It’s been a busy week that felt long which is always the worst. The highlight of the week though was having someone’s blood dripping from their mouth onto my counter. Shortly thereafter I sent a love letter to Plexiglass inventor, Otto Röhm.

I experienced gastro euphoria for lunch on Thursday which could have very well redeemed my week because good food tends to fix everything. There are bright sides to working in the Downtown East Side and that’s being so close to Gastown. For my visiting readers from cities aplenty please forget not to experience Gastown if you’re in the neighbourhood. Then find The Black Frog and call me, damn it.

I overhauled my living room last weekend (which is really two weekends ago now, this has taken me that long to write). This will be my fifth arrangement since October 2007. I’m not sure how normal that is but normal doesn’t usually apply to me anyway so I’m not going to worry. 

I did acquire a new piece of furniture as well and that is a big, IKEA Billy shelving unit with glass doors that Gg handed down to yours truly. Ghetto me could never afford such a thing brand new so hookups are nice. Now that I think about it, this may have all started when I sold my IKEA Benno shelves on Craigslist. For approx 5 nights 140 DVDs and probably an equal amount of CDs were actually taking up space on my living room floor. If you know me then you know how devastating this disorganization was to me. At the same time, those who know me will also know that it makes perfect sense that I sell the shelves on a whim without any sort of plan regarding where the DVDs and CDs will go when the shelves are actually sold. I lament the disorganization I bring upon myself. Go figure.

So to recover from this not-very-well-thought-out situation that was my living room, I reorganized, shuffled, and rearranged my furniture just to prove something to myself. As a side note, I never feel wholeheartedly lonely because I seem to be perpetually in a state of autonomous interaction with my conflicting personality idiosyncrasies. In this case it was the impractical visionary vs the disciplinary and the end result, fittingly, was a living room I love and one that so far Cathy and Gg are not so fond of. It only makes perfect sense.

What do you make of it:

Here’s why I like it:

1. Previously my computer was against the wall behind where it is now. I faced … the wall. Again, for those who know me, they know I can’t face walls – especially in restaurants – and while also sitting at my computer desk. It’s not claustrophobia, it’s neurosis. 

2. I like feeling cozy and workstations are sometimes hard to make cozy. But tell me you wouldn’t curl up into a ball right on top of my desk now and fall asleep there.

3) I spend most of my reading, scheming, escaping, daydreaming, and playing crossword puzzles on that there sofa. There’s something very tranquil about lying down on it and having those wide open windows in front of me. Previously they were behind me and what kind of purpose does that serve? None other than to make me wonder what’s going on in the world. Pointless; I need to know everything at all times.

4) Other than three glasses of red wine, Gravol, or Coronation Street, there is not much else that turns my mind off other than flames from a fire with a flavouring of José Feliciano from the vinyl.

Oh come on, you appreciate the effect and secretly wish you were sitting in my living room too.

5) The wall that now stands to support my books, DVDs, and CDs is the only wall long enough to keep them together as a family. 

And with that I will not justify my logic any longer. You will either enjoy it, dislike it, or not really give a shit either way so there really isn’t much more to discuss. 

I’ve now been composing this post for two weeks and four days. My new year’s resolution really should have been to finish my blog posts in a reasonable time frame…

Last weekend Mandy bunny and I made a fairly spontaneous plan to go to Whistler. The last time I was there they had the peak express lift closed because it was miserable and torrential. But this time, although it wasn’t a clear day, the snow conditions were probably the best I’ve skied in my 22 years of skiing. It was abundant and frigging fast and this is perfection to me.

In the words of whistlerblackcomb.com: “Whistler’s Peak Express offers some of the planet’s most rugged high alpine.” Now tell me that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine in all the right ways. We reached the peak and were submerged in heavy clouds. It was blustery and dark making the ground impossible to decipher from the atmosphere. I’d be lying if I said we weren’t scared shitless and that’s simply because when you’re on a sharp decline and you can’t see even ten feet ahead of you, you’re pulling guts from areas other than the pit of your stomach. In fact we were stealing guts from each other. We swore the whole way down to the first ridge and upon survival we masochistically wanted to do it all over again just for the thrill of it.

Isn’t Mandy the cutest thing?

On one of our lift rides we started talking about what the hills in Ottawa were like. Myself, I learned to ski at Edelweiss in Gatineau. We thought of all our favourite hills and how sadly they pale in comparison to what we are so lucky to have here. Just to put it into perspective, I did some quick calculations and came up with this very roughly scaled example of how Edelweiss might compare to Whistler. Technically speaking, Whistler has a top elevation of 2,182 metres compared to Edelweiss’s 350 metres. 

I mean, check out this vista:

Whistler © Andrea C.

Oh, am I bragging? Sorryyy.

What else is new…

Oh yes, here’s the car that’s going to replace my Ford Fo’ once my lease is up. Thirteen more days to go, by the way, and my last car payment comes out. Then I will be car-payment free. Free! Fr.EE! F|r|e|E! f:r/EE!

Cute isn’t it? Rando found me this little gem and I couldn’t be happier. I introduce you to my 1991 Civic Si.

Okay I will leave you with some Sunday Jammin’ Music on… yes, Thursday. This one’s solid for jammin’. Thievery Corporation – Un Simple Histoire

Please also enjoy with me this incredibly sexy photo of Johnny Depp.

This type of question usually comes up in an interview and at that time you’re pretty prepared for it. You offer up some sort of ambitious, somewhere over the rainbow, in a perfect world, answer that would essentially guarantee you on a rickety canoe in the middle of Lago de Atitlán in Southern Guatemala, using a wireless connection that you developed to work remotely, and with a 2nd tab open in Firefox to the World Vision sponsorship form.

On a personal level though, I find it very hard to answer this question. Part of the reason may be that if I rewind five years back from today I would have never positioned myself in Vancouver, living alone, single, working for the provincial government, and generally being a recluse on Fridays, then transforming into a wild animal on the occasional Saturday.

And now, before I know it, I will be collecting another colourful magnet on this fridge of mine. See, for the last year or so I’ve been working with my dad to get my European Union citizenship as my brother and I are first generation Canadian on his side. Paperwork has been mailed back and forth over the time I’ve been here in Vancouver and finally I have entered the final stages of the process. With a few glitches along the way and a lot of time spent by my dad at the Czech Embassy in Ottawa, the process is basically ironed out. I’m so close to having dual citizenship I can almost taste it. All that’s left is a Czech passport photo this September when I’m home for my brother’s wedding.

It’s been lengthy because I can only work with  the Czech Embassy in Ottawa because in Vancouver we just have a secondary consulate office and this is not effective from a legal perspective – they don’t have citizenship authorisation. I’ll have to make it back to Ottawa one more time after my passport arrives to sign it in the presence of a representative.

This is a big thing for me in a lot of ways because it is bridging me to an area of the world where both my parents’ lineage comes from. It’s nice that both Italy and the Czech Republic are part of the European Union now because the opportunity will be available to me to live and work anywhere in the EU indefinitely; for I will be a citizen!

So back to where I will be in five years from now…

I’ll be in my “late” thirties… maybe I will have moved onto a new life again. As a single girl, I have dreams of traveling Europe by train. One of the most beautiful train rides I’ve been on (and I haven’t been on many) was from Prague to Olomouc in the Czech Republic. We were mid-destination by dusk at a time when the rolling hills glowed the lushest green underneath a sky the colour of steel, sliced by the rays of a deep orange sun. The Euro trains are just like in the movies with ledges and wooden compartments and wide open windows.

I don’t think I’ll stop until I’m fulfilled, and if this means I don’t stop until I take my last breath then that’s the way it’ll go. I say this now, on my lunch hour with a hungry stomach… but sometimes it feels as undeniable as my hankering for Christian Bale’s body in American Psycho.

There is more out there for me. Whether I’m alone, or with a best friend, or a lover, or a purse dog – I’ve got to fit in as much as I can into this life. It just makes sense to me, right now anyway.