Our White Christmas

Today it's snowing furiously. It's warmer than it's been the last few days so we're getting big, soft flakes. Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet is playing on one of the classical FM stations. Margo and Sarah have just made a snowman in our back yard, and Sarah is building a snow fort nearby.



Apparently Vancouver gets snow at Christmastime about once every ten years. We've also had near-record cold temperatures this past week.

I've been out every day one way or another, often on foot, and while there's less traffic, people are still getting around. Buses are running reasonably well, and the SkyTrain has been running empty trains overnight to keep the tracks clear.

Monday I rode much of the SkyTrain system via a trip downtown and a trip to Surrey. The track is at tree level, and riding is like flying through forests of firs dipped in icing. And while we've been used to seeing snow on the tops of the mountains to our north, we're now seeing snow covering every part of them. The mountains are such a great backdrop; all you have to do is look north, and everything looks great in front of them. The sun came out as I was having lunch at Central City Brewing, and what a happy meal: fish and chips, first with a glass of the seasonal Thor's Hammer barley wine ("drink it slowly", the bartender advised), then a pint of their award-winning Imperial IPA, whilst looking out at the snowy, sunny scenery.

Yesterday the three of us went downtown to collect our permanent resident cards at a preappointed time. The cards are official proof of our status as Canadian residents. It's the last step in our immigration process, the culmination of four years, thousands of dollars, and dozens of forms, and I'm well pleased to finally have this card. We went to lunch afterwards, and since we were nearby, Margo and I got driver licenses at an ICBC office. (We couldn't do this until we got our PR cards.) It's great to have this finished, and I feel more like I belong here now.

I expect to be working in January. One company is in the process of making me an offer, but it's slow going as they're a large multinational corporation and their HR does not move quickly, as well as it being the holidays. And though I've been told it's as close to a certainty as one could expect, in case it doesn't work out, there's a contracting opportunity that may also become active next month. Both of these opportunities have been cooking since early November, when I'd first been contacted by recruiters for each. And really, there haven't been many other opportunities in that time - I'd guess fewer than five that I'm aware of. The market is still very tight, though recruiters tell me things should pick up after the holidays as new year budgets are active.

Margo and I have both (unknowing of each other) made donations to the Vancouver Food Bank. We also wanted to buy food as a family activity but decided not to as a donation is more efficient - the Bank has the buying power to get more value if it makes the purchase. I've been looking into volunteering opportunities also, but haven't found a good fit yet, mostly since I'm unable to commit to daytime schedules as I could be working at any time. But we are grateful to have a warm house and ample food and drink.

With two weeks together, we are hoping to avoid killing each other. Being snowed in, with an unemployed father, we'll probably avoid watching The Shining.

Sarah is enjoying her holiday, but she does bore easily. Her first choice is to play LittleBigPlanet, a Playstation game we got her for her birthday last week. She's already building her second level. She also enjoys reading comics from the library and books from our collection, especially Harry Potter.

Unlike Sarah and myself, Margo has no troubles finding things to do. These mostly include baking and napping, both of which seem to take place daily.

We are looking forward to hosting friends from Portland next week. Sarah is especially looking forward to sharing her bunk bed with her best friend Nika.

Whatever you are doing this holiday season, we wish you joy and peace. I leave you with some holiday words of wisdom from Frank Zappa: Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow.

Paperwork completed!

Yesterday we picked up our Canadian Permanent Residency Cards - the end of a four year process of lots of paperwork and lots of waiting. Now we are able to travel in and out of Canada on commercial transport without needing to secure a re-entry Visa in advance of our travel each time. We also were able to get BC driver's licenses yesterday - and it was an amazingly short and easy process.

So, until we need to renew our PR cards (in 5 years) or until we apply for citizenship, we should be done with all of the paperwork needed in our new home.

Margo

Photos from pancake breakfast

Our friend Noel, (the mother of Sarah's friend and classmate Ted), also volunteered with me at the pancake breakfast and she took these photos of Sarah and sent them along:

Sarah looking pretty cute in her striped pajamas - ready to dig into some pancakes.

I was on juice duty throughout the morning

Sarah with some of her classmates (Ted is across the table in the striped sweater)

With the man of the day himself. (Though Sarah informs me that he is not the REAL Santa who is very busy at the moment preparing for Christmas at the North Pole.)

Cheers,
Margo

Sarah Birthday / Snow

Well, Sarah's season of plenty has begun - with her birthday yesterday. We had some muffins rolled in cinnamon sugar for breakfast (complete with a candle and the Happy Birthday song) as a birthday morning treat and Sarah chose to bring some peppermint meringue candy canes to school to share with her classmates. She rushed home in the afternoon in anticipation of unwrapping her presents...




She LOVED the moon boots from Granny and Grandpa, even though it was too cold outside (low 20's Fahrenheit) to really get a chance to use them.


Later that evening, our neighbor upstairs, Kati, came down and shared some birthday cake with us. This was the first time in a while that I have baked a proper cake. Sarah chose chocolate fudge cake with white chocolate frosting.



The next morning, Sarah enjoyed the rare opportunity to attend school in her pajamas, as a pajama pancake breakfast with Santa was the big event of the day.



After school, Mom had a surprise - a new sled and snow pants. We had a snack and then headed up hill to a small park where the neighborhood children often gather for sledding. Below are pictures of all three of us enjoying the sunny afternoon.









We are all looking forward to a relaxed Christmas vacation, more snow, lots of good food and a visit from friends during the week between Christmas and New Years. We'll post more photos as the week progresses!

Love,
Margo

Snow

We've had a bit of a dusting a few days ago, but last night and this morning we saw our first serious snowfall. We're expected to have more over the next few days.

After school, Sarah and I walked to a nearby park for snowfights and making snow angels. Margo met us on the way back with the camera.

Say, what's that in your hand, Sarah?

No!

You'll pay for that!

Burnaby Mountain and our snowy neighbourhood ...

WORLD RECORD

I, Sarah Nelson, read a 309 page book in one week. [Harry Potter book]


GRADE 3

AGE 7

BIRTHDAY DEC 18TH

SCHOOL CAPITOL HILL

DATE DEC 11

Neighbourhood Views

Today we had an unusual clear day. I took a few walks around our neighbourhood to try and capture some views.

This is not as easy as you'd think. There's always something in the way - rooftops, tree branches, phone lines. There don't seem to be any public places that have perfect, unobstructed views in our neighbourhood, short of hiring a helicopter. So these are all cropped heavily. But they were all taken within a few blocks of our house, on streets and sidewalks.

Going east, over the crest of Capitol Hill, is a view of downtown Vancouver.

To its right, the northeast, are the towers of North Vancouver and the shipping terminals.

This is the view north, looking across the Burrard Inlet.


There are often oil tankers anchored here as there's a small oil refinery on the waterfront.

Continuing right, to the northwest, we can just make out the city of Port Coquitlam, at the far end of the inlet.

To our west is Burnaby Mountain. Much of it is parkland, and Simon Fraser University is at the summit. This is much like the view from our living room, except we have more branches in the way.


To the southwest we see some more of Burnaby. On a good day we can see Mount Baker in Washington State, and at sunset the sun glints off the lone City Centre tower in Surrey.

And to our south are the towers of central Burnaby.

Christmas Baking and Decorations

We are now completely unpacked (though not completely sorted) and much more settled. Sarah and Margo have been making Christmas cookies.



Margo's also been spending much of her break time decorating our new home. Here are pictures from corners of our living room.

Portland and Stuff

We had a great weekend in Portland. It was so nice to see friends and family again. We celebrated with everyone; we were eager to see people and they were eager to see us. It felt great to be so welcomed, like we'd never left.

I didn't have much of an agenda, but even so I got to tick off a bunch of boxes on my list of Favourite Things To Do in Portland:

• Shop for CDs (used, of course) at Everyday Music (there's nothing like it in Vancouver, or most of Europe for that matter)
• Shop for magazines at Rich's Cigars
• Buy some Stumptown coffee (ground for French Press)
• Have a pint at Laurelwood (the seasonal Vinter Varmer no less)
• Have some German ale (Spaten Optimator) at the Rheinlander
• Get a slice of Flying Pie pizza (sausage and mushroom!)
• See a matinee at the Academy Theater
• Shop for hard-to-find foodie items at Trader Joe's (actually, Margo did this)

We enjoyed lots of food, drink, and excellent company. For readers who were there ... thanks for your warmth and hospitality and we look forward to visiting soon.

Monday was our moving day. It was a sad parting, especially for Sarah, who cried for some time at leaving her friend Nika. Margo met the movers she'd hired at the truck rental, and I met them all at our storage unit. The loading went smoothly and quickly. Then we were off - two movers in the truck, and us in the rental car. We agreed to stop at Blaine so I could swap passenger seats with them, since I had the Customs paperwork.

Ever since we made landing last year in Edmonton and declared our personal effects to follow, we wondered exactly how this would play out. We knew we needed to present these papers and inventory at the border, with our possessions, but we had no idea what to expect: would they be searched? Would we need to provide additional ID or papers? 

But the actuality was surprisingly smooth. I showed our papers at the booth; we were directed to a bay on the side, entered an administration building, and our papers and IDs were checked again. There was no inspection (though I'd expect there was some form of sensor inspection as we passed the booth). The border wait was just five minutes, and this only added about ten minutes to that.

Then we unloaded it all. It was a challenge to find space for it. But the unloading was just as quick. The movers, friendly and professional, took their leave of us to enjoy a hotel in town before returning the truck to Bellingham and taking the train back to Portland (all at our expense, as agreed).

Now we have hills of boxes, though the hills are getting smaller. Box after box is being scissored open, emptied, broken down, and added to a stack for recycling later. (It will be another van hire.)

Some of our things are nice surprises, like seeing old friends. For me, these include office shirts, several pairs of trousers I didn't know I had, bike panniers I thought we'd given away. But for much of the things, we're wondering why we ever stored them. We agree we saved way too many things. We'll struggle to place what we keep, and lots will be Craigslisted and Freecycled.

Also, with all this new furniture, we're seeing our first dust gathering on it, and realizing that soon enough, we'll have bum imprints in our futons, and our white sofa covers will need laundering. 

But it is nice to have all our things in one place, finally, and to enjoy them again. Me, I'm enjoying listening to albums again. For the last few years, with only an iPod and dock, I've only listened to ripped music. I've figured out how to use our Playstation to play CDs without needing a TV, so I don't have to buy a CD player.

Sarah is enjoying the boxes of childrens' books that Margo saved for her from her own childhood. Sarah is quite excited to have books from favourite authors like Roald Dahl and Judy Blume in her room, and we find she gets lost in a book quite easily.

It's also great to have our dishes again. The Italian mugs, the wine glasses, the familiar ceramic of the plates and bowls - it's so nice to see and use them again.

Built

It's been a busy week and I haven't had much time to write. Our furniture is all built now. We've gone from an empty house to a fully-furnished one in about six days. Over that time I have assembled or otherwise unpacked and prepared:

• 2 sofas
• 10 bookshelves
• 5 bookshelf extensions
• 2 bed frames
• 3 dressers
• 2 bedside tables
• 2 end tables
• 1 coffee table
• 1 media table
• 4 CD shelves
• 3 desks
• 4 kitchen chairs
• 3 office chairs
• 1 lounge chair and footstool

We have a thick stack of assembly manuals with names like markör and hemnes and poäng. I must say, I have a newfound respect for IKEA engineering. Not only do they design the furniture, they must also design the boxes and their packing schemes, they must ensure there is clearance for tools at all fastenings, and the joins usually offer a single affordance, so it is impossible to join pieces incorrectly. The wordless manuals are brilliant: the illustrations show how pieces should be positioned, and the steps ensure that the progression of assembly is smooth - with little exception, each piece of furniture can be assembled by one person, in a fairly contained space, with no additional supports or tools needed.

You wouldn't believe how much cardboard we were left with. We also had big bags full of recyclable plastic (mostly type 2, some type 4). There was some paper to recycle, and some cardboard as waste.

Today, after a morning interview, I met up with a guy with a van I'd found on Craigslist, and he and I moved our stuff from the vacation rental to our new home. We arrived in Vancouver with our luggage, we had about a dozen boxes shipped from England, but when Margo's new clothes and Sarah's new books and toys were added to the load, we had a completely full van.

After unloading at the new house, we loaded the cardboard and plastic bags, and once again the van was completely full. We went to the Burnaby recycling centre and unloaded into the appropriate containers. The cardboard went into the back of a garbage truck, and we'd filled it so high that an aide came out to run the crusher at the back. He had to run it about three times before we could resume filling it.

So now we have a furnished house. We could live here if we had dishes. Tomorrow we go to Portland to visit, and on Monday we bring up the rest of our stuff - some more clothes, our dishes, books and music, and art.

Furniture!

Yesterday a truck pulled up behind our new house and I helped two guys unload dozens of boxes of IKEA flat pack furniture into our living room. Before opening a single box, I took a few pictures.


You see, Margo and I have never bought a lot of furniture before. In our Portland house, we just shared the furniture we'd each accumulated over our adult lives. We bought a crib and a dresser for Sarah, and a new mattress for us, but that was about it. The twin futon I bought right after college became Sarah's bed, for example.

Before moving overseas, we liquidated pretty much all our furniture, so here in Vancouver we were starting from scratch. There's a lot of stuff you need in a house, if you think about it. Like a toilet brush. Can you live in a house without a toilet brush? Probably not well.

Margo has been looking forward to this day for years. No more shipping boxes as end tables! She has spent days surfing online catalogs and making plans. One day I came home to see her rotating roomfuls of furniture with a 3D design tool she'd downloaded.

So we've gone from an empty to full house in about a week. Above are two sofas, chairs, stools, lots of bookshelves, desks, and end tables. An earlier run to IKEA got us lamps, linens, coat hangers, and curtain rods. Another delivery brought bed frames and futons for Sarah and I. And next week at the end of our Portland visit, we'll return with books, clothes, compact discs, a mattress, art, and dishes.

I've had a busy few days assembling furniture. Some things go fast, like the bookshelves; some things, like my dresser, take hours. Margo was around today to help. My hands are getting quite sore. I'm guessing we've got about two more days of assembly. But it's great having a home again.

Power

We are enjoying the setting up of our new home. We've done a lot of moving in the past few years, and moving out is the worst as you have a houseful of stuff you have to liquidate quickly. Moving in is the sweetest because you get to buy a bunch of stuff. Margo is especially enjoying this. She's been looking forward to this for years.

So Margo's been spending hours on her laptop ordering many things unknown to me. A delivery from Sears arrived recently and one box contained a Craftsman power drill. It's a massive chunky thing with a huge battery pack, one spare, and a quick charger. I remember asking Margo, isn't this a bit of overkill just to hang some curtain rods and coat racks?

Then came the flat pack furniture. Margo's cabinets went together with speed. Our bedframes were trickier - they needed Allen wrenches and many joins didn't afford room for a power drill. So I torqued and torqued until my fingers got sore. The next day I was at a hardware store for sundries and got a set of drill bits that included Allen keys. The rest of the bedframe assembly went much smoother. I'm nursing a blister on my right index finger that I probably didn't need to get.

Margo keeps asking me how the crow that I'm dining on tastes. Not too bad.

Election

It will be unsurprising to our readers that we were hoping that Barack Obama would prevail in the American election and it was gratifying, after watching the returns with dismay in 2000 and 2004, to see the numbers coming in as the polls closed. To see Pennsylvania and Ohio recorded as blue on the news coverage so early in the evening was so exciting.


We could see on the CBC that there were groups of Americans and Canadians celebrating in pubs downtown and we wished we could be with them. Unfortunately, Sarah was really sick with a kidney infection and we weren't going to be going anywhere that evening. So, Mike went to the BC liquor store and bought a six pack of beer and some crisps from the marked across the street, and we had a small celebration at home ... weeping a bit as we watched the acceptance speech and the jublilation of the crowds in Chicago and all over the country and around the world.


Having lived overseas for a couple of years, I can say that even those with a conservative ideological tilt were befuddled and could not understand how George Bush remained president in the states for two terms. They felt that Americans were uneducated, or incurious, or racist or SOMETHING - how else to explain the support for somebody so ideologically extreme and intellectually incurious? To have as the leader of the free world somebody who disdained any discourse or discussion of difficult and divisive issues was incomprehensible. This election has me feeling that Americans have been redeemed in the eyes of the world (and I do think that this is important - that we are, and should be, increasingly part of a global community) and that in rejecting racism, hate speech, and negativity, we have affirmed our best values and maybe turned a corner.


I know that there are some who believe that the positive response around the world to this election may be because other nations think that we will be weaker and easier to push around. I don't think this is the case. Despite everything, the perception of the American people has not seemed to me to be all that negative - the Bush administration was seen as highly problematic and there seemed to be puzzlement how such a good people could accept and support that government. I think this election has re-affirmed the belief of people around the world that the people of the US actually do believe in justice and fairness and equality and all of the other values that we like to consider as characteristic of the American ethic.


Happy days! - I hope President Obama's intellect and steady temperament prove sufficient as the US navigates the rough seas that I fear lie before us.


Love,
Margo

Unemployed Again

Well, that was a quick three weeks.

I haven't written much about my job since first getting it. I had hoped to get more settled into it first. But this afternoon I was laid off. I don't even have all the details as to why just yet, as I was informed secondhand. But I think there was a conflict between our owner and our customer about my role. The customer wanted someone in my position who can work into late evenings without notice, which I'm unable and unwilling to do.

I don't believe I was hired with this expectation. I'm not even sure the customer would have expected it at first. But I think the customer was acting under intense pressure from another customer of theirs and this project just became crazy.

Me, I kept hearing reassurances that this project is unusual, that normally projects are much saner with this client. I can't say. Maybe it was very bad timing for me to be hired and then tossed into such chaos.

And what a mess it was. Very little planning. One of our staff took on the role of writing specifications for the client - otherwise we'd have none. Requirements were fragmented across dozens of emails and one or two conference calls a week. I got one day of knowledge transfer from another coworker, and that was it. No designing. No modeling. No analysis. Just write code, write test classes, and move on.

This project also had external dependencies and resources that we didn't have access to. We coded our parts, but when things didn't work at integration, there were many late nights trying to diagnose problems. We worked under pressure trying to figure out what we could with our limited access.

I managed to get home at reasonable hours, but lost a good deal of sleep from anxiety. We never knew which nights the client would be working late to test our system, and expecting us to help fix things.

The worst for me was not knowing what to expect. The first few weeks of any job are tough until you learn the rules and patterns, who to ask about what, and what you can and can't say and do. And you might have a honeymoon period, but soon you have to prove yourself. I think I may have proven myself; I certainly got good feedback from some coworkers, and I think my competence is not in question. I think the issue in my case was my availability and not my ability.

I've done a bit of consulting - I even had a consulting business of my own, many years ago - but I've mostly worked on products and services and have managed to avoid such chaos. So one good thing from all this is that I know more what to look out for when interviewing. But I still think that if it hadn't been for this particular project and its demands, I'd be doing all right.

This is frustrating for me as it looks quite bad to lose a job after just a few weeks. I plan to get references from this attesting to my skills. It's also a concern as our field doesn't provide stability with age - there are always younger coders who will work longer hours for less money, and experience doesn't mean as much as it may in other disciplines.

So it's back to the job boards for me. But at the moment I'm not sad. More relieved; I look forward to getting better sleep and spending more time with my family.

Halloween, IKEA, US Election

Halloween

Sarah has reported that she had her best Halloween ever. I'm not sure what made it so fabulous, other than the contrast with her time in England, where the holiday is not really observed much. She reprized her skeleton costume from a few years ago and was a big hit at school. She hung out with a friend from upstairs for a bit in the afternoon and then I took her out to trick or treat after dinner. It had been raining all day, but there was a break during the early evening which worked well. The other thing that worked well is that Sarah does not like candy with nuts or peanut butter, so Mike has been the recipient of the Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and I get the Snickers and Mars Bars. It was a nice night and I again appreciated the basic friendliness of Canadians.

IKEA

Yesterday Sarah and I went on an epic shopping excursion to our local IKEA to purchase the linens, curtains, lamps and rugs for our new home, plus stuff like coat and shoe racks, mirrors and the other miscellaneous stuff needed. We still have a big order of furniture to come. I had hoped to be in a position to get furniture that does not require the use of an allen wrench to assemble, but this is not my reality. Fortunately, Mike is a competent assembler of flat pack furniture.

It was a big undertaking as we filled 4 large grocery carts plus one trolley. Sarah was a trooper, helping with the carts throughout the trip. We called a minivan cab and Mike met us at the house to unload and schlep everything into the house. Then, we spent the afternoon assembling the bases for my desk (Sarah and Mike did this - Sarah enjoyed hammering in the dowels the most) and putting together all of the lamps etc. It was a long day and we were all pretty tired by the time we walked down the hill to our apartment, stopping for a pizza dinner at our local Italian place on the way. I went to bed very early and slept long and well.

I am really looking forward to making a home again. We always felt very temporary in England, even using a couple of our moving boxes as tables. The house was very nice and our landlord was lovely, but the furniture and curtains were not what we would have chosen, and, at least for me, it never really felt like home. I am excited to hang our pictures - we have brought back some art and antique maps from Europe, as well as our photographs of our travels, and I'll be getting these framed and hung up once we get our furniture organized. I have no school at all during the month of December, so I have lots of time to get the house sorted and to enjoy the holidays.

It has been a lot of fun to pick out lamps, linens, curtains, etc. I think we will be very cozy in our new place. We have a fold out sofa and an extra full-size futon bed, so there is lots of space for visitors.

Elections

I have been more than a little bit obsessed with the US election. Although we have had a recent national election in Canada, and provincial elections as well, we can't vote here and haven't been here long enough to feel passionate about any of the candidates. I think everyone who reads this blog will be aware of my political leanings to the left - not unusual for a social worker - and I am first and foremost relieved that we will soon be seeing the last of Bush. I do not think that his secretive, combative and anti-intellectual style has been a good thing for the country or for the presidency. (I for one would be happy to have a president who is smarter and better informed than myelf and Bush was sadly deficient in this respect - as would be Sarah Palin.)

I think one reason that Obama has done so well, aside from the economic crisis, is that there is a sense that the Bush presidency pushed the country too far in a particular direction - any move to the left can perhaps be seen as an attempt to move the Federal government back towards the centre.

Anyway, I won't rant at length, but I don't know what I'll do once the election is over and I am no longer obsessively surfing CNN, Politico, the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and (even though I hold my nose to do it) Fox News.

Well that's my post for the day. Hope all is well with our friends and family. We invite you all to plan a trip to Vancouver sometime soon - we'd love to welcome you to our new home!

Love,
Margo

Beer Excursions: The Irish Heather, The Alibi Room

I have two more pubs to write about. Both have been written as among the best in the city. And both are in deep Gastown, unfortunately mere blocks from the nastiest part of East Hastings.

The Irish Heather was recently redesigned; its wood flooring is made from old Guinness barrels. It has some UK taps, including that brown stuff from Dublin, Kilkenny, and Strongbow cider, plus Carlsberg lager. In bottles, beers from some of my favourite Northwest breweries like Rogue and Fish sit next to UK brews like Newcastle Brown. It also features dozens of whiskeys from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, plus Canada and the US. And - the biggest attraction for me - it has the city's only cask pump. Some pubs feature a regular cask night, but this is the only permanent one - perhaps the only one in BC, or even Canada. It currently serves a tasty BC ale. I've been wanting to take a picture.

The Alibi Room has an even greater selection of beers. Taps pour BC ales but also a few Oregonians, often from Rogue. And in bottles are some fabulous choices from Belgium, the UK, Germany, the Czech Republic, and of course the Northewst, and include a great Scotch ale I look forward to trying, plus the Paulaner Salvator I was unable to find in Munich.

Things I'm Getting Used To

There are lots of details that I've neglected to write about. Their novelty has worn off and now I'm pretty used to them.

Some buses are doubles, but one behind the other, called "bendy buses" in London since they're articulated in the middle. It'll be nice to see up-and-down double buses in Victoria again. Newer buses have some neat features. As it pulls up, a synthesized voice announces the route and number on an external speaker, for blind riders. Inside, an LED reader board shows the next major cross street coming up; it's also announced by the synthetic voice. But, sometimes the buses get a bit trashy. I usually have to stand on the ride home.

It seems every intersection with a traffic light has pedestrian crossing buttons too. When it's time to cross, they'll either make a "bip-boop bip-boop" sound, or an LED will count down the seconds (usually 20-something; it seems to vary) while making a "beew beew beew" sound.

There are residential towers all over, not just downtown or in cities. Weeks ago I had an interview in Port Coquitlam, miles east of Burnaby (and we're miles east of downtown), and was amazed to see a dozen or so towers there. It seems they're spread all over the Lower Mainland.

Losing Our Englishness

Last week I used the last of my Boots Men's Face Wash. Though I still have my Boots Shaving Gel, and my Fish "Born in Soho" Styling Gel. Plus Oral-B dental floss made in Ireland.

Sarah's English accent is almost completely gone. I sometimes wear my London dress shirts to the office, though there's no need to - I could as acceptably wear T-shirts.

We've also lost a bit of the English spelling I've become accustomed to. I still write labour and centre, but must now use realize and not realise. For some reason, I'm sad to give that up. Yet "z" is still pronounced "zed" here.

I'm relearning some words too. Instead of plaster, torch, and toilet, we use band-aid, flashlight, and washroom. I still use "mate" and "cheers" a lot, though. They're nice words.

And I'm re-adapting to the local pronunciation. Tomayto instead of tomahto; mobill instead of mobile.

I'm missing other European things. Last night we saw a film set in Europe and seeing narrow cobbled lanes made me a bit nostalgic for Medieval streets and ornate buildings.

Sarah's school picture

Sarah came home with her school pictures today - and we got a digital copy too, so I thought I'd post it, although we will send hard copies out to grandparents etc also.


She also has a less favored version, which we didn't get prints of, but the view of all the lost teeth is pretty cute...

And that's it for today - we are in the midst of finishing preparations for Halloween and getting organized for the huge shopping trip at Ikea. Looking forward to being in our own place for Christmas!

Love,
Margo

Appreciative

Last week we got our first bill for BC health insurance. It pays us forward to February. The other day we got our health insurance cards in the mail. And it triggered a wave of appreciation for me.

The card's face says, in big letters, Care Card. On the bottom, it has my name on it. It seems to imply, "We care about you, MICHAEL PATRICK NELSON." And as a new immigrant, that means a lot. We've been busy (and still are busy) with all the details of settling - creating accounts, finding housing, finding furniture, finding work - so it's been easy to overlook the fact that, hey, we're living in Canada now.

So I signed the back of the card. I signed it carefully and joyfully. Then I let it sit to dry, being careful not to smudge it. I remembered way back when Hilary Clinton held up a prototype US health card, and thought, Now I have one. (Though the NHS in the UK is brilliant too - no card needed, and no bill either.)

This, and a few yoga stretches, contributed to this sudden onset of appreciation. A realization of, hey, we've spent a lot of money and filled out a lot of forms and waited a long time to be here, and now we're here.

I took time to appreciate some other tokens of identity and belonging. A coffee card. My Rogers Video card. (Okay, that's not so special.) And the currency. I happened to have a 5, 10, and 20 dollar bill each. And you know what? I've never taken the time to really look at them. And they're fascinating! Lots of colours. There's the face of a historical government figure on the front (except the Queen on the 20 - she's not exactly historical yet), plus a drawing of some feature of the Parliament buildings. And such fine patterns in the background! And a hologram strip! On the back are more drawings. One bill portrays a family, ice skating, happy and enjoying their Canadian lives.

My New Job

So let me tell you about my new job. I have joined CrazedCoders, a small consulting firm based in Edmonton. Much of its work has been with the Flex tool but they have taken on considerable back-end work in Java. Contractors and staff have handled the Java work in the past and I am the first hire to work on it full-time.

I work on a small office in downtown Vancouver. I can get there in a half hour by bike or bus. There's one other employee there, and occasionally we're joined by a contractor who mostly works at home. There's just a front room and a back room in the office. I have one of the two window seats.

Our office is on Pender at Richards and is nicely located: we're two blocks from the start of Water street and Gastown, and a block from shopping on Granville, and a few blocks further from Robson. So far I know of four coffee shops within a block, the closest serving Illy beans, right below us. I also know of a few pubs nearby. On our ground floor are lots of small cafes: one can get sushi, sandwiches, wraps, salads and pizza slices from several sources.

I work on a pretty herky ThinkPad laptop. It's got high specs, a screen resolution so high I need to wear my reading glasses, and is nearly indestructible with a spillproof keyboard and shock protection for the disk drive. At the office it connects to a second monitor, and I can take it home whenever I want.

I'm in that state you always start a job in, where you don't know the systems you're working on, you have new tools to learn quickly, and you feel dumb as a brick.

I like my coworkers. One of the Edmonton staff flew over last Thursday to deliver this laptop and spend the day doing knowledge transfer. We all had dinner that night, and I've started a tradition of pub lunches on Fridays.

It's nice to be working with a small team, but I wouldn't mind having a few more people around to meet and socialise with. I also have less opportunity to learn from others; I think I'll be spending more time online and in books.

It's great to be working again, to be busy. I look forward to getting more confident with these systems and tools and be cranking out great code.

Margo's Laptop, RIP

Last night Margo started getting BSODs (Blue Screens of Death) on her computer. This morning I ran chkdsk and it found an orphaned file from the Avast anti-virus product. We uninstalled this but still got blue screens. I ran a chkdsk with all options on startup, and we still got them afterwards.

I suspect her hard disk is failing. For most of its life, her computer has been woefully short of memory. In normal use it took many minutes to boot, and the disk drive would be cranking away for just about any substantial tasks as memory was swapped to disk. So with all that constant disk activity, I'm not terribly surprised that it's finally showing signs of stress. We finally increased its memory severalfold a few weeks ago in conjunction with new software Margo was installing for school, and it seemed all was well until last night. At any rate, it appears the disk, OS, or both are corrupted to the point that it is no longer usable. Margo has lots of school work on her plate and requires a reliable computer.

So today we made a trip to Future Shop to make an unscheduled upgrade. She is now setting up a new Compaq laptop, and I am partitioning and formatting a terabyte drive we got for backups at the same time. Her computing needs should be well served for the next several years.

But her old Dell has served us well. It's gotten her through years of graduate school. Many gigabytes of research articles have flowed through its browser, and hundreds of pages have been written with its software.

And its list of wireless networks reads like a travelogue of European hotels and bed-and-breakfasts. It's been hauled into overhead luggage racks on many a train and plane. It's let us process pictures from our cameras and keep writing blogs on our travels. It's even served as a DVD cinema and as an iTunes music jukebox.

Its future is yet to be decided. I may put Ubuntu Linux on it and set it up for Sarah's use. Or we might wipe it and donate it to a nonprofit. But it has met our needs nicely the last few years, and we salute it.

Thanksgiving

Toonite it was Thanksgiving we had a big heavy turky,
it was the smallest one they had. I ate a turky leg, it was pretty big
the picture of margo and I is when we were just about to eat Dinner,
it was very tasty . When we had all finished our Dinner we
ate desert ... it was pumkin pie and........
pecan pie.

MMmmmm...

The best part of Thanksgiving? Pumpkin pie for breakfast the morning after. Two slices.

Margo

Advice for Interviewers

Before I forget my recent interview experiences, I thought I'd write about them a bit in that some could have been improved greatly, in my opinion. So if I were to be holding an interview, I would consider the following ...

• Use caution with written tests. They might be useful in situations where you want a candidate to explain something, and it shows a candidate's writing skills. But I think multiple choice and true-false questions are a bad idea. They're inflexible, so a candidate has no opportunity to argue his/her case - a candidate might be quite close to the answer but is unable to demonstrate that. And by all means, don't rely on a written test as the only means of evaluation - that's so impersonal and rigid.
  
• Set a relaxed tone. Interviews are awkward, and can be especially so when engineers are involved. Try to get the candidate to relax and open up. Otherwise you might be missing out.
  
• Pose a problem. Ideally, a problem without a single solution, with no correct answer. See how the candidate thinks about solving it. I really enjoyed such exercises.
• Ask a bogus question. Make something up. Ask the candidate about it and listen for his/her response. I think it's important for a software developer to be able to say, "I'm not familiar with that" or "I don't know". Ours is a profession where learning is constant, and a candidate should not pretend to know everything.
• Don't expect all answers to be correct. A software developer can be expected to have at least some skills in lots of areas: database design, algorithms, object orientation, data structures, enterprise libraries, web frameworks, AJAX interactions, web design, usability, quality assurance, software methodology. No one person can be an expert in all these areas. I'd recommend asking about the things that are important to your organisation. Or alternately, come up with a set of questions no one person could possibly be expected to answer completely correctly.
• Follow up afterwards. You've made an offer, and a candidate has accepted. But don't forget the other candidates, especially the ones who've made it to the final round. Each has given you hours of his/her time; the least you can do is acknowledge this with a few minutes of your time. When you write those "no thank you" emails, don't be afraid to include reasons why you went with another candidate - this is helpful information.
  

New Dyson

I don't usually enjoy buying stuff, but there are some things that you enjoy using and you look forward to acquiring. Like my iMac, my bike, and now this Dyson vacuum cleaner.

You know how tidy I like to be, so I like to have a good tool to keep my environment clean. And ever since I got that used Dyson in Ipswich, I knew once we settled I'd be investing in a new one. Today was that day.

I asked Sarah to capture me with my just-assembled new toy minutes before its first use.

Canadian Thanksgiving

Today is our first Thanksgiving in Canada and we are thankful to be settling well here.

As Mike posted on Friday, he has received a job offer and will begin work on Tuesday. He feels that the company is a good fit for his personality and skills, and I am pleased that he has flexible hours and the ability to work from home from time to time. This means that I do not need to worry about sorting child care arrangements on the days that I go to class early or return late.

Sarah has settled really well in her new school and is working hard and making friends. She likes her teacher, who is very kind and gentle in personality, a lot, but also acknowledges that her last teacher in England was a good fit because she was "very strict and old-fashioned".

Sarah has been in a phase recently of challenging the authority of her parents on a regular basis - either explicitly or through a strategy of sustained passive resistance (i.e. ignoring us, "forgetting," not "hearing" us, or retreating to her room and then ignoring us). Very annoying.

She recently employed a strategy that I remember well from my own childhood. When asked to clean her room, she showed us a very clean room and was released to go out and play. The next day, while trying to track down her school planner, I happened to open the closet door and encountered a small avalanche of books, toys, papers and dirty laundry.

An alternative strategy is arguing that as she is only 7 years old, we are unreasonable in our expectations that she clean her own room, keep track of her own school books, put away her own laundry and help around the house. We are ogres! She is the only child her age in the whole school who has to be responsible for such odious tasks!

We are also, apparently, (and sadly), no longer the experts in everything and the masters of the universe. Dang! I had hoped that we could stretch out the good times for a year or two more. We are responding to the insurrection by trying to judiciously mix redirection, discussion, reminders, and consequences, with mixed success, (although we are optimistic that the surge will be ultimately successful!)

School is also going well for me. I received my first paper back with high marks and have heard that my grant application was ranked highly before being sent off to the office of graduate studies for further ranking before (I hope) being sent to Ottawa for final consideration. If awarded this grant, it will be for 20k-35k a year for the duration of my time in the program, so it is a pretty big deal. I'll find out in the spring if I've been funded. I'm getting ready to submit my first independent journal article and hope that it is accepted for publication.

I am today preparing our first turkey dinner in a couple of years (our oven in England was too small for a turkey) and looking forward to consuming all of the fixings. This year's menu is traditional with no gourmet touches - Roast turkey, dressing, mashed sweet potato, green beans, butterflake rolls, gravy, cranberry sauce, pecan pie and pumpkin pie.

Canadian Thanksgiving is not the unrestrained orgy of eating that kicks off the excesses of the Christmas season ... that is the particular joy of an American Thanksgiving. My advisor lived in the states for a while and says that he never misses a year in America for Thanksgiving as it is more fun. Here it has traditionally been a liturgical festival. Although there is a national holiday on Monday, dinner is traditionally eaten on Sunday, according to my informants. So, that is what we are doing.

It has been interesting to participate in the immigrant experience in Canada. About 20-25% of Vancouver residents are immigrants, so I meet people everywhere I go who are recently arrived in this country. There is, at least in the newspapers I have read, almost no anti-immigrant sentiment expressed. This is very different from the US and UK and I want to find out more about it as one would think that the tensions involved with a large influx of people from different cultures, speaking different languages etc, would be similar.

I have been avidly following the US election on TV and in the blogosphere. We have elections in Canada this week and provincial elections in November, but many Canadians are more interested in what is happening in the US this year. I sent in my absentee ballot last week. Bush is in the last 100 days of his presidency, thank goodness. I am dismayed by the Republican vice presidential candidate and have

Sarah and I have been taking a family art class on Saturday afternoons and it has been a lot of fun doing that together.

Well, into the kitchen for me now ... pie crusts and potatoes to peel and a turkey to stuff await me!

Love,
Margo

Hired

Ha! About an hour after writing that last whingeing post, the phone rang and I got a job offer. I'll write more details once it's official. Maybe I should have started whingeing earlier ...

Job Hunting

I hate, hate, HATE job hunting. It's not the application process, and I quite like interviewing. It's the waiting, and knowing that there's not much you can do to influence the process.

I've been particularly frustrated because it's taking me so long to get hired. I've had way more interviews - with about a dozen organisations so far - than it normally takes me to get an offer. I haven't had trouble getting interviews - in fact, most of the jobs I've applied for (usually a few a week) have asked me to interview. And I often get a second interview. It just seems that, after that last interview ... there's nothing. Sometimes I don't get contacted for weeks. Sometimes I'm not contacted at all. I've been told I've been a second choice on a few occasions.

I've had suspicions as to why, and today in an interview they were confirmed. The answer is simple: Vancouver has a glut of Java developers. This is a very attractive and desirable place to live, and it attracts a lot of software professionals.

This explains things better for me. Where I may have once stood out, I'm now merely average. And employers are in a buyer's market. They have no incentive to decide quickly - they can take their time to make the best choice for themselves.

I feel a bit of relief because I've been agonising over this. Asking myself, how can I be failing here when I've advanced more easily elsewhere? Is it me? Have my skills been in decline? Am I presenting myself badly? And so on.

It's been especially hard given our situation. We're new immigrants. We don't know anybody. We have no job history here, no credit history, no one who can vouch for us. This was the first time as a family that we've ever relocated without having a job waiting for us. I'm not too worried in the short term - we have enough cash to live comfortably for perhaps a year or more, and Margo should have an easier time finding work, and fairly soon. But it has been affecting me badly. I feel like I'm failing my family. And I don't have a role - I don't belong anywhere, so I still feel like a tourist sometimes. And in technology, time not working looks bad. I'm really eager to get working again, to feel like I'm part of something and contributing to something.

Since I'm getting invited to interviews, it tells me I have something to offer, and gives me hope that if I just keep at it, eventually something will come through. In fact, as I write, I have four opportunities that have advanced to the offer/not offer stage, and I expect to be notified on all four within days.

But given the glut, I may look into other options. I've been hesitant to do contracting, because I'd prefer to join an organisation and because I'm not too knowledgeable about the accounting and tax requirements, but that would be a great way to get working quickly. I may also apply for some less senior positions, or positions with larger organisations, both of which I've been mostly avoiding.

In the meantime, I've not been completely idle. I've been catching up on some areas of the J2EE universe I've been neglecting, like the EJB 3 specification and the Java Persistence API. I've downloaded JBoss Seam and have spent some time playing with it. I've been reading about the better aspects of the JavaScript language. I've also been reading up on LISP. I've spent time updating my Mac OS X environment with newer development tools. And I keep up on technology news by reading sites and blogs.

I also help around the house, doing small grocery shopping trips and running laundry. I'm often around to drop off and pick up Sarah from school.

And I've let myself have some fun too, with bike trips exploring the city, sampling a few cafés and coffee shops. I visit the library weekly. And I bought a Playstation for the chance to enjoy a few games I've been wanting to spend time with for a while.

And in the meantime, my job is, finding a job. With each interview I'm getting better, refreshing myself on any technology questions that I miss, as well as learning more about the local environment and market. So I hope soon to be writing the "I'm hired" post.

Beer Excursion: Central City Brewing

I've been good. Really, I have. Mostly. In the time we've been here, I've had maybe three pints of ale, less than a pint a week, which is much much lower than my UK average. I've been cycling steep hills, snacking on veg, and eating much less than an office worker might be tempted to. My belly is much smaller and I'm grateful for it.

But today was one of those days when you toss the rules out the window. I joined Margo and Sarah on their trip to their Burnaby arts class on the 129 to Edmonds Station, but I jumped off the bus at the Holdom SkyTrain station, took it to Columbia Station, transferred to the Expo Line eastbound, and got off at Surrey City Centre, the second-to-last stop.

I'd planned to walk to nearby King George Highway to visit a pub I'd read about, but by the time I arrived, in the rain, and looked up and down the street, all I saw were box stores, so I hiked back to the Central City office tower and shopping mall, near the station. And another destination, Central City Brewing.

I started with some samples of their red, their IPA, and their bock. I started with a pint of the Boomers Red Ale. I'm still getting used to the colder ale temperatures here. But my, the hops! It just makes a beer brighter.

Around this time, I thought another pint might be nice, but it might be prudent to order a bar snack to soak up a bit of the drink. I asked the bartender, and he procured a menu, but did mention that the special was fish and chips for $10. Now, if he'd said just about anything else, I'd have said, "No thanks, mate, I'm just not that hungry". But with that magical phrase - "fish and chips" - my reptilian brain kicked in and I said, "Aw, mate, that sounds great, no need for a menu." And next in the pipeline was not their IPA, which apparently CAMRA Vancouver declared the best of 2008, but its temporary replacement, an Imperial IPA stuffed with hops but a good deal of malt to, in order to weigh in at its mealy 8.5% ABV. (CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, is a UK organisation for the appreciation of real ales, and I was nicely surprised to see there is a Canadian counterpart.)

So even though I arose late this morning, fighting a cold and with a pond's worth of frogs in my throat, I temporarily achieved a sense of blissful nirvana, which carried me on my trip home up to the point of leaving the SkyTrain station only to see my green light across Holdom turn amber, and the waiting 129 (with Margo and Sarah on board, no less) gleefully flooring it up the hill. So, instead of waiting another half hour for the next one, I decided to walk. Up the hill. No, up two bloody hills. In the rain. Did I mention it was uphill all the way? And that it was raining?

Boxes!

We finally got our shipment of boxes from the UK. Well, 8 out of the 9. The last one's due later today or tomorrow. These are the boxes that were supposed to arrive a week or two after we did.

Two of those were mine. It's nice to have winter clothing again - it's been getting colder here and, other than dress shirts, I haven't had anything with long sleeves to wear. Having winter coats is nice. So now we're no longer living out of suitcases!

About one in ten of my CDs got a bit munged, but only plastic cases - the CDs themselves are unscratched.

It's great to see some of these things again. Like our collection of flags, and my collection of beer coasters. And our Nelson coat of arms refrigerator magnet.

Downtown Decorations

After about a week of clouds and rain, today we had a perfectly sunny day. I took another trip downtown to get more pictures.

First, I took the SeaBus across to North Vancouver to get a few shots of downtown from a distance.



Then I got on with my main, er, focus: I wanted to capture some interesting building decorations. You know, those bits that stick out that don't seem to have any useful purpose? I've been noticing lots and have meant to capture some of them.


"And for the kids, we also offer a roller coaster on the roof."


I sure could go for an ice cream cone. A waffle cone.



"What will we do with these leftover columns?"
"Hmm, I think I have an idea."



"Such a large piece of cheese ... if only we could grate it into thin slices ..."



"Well, I like the idea of a large pot of boiling oil on the roof to repel invaders ... but what if we get strong winds?"


"It's a nice building design, but where will we fit the cyclotron?"
"Hmm, I think I have an idea."


I love this: it's not just a tree on the roof ... it's a tree you could climb.



I also spent a bit of time inside the Vancouver Public Library, which has been used in Battlestar Galactica and The 6th Day.