A summary of the last few weeks

• We sold our place at last! The closing date is set for March 17. We’ve already booked our flight to Halifax for March 16. My last day at the café is Friday 13 February, I picked the date especially! I’m excited and sad all at the same time, I will miss the café, my co-workers, and I will miss this neighbourhood.

• We celebrated the Chinese New Year by having some friends over for a hot pot dinner. This of course required a trip down to Chinatown for groceries. I think Nate had a great time looking at all the stuff down there, and I hope we get to go again before we leave Vancouver. At the last moment we realized that our hot pot had been packed away and stored at Steve’s house, but we were able to improvise with a couple of large pots which we reheated on the stove every now and then.

• We took Nate to Monster Jam on Saturday evening. After a week of build-up he woke up that morning with a sore throat and fever. But he was adamant that he was going to see the monster trucks. So we went and got to see the first half of the show before he threw up. The poor little guy has been quite sick since then.

• Nate just woke up from his nap this afternoon and told us he wanted to put his soother in the garbage. After a quick examination, Patty informed him that there was nothing wrong with it. Nate then informed us that he wanted to throw all his soothers in the garbage and he didn’t want to sleep with them anymore. ‘Bye bye sookie’ he said, as I took the soother downstairs and stashed it away in a cupboard just in case. I suspect he might be a little delirious from his fever or something. But who knows…it might just actually be that he’s decided he doesn’t need one anymore. Only time will tell.

Generosity

I forgot my wallet when I left the house the other day. I managed to scrounge up enough money from my tip cup to buy Nate a cookie at the café, but that was about all I was going to be buying for that outing.

On the way home Nate insisted we stop off at the pet store to get a treat for Snoopy. I reminded him that I did not have any money on me, but he was adamant, so I obliged him.

After playing fetch the ball with a member of the staff, Nate picked out a chew stick and said “I get this for Snoopy.”

What follows is the rest of our conversation:

Me: We can’t get that today Nate, I don’t have my wallet so I can’t pay for it.

Nate: But I want to get this for Snoopy.

Me: I know and that’s really nice of you, but I don’t have money to pay for it.

Nate: I have some money dad, it’s OK.

Me: I don’t think that’s going to be enough (as he fished a quarter out of his pocket)

Nate: It’s alright dad, we can go home and get some more money from my piggy bank and then we can buy Snoopy a treat!

At that point there was a collective ‘Awwwwwww!’ from everyone who was within earshot.

The first entry for 2009

I had intended to write a summary of the year past, a review of the highs and lows of 2008, for my first entry for 2009. As I sat down to gather my thoughts, it became obvious to me that I had far more lows than highs. This has probably more to do with my make-up than the year that was 2008. Nevertheless, I became overwhelmed by it all and gave up, despaired by the task at hand and the state of the world.

It got me thinking about why we wish people a happy new year. Are we just so relieved to have got through another year that this is cause for celebration? Or is it a misguided or naïve hope that the changing of a number on the calendar will bring better things with it? I wonder if people on the Gaza Strip were wishing each other a happy new year?

Time will roll on, and most of us will do what we can to hang on for the ride. There will always be things happening around us that are beyond our sphere of influence. But maybe it's enough to do what we can to make things better in that sphere. Perhaps if there were more of these small spheres of good everywhere, they'd eventually overlap and become bigger. I realize I may be sounding naïve here, and uncharacteristically optimistic. Who knows, things could just get better!

Happy new year!

Nate's third Christmas

How things have changed in the year between Christmases. While Nate was clearly more interested in Christmas last year compared to his first year, he was quite happy to wait till Christmas morning to open his presents. Not so this year.

We brought our tree home on the evening of the 3rd. Our old Christmas tradition involved us walking up to the Lion's tree lot at Oak and 25th, hoisting the tree on our shoulders and walking it the twenty-two odd blocks home. We'd sing carols along the way, to the amusement of the people that we passed. This being Vancouver, we usually did this in the rain. Luckily for us, a tree lot has taken up residence at 12th and Main, making for a much shorter walk home.

The first present under the tree was for Nate. It came in the mail from our friends Lori, Paul and Sosi, who moved from Vancouver to Charlottetown PE last year. From the moment it arrived, Nate could not wait to open it. He'd start the day by saying:

"Can I open my present today dad?"

As the days passed and it got closer and closer to Christmas, the pile under the tree grew larger and larger, and Nate's morning greeting to me evolved into:

"Hey dad! It's Christmas today! Can I open my present?"

My attempts to explain to him that Christmas was still some time away didn't seem to be making any impact and the morning greeting soon became:

"I'm going to open my presents today because it's Christmas!"

More a statement than a question.

When Christmas morning finally came, I thought that he'd be so wound up that his head would pop off or something! Imagine my surprise when I wasn't greeted by the usual morning declaration of his intent to free his presents from their gift-wrap prisons. Instead he was quite subdued and seemed in no hurry to open his presents at all.

After unwrapping his first gift, a Hot wheels monster truck, he announced that he was going to play with it right there and then. Never mind that other gifts under the tree. We actually had to talk him into putting it aside and continue with the unwrapping of gifts. Even then, he would stop after he'd unwrapped a gift, and pick out a gift for either Patty or myself and bring it over to us to unwrap.

Perhaps all that waiting finally wore him out. In any case, I think it all worked out for the best. We had a very relaxing morning unwrapping gifts and got to spend the rest of our Christmas in the company of a few good friends.

I can only imagine what next Christmas will be like.

Maybe we already moved to NS and I just forgot...

It is snowing outside as I write this, on the first day of winter. We've had snow on the ground in Vancouver now for more than a week. This in itself is something of a rarity. This evening, as I left work and walked home, I realized that I could not tell the difference between the road and the sidewalk anymore.

Poor old Snoopy, when I took him out for his evening walk, he could hardly get through the stuff. In fact I think he peed on the sidewalk, or where the sidewalk would have been if we could see it.

Everything is covered under a nice thick rolling blanket of white. It really is quite beautiful. In the ten winters I've spent here in Vancouver, I've never seen anything quite like it. And there is still more to come. The forecast is calling for more snow on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I may finally get a white Christmas, and I didn't even need to move to Nova Scotia!

Just when I thought it was over...

We've had our townhome on the market for some time now. As expected there hasn't been much activity on it. We've had about 3 to 4 showings per week on average, but it's tapered off to 1 or 2 in the last couple of weeks.

The plan was to take it off the market on the 15th of the month, so that we didn't have to deal with people traipsing through the place over the holiday period. It would be an understatement if I said I was looking forward to the 15th.

Well, it's now the 17th, and wouldn't you know it, we're still on the market. As luck would have it, the people who came to see our home on the 14th called and requested to come and see it again yesterday morning. They made an offer yesterday afternoon, if you could call it that. Their realtor called our realtor to follow up later in the day and the conversation went something like this:

Their realtor: Did you get my email?
Our realtor: I did, weren't you sending us an offer?
Their realtor: You didn't get my email?
Our realtor: No, I got it. I thought you were sending us an offer.
Their realtor: Oh.

No, we were not impressed. What does this all mean? Who knows? Except that maybe this is going to drag on for more than I would have liked, and we'll probably have strangers traipsing through here right up to the holidays.

Snow day

We had our first real snowfall of the winter Saturday evening. It started to come down after 9pm, and by the time I got off work at 11.30pm, there was layer of white over everything. It made for a nice late night walk with Snoopy.

Sunday morning, and there was still snow on the ground. Not as much as I would have liked, but still enough to get Nate all excited. He wanted to go outside and play, and he wanted to make a snowman. As we left home, he suddenly said to me: "Hey! We need to go back home to get some treats for the snowman!". He'd remembered that we had used dog treats to make the eyes, nose and mouth of his snowman last winter!

It wasn't quite snowman building snow though. Much too dry and fluffy, but it did pack into good snowballs, and that's what we did. Nate had a great time making and throwing snowballs, and running around with the dogs in the park. 

As we were about to leave for home, he stopped me and said: "I want to bring a snowball home for my mama.". So he packed a snowball and carried it home for 5 blocks, all the while talking to it, and telling me how it was thirsty and we needed to get the snowball a drink of water when we got home. At one point, I pulled out his water bottle from my bag to give Nate a sip of water, and he promptly stuck the snowball to the spout after he had had a drink. It made people walking past laugh.

We were just a block from home when he dropped his snowball as he went to push the button for the pedestrian crossing. I'm not sure I have ever seen him look so sad as he stood over his fallen snowball, now covered in grit and sidewalk dirt. As I started to tell him we could make another, he burst into tears and sobbed as we hurried across the street. It took some convincing, but he finally accepted another snowball I made as passable, and carefully carried it the rest of the way home.

He was all smiles when he presented it to Patty.

"I got you a snowball mama!"

And that, is why we now have a snowball in our freezer.