Home Sweet Home

I made it back to Canada and am very very slowly settling in. Now that I've been here for 2 weeks, I can hardly say that I am still jet-lagged... but these long evenings still really have me confused as to what the time of day is. It doesn't get dark until about 8:45pm.

After I arrived in Vancouver, I immediately started house-hunting and found an apartment 3 blocks from the school that I'll be attending. I couldn't move in until the first of May, so yesterday was The Big Move. Next on the agenda was finding a car-- so the brother of a friend of my sister in law (get that one... took me awhile to make the connection. Didn't know him before.) took me car shopping and we landed an awesome VW Passat-- it's in amazing condition and has a 10-CD stacker and bum-warming seats. I love it.



So yesterday I woke up, loaded up my car, cleaned the place I was staying in, and went over to my new apartment block thinking that I would just grab the keys from the landlord, dump my stuff, and leave again. As it turns out, my landlord is Bulgarian (impossible to understand) and LOVES to talk. He babbled away, brought the wrong keys upstairs, made me sign some forms, kept babbling... and an hour and a half later I was very late to meet a friend in Langley, which is a 40-minute drive from downtown Vancouver.
Anyway, we managed to meet, re-loaded both of our cars with a shipment of stuff that I had sent from Africa in June and was in storage, and headed back to Vancouver. After filling the elevator twice, our cars were empty, there were piles of boxes in my new livingroom, and I realized that I was late for a costume party in Surrey... another 40 minute drive.
Jumped into the shower-- no shower curtain yet so I soaked the floor-- quickly threw some clothes and CDs into a suitcase, and put on the stupidest outfit I could find for this party.
I was late, the party pretty much sucked anyway, and then I spent the night in Surrey because it is way closer to my cabin than Vancouver is... and that brings us up to today-- I came home to my cabin on the edge of Shuswap Lake. (Yay!)
Took me about 5 hours to get here, landlord called me when I was about half-way and informed me that my first rent-cheque is late... shit... have to go to the bank tomorrow...
Then when I arrived, my aunt and uncle and grandmother were all busy doing stuff and the house was a complete disaster-- boxes, bags, carpets, clothes and towels everywhere. I couldn't believe it... I thought I was coming home to an empty house... which I was, but they had come in to check on it and discovered that there was a huge flood and the entire downstairs bedroom, bed, carpets, clothes, etc. etc. are soaked.
So instead of going hiking, having a nap, playing the piano, and having a bubble bath as I had expected to do, I have spent all afternoon trying to dry stuff out, doing load after load of laundry, and pulling all of the insulation out of the ceiling in the basement guest-room.
As I was mopping up the floor with some towels, I noticed some droppings and discovered that the house is also infested with shrews (like small mice with long noses. They get into EVERYTHING.) and so I had to empty all of the drawers and shelves in the kitchen and wash everything there as well. My 88-year old Gran set the traps because I'm always afraid of snapping my fingers.
In order to hang everything up, I had to set up the railing on the deck (we bring it in over the winter so the snow doesn't knock it off) and as I was doing that I saw some carpenter ants casually strolling into the wooden house... infestation #2.
So I set an ant trap.
Then I went upstairs to take the dustcovers off the bed up there so I have somewhere to sleep... found a bunch of dead bugs (we have a problem with big beetles called stinkbugs that infest all of the houses here every winter), so I got the vacuum out to suck them up. When I opened the sliding glass door upstairs, there was a nasty surprise of at least 200 dead stinkbugs lying on the ground between the doors, and I looked around the room and found 3 or 4 live ones. As I type this, there are a few buzzing through the air and I have already caught at least 50. (If we crush them, they stink, so we have to trap them in a can and set them free outside.)
So... that's my life in a nutshell, up to the present. Good to be home!