This picture is for my friend Dee who wanted to see what my duck shoes look like. The PJs are a bonus. 🙂
(It only took me two hours to get this picture online with our internet connection here. Which explains why I haven’t been posting much lately and have been slow to approve and respond to comments. Yes, I’m fed up.)
Sometimes practicality trumps style!
The past few Friday evenings, since a couple of weeks before I started my new job, I’ve been going to dinner and then seeing a movie. I always go to the Colossus in Langley because there is a Montana’s restaurant just across the parking lot and Montana’s is my favourite place to go when I want cheap and delicious food I didn’t cook myself.
I’ve been coming down with a cold all week and it hit overnight, so I felt increasingly worn down as the afternoon progressed. I argued back and forth with myself about whether or not to go out and I finally decided to just go home.
Which is good because just about the time I would have been pulling into the parking lot at the theatre, there was a gang shooting. Twenty plus shots fired, one person gravely wounded.
Oookay, I think I’m going to start going to the theatre in White Rock instead.
Who says that you should only fulfill one dream at a time? Sometimes living one dream can help you make another come true.
I acted on impulse tonight, did something without thinking it through at all. It might seem to some that this is how I make all my decisions, but that’s only an impression, because I don’t share all the behind-the-scenes planning. But this thing I did, I did without any reasoning. It was foolish and brave and on this second February 5th without my father, it was just the sort of thing my wounded heart needed. I truly think he had a hand at it.
Let’s start at the beginning.
For years, I have dreamt of visiting the Canadian north. I looked for jobs in Dawson City, Whitehorse, Inuvik, Yellowknife… Applied for positions in such far off places as Hay River and Paulatuk… Yearned especially to to take a ferry up the inside passage to Skagway and hike the Chilkoot pass to the Yukon…
Jobs were hard to find from the Outside and I didn’t have the means to get up there on my own. I did come very close to a summer job in Dawson City, but I didn’t have my degree yet, so the job slipped through my fingers. Then a friend and I were going to max out our credit and savings and go spend three weeks hiking in the Yukon. Several financial crises came up that spring and I had to cancel the trip. My father’s one final wish for his life was to take an Alaskan cruise. When we realised that he didn’t have much time left, I scrambled to find the necessary money to take him on such a trip. But it was too late; his doctor would not allow him to go.
Finally, I decided that the north was a dream I had to abandon. I never had any intention of settling there permanently and my financial situation wasn’t stable enough to give up everything to relocate there for a year or two and then come back. I also didn’t really want to see the north in winter. Been there, done that, after spending almost a full month in arctic Quebec in my youth.
So, there was no doubt in my mind, when I set off on my great big adventure last fall, that I would find my way to the Yukon. I dreamt of the Chilkoot, but felt that was still beyond my grasp. It’s just not something a smart solo hiker would do and the logistics of joining an organized group were daunting. I still researched options last June, to convince myself that even if I got as far as Whitehorse, the Chilkoot would not be doable, and ended up finding a tour group that departs from Whitehorse and returns you to Whitehorse. It offered the best itinerary, bang for the buck, and an easier(ish) seven day tour schedule. That’s the tour I would have done, if doing such a tour was possible.
I think my dad was speaking to me tonight because without any sort of prompting, I found myself on Google typing in “Chilkoot Pass”, and one of the first links that came up was for that tour company. They were still offering the hike, including one in mid-July, the date I wanted, and there was space for just one more person….
A lot can happen between now and mid-July, I have to figure out what to do with Miranda and the cats for a week, I need to come up with 1,500$ by the beginning of May, and I have to whip my ass back into shape, but I just put a non-refundable 500$ deposit on a dream.
All I can say is that fulfilling dreams is addictive.
How then am I so different from
The first men through this way?
Like them I left a settled life,
I threw it all away,
To seek a northwest passage
At the call of many men,
To find there but the road back home again. (Stan Rogers, ‘Northwest Passage’)
Since moving to Surrey, there has been almost daily news about new gang-related violence and mayhem and more murders than I am accustomed to hearing about in a whole year!
I was warned before moving here that Surrey is renown for its crime rate. As I expected, the violence is pretty much localized to a particular part of town. I am glad that I made the decision to remain in the southernmost part of Surrey and do not believe I would feel quite as safe in a ‘mid-town’ RV park such as Peace Arch, but I don’t feel threatened. That said, I am very aware of where I travel and at what time, and I have to confess that one of the reasons why I’ve decided to stop taking public transit is that the Skytrain Station is located in gangland and waiting for a bus in the dark made me nervous. Petty crime is also a major problem all through the GVR, so I am doubly cautious when parking the car, taking the GPS with me and leaving the trunk cover (I have a hatchback) open to make it obvious that I’m not trying to ‘hide’ anything. A BC politician recently stashed all her personal gear (passport, Blackberry, wallet, etc.) in her trunk and lost it all, so I’m not being overly cautious!
What is sad is to listen to how hopeless people feel about the violence in their city. Neighbouring Abbotsford is facing a similar challenge the police have admitted their powerlessness to deal with this growing problem. There is also the concern that the perpetrators are getting younger and younger. A boy of 13 was arrested this week after stabbing a man on the Skytrain!
Despite all of this, I am getting less and less timid about this place that scared me so much. The next nice weekend (definitely not this one 🙁 ), I am going to downtown Vancouver! I’ll just make sure I stay on the west side of Hastings!
The time of year that makes me regret I ever learned to drive, that is.
It starts in February, when I owe the SAAQ 250$ for my toad’s license plate. It then continues in March when I owe them 100$ for my driver’s license. This year, the party will continue for a third month straight when I will owe them 500$ and change for Miranda’s license plate.
(The non-RVers go: “HA! My house doesn’t need a license plate, nyah nyah!” Rae replies: “My house doesn’t require me to pay school or property taxes, nyah, nyah!”)
There is some stuff going on behind the scenes that tells me that I will be taking up BC residency this coming fall. I’ve been warned that BC means ‘bring cash’ and that their driving fees are more draconian than Quebec’s. I find that hard to believe, but even if that’s the case, income tax will be less, so it will all come out in the wash.
What irks me with the SAAQ is that I can’t just send them three post dated cheques tomorrow. I need to wait for the February notice to appear in my mailbox in Gatineau and have said notice forwarded to me. I will then send said notice with payment attached back to Quebec. In March, I won’t need to wait for a notice since Quebec has come up with a really great scheme for nabbing people for lapsed licenses and imposing gargantuan fines on them: don’t send out notices that the license needs to be renewed and let people remember this for themselves. They do make it easy on us: license renewal happens on our birthday, on either an even year or an odd year, depending on the year we were born. So, on my birthday every odd year, I have to remember to send them a cheque. Gee, thanks, this is always what I wanted to do for my thirtieth birthday!!! Finally, in April, I will have to repeat February’s circus.
I’m just glad that this odd year isn’t the odd year when I need to get a new picture taken for my license. This was actually a factor in my decision to take off as quickly as I did. Since you have to be physically present in Quebec to have your picture taken (ie. you can’t send in an authenticated picture the way you can for a passport application) I wanted that two year buffer to reduce the urgency of making a decision about whether or not to go back. Of course, going back to Quebec never was more than option Z on a list of twenty-six options, but it was there (note that going back to my old job didn’t necessarily entail going back to Quebec other than to actually work since I could live in Ottawa, making that option significantly higher up on the list than taking up residence in Quebec again. Just thought I’d clarify).
I did get ‘happy’ news from Hydro Quebec this week. When I sold my house in the spring of 2007, I was sure that they owed me money, but still paid their huge final bill. A few months later, I got a sizable cheque from them. When I left my rental house in the fall of 2008, I once again got a huge final bill, which I paid. Guess what came in the mail this week? Hint: it’s a shame they couldn’t have made the cheque out to the SAAQ since it would have saved me from having to send it anything in February or March (!). For years now, I’ve dreamt of living ‘off the grid’ and not having to rely on utilities. Now that RVing has given me a taste of what this is like (22$ power bill for January, woohoo!), never having to deal again with Hydro Quebec is another of the many reasons why returning to Quebec is option Z on my list. 😀
(I’ve been told that I can come across as very critical of Quebec. Yeah, so? Just because I come from one of the (not THE, mind you) best places in the world in which to live it doesn’t mean that I have to take what’s wrong with it place sitting down, that I’m not allowed to criticize what’s not working. I vote, so I feel it’s my right to have a say. In fact, I think it’s my duty to not just sit by complacently. At any rate, José Emilio Pacheco sums up my thoughts about Quebec (and Canada, for that matter) perfectly (even though he was writing about Mexico). I’m not sure if my translation from the Spanish is 100% perfect, but it’s close enough:
High Treason
I do not love my country. Its abstract splendour
is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history
mountains
(and three or four rivers).)