Home Sweet Home

This is our new home, hopefully permanent, in Duncan BC. It's from 1912, but fully renovated, with nothing that needs immediate repair. It has a big heat pump, city water and sewer. We have a gigantic ancient apple tree, a gigantic ancient cherry tree, and a chestnut in the front yard.

For now we're ignoring the fences, and the massive infestations of English Ivy and blackberries, both of which I now know are invasive species that need to be rooted out.

We're within walking distance of downtown - a real downtown with stores and cafes, all run by real people, not multinational corporations. There's even a bookstore or two! We're a five minute drive to a great community centre and gym, and the library, and an actually pretty good fish store.

Most of our possessions have arrived from Nova Scotia, including Susan's Steinway grand piano.

How, you ask, do you ship a grand piano across the country? In a cardboard box!

Admittedly a very heavy cardboard box, but it did the trick. The piano is now sitting for a few weeks to acclimatise before the first of multiple tunings. And how do you get that piano off of it's side, and onto its feet?

With a crew of four guys, one of whom is very, very big, and holds up the entire weight of one corner while the smaller guy crawls underneath to attach the third leg. That is TRUST!

I've spent several days over the last few weeks working polls for the municipal and provincial elections. I now know that Duncan, where we live, is not actually part of the Cowichan Valley Regional District. The CVRD is a large, complicated, and sometimes baffling collection of towns and regions that I suspect less than 2% of the population understands.

I think we've managed to understand the rules and scheduling of waste and recycling collection - always one of the biggest challenges when you move house. Organics every week, with recycling and trash alternating. Glass is separate, and picked up once a month, except for over the winter (?). I was fascinated to see that there is no-one outside of the waste collection truck. Instead robotic forks extend out to the side of the street and pick up and empty the mandated plastic bins.

Finally, I'm now a student in the Creative Writing program at Vancouver Island University (formerly Malaspina College). For the moment, while getting settled, I'm just doing a screenwriting course that has proved utterly fascinating.

I am proud to have been one of the people who could identify this image from a famous movie, and who has seen it in a an actual movie theatre.

Yeah, given the results of the BC election, and events down south, it does feel like a good choice right now.

I've also revisited two great road movies this week: doing a script study of Thelma and Louise, then re-watching one my all-time favourite Canadian films: Bruce McDonald's Highway 61.

Sigh. I still have a VHS copy of this film.