On 27 June we headed to an Island called Saltspring for a combined stag/stagette weeknd for Joel and Drags. Ruby, Jan and I headed out after work and got in late on Friday night. Jan and Ruby were concerned that my car wasn't going to be big enough for all our shit and surprisingly it came close to being full but it still managed to eat everything.
In the morning we had a full day of sports planned. I was gifted an awesome wee insulated cup thing and I proceeded to fill it up with a delicious ceasar followed by a couple of beers. On my team was Ruby, Jonas, Ky, Whitney and Kellen. It was funny that Kellen and I ended up on the same team as we were doing a bit of shit talking towards each other the night before when we didn't even know what teams we would be on. We were team white and we had a team war cry that probably shouldn't be written on the open internet. The first activity was the Tug of war. We thought we would do OK with Jonas but the first team up we challenged had a couple of pretty big guys so we lost 2-1.
Then came my second and final activity (apart from drinking) of the day. The long jump. Somehow I managed to get off balance in the air and slip and land on my hand awkwardly. My hand hurt a bit when I got up and I was pretty disappointed that I had probably sprained it pretty bad. I was massaging it and trying to find out exactly what part was hurt when I felt some bones moving in my hand that probably shouldn't be moving. Then I decided my hand was broken, then I nearly passed out. The usual wave of "oh shit, what have I got coming up and what won't I be able to do". After declining Jonas' kind offer of fashioning a splint out of duct tape and beer bottles Salima drove me to the hospital (we luckily spotted it on our way to the cabins complete with the Jokes about good to know where it is in case someone gets hurt). Luckily they were fully equipped to deal with my broken hand and I didn't have to go back to Vancouver. I had some X-rays done and my hand started to hurt really bad while I was waiting but once they put it in a splint it started to hurt less. The doctor gave me a prescription for some Tramadol (Tarantula) and the pharmacist told me in no uncertain terms that I could not consume alcohol while on the medication. So we went to the liquor store to buy a bottle of Vodka (as you do) and headed back to the cabins.
I ended up just drinking Scotch for the rest of the night instead of taking the medication and had a pretty good time. The worst part was not being able to play guitar. I did form a sort of hilarious band called "Blair squared" with another Blair and I fretted and he strummed. Hilarious
The next few weeks were pretty shit. It was my right hand so I was pretty screwed. The worst was trying to work. As I have always used my left hand a bit on the mouse that wasn't so bad but typing was excruciating. I was probably still faster at typing with one hand as some of the other older guys though.
After some discussions with the hand specialist he gave me a choice to have surgery to fix the bones in place with a couple of screws. I opted for this as it would lead to a faster recovery. Surgery was pretty awful though. The first time I turned up, got in my gown waited for two hours and was then told that my surgery had been postponed. I was pretty guted and just wanted to have the bloody thing done. I went back a couple of days later to have it done and all went well. It was pretty weird because I only had a nerve block and some mild sedation. They used an ultrasound to look at my shoulder while they put the needle in so that they could see that the anesthetic had worked properly. Then my hole arm proceeded to become numb from the shoulder down. I couldn't feel anything and I couldn't move it. Then as they wheeled me into the OR the sedation had all but wore off. I asked the anesthesiologist if I should still be sedated and he replied with "do you want to be?" I was thinking that he was the expert. But he explained that unless I was stressing out about the whole thing he would give me as little sedative as possible which would allow me to recover quicker. The whole thing was over in about 45 min and all went well. I was then sent home for the rest of the day and the nerve block didn't wear off until about 12 hours later. I thought I had dislocated my elbow multiple times during the day as I just could feel anything or move it at all. It was like a massive warm bag of meat hanging from my shoulder.
I had a few shitty days where my hand had gone back a few steps but then I started to be able to move it a bit without it hurting. Then I started physio and it is slowly getting back to 100%. I am typing this on 15 September and it is doing OK but is starting to hurt a bit from all the words. It is also still pretty week. I think I must have sprained my middle finger pretty bad though as that is the one that hurts the most even though I broke my ring finger.
Oh well, nothing to be done about it now!
Monday, 15 September 2014
Kylie in the house!
Righto, got a bit of catching up to do. I think this one stretches back to 9 May! Ugh.
So Miss Kylie March of Blenheim town came to see me for a whirlwind tour. She had been in Ottawa for work as she is some lah di dah NZ embassy girl. On her way back through she crashed for a night with me. I picked her up on Friday at about 6pm and we dropped her stuff at my place. For dins we went to Craft beer market which was delicious as usual. Then as we were about to head home for bed I then ascertained that my flatmate had found a watering hole in Gastown somewhere so we went to join her. After an appropriate amount of drinks there we went back to Joel and Drags place for a couple more beers before finally getting to bed around 2am or so.
The drinking on the Friday definitely impeded the Saturday plan which was to climb the chief but we didn't let a couple of hangovers stop us. We made it up in pretty good time and Kylie was pretty stoked with the view.
Then we headed down to get Kylie back to the airport. On the way we stopped for Poutine and I had her back at the terminal on time. All in all she had only been in Vancouver for 23 hours but I think it made the right impression. I'm sure she had a good sleep on the way home!
So Miss Kylie March of Blenheim town came to see me for a whirlwind tour. She had been in Ottawa for work as she is some lah di dah NZ embassy girl. On her way back through she crashed for a night with me. I picked her up on Friday at about 6pm and we dropped her stuff at my place. For dins we went to Craft beer market which was delicious as usual. Then as we were about to head home for bed I then ascertained that my flatmate had found a watering hole in Gastown somewhere so we went to join her. After an appropriate amount of drinks there we went back to Joel and Drags place for a couple more beers before finally getting to bed around 2am or so.
The drinking on the Friday definitely impeded the Saturday plan which was to climb the chief but we didn't let a couple of hangovers stop us. We made it up in pretty good time and Kylie was pretty stoked with the view.
Then we headed down to get Kylie back to the airport. On the way we stopped for Poutine and I had her back at the terminal on time. All in all she had only been in Vancouver for 23 hours but I think it made the right impression. I'm sure she had a good sleep on the way home!
Monday, 19 May 2014
April Part 2
Right, so finally the second half of the stupid busy month of April. After getting back from NZ I had to get straight down to studying for my professional practice exam. The week after I got back I went to site which was actually a good thing as there was nothing to do except study in the evening. I was a little worried about it as I talked to a few people who studied for months. I heard two things about the exam 1) just about everyone passes and 2) just about everyone over-studies. I was concerned as I definitely didn't fall into category 2 so I was dubious if I would fall into category 1.
In the end I don't think it was too bad. It was all multi choice but some of it was pretty hard. Some questions I had to guess outright but not many of them. I swear some of them had two or more right answers! The essay question was about the worst part! I wrote about "self regulation" and it made me feel like a 5 year old retard. "I think self regulation is good because people get to self regulate" god dammit. I'm hoping that it was mainly to weed out people with poor english so I tried my best to form complete sentences, the content was pretty weak though. Hopefully I never have to sit that again, fingers crossed.
Then the rest of the week was dedicated to getting our bloody rube goldberg machine built. Some people at work (Katty, Elyse and Chris) and I had signed up to build a machine to connect to a bunch of other consultants machines in a mall and run them all together in a mall. If you don't know what a rube goldberg machine a little googling will fix that. We decided that we would build a machine to illustrate the rock cycle. We had tectonic plate subduction, a volcano, sedimentation and then a wee truck taking dirt away. It was a pretty massive task and I was pretty sure we had bitten off more than we could chew. However, some late nights after my exam were pulled and we had it working on the Thursday, with the show on Saturday. We decided to take Friday off, which may have been a bad idea....
With my night off I now had time to go and celebrate Jans birthday with her. I had a few drinks at a bar and then we headed to this new thing in Vancouver called E-Exit. It is kinda like a real life video game. They stick you in a room for 45 minutes and you have to solve problems and find clues to unlock things to get out. I was on a team with Jonas, Kai, Dessi, Ruby and Arif. We allegedly had the hardest room called "The Lab". It was incredibly well made. In one suit case we unlocked was a box with a joystick and a button on it and when you pressed the button a laser shone across the room, you could then control the laser pointer with the joystick and had to line it up with a thing to unlock the next part. Then there was a stupid whiteboard with a matrix of numbers that we never solved and a secret passageway to closet thing. We all worked pretty well together and we thought we were doing pretty well but when our 45 min was up we discovered we had only unlocked 55% of the room! It was disappointing we didn't do any better, but it was pretty awesome nonetheless. After that we went and had a few drinks at a bar until it was waaaaay past my bedtime. I stumbled home to bed and set two alarms to try and get up at 7 the next morning to go and organise getting our rube goldberg machine to the mall....
I woke up at about 7:50 and I was supposed to pick Elyse up at 7:30! I felt awful and I rolled over to let everyone know I would be running a little late. I had slept through two alarms and two calls! Ugh! I finally picked Elyse up and got out to help load the machine. When we got the machine to the mall we found out it wouldn't fit through many of the doors or elevators so we had a hell of a time getting it to where all the other machines were. We were pretty confused because we were told that we had a 4ft by 4ft by 8ft space which we used most of. We finally walked it through the mall with some angry security guards watching us. Everyone was freaking about public liability. It was a terrible example how the sueing culture here has made everything so much harder.
We got our machine into position and started running it. Over the course of the day we ran the machines close to 20 times. It was pretty awesome except I was hungover as hell. Even some filthy KFC didn't help much. It turned out our machine was the most reliable with most of the machines stopping a lot of the time. I think one machine didn't make it the whole way through once without stopping which was a little pathetic. So Saturday night was very subdued which worked well into my favour for the last hurdle of April.
Bloody Sun Run!!! I signed up with the work team (so it didn't cost me anything) to do this 10km race in downtown Vancouver. It is one of the largest 10km races in the world with close to 50000 runners and walkers. It was a pretty crappy morning weather wise but it didn't piss down which was lucky. They do this wave start where you pick a group based on your 10km time so it roughly puts slower people towards the back and faster toward the front. Unfortunately there are a few idiots that get it very wrong, or just stand in the wrong group. I had selected the fasted group that wasn't seeded but I still had about a 20min walk to the start line after they had started the race. The race felt pretty awful. I was hoping to do a bit of training for it but because the month was pretty busy I hadn't run much at all. It was pretty crazy to be part of such a big event. When I was nearing the end I put a bit of a sprint on. After about 100m I caught up to this other guy that was sprinting a bit too, but he was having none of it. We ended up boosting the last 200m together and it was pretty awesome. Then I found out my time as was pretty stoked as it was 44:52. Without my sprint finish against that random guy I probably wouldn't have made it under 45min and I would have been pretty guted. Before the race I had talked to another person from work who was keen for a drink afterwards. I told them I would just run home and text from there because I didn't want to take my cell phone running. So I ran home and had a show before they text me. I was expecting they had just finished but they weren't even at the start line yet! I had run the whole race and had a shower and they were still waiting to start! Ridiculous. So it was kinda hilarious but I definitely wouldn't go out of my way to run it again.
And thats the end of April, well it was about the 23rd, but it was over as far as I was concerned.
In the end I don't think it was too bad. It was all multi choice but some of it was pretty hard. Some questions I had to guess outright but not many of them. I swear some of them had two or more right answers! The essay question was about the worst part! I wrote about "self regulation" and it made me feel like a 5 year old retard. "I think self regulation is good because people get to self regulate" god dammit. I'm hoping that it was mainly to weed out people with poor english so I tried my best to form complete sentences, the content was pretty weak though. Hopefully I never have to sit that again, fingers crossed.
Then the rest of the week was dedicated to getting our bloody rube goldberg machine built. Some people at work (Katty, Elyse and Chris) and I had signed up to build a machine to connect to a bunch of other consultants machines in a mall and run them all together in a mall. If you don't know what a rube goldberg machine a little googling will fix that. We decided that we would build a machine to illustrate the rock cycle. We had tectonic plate subduction, a volcano, sedimentation and then a wee truck taking dirt away. It was a pretty massive task and I was pretty sure we had bitten off more than we could chew. However, some late nights after my exam were pulled and we had it working on the Thursday, with the show on Saturday. We decided to take Friday off, which may have been a bad idea....
With my night off I now had time to go and celebrate Jans birthday with her. I had a few drinks at a bar and then we headed to this new thing in Vancouver called E-Exit. It is kinda like a real life video game. They stick you in a room for 45 minutes and you have to solve problems and find clues to unlock things to get out. I was on a team with Jonas, Kai, Dessi, Ruby and Arif. We allegedly had the hardest room called "The Lab". It was incredibly well made. In one suit case we unlocked was a box with a joystick and a button on it and when you pressed the button a laser shone across the room, you could then control the laser pointer with the joystick and had to line it up with a thing to unlock the next part. Then there was a stupid whiteboard with a matrix of numbers that we never solved and a secret passageway to closet thing. We all worked pretty well together and we thought we were doing pretty well but when our 45 min was up we discovered we had only unlocked 55% of the room! It was disappointing we didn't do any better, but it was pretty awesome nonetheless. After that we went and had a few drinks at a bar until it was waaaaay past my bedtime. I stumbled home to bed and set two alarms to try and get up at 7 the next morning to go and organise getting our rube goldberg machine to the mall....
I woke up at about 7:50 and I was supposed to pick Elyse up at 7:30! I felt awful and I rolled over to let everyone know I would be running a little late. I had slept through two alarms and two calls! Ugh! I finally picked Elyse up and got out to help load the machine. When we got the machine to the mall we found out it wouldn't fit through many of the doors or elevators so we had a hell of a time getting it to where all the other machines were. We were pretty confused because we were told that we had a 4ft by 4ft by 8ft space which we used most of. We finally walked it through the mall with some angry security guards watching us. Everyone was freaking about public liability. It was a terrible example how the sueing culture here has made everything so much harder.
We got our machine into position and started running it. Over the course of the day we ran the machines close to 20 times. It was pretty awesome except I was hungover as hell. Even some filthy KFC didn't help much. It turned out our machine was the most reliable with most of the machines stopping a lot of the time. I think one machine didn't make it the whole way through once without stopping which was a little pathetic. So Saturday night was very subdued which worked well into my favour for the last hurdle of April.
Bloody Sun Run!!! I signed up with the work team (so it didn't cost me anything) to do this 10km race in downtown Vancouver. It is one of the largest 10km races in the world with close to 50000 runners and walkers. It was a pretty crappy morning weather wise but it didn't piss down which was lucky. They do this wave start where you pick a group based on your 10km time so it roughly puts slower people towards the back and faster toward the front. Unfortunately there are a few idiots that get it very wrong, or just stand in the wrong group. I had selected the fasted group that wasn't seeded but I still had about a 20min walk to the start line after they had started the race. The race felt pretty awful. I was hoping to do a bit of training for it but because the month was pretty busy I hadn't run much at all. It was pretty crazy to be part of such a big event. When I was nearing the end I put a bit of a sprint on. After about 100m I caught up to this other guy that was sprinting a bit too, but he was having none of it. We ended up boosting the last 200m together and it was pretty awesome. Then I found out my time as was pretty stoked as it was 44:52. Without my sprint finish against that random guy I probably wouldn't have made it under 45min and I would have been pretty guted. Before the race I had talked to another person from work who was keen for a drink afterwards. I told them I would just run home and text from there because I didn't want to take my cell phone running. So I ran home and had a show before they text me. I was expecting they had just finished but they weren't even at the start line yet! I had run the whole race and had a shower and they were still waiting to start! Ridiculous. So it was kinda hilarious but I definitely wouldn't go out of my way to run it again.
And thats the end of April, well it was about the 23rd, but it was over as far as I was concerned.
Monday, 28 April 2014
April Part 1
Righto, so April is split into two bits cos it was a bit ridiculous. Apparently I signed up to a bunch of things and then a couple of other things happened and before I knew it I was stupid busy.
Firstly due to a variety of reason I was left as the only electrical engineer working for Klohn for a few weeks. I really was looking forward to the challenge and then I got all this work and then I didn't want the challenge anymore. It got to the point where I just had no idea where to start because I had so much to do. It was pretty shit and I don't think I managed my time very well. Somehow I still managed to get all my deliverables done and then we hired three new electrical engineers. It was pretty interesting to have 3 new people start within about 3 weeks of each other. They all seem like pretty good guys though so its nice to have a bit of a team.
Then poor old boss got real crook. It was apparent that he wasn't gonna make it so in the space of a few days I was making a fairly unplanned trip back to NZ. It was terrible timing at work but there wasn't really much I could do. Work was pretty nice to give me three days bereavement leave and I took the rest without pay. I was morbidly looking forward to it really. I hadn't been home in about a year and a half and it was going to be nice to be back with the whole family. Mum and Dad were in Mayanmar at the time so it wasn't real good timing for them either.
So I booked a flight on Friday and Flew out on Sunday! Jan was nice enough to give me a ride to the airport and I checked in and got on the plane no worries. Then I felt like an idiot because the one time I decide not to take my plane adapter thing for my headphones the plane is an old crappy one and it needs one. Lesson learned. The flight was pretty long and uncomfortable but at least it was direct from Vancouver to Auckland.
I got off the plane and got my quota at duty free before heading straight to the rental car place which was pretty hilarious. I was tripping out at all the kiwi accents everywhere. Then the lady that served me at the rental car place was a big ole pacific islander with a hard core bro accent. I was having so much trouble trying to keep a straight face! Then the big challenge: Getting off a 14 hour plane trip with a couple of hours sleep and switching over to drive on the left hand side of the road. I got to the edge of the car park and got totally confused. I hit the windscreen wipers and had no idea which side of the road to pull onto. Then I looked at the dash board and it had a handy sticker saying "KEEP LEFT". Thanks rental car! After that it was actually pretty easy. I seemed to relax back into that side of the road and I think I actually still prefer it over the right. seems much more natural to control the steering wheel with my right hand to have my left free to change gears.
Then I had a mare trying to get in touch with people. It was like being on my own overseas again but I was in my own goddamn country! It was about 7 or 8 in the morning so I went to McDicks for some breakfast and free wifi. Stupid internet kept dropping out and I finally got in touch with Gaz. I was supposed to go and hang out with Nut for the night as Hayden was flying in the next day. But because everything was so rushed I hadn't really organised anything with him. Gaz told me he lived in the same area so as I had been sitting in McDs for about 4 hours at this point and I was pretty grumpy I decided to get out for a drive. I figured I would go and kill some time at one tree hill and then head over to the North Shore to steal more internet to get in touch with Nut.
One tree hill was nice. I sat on the back of the car and played guitar for a while (and apparently got burned by the sun! Crazy NZ Sun! Or maybe it was the awesome Canadian winter tan I had going on). I also wandered up to the monument to kill some more time. After I was suitably less grumpy I headed over to the North Shore to find another McDonalds to get in touch with Nut. I found one and sat outside to leach some more Wifi. Bloody Nut was being completely non-responsive to all forms of communication so I got hayden to ring him. I was so lucky Hayden was answering his phone and helping otherwise I would have been screwed. Finally Nut got in touch and gave me an address so I stuck it in my phone and headed over. It wasn't very far away but when I got there the address didn't seem to exist. He had told me it was 29B but it was a dead end road and only seemed to go up to 24. I was so confused (keep in mind I was pretty tired and my grumpyness was coming back). I ended going up the driveway of 24 and talking to the dude inside. He said the street definitely didn't have a 29B! I was pretty pissed off. I ended up having to back to McDs (I was getting pretty sick of the place by now). Again, Nut was completely un-responsive and I had to get poor gaz to call him again. He went out to check his letter box and found out he had made a mistake. I told Gaz to tell him to go and wait on the road for me and I went round to find him a few houses away from where I was the first time. Gaaaaaaaaaah.
But we went and had a beer and it was OK. We had a pie snack, played games, drank rum, ate fish and chips and talked shit for a while. I crashed about 11pm or so so we hit the hay. Good times.
The next day Nut had to work so I had to get out of the house. I went to kill more time at McDicks (pretty much pure hate for that place by now) before haydens flight got in. After a couple of hours I headed over to get him. No worries finding my wee bro and from then on it was all good. We decided a beer was the first order so we tried to get google to give us some directions. We ended up getting pretty lost looking for what we suspected was an brewery, not a bar. There was roadworks up one of the streets we were supposed to go down and google kept sending us in circles. But it was OK cos we had a laugh about it and had plenty to yarn about. We ended up cutting our losses and heading back to the North Shore to meet up with Nutty again. We found a sweet wee pub on the beach and had a couple of brews, before having dins with Nut. Whilst beers were being drunk poor old boss nodded off. It was a bit sad, but at least I was in the right place and would be able to attend the funeral before heading back to Canada.
We headed down to the Tron that night to stay with Simon and Anna. From then on it was yarning and drinking ahoy. Gaz and I polished off a bottle of Jack on the first night and finished another 3 bottles over the course of the following few days. It was so good to see everyone again.
The funeral was sad but great. Simons Eulogy was incredible. Est and Liz read an awesome poem called close the gate and Gaz and I sung I love you because by Jim Reeves. That night we went back to Simon and Annas with a bunch of people and played piano/guitar and sang the night away. Sad but fantastic.
The rest of the time consisted of a couple of runs around the lake behind Simons place, and drinking more. Dad bought a GPS device so we did a bit of geo caching which was fun. Gotta do that a bit more. Apparently I inherited a writing desk too so thats cool I guess!
On Tuesday we headed back to Auckland for the night. We looked for something to do and found a play to go to. It was kinda cool but a bit "art house" for most of us. There was unnecessary full nudity and a very graphic gay sex scene. And of course everyone had aids. It was kinda cool though and had some funny bits in it. You gotta see different shit sometimes to appreciate what you like.
Then on Wednesday it was back to the Couv. It was a bit sad actually. I realised after travelling in Europe and the states and living in Vancouver that Auckland is pretty cool. You just have to get over the whole "bloody jaffa" thing. 1. its warmer than Vancouver. 2. Its got mountains close by. 3. Its in NZ. Its a little smaller but thats probably OK.
So we all went to the airport and split in different directions. Hayden back to Blenheim at 6pm, me to Vancouver at 8pm and Mum and Dad to Singapore at 11pm. Crazy shit.
Flight back was good and as soon as I got home I hopped in my car to go to the supermarket. It hadn't been 20 hours from when I was on the other side of the road and I slipped straight back into driving on the right. Really weird.
Sunday, 9 March 2014
March 2014
Its been a hur of a long time since I've written anything on here but I think I need to keep stabbing it occasionally so that when sweet stuff happens I will document it somewhat.
I haven't been up to too much. Wasted a lot of weekends drinking when I would normally be hiking but I think thats OK. With not running to work every day I might be getting a bit fat though. I have signed up to the sun run in April though which is a 10km race that has about 50,000 entries. Yup, five-zero-zero-zero-zero. I saw it last year and it was a gong show. I picked the fasted group that wasn't seeded so I am supposed to run it in about 36 to 40 min which is a bit of a tall order. Will have to run a bit more over the coming weeks I think!
The other thing I have been up to is a bit of skiing. I don't think I will ever get my monies worth out of my season pass but its pretty good fun. Been a really shit season though with bugger all snow. I think I am slowly getting better but still got a fair way to go before I can get out into the back country I think.
I attended a couple of concerts which was cool: John Butler Trio, Zakk Wylde and a guy called Martin Sexton. The last was recommended by a friend and it was amazing. The guy did a whole bunch of different stuff with cool jazz trumpet solos that he did with his mouth. Afterwards the obligatory debrief at St Augustines.
Daylight saving has just kicked in which is a pretty good sign. Winter is pretty cool but bring on the hiking, biking, running and kayaking I say!
I haven't been up to too much. Wasted a lot of weekends drinking when I would normally be hiking but I think thats OK. With not running to work every day I might be getting a bit fat though. I have signed up to the sun run in April though which is a 10km race that has about 50,000 entries. Yup, five-zero-zero-zero-zero. I saw it last year and it was a gong show. I picked the fasted group that wasn't seeded so I am supposed to run it in about 36 to 40 min which is a bit of a tall order. Will have to run a bit more over the coming weeks I think!
The other thing I have been up to is a bit of skiing. I don't think I will ever get my monies worth out of my season pass but its pretty good fun. Been a really shit season though with bugger all snow. I think I am slowly getting better but still got a fair way to go before I can get out into the back country I think.
I attended a couple of concerts which was cool: John Butler Trio, Zakk Wylde and a guy called Martin Sexton. The last was recommended by a friend and it was amazing. The guy did a whole bunch of different stuff with cool jazz trumpet solos that he did with his mouth. Afterwards the obligatory debrief at St Augustines.
Daylight saving has just kicked in which is a pretty good sign. Winter is pretty cool but bring on the hiking, biking, running and kayaking I say!
Whistler winter
So a friends (Miranda) birthday was coming up and she was going to whistler to ski with a few friends. I was kinda leaning towards not going because I had already spent so much on a season pass to Cypress and hadn't even used it yet. But I decided I would go and get a lesson and stuff.
We kinda started planning it and decided to take my car. I had been tossing up whether I needed to get winter tyres for my car for a while ago and this kicked my decision making into top gear. It seemed pretty expensive and about equal numbers of people said "yes, you need them for going up Cypress and to whistler" and "no, I don't have them and I've never had much of a problem. In the mean time I knew I needed a new left headlight bulb. The bulb in the was pretty had to get at but I managed to get him out. I went to Canadian Tire (stupid spelling) in my lunch time and debated over getting two at the same time and getting the 30% extra bright ones. Decided not to and went home. When I got home I put the bulb in and went to check them. So the side I replaced worked but now the right hand side was out! I knew that one side was usually easier to get at than the other and hoped that I had just done the tough one. My hoping didn't work at all. I undid the weather cap on the back of the unit and it fell down inside the car. Trying to get the bulb out proved impossible and it was going to be more difficult to get the new one in. I ended up having to take the radiator reservoir out to get at it. Luckily the reservoir was not to tricky to extract and I could leave all the hoses connected while I moved it out of the way. So back to Canadian Tire I went for a second bulb. Put that all in no worries but then decided to get winter tyres. It was $1000 all up and I have to pay them to store my summer tyres but I figure I only really use the car in the weekend so its not like I'm gonna wear the winter tyres out commuting. I was beginning to feel a little trapped in the city again too so now at least I will be more prepared for getting up the mountains to where I enjoy being.
Another hilarious thing I found in my car-preparing was that Canadians get ripped off when replacing their wipers. I went to get some new ones and found a whole aisle of wiper assemblies (the whole thing that clips into the arm). I had to look really hard to find just the blades (that slide into the assembly). The assembly cost $25 or something and just the blades were $6 or something. When I talked to some people at work the next day they had no idea what I was talking about! I told them that the blade is the only bit that really wears out and they don't need to buy the rest of it. They were pretty stunned!
So the weekend rolled around pretty fast. Unfortunately a mate from work had drinks at a pub for his birthday so I packed when I was drunk and only got to bed at about 12:30am on Saturday morning. Seems to be a trend forming for my Whistler trips! I woke up at 4:30am and felt really crook and got concerned that I had just spent a whole shit tonne of money on a lesson and I wasn't even going to enjoy it so I nailed a liter of water and went back to bed. When I lay down I felt even worse because I now had a liter of water in me. I curled up in the fetal position and somehow got back to sleep. Woke up at 6am and kinda felt OK. Dodged a bit of a bullet there. I went to pick up Ian, Miranda and Sy Yunn at 6:30. There were quite a few people up loading cars with skis and snowboards! The others were concerned that everything wouldn't fit in my car! I laughed as I kept piling stuff in the back. Apparently my car "looks small", which it most certainly is not. I recon we could have fit another person and their gear if I didn't have to have one of the seats down to fit the skis. I was pretty stoked to finally fill my car up with people and gear (what I bought it for) and hit the road.
When hit quite a lot of traffic when we were just getting close to Whistler and I nearly missed the start of my lesson which was a bit stressful. I was feeling OK though as a coffee at Squamish had sorted me out. The lesson was really good. The instructor told us all about the gear and I got pretty comfortable with slowing down and turning and stuff. It was a pretty expensive 5 hours though at $270! They really are creaming it! The conditions were great and they were getting better all the time. The season had a pretty slow start and every man and his dog from the lower mainland were up on the mountain. It didn't affect me too much though as I was just on the wee hills at the bottom.
On Saturday night we met up with the rest of the group and drank a lot while playing guitar / cards against humanity. There was about 12 of us I think and I only knew the three people that came in my car but it was a good group. For some reason someone thought it was a good idea to go to a bar (probably a good thing to stop making noise in the condo though) so we went to some place called Brandis. There we had a couple more and met some Aussie guys. Lots of shenanigans ensued and too much more alcohol was drunk. The bar closed at about 2am and I got to bed about 2:30. Needless to say we all kept it pretty low key on Sunday! The past couple of days were catching up with me but after some breakfast and wandering around in the snow I felt OK and we drove back to Vancouver. We did have big plans to go snow shoeing and / or tubing but that never really happened for some reason!
Cheers Guys!
When hit quite a lot of traffic when we were just getting close to Whistler and I nearly missed the start of my lesson which was a bit stressful. I was feeling OK though as a coffee at Squamish had sorted me out. The lesson was really good. The instructor told us all about the gear and I got pretty comfortable with slowing down and turning and stuff. It was a pretty expensive 5 hours though at $270! They really are creaming it! The conditions were great and they were getting better all the time. The season had a pretty slow start and every man and his dog from the lower mainland were up on the mountain. It didn't affect me too much though as I was just on the wee hills at the bottom.
On Saturday night we met up with the rest of the group and drank a lot while playing guitar / cards against humanity. There was about 12 of us I think and I only knew the three people that came in my car but it was a good group. For some reason someone thought it was a good idea to go to a bar (probably a good thing to stop making noise in the condo though) so we went to some place called Brandis. There we had a couple more and met some Aussie guys. Lots of shenanigans ensued and too much more alcohol was drunk. The bar closed at about 2am and I got to bed about 2:30. Needless to say we all kept it pretty low key on Sunday! The past couple of days were catching up with me but after some breakfast and wandering around in the snow I felt OK and we drove back to Vancouver. We did have big plans to go snow shoeing and / or tubing but that never really happened for some reason!
Cheers Guys!
Christmas 2013
Leading up to Christmas I went to a pretty awesome event called a "teddy bear toss". It is a special ice hockey event for charity. Some people and I from work went along to a Giants game and when the local side scored the first goal everyone chucks a teddy bear on to the ice. It was pretty funny because there was a "close" goal in the first period and people started chucking teddy bears. They had to put a sign up on the big screen saying "NO BEARS! NO BEARS!" Hilarious. When the finally did score it was bloody amazing. So many goddamn bears! There were bears being chucked on to the ice for a couple of minutes and they must have spent about 15min getting them all off the ice. Absolute teddy bear mayhem. All the bears get donated to charity so it was pretty cool.
Actual Christmas day of 2013 was pretty sweet. I can't say that I feel too bad about being invited to two christmasas but it does make it tricky to decide between the Fishers and the Pearses'. I decided to go out to Abbotsford to have christmas with Pam, Terry, Lucas and Mitch again as I had spend thanksgiving with the Fishers. It was great, I got given lots of bear and a beer tasting tool kit amongst other things. Mummy and Daddy gave me a personal locator beacon so that was pretty sweet too. Other than that I ate lots and drank lots, good times. Didn't have a white Christmas again but there was a bit of snow a couple of weeks before.
Actual Christmas day of 2013 was pretty sweet. I can't say that I feel too bad about being invited to two christmasas but it does make it tricky to decide between the Fishers and the Pearses'. I decided to go out to Abbotsford to have christmas with Pam, Terry, Lucas and Mitch again as I had spend thanksgiving with the Fishers. It was great, I got given lots of bear and a beer tasting tool kit amongst other things. Mummy and Daddy gave me a personal locator beacon so that was pretty sweet too. Other than that I ate lots and drank lots, good times. Didn't have a white Christmas again but there was a bit of snow a couple of weeks before.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)