Community

We're still having a ball up here. Last Saturday we went with a bunch of other families in our community to the Nitobe Memorial Gardens. Its a Japanese garden which is just beautiful, and we get in for free! I have pictures but I can't upload them yet. We had a blast, the place is amazing. I'm going to make trips back there to meditate. Later that day I took the kids to some robot racing, which was really fun. There's just tons of stuff to do here, and most of it is free and the kids love it!

The whole week has mostly been about hanging out and enjoying ourselves. We've been trying to stretch our groceries out a bit, and cook in some new ways. We've walked around to see more of the area. We've decided on some favourite places to frequent. Its really nice here.

Alyssa is still hard at studying, trying to get ready for her coming year of being a grad student and a teacher (and her entrance exams, to boot). I've started a language exchange with someone from Paris. She is teaching me French while I help her with her English. We've met once, and I think we're meeting again today.

The kids are just great. They love to play; its so easy to take them to a park for for a hike in the woods. We live a stone's throw from Pacific Spirit Regional Park, which is a forest 3 or 4 times the size of UBC campus (for those of you who don't know, UBC is about 3 or 4 times the size of UO campus). We've barely scratched the surface of its trails. (And we expect to find several Stargate SG-1 shooting locations!)

Wednesday night Alyssa went to the Distant Worlds concert that I got her tickets for. It was a stroke of luck that they were coming to Vancouver when we'd be here, and we payed extra for her ticket so she could actually meet Nobuo Uematsu and Arnie Roth! We have a picture of that as well, but I didn't bring the right computer with me to upload the photos, so another time. She said it was the opportunity of a lifetime, so I'm glad we were able to send her.

Tomorrow night, Paula and Kellie get in to town to visit us! They'll stay with us that night since they get in so late, and be here for 4 or 5 days. It'll be really fun to hang out with them and show them the area. And the kids can't wait to see Grandma. :)

We finally got doctors up here. See them in the second week of August, which is not too long a wait for first appointments. The insurance pays for everything, so we can get dental, massages, acupuncture, I can get my foot looked at, and we can come in as often as we need. Plus, the hospital where all these doctors are is a half-kilometer walk up the road from us.

Well, I took advantage of Freya falling asleep on our walk to sit and write this. Better get back home. :)

Fun in the sun!

I suspect that my updates will be farther between but greater in length, owing to the lack of internet in our home.

We are having a great time here. There's been a few bumps as we get used to what things cost, but it'll work out. The weather has been a little strange; rainy but warm for a few days, and now plenty of sun, but I hear that is happening elsewhere as well so I don't chalk it up to the region just yet. We do get some nice hot, sunny days, and we've taken to adventures outside to enjoy them.

There's so many free community events going on in our neighborhood to take the kids to go play. It's really amazing what there is. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we take Freya (and sometimes Odin) to a massive play date in a multipurpose room about twice the size of a basketball court. There's toys everywhere, play houses, cars to ride in, and they do a snack, book reading, singing, and other such things. We signed Odin up for a free class every Tuesday in the same room where he does guided arts and crafts. Last week (the first week) he came home with a fridge magnet of him and one of Freya, plus a 5x7 wooden photo frame which he had painted himself. This week he made masks for himself and Freya. (We got some pictures of that, but I haven't uploaded them yet.) Today Alyssa is taking Odin for some quality time to a Biodiversity museum since she gets in free as a student and he does as a child. (There's actually a ton of museums and attractions to within walking distance which are free for all of us except me until I become a student as well, so entertainment is really easy.) He's been excited about it all week, I gave Alyssa the camera.

We've found a lot of our favourite little places to hang out or go eat, such as forest trails, parks, walks in gardens, and the like. One of the kids' favourite treats is Tim Bits, which are small boxes of a few donut-holes from Vancouver's version of a Dutch Bros, called Tim Horton's. There's a lot of really cool looking restaurants around here for any kind of food we could want at any meal, so it's going to take us a long time to try them all.

Lately Freya loves to draw. She gets paper and a pen whenever she can and draws all over it, then comes to us and says "Look what I draw!" or some other proud exclamation. We're working on her table manners and trying to start the potty training.

Odin also likes to draw, but he's been focusing on building and imaginary play with all his toys now that he has plenty of room to play in the house. It's actually surprising how much space we have, when you stop to look around at it all.

Alyssa and I have been experimenting with new ways to cook on a smaller budget. We're making a lot of raw recipes, because it's easy to get cheap produce here and it tends to make a lot, plus there's no part of anything that goes to waste; excess or un-used parts of food can be used in another recipe. In fact, last night we made our own almond milk (way cheaper to make it with almonds than to buy it) and today we are using the leftover pulp to make an almond bread, so we spent way less on something that made tons more food, twice.

Alyssa's been hard at the studying for her first year. I'm really excited for her; she gets to teach a class and work in a really nice, new lab. One thing that killed us about her old lab was that she only had it at certain times so she had to go no matter what was going on at home, and it was really far away. Her new lab is a 5 minute walk from here, and it's open 24 hours without scheduling, so she can go one night she feels like it, and the next night she doesn't have to if the kids are staying up late, or something. It's going to be really different.

I'm trying to use my year off to catch up on some studies. I promised myself I wouldn't worry about it until we were all settled (which would give me a few weeks to relax), but we are now and I'm trying to motivate myself to get back in the saddle. So far with no success, but I'll get my act together. :)

We still have to find doctors for all four of us, but it looks like our insurance is going to come in in a day or so, so we can get whatever treatment we need. We still need to get Alyssa's Social Insurance Number so she can get paid for working, but after that, there's no red-tape to take care of, so we can just relax and enjoy ourselves.

It's so nice here being able to live in a nice area, with lots of community around, and plenty of fun and free things within walking distance for us all to have a fun day. Just a couple days ago we found the beach. It was about a 10 story hike down some wooden stairs (which was murder coming back up) through a beautiful forest, and the beach was perfect. There's hardly any wind (because it's in a bay, though still ocean water), and the water is about as warm as a public pool so swimming is super easy. I swam in the Umpqua and it was colder.

Well, that will do for now. Alyssa is at the museum with Odin and I'm out for a walk with Freya, so I think we'll go. I thought it would be a long post.

Eh?

In short, all is well in the land of the CND.

In long;

We got in on the train at about 11:30 - 40 minutes late thanks to some errant freight trains. Customs took a while because we had so much luggage (we were moving, after all). They didn't really search us at all, but we had to go to immigration to get documents for the kids, which took until about 1am or so. We got a taxi home and put the kids in bed. Unfortunately, poor Odin woke up in the middle of the night in his new bed and had no idea what had happened (he had fallen asleep in the taxi) and I found him clawing at the front door and screaming for Mommy and Daddy in the middle of the night. (He's was fine the next night.)

We love our new apartment. The kids have a huge room with plenty of floor space to play, and we bought them some great furniture which is working out great. Our room is pretty small, but very simple (all we need is a bed and a dresser, we have nothing else in it) so it's nice. The kitchen is good, we have lots of closet space and a huge laundry room for storage. The dining room has a linoleum floor - thank Zeus! We don't have to worry about spills! It's quite big and fits our bookcases in it with plenty of room to walk around the table (the kids even drive around it in cars they can sit on and push around). The living room is absolutely huge, and we have more windows than walls. There's room for all our furniture (which looks stylish and is amazing, thanks to Mom's generosity and Ikea) and still plenty of floor space and room to stretch or dance around the apartment. We also have a nice deck which views one of the many parks/playgrounds around here, though right now it's filled with cardboard boxes that need to be torn down. (See also the short video tour I shot of our place.)

We've spent most of our first few days getting acclimated to the new surroundings. We've found all the local spots we love. There's a giant grocery store a little under a kilometer walk south of us, along with a sushi place, a coffee house, and all kinds of other stuff like a mini metropolis. A little while further is the UBC farm which has a Farmer's market every Saturday (did that today). Just north of us a few blocks is another grocery store. Add that to the main grocery store we bus to down the road, and we have three of them. It works out well because each one is good for different products and seasonal items, so we can always get things at the cheapest price around by going to the right one at the right time. There are also numerous convenient stores, restaurants and eateries, and attractions within blocks of us. (Yesterday alone on one walk, we passed by a pizza place, sushi shop, Indian curry house, bubble tea house, and four others, all in the same general area.)

Right now we're trying to work out some of the more important details, like where to take the kids for a pediatrician, which bank we should sign up with, and how to get on the Canadian tax system (apparently we're entitled to an annual check just for living here, even though we've only been here a few days, because we pay sales tax like everybody else).

There are tons of parks near by for the kids, lots of fun to be had walking around campus, the UBC Hockey Rink (for the Thunderbirds) is across the street from us (I promised Odin I'd take him to a game), and we even have a forest a block away with hiking trails:

From Jul - Sep '11

The air is great here, the people are so nice, the buses work great, there's lots to see, it's amazing. Prices are a bit high depending on what you're buying, but you get used to it, and there are other trade-offs to make it worth it. We're discovering just how much we love it here, and we're all really happy about it.

I put a ton of new pictures in the Apr - Jun '11 album, as well as a lot in the new Jul - Sep '11 album, including some videos. Enjoy!

Go Canucks Go!

Well we did it; we moved up to Canada. Mostly. Right now I'm writing this blog while riding the train back to Eugene to get the kids, and we'll all head back up there on the 6th.

It was an eventful trip. We got the moving truck with no problem, and loaded it up Tuesday night. Getting on the road Wednesday morning was easy, and we headed to Portland to meet Mom at Ikea. Unfortunately, the GPS we were using couldn't keep up with how weird Portland's streets are and we got lost for almost half an hour. We spent more time in Ikea than we thought, but it was a truly magical place and we ended up with a lot of nice stuff. Thank you Mom very much for buying half the stuff, we had expected to do it all on our own.

The Ikea stuff went right in to the back of the truck and we rushed off. Traffic around Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett was just plain stupid. How can that many people need to be going somewhere at the same time? But we made it through. No problems at the border, except that the Canadian officer was surprised when we answered the "Do you have any guns?" question with a "No."

We got to our apartment complex a little later than planned, so we didn't have time to unload much of anything (they ask you not to do any moving after 10pm for the quiet hours). We brought up most of the Ikea furniture because we figured we could stay up late putting it together but instead passed out on the floor for the night. Thursday morning I found my new favourite breakfast place (a restaurant called The Pendulum in the SUB - student union building - which serves delicious food and plays blues and jazz all day) and we went back home to bring up as many loads of boxes as we could.

Moving all that in was hard. We have to pull the truck in the Don't Park Here zone temporarily, unload enough stuff to fit the elevator, unlock the building door and move it all to the elevator, call it to the lobby and lock in (the management gave us the key), load it up, bring it to the third floor, lock it again, move it to the 3rd floor lobby, then go prop open another door down an impossibly long hallway and bring stuff from the 3rd floor lobby to our front door, than prop open our front door and bring it all in the apartment. It worked a lot faster and easier than it sounds, but it was a lot of work. We also took a quick trip to our grocery store for food and to get acclimated to the trip and the metric system with shopping for food (also the price differences).

Most of Thursday and all of Friday were spent setting the house in order since we were leaving Saturday at the butt-crack of dawn (not really) and wanted to have it all done before the, kids got there. I'm really happy to say that we got it all finished and I'm really amazed at our apartment. Everything in it is stuff we picked ourselves to be just the way we want, right down to the silverware, dishes, towels, everything. That's never happened to us before; we've usually had to accept what donations friends and family gave us as we went along and never had too much surplus income to get new, nice things. This time our family was overly generous and we sold more than half of what we previously owned so now we have a wonderful apartment that looks like it's from one of the Ikea showrooms.

It's a great apartment; lots of space, more windows than walls, very nice construction and design, just charming. I'll be doing a little video tour of it later for the family that wants to see who might not be visiting too soon.

Today was a little less lucky. We've spent a lot more money than we meant to trying to overcome the various obstacles. We started out a tiny bit later than planned, but ended up with no trouble getting through the border. The USA border officer broke my luggage, but I managed to fix it. Still, he could have just asked me to open it rather than break it open. We ran in to a huge traffic stop due to construction that seemed rather pointless as we passed by, so we ended up so late that we had to spend extra money to change our train tickets. We got to Seattle and had to make a stop at that Ikea because we'd bought lamps we didn't need (how could we know without first seeing the apartment?) and pick up a few pieces to furniture we'd already started but missed one or two items for. That didn't really set us back, but getting the truck back before the train was so close that we had to pay extra and get a taxi instead of walking from the truck drop-off to the train station. Also, gassing the damned thing cost almost as much as renting it. Sheesh.

So now we're on the train, about 40 minutes from Eugene (even though we should have been here 2 hours ago) and hopefully we can get some rest and finally see our kids! It was interesting not having them around, and really helpful for getting the apartment done (I don't think we would have been able to do it at all if we'd had them up there with us), but we really missed them and can't wait to see them.

Now we just hang out in Eugene for a few days seeing friends and family, and then it's the train ride back home for us.