Packing Madness

Tomorrow is moving day. It will be my first UHaul experience. They're forecasting rain, it's Vancouver after all!

For the past few weeks I've been "packing". For the past couple days I've been packing in earnest. How did I ever accumulate so much stuff? And why do I own so many books? I shudder to think that this is just part of my collection, and that most of them I bought in Vancouver over the past couple of years. Yikes!

I'm proud to report though that most my stuff was not purchased in the last year. I've been getting better. There was only one suitcase full of clothing and books to donate. Not bad.

My aunt E. bought 12 boxes for me, 6 smaller ones, 6 larger ones. At first, I thought that it'd never be enough, but in the end, that was exactly right. Most were full of kitchen supplies, bathroom supplies, and books. The last two, "odds and ends" were full of things that I didn't even remember that I owned!

My new place is a two bedroom, my friend C. is coming back from a year in Nelson to go to Librarian college and will be my roommate. The place is smaller, but I remember thinking that it had good potential last time I saw it. Wood floors, full size windows, a decent size bedroom, the only problem is the small kitchen, but we'll make it work! I hope that it's an amazing place, that we set it up well, and that I don't need to move for at least another 2 years! In the last 5 years since I've left home, I've changed apartments 5 times, once a year, plus I've moved to camp for the summer 3 times, and across the country once. It's getting old fast, especially since furniture has been involved!

Camping: Manning Park

Last weekend I got to go camping again, and explore a new part of B.C. : Manning Park! It's located east of Vancouver, about 2hrs 30mins away, just past Hope. (I just wanted to mention that there was a city called Hope in B.C.!)

It was great to get away. I had been working long hours in the workshop all week, and then marking the final exam on Friday, so getting out of the city with B. on Saturday was heavenly. She took Monday off, and I skipped out on, well, my office mates? so we got to have a long weekend in the forest. We arrived in the early afternoon and set up the tent in the best spot (according to us). It was surrounded by large trees, right next to the river, which gave us a false sense of seclusion (on Monday morning, the couple in the spot beside us blasted music while taking down their tent, shattering our seclusion idea.) We then headed out to Lightning Lake for a nice hike around the lake, with a short visit over to the next lake: Flash Lake. Once back to the car, B. braved the weather and went for a quick dip in the lake. Very impressive to me, I was chilly just waiting for her to get out!

Back at the campsite, we decided to put up the tarp that I had thoughtfully borrowed from J. We realized quickly that our "ideal" camping spot was not ideal for putting up a tarp. Lots of big trees meant no branches close to the ground. We wanted to cover the picnic table first since we didn't want to have to cook in the rain. We succeeded with the help of a stick and many tosses to secure two corners of the tarp, but when we held the other two corners out realized that the tarp covered, well, the ground next to the table. So we gave up on that idea and moved on to trying to cover the tent, which looked easier to accomplish. Here was the result:

Impressive, I know.

Luckily my tent was up to the challenge and kept us dry!

The next day, it rained off and on. I realized early that I had forgotten my rain coat, and so had to buy a 1$ emergency poncho, which I then referred to as a human condom for the rest of the trip. We drove up to the top of one of the mountains in the park, and went for a hike along the Heather Trail. Now this was my kind of hiking! Mostly flat, with an amazing view for most of the hike! Lots of flowers, trees, berries (no bears!), and beautiful alpine meadows, which is what Manning Park is famous for.

Monday was going home day. It was sunny and warm, and we were both reluctant to get back to the city too early. We took a detour in Chilliwack and went swimming in Cultus Lake, one of the rare warm lakes in B.C. since it isn't a glacier lake. We found a nice falsely secluded (again) spot along the road where we could go down to the lake and have a swim without paying for parking. It was warm, and lovely to swim in non-salty water! Afterwards, we stopped for ice cream, the cherry on the sunday of a great weekend!

Inception

Wow! It's not often that I'm willing to pay to see a movie twice! But Inception was worth it, especially the second time around. (As a side note, I went to see How to tame your dragon twice also, but the second time wasn't as good as the first, sadly.)

So if you haven't seen Inception yet, don't read this post. Spoilers!

After my first screening, my brain was reeling for hours, days, trying to figure out limbo, time frames, dreamers vs. subjects, etc. I was also convinced that Leonardo was still dreaming in the last scene. If fact, I was convinced that he'd been dreaming for a lot of the movie... and this was somewhat disappointing to me. It reminded me of elementary school, when we were assigned a short story essay and were told to make the ending surprising. I remember making my "surprise" ending a wake-up scene... gasp! It was all a dream! My teacher was not impressed and wrote in the margin "pas très original, tu peux faire mieux!" and I was devastated. So ended my short story career. So needless to say that though Sh. and I (Sh. went to see both screenings with me) were both convinced that Leonardo was sleeping at the end, I didn't want that to be the case.

So round two! This time it was Sh. once more with her husband and my other friend So. (Sh.'s husband's name also starts with an S... ggrrr) This time around I found the shooting scenes rather long, and the whole winter world sequence hilarious: who thought of snowmobiles pulling skiers with guns would be a good idea? Still, a lot more things made sense, and best of all, all three of us who saw it for a second time were convinced that in fact Leonardo was awake in the end. :D This made me happy. Why did we come to that conclusion? For one, the kids were older looking, and So. was convinced that their clothing was somewhat different than the first time. Also, I thought that their voices on the phone sounded older too. For another, we came to the conclusion that Ellen Page and Leonardo did not go into limbo together, but into his dream, which brought them into his old limbo. Then after Ellen Page leaves on the kick, Leonardo dies because all the buildings were falling, and then falls into limbo. This explains why he ends up on the beach again, and why the Japanese guy is so old and Leonardo is not. And its at that point, after the sedatives in the plane wear off, that they all wake up! I don't know if this makes sense, but that's what I'm going with!

More Heat

Sooo warm. In fact, this morning at 11am, I was over at J. and V.'s and their thermostat read 38.8C when we left to go to Stanley Park for an Indian Festival. Biking wasn't too bad, and we staked out a good spot in the shade for the parade (Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Hare, Krishna Krishna, and repeat!)... the real heat came when we got to the park, and saw the line for food. The website had boasted "Free Vegetarian Feast for 20000 People", that's a lot of food for a lot of people. The line was long and in the sun. But the food was good, and the wait was worth it.

We spent a little time under a tent, listening to chants and songs, and one of the young singers fell unconscious due to heat and dehydration I think. It was quite scary. Luckily he seemed fine after drinking 3 bottles of water. Lots of water drinking for us after that! V. and I then got out hands painted with henna, very pretty! This meant that we had to wait an hour before swimming, so back to the shade. After waiting like patient adults for the hour to elapse, we put clover oil on to protect the henna and headed to the ocean. The paint seemed to be coming off in the water despite our wait, so V. and I did some crazy acrobatics to keep our hands out of the water and still cool off.

After the very welcome dip, J. and V. headed off to yet another music festival somewhere else in the city (Vancouver in the summer is crazy busy and simply an incredible place to be. For example, last Friday B. and I decided to go to Wreck Beach for the afternoon and on the way there stumbled upon an Anime Convention at UBC! Lots of amazing costumes!!). I was lazy and decided to get more free food and enjoy Second Beach for a bit before biking home.

In other news, I tried making Kettle Corn for a snack tonight, and failed to read the instruction to put the sugar on before the popcorn started to pop and thought I had read to add it just after the first few pops... Needless to say that I was attacked by flying, burning popcorn soon after lifting the lid!

"Adult" sushi

Tonight was one of the last nights that M. will have in Vancouver before moving to Montreal to do her Ph.D., I know, a doctorate, crazy. Anyways, after much deliberation, it was decided that she was simply too busy for a big get together, so we just went for sushi with S. at a nice place near Gilmore station.

Now, it's really REALLY hot in Vancouver today, and as a Vancouverite I'm just not used to heat anymore. Walking from the skytrain home was brutal, and the idea of food when I was that hot wasn't too appealing. Still, there we were, sitting with menus, and I was trying to decide on what to eat and whether to "force" ourselves to be piggy or not (I had swum almost 3kms in kits pool earlier), when S. was like "I just want nigiri, is that weird?". I agreed that that is what I also had a hankering for, well that and these huge rolls they call house rolls that have simply everything inside them and are super yummy! So that's what we ordered. Which led S. to comment that we had "graduated" to "adult" sushi. Yum! Is all I have to say to that!

Posters

Just when you thought you were done with making pretty, colored, posters....

In elementary school, you have the colored paper, crayons, hand-drawn pictures.

In high school, you upgrade to likable color schemes, still on the colored paper, maybe some graphs or pictures printed off from the internet, bold, beautiful hand written titles in colored block letters.

In undergrad, you think you're done. It's a tease, you join a club, they have a bake sale, and out come the colored paper and crayons, but this time you don't care so much, so you draw half-assed pictures and block letters.

In graduate school (i.e. now for me), you really, REALLY think you're done. You even steer clear of clubs, just in case... but now there's a new secret club, it's called a conference, and they've got poster sessions, and you think that it'd be a good idea to share with the "world" what you've been working on for months... and out come the colored paper and crayons... not. I wish.

Nope, graduate-style posters for a conference are a whole other beast. They are computer-generated, beautiful, large sheets of paper. They still have pictures, and graphs (they just take forever to place in the right spot, oh how I miss scissors and glue!). They still have color schemes (but you can't really quite tell what color they will actually be once printed). New additions: math formulas, references, flow charts, and many, many more hours invested.

Any guesses as to what I've been up to this week in the office? Here's a hint: I'm entering a _____ for computational math day next week!

Fruit Squared

This is a shout out to an amazing recipe I made last night from my newest cookbook, Company's Coming's "Fruit Squared". (Yes, this appeals the the geeky math nerd that lives inside of me...)

Gold-Dust Lemon Bars

BOTTOM LAYER

1 1/4 cups Flour

1/2 cup Softened Butter

3 tbsp Sugar

1/4 tsp Salt

TOP LAYER

3 Eggs

1 cup Sugar

1/4 cup Lemon Juice (takes about 1 1/2 lemons)

3 tbsp Flour

1 tsp Grated lemon zest (do this before getting the juice)

1/2 tsp Baking powder

Bottom Layer: Beat first 4 ingredients until smooth. Press firmly in greased 9''x9'' pan. Bake in 350F over for 20 minutes until just golden.

Top Layer: Whisk all 6 ingredients in small bowl until smooth. Pour over bottom layer. Bake for 20 minutes until set.

EAT! It's really really good. I've finished half my pan already, and I finished making them quite late last night.

Also, funny story about why I decided to bake these: I was procrastinating and watching You-Tube videos, when one of those annoying commercials came on. It was something to do with yogurt that tasted like cheese cake and that made you loose weight. What I got out of it was an incredible urge to eat cheese cake. I then looked up recipes online and decided that it was too much work, so I settled on baking lemon squares. I was very glad that they turned out to be good! :)