Uncategorized

New city means new hairstylist. Luckily the place I randomly picked is the unofficial official salon for my new company as the owner is a coworker’s wife. I’m back to being a blonde, it seems. That probably works better with the sunshine.

It’s hard to talk about what’s on my mind these days. I’m not one to embrace change (I just know I should) and leaving my family and friends in Vancouver is an upsetting concept, though Kelowna is hardly Siberia and I plan on visiting when there are Westjet sales. But there is the worry that the life I know is over, and when I come back things will be different, even if it’s because I’ve changed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it makes me sad nonetheless. I’m nostalgic for right now.

I expect to lose some friends due to the distance but I hope the awesomest ones will keep in touch and maybe even visit. A good number of them are winos so surely there is reason to come see the wineries, unless they all are set alight by the current fires. You weren’t needing those grapes, were you? Or your house?

People have been contacting me making sure that my cat and I haven’t been turned to charcoal so I feel I should point out that I’m still in Vancouver. I was in K-town a week ago to find an apartment in a day, which I did, but I have been back here and won’t be heading up for good until August 1st. The fact you haven’t seen me is just because I’m antisocial, not that I’ve been set ablaze.

My apartment will be okay, as it’s across the highway from downtown and a good distance from forest. The great white wangsails will be the last thing to go, I’d think, possibly because the statue is made out of non-flammable material but also that the entire city is between it and the trees. I got the place I wanted, a ten minute walk to the beach or downtown, and work is 3 km of flat terrain away. As far as I can see the only thing that would’ve made it better would’ve been a Tim Hortons on my street, but alas, you can’t have everything.

This move also means living in a new ecosystem: desert. I definitely feel at home in Vancouver weather (I don’t get why people say it rains “too much”) so I’m going to miss the wet. I’ll be the one person in Kelowna standing outside in the rain and smiling. I may be institutionalized.

But I will soon find out, as I’m moving house to the land of surprisingly expensive housing sometime in the next month. The thing is, I hate all of you and I want to get as far away from you as possible while still being close enough to taunt you with the idea of me. Oh, and I got a job there.

Last week was something else. I started it by quitting my two-week-old “recession job” and being told by that employer that he didn’t consider me a “real DBA” (DBA = database administrator, in case you’ve just joined us). I then ended the week with two job offers for DBA positions and it’s been hard for me not to send a “nya nya” themed email in a certain someone’s direction, but I will resist somehow. I was also crowned Queen of England and had a poodle breed named after me, but those events seemed less important.

Some of you might say I’m lucky to get the job offers, but you have to remember, I haven’t had a full-time DBA job in 10 months (!!!). Fate screwed me over multiple times by having companies promise to hire me only to back out due to policy or financial issues. The only times I haven’t been miserable this past year were when I was too busy doing contract work to notice how miserable I was. In other words, I was overdue for some awesomeness. I wouldn’t have minded a lesser amount of whee! at an earlier date, though.

I don’t have any details yet about when I’m moving and how I’m going to pretend to be a nice person in order to make new friends but I should have news on the former later this week. All this, and I haven’t been to Kelowna since I was a kid and I liked Penticton better.

This is just a quick note to say that I will not be writing to this blog again for the next while. Thanks for reading, and good luck.

There’s not much to talk about these days, as night school and looking for work are pretty dull topics, and I haven’t seen the new Star Trek yet. So here’s a glimpse into what life’s like in my apartment, i.e., the constant cat on the lap.

I’m sure those of you in England and Europe are possibly sick of, or saddened by, all the coverage today on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, but I only noticed the date from a rather emotional Metafilter thread I saw a few hours ago. Wow, 20 years.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it was a tragedy at a football (soccer) stadium in Sheffield, England where, due to bad crowd control, 96 people were crushed to death. By the crowd.

The whole story boggles my mind, even now. I remember when it happened, because both my dad and stepdad were football fans and I was often forced to watch matches on Saturday mornings when I really would’ve preferred cartoons. I remember Dad asking me about it, too, the next time I was at his place. And I remember it never really made sense.

While I recall watching video footage of the crowd pushing onto the field, and of a few people being pulled up out of the crush by people hanging over the upper stands, my 11-year-old brain was confused. People die from being hit by other people. Or being shot by other people. Or by falling. They don’t die from being squished, right? Nobody dies of too many people around you.

I’ve always tended to push out of my head things that were beyond my comprehension, and due to the lack of further news coverage at home I compartmentalized the memory to just images from the TV and the connection to Dad’s family (he grew up in Sheffield) and erased the bit about the deaths. I think it was only a few years ago, maybe even when looking it up on Wikipedia, that I relearned the specifics.

What I didn’t know, until today, was about the aftermath, how the Sun newspaper originally blamed Liverpool hooliganism for the deaths, and how much the police screwed up that day but nobody was made accountable (to any satisfying degree) for the tragedy. “Justice for the 96″. After 20 years, you’d think people would’ve been granted closure.

But, going back to the cause of death, I still don’t get it. I do, but I don’t. What an inhuman way to die, by the crush of a crowd of regular people, fellow sports fans, pushing against you, none of them with angry or violent intentions towards you or anyone around you. The SPCA shuts down farms for putting animals in these conditions.

Today is also the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs, so I hope my friends who go to the Canucks games (may there be many) will appreciate that good stadium design and crowd management is helping keep them safe, because otherwise we’d never give it a second thought. Maybe we should.