everyday is d. day

got work to do

i arrive home gutted after my day at work. didn't help trundling home on the train standing wedged in the narrow aisle, after hassling my way in, slightly damp but too warm. my wet weather coat is suited to much cooler temperatures.  i did have the presence of mind to plug my ipod in before i got on. i suspected as much. this is the drawback of travelling during "rush hour". last week i had to let a train go by.

it's just one day. i could not imagine having to engage in this every day. in Toronto i avoided the crush by walking to work; simply not an option now.

with some gritty determination, i employed some underused TO commuting skills to elbow past some oblivious commuter blocking the door. (sharp elbows and height are a definite advantage.) however, this behaviour is one i will never understand. we all would like easy unobstructed access to the door, but making like an immovable object when people are trying to get past you is simply the action of....a dunderhead, idiotstick, well somebody that complete lacks the inability to consider the needs of others.

i begged off cooking dinner and made for the sofa and the sweet relief of simply sitting down on something vaguely comfortable. i have no idea how i managed to attend to all the mundane household tasks (including cooking dinner) when i worked full time. it seems an impossibility now.

i coulda toldja that

we arrived back at the apartment after a somewhat uninspired shopping expedition. and though we weren't completely unsuccessful, i was exhausted after trolling around a few stores hoping what i needed would jump into my arms and declare itself practically free. shaun proudly modelled his finds once we got home. he is several inches narrower than he used to be. myself, i have gone the other way. but not for lack of trying. he is oblivious, actually he is happy i am carrying more heft, but the discovery has hit my proud self hard and just won't go away. last time i was this size a bit of idle dieting and a few trips to the gym and it was sorted. not so easy on the other side of the four-oh. deliberate dieting, exercise, green tea, caffeine and sheer deprivation; nothing has helped shift it. it's a mere 8 pounds but it is driving me to distraction. i'm obsessing over what is and what isn't there. over what was and wasn't.  i know i shouldn't but i do anyway.

so.....i wanted to snooze after another demoralizing session with my clothes off in front of a mirror at the local a&n bo-tee-que. my body's way of dealing is by shutting the whole thing down. i curl up with a blanket and begin to drift off. the fire alarm peals insolently and after a delayed response we put the harness and leash on bijou and join the small crowd of neighbours outside. as we stand in the park waiting we could still see people moving around in their suites. regular law abiding citizens. apparently this is a common occurrence says a neighbour who lives down the hall--a teenage girl who has taken a liking to bijou and is an afficiando of all things cats, especially the musical. in her 10 year tenure she has heard the alarm go off many more times than she count.

the next day i see that a notice has been posted on the the door by the fire department. there is a problem with the alarm system and our building at the moment has been deemed "unsafe". if the deficiencies aren't fixed the building will be declared uninhabitable. rich. the fire department is as unimpressed with their slack maintenance and cutting corners as we are. and now they are being taken to task. if they put as much energy into taking care of the building as they do in their "no crime" enforcement perhaps it wouldn't be in the shape it is. strange, but i forgave heritage age buildings i've lived in a whole miscellany of inadequacies and oversights just because they were so old, but in my dealings with the management of this building (a whole two months in) i've run out of patience with this teen age building.

it's like the sky is imploding with a crash and a bang

i'm wondering if i'll ever get used to my neighbours upstairs oh they of heavy feet. and that awful thumping bass at all hour of day. then there's the audacity to vacuum early in the am. someone clearly doesn't get the concept of being neighbourly.

it's early days, though and maybe time will make it so the noise of their life upstairs will fall into the background. and one hopes i won't be in the house to hear a lot of it. today s. slammed the door in annoyance, maybe it sent a bit of a signal back about the whole you get what you give.

home suite home?

i'm reflecting on the current days past since we moved in. i still really don't feel like writing anything down. it's as if all my energy were sapped in the effort of moving here.

right now there is a gash in the wall at the ceiling. it was a water bubble that formed after the recent rains. they are coming to repair it today at some point. it's like waiting for the cable guy. who ever gets the guy at his first appointment of the day, i wonder because i never do.

there are tradeoffs when moving into any new space, but when you are a tenant and not an owner the compromises are that much greater. some you don't see when you eagerly (or reluctantly) sign on the dotted line. we are experiencing a spate of cons at the moment, some of them will pass and others we'll have to learn to live with.

our apartment is spacious and came with its own storage locker. shaun has managed a careful spatial choreography to get everything we can't accommodate in our living space. at the old place we would have had to pay for the privilege so our tiny den served as storage space albeit neatly arranged to look like an office and music room.

we are closer to downtown vancouver with just a single train ride taking us right downtown and the other route getting us to commercial drive faster and more reliably than the 20 bus ever did. where we are is fairly central to anywhere and everywhere and a definite plus.

we have a herd of wild elephants living above us (a child with astonishingly heavy feet who apparently doesn't get in enough running around time in the park across the street). we've done the old broom handle to the ceiling a few times. maybe with time it will become part of the background noise.

as part of the whole "crime free" mandate enforced and advertised on a lot of buildings, marijuana use is prohibited. we've already received the heavy handed reminder about the rules and regs, and it does make us shake our heads a bit. after all, how could it be conclusively proven. as part of the objective, there are supposed periodic suite inspections, which i will not submit to, even though i said i would. it is an invasion of privacy. period. end of story. i'm not going to go all mark emery since i don't even smoke pot or anything at all, but the whole notion bothers me. it is strange how otherwise law abiding citizens that partake now and again are lumped in with hardcore users and criminals.

there's no way the both of us grown adults can fit in the bathroom at the same time unless one of us is using the tub, but we solved the litter box problem. it now resides in the tub when no one is using it. fortunately, bijou doesn't mind getting her paws wet to use her box. smart one, our little girl.

so the wall just needs to be fixed so we can put the apartment back together again and start dressing it up. 12:30. whatever dude comes to do he's got to get it fixed in 4 and a half hours. hmmm....

getting to know the hood

we thought there was a great little organic shop on our quaint little main drag, only to finally go in, needing groceries of some sort and finding it to be what amounted to nothing more than a bare bones kiosk with a small selection of organic meats, dairy and produce. twice we've been in there for the most necessary and have been the only people in there. it hardly inspires confidence and is hardly what i expected. i prefer to patronize and support a small business, but even with this in mind i am hardpressed to give them my business.

so today i made the uphill climb to the local choices i discovered nearby. it is a small but well stocked organic/greenie's dream. i had forgotten my list and used that as an excuse to slowly browse every aisle.  it was worth every minute the butt, leg and lung busting effort to get there.

been there and heard that

tomorrow we'll become residents of New Westminster.  it is one of the only parts of Greater Vancouver where i haven't lived.  i'm looking forward to the move; forward to getting it over and to getting through to the other side of the process.  know what i mean? unpacking and finding a place for everything is almost as arduous at the process of making it all fit into boxes to move it, but in this case we are looking forward to the area, because of the possibilities it offers, even though it came out of the necessity of scaling down.

while packing away the dishes into newspaper i begin to read some of the stories and headlines idly as i wrap. i probably didn't read most of them at the time i had cached them away.  they were accumulated from as far back as 1995 when i began to make a habit of picking up a newspaper on matt's birthday as a memento of the day. i've been carrying them around since...well 1995, and though it was interesting to see what was going on in the world and in the community from a reported perspective, it was time to let go. most news is much the same from year to year anyway. body counts and the bad things that some people do to other people.

i figure i've done enough for now and i'm drinking a well deserved tumbler of wine, the remnants from the bottle on the counter, while a gentle breeze blows in through the sliding doors of the bedroom. the day is clear and brilliant. i hope it remains the same for tomorrow. moving day.

the last easter....here....

it's a truly horrible day.  a perfect day to dig in and make some exponential progress with packing.

impetuously and spontaneously i also decided too to host a little family easter gathering, just the three of us, if only to make things a little more interesting i was thinking of inviting a couple of friends, but our living room will only accommodate 3 people sitting on proper furniture and i doubt that too many people really enjoy eating a big meal from the crease of their lap. the table has been broken down in favour of space and instead newly filled and stacked boxes inhabit its former space.

the turkey is stuffed with the homemade dressing and in the oven. it's beginning to lend its savoury aroma to the apartment. i'll miss some aspects ofthis apartment: the bright window alcove where the table sits, the washer dryer room that serves as a pantry, our panoramic view of the rooftops from our balcony. The warmth of the sun as it moved across to the western sky, the 2 closets in the bedroom. But then also the change of scenery fills me with a certain trill of anticipation in the new.

just another ordinary day

watching two and a half men, waiting for laundry to go into the dryer. i'm pretty sure i've seen the episode before, but it's still funny. a little humour is better than no humour at all.

today was another day that i seemed to make no progress. another day in the string of many. clawing up that hill but getting nowhere.  put on smile and a brave face and do it again tomorrow. hope for the best. not sure how long i can continue this exercise, because that's what it feels like, an exercise. i'm hearing all about these places that are hiring. but when i check out the sites and ask, it turns out they are not. i appreciate the good intentions, but they are proving fruitless.

i got my project into the instructor with only hours to spare and my mark wasn't too bad considering. could have been worse. i was pleased with the result, but since i am still clinging to the learning curve i imagined that there would be mistakes. some of the errors seemed to me to be problems with the program, since i depended on it to generate the proper code and it didn't. 

time to go play in photoshop or elsewhere. work on something pleasing to the eye, at least.

what's green and not very pointy anymore?

today i discovered the edges of the aloe plant ragged and broken. it's s.'s plant and so i had to break the news to him. i could tell by the expression on his face it was possible i was trying to pass the damage off on the cat. and i did think at first that i had somehow broken them when i was moving the plant around even though i knew i hadn't.

the alternative was that bijou had eaten the plant, which brought up another issue. if bijou had munched on the tips of the aloe leaves she might surely be sick, but she was her usual self. we were still concerned that she could still fall ill, maybe die. we scoured the net, but the only consensus we could find was that the plant was indeed toxic. from some more in-depth information we found; on one of those sites where you pay for an answer from a professional from any number of particular fields, the rather definitive answer i got for $9 was that the gel of the aloe wasn't toxic, but the white substance just under the skin of the plant was. i couldn't imagine how she could eat the one part of the plant without ingesting the other, but if she had she surely did. apparently the girl has a cast iron stomach or nipped the bits off and began to bat them about the room until they ended up with all her other small cat toys, because she is fine, she's still fine, relative to her usual self.

it's a mystery that will likely won't be solved until we move. i sprinkled cayenne on the tips of all the leaves to discourage her nibbling anymore, as opposed to moving the plant out of her reach, which would be be preferable but there really isn't any other place for the plant. s. wasn't happy about the solution, and it isn't all that aesthetically pleasing to me, but it's a preventative measure that i hope works.

time to move that mountain, move that hill....again.....

it's difficult putting your life into boxes, even when it's necessary. life isn't so easily contained.  it's messy and unruly. and in the process the chaos created makes it seem an even a more insurmoutable task.

i am surrounded by bins and taped up boxes. some of the bins gape, waiting for something more to fill them up. this will make for interesting searching once we are in the new place, but every little bit of available space has to be used to its utmost efficiency.  the process has stalled as of just a little while ago because i've run out of vessels to fill. there are more coming, and just in the nick of time. s. thought they wouldn't be necessary, but i always prefer to err on the side of caution. i'd rather recycle the boxes than be tossing my earthly possessions into garbage bags. there's just something so undignified about that.

i'm trying to estimate how much the move will cost. at least it's flat rate. mostly it is dependent on how initiated the movers are. since we are moving on a friday the access to able bodied volunteers has diminished almost completely. i am counting on our two strong hired hands on coming through as they did in the past when they didn't have a website and only had a beat up cargo van and deep philosophic views on life.

we're in the homestretch now. 4 days to blastoff. again. not exactly the way we planned it. it's no hundred metre sprint, it's a much longer journey and it's to be expected that false starts will occur. we are sanguine that our next will get us off on the right foot so we can be on our way.