VANCOUVER - Flight of the Bumblebeast

My small but slowly-gathering-pace Vancouver Phworld following tell me that I'm obviously working too hard as blog frequency has been suffering of late. This is quite possibly true: working for the Church is not like anywhere else. Your working hours are an opening offer; not a done deal. Mine are some multiple of twenty... Also, I have had nature to contend with. Following the recent blizzards, we had literally days of grey normality before the skies rolled and another huge set of storms battered the lower mainland. No trees down this time, but some big power outages including one of the major sets of traffic lights on the roads between Downtown and West Vancouver. Cause of many an hilarious incident of overly polite Canadians being too terrified to actually move at junctions (I was back in the Mercedes and took the right of way which was, quite obviously, mine) Finally, early Saturday morning after the fabulous Galvani Christmas Bash I found myself driving home on empty highways... and into an horrendous blizzard which came from nowhere.

So, you see, a lot of busy-ness and no news whatsoever... Hmmm... Well, in the absence of real news, here's a lot of me wittering on about my new apartment.


New living room! New TV and DVD player! New fouton! New Christmas tree! New Tibetan prayer flags! And, guess what? None of them are mine! At all! Not even the prayer flags; despite the fact I own a similar set back in Britain! Isn't it lovely when you meet people who share some of your more bizarre interests?

There's a couple of ways of finding houses. Back in the olden days; one would arrive in a new place, spend some time in a youth hostel or alike and after money started dwindling make a haphazard selection of people from the slim pickings in your dorm and go find a horrid apartment to go suffer in for several months until seething resentment grew to a point where you'd either move on to repeat the process or kill everyone in sight. Those days were, of course, around last year. These days, however, we have craigslist.org (thegumtree.com for you limeys out there) For just a few taps of the keyboard, all sorts of potential new friends and psychopaths for your choosing!

I actually did all the scouting, viewing and choosing within my first weeks of arriving here. However, due to several factors (mostly involving my fabulous no-money status) I only moved in at the beginning of this month. Obviously I am not living with a psycho: most of our decor is cream and if either of us did have to butcher the other to death then there would be all sorts of blood on the walls/carpets problems to deal with and we're both rather too keen on decent interior design to let that happen. Josee (for it is she) is a French Canadian who works on one of the local ski resorts. She is into indie cinema, decent cooking and long distance relationships. We get on famously, not that I'm in enough for us to actually see each other...


Josee and I purchased and assembled a funky Ikea bookcase/showcase. For books and, uh, showy stuff. Being a new immigrant with only two bags to my name, very little of the interesting French literature and reference material therein is my own. However, givers of some of my more wonderful pieces of tack and cute stuffed animals may be able to recognise their contributions.

As you can see, we're a little unfurnished at the moment. Some of the better blog pictures from the last year will be printed out in massive style for the walls; and I'll be acquiring some furniture to go with my bed (which is *huge*. Bigger than a poker champion's wallet and entirely unnecessary for my needs. But I work in West Vancouver. This is what I have to do these days) I'm also planning to have a couple of youth group Christmas parties this week, as well as jumping on ship for a couple of Christmas dinners next Monday. Sometime in the middle of all the chaos, I'll be dissapearing for a week in Cincinatti, and maybe even taking the BC driving test which is an inevitable horror I've been dreading for some time... And then maybe, just maybe, I'll find something genuinely interesting to blog about.