Wind energy

Imagine having your very own wind turbine in your backyard! Apparently they are becoming more and more affordable, and homeowners are putting them in their backyards. You can even buy them at Canadian Tire, a Canadian hardware store chain that is a lot cooler than I remember it being.

Crazy. There was an article about this in the New York Times today, too.

Douglas says he can build one from a bicycle generator hub. I'll keep you posted.

yahoo!

I got an official job offer from UBC yesterday, and starting January 2 will be doing something much more up my alley - I'm positively oscillating with glee.

I handed in my resignation at the engineering company today. It was sweet. Very sweet. It was also fun to watch people's eyes get big when I told them about my new job. Hell, I didn't get a Masters degree to be a secretary, sugar.

The marketing manager, the one with the secret record producing identity, was genuinely pleased for me. He said nice things about how I'd be hard to replace (I've been doing more and more work for him lately) and offered to take me out to lunch next week. The office micromanager was happy, too, but I think she was just happy that I'm leaving so she can complain about how she has to do *everything* around the office again.

ah. 6 more days. 45 hours.

And then I get to work in the technicolor world of biology again! It'll be just like in the movies. Not that there are many movies about biologists. But you know what I mean.

Knit Nuts

With Christmas just around the corner, Douglas and I have been knitting and projecting like maniacal little elves to get all of our Christmas presents made. Luckily Douglas is a fast and adventurous knitter. He went straight from knitting a single, plain square, to making complicated felting projects that involve 4 double-pointed needles, increases, decreases, thumbs, you name it. They're turning out great, and some are in the machine felting right this second.

In the past week, we've knitted a pound and a half of yarn into half a dozen projects. That's a piece of yarn as long as 6 football fields. I wish I knew how many stitches it was...

I won't post pictures of the projects, so I don't spoil any surprises. But here's a picture of Douglas knitting:



At the yarn store, we also found out about Ravelry, a site where you can post and search thousands of knitting projects. People post yarn, yardage, pictures of the finished project, whatever. I've signed up to be a beta tester. There's a waiting list, so I don't have an account yet, but I'll post more once I have access.

I'm still in job purgatory, waiting for HR to do something with my new job description. I've written my resignation letter a thousand times in my head. Fingers crossed...

Seline and Dylan's wedding, highlights

I've been wanting to post about the goodness of Celine and Dylan's wedding for a while, but every time I sit down to do it, I think of too many good moments to write about, decide it will take me hours to do it, and then give up. So, instead, I'm going to post a few of my favorite photos with little captions.

We were immersed in the Arizona heat from Thurs night 'til Monday morning, and when it was all over, and we were saying goodbye to Seline and Dylan on Sunday night (late), we couldn't believe it had gone by so quickly.

Here we are at Elizabeth and Matt's house, around the corner from Seline's house. We were putting flowers in Celine's hair, doing up her bouquet, and feeding her hors d'ouevres and margaritas. That's me, Shelley, Celine, Kelly, Vera, and Elizabeth.



Celine was a beautiful glowing bride:



But she wasn't used to dealing with the paparazzi:



They said their vows in their backyard, lit by fairy lights in the trees:



After the ceremony, the guests gathered at tables under a big white tent in their backyard, to feast on a pig that Dylan's cousin roasted in the ground (there were lots of yummy vegetarian options, too, but the pig is the best food story - o, except for the cakes, but I'll get to those):



Celine and Dylan were both beaming with happiness:



Celine's brother Rene and his wife Nicole started the tradition of asking guests to sing a song about love to make the bride and groom kiss. Celine and Dylan asked guests to do this, too, and it resulted in a great mad rush of guests standing up to sing song after song. Here are Celine's mom, Huguette, and her mom's sister and cousin singing a French love song:



One of the three (!) wedding cakes was the French traditional croquembouche, which basically means mouth crunch cake. It was a spectacularly tall golden confection, a giant cone of cream puffs stuck together with spun sugar. Wow. It tasted at least as good as it looked, which is saying a lot.



The happy couple fed each other cake, of course. These are some of my favorite pictures from the whole wedding:







There was lots of wine,



and live music (provided by the groom, no less!),



and at the end of it we were totally worn out,



and also full of the feeling that the world is a wonderful place. We had such a good time catching up with old friends, meeting new friends, and most of all, seeing two people we love looking gloriously happy. Life is good.

s&b

We just had an s&b meeting at my house. Susannah brought a project she was working on the last time I had s&b in Vancouver, 5 and a half years ago. There were tea and brownies, ginger biscuits and banana bread. Jen learned how to cast on, Katrin tried to remember how to crochet, Shelley cussed out her laceweight shawl, and Kathleen's cabled mittens made me want to try out a cable pattern myself. It was good - I missed s&b. No one bitched as well as Alexandra, but, then, that's a lot to ask. 8)

I am still waiting to hear the final word on the new job - the director submitted my new job description last week, and was told that it would take them about a week or two to process it so they can make me an offer. I'm holding my breath!

Douglas went 'dirt surfing' on the Sunshine Coast today (it's on the mainland, but you have to take a 40 minute ferry ride to get there), and he's just beaming with joy about how good it was. He's glad he's found some friends to mountain bike with, and he still can't get over how pretty it is here....

Miraculous

I time travelled on my way to work yesterday. How do I know? I ended up in the 19th century. Let me explain.

The receptionist quit last week. They haven't hired a temp to replace her. Instead, they have temporarily demoted the woman who used to do the job to receptionist again. Yesterday she had a dentist appointment, which meant no one would be around to answer the phones. I was told that "the ladies in the office usually answer the phones," and asked to step up and do my bit.

I replied that although I do not have balls, I'm not a lady, and therefore do not qualify. I still ended up answering the phones.

At least The Job is good blog fodder. Enjoy it while you can (I am, o, am I ever) - earlier this week the director e-mailed me the description of my soon-to-be-new-job. We're waiting for HR to do some paperwork. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Coyote

We saw an urban coyote on our dog walk the other night! Douglas wrote about it on his blog, so I won't duplicate it here. A coyote! Wow!

My Secret Identity

I haven't talked much about my job since I got it. That's because it's perfectly odious, and I can't talk about it without cussing. I try to avoid the subject. Particularly on my blog. I somehow feel like I should stick to the positive here. I wonder why that is?

So, I'm a proofreader at a civil engineering office. To pay our astronomical Vancouver rent, I spend my days reading and correcting 40-page building code reports written by men whose first languages are Romanian, Mandarin, Bengali. The grammar isn't pretty. Nothing about the office is pretty. It's a monochrome wasteland that reeks of toner. I had wondered what engineers do. Now I know, and I wish I didn't.

When I'm there, I feel like the odd one out in a sci fi movie, like I need to hide something about myself so I don't get chewed up by the machine that detects difference. Like I have a secret identity. These people don't even know what gels or primers are. Imagine!

Last week I found out that I'm not the only one with a secret identity. One of the guys with an office near mine has always seemed like the odd man out. He's a hugely tall, jovial guy who listens to loud music on his headphones. He's middle-aged, but he looks like he thinks he's a kid someone's let into the boardroom by mistake. He doesn't seem to love his job as much as everyone else does - he sometimes leaves early, and doesn't obsess about architectural drawings. I put it down to his being in sales.

He mentioned he was taking a week off, to go fishing. I overheard him say he was going to the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Charlottes are possibly my favorite place in the whole world, so of course I had to ask him for more details. He was very vague, and rushed off without saying much. I figured he was in a hurry right then, and asked him again later, and mentioned that I had been there to collect moss. He raised an eyebrow, and I ended up explaining my story, complete with biology degrees and trip through Latin America in a hippie bus.

Somewhere in the middle of my story, he started to look shamefaced. At the end, he said he couldn't lie anymore, he wasn't going fishing after all. Instead, he was going to spend time at a recording studio, producing music for a young songwriter who's just starting out. He pulled a chain out from under his tie to show me the peace sign dangling from it, and said in a hushed voice that he didn't want anyone to know he's a hippie.

We agreed to keep each other's secret identities hush-hush.

I promise an installment about Seline and Dylan's wedding very soon! We're still working on the photos, and I can't post without photos...

fried

We spent a glorious few days in Tucson at Seline and Dylan's wedding. It was perfectly sublime, with fairy lights, mouth-crunch cake, old and new friends, and knock-you-on-your-ass margaritas. We could not have had a better time.

I will write more and post more pictures later, though. My computer kicked the bucket today, and I've lost a lot of applications and data. My last backup was too long ago. I've never been so dependent on a computer before. It had started to feel like an extension of my brain. Now that it's gone down the tubes, I kind of feel like it's taken my brain with it.

More later, when I'm a fully functioning cyberbeing again.

Rain and Snow

It has rained steadily for the past week or so. Douglas made Saira a super-cute gore-tex raincoat so she stays dry:


This morning the clouds lifted. Not all the way, of course, but we can see the mountains again. So much rain! At least we have some snow to show for it:



My work mirrors the weather - it is drudgery, plain and simple. Last week I got frustrated with it, and Douglas cheered me up by telling me funny stories about when he stuffed insulation with ex-cons to pay the rent in Idaho. Now, when I feel my brain melting and running out my ears, I remind myself that at least I'm not covered in fiberglass and surrounded by criminals.

Hopefully the clouds will lift in my work life soon, too. There are some other options on the horizon. I haven't heard back from the elusive Project Seahorse folks. They tell me they are still deliberating, and so I am still hoping. (There were 200 applicants for the job, and I made it to the final 5, so that counts for something.) I've applied for a cool-sounding job at the Vancouver Aquarium.

Tomorrow we leave all of this behind. We're going to Tucson, for Seline and Dylan's wedding. I am bouncing off the walls, I'm so excited. The wedding, seeing all of our friends, warm sunny weather, 5 days off work - there are so many reasons to be excited!

Art trade, housewarming, and raincloud

Our housewarming party was last night, and it was fabulous. We don't know that many folks in town yet, so it was small. Not all of our friends know each other, but everyone mixed and mingled really well. The house feels properly warmed, and we're looking forward to the future plans we made with folks last night, like culture crawls and dog walks and dinner parties. I meant to take photos - I even charged my camera battery - but I got caught up in chatting and completely forgot! Next party.

The weather is getting wintery, and there's been lots of in-house projecting time. I finished Erika's fingerless gloves. I'm happy with how they turned out. I'm making Douglas a pair, and maybe I'll make myself a pair, too.



I really liked trading with Erika, so I suggested to Susannah (a talented painter and artist friend) that we should trade, too. She doesn't knit much, and I don't paint at all, so that's what we're trading. I'm going to knit her some felted mittens in return for watercolors. She brought over two miniature paintings as a housewarming gift last night:



I love them! I can't wait to see what she makes in trade for the mittens. I like the water theme; very appropriate for a welcome to Vancouver gift.

Speaking of rain, we've realized that we have our own personal raincloud over our neighbourhood. It is *always* raining at our house, but it stops as soon as we leave our neighbourhood. Our house is right on the Burrard Inlet, and the rainclouds seem to funnel up the inlet, get stuck on the North Shore mountains, and then empty themselves on our house. This has been a really good realization, actually, because it means that it doesn't matter what the weather is doing at our house - there are probably clearer skies just a few blocks away.

Getting ready for our party, we did lots of house organizing, and part of that involved finding our digital collection of music. We keep all of our music on a NAS (network accessible storage drive), and play it from our computer. Before we left for our trip to Latin America, we tried to copy all of our music onto the laptop we were taking with us. Of course it was a last-minute effort, and we set up the file copy the night before we were leaving, hoping it would work overnight with no hitches.

We forgot that we had a bunch of movies on the NAS, and in the middle of the night the copying got to the movies, and never got past them. The last music that got copied was the Mountain Goats. I hate the Mountain Goats, and I still think they killed the file copy....

This meant that our music selection for the past 9 months has been only A-M. Now that we've set up our NAS again, we have all of our music back!! The playlist is all N-Z, of course.

Skunked

Poor Saira got skunked this week. I let her out on the back porch Wednesday night, and she came back minutes later, stinking and shaking.

I'd never smelled fresh, potent skunk before, and it didn't smell quite like skunk. It was a really acrid combination of burned garlic and burned rubber, with a hint of celery. Weird.

We chucked her in the bath (the clawfoot tub is good for this, too - the sides are high so she can't hop out, and when she shook off the spray didn't get spread all over the bathroom).

The web was really helpful in figuring out what to do. We checked out wikipedia and learned a couple of cool things about skunks. We washed her in a combination of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap, as recommended, and it did the trick. She still has a bit of an odor if you get right up close, but it's not too bad.

Golden Ears

This weekend we went camping with my parents in Golden Ears Provincial Park, just an hour's drive from our house. Well, it would have been an hour's drive if I hadn't messed up the directions and taken us on a tour of north Coquitlam, and a detour to Pitt Lake. The Pitt Lake detour was cool - we saw folks filming a western. Movie sets are all over the place here. You can't throw a pebble in the Lower Mainland without hitting a movie truck, or a kid with funny hair and big sunglasses directing traffic around a shoot.

Anyhow, we got there, eventually, and went for a walk down to Gold Creek, made s'mores around the campfire, and generally had a grand time.

Here we all are in front of a giant tree stump:



Making s'mores:


The perfect s'more:


Douglas and Saira at the creek:



The lake where we took Saira swimming the next day:



and, OK, one more of Saira, after her swim:

Criminy

Last Thursday morning, when I was heading out to work, I found a black baseball hat in the middle of our backyard. I figured someone had tossed it over the fence and not wanted to come through our gate to retrieve it.

Douglas got the real story from a neighbour a few days later. Apparently, just a few houses down from us, a young punk kicked in the front door, grabbed a bag from in front of the surprised residents (who were at home), and raced off. The neighbour gave chase (even though the bag was full of dirty laundry).

The punk jumped our back fence, ran across the yard - lost his hat - jumped the other side of the fence, and vanished into the night. With the dirty laundry. Lucky guy.

I guess we should be a little more careful about locking doors and windows. And ask our landlords again about fixing our front door (which has been kicked in and glued back together...).

Turkey and Feng Shui

Last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and our family gathered at my parents' house in Langley to eat turkey and celebrate the harvest. My brother came over from Victoria for the weekend, and Douglas came back from working with Mark on the skate park in Idaho just in time and full of stories.

We've had a busy week, with lots of work and bread baking, and sorting out all the stuff that Douglas brought back from Idaho. We finally have all of our junk out of storage, and boy do we have a lot of it. The shui of our house got all fenged up, but Douglas spent a couple of days sorting it out, and now it looks better than ever. It's finally feeling like home. My papasan chair is installed in a corner, tables are covered in Guatemalan textiles, the stacks of books reach the ceiling in places, and Douglas can find most of his tools. Ah. Home.

Here are a couple of pictures from Douglas' skate park building trip. Here's the skate park:



And here's Douglas enjoying some Idaho snow:



And here's a cute one of Saira:

Tango in San Telmo

I just found a few of my favorite pictures from Buenos Aires. On Sundays in San Telmo there is an antique market that stretches for blocks and blocks. There are tango dancers, street vendors, free hugs, street orchestras, and, yes, antiques.







When night fell, they cleared part of the square, laid down a portable dance floor, and set up some big speakers. Then the locals came out to tango. My favorite part was the expression on their faces while they danced: utterly, utterly absorbed. This video is dark, but you can hear the music and get an impression of what neighbourhood tango is like.



And, because they are the very best cookies in the whole wide world, some pictures of alfajores. They sort of look like hamburgers, but they are melt-in-your-mouth cookie sandwiches filled with caramel.

Quiet

Douglas and Saira are in Challis, ID this week, helping Mark build a skate park. Saira has a lot of experience working with concrete, and Douglas just went along for the fun of it. He says it's gorgeous down there, a real small town. The kids come past the job site and say 'thanks!' for building the skate park. And in the evenings the guys go to the nearby hotsprings for a soak. It sounds idyllic. The concrete truck was supposed to come today, so they're making good progress.

It's been a quiet week here, aside from Sunday's whirlwind shopping trip with my parents. I wanted to get some new work clothes with my first paycheque, and we all 3 went to the mall in Coquitlam to check out the new H&M store. It's billed as the Ikea of clothing, and I'd say it's not far off. We all got some good stuff. Well, not my dad. We looked at some tools, but he didn't buy them. He did spend some time browsing through the clothing racks, though, and even suggested we try on the odd item. Mostly he was very patient.

I didn't take any pictures this week because, as soon as Douglas left town, it started to pour and it hasn't let up for a moment. Here's a picture he took last week on one of his bike rides:



I'm working on editing the rest of our Latin American trip photos. Maybe soon the Uruguay, Brazil, and the last of the Argentina photos will be posted....

Tiny mushroom candy

When I visited Tokyo a long time ago, one of my favorite things was the tiny pocky candy shaped like mushrooms. Little chocolate mushroom caps, perched on a yummy cookie stalk. What could be better?

I ate them like they were going out of style for the few days that I was there, and then I never saw them again.

Today it made my day when we found the tiny mushroom candy in Fujiya, our local Japanese market!!!! Here they are, in all their glory:



mmmm...

Fingerless gloves, a wedding, and a robot

When I first started this blog, I intended to use it to keep track of my knitting projects. Of course, I didn't post a single thing about knitting or anything else until we got back from our trip and I found that I was addicted to blogging. But, hooray, I'm about to post my first knitting entry! There will be other elements, too, for the craft phobic, don't worry.

When we travelled through Idaho on our way to Vancouver, Erika cut my hair. We decided to do a work trade, in return I am knitting her a pair of fingerless gloves. You can see the pattern here. I'm using a different yarn that I'm pretty smitten with: Smart Superwash wool from Norway. It's inexpensive and really nice to knit with. The mittens are funny because you begin by knitting each finger tube separately. Before you join them, you have five 1" long tubes sitting in a row on the table in front of you. They look silly.

I'm only partway done the first mitten, but i'm pretty pleased with how they are turning out. I had to modify the pattern to make them a little smaller, though. I'm only knitting one row between each decrease row for the thumb gusset. I'll let you know how it turns out.



My first weekend after a full week of work is approaching. I'm looking forward to it. But I'm enjoying being a working girl. I still haven't figured out this Business Casual thing, but I don't care too much anymore. I'm enjoying waking up early and feeling like I've accomplished something by 4pm. I like being the breadwinner.

My new job is working out pretty well. I'm the tech writer for an engineering firm. They write a lot of building code reports, and many of the engineers at the firm speak English as a second language. They make a lot of mistakes. It's a good thing I get some strange kind of satisfaction from correcting other people's spelling and grammar. And I do. I don't know why, but I do.

This past weekend Douglas went out to NC for Dean and Annette's wedding. He said it was absolutely glorious, and I'm very envious that he got to go and I didn't. But I'm really glad that at least one of us was there to witness the moment and celebrate with them. Here's my favorite picture from the event:



And here are Douglas and David and Anna, looking blissed out:



The NC mountains are absolutely heavenly in the early fall...

Right, and the robot bit! Earlier this week I needed to find some engineering articles for a report, and they were only available at the UBC library. So I trekked up there to find them. Actually, I was going there anyway for my friend Gina (now Master Gina)'s defense party. Anyhow, I went to Main library, expecting to be sent to a different library where I would have to sift through stacks of musty bound journals. I asked the reference librarian where to find my journal, she looked it up on her computer, and told me it would arrive shortly and I could come back and pick it up.

What?

After much confused questioning, I discovered that all the journals are now kept in robot accessible storage, and that the thumping noises I could hear issuing from behind the smoked glass wall behind the librarian were coming from the robot. The robot that was finding my journal for me, and bringing it to the reference desk within 5 minutes.



Wow. Things, they do change. The picture kind of scares me - how much room is between the stacks? and how tall are they? What happens if the robot drops a book?? Is it lost forever? It doesn't look like there's enough room for a person to go in there and retrieve it!

But the Blue Chip cookie I had tasted exactly the same... 8) (Bev and Hanna still run the place, I was told).

Inappropriate shoes

My one respectable, professional pair of shoes died a noble death in my job interview last week, and when I went to work this morning, it was hard to choose which pair of inappropriate shoes I should wear. I had noticed in my interview that dress at my new workplace is on the casual side of business casual. I looked at my Keens, which are closed-toed, muted blue, lace-up shoes. I looked at my impractical little flip-floppy Argentinean shoes. I picked my Keens. I wore a button-down shirt and some nice pants, but I still picked my Keens.

I got the usual first-day run-around in the office, with introductions to absolutely everyone, and an avalanche of information. Normal for a first day, and far from the most intimidating first day I have ever had. But everyone seemed to think I might be intimidated. They kept asking if I was scared yet, and if I was planning to come back tomorrow. Until one fellow said "Nah, she's wearing hiking boots, I don't think she scares easy."

Hiking boots???? Did I commit a serious corporate style faux pas?

Tonight I am packing my bag for tomorrow's early wake up call, and wondering about which shoes to choose. Do I keep wearing the "hiking boots"? I never deal with clients, and the shoes are comfy. Or do I wear my ultra-girly Argentinean shoes with the embroidered flowers?

It's an office of engineers - I'm definitely in the female minority. Do I toe the girly style line? Or do I keep wearing my "tough" hiking shoes? I want to wear my "doesn't scare easy" boots. I'm not sure if that's rational. But I think it's what I'll do anyway.

Workity work

On Friday I had two job interviews - one over the phone, for a biology-type job that I was pretty excited about, the other an in-person second interview for the position as a tech writer for an engineering firm.

The phone interview was a little more exciting than I had expected. They were supposed to call at 10:50, and when they hadn't called at 10:53, Douglas suggested I check our new digital phone for dial tone. No dial tone!!! Eek! We rushed around trying to fix it, and I ended up using Skype to call the office, and someone patched me through to the interviewers. Whew. They said they were impressed that I managed to get through to them in spite of having a broken phone, and the rest of the interview went well. Their hiring timeline is pretty long, though, and they won't even be getting back to me on whether or not I get a second interview until later this week.

The afternoon interview went well, too, in spite of my unprofessional shoes (little slip-ons that I bought in Argentina), and on Monday, the engineering firm called me back and offered me a position starting Wednesday (today), and I took it.

What to say about my first day. I think I'll just say that it reminded me why I like working as a biologist. But it will do in the interim. I'm correcting engineer's reports for spelling, grammar, readability. The people are nice.

The mountains are glorious today, so I'm off for a walk with Saira. Douglas left last night for NC, to go to Dean and Annette's wedding. He should be landing in the South right about now, and heading up to the mountains. Lucky boy! I miss him already.

Fry Daddy

That's what they call a deep fryer in the South. It's also what Douglas has become. And you know he doesn't do anything by halves. He's going a little crazy with it. Here he is, laughing and showing off his deep fried mushrooms, just like they make at the Starlite Drive-In and Gun Shop in Durham (I kid you not, about any of that):



Last week, my parents' neighbour, Melinda, gave us a deep fryer. It's amazing what all you can deep fry. We haven't tried Snickers bars or Oreos yet (these are common at the NC State Fair). I'm fixin' to fry us up some pickles soon, though. Melinda has also promised to teach us how to make amazing spring rolls, Filipino style. mmmmm.

On Friday I have two job interviews - one for a job only about 5 miles away, one about 10 miles away. For the sake of the size of my butt, let's all hope I get the one that's far away...

This is what we're worried will happen to our bikes

Seven Dollar Suit

While I am working on the website for the new Biodiversity Museum (the site will go public soon and I'll post a link) up at UBC, I am also hunting for a more permanent job. Today I had an interview at a fairly businesslike company. After 8 years working as a lab scientist, my closet is not exactly full of business attire. And, after 8 months of travelling the world, my wallet is not exactly full of money.

So, last night, after reviewing my selection of potential interview wear (Douglas said "if you're going to wear that, you might as well wear your hiking boots, too"), we set out in search of a suit. Eek! A suit. My goodness. Don't worry, though, with our current budget limitations, we couldn't go out and buy a *real* suit, so we went to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Whew. Saved from proper business attire by a technicality.

Surprise, surprise, success! We found a grey matching pant/jacket set that I actually think is pretty cute. It's a little on the small side, though. I have to suck in my belly to do up the button. And I can't move my arms too much. But that's OK - I don't think you're supposed to wave your arms around in job interviews, anyhow. Or so I'm told.

I paid for the suit, a whole seven dollars. Even the lady at the cash register thought I was getting a good deal. I chuckled to myself as I pulled out my wallet - the wallet that cost at least 5 times as much as the suit! Times change...

The suit wasn't the only part of my outfit that was a little on the sketchy side, either. I picked an old favorite pair of shoes that look business like enough, black leather mules with chunky heels. They're at least 10 years old and nicely broken in, but still very respectable. This morning I put them on confidently and strolled out to the bus stop. Something seemed funny about the left heel, but I ignored it. On the bus I noticed that there were some loose bits of rubber around the soles. O, well, I thought, I'll just keep my scruffy feet tucked away during the interview.

On the way home, though, my shoes starting feeling even wonkier, and I took another look at them. They had completely disintegrated!!! They looked perfect when I put them on, but after 30 minutes of walking, the rubber was stripped off the soles, and the heel was falling off in huge chunks!! I wonder if I left a big piece of shoe in the interview room...

Anyhow, the suit must have done its job, because I have a second interview on Friday! Keep your fingers crossed for me, 'cuz baby needs a new pair of shoes!!



Another piece of good news today - we finally have internet and a phone at home!! We haven't had a phone in 8 months. People can call us now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Emily's in Ecuador

My friend Emily



is living in Quito, Ecuador for the next 4 months on a Rotary scholarship. She's taking Spanish classes and blogging about her experiences here:

http://eurekacat.wordpress.com/

Check it out. It's awesome. There's a link to the right, too.

Market Madness

Something I remember loving about Vancouver is the independent Chinese grocery stores. They rock. They are packed with everything you could ever wish for, and they are *cheap*. I've been trying out the ones nearby, and today I found The One.

It's only a 5 minute bikeride from our house, and it's chock full of gorgeous local produce. It's also got a great selection of tofu products, including 4 flavors of veggie ground round (tofu made to taste like ground meat, for sauces). Add to that a fantastic italian foods selection, including fresh gnocchi for $2, and about 20 different kinds of olive oil. Nevermind the wall of tea (some of which is $1.50 for 20 tea bags). Or the bread from the local organic bakery for $2.39 a loaf. Udon noodles. Salsa. Barbecue ducks hanging in the window. A hot lunch bar with tasty Chinese food. What more could a girl ask for? Durhamites, it's like the farmer's market meets Grand Asia market meets Whole Foods. With an Italian market thrown in for good measure.

That whole section of Hastings Street is full of great little shops. Right next to the grocers is an Italian specialty shop (also inexpensive), a Chinese bakery, a Japanese antique furniture store, a European bakery, and a Mexican restaurant. I am in heaven. I haven't found the local Pho shop yet, but I'm sure there are plenty.

The bike ride home from the shop was typically nice, too. I've stopped counting the number of times that drivers have stopped for me, of their own free will, with a smile, so I could cross 4 lanes of traffic.

I may have stopped counting, but I still say "holy crap" in my head every time it happens.

Of course, there are some things about our neighbourhood, and Vancouver as a whole, that are less than perfect. Bike theft is rampant. Here is my bike parked next to someone's ill-fated U-lock:




There's a garbage strike on, and the city is stinky. We keep finding used condoms in our front yard (echhhh). There are a lot of thin, twitchy people in our neighbourhood. Car insurance costs more than twice what it costs in the states. But it's hard to notice things like that when you're mesmerized by a view like this:



And this is just the view from the port near our house - industrial meets beautiful. There are plenty of beaches (not so near our house) where you can have a view of the inlet and the mountains, unadulterated by industry.

Yeasty Beasties

Douglas can't work in Canada yet, so while I work in the daytime, he putters around the house, rides his bike, and dreams up things to build. I think he's liking life as a kept man. If only I could keep him in the style to which he is accustomed...

My favorite of his new hobbies is baking bread. From scratch, no bread machine. He's turning out amazing crusty whole wheat loaves that taste like they came from a fancy bread store. They're fantastic. (Suzanne, o Baking Queen, if you're reading, we have a question - the loaves are flattening out a little more than he'd like, just before they go in the oven. Any tips?)





We have this book called Bread Alone, which talks about the art of breadmaking in a really lyrical way. I swear, this baker thinks of his yeast like pets. He has whole paragraphs about cultivating your kitchen's wild yeast population. How the wooden bowl your bread rises in will become home to swarms of yeast cells waiting to help the next loaf rise. How if you bake bread regularly, your kitchen will be home to lots of rogue yeast cells ready to jump into your bread and leaven it. I like the thought of all those yeastie beasties roaming around in there, looking for warm bread...