Category: Canada

Tomorrow, I am moving for the second major time in two weeks – to the staging location in Ottawa from which I will try to find an apartment. Within a few days, I should have a cell phone and some sense of how to navigate the city.

Choosing what to bring with me is tricky. At the minimum, I will be spending one year in Ottawa in a furnished apartment or a room in a shared house. At the maximum, it is conceivable that I will be there for many years and eventually living somewhere I furnish myself. It seems most sensible to begin on the assumption that the former possibility is the likely one, scaling up as necessary on the basis of trips back to Vancouver and helpful people who are coming to Ottawa and willing to act as couriers.

Between the hike and the dinner tonight, this was definitely one of the best days in the past year. Many thanks to the seventeen people who showed up for our ten person reservation, to the cooking staff at Guu for making such tasty food, and to the serving staff for tolerating our peculiarities with very good humour. I am doubly lucky to have such an interesting collection of friends and to have been able to see so many during my brief time in Vancouver.

At every time in the last six years, I have had a substantial collection of personal items stored in boxes somewhere other than where I was living. Generally, this has meant a closet full of big Tupperware containers, duct taped shut between visits.

When the chance or the need arises to dig through the stack, the result is a kind of auto-archeology. Things of persistent value tend to stay near the top of the stack, because they have been left there by past expeditions. Things near the bottom – rarely glimpsed – are likely photographs or letters from more than a decade in the past.

Today’s minor foray was motivated by a search for writable CDs for the Cabin Fever trip this weekend, so it was both superficial and unsuccessful.

The first day back has been especially eventful, though it is better to get some rest than to spend much time writing about. It was particularly good to see Jonathan and Meaghan, as well as the Bard on the Beach production of Julius Caesar that I saw with my family. Running into Astrid after the show was also a nice surprise, especially given how I didn’t manage to see her during my previous visit to Vancouver.

Every time I visit Vancouver, I am reminded of the fundamental mathematical difficulty of arranging a collection of gatherings with a large and busy group of friends. With a variable number of events, each of which could occur on any of several days and involve any of a moderately sized group of people, the number of permutations easily runs into the thousands. I shall do my utmost to see everyone at least once, with apologies to those who are inconvenienced by how things fall out.

With luck, I will be able to pick up a cell phone with an Ottawa number while I am here. If so, it will make coordination an easier task.