Bringing home Baby

The new addition, Mazda 2

In honour of Mother's Day (May 8th here) Lorne and I became proud parents to Mazda 2 GX, our brand new baby.....car! Well, almost. While we did sign the adoption papers we actually didn't get to take the new addition home with us right away - in fact we've had to wait almost 2 weeks - but finally picked it up today.

Wahoooo. It's a manual/standard/stick-shift too, so I have to get used to that again, after driving only automatics over here. In test-driving this car it was bizarre how my muscle memory had me reaching down the door panel with my left hand to change gears, since the gearstick would have been to my left when I learned to drive back in England. Old habits die hard - hopefully I won't also revert to driving on the left, or that could be a bigger problem. Eeeek!

It's a great little 4-door hatchback (very much a european size/style car) and should be a little more economical on gas - which is presently sitting around $1.40/litre in Vancouver. So compact that we can even park her in the driveway with room to spare.

Nissan Altima, the loyal old family dog

As silly as it sounds, I can't deny I feel incredibly guilty to our old car, like we're giving up the devoted old family dog for a sprite new puppy. :-( Our 14 yr old, ever-faithful Nissan Altima has served us so well for the past 6.5 years - trouble-free (despite the fact I just about reversed it down a staircase during the first week - long story, but seriously - who puts a basement loading bay in a single-level parking lot?) and with less than 130,000 km on the clock, she still runs incredibly well and has never been a problem nor a huge expense. Yes, it'll be a sad day when we say our goodbyes to the Altima - though perhaps still not quite as sad as the day we left Lorne's funky old massive 1977 cadillac (aka couch on wheels) at the scrap yard to meet it's fate with the crusher. We were both pretty choked-up that day and didn't hang around to watch.

Anyway, I have to end here and get packed because - we are go-ing to San....Fran....Cisco.

A week or two of things that did and didn't happen

While I'm in this long-overdue 'post' mode, I thought I'd also do a quick summary of other recent events - good, bad and painful - in hope that I can finally get a little more caught up on this blog.

Did: Resign and leave the Big Brother environment of a certain downtown architecture, engineering, interior design company, after just under two years. I'm surprised it even took that long really - considering there were many occasions during the masses of never-ending overtime there last year, that I came oh-so-very close. I'll spare the gory details but, apart from having a pretty decent direct boss and quite enjoying the company of my marketing co-workers (even though personal pleasantries and conversations were limited and often felt frowned upon), it was an excessive and thankless task - but hey, I learned a lot!  And in resigning, I also learned to enjoy the sense of empowerment that goes with choosing to leave because I simply can't support their gun-ho strategy of sleeping with the oil sands enemy across Alberta - while triumphantly touting themselves as 'sustainable'. Greedily wringing your hands with $$S signs in your eyes & saying you're designing 'LEED-based' buildings for the massive worker's camps/towns at these environmentally disasterous facilities, does not a truly 'sustainable' company make. In fact such claims are what's more commonly known as green-washing.

Anyway, it came as no great surprise that I didn't get a single word of thanks from any of the principals (ie Directors/shareholders) for whom I repeatedly slogged myself ragged at work, making sure the hundreds of proposals, for projects they claimed to want, looked great and were sufficiently researched and well-written to meet the endless stream of hard and intense deadlines. Of course it also didn't help that the wide-eyed puppy in HR waited till the day before I left to actually send out a company-wide email which was so vague that it actually made it sound like I'd got fired. Cheers!

Anyway, who cares? - I'm just pleased to have escaped from that particular workhouse where fun, personality and warmth were to be checked at the door upon entry.

Didn't: Get to enjoy my first ever simulated sky-diving adventure courtesy of Vancouver's FlyZone on my birthday. Lorne's so good at booking surprises and, being the luv that he is, had secretly booked us both at Fly Zone, but when the confirmation came with accompanying Rules and Regulations, he knew he had to let me in on the surprise.... First thing on the "Cannot participate if..." list? If the participant has ever had a shoulder dislocation. Nooooo!!!!  Since I had 7 dislocations and eventually surgery on my left shoulder and my right shoulder is loose and unpredictable at best, there really was no way we could ignore this one. Bummer! I would LOVE to do this skydiving - simulated or for real. I could not believe my bad luck and calling them just to double-check didn't tell me anything different. Un-bloody-believable! I would have just gone for it anyway except that I have been getting odd twinges of instability in both shoulders. Potentially dislocating both at once on my birthday just didn't sound like such a fun idea after all. :-(

Still, in its place, Lorne's going to take me zip-lining in Victoria - something else I've always wanted to do. He did it with some friends last year and had a blast, so I can't wait!

I did unfortunately encounter my first ever bout of strep throat. Wow, it's nasty and I hope we never meet again!!! I've never had such a painful and incredibly swollen throat and glands - my neck was starting to look more like a mountain range. Of course it kicked in full-force the night I finished one job and was hoping to enjoy 4 days off, including my birthday, before starting the new one. Timing, eh? That said, praise be to penicillin, my new superhero - I was thankfully feeling much better within 4-5 days.

Anyhow, despite the strep throat saga, I did nevertheless have a lovely birthday - Lorne completely pampered me with the most amazing breakfast in bed; big fat croissants, pastries/tarts, fruit, bread & yummy cheese. Had I felt better, I would have happily supped a bucks-fizz too, but I wasn't quite up to it at the time. Such a lovely brekky, it was very reminiscent of the outstanding spread that they put on at the delightful B&B "Casa D'Obidos" where we stayed in Obidos, Portugal 5 years ago. We've reminisced often about the wonderous breakfast-fairies who seemed to sneak in overnight and decorate the enormous dining-table with an endless array of tantalizing treats and heavenly goodies.

And on the birthday theme I did receive a surprise ticket to see Ray LaMontagne with Vicky on Sept. 2nd. Wohooo. What better excuse to continue my birthday in another 4 months? I've seen him perform a couple of times before, and really enjoyed it. We're going to make a night of it - go for dinner, see the concert & stay at a hotel downtown just for the hell of it. Can't wait - thanks Vicky, Mark, Bronwyn and River xxx. Thanks to Mum too, for the delicate little silver locket, which thankfully didn't get kicked around or smushed in the post. xxx

I did also start back at running - for the first time since last Summer when I was suffering severe and ongoing muscle spasms/stress in my bum cheek (of all places) and finally had to give up altogether. Albeit I've only done 3 short  runs so far and they have felt like hard work plus I'm presently running a few minutes slower than last year and still a long ways off from the 90-100mins I had worked up to previously, but so far so good.

So now that I'm in week 2 of the new job, the weather's finally picked up, I had a lovely birthday, barring the strep throat which is thankfully now history, and I'm heading into a few days off AND a long weekend to visit San Francisco for the first time - I'm feeling pretty darn good!  :-)  Plus I just had a few days home alone while Lorne's been off touring bourbon distilleries in Kentucky with a couple of friends. It sounds like he's had a fun trip and I look forward to more details - and ideally some Duty Free - when he gets home tonight.

Et voila.

Thanks to a little help from my friends

I've never really been one for having a wide circle of friends. A posse. A gaggle of girlies. Or going out in a crowd - except when 7 of us shared a house during my university years and we'd each pour our booze of choice into a single mixing bowl and then sit around it, each armed with a straw, slurping up whatever potent cocktail would get us drunk quickest so that we could spend as little money as possible actually in the bars. The pangalactic gargleblaster was often a post-nuclear blue or luminescent greeny/yellow in colour. Both going down and...sometimes....coming back up. But whatever mix we concocted, there was always vodka in it...somewhere.

From what I remember (if I spin myself around 20 times and cover one eye), we always had fun...and came home blurry, slurry and craving a toast party, raiding the cupboards of every last slice of bread. (Is that just a British thing I wonder? To demolish a whole loaf of bread as you ricochet between fridge, cupboard, fridge, couch, fridge, toaster, plate cupboard and back to couch again.) Yes, it was all fun, games and toast massacres - till the hangover kicked in anyway.

But apart from that, I've always preferred to keep just one or two close friends, friends that mean a lot to me, rather than flutter around in a complex and catty network of Sex-in-the-City-wannabes. Well, that probably sounds more derogatory than I intend (or did I?), but I've experienced a couple of examples of the latter...and decided to keep my distance. Hard to be heartfelt honest with someone whom you know simply can't resist the urge to seek the 'worldly' perspective of her 40 or so nearest and dearest cohorts

Anyhow, on the note of good friends, I'm eternally grateful for the 3 wonderful women in my life (aside from my sister, who will always be my number 1), who have recently - and successfully - given me a prod in the right direction. A gentle, and in one case perhaps unintentional, shove towards new endeavours (not naming any names or anything Linda).

So without further ado, I'd like to pay homage to them.

Firstly there's Jo - who just made my week, my month, my year and quite possibly even more! Jo and I first met in 2006 when we did Basic and Intermediate Digital SLR photography courses together at Focal Point. We've stayed friends and have shared many a personal, creative and career dilemma. I've always admired her humour and down-to-earth nature as much as her creativity and artistic eye, which is different to my own but that's what I like - she sees things differently, physically as well as metaphorically and it comes across in her photography and other creative endeavours. I enjoy her easy and spontaneous company.
I have Jo to thank for the excitement of having my first ever photograph published!!! Wohoooo - as a poster (left - click on it to enlarge) and accompanying leaflet for an upcoming art event that she's organizing as part of her job with the North Vancouver Community Arts Council.

She was kind enough to suggest I send her some of my photos, knowing that I've done a fair bit of macro photography too. She also said wonderful things about the pictures I've posted on Flickr and from that, and with a little help from her own graphic artistry, this beautiful poster was born. I'm honoured and really, really excited about it. It looks great, even if I do say so myself and I'm ridiculously pleased that this is one of my very own photographs - and put to such great use!

It makes me think a lot more seriously about what Vicky and other people have said on many occasions - I should display/sell or otherwise do more with my photographs. Heck, I make cards all the time - why not even use my own photographs for them, take it in a different direction?

Then there's Linda: whom I have to thank wholeheartedly for the inadvertent push and inspiration to seeking pastures new and for being hands-down the best person I've ever had the pleasure to work with; lovely, funny, warm, sarcastic, caring and an ever-patient sympathizer and co-conspirator against the Orwellian austerity of life at the proposal workhouse and the egotistical architects, designers and salivating, money-hungry oil/tar sands megalomaniacs that dwell therein.

For the most part I hated the job. The few months Linda was around (a short while before and after her maternity leave) was the only time it was ever bearable and the only times I felt like I could actually be human again rather than the humourless robot that was expected of me most of the time; less chat more work, where the vacuous, pin-dropping silence was broken only by the profuse, echoing clickety-clicks of keyboards.

The return of my ally, the only person to utter more than two words every 9 hours, was the only thing that kept me from resigning sooner - so when she was kind and honest enough to share with me one lunchtime just a few short weeks ago that she was thrilled to have been accepted onto a Masters program (to become a Notary) starting this Fall - I was truly happy for her....at the same time I heard a definitive death knell. Without Linda there was simply no way I could ever face going back to the soulless, thankless life of relentless deadlines and life-sucking hours of overtime that has overshadowed and even consumed my life for the best part of the last 2 years.

While it had crossed my mind beforehand (and as a New Year's resolution) to start looking for a more normal job, ideally in the non-profit sector, Linda's announcement that she'd be moving on, to something much more exciting, rewarding and personally fulfilling was inspirational, admirable and a massive kick in the pants to get MOVING. I was so happy for her (and still am, I might add) but my heart also sank at the thought of the endless grey drudgery that would once more be my day job if she were to leave.

So thank you Linda - for trusting in me enough to share your wonderful news :-)  and for brightening the days at that horribly impersonal place that shall remain nameless. If it helps any, I do feel guilty that it happened so fast, meaning I had to abandon you back there - but you're on the home stretch!!!

And that brings me to my next great friend, Deb, who - by some sixth sense perhaps - called me up the evening of the very same day Linda had shared her plans to ask if I'd ever applied for the job with the Canadian Cancer Society that she'd been kind enough to send me a couple of months earlier. I'd read it at that time but felt maybe it wasn't right, I was unsure, things at work had been marginally better & with less overtime (because Linda was back) and ....well....in my usual style of procrastination, I held off. Deb informed me that they'd gone through the interview process, even short-listed candidates, but didn't feel confident with the person being what they were really looking for. In her unwavering faith in my personality and abilities, Deb had the tenacity and goodwill to poke me a second time around and encourage me to apply. Besides, she's been working for CCS in Victoria for several years and I've always admired/quietly envied the fire and passion with which she talks about her job and the people she works with. I'd be crazy not to want some of that for myself - or so you'd think. Apparently it took waving it under my nose a second time around to finally light a fire under my bum....and here I am, two days in at my new job, working for the Canadian Cancer Society in Vancouver! I have every hope that this is indeed the start of something wonderful - and definitely more fulfilling, inspiring and I love that it's non-profit rather than sloggin' myself stupid for greedy corporate bigwigs who couldn't give a damn about what really matters - except for ruthlessly fattening profit margins and planning their next yacht purchase or 5-star vacation.

Not only that, but – for obvious reasons – the amazing work of the Canadian Cancer Society (and similar counterparts) is close to my heart for the most important role it has played in making sure Vicky received such fast and outstanding medical attention in her recent fight against breast cancer. A powerful, life-changing journey for which I cannot help but feel I was personally and emotionally inadequate and sadly less of a support to her than I truly wanted to be. I only hope that I can one day more than make up for that.

So here I am.....just days into a new job, just got my first photograph published, enjoying a fresh start in a new direction - and thankful to the sprinkling of incredibly wonderful, thoughtful, caring and fabulous friends who support me in the nicest possible ways! And not-fogetting a sister who's all that and more!

So I might be able to count me friends on less than one hand, but they are close to my heart, caring, fun and amazing and their friendship means such a lot to me.

I'm very lucky indeed.