"George Had A Hat But It Wasn't Where It Wasn't At" (Sunday February 25 2007)

Welcome to another week of the Jaysmith Reality Blog! I've heard encouraging reports that I have as many as three readers, so, hey, this one's for you, True Believers! Feel free to leave feedback - that's why we're paying for the comments feature. (Yes, Sarah, I know it's free, I'm trying to guilt-trip the silent majority.) And now, straight into the colossality of All Our Important News. Honestly, it's like a fresh new set of Ten Commandments every seven days...

So, and to use a Canadian expression, "here's the thing": work is now tootling along well enough that I'm unlikely to refer to it unless my godlike genius renders it absolutely necessary - e.g. if I rescue a drowning fish from the reception area pond, or figure out a way to turn the Travelling Salesman problem into a best-selling PlayStation3 game. Thus, you can assume that, every weekday, regular as clockwork (or regular as a clock with a good fibre component in its diet), I trog into work, put in my eight hours for the powers that will always be, disinfect terrazo on the bathroom floor, and then come home, to discover what on earth Sarah has been up to for the day, and on some occasions to discover what I'm about to be up to for the evening.

We therefore join this blog on the evening of Monday Feb 19th, and I've returned home to find that Sarah has gone out to listen to an all-female choir sight-read through five new choral pieces, at some church down in deepest darkest Granville. I shrug and go off to jog on the treadmill for half an hour. When I return for a shower, I get a frantic call from my bunny, who has misplaced her destination and is furiously churning up the sidewalk on her way to where she now thinks it is. Being a caring and loving panda, I console her, give her a telephonic hug, and then forget all about her so I can enjoy an evening of nebbishing on my own with the television and the laptop.

So, while Sarah's getting damp and exhausted on her way to the church - even assuming they let her in after she arrives twenty minutes late - I can report that there's an amusing Canadian sitcom called Little Mosque On The Prairie, and that I've now seen an episode of The Sentinel, which is produced by Bilson and DeMeo, and which is certainly up there with the awfulness of The Flash (the TV show, featuring that bastion of high-quality televisual entertainment, Amanda Pays) and The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive (the comic, from which they've been booted in a near-record eight issues). After that horrible experience, a surprise episode of Doctor Who was almost incandescent in its brilliance. Admittedly it was the season two finale. But still. Even US/Canadian television's attempts to sabotage the BBC's genius by inserting an advertising break every eighty seconds FAILED, THEY FAILED, DO YOU HEAR ME? FAILED! Comics are spoiled rotten by adverts, and so are TV shows. Is it any wonder that people are switching to TiVo and torrent downloads? Or doing the television equivalent of "waiting for the trade", buying DVD boxed sets of shows? Get a clue, TV. Your advertising is one big L'Oreal tagline: Because You're Past It.

... oops, rant over, and Sarah returns. She made it in time to hear almost all of the singing. Turns out it was basically an open choir rehearsal, with the composers in attendance to hear what the conductor, and more interestingly the singers, had to say about these new pieces. She found it very interesting, and had primarily gone to hear what new choral music sounds like. With an eye (or ear) to composing some more of it herself. Go bunny! Go bunny!

Then we did some Sploofus quizzes. Sploofus is a massive trivia-quiz site where the quizzes are submitted by members. Some of the quizzes are just tooooooo far down the "you know how much about this?" line, but I guess a nerd is a nerd is a nerd. And I've done all the comics and scifi ones. They also have a trivia question of the day, which comes from a random category, many of which are frustratingly obscure for non-US residents. "I'm sorry, you were wrong, the ninth president of the United States was actually William Henry Harrison, and 99.6% of people so far today have gotten this question right..." - and don't get me started about NHL-related trivia. Still, it passes the time, and we're both top of the speed lists for quite a few quizzes.

Think I'll move onto Tuesday. On Tuesday Sarah went book-shopping, we had dinner at the Shanghai, I went on the treadmill again, and then Sarah chilled with her reading and her laptop playing Sudoku while I watched Justice League cartoons. I'm strangely attracted to this series. It's interesting, now that I've done so much work on games and graphics, how cartoons practically fall apart in front of me so I can see how they're composited. The combination of backgrounds, foreground characters, flipbooks (for crowd effects), special effects (torches, sun flares, shimmers on glass windows), and camera movement is very interesting to analyse. I also find it fascinating that the show leapt straight into telling stories, without a great deal of 'origin' work. It's not even like the League they chose is entirely self-explanatory. I'm nineteen episodes in and they still haven't really explained who Green Lantern or Hawkgirl are. Which is great. I hate origin stories. Leave 'em till last, I say.

Sarah's completely addicted to Sudoku, by the way. I got into it thanks to the daily puzzles in the Metro paper while commuting for five hours a day to London before Christmas, but we've now got a program which generates puzzles and provides some handy help and hints while you're trying to solve each one, and she just won't come to bed until she's solved another couple of them. It's absolutely fantastic... a definite 'zoning' experience.

Wednesday. Ah, the choir again. I'm still not completely impressed. This week we did the same five songs - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair, Penny Lane, I Got A Robe, El Grillo, and Vita De La Mia Vita - and added in The Road Less Travelled. I'm now at the point where I like two of the songs (The Road Less Travelled is very singable), but... oh well, we've paid now. ($145 each for the term! Plus some incidental fees! We definitely need to run a choir.)

The plus side to the choir is that after singing, they go to the pub. Technically not a pub, The Main on 23rd Street is a Greek restaurant, but it serves... Strongbow! Yes, cider! I've been trying a range of non-ciderholic beers with my meals here, including Keiths IPA and various Chinese and Indian beers, but... Strongbow!!! I promptly ordered two pints of it, which - fortunately - the waitress didn't think was a joke, as some of the choir did. They vanished pretty promptly and I had a third. Mmmm-mmmm. Strongbow!

Maybe the choir's not so bad.

Thursday. Sarah has the other choir on Thursday afternoons, and then she met me at work so we could SkyTrain out to Commercial Drive, shop at the Sainsburys(2) there, and then return to the apartment for... pork chops and mashed potato and broccoli! Yes, Bunny cooks a reasonably proper dinner for us both, for the first time in Canada! It was tasty, too.

Friday. I should warn anyone reading this who doesn't know us too well that you are about to witness the power of street knowledge... er, sorry, wrong quote... how about the power of Jaysmith Luck? Because on Friday, we started looking at apartments. "Here's the thing": we're in this fully-furnished flat for free until the end of March. We need to find a new flat to move into before then. Furthermore, half the contents of our three-storey Littlehampton house are in transit to us, ETA mid-to-end March. Rental contracts in Canada are all sorted out for either the 1st or the 15th of the month. So, this being Friday 23rd, it has occurred to us (already) that we need to research the matter.

Sarah has been looking on the Vancouver craigslist. Every internet geek knows about craigslist, but since most of our friends are sensible and only use the internet for good reasons rather than just because it's there, I'll just say that craigslist is like one big free classified ad site, sorted into categories, with plenty of big businesses using it just as much as individual people. And Sarah has been sweeping over the apartment listings for a few days now, hatching, hatching, hatching her lop-eared plans with the occasional reference to my potential likes and dislikes. Every so often every evening I've had a sudden Messenger popup with a craigslist link followed by a questionmark (sometimes implicit), and generally I've said no. But tonight - tonight! We have a viewing. It's in Yaletown and as it turns out it's quite nice. Spacious, quite shiny, lots of windows, and nice facilities. We have more to look at on Saturday and Sunday, so we tell her we'll get back to her by Sunday afternoon. Quite exciting, to be checking out places to live for the first time in over five years...

Saturday. A second apartment, this time in the corner of Yaletown, overlooking False Creek. Extremely furnished by the current owners. Difficult to imagine it without a giant stuffed tiger and a spider clambering over the back of the TV set. Not convinced about this one at all. Break for a long webcam chat at lunchtime with the Twines. Hello Twines!!! And then out again to see a flat in Alberni Street. After assorted phone calls, Sarah has sweet-talked the agent into showing it to us today instead of Monday evening. It's two blocks away from the Shanghai bistro. The location is generally superb. The agent, another of these reassuringly bonkers women you get around here in the realty business, shows us around, and it's clear to me that the Jaysmith Luck has struck again. Sometimes - a lot of the time - I just know. I point and announce "That one!" in a confident voice, and it's inevitably the right choice(1).

We say yes, we'll take it. And Sarah starts fretting the moment we get home. Actually, she may have started fretting the moment we left the agent at the building. It took three hours of reassurance for her to calm down - and I'm not sure whether it really was my reassurances or just her running out of puff. Either way, she was nervous enough about it that she insisted we go to the viewing we'd already arranged on Sunday - and, worse, the woman from Friday's viewing called at Sunday lunchtime wanting to know what we wanted to do... we suspect she really wanted us in there. So we said no, and trogged off to see what turned out to be a nice enough shiny apartment in Yaletown, but it was smaller and more expensive than the Alberni Street place...

... so we're taking that one.

That's going from "first viewing" to "finding and taking an apartment" in 20 hours. I thank you. This is why it's better to be lucky than wealthy.

We talked to Jane and Ed on Sunday - hello Jane and Ed! - and watched the Oscars - which Sarah enjoyed for the simple reason that they were on live and at a reasonable time. In England you can start watching them at 1:30am; a 5:30pm start is much more civilised. The scripted jokes are shit as ever though, and the speeches... zzzzz. Doesn't anyone get up there and say, "Well, sure, everyone else who worked on this project did a bang-up job, but they wouldn't have had the chance to do it if I hadn't been involved, so I'd like to thank ME!"

This just in: Martin Scorsese looks like a muppet. No, literally like a muppet.

Martin Scorsese (right):


A muppet:


Also, I've realised just how exasperating the 'liberal Academy' must be to conservatives. Okay, I get the point, global warming is bad, yeahALRIGHT! Just LEAVE IT! But no, we even have to have the bloody song from An Inconvenient Truth - there's a song about global warming? this is worse than Bob Roberts - and there's Powerpoint slides in the background about how even US carbon emissions are bad now - and Al Gore comes up on stage about a hundred times. Argh! We're finally all at the point - and the rest of the civilised world felt we were at this point at least fifteen years ago - where we know global warming is a problem, and the only argument that its former opponents are now able to field in their defence is "Yeah, but you might have been wrong." Which is about as puling and pathetic as it gets. We've won! Won, dammit! So stop annoying everyone with victory dances. I hate being yelled at, even - or especially - when it's by people I agree with. Let's just ban cars and business flights and switch to nuclear power and move on.

The shadow dancers and the sound-effects choir were good, though. Isn't that the same choir who did a car ad a few months back in England?

Oscars over and done with, we went round the corner for a late dinner at Earl's. (Doesn't that sound showbiz!) But it wasn't as nice as last Saturday's. The Sunday chef must be different - that or the Sunday steak ain't as nice. Apparently you can ask for fries without salt, which is good as Sarah's were so saturated I'm not surprised she needed a second drink. Cunning sales technique.

That then was the week, and I'm left only with the photo catchup. Looking back, I clearly haven't made up my mind whether I'm captioning above or below, so today let's go for "above"...

Sarah in her new top:



The pavement outside the Orpheum, home to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra:



The latest fantastic product on sale in Sainsburys(3):



"Size of a post office!":



Where all the cool spies go:



Yaletown's least effective gate. Perhaps people are scared off by the guard-stick (just visible, crouching and snarling to the left of the main doors):



A truckload of shit. Really, that's what it is. We walked past it on Burrard a block from our front door...



The doorman at our imminent new address on Alberni Street:



Sarah thought this was funny... yes, I managed to fall asleep with one hand still on the keyboard. Yeah, yeah, yok it up, skirt...



And finally, graffiti fans, several panels from the side of the Granville Street bridge:








This week's title: George Had A Hat was a track from Pere Ubu's 1988 album The Tenement Year.

1) Well, almost inevitably. Only once has it been evitable. I was stung by my low-research tactics when I chose a new car based on a small picture which conveyed the important facts that the car was 1) red and 2) shiny. Not exactly my finest hour.

2) Apparently it's a Safeway.

3) Alright, Safeway, dammit...

"Papa Was A Rolling Stone..." (Sunday 18 February 2007)

Saturday was not a good day to be the bunny. Sarah gets very uncomfortable and unhappy when I'm cross about something, and today I was cross about my new laptop. Which had started to crash. Big, sulking, blue-screen-of-death crashes. This is usually a bad sign. Although very occasionally you get a one-off BSOD, they more usually signify a ruinous situation with your hardware. My laptop - two weeks old to the day - crashed while I was reading comics... and then again, a few minutes after being rebooted... and then again, the moment I logged in... and then again before I could even log in. It worked fine in safe mode - which is where most of the hardware is turned off, so yes, that seemed to work OK, but what's the use if, instead of running, my laptop is now hobbling along on crutches? So, in a very irate mood, I left the laptop to cool down, reinstalled Vista from CD, and went downstairs to jog grumpily for half an hour in our apartment block's exercise room. The laptop was OK after this reinstallation... for about an hour and a half. And then, poot! it died again.

By this point we had cancelled going to that same improvisational singing session which we passed up out of tiredness the Saturday we got here... to start with I didn't want to do it, and then when I was in a "what the hell, might as well do something" mood, Sarah reasoned I wasn't in the right headspace to risk it. Probably wise. So, frankly, I pretty much ruined the day, for myself and for her.

When I've been grumpy it takes usually a day for me to come round to admitting it and feeling bad about it, and it'll only happen if the original problem is solved, in which case there's a brief period of such euphoria that the subsequent realisation of what a bastard I've been, and the immediately ensuing crash, leaves me a bit dazed and tearful. Depression: it's a wonderful, wonderful life.

I hadn't really recovered, but at least I was vaguely able to talk and operate socially, when we went out in the evening, scanning restaurants on Robson and eventually settling on "Original Flavours Of India". Another good curry house. We're noticing a few things about Indian food here. First, they make it on the premises, as opposed to heating it up from prepacked. We know this because Sarah has twice asked for her biryani to be made without nuts, and without nuts it has twice arrived. Second, all curries can be as spicy or as mild as you like: they offer you a range. Third, it seems that many Vancouverites don't eat curry, don't really understand it, and generally can't cope with spicy food - and the curry houses have adapted to that by offering far richer, milder food than you'd get in England. Both times we've had curries, it's been a much more flavourful experience than in England. My rogan gosh, for example, was a pleasant shade of orange, rather than the deadly red you'd get back home. And having asked for it hot (which almost made the waitress gasp in horror) I ate it without any difficulty. When she cleared the plates away she checked, a little worriedly, that I was still OK. Touching, but indicative of a completely different curry culture. And I kinda prefer it like this. Curry may be richer in Vancouver, almost to the point of causing an upset stomach, but that's better than the average over-spiced under-cooked English takeaway. That's not to say I won't miss them, mind you. But I'm sure the milder, customised curry experience is helpful for Sarah. She got halfway through tonight's biryani, which was piled pretty high.

The only downside of the waiting staff's dedication to the wellbeing of spice-untrained Vancouver diners is that the moment you've taken a sip of your water, someone swoops in to refill it. This has only happened at the two curry houses. Local custom? Required by law? Who can tell.

My food knocked me out reasonably quickly and I had a long nap on the couch, rising at 2am so I could go to bed. (It's like being a cat.)

This reminds me: by popular demand, here is a picture of Nelson, my new bear:



Sunday morning. Laptop still not working. Took me ages to copy my handful of personal files from it onto Sarah's. Eventually gave up and plugged in the hard drive. That took ten seconds. Even the wireless speed was rubbish. The plan was now to take it back to Futureshop and pull a Jacqui Twine - "What is the meaning of this?" Coincidentally, we spent a while on the phone to Jax before going out. Sounds like Alexis is having a fantastic run of success - go Twiney!

(For anyone who wants to get something out of their charitable donation, not to mention how you'll be making recently-emigrated songwriters feel appreciated, go here, where Alexis's CD is on sale in aid of pancreatic cancer research.) (1)

And now a brief public service announcement. Have YOU ever taken something back to an English superstore and tried to convince customer service staff that it's broken? Have YOU ever had to kick, scream, and act like a schoolgirl before you made your point? Have YOU had to talk to the manager?

Then come to Canada, where customer service is like they have in America!

Seriously. I was fretful as we packed up the laptop to take it back to Futureshop because, hey, it's just going to be my word that it doesn't work. And I might have done anything to it. Or installed anything on it. I bought it a fortnight ago: sorry, squire, it's used now, what are we supposed to do with it, huh? Etc etc etc.

I needn't have worried. I explained the steps I'd taken to the customer service guy, and he shrugged and said, Well, it sounds like you've been pretty thorough in trying things... OK, do you want a direct exchange or do you want a refund and maybe buy a different one?

It's entirely possible that Sarah and I are still slightly in shock over this. I know we passed a guy in Robson Square who was offering free hugs and she was a little freaked out by hers (mine was good - hers was good too, it's just she hasn't been hugged by anyone except me for a while). Perhaps that's lingering. But... it's just strange, to be treated as though I have rights by someone in a shop.

Anyway, I came home with a sort of somewhat more expensive laptop. Ahem. On the plus side this one can play games, which the last one had real difficulty managing. (2Gb of RAM is one thing, but it had a comedy graphics card.) On the minus side, it's still got Windows Vista, which I still loathe. Today's unamusing Vista 'feature' - I swear this software is unfinished - is that it wouldn't stop connecting to other people's networks. I first noticed this when it gaily started downloading updates before I'd told it what our secret wireless router was called. Several attempts later, I'm still not sure I've solved the problem. I can't help thinking "Beware the jabberwock, my son..." as I contemplate the further potential for harebrained activity inherent in this thing.

For some reason we got a free printer with it. I say free, we have to mail in a rebate form, but it should work out to be free. The chances are it's a crap free printer... it's an HP all-in-one, after all... this does not exactly bode well... it's not bodacious... in fact it's the exact opposite... which would be... bodunk?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. At the time, and showing admirable restraint - ADMIRABLE I tell you - I left my new laptop in its box, and we went for a long relaxing walk around Yaletown. This is the south/southeastern district of downtown Vancouver, and we haven't done much exploring there so far. I think we made up for that today though. The photo highlights follow.

Jax, you'll need to bring an empty suitcase to fill up with stuff for Maxie...






A strange sculpture just off the boardwalk:



Hero Panda!



Turtles made of bread:



All this and more awaits you in... Yaletown!

We took a quick look in the much-anticipated 'yuppie deli', Urban Fayre. It didn't seem all that out of the ordinary. No more expensive than The Market Place just across from us. We picked up some goodies there on the way home. Was (Not Was)'s song Papa Was A Rolling Stone was playing on the radio while we were in there. Now there's a song I haven't heard in ages. What a great band. I checked on Wikipedia and found that they did indeed only do four albums, so I had the whole set at one point. What a winning band. Definitely a Panda favourite.

Sarah had a nap, and then we had dinner at Earl's on Seymour. Another steak place. I discovered I really like asparagus tips. Another restaurant which, benefiting from a substantial young male clientele, dresses its waitresses to please same. I still find this a bit weird. Can't fault their rare steak, though.

Back to the Electra and we played some more pool. Sarah is... well, let's stick with 'getting better'. The cue is a disgrace and the table has seen far better days, but it's a laugh. I wonder whether, with all the hype to do with realistic physics and so forth, anyone has ever done a snooker or pool computer game where you can play on an old, tatty table with withered cushions and a black hole in the middle. You'd get more real-world experience from it, that's for sure.

'night all.


(1) If your name is Maggie, and you tried messing with the Twines with regard to the first version of this CD, then... your mum!

10x10x10xNo! (Friday February 16 2007)

Difficult to know where to start with the week's roundup, and I suspect this will happen often. The problem is that each day starts with me getting up, sitting on the couch for a while absorbing breakfast on autopilot, and then going to work for eight hours. That means Sarah typically does the most interesting things during the daytime, and as we've already established that Bunnies Don't Blog, I can only repeat her tales of daytime adventure and derring-do. Joint life resumes sometime after six, when we meet out or I come back home, and then we get to Do Stuff Together, and then... I'm there! (Literally.) So my writeup has that much extra zing.

This is not to say that Sarah's adventures are not as exciting as our joint excursions into the city of Vancouver. For example, on Monday this week she spent a good deal of Monday exploring Broadway, the big road which runs through Kitsilano and a good chunk of the way to New Westminister. This was an act of selfless devotion: I had been feeling very down, and frankly, this was because all my bears are in storage. Tenpence Bear and Hugh Manatee are my favourite bedtime companions (some would ask whether this is really the case with Sarah around, but Tenpence has been with me a lot longer) and I feel bear-eft without my small corduroy bear to hug of a nighttime. So Sarah went looking for a bear for me, and trogged for what I understand was a long, long, lonnnnnng time along Broadway looking for bear shops. Eventually she found one. He's very cuddly, somewhat bigger and lankier than Tenpence, but he's reasonably adorable. It takes a while for a bear's name to become apparent, but after a few days of pondering, he has decided that his name is Nelson (one of the roads we're living on just now). So we welcome Nelson to my entourage, and nighttimes have been a little less lonely.

Sarah's other solo activities this week have included attending a Valentine's Day concert, and returning to the "Afternoon Delights" choir which she sampled last Thursday.

More on choirs in a moment, but first, here are this week's photos. I'm afraid there aren't many, but hey, quality over quantity, as I'm sure you'll agree when you witness:


... the world's most derelict burned-out-looking shop which is still actually open.


"The Wicker Woman" (now a major movie)


This one's for Phil.


Shop here for all your generic computer needs.


This is pretty. A decorating idea which isn't used very often.


And this, from Toys'R'Us. Possibly the most disturbing use ever of a panda head (itself a disturbing enough phrase)...

Well, that intro seems to have broken my writer's block, so time to document our collective experiences of the week.

Monday: a singing masterclass at Vancouver Library, featuring a song cycle by Strauss. Except it wasn't a masterclass (where experienced performers get tips from even more experienced teachers, in public) but rather a kind of analysis of the songs themselves. The song cycle in question is a five-part setting of German poems about death. Each poem was read for us first in German and then in English, and then we heard one or other of the two sopranos sing it with piano. Then the experienced guy told us something about it, asked the singer to talk about the challenges of singing it, and so on...

...

...

... argh, look, OK, it was very annoying, and I'll tell you why. This is not my kind of music to start with. I don't go for foreign-language songs, because I generally don't believe that I can understand the meaning. If I can appreciate the actual sound of the words, then fine, it may be fun to sing it. But the only reason I cope with Latin songs is that I understand a reasonable amount of Latin. Italian or German - I have no idea what's going on, nor do I want to bother finding out. If it's possible to discern the general sentiment of a song by listening to it without understanding the language, then clearly that's a skill I don't possess. It might be more true where there's acting involved. And as you'll remember from the last entry, I don't mind putting in some effort to decipher an intellectual code, as might be used in modern dance. But when someone just stands there and sings a song in German as a singer, I don't know what it means, and I don't care how pretty it might sound.

So Sarah knew up-front that I was going to be a Restless Panda sitting there, and I knew it too but had hoped to learn something interesting about singing technique. When your man announced at the start that it wasn't a masterclass, rather a lecture about how wonderful this bunch of Strauss songs are, I gritted my teeth and sat there for it.

I completely lost interest when, during the analysis of the second song, the guy played an excerpt from a CD of the songs to demonstrate how impressive was Strauss's orchestral arrangement. I'm sorry, but I've been sitting here listening to it being played on piano, and I now find out that it was composed for a chamber orchestra? No bloody wonder it sounds grim on piano. The CD sounded a lot more interesting. The orchestration was clever. The different textures of the instrument added a lot. And, most irritatingly, the presenter kept on banging on about how for Strauss, music let him go to places which mere words couldn't... WELL, IN THAT CASE, WHY ARE YOU WASTING OUR EVENING MAKING US LISTEN TO A PIANO REDUCTION OF THE DAMN MUSIC?! It would be like telling me that such-and-such a film is the best ever, and proving it by restaging key scenes with some people you brought along from your amdram group. 10x10x10xNo!

By the time they hit the last song our backs were in agony from the library's chairs, so we, along with plenty other people in equal consternation at how much it was overrunning, got up and left.

Bloody Strauss masterclasses, rassinfrassin library misrepresentation, etc etc. Tump.

We had a very nice meal at Milestones on Hamilton. This is in Yaletown, which we haven't really explored as yet. It's a bit like the North Lanes in Brighton, US-style... lots of buildings converted into apartments. A further exploration is required. My meal was particularly excellent, although I can't remember what it was... some kind of pasta and peppers with a big load of chicken on top. Local beer is a bit watery, incidentally. I'm trying all the varieties and finding that Canadian lager gives me the same kind of grimace as English (or at least varieties available in England, whether English or otherwise). You can get Stella out here. No sign of Fosters though... Burge and Brook will have to make do.

Wednesday evening we went to a choir. And I felt very strange. I was sitting there, looking at the conductor (the same Ieva who runs Sarah's Thursday afternoon choir), looking at the people all around me, who were perfectly harmless individuals exemplifying the amateur choir type... and I sat there thinking "I want my posse". I felt very disconnected and homesick. We're joining for a term, anyway. It costs money to join a choir though... it might not actually be that much by the time you remember that almost everything in Canada costs $100, but still... it would be about a hundred and fifty quid for a year's membership. And I have to buy a poxy shirt for the concert. Burge apparently told Sarah to start setting up choirs as this is clearly where the money is.

This was the second week of this term's rehearsal, so everyone had already given a couple of the songs a bash. Some of the repertoire is the typical annoying cutesy crap, like "El Grillo", a gripping little ditty sung in Spanish, about how cute crickets are and why they sing. Do people not realise that this is the kind of crap that no-one wants to pay to hear? And it's in bloody Spanish too! Meanwhile, back in English, Bob Chilcott arranges The Beatles' "Penny Lane" for The King's Singers. Well, that'll be easy to learn then. We fled eight thousand miles to escape Bob Chilcott arrangements, but apparently they drift around the world in a silent spectral hunting pack. What else did we do? Oh, an Italian madrigal which they all learned last year, but which was probably the nicest thing of the evening. And a couple of other songs which have already lost my interest.

I want my posse :(

The only upside of this choir so far is that it's quite a bus trip away from our apartment, so I get to watch Sarah be quietly annoyed about our no longer having a car. I said last night that having a car by no means ever guaranteed that we (or many other people we know) ever got somewhere on time, and that bus trips are exciting! But I don't think I'm winning this argument.

On Thursday we ate at the Gain Wah chinese cafe on Keefer Street. Immense amounts of food at bargain prices, with the usual proviso that the food isn't necessarily the best ever. Sarah chose this one from the internet and it turns out she thought it was a little classier than it actually is. We may not go back there, but it is in walking distance from Radical's offices so I could conceivably steam up there one lunchtime and get a plateful of chow mein for about three quid.

On Friday we dropped to our lowest ebb for restaurants and went to Vera's Burger Bar in Kitsilano, on our way to the Planetarium for a late-night laser show set to a selection from "The Wall" by Pink Floyd. The show itself was great; lots of 360-degree photomontage effects, with the actual lasers being a bit limp until "Run Like Hell" came on and they fogged the place up a bit so the lasers started looking like what we'd actually been expecting. Sarah, it turns out, might be a Pink Floyd fan without having realised it. Obviously this is the right album to choose if you're going to start listening to the Floyd, but still, I'm pleased. Obviously I loved it: it's the best concept album about the post-war decline of England and dealing with your dad's death ever! And it certainly made up for the food. Vera's is a franchise operation with half a dozen or so outlets around Vancouver. The slogan is, and I quote, "You can't beat Vera's meat". Well, there's a challenge. Worse, you actually can, because the burgers weren't all that great shakes even by the standards of "look, you're eating a goddamn burger, what do you expect?" The service was pretty lacklustre, they'd run out of fries and chilli (OK, it was 10:15pm, but, no, actually that's when a burger place should expect to be selling a fair bit of food), and, oh, whatever. We won't be going back.

Interesting tidbit about how the internet works, though: you try Googling for "You can't beat Vera's meat". You'd think people would think that was hilariously funny and it would be all over the net. But in fact, there are just 15 results. OK, so it's kinda titchy as fast-food franchises go, but still, if this was San Francisco or even New York, people's comedy blogs and Flickr albums would be all over it. In Canada... even in the biggest city in Canada... not so much.

Vancouver Planetarium has a bloody great crab statue outside it. Scared the daylights out of me. Look!

Vulcan drug dealers (Sunday Feb 11 2007)

Saturday daytime started with a bit of a meander. Sunny, so we went down to Coal Harbour, one of Sarah's prospects for our neighbourhood when we have to leave this apartment. I wasn't too sold on it. It's a bit Torquay Seafront; some of the tower blocks there are suspiciously cheap-looking. The rule of thumb appears to be: the more glass there is, the newer/shinier/richer/more salubrious it is. There are a few glassy-looking buildings, but there's quite a lot of concrete in evidence, with the real reflective stuff kicking in a couple of streets inland. (I'd like to mention at this point that a block not far from where we are now, on Haro Street, features balcony walls stained in unpleasant shades of green. Either moss has a serious grip on this building, or, I dunno, Vulcan drug dealers are stabbing one another to death on every floor.)

Anyway, Coal Harbour has a lot of green space, a gorgeous view of the north waters, and close access to Stanley Island, but... it doesn't grab me. Not sure why. I suppose it's because there aren't many shops there, and I feel it's a bit much to have to live in a slightly shabby apartment and go down to your local community centre with its faded stucco and one-storey lack of chic, and all the while there are billion-dollar yachts bobbing offensively in the water a few hundred yards away. Coal Harbour Marina is absolutely crammed with sleek boats.

And some not-so-sleek, I grant you:



Bah. I hate the rich. To reassure me on the idea that the rich know nothing about art, Coal Harbour also features plenty of modern sculpture. Here's an example:



Baba Yaga's hut as never seen before - and in aluminium, too! Meanwhile, here's a seafront restaurant's front door sign:



And to make absolutely sure that no incautious rich people drown, how about this for a warning sign:



I can see this being an imposing statement of danger to something the height of a chicken (or a small bunny, I suppose) but really.

Visible from a block inland: the city's pinkest building. Well, there's probably a pinker self-storage place (for some reason these are always garishly-painted, presumably to terrorise would-be thiefs into going off to burgle some less day-glo property (1)) but this is the pinkest apartment block:



And since everyone loves seaplanes - ridiculous hybrids and bad safety records waiting to happen as they may be - here is a picture of a seaplane jetty:



And now: artism!

You often heard it said, usually by grumpy musicians, that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", the implication being that neither is possible, the extended theory being that music is unreviewable. I read a few years back about a modern dance piece commissioned to celebrate a major London landmark, so as far as I'm concerned you can't take that cliche as gospel. On the other hand, even longer ago, I read an autobiography where a music critic had decided that it was so true that writing about music was impossible that he had actually taken to composing musical pieces as critiques of other pieces. I'll repeat that, as it's a bit difficult to believe: he had, for example, written a piece for the violin which represented his feedback on someone else's violin music.

Question: what the hell does this have to do with anything, Panda? Answer: It sets up my next few paragraphs, as I write about dance, specifically "Orientik/Portrait", a dance show by Co. ERASGA at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on Saturday night.

After our trog around Coal Harbour, we trogged out to the supermarket on the Skytrain, trogged back, and then trogged once more to Metropolis at Metrotown. You'll remember that last weekend this was hosting Canadian Idol. Free of an infestation of goths and singer-songwriters (and permutations thereof), the mall was slightly less crowded. We got food in a bit of a hurry, and then bussed ourselves up to the Shadbolt on the 144. We were half an hour early so we explored a bit. Sarah was pleased to find that the Centre has an entire wall dedicated to photos and bios of the resident staff, musicians, and other artistic types. Meanwhile I stood in line, pleased to find that the woman in front of me was about six foot three and wearing a long skirt. I have to write about Vancouver's general and woeful lack of skirts sometime soon. But soon enough I was distracted by Sarah's return (she was also wearing a long skirt) and the theatre doors opened.

When we were here last September (blog TARDIS coming soon, I promise) we saw a fantastic one-woman dance show at the Vancouver Festival Fringe. This show: not quite as good. The positives first.

I'm a big fan of taiko drumming; it's a literally heartstopping experience. It's actually quite thrilling to find your pulse being grabbed and controlled by someone pummelling a drum the size of your lounge. The physical aspect of taiko drumming is thrilling too, both in the highly-ornamented shapes being thrown by the solo drummers, and the general level of fitness implied by that amount of drumming. And it was a female drummer tonight. Female pianist, too, playing some Khatchaturian piano pieces amongst others. As for the dancers: there were two, one male Asian, one female Canadian. I have a theory that this let them represent the experience of being Japanese/Canadian by separately embodying the two conflicting heritages of a single person. If so then this is clever, and I'd hope it was the case as it's the kind of thing that most other artforms would find it impossible to present. Dance, being generally a pretty symbolic thing, is the ideal place for additional symbolism. (Buy into one, symbolise one free.)

But symbolism is its own punishment. The downside of almost all modern dance is that if you don't get it, you're basically watching a lengthy and slightly strange-looking workout, and it's not often that they're good enough to do it to a recognisable tune. Non-narrative dance annoys me - which is why I get bored during dance breaks in musicals. Yeah, OK, so twenty people are dancing. So bloody what. They have to be dancing *really, really well* for me to care. Ideally, they have to be telling a story, and not in a patronisingly obvious way. But, it gets worse. Not only do I demand a story, I demand a self-decoding story. This is why I detest ballet; you have to buy into the conventions of ballet, wherein a particular step is deemed to mean some specific thing, a thing which is rarely obvious from the music nor from the acting. Watching a ballet piece is like watching a skate-dance routine at the Olympics; it has to push a bunch of standard buttons, and the rest is filler. I'm just not interested. And I never will be. What interests me is dance where the piece comes with its own dictionary; the title of the piece and the interaction of the dancer with the music combine with my own intelligence and ongoing thought processes to give me one or more possible meanings, which I can ponder as the dance progresses. At its best this gives me a considerable rush during the piece, plus a postmortem period in which my brain is still ticking over plenty of ideas.

For Orientik/Portrait... well, the title is what put me onto my initial theory about duality, and as for the individual pieces, I'm pretty sure there was something about a Japanese warrior spirit, something about a tea ceremony (with a couple of butterflies paying a visit), and something about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (a suspicion enhanced by that piece of music dating from 1946). And as far as I can say that I understood these, I liked them. The dancers' physical skills were certainly on point. However, there was also a lot of noisy cymbal-smashing towards the end which didn't seem to signify anything much. It's a shame, and it may well be because I know some key points of Japanese history but hardly anything about Canada, and certainly nothing about being a Japanese immigrant to Canada. Perhaps the rest of the audience lapped it up on those terms, although the comments we overheard as the lights came up and the 90-odd people in the theatre went wild were mostly to do with the dancers' physical prowess, rather than their work's deeply symbolic (or cymbalic) meaning.

So I dunno. Which is hardly an overwhelmingly intellectual conclusion, but if you wanted one of those you should have read Post-Modern Culture. There's actually a course on offer to improve one's writing about dance. Looks expensive, but as Sarah points out, it includes a lot. And as you can tell, I probably need it. For one thing, I'm still at the stage where the pretentiousness of a group's name directly affects my enjoyment of the show. "Co.ERASGA" indeed.

After all of that high-falutin' palaver, I can't find much to say about Sunday. There follows an important announcement: don't go to the Kirin Mandarin Restaurant on Alberni and order crispy rice with three kinds of meat. What I got was a bowl of extremely crispy rice which was immediately drowned in a second bowl of hot water and (get this for three kinds of meat) prawn, ham, and chicken. Ham. HAM!!!! Sarah says my face was a picture. It was pretty grim. I finished it; probably very healthy for me, but I tell you, thin slices of chicken look and taste unappetising as hell when floating in hot water. And did I say HAM? And peas. Pauvre panda! Sarah's pork dish didn't fare much better when put through the Kirin Unlikelihood Filter... it came shredded and mixed in with a large plate of hitherto-unmentioned noodles. Actually I ate more than she did. Pauvre lapin!

She did get a cheap MP3 player earlier in the day, though, as her reward for using the treadmill in the Electra's exercise room, and as an incentive for using it some more. Ever such an athletic rabbit...

We went to a Compline service in the evening. Compline is one of the traditional, and I mean back in Brother Cadfael's day traditional, services of the Christian day. The modern-day version is, I suppose, a way of closing down on the day, meditating, chilling out, and preparing for an early night. (I guess this last bit because there was no midnight service, which I'm sure Cadfael would have attended.) So we sat in the church, and we listened. It's a little silly to say, but I was expecting twenty monks in big robes with hoods to sing the chants. Instead there were four women. Sarah had a few bones to pick regarding their choice of music - apparently there was some Thomas Tallis in there, which is anachronistic but tolerable, and also some Purcell-type stuff with an organ accompaniment and harmony and everything, which is much less so. Quite restful in its way - its way being religious, so ultimately not for us.

And aside from using our 2-cents-a-minute calling card to contact numerous surprised people in England and Ireland, that was Sunday. Another weekend comes crashing to an end, and work starts again tomorrow. Cheers, all.



(1) A little piece of nostalgia: back in Littlehampton there was a secure self-storage place advertising itself just up the road from us, in Wick. For anyone who hasn't been there, Litlehampton is commonly known as LA - as in "Little'Ampton" - which would make Wick the equivalent of South Central. I had wondered just why anyone would put their valuable property into storage in Wick, but then it occurred to me that a self-storage place in Wick advertising itself as secure must be very secure indeed.

"The lovely Rachelle" (Friday February 9 2007)

Yes, well. This week had some almighty expectations, didn't it? Let's see how it stood up to the challenge.

Obviously I'm not in a position to talk that much about the details of working at Radical. They're nice-seeming people, and I've got a phenomenal amount to learn in the near future, which is entirely fine as (a) I operate best when confronted by far too much information for one human being to absorb - that's exactly the amount I've trained myself to internalise - and (b) it'll keep me off the streets. And, as we also discovered this week, there are plenty of things on the street to distract us if we aren't careful. So, I'll trim the details in this public blog, and the Posse will get more details offline.

One thing I can confidently say about Radical is that they know how to make work fun. This is actually counterproductive for anyone like me who has, it turns out, spent some years working in an atmosphere of fear and stress. It means I'm sitting there wondering when the whip is going to land across my back, as opposed to how I've been operating for years, which is to feel confident that I'm working fast enough and hard enough to avoid the whip. The point appears to be that there is no whip, at least not at this point when we're in preproduction for a new game. The office is littered with couches and game consoles, there's a sizeable research library, and the kitchen / recreation area is epic, no other word for it. (The blog TARDIS will mention this with appropriate awe and wonder when it visits September 2006.) All the food in the kitchen is free. And there's tons of it. They talk of "the Radical fifteen", the way college kids talk about the "freshman twenty". I have to watch out for that, as my bellybellybelly is quite large enough already. However, I'm very tempted by their enormous bowl of fresh bread.

After only a week there I haven't actually done anything useful, but I have notched up a personal first and created a 3D model of something (specifically a hammer) in a modelling package. I never got around to learning how to use 3DS Max at Creative Assembly; I came to 3Dness generally late in the day and was quite timorous about my overall comprehension levels. However, I'm now convinced that it's a lot simpler than I used to worry, and I intend to make a lot more of my opportunities this time around. Thus: 15 minutes of Maya experimentation a day. And Panda made a hammer. Look, it's my hammer:



(I'm not going to post up the egghead with a face which I made. It's just the wrong side of cute.)

I didn't manage to get many pointers about the social whirl at Radical, since I was too busy sitting there fretting that I wasn't working hard enough. More on this next week, as I'm sure there are social things to do, and the guy who sits behind me has already scored some serious welcoming points by chatting to me about comics now and then.

In short, therefore, Panda is basically happy with the initial impressions of his new job, with the proviso that the whole being-in-Canada thing is playing silly buggers with my head and I can't be sure what I think about anything just now.

So instead let's talk about our life outside of my work, where I can be somewhat more decisive in my feedback.

On Monday night I had a huge headache and to be honest I think both of us were wondering why in heaven's name we were here. So let's skip that. Decisive, perhaps, but not exactly uplifting. And Sarah, out strolling somewhere, took this picture, which I'm too scared to ask her about:



Tuesday was much more like it. I remembered to listen to my MP3 player - having loud music in my ears is always a booster - and my trip to and from work was that much more fun for it. I was positively bouncing by the time I got to the library to meet Sarah for our first cultural experience: a presentation about world music and jazz improvisation. Vancouver Library runs a sizeable programme of free talks, and we lucked into a winner for tonight. Four musicians spoke briefly about their views on music and improvisation, and we heard three improvised pieces. The first was remarkable; the second had at least one great moment but was slightly iffy, and the third was mostly just plain iffy, but that's what you get for improvisation. I was tempted (but too timid) to ask in the subsequent Q&A session what the panel thought about the idea of recording improvised pieces - along the lines of someone's observation that the first poet to write "lips of coral" was a surrealist, but the second one to do it was just a hack and a plagiarist - so I'll ask you instead: what do you think about improvised music and the recording of same? Sarah was also most impressed, and the speakers managed to sell us on the idea of a 90-minute improvised concert taking place at the start of March, and they had discounted tickets at the front table, so that's another entry in our diary. Dear me, we'll be exhausted at this rate.

After the talk we went looking for a restaurant and settled for an Indian just up Robson Street. The food was delicious; Sarah had a biryani, I had a korma. However, we both had upset tummies that night. We suspect it was just from the richness of the food... let's be honest, English curries are generally so grim that the shock of tasting a properly-cooked one could easily be as upsetting to badly-detuned gastric systems as badly-prepared food is to a happy intestine.

Wednesday. Another library talk, but much less interesting this time. The Romance Writers Of America organisation has a Greater Vancouver Chapter, did you know that? And five of its members came along to talk about their work. This presentation was blessed by a tramp type who heckled, interfered, and eventually blew his top at a security guard, earning himself an instant eviction, which wasn't too much of a shame. The speakers were a mixed bunch, the highlights including the first woman, who surveyed the breadth of romantic literature while managing to project an aura of being mortally offended by the existence of anything that wasn't pure old-fashioned romance ("You even get male-male relationships! But the market is very small! And that's not what I write at all! Not that there's anything wrong with it!" - come off it, you don't bother saying "not that there's anything wrong with that" if you actually believe it). I'm not sure why I wanted to go along to this one, unless it was some long-submerged desire to finish off the Mills & Boon novel I started writing back when I was 23 and bored. Not a real winner.

Wednesday's restaurant - the library talks run from 7 to 8:30, so there's plenty of time to get stuffed afterwards and still be home early - was a steakhouse called Moxie's, just off Robson Street. Sarah had been convinced she'd located a pasta place for me, but it turns out it no longer exists, or something. After trogging up and down Robson on foot and on the bus, we got bored and went for the next place we saw, hence Moxie's. I was a bit taken aback by the staff dress code. I haven't been in many restaurants where all the waitresses wear little black dresses. It was a little weird, but as usual (Sarah would say) I apparently chatted up at least two of them. The beef vindaloo was excellent and Sarah's steak was done just right. All this plus definite smiles and hair-touching from "the lovely Rachelle". I suppose we'll have to go back to this one, if only so Sarah can try this:



"O'Zimmerman", that well-known Irish name.

Meals in Vancouver are checking in at about £25 for the two of us, which seems reasonable enough.

On the way home we walked past a clothes shop which had been invaded by little red pigs. No, seriously...





Of this, really, men will know nothing, and if they're sensible, they won't ask.

Thursday we were tired so we stayed in, had pasta, and went to bed at eleven. However, while I had the excuse of being tired from working, Sarah's excuse is a little more convoluted. For today, between 1pm and 3pm, The Bunny went to a choir rehearsal in South Granville. It was the first rehearsal of the "Afternoon Delight Choir" Spring season, and overall, I gather, she liked it a lot. The choirmaster, Ieva, runs three choirs in all, and one of them meets Wednesday evenings, so we're both going to that one next week. The other members of the choir with whom Sarah chatted were amazed, or possibly appalled, that we're hitting Vancouver this hard and this quickly. Most of them didn't know that the library hosts all these free talks, for example, and as for the thought of joining a choir within eight days of arriving in the country... well, this country will learn that the Jaysmiths, when they promise to hit a country, aren't joking.

And tonight we've also stayed in, chilling with laptops and one eye on the television, where we saw an exceptionally early episode of Roseanne and some MTV. More pasta, and, god, who are these people I'm seeing on MTV? I can assure anyone reading this back in England that if you think there are some talentless bimbettes trying to look like grown-up R&B divas on television over there, Canadian MTV (which I presume is a pickup from the US version) runs videos from ten times as many who are clearly considered not good enough for export but quite adequate for domestic consumption. I was listening to Ciara's debut album on my MP3 player today; honestly, she can dance, but that's all. Considering I listened to Beyonce's B'Day earlier this week, I'm surprised Ciara hasn't just melted in embarassment. It's not like she even puts on tap shoes and dances loudly in the studio for the microphones to pick up (a quite pointless strategy adopted by the occasional Broadway cast recording album). No, Ciara's only virtue is that she moves okay in videos. Steer clear of any alternative. (See also the Pussycat Dolls - who are a quite frighteningly well-organised franchise, did you know that?)

Another update on Sunday after we've had another saunter around town. I'm really looking forward to this dance show tomorrow night. Anticipate a strained attempt to describe it after the event.

Duracell campanologists (Sunday Feb 4 2007)

That's how Sarah described the racket which assailed our ears as we rose from our unquiet slumbers at 11am. The church across the road needs its bells tuned. More about the church in a few paragraphs.

Today we trogged up to Davie Street and then caught the C23 bus down the hill to Safeways. English readers will gratefully latch onto a shop name which they recognise. Believe me, I sympathise. I feel completely adrift here. Not only do I not see shop names and brand names which I recognise, but I don't even have a clue of the meaning of the shop and brand names which I do see. They might as well be in a foreign language. I know this is purely experential - of course anyone coming to England from here won't know from the name what Evans sells, nor where they can buy clothes for larger women. So when we see a name we recognise, we feel a little relieved.

Unfortunately, just because Safeways Canada retains the intrinsic nature of Safeways England, viz. the selling of foodstuffs, that doesn't mean we know what we're doing. We found honey and garlic chicken wings in the deli section, which Sarah golloped down quite happily when we got home, and I found meat loaf. (Meat! In a loaf! Who could possibly complain?) As to which butter we should buy, or which soup tastes nicest when Heinz isn't available... well, that's trickier. We may be experimenting for a while.

Fans of good skin will be pleased to note the overwhelming opportunities available here:



... while some product lines really need a rethink:



At the checkout, we met the American practice of a second shop assistant packing our bags for us. In England you tend to pack your own, although they have been asking "Do you need help packing?" for a while now. This has felt particularly insulting when I approach the checkout with two bottles of Diet Coke and a couple of bagels; I'm fairly sure there isn't a disease which scrambles nerve impulses in the arms and affects people only when plastic bags are nearby, and if I can make it to the checkout with an armful of groceries, or even with a basket, it's safe to assume I can pack them. If the supermarket wants to look like it cares about people who have a problem handling groceries, surely they should station staff near the entrances, asking "Do you need help shopping?"

Out here it's a given, though: no matter how little you're presenting to buy, it'll get packed for you. I don't know whether this is because they don't trust people not to run off without paying, or, more likely, because it makes businesses feel socially acceptable by creating 'jobs' for the elderly and mentally ill, paying minimum wage for them to pack your groceries at mind-numbingly slow speeds while engaging you in conversation about effective denture fixatives, or the colour green.

Today's grocery packer was sporting a left arm in a cast: never a good sign, even if by chance it was some kind of work-related wound, demonstrating a packing speed which sometimes accelerated into the realms of the dangerous. Now, it's possible all his brain cells were there. But if so, I can promise you that today we learned that Canadian idiom is more American than English.

"I see you've bought those chicken wings," he began, and proceeded to suggest that we try another product next time, one containing cheese. I indicated that cheese is an anathema to me. "Do you like that English cheese, Stilton?" he asked. No, I answered, for it is a cheese, and as stated a moment ago, all cheese must die.

"Have you tried head cheese?" he asked.

Now in England, that question would get you lamped out. He appeared to have no idea what he had said, as my cautious "No..." was met with him telling me that his parents had tried to make him eat head cheese. In thin slices. On bread.

I was tempted to say that it wasn't too late to press charges of child abuse, but Sarah was shushing me. We escaped up the hill at some speed.

Sarah was feeling a bit glum today for various reasons, and my laptop's foibles are still annoying me, so we roused ourselves from junk-food introversion at 4 o'clock to go to "Jazz Vespers" at the church of the untuned duracell campanologists. This is a fine idea; musicians show up, play various songs, and let a pastor do his thing betweentimes. The thematic development wasn't bad and the reverend, who looked a lot like Steve Martin, was a damn good speaker. It's this kind of thing - tales of selflessness, people putting their hands in their pockets, an obvious wish to help the downtrodded - which makes me wish everyone could be basically good and helpful without needing religion as a spur, but apparently it gets things done, so fine. I just wish the disbelieving / unbelieving / bloody lazy masses would help out sometimes, too.

Oh, and I had another subjective confirmation of what I've been gleaning from the papers, which is that Vancouver's homeless problem is something that everyone wishes would go away but which no-one actually is prepared to do anything about. Giving money to panhandlers here is illegal, which is just great. On the way to Futureshop yesterday, we passed a late-teens girl who was freshly on the streets, sitting there asking for money with a sign saying HOMELESS & BROKE. Now I'm sorry, but girls of that age ought not to be HOMELESS & BROKE. I can't believe no-one can think of a solution to unhappy kids running away from home which doesn't involve watching them sitting under shop windows with signs and saying "Homeless people are just lazy drunks". Everyone who's homeless is homeless for a reason, and that reason, quite often, boils down to fear, danger, and money. And if we can't collectively do something about those things, we're a particularly worthless tribe. That's what I think. And I've done something direct and effective about it in the past, so I'm immune to the charge that I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm just a handwringing liberal.

OK, I'm calm now. Calm, yes, calm.

A quick word about our apartment block, The Electra, seeing as how this evening we spent a little time exploring it. Living in an apartment block is damn weird compared to living in a house. First off, getting in is like going to work. We have a key fob which electronically unlocks the main doors. It also persuades the elevators to take us to our floor, or to the sub-basement. We're personally responsible for all garbage disposal; there is a trash compactor (shades of Star Wars) in the basement, along with several massive recycling containers. A communal area on the ground floor contains a small concrete garden, some sofas, a big TV and a pool table (which we tried out - it's very old, the cushions are practically nonexistent, the balls move on gentle curves, and there's no chalk, but it was still fun). In the basement there's a table-tennis room, of all things. It's completely unlike living back in Littlehampton. Even our dotey flat on the seafront, where there was again no garbage collection and I used to pad out onto the street to stuff the municipal bins full of our detritus, was still basically 'in a house'. I have no frame of reference for this aspect of my new life. It feels like living in a hotel room. And I've never done that for longer than a fortnight.

Bedtime now. This blog is now 'up to date'. God only knows whether I'll manage to keep it current. I'll probably do a blog TARDIS next, to cover our trip here last September. And of course tomorrow I go into work for the first time. Five months of our lives went into making this day possible. I just hope it's worth it...

No Superman (Saturday Feb 3 2007)

Today we have very little to do, and what there is is all about fun.

We were very busy when we lived in Littlehampton. I'd forgotten the half of what we got up to, especially in our first year there, but looking back through our memory box of delights (a big blue boxfile in which we keep tickets, programmes, and suchlike) it appears we went to see shows, attend weekend and evening classes, and generally Look Like Eager Cultural Citizens. This lasted a good couple of years before we started singing, and our plan is to have at least a few months of similarly lazy cultural consumption in Vancouver before making any definite plans about participating in something, like joining a choir. Or starting a theatre group, which was one of my edgier moves in Littlehampton.

Artwatching in Vancouver is very simple. There are free magazines on every street corner. Metal boxes protect them from the elements, and most of them are free. As an indication of how civilised Vancouver is compared to, say, London, the free boxes are not emptied, their contents are not set on fire, and dogshit is not stuffed into them. And this freedom from vandalism seems to be a permanent state. You may ask why anyone would do something so pointless to an innocent metal box offering a free public service. The answer, in London, would be: because it's there and I find it funny / I find my life boring. In Vancouver, although I honestly can't say they've got the right approach to some social ills such as homelessness, they do at least seem to have persuaded everyone that you don't crap in the free newspapers box. ("... and live." Perhaps there's some kind of instant electrocution policy administered by low-flying black helicopters which has already taught the natives of the inviolability of the metal box.)

Anyway, yes, free newspapers and leaflets. Plenty of them. The library yielded quite a selection of pamphlets, and we've already marked our card with half a dozen fascinating-sounding discussions to be held down there over the next month. But next on the list is the Shadbolt Arts Centre. (Yep - Canadians spell the word 'centre'. And they say 'zed' rather than 'zee'.) The Shadbolt is on the north side of a giant park some way to the east of downtown Vancouver. The nearest SkyTrain stop is Metrotown, home of Metropolis, a sizeable mall. The 144 bus treks for 20 minutes through hillside suburbia - including, for Alexis's benefit, a road called Gilley Avenue. Inside, I perform my usual trick of hypnotising young women with my good looks while asking them beginners' questions about what we're paying to see. They're stunned that we've been here, like, three days and are already looking for something to watch, but that's the point - how long does it take, sitting in a room with nothing to do, before you decide the outside would be better for you? We're both fans of modern dance - narrative dance, specifically. Please don't try to tell me that ballet's any good at telling a story. I want dance works which come with their own inbuilt dictionary. We caught a brilliant piece at the Vancouver Festival Fringe which was running by happy coincidence when we were here in September, and I'm hoping these four pieces we're booking for - one a month till May - will also be interesting. A more thorough report on the Shadbolt will follow when we've actually been there for a show - next Saturday, I believe.

Waiting in the rain for the bus back, we start singing Java Jive. I miss my Posse.

Metropolis Mall is hosting Canadian Idol auditions. Why everyone is gathered around the edges of the multilevel mezzanine staring at what is essentially a high-tech queue is beyond me. Singer-songwriters, that dreaded subgenre of subhumans, are cruising the mall with guitars slung over their shoulders. This machine kills fascists, sure, but almost certainly only by boring them to death. Imagine being in hell. Now imagine being surrounded by two hundred copies of Phoebe from Friends. Now have another stab at hell. You've had some fresh ideas about it haven't you? I'm with a modified version of Goering: when I hear the word 'acoustic' I reach for my revolver.

The Disney store in Metropolis doesn't have Pooh Fleeces. Pooh Fleece was a valuable item in my wardrobe, warm and snuggly and eight years old and still counting. Unfortunately, when we got our two rabbits in late 2005, it became the item of clothing I wore while I handled them, with the result that it acquired enough ingrained fur to build a third rabbit from scratch, and enough holes to sink a battleship. "Big Red Bunny", as it was known, became the rabbits' touchstone for safety and comfort - and also acted as a giant floating flag signifying that it was time for them to stop scampering indoors and go back into the outside hutch. Rufus typically just lurked in the hope that if he didn't meet my eye he must be invisible. Rolo took the presence of Big Red Bunny as the starting pistol for a romp around the room which left us all exhausted. He loved it though - purring and clicking away within seconds of being snatched up. All this is why when we left Littlehampton, Pooh Fleece was consigned to the garbage - looking more like a ladies' lacy top than a solid macho fleece. I was hoping to get a replacement. Not today.

Metropolis's food court is much more like it. Sarah scoffed the same turkey dinner which she learned to love in September, and I can see her point. There's a Nando's there too, and a few other options, although some of the food choices are unusual and unlikely to get our custom - New York Fries literally serves fries, in a range of sauces.

Shopping in Metropolis: well, Sarah's father will like it. Designer outlets everywhere. Sarah picked up a bargain top in Addition-Elle (a sort of lightweight generic women's clothing store). Old Navy looks like a similarly generic shop. Turning a corner, we found a whole load of tops in browns and pastel blues which reminded me of Mike's favourite ranges in Burtons back in England. But these were for chicks. "Skurtons", you might say. Harmless enough if you happen to believe in fashion. (I have a rant about Canadian looks and fashion which I'm saving for a rainier day.)

And what the hell is this? I collect pictures of bizarre mannequins, but...



... Mr Cactus Head is one of the best yet!

No Superman, though. I felt let down. Perhaps if Lois Lane had fallen over the safety rail in the mezzanine while trying to cop a good view of the Idol line, he would have made an appearance.

The easy route home would have been to get the SkyTrain back from Metrotown. But why bother, when it travels on a big loop and our tickets will take the strain? So we sat observing the scenery (through a small amount of rain) for the next half-hour. Station names in Vancouver are history-free zones. I grant you that "22nd Street" is informative, if a little dull, but "Renfrew" and "Rupert"? Meh. The northern half of the loop features particularly uninteresting scenery. They really ought to consider redecorating.

At the interchange (the loop is not a real loop, just a long line which happens to cross over itself) there is a fast food joint called "Chubby Chicken and Teen Burger". A cartoon called Fast Food Superheroes surely beckons.

And so to Futureshop so Panda can buy a laptop. The laptop I'm using right now, in fact. I had considered buying a laptop on Thursday but opted to wait so I could do some research. Sarah observed as we entered the shop that I had clearly changed my mind. The thing is, bunnies are researching animals, whereas pandas work on instinct - which might look like they rush into things unprepared and simply because they're there, but, in fact... yeah, OK. I kinda walked into the shop, pointed and said "That one!" and walked out with it ten minutes later. The unavoidable attempt to sell us extra insurance wasn't too insulting - $300 for three years' total coverage isn't actually too bad - but we tend not to break stuff, and if stuff breaks itself, we avoid that brand forevermore. This is why, for example, you should always buy Sony laptops if you have the money. On the other hand, the Acer we recommended for Alexis seems to be working just dandy, so I picked essentially the same make. Including sales tax it was about £500, which ain't bad. If it breaks, eh, I'll buy a Sony.

On the other hand, while Acer could conceivably be blamed for the underlying decision, I primarily hold Microsoft responsible for the stress I've had since getting this thing home and unpacking it. Because my new laptop comes preinstalled with Windows Vista. And Windows Vista is doing a damn fine job of persuading me that it's a big waste of space and time... a veritable continuum of pointlessness. I'll tell you more about this later when I'm calmer. The only problem other than Vista's panoply of annoyances is that the keyboard is a bit stiff. I'm adapting. Commiserations to the usual address, please.

Walking home with the laptop, I got a strong pang about the rabbits. It sounds daft, and also unfair to everyone we knew, because we'd only had the bunnies for a year or so, and all our friendships have been going longer. But... bunnies. I hope they're scampering around Dave's garden, their minds filled with complete joy, their memories of us overwritten. I wish it was as simple for us.

We couldn't be bothered to eat properly this evening so Sarah had - I can't remember what she had, probably a bagel and then junk food, while I nipped over the road and started my campaign to persuade local Subway staff to realise that yes, sometimes people do just want meatballs with no cheese and no anything else. We really must do a proper grocery shop soon.

And so to bed.