Christmas Pics

We have had a really nice holiday this year. Sarah and I began her school vacation with a trip to Idaho to see Granny and Grandpa. We had a light dusting of snow while we were there and took a walk in the yard at dusk - here are some photos of the lovely sunset and of lovely Sarah...

Here are some more shots of the tree at home (after Santa came, ate up all of the Snickerdoodles, and left some gifts and filled the stockings).

And here are some photos of Mike and Sarah opening gifts on Christmas morning...

 

Here is a shot of me and Sarah...

And finally, a couple shots of Jupiter, the new kitty, playing with his stocking (which was stuffed with kitty treats that he really worked hard at extracting). Emma, our older cat, quite sensibly avoided the chaos and retreated to the basement while he horsed around with his toys.

I hope that all of you had as lovely a holiday as we did. We were feeling very grateful to be spending the day in our new home, and fortunate as always to be blessed with good friends and family all over the world.

Christmas Jammies

Margo has a tradition of getting us holiday jammies every year, and wearing them Christmas Eve. So this is us last night.

Holiday Hosting

Last night we hosted a neighbourhood party. It was our first opportunity to properly host people in about five years, since we just haven't had enough space until moving into our house.

Weeks ago we printed up invitations I'd designed and then went door-to door through our complex, popping them into mailboxes. (I'm hoping to make it easier next time - I collected contact information from guests and have shared the email list already.)

Margo has already been heavily Martha Stewarting our living room with holiday decorations, so her culinary contributions were no less impressive. We asked guests to bring dishes to share, but Margo came up with quite an attractive spread herself. The collection of sweets had childred goggle-eyed.

Margo also made vegeterian chili and cornbread.

I got to be a bartender again and made some hot spiced wine, chilled a few lagers and ales for guests whose beer tastes are less snobby than mine, and had a few homebrews on display to represent for the boxes of bottles on the floor nearby. I also served wines from the racks just above and later got to shake up a few mixed drinks.

Sarah and a friend chaperoned kids in the basement. They had some craft activities and later watched some Christmas animations and played board games.

It was great for us to finally host many of the neighbours we'd been having occasional chats with and get to know them better. We'll see a lot more of them after last night; a few plans have already been made. We're happy to be able to help grow some community in our shared housing - we've been wanting to do this for a long time.

Christmas Decorations

Margo and Sarah picked up a Christmas tree Friday and spent the evening decorating it. Margo is still adding finishing touches; this is what our living room looks like today.

We have lots of lights on our "street". Sorry this is so blurry but it gives you an idea how many lights there are.

And this is our house's contribution to the street's collection of lights.

Divination Dubbel

Today Sarah and I bottled my latest batch, a Belgian Dubbel style, just in time for the holidays (though it'll need a week to carbonate in the bottles). I ran out of bottlecaps with four to go, so I'm having a happy afternoon - you can't let it go to waste.

Christmas Comedy

Last night we caught the season's first performance of Under the Christmas Tree, Christmas-themed sketch comedy and improv from Table 23. It's been too many years since I saw live comedy, and overdue for some hearty laughs. Sarah enjoyed it too. Favourites for us were a reworded rendition of Baby, It's Cold Outside with an ex-boyfriend/stalker at the window, and a gospel-tinged hymn to the Visa card. The theatre is just a bike ride away, so I'm sure I'll be back for more soon.

Labeled

Today I bottled my IPA. I had to bone up on the bottling process again since it had been a few years. As I was filling the last bottles I wondered how much beer remained. More than I expected. I'd had one extra bottle I'd kept but saw there was much more still. Not wanting it to go to waste, I filled a glass jar (that coffee beans normally go in) and then started grabbing pint glasses. So after two full cases of bottles, I still had this much left over:

Even I would struggle with so much. I called a neighbour and texted some friends, and luckily the latter were free and willing to come to my aid.

The beer was flat, of course. Priming sugar was added just prior to bottling, so after about a week it will be more carbonated. But I thought it was pretty tasty. I was a bit worried with this being my first batch in some time, and also as I'd had to do some impromptu conversions with the measurements of the ingredients to go from 5 gallons to 23 litres.

I affixed labels to bottles to be sent home with our friends. I'm happy to be designing them again. With this design I'm going for a "warm glow in the dark of winter" look. Mike's Nanobrewery, which has formerly operated in Olympia, WA and Portland, OR, now calls Coquitlam, BC home (though I considered using Port Moody and Vancouver alternatively).

Scary Stuff

Last night we visited some neighbours for a neighbourhood Halloween party. Here's Devil Girl Margo and Scary Ghost Sarah. Sorry for the camera blur. I was Doctor Who. (Bow ties are cool.)

Tonight there's more trick or treating in our neighbourhood. Sarah went out after dinner, but here she is at dinner ...

... and here's Margo's outfit.

And dinner, pasta with eyeballs of meat (ground beef, Italian sausage, bread crumbs soaked in wine, Asiago cheese) with olive pupils. Mmmmm.

Endless Complaints about Jupiter

Aaaarrrrgh! Jupiter, the new kitten has been driving me nuts! When he first started living in my room he was very sweet and cuddly. Now he's on a peeing run and causing us trouble. Also, once he first started to explore the house when we put him back in my room al he did was whine (meow) and complain until he got to explore again. Now he likes to play with Emma who sometimes disagrees with him (ok, really it seems she hates him). Today I also started to play with Emma. I was dragging one of the toys Mom and me got for Jupiter. The toy is just a mouse connected to a string connected to a stick. So, anyway I was dragging th mouse along the floor so Jupiter would jump out from under Mom's shelf and chase the mouse. My plan was I'd try to catch him when he leapt out and grab him. Instead, not only he, but Emma too pounced at the mouse and I was very surprised as I have never played with Emma before. Oh right, back to Jupiter. Well all I can say now is an evil spirit is living inside him. Oh, and Happy Halloween!

Brewing Again

After a five year hiatus, Mike's Nanobrewery is back in action. Yesterday I reacquired supplies from Dan's Homebrewing Supplies and today I brewed.

I got this photo of the supplies, all new and shiny, plus ingredients. (I forgot to add the hops when I took it though.)

I brewed an IPA because I've never done one before, and since moving to Vancouver three years ago, it's become a favourite style, so it seemed to be a good one to start with. (I haven't named it yet.) I'll definitely be doing darker styles soon; in fact Margo's requested one for the holidays.

I'd brought my Charlie Papazian Joy of Home Brewing for its IPA recipes, but the guys at Dan's quickly tipped me to the fact that the US measurements are smaller than their Canadian counterparts (23 vs 17 litres I believe) so I needed to up the malt and grain measurements a bit. When it came to picking hops I mentioned I'd be happy to end up with something like Central City's Red Racer IPA, and they happened to have a recipe with the same hop profile, so I ended up getting Cascades and Zeus hops. They smelled like the brewery does, my favourite in BC.

Here's me after taking the original gravity reading.

I'm quite happy to be doing something creative again, and I look forward to sharing bottles with friends in a few weeks.

Margo Crunches

This morning Margo wanted to hike the Coquitlam Crunch, so I went with her. She's been working out regularly and her trainer recommended she get some cardio this weekend. We had a foggy morning but the sun burned through pretty well.

Here she is at the top of the trail.

Bad Kitty

Jupiter is making powerful enemies. Yesterday he weed on my bed, then later, Margo's. This morning after our backs were turned Margo caught him with his head in the bowl of panake batter.

Garage

Margo worked on rearranging the shelving, boxes, and leftover hardware bits in our garage, with a bit of assistance from us. At the end of the afternoon, we parked our car in our garage. For the first time.

Cats Update

Emma is getting a lot more comfortable. She's pretty much the cat we remember now. She's still a bit jumpy, and scurries away from us when we're walking, but as long as we're sitting, she'll come right up.

Jupiter is still rambunctious but it seems he's stopped weeing on fluffy surfaces when we're not looking.

They're mostly getting along. Jupiter often follows Emma around, though he does test her patience, and occasionally gets a hiss and/or swat.

At one point today I came into my bedroom to see this.

Awwwwww.

Exploring by Bike

Today I took two bike trips exploring some of the nearby Tri-Cities area. It was a fine, sunny fall day, a great day to get out.

My morning trip was a bit of an expedition to find a possible bike commute route to the nearest SkyTrain station. I knew of a nearby bike route from Moray Street that went uphill where I could connect to a north-south street to take me close to the station.

After climbing uphill for some ways I noticed a commemorative sign saying that this was where Rick Hansen pushed his wheelchair on the last day of his famous Man In Motion tour. It said the Thermal Drive ascent was one of the steepest he'd encountered in his tour around the world. That's great, I thought, wherever this Thermal Drive is. It turns out I was less than halfway to the top, and Moral becomes Thermal. So, definitely not a feasible bike commute route.

While I was up there I toured Como Lake. More a pond, really, but it's impressive to see a watershed that high up.

I made my way back using a different route, taking in more of the Port Moody waterfront.

In the afternoon Sarah wanted to go on a bike ride with me, so we looked at a map and picked a route taking us to nearby parkland. It turns out that parkland hides the Coquitlam River. We found a pedestrian bridge.

On the way back we also took in Lafarge Lake, another small pond, man-made I'd guess, but a nice view.

Cats!

Yesterday Margo returned from a few days in Portland. She came back with her rented truck loaded with a china cabinet, a massive and heavy piece of furniture that's been in her family for some time. And she also brought back our old cat Emma.

We left Emma with Margo's cousins five years ago when we left the continent for Europe. On visits to Portland she no longer recognised us. We haven't been able to give her a good home until now ... when we were renting, one of the upstairs owners was allergic to cats.

She is slowly adapting to her new home. Just as she did in Portland when we brought her from the pet shelter, she pretty much disappeared at first; now she's taken residence under Margo's bed, coming out for food. I managed to get this shot just as she turned to retreat.

But she's slowly warming up. Margo says Emma let her pet her this afternoon.

We're keeping the cats away from each other for a while. Margo has a plan to introduce their smells to each other in a friendly way first. But we're hoping they are good company for each other: the rambunctious youngster and the wizened elder.

Gadgets!

This morning was like Christmas morning for me. I got a new computer yesterday.

Now that we're settling into our house, we can do some of those things we've been meaning to do but didn't because we didn't have a good home for it. And, after spending tens of thousands of long-accumulated savings ... what's a little more? So I got to do a bit of shopping in recent days.

The catalyst for a new computer was my ability to work from home. My previous iMac has served me faithfully for much longer than I would have guessed. From walking it out of the Apple Store in London's Regent Street, to shipping it across the Atlantic and across the continent, it has given five years of reliable service housing our thousands of photos and hundreds of albums, being a fine Java development environment, showing hundreds of DVD movies and shows, enabling hours of Skype video chats. Its 2.1 Ghz dual core processor was more than enough for my needs, and as the years went by and I watched clock speeds barely rising, I saw no need to upgrade. But it has finally come to a bridge it cannot cross.

In my job we use the Scala language, which is built over Java, but is a more flexible and powerful language. However, because of the extra capability and complexity of the language, compiling and running Scala code often takes more resources - especially memory. For me to be running and debugging in our full development environment, including multiple servers, some running inside the development tool ... it could be done, but the memory demands caused lots of disk swapping, and the performance was slow and unresponsive enough to be getting quite frustrating.

The older iMac has a maximum of 3 Gb, and I have it up to 2.5. To reasonably accommodate the full development environment, I'd probably need at least 4, ideally more like 8. So ... it was finally time to move up, adding one more to my long list of Macs. (Though it was certainly no hardship.)

So I'm typing my first post on this new machine. I've already updated the OS to the latest version. I also used the Migration Assistant to restore everything from a Time Machine backup, and though I haven't completely reviewed the results, I'm very impressed: It appears that all my apps, data, and settings are here, as if I've just logged out of the old one and into the new one. And it comes with 4 Gb of memory, and when my order for more comes in this week, it'll have 12, not far from its maximum of 16. That should serve me a few more years.

(I was too lazy to go into deeper recursion.)

Which brings me to my next gadget: a smartphone, the one that took the photo above. As with my older iMac, I got by on my dumbphone for a long time. I just couldn't make a compelling case to buy into a new phone. I could make calls from anywhere I wanted, and there were few places I spent my day without wifi. And can you think of anything that depreciates faster than a smartphone?

What swayed me was the concept of carrying my online data with me. My online identity is pretty much housed by Google - my email, blogging, calendar, contacts, some documents, and now with Google Plus, my little bits of social networking. I realised there'd be good value in being able to access that anywhere, enough to convince me to pay the price for it. Plus, I was really slow texting replies to my mates on the numeric keypad. (Not that I'm much faster with the onscreen keyboard - I'm still missing keys often.)

I settled on Google's latest phone, the Nexus S. Latest for only a short while, though - their new one is rumoured to be out in October. However, this allowed me to get an S pretty cheaply.

I went with Android because that's also a Google creation. It's Java-based, so developing apps for it is more natural to me than it is for Apple's iOS (not that I have plans for writing apps; I'd just played with both developer tools.) And it's great to explore the other major handheld device ecosystem, to dive into its apps and market and get to know its OS.

I wanted the Nexus because it's the purest Google experience. Lots of other companies make Android phones, but they tend to build their own tools on top of it, so, much like buying a Windows computer from, say, Hewlett Packard, and getting tons of HP tools you didn't ask for, these phones have unwanted enhancements of questionable value. Plus, updates to the Android OS come more slowly for other phones because the vendors have to build in their own enhancements again; I'll get updates right away.

I chose Mobilicity as a carrier. They're an up-and-coming independent provider. They have the best prices I know of - I get unlimited voice and data for just $25 a month, and as far as I've seen it is truly unlimited - but the cost is that their coverage isn't as comprehensive as the big 3 Canadian carriers, though they are rapidly building out their infrastructure. Since I bought the phone outright, I don't need a contract and can switch at any time.

I've had the phone for over a week now and it's giving me lots of usefulness I hadn't anticipated. It's neat riding the train and seeing your position updating in real time on maps. I can be in a store and can refer to my wine tasting notes, or pull up a list of albums I'm curious about, or go online to get more information to help me make a decision. I drove someplace new (see below) and the Navigator app made my phone resemble a sat-nav, with audible driving directions and a great 3D map.

So the tiny minority of North Americans without a smartphone has decreased by one.

And on to my last recent gadget ... a CD player. What?, you ask, you didn't have one already? Well, yes and no. True, every computer in the house can play CDs, as well as the PS3. But none of these are connected to the hi-fi in the "family room" (which is what I think Margo is calling it ... but it's really my man-cave). The PS3 has served nicely but now it's in the basement with the TV.

Many of you will wonder why I bother, since it's all ripped to MP3/MP4 anyway. I bother because I can hear the difference, and when I'm enjoying an album, I want the full experience with no data loss.

That said, it's surprisingly hard to get an affordable CD player these days. The big box stores will sell Blu-Ray and DVD players that also play CDs, and might carry one or two models of CD changers. At the other end is the audiophile market with specially engineered digital-to-analog converters and exotic materials and such, which you can hardly get into for less than $500. What I wanted was a decent single-tray player, without a bunch of extra stuff, for a hundred or so, like I could easily get ten or twenty years ago.

So after some online sleuthing I found Innovative Audio in nearby Surrey. They not only sell quality used equipment, they have the know-how to service it too, so you can expect the gear to have been inspected and serviced well. After using the aforementioned GPS capabilities of my phone to get there, I walked out with a Sony player with some respectable audiophile credentials for $65. Sure, it's about 20 years old, the remote is missing, and I had to hunt for the manual online, but it plays like a champ, smoothly lasering through a scratched disc that none of the other computers can read without lots of sputtering.

So it's been a nice ride, scratching a few geeky itches.

Jupiter

Margo called me on Friday morning. She and Sarah were thinking of looking at kittens. Taken at face value, a statement like this admits the possibility that a kitten might not make its way into our house by the end of the day. But I knew better, and of course, when I got home, there was.

Me, I'm ambivalent about cats. Sure, they're cute and all. But I imagine: new carpeting smelling of cat wee. New hardwoods scratched by kitty claws. White furniture scratched to shreds and covered in cat fur. Think The Cat Came Back.

But Margo and Sarah have done their homework. Margo's had Sarah reading a book about taking care of cats. Sarah is now the cat's primary caretaker. 

Sarah named him Jupiter. Not for the planet, but for the god. She's been reading lots of Rick Riordan and such lately, where Graeco-Roman gods are brought into the modern world. Kids eat that stuff up.

So Jupiter has been living in Sarah's room, leaving only as a passenger in Sarah's arms. Yesterday morning he joined us at breakfast so I got some first pictures.

Sarah says he's ten weeks old, something like an eight month old human baby. Margo and I are having lots of schadenfreude as Sarah is woken up in the middle of the night and otherwise having less freedom and more responsibility. We thought we'd have to wait until we were grandparents to get a taste of revenge.

Yesterday Sarah said to me, "You know, I can kind of understand how annoying I must have been when I was smaller. I'm not apologizing, though."

Sarah's School and the Coquitlam Crunch

Class sizes are being finalised at Sarah's new school. Students are assigned to teams, the classmates they'll be spending most of their time with, and the teams are colour-coded. This week we were informed that the teams would be posted on windows at the front of the school, so today I walked Sarah to school so we could find her team.

Here's Sarah entering her new school grounds.

She's Yellow, by the way.

We parted ways on the way back. I wanted to hike the Coquitlam Crunch: a 5 km trail underneath BC Hydro power lines, a strip of greenspace running north-south from a substation in the hills down to the Fraser River. This part of the trail, right next to Sarah's school, is 2.5 km from the upper end, and this is where many people start.

From the top, I had a nice view of the Fraser Valley to the southeast.

And to the southwest, Port Moody and Burnaby. Here are some Port Moody condo towers.

And this panorama shows the same condo towers on the left, the towers of Metrotown in the centre, and Burnaby Mountain and Simon Fraser University on the right.

Neighbourhood Party

Yesterday afternoon I was pleasantly surprised to hear live music coming from the courtyard. A badminton net had been set up. Drinks and food and camp chairs were under the shade of a canopy. I introduced myself and enjoyed the music (performed by former students of a neighbour who teaches at the nearby high school). Later the girls joined us after their naps. I contributed a few bottles of wine and as it slowly disappeared, we met quite a few neighbours and guests. Sarah met lots of other kids - most are younger, but one is also starting middle school.

Sitting on the grass under a cloudless sky, enjoying food and drink and music and conversation, I kept remarking, "This is so great!" This sense of community is just what I'd hoped for. I look forward to contributing to it. I'll be participating in the next neighbourhood cleanup, and offered to help coordinate online tools. Margo will help coordinate Halloween activities with another of the neighbourhood mums. We're really happy top be here.

First Thoughts

We just finished hosting our friends Tom, Lena and Nika from Portland. It was a great visit. Now we have the house to ourselves again and are getting more used to living in it - things like ...

• Stairs. We're used to having everything close by, all one one floor, but now, with three storeys, it's a little different. When I open my mail upstairs, I don't want to take the envelope all the way down to the garage to recycle it. We have to come up with a caching system for intra-floor delivery of rubbish, recycling, and laundry. We're getting into the habit of looking for things to grab as we go up or down.
• Dust. We keep upper windows open all the time, and have hardwoods and low-profile carpeting, yet I'm still impressed with just how much dust we've accumulated in the last week.
• First dings. I know I will die some day, and I don't feel afraid of it. But getting the first scratches and dings in our new hardwood flooring was another matter.
• Privacy. With lots of big windows and neighbours close by, I'm changing my habits a bit. I have to remember to close my curtains before getting dressed, and I wear a bathrobe coming out of the shower now.
• Dishwasher. Having one is nice. I hardly used the one we had at our rental, but I find myself using this one more.
• Garage. I'm chuffed to be taking a garage door opener with me when I go on bike trips.
• Quiet. Early this morning I took some coffee out on the patio and read newspapers online. All I heard were birds. Half our house faces a large grassy courtyard dotted with trees. I saw a crow fly past and I could hear its wings.

Pics of the new house

After almost a solid month of 12-16 hour days - either moving out of the old house, moving into the new house, packing, unpacking and fixing the new place up - we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. There are still a few odd jobs to complete - a few shelves to hang, making cushions for the breakfast nook bench and the window seat, organizing the garage and a few boxes still remain unpacked - but basically, the hard work is done. I am very happy with how it is all turning out and thought I'd post a few photos:

My beautiful kitchen:

A view of the living room:

Looking from the living room toward the dining room and doors to our small deck:

 

Plenty of room for my cookbooks, and a view of the wine / pantry unit

A view past the breakfast nook and into the family room;

A new bar added to the pass-through between the kitchen and the family room: (I selected and hand finished the wood for the bar.)

Plenty of room for guests - so come on up to beautiful British Columbia and see us sometime!