Not To Be Trusted With Knives

So I bet you want to know all about the Olympics Opening Ceremony, the dress rehearsal for which I attended tonight, don’t you?  But I can’t tell you.  I mean, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.  You know how it is with state secrets.  There were parts that are so secret they didn’t even show them.  They had stand ins for celebrities and in the place of the person’s name on the screen it would just say “Talent ID” or “Flag Bearer 1.” Anyway, suffice it to say that’s it’s pretty awesome.  Especially the part where Quatchi does a striptease.

Less awesome = the lineups.  We stood in no fewer that five lineups tonight – one to get into the stadium, one for the bathroom, two food lineups (because you can’t buy both the overpriced veggie dogs and the overpriced fries at the same concession stand) and a lineup for Skytrain to get home.  The lineup to get into the stadium was the most crazy – it circled around several blocks!  The food lineups were longer than they needed to be, both because they wouldn’t sell fries at the hot dog concession counter (even though the two concessions were side-by-side and appeared to share a kitchen) and because the people working there were, to put it nicely, not very efficient.  Lineups are not my friend.

But the show totally made it worth all the lineups!  I can’t wait to see it on TV on Friday!

Tags: Canada, Olympics, Opening Ceremonies, sports, Vancouver, Vancouver 2010

I spent most of today and a good chunk of yesterday packing.  I now have the kitchen¹, the bathroom and the bedroom completely packed².  And I did all my laundry, including all the blankets and sheets³, and I took books back to both the Vancouver Public Library and UBC Library. The things I have left to do before moving day⁴:

• pack up my printer, scanner and the various things in my geek drawer
• pack all the food from my cupboards⁵
• make sure everything is saved off old desktop and laptop
• take old desktop to Kalev’s storage
• take various computer thingys to Free Geek
• take books to used bookstore and other crap to thrift store:

In other packing-related news, I was talking to Betty, my former landlady (who used to own the house until they sold it a few months ago, but is renting the upstairs until the end of this month) who said that I can have any of the furniture in my place (as I’ve been renting a furnished place⁶).  Which means I don’t have to buy a kitchen table and chairs! Yay!  I’m also taking this furniture, which I’ve been using in my kitchen these past three years:

And Betty let me in on a little secret: that’s baby furniture!  The thing I’ve been using as a microwave stand, is in actuality a baby change table!  As soon as she told me that, I could totally see it, but until that point it had never occurred to me that it was anything but kitchen furniture!

But even as the Flying Spaghetti Monster giveth, the Flying Spaghetti Monster taketh away. As I mentioned the other day, I’m making a concerted effort to get rid of things that I really don’t need.  For the most part, it’s been easy to toss things⁷ – like stuff that doesn’t fit/I don’t like anymore/is expired.  But there were two things that I needed to toss that gave me pause.  One was my old McMaster jacket.  It’s about 15 years old, and pretty wrecked up.  I know that I’ll never wear it again, but it was still tough to throw it away.  I took these photos to remember it by:

And the other thing I had to toss was my beloved eBay shoes!  You remember them, right?  Oh, the times we had!  I didn’t take a photo of them because they were pretty wrecked up and I want to remember them in better times.  I have photos like these to remember them by:

You will be missed, Mac jacket and beloved eBay shoes.

1. except the food [↩]
2. I’m staying at Tod’s this week so that I could just pack up everything at my place and not worry about needing to leave some stuff unpacked to use for the next week [↩]
3. have to take advantage of the in-home laundry while I still have it [↩]
4. Feb 15 [↩]
5. stuff from the fridge and freezer will get packed the day of, for obvious reasons [↩]
6. I have some of my own stuff, but a fair bit of it is theirs. But they are downsizing to a retirement condo so they can’t even keep all of the furniture upstairs, let alone the stuff in the basement [↩]
7. or put them into the “to donate” pile [↩]

Tags: eBay shoes, furniture, moving, packing

I picked up my Olympic tickets today!

Women’s hockey and men’s sledge hockey.  Stoked!

I had to go downtown to pick them up and downtown is really looking spiffy these days.  My personal fav is this building with the giant Canadian flag on it:

Also, I saw these dudes from Russia walking down Granville:

Oh yeah, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I also have a ticket to go see a dress rehearsal of the Opening Ceremonies on Monday!  I’m probably more excited about that than anything!  My friend Kim’s husband is in the show and everyone in the show got tickets to the dress rehearsals for their family/friends.  So Kim and I are going to see what people are paying thousands of dollars to see, but we get to see it for free and four days earlier!

Let the games begin!

Tags: 2010, Canada, hockey, Olympics, Opening Ceremonies, sledge hockey, sports, Vancouver, Vancouver 2010, Winter Olympics

Given how many cardboard boxes must be used every day to ship all the things that get shipped, you would expect it to be really easy to get your hands on those boxes.  I’m finding out, however, that this is not the case. I went to two liquor stores, a grocery store, a hardware store, and a drug store last night and all I managed to get were two sub-par boxes from the produce section of the grocery.  The drug store told me to call this morning and ask them to put the boxes aside for me, as they break them down and get rid of them right away.  The liquor store said to drop by today as that’s when they get their shipment.

I raided the recycling room at work and when I was at a meeting at another health unit yesterday afternoon, I raided their recycling room too!  Working in health, however, means you end up with boxes like this one:

And this one:

And my personal favourite:

Tags: boxes, moving, packing, photos

Sometimes you have two vices that are in direct opposition to one another.  For example, my ex’s BFF, who I like to refer to as SFP¹ often used to have an internal battle between the vices of “sloth” and “gluttony.”  Would his sheer laziness prevent him from walking to the store to buy copious amounts of peanut butter cups?  It was always amusing to watch such a battle play out.

Right now, I’m having to face my own Battle of the Vices.  My pack rat nature is fighting with my extreme desire to minimize the amount of shit I have to pack and move to my new place.  Fortunately, I have been waging a conscious fight against my tendency to hoard² and so laziness is winning the battle.

When I moved to my current place more than three and a half years ago, I was finishing up my PhD and so I had a lot of paper.  Boxes upon boxes upon boxes of journal articles, data analyses and multiple versions of multiple manuscripts.  Seeing as I’ve been done the dissertation for three years, all the manuscripts are published, and I no longer do research in that specific area, I think it’s safe to part with the vast majority of that paper³.  As well, I had really, really old financial records that I felt it was time to send on its merry way.

So this is what I took out to the recycling tonight:

The big green bag is shredded paper.  The rest are the paper that didn’t need shredding.

The toboggan, in case you are wondering, is just there because I was too lazy to move it to take the picture.  It’s not being recycled.

1. Stupid Friend Paul [↩]
2. which I come by honestly, I might add. [↩]
3. I have to keep the original data as that’s not replaceable and someone could, in theory, ask to see it, even all these years later.  But all the journal articles can be obtained from the library again should I ever need them and I have electronic copies of all the data analyses [↩]

Tags: lazy, moving, pack rat, packing, photos, vices

Tags: apartment, moving, video clip

So here’s the “to do” list I came up with off the top of my head for all the things I need to do for my move:

Can you think of anything I’ve overlooked?

Tags: list, moving, to do, to do list

So, I’ve found a new place to live.  I have to tell you I was ridiculously stressed out when I got the news that I had to move.  Like stressed out enough that I couldn’t eat for two days¹. There were a variety of reasons for this extreme stress reaction², including the fact that I *hate* apartment hunting, I hate packing, I hate moving and that this forced me to face a decision that I knew I should be facing.  That decision: Do I move to the ‘burbs?

I am not a suburbs kind of girl.  I grew up in the suburbs and I hated it.  I hated that everything is so sprawling you have to drive places instead of walking.  I hated that you can’t get everywhere you need to go by using public transit³.  I hated all the chain restaurants and big box stores.  I hated that there was nothing to do (though this isn’t quite the same in the suburbs around here as it was in my teeny tiny hometown).  But the fact remains that I work in the suburbs now and I currently spend 7.5 hours per week commuting from Vancouver.  And that’s 7.5 hrs that I can’t use for running or other forms of exercise, sleeping, blogging, or doing freelance work⁴.  It’s a full workday every week that’s wasted⁵.  In addition, I spend my weekends primarily at Tod’s, so my place really is more of a weekday home base.  I have to admit that it doesn’t really make sense to pay the higher rent of living in Vancouver and commit all that commuting time when I’m only in my place weekdays anyway. I still will spend my weekends in Vancouver and any weeknights I want to hang out with friends, it’s no big deal to drive to Vancouver, seeing as I’m used to driving from Vancouver to Surrey and back every weekday anyway!  (If it sounds like I’m trying to justify this choice to move to the ‘burbs, it’s only because I am.)

And so I have decided to take a place in Surrey.  A place that is five minutes from my work, in fact.  It’s bigger than anything I could reasonably afford in Vancouver, as well as nicer than the places I looked at in the city⁶.

Here are the deets:

• 850 sq ft
• all new appliances include a freaking DISHWASHER!!⁷
• lots of counter space (and very pretty countertops!) in the kitchen
• a bathtub (my current place only has a shower) with pretty sliding glass doors
• good sized closets for storage
• alarm system⁸
• rent includes heat, hydro, water, cable⁹, but not Internet

The major drawback of this place is that there’s no laundry.  It’s actually a pattern I noticed – any basement suites I looked at in Vancouver had laundry included (you just share it with the people who live upstairs), but all the ads for places in the suburbs say “no laundry, sorry.”  I’m not sure what it is about driving over the Oak and Knight Street bridges that makes above-ground dwellers unwilling to share their washer and dryer, but that just seems to be the way it is.  And for me, the inconvenience of going to a laundry mat once every week¹⁰ is outweighed by the glory of not having to wash my own dishes EVER AGAIN.

I signed the lease on my new place yesterday and take possession today!  The plan is to move in over February (i.e., moving in a few things here and there and then book movers to move the furniture and heavy boxes on one day).  It means I’ve had to scuttle my plan to do the 30-day yoga challenge, as I just won’t have time for it while packing and moving¹¹.  On the plus side, I’d kept most of my weeknights free with the intent of doing yoga, so I don’t have to cancel a bunch of dinners/coffees/other social occasions (as I would on a normal month).

So – anyone know of any good moving companies?

Also, consider this your forewarning: many of my blog postings this month will likely be about moving!

1. well, I did have about three things to eat in those two days, but I had to force myself to eat them [↩]
2. some of which I’m not going to talk about in a public forum [↩]
3. at least not in a reasonable time frame [↩]
4. not necessarily in that order! [↩]
5. I do listen to audiobooks to make it not entirely wasted, but I could listen to audiobooks in the comfort of my own home when I feel like it rather than basing my listening on my commuting schedule [↩]
6. except for one that was equally nice, but way, way smaller and dishwasher-less, and most costly [↩]
7. I’ve never in my life had a dishwasher.  And I LOATHE doing dishes. LOATHE! [↩]
8. though anytime a place has an alarm system, my first thought is “oh gawd, why do I need an alarm??” [↩]
9. of course, I don’t have a TV currently, but my friend Kim has an extra one! [↩]
10. or two – I have a lot of clothes [↩]
11. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for the next 30 day yoga challenge though, you can be sure! [↩]

Tags: apartment, basement dwelling, housing, moving, rampant narcissism, renting, Surrey, Surrey girl, Vancouver

For Christmas, my friend Clayton got me an iTunes gift card. He did so specifically because he knows I’m too cheap to buy any paid apps for my iPhone, but he knew I’d appreciate being able to get my hands on some sweet, sweet iPhone apps.

I redeemed my card to my account and then bought an app, but the app got charged to my credit card instead, which I thought was pretty annoying.  So I took my credit card information out of iTunes, so that the only payment info they would have would be the gift card.  And then I tried to buy another app, but iTunes asked for credit card info and there was no way to say, “Just use the damn gift card!” It was super frustrating, because I could see in the upper right of my iTunes that I have $50 worth of credit!  So I tweeted my frustration, figuring that the geeks would know how I could fix this problem.  And I got responses right away, but unfortunately it was not good news.  Apparently in Canada you can’t use iTunes gift certs to buy apps due to some sort of “tax laws and commerce restrictions for software in Canada.”

What a bunch of crap.

Image Credit: Posted by Zoë Campbell on Flickr.

Tags: bunch of crap, Canada, iTunes

Saw this over on Feisty, Frugal & Fabulous.  Apparently this was in the New Brunswick Legislature earlier this week.

Tags: Canada, hilarious, New Brunswick Legislature, pants on the ground, T. J. Burke