting acquainted with the neighbourhood (Coal Harbour) I walked down to the water and watched little seaplanes at the Harbour Airport. Across the water was North Vancouver with a mountain behind it. To my left, islands and Stanley Park all filled with trees. It was cool but not freezing and ships were passing by, far away. It felt very Pacific-Canadian, very much like how it should feel to be here.
I’m going to start taking more pictures, I think. I mean, I live here now. I want to start to get attached to the city, to make it feel like home. It’s harder to do that when you’re thinking of leaving again in a few months. But I think I’m going to try to stay when I’m done my degree. All I need to do that is to find work, right?
like talking in my sleep
So apartment hunting in Vancouver from Sydney was something I was kind of dreading. But since Holly decided she’s staying in Harrisonburg after Xmas, at least I only needed a place for one person. Last weekend I spent a big pile of time going through Vancouver listings using PadMapper and the UBC apartment listings. This is how I met Emma, who has a room in her Coal Harbour apartment (a character building with hardwood floors no less). We exchanged emails and she called one of my references, Marlis.
Now, Marlis is a chatter. An excellent one. Last February when someone stopped in to pick up a wine rack she was selling they talked in the living room for 45 minutes, prompting confusion in the kitchen as to whether this was someone she knew or a stranger. It was a stranger. This served me well, because when Emma called Marlis, they talked for 45 minutes, and Marlis told Emma everything she needed to know about me, so there was practically nothing for us to talk about on Skype the next day. Which, as you may be aware is good, because it’s a lot of work for me to be chatty.
I completely credit Marlis’ talking with getting me this place, because really, I’m some strange guy who’s going to be sharing space with Emma for months. She needs to have some idea that I’m not creepy or disgusting (which I’m not, but it’s much more useful to have third parties confirm that). Thank you Marlis. (If you’re in the market for a photographer, check out Imaging By Marlis, as she’s pretty great at taking pictures as well as talking to people.)
tracking (far from the outback)
Holly’s very into the jobhunt. They do this whole “job trial” thing here which is deeply annoying. They keep on bringing her into places for a few hours to work and then don’t call her back. Kind of a dick move. But it’s a big city and there are lots of people looking for work I guess. She’s pretty awesome about keeping on going even though it’s tough.
Today she went on an hour train ride north and back as part of this whole process. I can’t tell you why, or what she returned with, but I can post this picture she took from the train.
the present enveloping us
I love how differently time passes when you aren’t counting down to some event. And since I’m trying a new subtlety tack that’s all I’m going to say about that.
We’ve been hanging out with the people in our house more since Holly arrived. Last night we looked at Carola’s pictures of Patagonia for a long time, which was fine, it’s all very beautiful, but it got more interesting when she was showing us pictures of Valpariso and there was a mural featuring an oldish man in a suit she referred to as “my leader.” Then we got her to tell us the story of this leader and how he killed himself when the military staged its coup, and she was very serious about this history.
Now, I don’t know a lot about history in South America, but that sounded like the 1973ish coup. Allende and Pinochet such. The other 9/11. So I had to ask, “But this all happened before you were born right?” Of course it did. But it was interesting to hear her talk about this leader she never had as hers.
There was a lot more to the story, including cousins who’re rebels and uncles in the military. “We don’t talk very much about it because everyone has different opinions,” she said. It was fascinating. And something I wouldn’t have heard, had I been sitting in my room on the internet.
We’ve also been kind of awesomely domestic. The expense of things encourages it. I made a potato, chick pea and apple curry the other day. Holly’s made soup and white sauce for pasta, and a bunch of other stuff. We’re eating salad and drinking tea. We’re having pancakes on Saturday and then going bike shopping.
It’s pretty sweet being here/now.
