We live in a beautiful world...yeah we do, yeah we do

Friday is my favourite day of the week, and Friday afternoon at half past four is my favourite time of my favourite day of the week. It is the moment of the week where the longest amount of time exists before I have to return to work. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my job, but it can't compete with free time on any level. As I often find myself in a celebratory frame of mind on Friday, it's the day of the week where I most frequently indulge in little out of the ordinary extras. A favourite meal for dinner, a nice bottle of wine, going to a favourite bar, checking out a movie I've been waiting to see, etc.

This past Friday, the sun was still up when I arrived home from work and I asked Baasje if he would like to take a walk down to the little beach at the end of our street before dinner. I quickly changed out of my work clothes, put on my hiking boots, grabbed my iPod - but neglected to get my camera, a decision I would later regret - and ten minutes later, we were there. I hadn't brought my camera as I assumed, after three previous visits to our little beach, that I had plenty of pictures of the piles of driftwood, the rocky outer edges of the cove, the mountains across the water. Regretfully, I did not consider that the shoreline changes throughout the day. When we arrived, as the sun was beginning to set, the tide was out and a stretch of tidal pools and large sandy flats had been exposed. The water was smoother and the mountains across the water were tinted pink and orange. We walked to the far end of the cove, to a spot that is inaccessible at high tide, and stood on the rocks watching the sun set. I never in a million years would ever have guessed I would one day live by the ocean.

Up island adventure: Our first trip over the Malahat



Saturday morning we woke up, ate a quick breakfast and hit the road on our up island adventure. Since arriving in Victoria, I'd heard numerous people remark on the beautiful, sometimes dangerous, frequently tedious, drive over the Malahat - the mountain just west of Victoria and gateway to the north side of the Island. The Saturday traffic was a little congested in spots, but we managed to make it to the summit (elevation 352m) in under an hour. We spent a few minutes at the summit taking pictures and enjoying the view and then drove on to Chemainus to check out their "world famous" murals. The highlight of our road trip was definitely lunch at the Crow and Gate, a spectacularly situated pub owned and operated by British ex-pats. As most country pubs go, it was located in the middle of nowhere, though you wouldn't have guessed this from the crowd inside. Baasje had a scotch egg and I had the cheddar cheese ploughman's lunch. Both meals were delicious and we purchased some of their homemade rhubarb and red onion chutney to take home. We arrived at our destination, Qualicum Beach, a little after two o'clock in the afternoon and spent the afternoon catching up with Baasje's dad and two aunts.

Unfortunately, we've woken up to rain this morning (the day after our arrival), so I think we'll have to save the hikes we had planned until next time. Though it doesn't have to stop us from doing a little reconnaissance, as Baasje's Tante Marianne puts it. We'll be heading out soon and I guess we'll see where the day takes us.

Oh, wake me please when this is over...

It saddens me to no end that the corporate machine still has a strong enough grip on the music industry to have the means, and the gall, to drag us all through another Gram-lamity. 2008 best pop male vocal performance nominees, Kid Rock, Paul McCartney, Jason Mraz, Ne-Yo and James Taylor. I'm sorry, but can you repeat that? No, wait - please, don't.

In my admittedly sheltered experience, I find it difficult to imagine that the pop music industry could still be profitable enough to warrant this kind of behaviour. Don't get me wrong, I'm spending more money on music these days than I ever have, but it's certainly not on James Taylor or Kid Rock albums. In fact, I'm not even buying albums so much anymore.

My top 5 concerts of 2008


1) Holy Fuck, Plants and Animals
LOLA Festival, London, Ontario
September 29, 2008

I went to check out the Saturday night offerings at last summer's LOLA Festival to take in the Plants and Animals concert. It ended up being one of those delicious live music experiences were I was awestruck by a first time encounter with a band other than the one I had come to see. In my books, Holy Fuck is the first group since Pink Floyd to achieve a truly innovative and successful marriage of rock and technology (well okay, maybe Mike Patton's pretty good at it, too).

When I came across the band listed on the LOLA website, I had abruptly concluded that the name was the tragic and annoying result of a frat-boy perception of a clever moniker. By the time the first song had finished, I was drawn to admit the performance was leading me to rethink not only the appropriateness of their choice of band name, but my entire perception of what I had previously considered to be a tasteless expletive.

2) Iron and Wine
Phoenix Nightclub, Toronto, Ontario
November 13, 2008

It was a warm late autumn evening and Sam Beam and company played a lengthy set that encompassed a good assortment of offerings from all three albums in the Iron and Wine discography at Toronto's historic Phoenix Nightclub. Afterward we stopped at a kebab place for a snack before driving back to London. All in all, a fabulous evening.

3) The Sadies
Grand Stage Music and Arts Festival, Paris, Ontario
July 12, 2008

I'm not a big fan of North American versions of the outdoor summer festival. Too often the music seems to take a back seat to the underage drunk-fest in the beer garden. Thankfully the Sadies took the stage before the atmophere degraded into an alcoholic stupor. Well, to be fair, this particular festival never reached that point, most likely due to the excellent food options in the canteen (the pulled pork was delicious). Anway, the Good brothers were in fine, high-energy form and the thunderstorm in the distance that framed the stage with black clouds and streaks of lightning was a nice touch.


4) Great Lake Swimmers wsg Kate Maki
Lee's Palace, Toronto, Ontario
October 18, 2008

It was great to have the chance to take in one last performance from the Ongiara era before the upcoming release. My favourite band playing at my favourite Toronto venue - this concert probably would have been higher up in the list had it not been for the ridiculous heckler standing beside us.

5) Mother Mother wsg The Wooden Sky
Call the Office
London, Ontario
October 19, 2008

Ever since this concert, Mother Mother has been in heavy rotation on my iPod. They're just so damn fun.

How to move you, your partner and all your belongings across the country for $1000 - part deux

When we decided to make the move to Victoria, it quickly became apparent that it would be unreasonably expensive to move any of our large belongings out with us. On the bright side, this meant that there was no need to despair over which furniture to keep and which to jettison - we could just collectively morn the loss of our furniture in general. Considering this was the result of a choice we had made of our own free will and that more furniture was on the horizon, we did our best to get over it and move onto the decidedly more difficult task at hand - what to purge of the assortment of personal belongings the two of us had amassed over a total duration of 60+ years.

Top 10 casualties of the big purge:

1. The Vasque hiking boots Baasje purchased on the day we met (I was covering for the cashier on her lunch break)
2. The anvil*
3. My Monsterland upright video arcade game
4. The remainder of my vinyl collection
5. Most of my comics and graphic novels
6. Most of Baasje's wood working tools
7. Our large cast iron frying pan with an awesome finish that took over 10 years to build up
8. My Gamecube and games, most notably my copy of Zelda, Ocarina of Time
9. The awesome oak bookcase we bought for $10 at the auction held when they cleared out the old downtown branch of London Libraries
10. The heavy oak antique science lab table we got for $20 when they cleared out the staging building at Western

*Technically the anvil isn't exactly a casualty of the purge as we've stored it at my parents house, so there is a chance it might one day make the move if we ever see fit to pay to ship 80lbs of iron out here. We shall see.

Through a little blood, sweat and tears, we managed to pare everything down to about 10 boxes (of the storage bin 'Rubbermaid' variety):

3 boxes - clothes, outerwear and shoes
2 boxes - kitchen stuff
1.5 boxes - books, DVDs and CDs (transferred to a 400 disk capacity binder), and videocassettes
1 box - office supplies, necessary paper records and photographs
1 box - electronics (1 DVD player, 1 VCR, 1 small stereo, 1 printer)
1 box - camping kit
0.5 boxes - miscellaneous tchatchkis

Thanks to a deal we got through a family member we were able to Fed-Ex all 10 boxes out to Victoria for a little under $1 a pound which amounted to a little less than $500. In addition to these 10 boxes, Baasje drove our compact hatchback out here loaded with our artwork, guitars and the two small pieces of furniture we decided to keep - a sheepskin lamp we purchased in Montreal during the 2006 Jazz Fest and a one of a kind little end table built by our good friend, 2 Dollar Bill.

Selling off the rest of our furniture piece by piece was a bit of a dog and pony show ('So-and-so wants to buy our sofa...we sold it already, right?' and 'You said we'd sell the barbeque for what price?') The process culminated in a drop-in and pick-up your ‘new’ furniture open house complete with a 'plant with every purchase' throw-in and a daycare service that saw our house overrun with pre-schoolers as their parents transported furniture in multiple trips across the city in pick-up trucks. When all was said and done we made enough money to mostly cover the cost of the new furniture we purchased from IKEA** when we moved into the apartment in Victoria. Though the quality isn't quite what we'd had before, the new pieces are far more suitable in their compactness. As an alternative to purchasing from IKEA we briefly considered buying all our furniture off of usedvictoria.com - an excellent site with some undeniable great deals - but with all the hoopla we'd been through liquidating our belongings piece-by-piece, we really weren't keen on turning around and doing the whole thing in reverse.

**The IKEA bus departs twice monthly from the bus station in downtown Victoria headed to the Richmond IKEA on the mainland via the Swartz Bay - Tswwassen ferry. The cost of the return trip is $40, but if you spend $250 you get a $40 coupon to use towards your purchase. IKEA throws in a raffle draw and a 15% discount in the restaurant. I don't know about you, but I've never walked into an IKEA and not spent at least $40. That said, why go any other way?

When all was said and done we had spent about $1000 to move us and 'all' our belongings across the country. The breakdown of our expenses/income ended up as follows:

New furniture costs = A little bit less than the money raised by selling old furniture
Shipping costs = $500.