The Jaysmiths Hit Canada: 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.