How to have fun in Vancouver (for free!)

Friday Night: Go to a free concert featuring 4 choirs and 5 trombones in a Catholic cathedral downtown, put on by the 'cultural olympiad'. Maybe living in an Olympic host city isn't all construction and homeless people getting evicted...

Saturday Daytime: Go to an open house at the curling rink and spend an hour trying to learn how to balance while lunging on one foot on ice at the same time as you try to throw (and aim) a 25 pound block of marble. Consume vast quantities of donuts and coffee afterwards.

Saturday Evening: Make 12 pans of platz ('pie by the yard') with youth in a church basement, discovering the joys of exceedingly sticky dough and crumbling butter into sugar by hand.

Sunday Daytime: Lead a church sunday school, attend an annual general meeting, and clean up from the church lunch. Chase around small Spanish children with a vacuum while doing said cleaning.

Sunday Night: Wearing your most scandalous skimpy red dress, attend a Mardi Gras party and get fed hush puppies, shrimp gumbo, dirty rice, and Hurricanes (a very delicious form of mixed beverage). As a 'woman of ill repute,' name yourself 'Crimson Seychelle', and proceed to play footsies with everyone in the room with gay abandon.

All in all, an excellent weekend. Hopefully I'll be awake for my 8am greek class tomorrow...

Shrouded in warmth and whiteness

Vancouver, it appears, is my blogging black hole, into which all desire for scattershot internet communication of the blog variety gets sucked up, never to return. Of course, an over-busy schedule and facebook updates as a surrogate communication device don't help...

In any case, I'm now watching the snow-pocalypse from 13 floors up in a Toronto apartment, looking out over the Don Valley. Or, trying to, since I can't really see anything through the roaring snow. Biku sleeps in the next room, the lamp casts a warm glow on the pieces of my current sewing project (amazingly, I'm actually doing a sewing project of my own, under the watchful eye of Biku-sempai), and I'm swathed in a towel and feeling clean and well moisturized from my leisurely shower. Life is good, and spending time with Biku makes me happy. Very happy.

It's been a tough semester, but a good one. I love my courses and my friends and all that I'm learning in Vancouver, but one of the things I learned this semester was what life's like when you're feeling blue. Blue, as in really sad for no reason. A combination of several stressful factors got me to a place where I didn't want to get out of bed in the morning, let alone care about courses or even (on really bad days) cook anything. It's mostly gone away now, but I've got a much different outlook on life and the time I need to carve out for myself. The time I need to take to be sad and to be alone, so that I may have time and energy to also be out among awesome friends having fun. It's a balance, and I'm still getting it right.

Into this climate breaks Christmas holidays, which I appreciate more than ever now, for many reasons. Thanks to the generosity of family, I get to not only spend almost three weeks in Ontario, I also get to go out to Halifax -- when I can't really afford travel to either place. While others must work right through the holidays I can sleep in and spend lots of leisurely time with those I love -- a fabulous privilege.
And, some random guy was flirting with me at swing dancing, which is always nice for the ego (even if he was bizarre and kind of socially awkward).

So there y'are. In the great taxonomy of blogging, I suppose I fall under the category "Blogs massively when in a foreign country, never blogs when far away in her own country, blogs only when happy and home and having a lazy morning".

Merry Christmas!

Starry Nights and August Hail

I've just returned from four days in the wilds of British Columbia. Well, not exactly wilds -- there were still flush toilets, cars about ten metres from our tents, and alcohol and food to spare. However, on the other hand, I spent my days by a fire, outside in the unseasonably cold weather, and heard reports of bears browsing through nearby campsites -- so it wasn't exactly urban, either.

Once again I marvel at the ability nature has to rejuvenate me. I knew I needed to get away for a while, and I was certainly right. Even with 'car camping' being less of a wilderness experience than the canoe trip I really craved, it was so refreshing to just be somewhere where the very basics of life (food, shelter, warmth) became all that was necessary, and the sometimes exciting but often overwhelming modern conveniences of tv and email and supermarkets faded away into the distance. I scrambled up mountainsides, gazed in awe at more stars than I've ever seen before in my life, found out just how cold glacier-fed streams are, and hiked along the ridgeline of a mountain in a hailstorm on the last day of August. This among a whole spate of doing not very much at all, which was just what this over-busy extrovert needed.

I'm happy to be back to the land of hot showers and email and warm spaces, not to mention Regent courses and Vancouver friends and phone lines to friends afar. But damn, was it ever good to get away.

NBC = teh liars

I just watched Michael Phelps win his first gold medal in Beijing 'live' on NBC. I would have believed the little gold graphic in the top corner proclaiming that this was 'live' -- if I hadn't already seen Michael Phelps win the exact same gold medal more than three hours earlier on CBC. So either Canada's got some serious time-warp action going on, or NBC isn't exactly being honest...

In other news, despite my growing concerns with the Olympics as a horrendously wasteful exercise in patriotism and my continuing concerns with rewarding China with the games simply because they have economic clout, I am once again addicted to the spectacle. I can resist anything but temptation, it seems.

It's a Good Day when:

a) I work 5 hours at a job which keeps my muscles limber and allows me ample time to think.

b) I make bread as a housewarming gift for some new friends.

c) I make granola with Laurena's awesome recipe.

d) I watch an episode of Due South.

e) I discover the deliciousness of Butter Chicken spice packets.

f) I go to a BBQ hosted by a Swede. Who is calling himself "Arnold Schwarzennagger," for some reason

g) ALL OF THE ABOVE. (hurrah!)

_____________________________________

PS -- is anyone surprised that half the things which make me happy involve cooking? Didn't think so.

Awakening

Needless to say, I haven't posted in a while. Also needless to say, I'm still alive, still out here on the left coast, and still busy enough that I don't usually have time to answer all my emails, let alone think "Hey! I should post to my blog." I won't bore you with apologies, but I will actually try and post more often without the guilt that kept me away so long. Somehow feeling guilty that I haven't posted in a while doesn't make me eager to start again. Stupid guilt.

Anyways, on to today's story, kids!

It begins last night at 3:45 am. Well, actually, it begins earlier than that, but 3:45 is when I finally blearily squinted at my alarm clock to see what time it was. I had been awake, mostly, for an hour already, unable to sleep because someone was pounding on one of my neighbours doors every ten minutes or so. I knew it wasn't my door, but it was close enough that my sleep befuddled brain had to figure that out every time I got woken up.

Eventually, I was awake enough to get scared. It's dark, it's quiet (except for the knocking, which was more like thudding), and my housemate isn't home for the weekend. Just me, the cats, and someone outside who doesn't live here and won't go away. I become prenaturally alert to every sound, and when a shadow passes close enough to my window for me to make a pretty good estimate of the guy's height and age I become seriously scared.

Then I hear one of my neighbours (one I don't know... although I don't know any of them really) open his door start to question the man in a loud, authoritative voice. What are you doing here? Who do you know here? Why were you trying to get in my window? Etc. The man mumbles answers in a language that's definately not English (and maybe not anything else either) and the police get called. There's another half hour of conversations both loud and quiet, I get to hear my neighbour explaining his experience and this man getting his rights read to him (for whatever that was worth, he didn't seem to understand what a 'lawyer' was) as he was arrested. My fear slowly ebbs and I get up, peer through the keyhole (seeing nothing), let a cat in via the back door, and make sure everything's locked. Strangely enough, the most reassuring thing was when the second cop, a woman, shows up and says "Good Morning" in a quietly cheery voice. At 4 in the morning to her partner, who sounds like he's arresting the man right outside my bedroom window.

Eventually, with the comfort of a purring cat next to me, I fall back to sleep and have weird dreams for a few hours before getting jolted awake at 7am by my alarm. Off to work, half-dead and feeling sheepish for being so scared. I should have said something long beforehand, or at least gotten up when the police came to tell them my version of the story. Anything other than cowering in my bed just because of some guy was outside. The guy was suspicious, certainly, but wasn't dangerous. If I had asked in a loud voice what the hell he was doing knocking on a door for an hour in the middle of the night I probably could have gotten much more sleep. He seemed to be saying he was trying to get a hold of a friend, and maybe he was. Or maybe he was a druggie. In any case, I could have done something myself rather than being a passive victim of my own fears.

In any case, I phoned the police today and told them what I heard, for what it's worth. The most disturbing part of all this is, in reality, the fact that now I think about it, I believe I've been woken up (and fallen immediately back asleep) by similar knocking a few times in the past few weeks. But in any case, if I'm going to be an actually independant person, I need to learn how to handle myself better when I have such a rude awakening. Because fear isn't worth it, and I don't want to let it get the better of me again.

Day 8 and counting...

Have just worked my 8th day in a row. I'm assured this isn't normal, it's because one of my coworkers (who is like two normal people, workload-wise)is on vacation this week, but still. I'm tired. I feel like a bit of a wuss, since it hasn't been full time -- only 5 or 6 hours, depending on the day -- but I try and tell myself that working 5 or 6 hours making beds and hauling laundry and pushing vacuums is a hard thing to do. In any case, wuss or not, I'm going to need a day off soon. I've been promised Monday off, if not Tuesday as well, so I have hope.

It doesn't help, of course, that it's an absolutely gorgeous Victoria Day weekend (Happy Weekend, Victoria!) and my housemate's off camping and I'm all alone and I'm sure everyone else is outside enjoying the weather...but all I have enough energy to do is lounge about inside watching tv. Which is relaxing enough, but is kind of my mental equivalent of eating at McDonald's -- it smells and tastes wonderful when you're hungry, but then you just feel kind of sick afterwards.

So now I'm off to a bookstore to see if I can't cheer myself up by finding a used copy of The Book of Alternative Services for the Anglican Church.

Yes, I know I'm a weirdo.

Update: I did not find the book I was looking for (I'm going to have to give in soon and just steal one from a church, I think), but found a cure for my tired grumpiness in the bottom of a Tim Horton's Ice Capp. This may be the town of fancy gourmet coffee, but I just want the iced beverage that every other non-Vancouver Canadian drinks when it gets hot.