Spring!

Last weekend we went to the Chinese New Year celebrations in Chinatown, not far from our neighbourhood. I forgot to post about it, but it was spectacular. The roads were blocked off, pedestrians were everywhere. Dragons were dancing in front of businesses, maybe as a blessing? There was something about lettuce, too - lettuce was strewn all over the streets. We ate some steam buns, moon cakes, and soaked it all in...





This week spring has sprung in our yard. The crocuses are up, the weather is gorgeous, and we were inspired to do a bunch of gardening. I can't believe our luck at inheriting such a fabulous garden, and am excited to see what else will come up.



In keeping with spring, several friends are due to have kids, so I've knitted up another batch of felted booties. They're quick and cute. Here they are before felting



And here they are after felting, steaming like little furry bread rolls, fresh from the washing machine. I finished them up after s&b at Kathleen's house this afternoon, hooray for s&b.

TED

The TED conference brings together fascinating people at the tops of their fields, and asks them to give the best talk of their lives, in 18 minutes. The original three themes of the conference were Technology, Entertainment, and Design, but the range has expanded to include deep-sea biology, poverty, history, and happiness. The talks are all online now, and they are fabulous 20-minute packets of pure inspiration. Check them out here.

We've been watching them one or two at a time (they really blow your hair back and I haven't been able to watch more than two in a row), bouncing from topic to topic. wheee

snippets

It's snowing outside, and Douglas has gone diving this afternoon. It's his second time - he's finished his volunteer training at the aquarium, and is getting set to dive in their tanks. He says it is COLD, but beautiful! He even saw a nudibranch on his Monday dive!

Saira's bandages have come off, and her foot is looking small and crooked - it reminds Douglas of a camelid's foot. Saira doesn't even seem to notice that she is missing a toe, though - she is just happy to be able to go for walks again now that the bandage is off! Pics of the odd-toed dog coming soon.

if it's good enough for the queen...

http://youtube.com/user/TheRoyalChannel

reprieve

Whew! The letter from the immigration office wasn't a work permit, after all. Just a notice that Douglas can now pay a lot of money and *apply* for a work permit. But since we can't find (after an hour of looking) the correct form on the website, and his passport is still off somewhere getting renewed and barcoded, it will likely be a good long while before he can apply for the permit. We couldn't find work permit processing times on the website, either, but we can safely assume that that will add another few weeks or months.

Thank goodness for the tremendous efficiency and transparency of the immigration offices!

triple eek!

It has been a crazy pair of days.

First. Yesterday there was a lockdown in my building because someone e-mailed in a threat to do harm to someone in the building. Everyone in the building was either evacuated or told to stay behind locked doors from 2pm onwards. They brought in the SWAT team, there were helicopters circling, and general mayhem ensued. Fortunately, the SWAT team didn't find anyone, no one was hurt, and everyone eventually got to leave their offices (some people as early at 4:30, some as late at 6pm). I was evacuated, went to a meeting in another building, and then went home, after asking the campus police to turn off the little old space heater I had left on beside my desk.

Second. The Canada Immigration website says that they have processed my Irish husband's application, and mailed him his working papers! He's in shock at the thought of having to go back to work. He may have to ease into it, and is considering driving a snow grooming machine on the local ski hill for a while.

Third. I coordinated another big grant application this week. This one is ~42 single-spaced pages long, and has contributions from 6 people, including me. I've finally written my parts, gathered everyone else's parts, and made them all sound like they are part of a single application. Tomorrow I have to finish figuring out the budget and cut and paste it all into ridiculous online forms. Lots of work!

snippets

Life has been busy!!! Mark and Erika visited us for a fabulous week. We ran around Vancouver, showing them the sights, rode our bikes,



and ate lots of sushi.



Then we drove up to Sun Peaks for the icewine festival, went tubing (a first for all of us, and wayyy more fun than we expected - the hills were steep, the curves were sharp, and the snow berms were high - but sometimes we thought we were going to go right over the edge!),



and drank lots of wine. We went to two seminars, one a wine & chocolate tasting that was like a science experiment with food (you tasted 8 wines and 4 chocolates in every possible combination, then drank the wine at the empty tables - lots of folks were too rich and too busy skiing to attend, even though they'd bought tickets),



and another was a progressive wine tasting, where you walked from booth to booth, tasting wine for 3 whole hours. It was SO decadent, and so delicious.

The week was over too soon, and we had to let them go. Two days later, Saira had her toe operation. She's likely got bone cancer in one of her toes, and she had the toe removed last Tuesday. It's been hurting her for months and months, and she is recovering from the surgery amazingly well. We were worried about how she would make it through the anaesthetic, but she was just fine. She's walking around with a cute bandage on her foot, and eating well - probably better than before the operation!

Work is going really well at the new job. It's intense - I'm doing a million things I've never done before - in my first week, I co-wrote a $100,000 grant. Next week there is more grant writing on my plate, and a meeting with the Vice-President of the Properties Trust to talk about the budget. eek! It's fun, and scary. I'm sure it will get less scary as I get a better idea of what my responsibilities are. But for the moment, every time I hear about something that needs to be done and isn't getting done (which, since everything is ramping up for our move in a year, is about every 5 minutes), I feel like maybe *I* should do it - obviously that's ridiculous, but it's how I'm feeling right now.

Douglas is volunteering at the Vancouver Aquarium as a diver, and loving every second of it. Every time he comes home from an orientation session, he tells me about a dozen cool things about local marine organisms. I'm going to have to get a membership so I can go there often and check out everything he's telling me about!

I went to the second Vancouver stitch and bitch meeting today, at my friend Shelley's house, and we made plans for a next meeting, so stitch and bitch lives! hooray! I'm still obsessed with ravelry, too, and have picked out a pattern for my first sweater.

I'll leave you with this vision of Douglas' and my future:



How many llamas will fit in a sprinter??

r-a-v

I've been a bad, bad blogger - I haven't blogged in aaaages. And the longer I leave it, the more stuff there is to mention, so I leave it even longer...

This morning we went cross-country skiing at Cypress Mountain. We drove over the bridge to North Van, along the trans-Canada highway for a bit, and suddenly we were in a winter wonderland. They have a 10-foot base layer of snow, and a foot of new snow. The trees are covered in snow - even their trunks. It was gorgeous up there. And it's such a perfect arrangement - the snow is up on the mountain where it belongs. You don't have to shovel it, or drive in it, but you can go visit it whenever you want.



Here are our friends Yanick and Tina:



The Christmas holidays are over, the days are getting longer. The friends who were in town visiting have gone home, the Christmas parties are over, and the Christmas baking is gone (though I might have to make another batch of shortbread - that stuff is addictive). We both had the flu this year, so the holidays were quiet. I feel rested, ready for the new year.

I have 2 new obsessions, both starting with r-a-v. Ravelry, first - it's facebook for knitters. I can browse patterns, looking for something new to make. Or I can pull a lonely bit of yarn out of my stash, and see what other people have made with it. Or I can check out how a pattern I want to make will turn out in various yarns people have used. I can see friends' projects. It's eating a lot of my time! There are a lot of other obsessed knitters in Vancouver, though - we tried to go to a late boxing day sale at 3 Bags Full on Main Street, and we had to leave because the lineup to pay for yarn was about 60 people long. The store was *packed* and everyone in there was in line with a basket or bag full of yarn.

O, and before I get to my next r-a-v obsession, I've found something else to do with wool - felting without knitting! My brother gave me a book called Felt: Handmade Style (which I can't find on amazon, oddly) about felting straight from unspun wool. It's crazy. You take the unspun wool (called either sliver or roving), lay it out on a sushi mat, wet it, roll up the sushi mat, bash it around a bit, and voila, you have a flat felted fabric. Crazy. You can also make bubble wrap forms, and make hats and bags, you name it. I'll post pictures when I make something other than a flat piece of fabric.

OK, and the next r-a-v obsession - ravioli!! We got a ravioli tray from the Italian market down the road (where everyone speaks Italian all the time), and have been making ravioli non-stop. mmmmmmmmm



Douglas has been working on camperizing the van, and soon, soon, it will be functional!! I can't believe the progress he's making. Here's the inside of the van (and me, looking silly):



I hope everyone is having a good New Year!

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.