My sister is one of my favourite people in the whole world. She's the person I miss the most from the UK, and although I love my three Canadian sisters-in-law dearly*, it's just not quite the same.
There was only ever going to be one answer to the "so who's gonna be your bridesmaid?!" question
Sis is two years younger than me, and always managed to be better than me at everything. I got excellent grades, but she always went just a little bit further, taking more subjects and managing to avoid the B I got in GCSE music. I sucked at sports, but she was in the school and county and/or city netball, field hockey, and cross country running teams. I got my Grade 6 music exam (classical guitar); she got her Grade 7 (clarinet). Thank the flying spaghetti monster that I'm the older one and didn't have to follow her and meet the expectations she set!
Fortunately for me, we chose different subjects in high school. There was lots of overlap in the GCSEs (the exams we took at the age of 16) we got, since certain core subjects are compulsory. However, when it came to our A level courses, we diverged significantly. At the time, students had to choose three (or occasionally four) subjects to study for the final two (optional) years of high school. I chose biology, chemistry and maths; sis chose history, French, and English language.
The interesting thing - and a sign of what was to come - is that when sis was making her choices, my Dad asked what we each would have chosen if we could have taken five subjects. I would have added French and history to my choices, and she would have added biology and maths to hers. So from no overlap at all in our three actual choices, with five we would have 80% of our subjects in common.
As it was though, we each followed our own paths. You know mine: undergrad degree in genetics, PhD in molecular cell biology, postdoc in molecular biology and genome evolution, marketing in the biotech industry, cancer research grant wrangler. My sister followed in the footsteps of both our parents, plus an auntie and a cousin, and did her degree in modern languages - French and Italian, to be precise**. Her department wanted her to stay and do a PhD, but she decided that this time she wouldn't try to outdo me, and went off to do an internship in the publishing industry in London (hence continuing her trend of moving ever further south, while I kept moving north and/or west).
Sis chose non-fiction, rather than fiction publishing, because editors get to have more input into the final product than in the fiction industry; they can suggest additions to the content, for example. To be honest I've lost track of her exact series of jobs because she moved around a lot in the first few years, but I know that she started off in the mind/body/spirit field (everything from astrology to fitness to psychology) before moving into a more medical/scientific space; her last job was at a journal publishing company that specialises in annual compilations of scientific review articles.
She just started a new job though, one she's very excited about. Like me when I moved into my current job, she's absolutely delighted to find herself in the non-profit sector, where the pay may be lower but people are (generally) nicer and everything's not just about the money. She's now helping to manage the publishing arm of one of the British medical professional societies, or Royal Colleges. Their output includes a journal, textbooks, electronic learning resources, special reports, clinical guidelines, and information for the public.
So, although we took very different paths through high school, university, and the early years of our respective careers, my sister and I now both have jobs where a large part of our role is to write and edit text about the same kind of cancer.
I say "it must be genetic", she says "Mamma Mia!", but we both think it's hilarious and awesome.
Well, something's definitely genetic.
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*I decided at the weekend, at the wedding of Mr E Man's brother to my newest sister-in-law, that if men get to "brothers from another mother", we get to be "sisters from distant misters"
Me and my lovely three sisters-in-law sisters-from-distant-misters on Saturday
**Mum: Spanish and French; Dad: French and German; Auntie: Spanish and Italian; Cousin: French and psychology. Plus one of my uncles has a degree in English, and another cousin who didn't go to university is fluent in German. I'm considered a freak in my family, although both of my male cousins are in technical fields, so I'm not completely alone.
My sister-in-law got me a "puzzle of the day" desk calendar for Christmas. She apologised profusely for not getting me anything "better" (by which she meant "more expensive"), but honestly it's one of the best presents I got! Some of the puzzles are dumb, but lots of them are really fun, and just occasionally there's a science or maths themed entry that provides me with excellent blog fodder.
This one's a set of geometry-related anagrams, perfect for a Friday quiz for my readers!
ALARM GALLOPER is PARALLELOGRAM (PIKA)
BARLEY HOP is HYPERBOLA (BOB)
EARTH RODENT is TETRAHEDRON (BOB)
GREY TIN MOTOR is TRIGONOMETRY (ARINK)
HOP DEARLY is POLYHEDRA (SILVER FOX)
NUCLEAR DIPPER is PERPENDICULAR (PIKA)
PRIME TREE is PERIMETER (PIKA)
READ TIME is DIAMETER (ARINK)
RELATE QUAIL is EQUILATERAL (ARINK)
SEES COILS is ISOSCELES (BOB)
TO SCRIBE is BISECTOR (PIKA)
UPSET HONEY is HYPOTENUSE (BOB)
Answer in the comments - but please submit only one answer per person per hour, to give as many people as possible a chance to play before Bob attempts to sweep the board like he did last time. Oh, and there's no need to answer in the right order - choose any anagram you like!
I'll update the post with the answers and bragging rights as and when I get time, and I'll add clues if there are any unanswered questions after a day or two.
I have a talent for making born-and-bred Canadians laugh at me, especially when it comes to my accent and pronunciation. I mean, it's obviously just ridiculous to assume that French-looking names would be pronounced according to French pronunciation norms in a country where French is an official language!
This all started on my first visit to Vancouver Island, when I pronounced Esquimault, home of the Canadian Navy's Pacific fleet, as Eskimo. WRONG! It's Esk-WHY-molt.
Obviously.
There have been other examples over the years, with the most recent being new Vancouver Canucks defenceman Dan Hamhuis.
Which is apparently pronounced HAM-hoys*, not am-HWEE.
Now, in the Geordie dialect of the northeast of England, where I'm originally from, hoy means throw**. So when I hear "Ham-hoys", I imagine a Geordie sport that entails throwing pork joints as far as you can - similar to the Scottish caber toss.
But with ham.
This is gonna make next season's match commentary much more interesting.
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*So I'm guessing his family isn't of French origin after all, then. It was the -uis that threw me!
**Apparently it's the same in Chinese! My Dad used to play on a football team in Manchester (which is not in Geordieland) that once tried out a goalie who'd recently immigrated from China. The goalie's kicks forward to his teammates were rather erratic, so they asked him to throw the ball to them instead - but he didn't understand. Everyone got really frustrated until my Dad shouted "just hoy it, man!" None of the other English players understood what he meant, but the goalie said "hoy? Oh, hoy!" and threw the ball straight to my Dad's feet.
I'm not a sun worshipper by any stretch of the imagination; I burn really quickly, and find temperatures over 30C quite unpleasant (in the city, at least). But June-uary was too much even for me - I think we got more sunshine during the Olympics - and really, I shouldn't have to wear jeans, boots, and a sweater on Canada Day. But this week has been all capris, sandals, and t-shirts, and people are in a noticeably better mood!
So here are some other little things that make me happy!
Eating outside
Coming home on hot days to a pot of ice-cold, uber-strong peppermint tea that's been brewing in the fridge all day
Watching world cup games live, knowing that my friends and family all over the world are watching the exact same thing at the exact same time
Calling my Dad during world cup games so we can slag off the players together
Stripey socks
Red sandals (not with socks)
Chocolate brown trousers / capris with a white top (presence of socks depends on length of trousers)
"Let's do X!!!1!1!!" followed by "Let's not, but say we did"
Finding Saba lying on her back in a doorway with her back legs splayed and front paws tucked neatly under her chin, patiently waiting for the next passing hoomin to give her a belly rub
Seeing Google's paw poking through the gap under the bedroom door in the morning, patiently waiting for us to pass her just-out-of-reach toys back
Being Auntie Cath (and then coming home to a peaceful house afterwards)
Finding out that the monkey hand puppet I bought Lilah on the day she was born is her absolute favourite toy
My nephews chanting "under the bus! under the bus!" when tattled on by a sibling or cousin
Plucking my eyebrows (hence the "freakishness" tag - I don't think this is normal)
Re-runs of Friends
Finding out that my husband is even geekier than I am*
What about you?
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*He's planning to buy me an iPhone 4G when it goes on sale in Canada, as a (very) belated birthday present, and then take my 3G for himself. I heard a squeal of excitement the other day as he was browsing the app store, and found out that he's been coveting a particular, very expensive (many hundreds of dollars) kind of calculator for years, and that there's an iPhone app for "only" $15 that has almost all of the special functions he needs from the calculator.
Well, it is to me! I haven't had a hair cut for months, because I just haven't had the time. Literally every weekend since the beginning of the Olympics has been jammed; I've been double or even triple booked almost every day of every weekend, and plenty of weekday evenings too.
It sounds incredibly whiny to complain (and I do apologise for said complaining), because it's all been really fun stuff and it's been a privilege to experience it. I loved the Olympics, I loved having my friends and then my parents here (for a total of seven weeks in just over two months). I even enjoyed most of my training for the Vancouver-Seattle ride; I just seriously underestimated how much of my time it would take up, especially in combination with hosting visitors. I've had to turn down lots of invitations to fun events this year, and I feel like I've neglected many of my friends.
I've also neglected myself. I find that I need some down-time at least every second weekend; time spent just hanging out, either by myself or with just Mr E Man. Time spent reading, writing, playing my guitar, playing card and board games with Mr E Man, or online Monopoly when I'm feeling really burned out - that kind of thing. But I haven't had any real down-time for such a long time (hosting jet-lagged UK visitors eliminates even my early morning pre-work pseudodown-time), and I've been feeling it, both mentally and physically. In fact I've been feeling much the same way my hair looks - as it gets longer, its own weight starts to pull the curls out of it, and when it's not being limp and flat it gets fuzzy and annoying instead.
Last weekend, I had my first real down-time in months. It was heaven. I didn't do ANYthing (except watch football) on Saturday, then on Sunday I actually had the time to go clothes shopping to replace the literally falling-apart clothes I've been walking around in. I just got some jeans and capris and t-shirts, but it's so nice to have more than three outfits composed of intact items of clothing again!
I've also started to be able to plan things again. Things that are selfishly all about ME ME ME (well, and Mr E Man too. But mostly ME). Last weekend I bought tickets for a music festival on Vancouver Island, and booked a week off work for a kayaking trip (destination TBD). I also signed up for the MS Society 60 km bike ride, a really fun event that I did a couple of years ago - 60km is a piece of cake now, and I could afford to cover the minimum donation amount myself without having to bug any of my friends. I feel like I've got my life back, and the summer can finally begin!
And tomorrow I get to break free from the last of the dead weight! My curls will spring back - and hopefully, so will I!
(Well, except for the bits that actually were downhill. But some of those bits were really hard, too).
But let's start at the beginning...
(BTW this is a really long post. And those of you who donated will have already received an abbreviated version by email, edited and sanitised for the sake of my parents and assorted other relatives. So feel free to skip to the video at the end).
DAY ONE
My friends showed up at my house at 5:30 am on Saturday, put my bike on their bike rack, and drove me to the start of the ride in Surrey, just outside Vancouver. As we got closer we saw more and more cars with bikes on them, and by the time we reached the parking lot, there must have been several hundred thousand dollars worth of bike within sight. We loaded our bags onto a truck, ate a little food, covered ourselves in Chamois Butt'r, and tried to find constructive uses for all our nervous energy. In my case this mostly meant chattering like a monkey and checking that I had my passport about once every five minutes as we waited for the 7:00 am opening ceremonies. The crowds built up around us, and after the arrival of some Mounties carrying a Canadian flag and the singing of O Canada, we learned from the first speaker that there were more than 2,200 riders, and that between us we'd already raised more than 9.2 million dollars!*
The speeches were short and to the point (although a little bit too Bravehearty for my taste in parts - there was a bagpipe sound track and everything), and off we went! It was a slow and wobbly start as 2,200 riders tried to squeeze through the official start gate, but we were soon pedalling smoothly on the closed-off roads (with the exception of the poor soul I saw fixing a puncture within ten minutes of the start). As expected, I lost my faster, fitter, better-bike-owning friends (who were sprinting for the border to avoid the line-ups) within a couple of minutes, but I was happy enough to go at my own pace and enjoy the atmosphere as riders chatted to each other and supporters waved signs and cheered and rang cow bells and blew vuvuzelas from the side of the road.
The first 28 km to the border went by quickly, although the head wind that hit us on a nice long gentle down hill section was a bit of a bugger; I hate that disconnect where your eyes and brain go "wheeeeee! Down hill! Yay! Let's go!", but your legs go "whyyyyyyy is this sooooooo haaaaaaard????". I also quickly realised that I had omitted something crucial from my training: steep downhill rides! I grew up in an extremely flat place and literally never went up or down a hill on a bike until I was 22. Steepness and speed are very scary things for me, especially when surrounded and being passed by so many other people (almost all of my training was done solo).
The border itself was the only organisational weak spot on the whole ride. People like my friends who got there early went straight through, but by the time I got there the official queue area was full, and people were forming a wide, ragged, and basically stationary line behind the official area. I stood in this line for over 15 minutes before the DJ announced that anyone not already in the official queue area was supposed to have been given a coloured sticker, and they'd call everyone up by colour so we didn't have to stand in line for so long. It then took me 5 minutes to find someone giving out stickers (pink). As I was sitting down 15-20 minutes later, I saw someone else handing out red and orange stickers; those were the first colours called, with pink following quite a bit later. The DJ's tune choices didn't help much - as he played "Born in the USA", people around me started singing "We're not in the USA, not in the USA", and the follow up ("Highway to the Danger Zone") was an even worse choice. At least it was sunny, with lots of food and drink on offer! Once I was in the official line it moved quite quickly and I was through and into Washington State with a minimum of fuss. And waiting so long at the border left me with fresh legs for the remaining 101 km of the first day.
The next bit of the ride was gorgeous - so much nicer than blazing down the I5 like we usually do when we drive to Seattle. It turns out that Blaine is a really nice little town, and lots of the locals came out to cheer us on. We then went through a gorgeous State park by the ocean, and through some really pretty countryside, although the head wind came back with a vengeance at times. The first real hill of the day was in Bellingham, but it wasn't any worse than any of my training hills, and there were lots of stops at red lights that offered short recovery periods. Once through the town there was a very gradual but very, very long hill up to the lake where we had lunch - again, that disconnect between your brain seeing a nice flat road and your legs dying a slow death on the hill! As I said to a fellow rider, "this hill sucks. If you're going to be a hard hill to climb, you could at least have the decency to actually look like a hill. This hill is just mean". (This may have been the beginning of the "incoherent ramblings" stage that lasted for most of the rest of the ride).
Sitting down at lunch time was niiiiice. The lakeside setting was lovely, and the lunch was tasty and full of carbs. There was another section of the long gradual hill immediately after lunch - not fun on a full stomach - but that was essentially the end of the climbing for the day.
The probable shooting incident happened with about 35 km still to go. We'd just passed an interesting section of road, featuring a gun range and a huge speedway with hundreds of people camping by the side of the road, and I was essentially riding by myself** down a hill being a bit wussy and scared by the steepness and the speed. There were quite a few vehicles on the road, and many of them weren't giving us much space (it was one of the few sections of road with no shoulder or bike lane at all), so I wasn't entirely happy to hear another one approaching from behind. Then, just before the vehicle entered my field of vision, there was an almighty sharp BANG!!!!!!!. I was startled and jumped a bit, but didn't lose control of my bike, and the vehicle (a gunmetal grey pickup with no license plate on the back) came blazing past me. I didn't see the source of the noise, but my first thought was "OMG GUN!!!!", because that's totally what it sounded like. I was already thinking "or maybe his engine backfired, although that's really unlikely when going down a big hill, or maybe he did it on purpose, although I don't even know if that's possible, or maybe..." when another cyclist came up alongside me from behind. She said "oh my god OH MY GOD, are you OK???!!!" I said that I was, and she said "that was REALLY. FUCKING. SCARY", but then she rode off ahead of me before I could ask her what she'd seen that had freaked her out so much.
I still wasn't sure what had happened, but then at camp that night a colleague told me that he'd seen someone at the gun range testing out a scope on a rifle by looking down it at a long line of riders in a really scary way. And then - the clincher - a volunteer who'd been riding one of the escort motorbikes told me the next morning that another rider had been hit with a pellet gun on the same stretch of road, and they'd had various reports of guns seen and shots fired (from vehicles and from the side of the road). So I think someone almost certainly fired a gun, either at me or into the air behind me. Either that or they launched a firework at me, although I didn't smell a firework, and that's hardly any better than being shot at, anyway. Several drivers on this section of road also apparently shouted "GO HOME!" (or ruder variations thereof) at riders and volunteers. Nice, eh?
Given that I wasn't sure what had happened at the time, I actually wasn't that traumatised. There was an incident towards the end of the next day that scared me much, much more - coming down a steep hill in the rain and needing to make a left turn off the main road halfway down the hill, I got totally freaked out by my speed and hit my brakes quite hard. I was freezing cold and exhausted at this point and not making terribly good decisions, so I didn't think to look behind me before I braked, and the car behind me (that I hadn't heard) almost hit me - there was a screeching of brakes and tyres and a swerve and a lingering smell of burning rubber. Mostly my fault (I'm really sorry, dude, whoever you are - I'm sure I scared the bejeezus out of you), although I'd say he/she was maybe a little too close behind me (again, no shoulder or bike lane). I had to pull off the road and wait a few minutes before I could calm down enough to continue.
Anyway, I'm still supposed to be describing day one. After surviving the putative shooting incident there were a couple more downhill sections and then the rest of the ride was flat. It was painful, though, and not helped by what I'm sure was some inaccurate distance marking. I seemed to get from the 110 km to the 120 km mark really quickly, but then the final (alleged) 9 km into camp took for-bloody-ever. I think the 120 km distance sign was accidentally put up at around the 115 km mark, and a few other riders I talked to agreed, because the last hour was just awful. The road was also quite rough in texture, which didn't help the sore hands, wrists, and other parts, and the added friction made us pedal harder than if we were on a smooth road. This part of the ride was purely about survival, and I have to say that when I finally turned the last corner just before 4:00 pm and saw the Mount Vernon camp site and the welcoming committee of cheering volunteers, I almost cried with gratitude!
CAMP
Camp was great! I grabbed my bag, set up my sleeping gear, had a lovely lovely hot shower, found my friends, ate some tasty if slightly lukewarm food, and drank some free beer. I ran into a few other people I know, and got one of my colleagues to do a bit to camera about how the money from the ride benefits his research (see video at the end of the post). I love how PIs can snap into this mode at a moment's notice, and then snap straight back into "normal guy drinking beer and shooting the breeze" mode just as quickly. It was great to get everyone else's perspective on the ride (and, if I'm honest, nice to see so many people arriving well after me. I'd been worried about being one of the slowest riders after seeing all the amazing bikes people had, and indeed most of my friends and colleagues finished 2-3 hours ahead of me on both days, but I passed loads of people on some really high-end bikes, while people on fat tyre mountain bikes passed me several times).
There were speeches, clips of the day's media coverage, and then two bands - the first one good, the second one fabulous. We went off to bed at 9:30 pm, looking forward to a really good sleep before the second day's ride.
Unfortunately...
Some idiots decided that the best way to prepare for the second day was to get wasted and whoop and holler and run around. It went on for ages. The security guards were trying to make them go to bed, but they were unsuccessful, and the sounds of rowdiness carried all over the campsite. I hate that maybe 5 or 6 people got to decide that hundreds of other people shouldn't get any sleep; this has happened at every music festival I've ever been to, but I really wasn't expecting it on the ride. However, I love that some of them apparently ended up throwing up and passing out drunk - ride 120 km on THAT, mofos! (I'm assuming they were riders. If they were non-riding volunteers, I'm even more pissed off that they kept everyone up). They finally shut up at around midnight... just in time for a train to come by the camp site, blowing its horn for what seemed like full minutes at a time. At this point the only people getting any sleep at all were the loudest snorers in camp; my tent mate and I were awake almost all night, getting maybe an hour of sleep, two max, in short ten minute bursts, until another train came through at 4:45 am and everyone around us apparently said "screw it" and started talking and rustling their bags as they got up and started packing.
The early start had its benefits, though - we were pretty much first in line for the excellent cooked breakfast (although the coffee sucked and the tea was barely even yellow after steeping the bag for two minutes - hotter water next time, please, guys!). By the time we'd put our bags back on the truck and gone to retrieve our bikes, the line was huuuuge and hundreds of people were still waiting for breakfast when we were allowed to start riding shortly after 7:00 am.
DAY TWO
Once again we started the day in a town, with the roads closed by the police and people riding four or more abreast. In contrast to the previous day's sun and cloud mix, we started with a fine misty drizzle that didn't even warrant a waterproof jacket and actually felt quite refreshing. I was amused to see a humongous queue of riders at the first coffee stand we passed - apparently lots of other people were unimpressed by the caffeinated options at camp!
The route was nicer this second day, with much of it on off-road bike trails through the woods. It was heavenly to be away from the traffic; this relief completely mitigated the increasingly heavy rain fall...
... at least for a while.
By the time I got to lunch I was soaked to the skin and freezing cold. I'd put on my waterproof jacket as soon as the drizzle turned to rain, but the elements defeated anything that I (or any of the other riders) could throw at them. There was some cover at the lunch site, but it was all taken up by other soaked riders, so I sat on a cold, wet, wooden bench and ate my cold lunch and drank my cold drinks out in the open, with my sandwich getting more and more soggy with rain. I was shivering at this point, and would have given anything for a hot (or even a warm) drink - but there was only water and Gatorade. I got out of there as fast as I could, only noticing as I left the lunch site that they were handing out those metallic emergency blankets you see at the end of marathons. Too late for me, I was on my way and didn't want to stop moving!
Now, I'd been told at camp by several people (including someone who shall remain nameless but who one would expect to have accurate inside information) that there were "no hills after lunch!!! Downhill all the way!!!". When I got onto the first hill after lunch I was so grateful for the (relative) warmth provided by the extra exertion that I didn't think much of it...
...but then the hill just did.
not.
stop.
It was hard. Really hard. Really, really, hard. We'd seen hardly any supporters that day, just one or two people honking horns or waving from cars, and the one group who did brave the rain to stand and wave signs and cheer us on literally had me in tears of gratitude. I was miserable. I kept thinking of why I was doing the ride, and reminding myself that whatever I was feeling was nowhere near as bad as the cancer treatments my friends and relatives have been through. This helped - quite a lot, actually - but I was still suffering.
This part is all a bit of a blur; long slogs up hills, occasionally steep enough to force me off my bike for a few hundred metres of walking, followed by short and terrifying downhill sections (this is where I made the aforementioned mistake and almost got hit by a car), followed by turning corners to see yet another massive climb ahead. My phone rang a couple of times during this stage, but I knew I couldn't get to it in time to answer, and that I couldn't pick up my voicemail or even see who was calling without turning on the prohibitively expensive data roaming option; this only served to piss me off more. I followed Mermaid's advice of eating something if I started to feel pissed off, but it really didn't help at all (and this was within an hour of eating lunch), and I started to think that exhaustion / hypothermia / near-death experiences / PMS were viable alternative hypotheses.
At one point, turning yet another bloody corner to see yet another bloody hill, I said loudly "OH FUCK. RIGHT. OFF, you bastard hill", and the rider ahead of me started giggling. This really seemed to lift my mood, and everything after that point seemed easier to deal with, even though the long climbs and steep terrifying descents and pouring rain were much the same as before.
At the final pit stop, I called Mr E Man and my good friend from high school who lives close to the end of the ride. Hearing their voices was an amazing boost to my spirits, even though my friend said she wouldn't be able to see me cross the line because her baby was just starting his nap. I learned that my friends had finished the ride and that one of them was waiting for me with his wife and baby Morgan, and that there was beer and hot food and dry clothes, with only 15 km of very pleasant, flat, smooth, off-road riverside bike trail standing in my way. At this point it stopped raining and I jumped on my bike for the final time, still soaked, still freezing, but no longer miserable!
The last section was a pure pleasure. Everyone was so excited to be near the end, and there was much chatter and laughter and discussion of whether we should have a beer first or a hot drink first. And then, at about 2:45 pm, I saw a sign for Marymoor park - the end of the ride - 1.5 miles away! The joy! The euphoria! The hooting and hollering among the riders!
There were people lining the whole of the rest of the route, cheering and yelling and waving signs. Coming into the park, I could hear the music and the announcer... getting louder and louder... and then I turned the final corner and saw a field full of people... and then I was in a muddy field and crossing the line and people on my right were yelling "CATH! CATH! CATH!"
I have honestly never been so happy in my life to see my husband and friends. I'll spare you the over-emotional details, but there were hugs and tears aplenty, and not just from me.
The beer was so delicious. The food was so yummy. And the atmosphere was so amazing. But we were soooo cold (you'll see me moving from side to side in the video below - I didn't need the loo, I was just trying to generate some warmth and also stretch my muscles out a bit). When we got to our nearby hotel I had a long hot shower, but as soon as I got out, I started shivering again. So I got in the hot tub, but when I got out after 5 minutes to go and grab my camera, I started shivering again. I didn't feel properly warm for about another half hour, but by that time I'd had a couple of beers and was incredibly happy, so it didn't really seem to matter all that much any more. And then I got to have dinner with my hubby, my Vancouver friends, and my high school friend! And then fall asleep about ten minutes after we got back to our room!
Muscle-wise, I felt better than I'd expected. Much better, actually. My quads were pretty tight, but I was fine as long as I kept moving. Stopping was bad, though - I could barely get out of my chair after dinner on Sunday, and the next day was rather painful, especially when I first got up and then again when I got out of the car after the drive home. (It was depressing how quickly we blasted through all the landmarks from the ride - the lunch site, the campsite, the first day's lunch site, the border. It's really not far at all in a car!). Back home, I woke up at about 4 am on Tuesday with all kinds of weird back spasms going on, but that problem fixed itself with an almighty CLICK during a meeting later that day, and on Thursday morning I was back on my bike. My regular commute felt so short, and I stormed up the hills like they weren't even there - but where were all the people cheering me on, and welcoming me into the bike room with signs and pom poms and vuvuzelas?!
My arse still hurts a bit, but that'll pass soon enough.
Overall, it was an amazingly positive experience. I'm immensely glad I did it***, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who donated and/or supported me in any other way.
I maded you guys a video! (With some beer in it!)
And then I drinked it! (The beer, not the video!)
THANK YOU, EVERYONE!
YOU ROCK!
Video: Part I (I sure wish YouTube would have told me the original all-in-one version was too long before it spent 21 minutes saying "uploading"):
Part II:
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*I got some more donations after the ride started, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, so the total will be higher by now!
**having just passed one group of cyclists, and on my way to catching up with the next one (yes, I passed people! Quite a lot of people! Although lots of groups were passing me, too). This was my pattern for most of the ride. I think my speed fell somewhere between the average for the recreational riders and the average for the actual good cyclists. Or something
***I'm also immensely glad it's over! It's been hanging over me for months, and the training combined with 7 weeks of hosting friends and family over the last 2.5 months means that I feel like I've had no time to myself, literally since the Olympics. I haven't had time to get a hair cut, or buy new clothes to replace the ones that are literally falling apart on me - I'm a shaggy-headed, scruffy-clothed ragamuffin! But this weekend I get to do whatever I want! Like, watch every single World Cup game! COME ON ENGLAND!!!
As you may remember from an old post, since I moved to Canada in 2002 I've spent much, much more time worrying about bears than actually encountering them. In fact, I'd only ever seen one bear in the wild...
...until Wednesday.
My Mum spotted the first bear. It was ambling through a field, on the edge of the forest and parallel to the highway, just North of Pemberton. Mr E Man thought it was a male, based on its size - and it was indeed a fine, fat, glossy, jet black specimen of beariness. We slowed down as much as the highway traffic would allow, and oohed and aahed with excitement. I was delighted to double my bear count, especially as we'd seen it from such a position of safety.
After a lovely lunch in Pemby, we proceeded South to the condo we'd rented in Whistler. Mr E Man and I have stayed at the same place a number of times - it belongs to a good friend's client, who gives our friend a preferred rate - but only during the ski season, when all the bears are (supposed to be) hibernating. The property is North of Whistler Village, and while there are new homes going up all around it, it's on the very edge of the forest and still has some untouched patches of trees immediately behind it. We often see rabbits and hares in the garden, but given the comforting presence of lots of other houses, I'd somewhat naively never thought it was wild enough that I had to worry about bears. In fact I've even walked my friend's dog - off-leash - on the road right behind the property, without a care in the world.
I won't ever be doing that again, though. Because at around 7 pm on Wednesday, after the construction crews had packed up for the day and gone home, I was sitting in the hot tub in the back garden, chatting to Mr E Man, and suddenly saw what I'd thought was a log covered in moss or lichen, situated right in the middle of the small stand of trees about 75 metres away, start... moving.
My reaction was very cool, calm, and collected.
"BEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!", I yelled.
Mr E Man didn't believe me at first, given my track record of false alarms when it comes to bear panic, but then he was forced to agree that the mossy log was indeed moving around. And had ears. And eyes. That were looking right at us.
Now, there was a construction company fence between us and the bear. But the gate in the fence, in the middle of the road that runs right by the back of the garden, was wide open. I didn't feel immediately threatened though; the bear seemed only mildly interested in us, so after alerting my parents (watching BBC World News upstairs) to the bear's presence, I came back down to the hot tub. My parents followed, bringing their binoculars, and we quickly realised that the bear was actually one of three. They were all of the species known as the black bear, but they were all different colour variants - the mother was a rich chocolate brown, with one jet black and one "cinnamon" cub. The latter was the one we'd seen first, and both cubs looked to be yearlings, in great condition. When they started to wander a little closer, we all retreated to the balcony upstairs that overlooks the back of the condo, and enjoyed almost a full hour (in the rain) of watching the bears eat plants, climb trees, scratch their backs (and arses) on trees a la Baloo from the Jungle Book (I instantly got "The Bear Necessities" stuck in my head), and generally get on with their daily lives with hardly a glance at the gaggle of humans chattering away about them just 30 metres away.
It was awesome, in the original sense of the word. What a privilege to watch three such beautiful animals, in the wild but from a position of complete safety. We all had massive grins on our faces for hours after they finally wandered back into the forest.
My camera batteries had died the day before and I'd forgotten my charger (D'OH!!!), and my parents don't have their photo uploading cord with them, so these photos are from my iPhone. No zoom, remember... these guys were close! At one point they were right in the middle of the road, but by that point I'd given up on taking photos and was just enjoying the show. Besides, my phone was getting wet.
Momma bear. The yellow fence at the bottom of the photo is right at the edge of the condo's back garden
Two cubs
The watchers - from left to right, one chocolate brown, one (ex) cinammon, and one (rapidly becoming ex) jet black colour variant
Over dinner I admitted to feeling sorry for the first bear we'd seen, from the car, a few hours before - I just wasn't all that excited about him any more. My Mum replied that she felt sorry for the handsome white-legged snowshoe hare that had hopped into the garden while we were all oohing and aahing at the bears from beside the hot tub - on any other day, he would have been the star attraction, but we barely gave him a glance! It's good to know that guilt and anthropomorphism run in the family...
We looked for the bears again the next evening, but it was to be a one-off performance. But what a perfomance!
Bloody typical though, really. You wait six years for the next bear, then four come along at once...
When we bought our house (four years ago today!), one of the best things that Mr E Man and I did was to invest in a really good bed. We'd been sleeping on a queen-size futon, and although it was a good fit for our small rented apartment, we decided that our larger space and newly-acquired grown-up status were worthy of a better place to lay our heads. So we found a beautiful cherry-wood bedroom furniture set on Craigslist, including a king-size sleigh bed frame, and bought the best mattress we could afford to go with it. Memory foam pillows and a lovely heavy duvet complete the set, and we both now (usually) sleep better than we ever have before in our adult lives. We like to cuddle up when we first go to bed, and again when we wake up, but we separate to sleep - and in our lovely lovely bed, there's plenty of space for us both to move around and get comfy without ever touching each other!
The problem comes when we go on vacation. We've spoiled ourselves rotten at home, and have a terrible time sleeping in inferior beds. Anything smaller than a king-sized bed has us tossing and turning and fighting for space in an extreeeeeemely mature way ("stop touching me!!!" "I'm not! YOU'RE touching ME!!!"), and back in November The Most Uncomfortable Bed In The World forced us to abandon our otherwise wonderful accommodation in Cienfuegos, and upset our gracious hostess in the process.
Hotel beds are usually fine, but our budget is better suited to B&Bs and friends'/relatives' spare rooms. And so it was on last week's trip. With my parents in tow, we didn't even get the best spare room in each case. We slept on a pull-out sofa bed at my sister-in-law's, an old and not terribly comfortable queen-size bed in the condo we rented in Whistler, and then foam pads on the floor of the computer room at my mother-in-law's. (The latter was actually the most comfortable bed of the three - or at least the one that offered the most space). These inferior beds meant that I got little sleep on our "vacation", typically waking two or three times during the night and waking up for good by 6:30 am at the latest. We always relish sleeping in our own bed for the first time after a trip, but last night's return to home base was particularly welcome.
There was an upside to last week's inferior sleeping arrangements, though: I got to experience two new categories of dreams!
I love dreams. I find them fascinating. Where do they come from? What are they for? (And do my cats' dreams serve the same purpose as my own?) So whole new dream categories are extremely welcome, even if the dreams themselves suck.
Category I: The Boring Dream.
I had Boring Dreams twice on the trip. I can't remember what they were about - because they were really, really boring - but I woke up with a huge sense of relief - "thank God that's over with". This made waking up at 6 am on a vacation day feel much more welcome than it would have done otherwise.
Category II: The PMS Dream.
I woke up (early, of course) one morning to find myself really, really mad at Mr E Man. The reason? Well, you see, he'd been put in prison for something or other, but I knew that he was innocent, and I worked my ass off for six months to prove it. When I finally got him out of jail - having lost my job and several friends in the process - he wanted to see his friends instead of just spending time with me all the time, and I turned into Super Bitch. In my dream, I knew I was hormonal and wasn't being entirely rational or reasonable in my anger, but I couldn't stop myself from escalating the situation, until I ended up screaming at him in front of all his friends - at his prison release celebration party, no less! - and storming off down the street in a dodgy neighbourhood in the middle of the night.
I'm not quite that bad in real life when I have PMS*, but the sense of "oh this is because I'm hormonal but oops I don't seem to be able to stop myself even though I've now realised that I'm overreacting" was uncannily familiar. First time in a dream, though - but not the first time I've stayed mad at someone in the morning after "they" pissed me off in a dream!
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*although I did once storm out of a restaurant in a huff because Mr E Man kept tickling my knee after I'd asked him to stop it - TWICE. I already felt silly by the time I got home, about two minutes later...
Nothing says "generation gap" to me quite like ironing. I haven't ironed anything for years - not since I worked in industry and had to dress like a grownup, and even then it was only occasionally. My philosophy is that if you pull things out of the dryer quickly enough, or hang them correctly during air drying, they don't need to be ironed. My Mum, on the other hand, irons pretty much everything except underwear. Casual t-shirts, pajamas, pillow cases - she'll iron 'em. I do have an ironing board and iron, but couldn't find the latter when asked for it. I emptied all the cupboards and couldn't find it anywhere. My parents were leaving for their Alaskan cruise the next day, and actually made me call a couple of friends to see if they could borrow an iron before they left. No-one had one, so... they went out and bought a new one. Then made a point of keeping it in their room while they're here "in case anything happens to it".
My parents have more conversations with strangers in a couple of weeks in Vancouver than I manage in a year. They come back every day with stories of meeting a couple from Australia, a woman who works for the Canucks, a lovely old lady from Germany etc etc etc. I guess it's due to spending most of their time in touristy places with other people who are more relaxed and ready to talk than your average Vancouverite.
They also have a habit of bumping into people they know - they went on a snowshoeing excursion in Alaska and met the parents of a girl who used to play netball with my sister. Every trip, I swear.
They found out about my tattoo. I was planning on bringing it up in the next couple of days, because we're renting a place in Whistler with a hot tub next week, but a friend forced the issue at a party last night. He asked me - quietly, but right in front of my Dad - what my parents thought of my tattoo. I threw said "friend" a filthy look, and hoped that my Dad hadn't heard. A little while later, my Mum commented (coincidentally. Or maybe not.) that there were a lot of people with tattoos in the room - "much more than in England" - and I decided to bite the bullet. I didn't show it off until this morning, and the reaction was "Oh, that's not too bad! It's very big, though" (Mum) and "I suppose it could be worse" (Dad). Considering that they don't like a) tattoos and b) me being Canadian, the reaction could also have been worse (and possibly will be, in private!)
I have confirmed that my complete inability to dance is genetic - on both sides of the family
We're leaving tomorrow for a circuit of South-Western BC, encompassing visits with my sister-in-law, a golf / spa stay in Whistler, and a visit with my mother-in-law. I'll be offline for the whole week... wish me luck!
Your parents will finally announce the start and end dates of their much-discussed five week trip to Vancouver
You will dutifully add the dates to your calendar
A few weeks later, you will find out that Delhi 2 Dublin are playing the Commodore on May 7th, and you finally have a chance to see them after missing out twice in the last couple of years
You will check your calendar and realise that the gig will take place while your parents are in town
You will swear
You will ask your parents via Skype if they would like to go to see a Celtic-bhangra fusion band
They will say "we're up for anything!"
You will buy four tickets to said concert
Your sister will say "erm... seriously? HAHAHAHA!"
When your parents arrive, you will remind them that you have tickets for a gig on May 7th
They will have forgotten, and will look slightly dubious about the concept of Celtic-bhangra fusion music
The Canucks will end up playing Game 4 of their second round playoff series on the same night
Your husband will threaten not to come to the concert
You will call the Commodore, and they will tell you that they do not show hockey games on night when there's a band on
You will swear
You will decide to watch the game at home and then jump in a cab and head downtown as soon as it ends
You will hope there is no overtime
The Canucks will suck
You will drink faster than normal during the game because of the tension and frustration of it all
You will realise that overtime is a laughably over-optimistic objective for this game
Everyone will swear
And again
And then some more
Your husband will call a cab just as the game ends
No-one will be ready to leave as he makes the call, but your husband will confidently say "plenty of time, it's going to take bloody ages to get a cab tonight"
The cab will arrive immediately
Everyone will swear and run around the house in a mad panic
You will pop to the loo before leaving
When you come out, everyone will be outside chasing your cat, who escaped through the front door during the chaos
You will swear
Everyone will swear
The taxi driver will laugh at you all
You will be mad at everybody for letting the cat out
The cat will evade all attempts at recapture and disappear down the back alley
You will swear some more
You will get into the cab and go to the gig anyway, although you will be really worried about the cat, who has never been outside at night before and there are raccoons and coyotes and she doesn't even have her sister with her for backup
Everyone will be grumpy in the cab, because of the stoopid cat and the even stoopider Canucks
You will tip the driver well for not driving away in disgust during the chaos
You will cheer up a bit when you get IDed at the venue
Your Dad will be astonished (and delighted) that beer is available for purchase
He will say "do they sell beer at gigs in England?"
You will ask him when he last went to a gig*
He will admit that he doesn't remember, but it was probably in the 60s and might have been the Hollies
You will drink faster than normal because you're worried about your cat and mad that no-one was paying attention while she escaped, but don't want to get into an argument about it at this precise moment
There will be several techno DJs as support acts
They will mostly suck
Your parents will look a bit lost and confused and uncomfortable
They will enjoy the break dancers though
Your husband will ease the tension by asking your Mum what her favourite song was so far
You will gradually lighten up and start to enjoy yourself
You will get into a debate with your Dad about which is worse: to have never seen your team (Newcastle United) win anything in your whole lifetime (me), or to have seen them win something when you were seven and then suffer through a much longer lifetime of disappointment and failure after that (him)
You will approach a guy in a Newcastle shirt to ask him to settle the dispute
When you get close, you will realise that it's actually a Juventus shirt
You will realise that you are drunk
Delhi 2 Dublin will finally come on at about 11:30pm
They will rock
Everyone will get up and dance
Your Dad will astonish you by shouting "I know this song!"
You will drag him onto the dance floor
You will realise that you are really drunk, but that's OK because so is your Dad
And your husband
Everyone will have an awesome time and buy CDs as souvenirs
You will get home to find one freaked-out cat with a big bloody scratch on her nose cowering by the back door
She will be completely fine after a big cuddle
You will declare the evening a huge success
You will be very hungover the next day
Next up: what will happen if you take your parents to a Canucks game! Yay Canucks for winning Game 5 after Mr E Man had secured tickets for Game 6! WOOOOOOOOOO!
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*as opposed to a sit-down concert. They go to lots of those
Dad: "Stay here and watch the election coverage on the internet"
Yup, it's election time in the UK!
I'm not voting, because I don't think it's fair for people to influence the results if they don't have to live with the consequences1. For the record, if I had decided to vote, I would have picked the Liberal Democrats - their coalition with Labour did some good things in the Scottish parliament, and I think that would be my favoured outcome for this election. Although if there's a hung parliament and Labour end up in third place, as is being predicted, a Lib Dem - Conservative coalition might better reflect the way the country voted and therefore be a fairer outcome, if a less natural relationship.
Speaking of which, the chance that the Lib Dems might manage to push through some kind of electoral reform is one of my reasons for hoping they form part of the next government. The current first-past-the-post system is blatantly unfair; the Lib Dems in the UK (and the NDP in Canada) get far fewer seats than they should, given the share of the popular vote they attract. Given that the UK and Canadian systems are essentially identical, my wish is the same for both systems: a mixed constituency MP / proportional representation system like the Scottish one. In Scotland, everyone gets two votes - the first for a candidate in your constituency, and the second for a political party. A certain percentage of seats in the house are given to the candidates who win in each constituency with the first vote, and the rest are divided up among the parties according to what percentage of the second vote they won. This system let me vote for Donald Dewar, the Labour candidate in my constituency, who was a bloody good bloke and also guaranteed to win regardless of how I voted, but also for the Lib Dems, who, as I mentioned, used their PR share of the seats to form a governing coalition with Labour and get some of their pet issues (abolition of university tuition fees, universal free care for the elderly) into the books.
Anyway, I seem to have got sidetracked from the original purpose of this post, which was to lament that I miss the British election fever. It's just not the same in Canada; people don't talk about politics as much, and we're missing a certain British sense of silliness and fun. Every Brit I know in real life and on the internet is positively obsessed with this election, and I've had a fantastic time reading their posts, debating with them,and listening to the hilarious Vote Now Show podcasts from the BBC2. The last Canadian election campaign was deathly dull in comparison. My friends did talk about it, but not with the passion and obsession that you see in the UK. I think we actually discussed the US election more than the Canadian one. There were no election night parties with drinking games (featuring red, blue, and yellow drinks, obviously) based on the number of seats each party wins, and no-one stayed up all night to watch the results come in like everyone I know always does in the UK.
Part of the reason is that I'm in the West of Canada, where we're under-represented in parliament and where people are still voting when the results in the East are already known. Yeah, there's a complete ban on reporting those results until the Western polls close, but it doesn't exactly help to ease the existing sense that our voices don't matter and that people in other provinces have already chosen the government before we've even voted. I've watched election night CBC news shows where the outcome was announced within ten minutes of our polls closing, before a single BC vote had even been counted.
Prince Edward Island: 33,824
Saskatchewan: 69,924
New Brunswick: 72,950
Newfoundland and Labrador: 73,276
Manitoba: 79,970
Nova Scotia: 82,546
Quebec: 96,500
Alberta: 106,243
Ontario: 107,642
British Columbia: 108,548
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Combining this situation with a first-past-the-post system is a recipe for voter disengagement and dangerously low turnouts, especially in the West3. We should have a mixed constituency MP / proportional representation system. You know, like the Scottish one (see how I managed to link what I originally planned to write about back into what I waffled on about at the beginning? Blogging WIN!)
Can any of my Canadian readers from over-represented and/or Eastern time zone provinces please let me know if there's any more election fever there than there is in BC? I might have to come for a visit during the next election campaign...
Anyway, if you're in the UK, enjoy all the swingometer action tonight! Have some red, blue, and/or yellow drinks for me.
And, if you haven't voted yet, GET OUT AND VOTE! You have a right that's been given to only a tiny minority of the people who have ever lived, and which is still denied to far too many: please don't take it for granted.
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1) Although I might vote next time just to make sure that I keep my rights in case I want to use them in the future - see Tideliar's recent post about trying to register as an overseas voter. I'd probably vote for the Green party though, or someone else who hasn't got a chance of winning.
2) I taught my parents how to play these podcasts from iTunes before I left this morning. They're both feeling homesick today.
3) Oh well, at least we've got the oil sands Rocky Mountains and all the best ski resorts.
They arrived on Saturday, on the same flight as my boss's inlaws1 and the woman who Gordon Brown called a bigot2. And now I have five weeks of chatting to my Dad about football before work! Oh, and endless comments of the "do you always have that kind of thing for breakfast?" variety. At least my Mum has finally given up trying to stop me (and my sister, when they visit her) from leaving the house with wet hair.
Yesterday morning was spent in the VanDusen Botanical Garden, which is in full and splendid bloom at the moment.
A non-blooming part of the garden. Oops!
My Dad's sense of humour has been documented here previously, but one thing I didn't mention was that every trip has to have a theme. He'll find something that amuses him, then create a whole set of jokes, stories, and banter around it. For example, after meeting someone on his flight once who had an annoying voice and rather unusual opinions on several issues, everything that happened on that trip had to be commented on and re-told as if by that person. It's always very funny for the first week, less so the second, and gets gradually more annoying through constant repetition. By the end of five weeks we'll be begging him to stop, but my poor Mum will have to live with it for at least another month after they get home.
Mr E Man's Scottish heritage is a recurring theme of my Dad's banter, and he happened to be wearing his Scotland rugby shirt yesterday. So when my Dad spotted a mention of a "famous Scottish tree hybridiser" on one of the Garden's plaques, it quickly became apparent that the theme for this trip was set.
"You Scotsmen will shag anything!" was the opening salvo. (Mr E Man did point out that this is not a very nice thing to say to the man who married your daughter).
There was much more banter along these lines as we made our way around the garden, and the puns and jokes continued over lunch. I know I shouldn't encourage my Dad in his efforts, but "Robert the Spruce" popped into my head and was too good not to share. My Dad then inquired whether Mr E Man's ancestors came from the Outer or Inner Hybridise3, and it's all been downhill since then.
Sigh.
Ah well, it's lovely to see them, and we have lots planned for the next few weeks. Luckily, both my parents seem happy to watch lots of hockey (Go Canucks Go! WOOOOOOO!). We're also taking them to see Delhi 2 Dublin (we've told my Dad that the venue will be serving curried Guiness), and to visit Mr E Man's mum and then one of his sisters. Oh, and we're going to Whistler so the boys can play golf and the girls can go to the spa. So if you don't see me round the blogosphere as much as usual, this is why... so much to do! Although we will have a temporary return to normality next week when my parents leave for their week-long Alaskan cruise, and they might also go down to Seattle for a couple of days at some point.
Oh, and the cats are being excellent ambassadors for their species; if this continues, my Mum should be able to persuade my Dad to get another cat (the last one died seven years ago), if/when she decides that she would like one. She's always been a pet person, but my Dad most definitely isn't, and he agreed to get the last cat only after much begging and crying by my sister and me. The cat turned out to be a vicious little bugger who'd rather scratch you than snuggle with you; Google and Saba are the opposite, and have already slept on his lap several times. Nice work, kitties!
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1) I ran into him and his family in the arrivals area. We had a long wait as there was a problem with the baggage carousel; my parents got one suitcase immediately, but had to wait an hour before the second one showed up.
2) Apparently she was very embarrassed to be recognised! I wonder if it was a pre-planned trip or if she suddenly felt the need to flee the country...
3) Link for those of you not au fait with Scottish geography
The events described in this post took place several weeks ago. I am only just able to bring myself to write about them...
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My hilarious soon-to-be sister-in-law, K, owns a float home. (Not a house boat, which is an actual boat that you live on, but rather a log cabin-like home that floats, and that you secure to a dock. You can't drive it like you can with a boat, but you can have it towed. Carefully).
I saw it for the first time on a cold and rainy night a couple of winters ago. We'd been invited for dinner, and showed up at the North Vancouver marina clutching flowers, a bottle of good red wine, and very complicated instructions to go to Gate E, enter a code on the security pad, go down the ramp, turn right at the hand rail covered in Christmas lights, then take the second left at the blue sail boat, and so on.
By the time we'd navigated the maze of floating walkways and found the right home, we were soaked through and freezing cold. But we were welcomed into a floating haven of light and coziness that made me fall in love at first sight.
Before I'd even taken my coat off, I turned to K and said, "if you ever decide to sell this place, CALL ME. Seriously".
Well, we got the call in September. K and my brother-in-law are selling her float home and his condo so they can buy a house; between them they have two grown-up kids, two almost teenaged boys, and a couple of large dogs, so it's time.
Mr E Man and I were very excited by this news. We both love being in, on, and around the ocean, so this would be perfect! We could buy kayaks and tie them up to the back of the house! I would even be able to commute by boat, FFS!
We started discussing how much we could afford to pay in additional mortgage payments, factoring in the rent we could charge for our current place.
But then we heard the asking price, as (finally) calculated by the rather lazy realtor. I was devastated; it was way more than we'd expected, and completely out of our price range. We briefly discussed selling our current place instead of renting it out in order to finance the deal, but the thing is that a float home is a depreciating asset, and there's no way we're going to give up the appreciating asset of our house*.
However, after the float home spent a few months on the market attracting very little interest, the realtor told K that it was time to drop the price. We got another phone call; at the new price, it would make more sense for K to sell the place to us directly at a further discount than to go through realtors and pay the fees on the revised price.
The excitement built again. I was all for going straight to the bank to renegotiate our mortgage, but luckily Mr E Man is much more sensible than me, and suggested that we spend a weekend at the float home before deciding. K agreed, and that's how we spent our first post-Olympics weekend.
When we walked through the door, it was just as lovely and cozy and warm as I remembered. I fell in love all over again.
The kitchen space is right by the front door
Laid-back neighbours
Back deck. No doubt Saba, our ever so "special" cat who often falls off the sofa, would fall off this, too. But Kyrsten, who has lived on a boat with a cat, had already suggested that a fishing net would be a functional and economic investment.
Main living space. The stairs lead up to the sleeping area. The bathroom is behind the wall with the painting on it. This information will be important in a TMI section later on in this post. You have been warned...
Extreme coziness inside...
...and extreme beauty outside, even on a cloudy day
We found a great brew pub within walking distance and had a lovely evening of good food, great beer, and awesome hockey on the TV. We then strolled back to the lovely float home, threw some more logs on the fire, and snuggled together on the sofa to re-watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on DVD.
At this point, we were ready to call the bank.
The problems started when we went to bed. The Queen sized mattress only just fit into the sleeping space; we have a King size, and can't imagine switching back. (Yes, I'm spoiled!) But worse was to come (and here comes the TMI...)
Mr E Man went to the loo while I was in bed, and, well, the privacy of the situation left a lot to be desired. For both of us, but especially for me. The bathroom is really nicely designed inside, but as you can see in the fourth photo in this post, it's separated from the sleeping area only by a wall of rough planks. Planks with gaps between them that let out far, far too much sound. And fumes. (Did I mention all the great beer? The brew pub does a very hoppy IPA that is delectably delicous... but dangerous).
A married couple can get used to these things, but what happens when you have guests?!
We had already highlighted the lack of a guest room as a problem. There's plenty of room for a sofa bed, but the whole space is open plan.We don't have guests all that often, but when they do come, they come for a long time (we have some British friends arriving on Thursday for nine days, then we have a couple of weeks off before my parents arrive for a month). Things can be frustrating enough in our current house, which has plenty of distance (and walls!) between the main and guest bedroom, but only one bathroom. My Mum in particular has a bad habit of taking very long showers without checking if anyone needs to get in ahead of her, often when I was just about to go and get ready to leave for work. In the float home, we just wouldn't be able to have long-term guests, and after that night, we were completely put off the idea of having any overnight guests at all!
Another con manifested itself at 1 am. And 2 am. And 3:30 am. And so on throughout the night. Yep; the railway tracks run right by the marina. You don't notice the sound during the day, but you sure as hell notice it when a train whistle suddenly wakes you from a deep sleep! This wouldn't be a deal breaker in and of itself; you can adjust to new noises over time. But on top of the other cons (and the smaller living and storage space; we'd be back to our apartment dwelling days of having bikes in the kitchen and skis and golf clubs in the living room), it was just a bit too much.
We agreed over breakfast at the awesome and OH, SO HEARTBREAKINGLY CLOSE! Lonsdale Quay Public Market that we should get over our state of denial and realise that we are in fact responsible grown-ups, who need to think clearly and rationally rather than basing major financial decisions on love at first sight.
But I could still feel the love.
The news a few days later that K had hired a new, less lazy realtor who was able to almost immediately sell the float home for way more than the original September asking price, came almost as a relief. I was still in two minds, and having the decision made for me made things so much easier. And the higher price really helps out our wonderful family members, who we love truly and dearly.
But.
But but but.
There will always be a little part of me that regrets not following my heart and buying K's beautiful, cozy float home.Given enough time and money we could have closed up the gaps in that bathroom wall; we could have built some kind of private space for guests; we could have built an extension to the sleeping space that would accommodate our King size mattress; we could have got used to the train whistles.
My head knows we made the right decision. But that doesn't stop me from thinking that being a grown-up really, really sucks sometimes.
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*or rather the land it's built on; the actual house is old and depreciating, and according to our last property tax assessment now makes up something like 8% of the total value of the property. That's Vancouver for ya; with the border to the South, ocean to the West, and mountains to the North, the only way to build is either up or East, making land in Vancouver proper extremely valuable. This is why Mr E Man insisted we buy a house with land rather than a condo or townhouse. He really is much more sensible than I am, and also much better at pretending to be a responsible grown-up.
Right after EcoGeoFemme pointed out that there haven't been many memes circulating recently, Amanda went and tagged me for one! The assignment is to write about seven things that I've never talked about in my blog.
This is a tricky one for me, because like in real life, I talk/blog too much and with too few filters. It's easy enough to find seven things I've never written about, but that aren't meaningful to me: porcupines, ravioli, WWII tank design, the history of ten pin bowling. My other initial reaction was to go too far in the other direction, into TMI territory, but luckily I decided to tone those ideas down (there still might be TMI for some people). So I present to you a mix of subjects I just haven't got around to, and subjects I've tried to blog about before as a full post but couldn't find the right angle, or that otherwise caused a severe case of writer's block.
1) I have a rather impressive scar on the inside of my left arm.
I got it in a rather embarrassingly cliched middle class way, by falling off a pony at a riding lesson when I was seven and breaking my arm just above the elbow. Contrary to everyone's first reaction, the main scar isn't from the bone breaking through the skin (although I do have a much smaller scar from that - just barely visible in the photo, slightly above and to the right of the mole). It's actually from the multiple surgeries I had to have to repair the blood vessels and nerves that the broken bone cut through at the point where they all bunch together at the elbow joint. My arm swelled up after one surgery, bursting a couple of stitches and stretching the scar tissue out, and it stretched further as I grew. I'm lucky to still have my arm at all; during one surgery that was supposed to last a couple of hours but was well into its seventh (my parents were freaking out at this point, as you can imagine), the surgeons discussed amputation as the best option. Luckily, they persevered and saved my arm. I was in traction for two weeks (apparently there's a published case study about how they set up the traction apparatus - I remember them videoing it - but I can't find it in PubMed), and it took a year or so of intensive physio before I could use my hand properly again. It still sometimes spazzes out on me and I lose my grip on whatever I'm holding with no warning: this is good in that it got me out of playing the viola in high school (the position I had to hold my wrist in seemed to aggravate the problem), but bad in that I once dropped an open 2L bottle of conc HCl while doing my undergrad research project, destroying my lab coat and a patch of the flooring. I've never held anything that scary in my left hand since, even though these incidents are much less common than they used to be.
I remember freaking out when I first saw the scar emerge from inside the cast I'd been wearing; it was hideously red and swollen and flaky and gross. I cried. A lot. However, I soon realised that I could use it to scare younger kids and chase them around the playground, and I almost always win "biggest scar" competitions. It's in such a discrete location, and it's faded and flattened so well, that people sometimes know me for years before they notice it, and it's such a normal part of me now that I barely even remember it's there. Also, the position of one of my moles makes it look like a winky smiley face.
Funnily enough, I have two friends with similar scars in the exact same place, following motorbike accidents. Motorbikes are much cooler than ponies.
OK, that one went longer than I'd intended... I'll try to be more concise in the remaining six points!
2) I sometimes have dreams about people I know that make me think about them in a completely different way. Usually just for the next day, but sometimes permanently. These dreams are sometimes the first conscious sign of something going on subconsciously, e.g. that it was time to let one friendship fizzle out, or that a formerly platonic friendship was heading in a new direction that had to be addressed. But other times they're just completely from left field and make me giggle with their weirdness.
There's a episode of Friends where Phoebe finally remembers why she's mad at Ross:
"Oh, come on! Yes... remember that time on the frozen lake? We were playing chess, you said I was boring, and then you took off your energy mask and you were Cameron Diaz! Okay, there's a chance this may have been a dream"
I couldn't find the clip on YouTube, but it sums up the latter category of dream perfectly.
3) Being around my friends' babies has had a complicated effect on me: it's made me feel very secure in my own decision not to have kids, but also made me less scared of an accident. We had a scare just before last summer's baby boom (my previously 100% reliable record of years of 27 day cycles suddenly disappeared with an unprecedented 42 day cycle) and I totally freaked out. We had another scare in November, and I freaked out considerably less. Although there was still some freaking, obviously.
4) I always used to say that if I won the lottery, I'd still want to work. But the older I get, the more I think I'd just want to bum about, living on a boat (summer) and in a ski cabin (winter) and maybe dabbling in a little writing. I think this is the opposite of how you're supposed to change as you get older.
5) I believe in ghosts. Well, I don't not believe in ghosts. I don't believe in the usual way; I don't think there are self-aware / conscious spirits floating around, trying to avenge their own deaths or otherwise deliberately haunting the living because of unresolved issues from their lives. I cycle through the local cemetery in the dark all the time: I aint afraid of no ghost! (Campfire stories are another matter entirely). But too many people I know and trust have told me too many, too convincing stories. There are also too many examples of multiple people seeing the same thing in the same place and/or at the same time.
The most convincing stories are where the person sees a ghost that doesn't interact with them. "This white apparition rose out of a grave and waved at me" doesn't cut it. But the other stories do. For example, my Dad has a story about a fellow student from his hall of residence who died after breaking his neck in a rugby scrum. A few weeks later my Dad was walking past this student's room (which had been emptied and locked up for the year; no-one else wanted to live there), and saw the dead guy open the door, walk out into the corridor, lock his room door behind him, and walk away without acknowledging my Dad, who was standing a few inches away with his mouth wide open. He says it was unmistakably, undeniably, definitely, the dead guy (in the dead guy's clothes). This student definitely did not have a twin or any other similar looking relatives (my Dad knew him well enough to go to the funeral and meet his family).
Now, I'm no physicist, but I do try to read the complicated physics articles in New Scientist, and I know that our understanding of time is incomplete and there are some unresolved problems with the current theories. Is it possible that we might sometimes catch a glimpse of someone or something from the past? That my Dad, and other people I know and trust who have similar stories, somehow watched a play-back of a moment from this guy's life, like watching a video?
I can almost hear Massimo (and any other physicists who read this) laughing at me right now.
Possible alternative explanations:
a) cognitive dissonance
b) my Dad is crazy
c) my Dad has repeatedly lied to me about this experience (I don't think he his. You should see his face when he tells this story).
d) lots of other people are either crazy or lying
e) I'm crazy
f) I've watched too much sci-fi
7) The sad demise of Mad Hatter's blog had really got me thinking. I totally understand her reasons. Don't worry / celebrate, I have no intentions of shutting down my blog. But blogging really is a trigger for wasting lots of time on the internet, time that would be better spent reading, writing, playing my guitar, and hanging with Mr E Man and the kitties. I spend a lot of time reading and commenting on blog posts, and I don't want to stop completely, because I love it. You guys are my friends, and I want to know what you're up to! Also, you can't / shouldn't be a blogger without also contributing to the community by reading and commenting on other people's blogs.
I think the solution (for me) is to try and be more selective. I went through my Google Reader account yesterday and deleted some feeds. I pruned way back to the bare bones, i.e. I unsubscribed from eight blogs (and resubscribed to three of them this morning). It's so hard! There are too many good blogs out there! So I think rather than reading fewer blogs, I need to read fewer posts on each blog. Almost every blog contains a mixture of things I'm really interested in, and things I'm less interested in (speaking of which, I do apologise for the recent flood of posts about Canadian politics. Please bear with me). For example, it's now five years since I last held a pipette, and I really don't have any useful, current advice to contribute to conversations about lab work and related aspects of the grad student / postdoc experience. Similarly, not being a prof or lecturer, I have nothing useful to contribute on posts about teaching methods and such.
So, if you see fewer comments and page hits from me, please forgive me! I'm still skim-reading in Google Reader, but applying more filters to my thorough reading and commenting. And I'll always click through to celebrate your highs and commiserate with your lows.
Unless they're about breaking a pipette while teaching.
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I tag: anyone willing to post their own scar photo!
