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...
3 comments:
Bounce Bounce Bounce :-) Thought I'd let you know I read your blog like a god! Though I'd like to remain anonymous. Your Mum!
jaysmiths.blogspot.com; You saved my day again.
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