Wuxtry! Wuxtry! (part two)

If you do only one blog-related thing today, it should be to scroll down and read the first part of "Wuxtry! Wuxtry!" directly below this post. Reason: I'm making two posts in one night. This isn't the best way to overcompensate for running at a weekly pace, but it's my way or the highway.

The specific good news in this bonus entry is: our stuff has arrived! At last! And it was a relatively painless process. We got a call on Wednesday to say it would arrive between 9am and 10am on Friday morning. I immediately (1) booked a 'defrag day' (paid emergency leave, six days a year, separate from my proper holiday allowance) so I could be at home to help Sarah with it all. In the end it took about an hour and a half from top to tail, and we had the rest of the day off. Er, unless anyone from Radical is reading this, in which case we also unpacked lots of stuff and generally did things which would have proven impossible for Sarah (a mere woman, you'll remember) to handle on her own.

Photographic proof, if proof be needs be, of our stuff's arrival now follows. This is our 'room 2', initially empty:


And this is how the truck looked when it arrived at the back of the building:



This is the red carpet upon which the boxes were delivered unto us:


And this is how it looked at the end. 80 boxes!


Tenpence and Hugh!!!!!!!!


And Rattle. Well, I was sleepy, and Rattle was closest.


What a cute rabbit. Actually, this is not a cute rabbit, rather a very unhappy one: this photo is timestamped 9:03am and is of Sarah standing at the bus stop as we waited on Saturday morning to go to our choir's full-day singing workshop.


I, on the other hand, was all set for a bouncy day!


After singing, a tenor needs: cider! And after trying several individual pints, a tenor likes to try: a pitcher of cider! Yes, friends, this is my pitcher of cider. Go buy your own.




There. Two posts in one day. Painless. You may go again now.


(1) After a day's delay and numerous reminders from Sarah

Wuxtry! Wuxtry!

But it's not a wuxtry is it Gil! It's just the regular weekly edition, and I didn't manage the daily thing at all. In fact I forgot about it till Megan mentioned she was reading the blog on Messenger this morning. All these loyal readers and no new content. Well, let me address that with this special catch-up photo edition of The Jaysmiths Hit Canada.

Let's start with these pics from when Dan and Kathryn visited. This is them, posing comfortably on one of the couches in our apartment block's communal lounge; at the time we had no furniture, so we sat and chatted down there:


And this is a closeup of the base of the couch. It's chained down! Presumably they have a big problem with bloody-heavy-sofa theft in The Carlyle.


A couple of Sundays ago we went for a very nice saunter around English Bay. The sun and the people were out in abundance. Herewith what we saw.

A cute little house we walked past on Nelson:


Someone had abandoned a small dinosaur on a bench in a park on Nelson:


"Sun's going down like a big bald head, it's Sharkey's night..."


It'sa me, Panda-o!


And where there is a panda there is inevitably a bunny!


The big First Nations sculpture at the tip of English Bay:


The English Bay area of downtown, plus Stanley Island, viewed from the sculpture:


Us. We're looking well, I think:


Lens flare: it's not just for computer games.



And now the inevitable comedy section:

These are our two 'roadkill' toys, Pan-Dah and Bun-Nee. Pan-Dah is slightly, er, slow, whereas Bun-Nee is hyperactive. Bun-Nee also has an endearing tendency to stand on her ears and run around to the tune of Baba Yaga's Hut:


This is Sarah trying to hide behind one of our lovely Egyptian cushions:


Do you dream of JOKKMOKK? You will now...


This picture captions itself:


Whereas this one simply scares me:


Alexis, we snapped this building some time back for you... here's a better shot:


And here's Derek the Dalek, dominating the old apartment the day we left it:


Random assortment time now, plus catchup from what we did last weekend. First, here is Vancouver train station, or one of them anyway, glimpsed from the Skytrain stop near my office (Stadium / Science World - very convenient for Telus World Of Science):


This, a coffee shop sign spotted by Sarah:


This, one of the four mosaics outside Stadium/Science World Skytrain. The others read Responsibility, Community, and, er, something else. Memory, most likely. They're in a wriggly line connected by pictures of tree branches. Sarah insisted on walking along each branch, making passers-by think she was drunk or deranged or both...


This is Telus World Of Science from a distance. Nope, not ripping off Epcot's Spaceship Earth at all. Telus World Of Science:


And Spaceship Earth at Epcot. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, back at Telus World Of Science, the panda sits very happily in a chair, having pulled himself up by his own bootstraps:


Whle the bunny plays a laser harp. Funky! Jean-Michel Jarre used to play one of these. But I bet his worked better for not experiencing random influxes of eight-year-olds (or bunnies).


This one's for Mike. The question has often been asked!


To gain readmission to Telus World Of Science, we had to join the Telus Tong. The indoctrination comprised two steps: (1) an ink stamp was applied to the backs of our hands, and (2) our little fingers were truncated at the first joint. Was it worth it? No! Did we get the tips of our little fingers back? No! Grrrr.


World's dotiest bird. Awwww.



Thus concludes the photo catchup. You may go now.

"Camille, Lee Miller, Gala or whatever" (Sunday April 8 2007)

Before anything else, did you listen to Southern Counties Radio this morning at about quarter to nine, to hear Alexis talking about her charity CD and South Coast Idol? Well did you? We did and we're eight thousand miles away from their catchment area. Make an effort! There was a bunny singing and playing piano, too! The things you hear on the internet, if you're not careful.

Thinking of going daily, or at least "the day something happens", with this, as Sunday evenings are becoming a bit "oh god, got to write a blog entry which will be massive". The problem is that things which were great fun at the time become chores to document if I guiltily leave them lying around in the back of my mind for a while.

A prime example of this is the visit of Dan Parkes and his partner Kathryn to this burg a couple of weekends ago. I didn't write about it then; writing about (and, to be fair, moving into) the apartment tired me out; and now it's a fortnight later and forget about how I feel, I look like a bad, bad friend. So, to redeem myself, let me say that it was a real pleasure to catch up with Dan, who was at The Creative Assembly before I got there and left not long before me, and who has spent the last two years living in Toronto, taking a career break, in the sense that he doesn't want to do more games programming and so broke out the quill and ink and wrote a novel. Ohweeey! Sounds like he didn't have bad results sending it to prospective agents, either. We ate out at the Shanghai on Friday night, and then on Saturday they completely failed to get out of bed to explore Vancouver Island, so we got a sheepish phone call in the afternoon asking if we'd like to catch a movie. We ambled over to Tinseltown for the early show of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. They kinda hated it; Dan was apologising profusely as the credits rolled, and then he realised we'd really liked it. Well, it looked good, the script had a lot of heart, and it was much more fun than I'm expecting from Shrek 3.

So thanks for visiting Dan, and if you hate it back in England, move back here! Especially now we live next door to the Shanghai.

Where am I up to? Let's figure it's Saturday March 31 and we're off to the Shadbolt Arts Centre for the next in our Black Box series of dance performances. We did our usual trick of eating at Metropolis and catching the 144 up to the Shadbolt. Now you'll remember we liked the last show. This time: not so much. Actually this was awful. The group was called mmHOP (no not mmbop, although that would have been preferable - it stands for marta marta HOUSE OF PRIDE, of course) and comprised three women and two men dancing and talking - talking way too much - about the concept of resilience. Didn't help that the show was called "RI'ZILYENT". Didn't help that their dancing was frequently out of sync with music or one another. Didn't help that they took a break halfway through, until about three-quarters of the way through, to pass around a microphone and tell dull stories about painful personal experiences before nominating the next person in the circle to dance the relevant feeling or emotion. Most of the feelings and emotions turn out to look exactly the same when danced, but I'm pretty sure that's not a problem of dance per se, more to do with what happens when you improvise on stage and expect it all to work. The addition of graffiti by a well-known paraplegic artist (don't ask) was pretty much of a subtraction too. This was poor. Really poor. This is the kind of dance show that makes people not want to come to dance shows. Only one of the segments had any real dynamism or interest. Other than that, it was five not-very-good hip-hop dancers mostly making shit up. And there's a reason why they edit a hip-hop video to within an inch of its life.

We shuddered about that dreadful show all the way home, and although we did our best to forget it, every so often it resurfaced, like bad acid. Er, as I understand can happen.

Happy Sunday, though, for although nothing else memorable happened, we discovered our floor's garbage chute. A revelation on a par with Burge and Brook discovering our uber-fridge's water dispenser at Queen Street! It is, quite literally, a chute running through every floor and depositing garbage in a big container in the basement. This means that if you drop a bag into the chute and hold the door open, you can hear it going bump-bump-bump all the way to the bottom. It's a hoot! Now we have to find a reputable stockist for hand grenades. Little things please little minds.

And now, synchronicity strikes! And now it does it again!

Strike One! On Tuesday we caught another of the free talks at Vancouver Public Library. This was the next in the series hosted by VICO, the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra, and the presenter was Pepe, the funky drummer who we saw at the improv concert a few weeks back. He talked a bit but mostly he played... covering a range of rhythm instruments from Africa, Spain, Cuba, and elsewhere. He had a fellow drummer from Guinea and a dancer from Angola to help out. Informative, funky, and just the right length... and free! Can't complain.

Strike Two! Yesterday we went to Telus World Of Science (1), the big globe by the docks which desperately wants to be the AT&T World Of Tomorrow from Epcot, but which fails dismally. We got there at about 2pm and had exhausted its content within half an hour. Probably more fun if you're eight years old, in which case the slightly desperate sheen of "Look, kids, science!" would be less obvious. Half the interactive attractions weren't working, or were so cyclical that it hurt to figure out where you were supposed to start interacting. Anyway, we were so bored, we left and went to Metropolis for a while before returning for the 5pm Omnimax movie which had made the ticket price seem, before entry, such a bargain. Omnimax, iMax, eh, it's a big big screen. I had a headache from how crap the exhibits were, so was it a wise move to go see PULSE: a STOMP odyssey? STOMP being the percussion group from Brighton who are now a globetrotting music concern? Well, it turned out the music wrapped my head up in a warm blanket rather than pummelling it to further death. And on the plus side - here comes the synchronicity - we saw pretty much every drum-like instrument that Pepe had demonstrated to us on Tuesday.

On the super-plus side, one of the movie segments took in the rhythms and dances of Spain, specifically flamenco. And on the screen in a spectacular long purple skirt appeared the tallest flamenco dancer you've ever seen. Attack Of The Fifty-Foot Woman had nothing on this chick. What a happy panda. Sarah tells me that was my birthday present.

On a sidenote, we've eaten our second and last meal at India Gate, the tandoori up Robson from the library. The food's nice enough, but the food is good everywhere in town, so you might as well start rating places on service, and at India Gate it's slow. Sarah suggested a spoof VISA ad: "Getting your bill before you grow old and die: priceless..."

On the subject of ads, here's an interesting bit of semiotics. There's an ad for Fido, a mobile phone service - offered by Canadian phone giant Rogers, if you look real hard at the small print. (Just like Amp'd is nothing to do with Telus, no, honest, not a subsidiary at all, no, Telus is, like, the phone company your dad would use, but Amp'd is cool.) Fido has an endearing ad showing a slightly scruffy guy hugging a big faithful-looking dog, and it plays on the whole "man's best friend" trope to make you think Ahh, innit nice, must get a new mobile phone. However. There are actually several versions of this ad:

- One version, which is seen on posters in bus shelters and generally out and about on the street - has the dog more in front of the man, and they're off-centre, so the guy looks homeless. Yes, you can be down and out, but your dog will still be your best friend. Implication: no matter your circumstances, Fido is the mobile phone service for you.

- The second version, which is used in print magazines, shows the full width of the man, and the dog is more to his side - exposing the man's shirt collar and tie. Aha! He's a businessman! The real independent, unafraid-to-be-a-little-scruffy-but-still-wearing-a-nice-shirt-and-tie businessman, now you see, he uses Fido. Implication: so should you, if you want to be successful but achieve his near-zen cool.

The Fido website features a cunning half-and-half shot which exposes his shirt collar but not his tie, so you can draw your own conclusion depending on whether you're a passing businessman or one of these hippy loser freaks who believes in rights for poor people. (He said, in his unbiased way.)

They don't pick these pictures at random, y'know.

... See, I'm tired now and I still have stuff from yesterday and today to write about. And we haven't uploaded photos. Tump, tump, tump. But I get tomorrow off - ha ha! Radical is owned by an American company so most of Canada works Easter Monday but WE DON'T, LOOOOOOOOOOOSERS!!! - so we'll see about this 'blizzard of updates' thing starting tomorrow. And I bet it all unravels and I wind up updating every fortnight for the rest of my life... oi vey, my life.

Hugs and kisses (and other Hersheys products) from our overly-hot Vancouver apartment.


(1) That's Telus World Of Science, not Science World. OK, Telus clearly owns the place and pays for it, but this hasn't always been the case: the nearest SkyTrain stop is called Science World, and the official website is http://www.scienceworld.bc.ca and talks about "Science World at Telus World Of Science", which is a name fresh out of a legal department if ever I saw one. I mention this in such detail because I have the facts of it all on good authority from a mother of four who was taking her children there behind us and lecturing one of them on the importance of getting the name right. "It's not called Science World. It's called Telus World Of Science. You can't just call it what you want. That's not how it works. That's very selfish." Errrr... yeah. OK mom. In twenty years' time, or, what the hey, now, when you grumble that everything's sponsored, you might want to remember this day as the one where you practically slapped your child for not giving Telus its due.

Hear that Mike Post theme again (Sunday April 1 2007)

Gather round, best beloveds, and let me tell you of events on the urban veldt this last week... and what an action-packed week full of event and discovery it's been... moderated by our customary unflappable and understated style, natch.

First off, Alexis Twine, take a bow! Through to the second-last round of South Coast Idol! Ah yes, "we knew her when..."

Second, if you're Dan and Kathryn wondering where the hell is any mention of your visit, don't worry, I'll write about that at greater length next time. I just wanted to get this out of my head first.

This week we bade goodbye to the apartment at 989 Nelson Street. Just this very morning, in fact, we dropped the keys in at Bruce Ward Realty, using their out-of-hours drop-box, which is just so cute!



989 Nelson has served us well - and for free, remember, thanks to an extremely generous relocation package - and it had more instantly appreciable views than our new address, but nevertheless, that phase of our time here is over, and now we're in the new place.

Moving in was a bit tumultuous, and I can honestly say that I can't communicate the full import of that tumult to you - because Sarah bore the brunt of it. She went down to Ikea on Friday 22nd to order stuff, and while she was there, she called me and we changed our plans completely! We'd intended to buy a nice table and chairs, an expensive but delightful Sheraton bed, an undecided-upon-but-I'd-know-it-when-I-saw-it sofa, the works... but we'd also been boggling at the strain this would put on our credit card. And the Sheraton bed was going to take weeks to arrive, so we should have ordered it asap... and in the meantime we planned to get a futon to sleep on, which would then become the guest bed... ahhhh, whatever. We decided this was entirely too much expense. So instead Sarah bought a bunch of Ikea furniture - table, four chairs, bed frame, mattress, bedside tables - and a futon which will work as our sofa: total cost, about $1400, which believe me is about a third of what we might have wound up spending. Gratifyingly, this means we can clear our credit card when I get paid at the end of this week, and we'll have a furnished apartment to show for it.

Of course the fun part was getting all this stuff delivered. Sarah staggered home on numerous buses with the portable bits, after being told by Ikea that they could deliver on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. And this was Friday. And our building manager technically requires 48 hours' notice to arrange a move-in... you can't just bring stuff in at random, because the back doors are alarmed and will complain if you hold them open for longer than twenty seconds, and the elevators are extremely keen to love you and leave you. Sarah fretted about this for most of the weekend but come Monday it turned out to be OK. At least, apart from the fact that the Ikea people, promising a delivery between midday and 5pm with a courtesy call half an hour before their arrival, in fact showed up at the apartment (where, remember, we weren't yet living, owing to a lack of furniture) at 11.15am, and called to ask where Sarah was. Much The Plank-style hilarity ensued with the delivery minwags, so Sarah and Chris the assistant building manager bonded on this topic. And the fretful crisis was averted. And we had a lot of furniture, in boxes, waiting to be assembled. More boxes arrived on Thursday when the futon guy delivered, in much less of an incompetent flurry than his much bigger and supposedly more professional rivals.

Thursday and Friday night, we built stuff. That was entertaining. We shared the table and chairs, Sarah built the bedside cabinets, I did the bed, and we sort of collaborated on the futon. The futon was a real old-school assembly experience. DIY instructions from Ikea are wholly illustration-based, to avoid the need for localised copies in a hundred and twelve languages. This means you get the occasional amusing icon:



But you can imagine these instructions have gone through numerous focus groups, redrawn and amended with "don't do this" breakout boxes until there's simply no way to misunderstand them. Or, if like Mr Puzzled above, you do manage to misunderstand them, at least you can call Ikea and they'll help. Here is a happy Panda of many parts, just before starting to work on the bed:



Now, compare the Ikea method to the futon's instructions, which I reproduce in their entirety here:



Now that's a man's instruction sheet! Note the unclear diagram, the sense that the text is being gabbled! And, in a stroke of confusion-sowing anti-genius, a random selection of this work has been done already - the spring armature on each side arrived preassembled, meaning the parts list appeared worryingly incomplete until I figured out what was going on. MFI, your 1970s legacy lives on.

So after all this assembly, we wound up with a mostly-furnished flat, albeit still slightly short of 'living' stuff. We rewarded ourselves on Friday night with some time in the hot tub. And, deliciously, we didn't have to stagger back up Burrard Street to get into bed... we just got in the elevator, went up seventeen floors, had a shower, and fell into bed right here. Ohweeeeeeyyy!! You know you really live somewhere when you can sleep there in comfort anytime you want.

Sarah shopped for odds and ends through the week, but yesterday and today we finished off the kitting-out, with a microwave, kettle, an upright lamp for the dark corner of the main room, and some bits and pieces for the kitchen and bathrooms. We can now cook and eat meals - provided they don't require saucepans - we can keep ourselves hygienic, we could technically hang up all our clothes, and we can see where we're going. We still have some piles of stuff on the floor, but in a fit of tidiness I threw out all the cardboard and bagged up all the styofoam and other packaging, so we're reasonably neat. And of course we can make music.

Let me now give you a brief photo tour of the apartment...

This is from the door looking into the main room. A bit of a mess, currently, but you can see the the futon and the enclosed balcony:



This is from halfway down the main room, showing you our table and chairs and some of our numerous cupboards:



From the same point, you can turn around to see the second bathroom and the box room, or the laundry closet:




This is the second bedroom, unused except as a dumping ground for now:



This is the kitchen, narrow but surprisingly usable:



This is the main bedroom - with, I see, the bedside light on, Sarah ;)



This is the view from the balcony:



And this is the main room from next to the balcony. Note the keyboard, the first thing we bought for the place...




You'll see the Dalek (whose name is Derek - thanks to Phil Twine for that!) has taken up residence in the box room. I carried Derek through the streets without deflating him... Sarah, tagging behind with other stuff, reports that I got an awful lot of 'looks' from people, but clearly Vancouverites are too refined to remark on things like this. In London I'd have been applauded and barracked in equal measure. I'm tempted to take Derek out for a Sunday walk sometime in the future... perhaps rig up some small wheels for him and a thread so I can tow him without people immediately realising how it's working. That'd be a hoot. I'm also considering carrying him up and down in the elevators for a few hours, holding him up in front of the doors each time they open. The thing is, again, this would be much more effective in England, where I reckon I could easily cause some heart attacks in thirtysomethings whose secret nightmares include a Dalek emerging from an elevator just like in all the best 'Daleks in cities' stories.

Nothing much else to report from work, and Sarah's activities this week, while extremely active, must be classified a Bunny Top Secret for now. (Isn't the expression 'top secret' a bit daft... you'd think 'highest secret' or 'most secret' would be more... dignified?) So onto the frivolous parts of today's blog:

First, meet Minty! He's from Ikea and he's a polar bear. He's just adorable...





Next, for all you Sharon Kong fans, here's her leaflet:




In fact, I haven't checked, this might be her latest leaflet... with that special offer on the back, business is clearly good for Ms Kong. Remember, Sharon Kong for all your downtown Vancouver realty needs. And don't worry, she can spell the word 'call'... it was one of her people who misspelled it for her on her leaflet.

I've been hammering away at Mystery Case Files: Huntsville for hours. I've completed it four times. It increases the variety of things it expects me to find, and there's a time-trial element to the game, so it's holding up very well. This is about twelve hours I've been playing it thusfar: modern console games often clock in at half that, for three or four times the price. Here's another shot from it... see how you do at spotting the objects named on the right. Obviously in the game you get to click on them and find out if you're right, but hey - we made do with less technology in the old days... deal with it.



And finally, an advert with a bunny. Because all things are better when a bunny is involved. (Burge: do not add 'including stew'.)



That's all for now, folks, I'm a bit tired... more later in the week.