I’m going to have to get around to updating this properly soon but I’ve got a few more photos anyway.
How I kept busy at work.
Busting a gnarly indie. Totally rad. Cowabunga.
My boarding pals.
I will be happy if I never have to see this view ever again. I've spent way too many hours on buses and coaches in the last 9 months.
Downtown from North Vancouver
Some stuff has happened in the past month or so since I last updated this thing. Not much though. These days life is pretty much work, eat, sleep and repeat.
EXCEPT we had some more snow in downtown Vancouver about 4 weeks ago:
Just outside my apartment building
And on February 26 (I think) it was the first anniversary of the end of the 2010 Olympic Games so there was an unofficial party down Granville St where a couple of guys started a pirate radio station and encouraged people to come along and bring their own boomboxes so the music would be blasted all the way up and down the street. It was odd rocking up to see the street flooded with a sea of people decked out in red and white:
Bee came to visit for about 5 days before she headed back home. We did a bit of Vancouver sightseeing together, starting with a trip to Lynn Canyon which is kind of like a miniaturised Capilano Suspension Bridge adventure, and cost us nothing more than the bus trip out there. Yay.
I’d somehow discovered Vancouver has a hedge maze so we found our way there at some point during the week too:
And we went to Queen Elizabeth park, a little south of the CBD for some sweet views over the city:
And now for some more pics of my mountain:
And now the countdown begins… a month from tomorrow I leave Canada and head for China.
Work’s been a little better recently, night shifts still suck but I’m getting used to the long days plus I’ve also got enough time every day to get in about 45-60 mins of snowboarding which takes the edge off a little bit. I still haven’t broken anything, or at least not any bones… Put a dirty big crack in my googles yesterday after an elegant face plant, though I only actually noticed the crack when I took the goggles off to look at them. Maybe it was just my ugly mug that cracked them?
Yesterday was a pretty good day on the hill, I tried to take some video while snowboarding so you can see the kinds of views you get from up there on a nice day… It’s mostly just of me slowly going down the hill, with the camera angled off to the side at pretty much nothing, but I wasn’t really keen to go flying down the hill while holding my camera. You start seeing a bit of the scenery overlooking downtown Vancouver about halfway through. Looks pretty rad in real life.
Heading back up to Vernon/SilverStar to spend new years with Bee and Allie, somehow managed to organise a long weekend for myself so I could get there…
Also the Australian crew at work are already working on Australia Day plans (looks like the Australian contingent of the Lift Operations team will be conspicuously absent that day), and I am working on heading back to Seattle in early February. Or maybe Portland. We’ll see what happens as time gets closer.
This everlasting holiday rules.
Having somewhat of an annoyance and dilemma at the moment… to keep the mountain job or not. Easy job with cool people, sometimes pretty fun work and a season pass, but long, cold days with sometimes inclement weather.
I knew what I was getting myself in for, in terms of standing around in the cold and sometimes wet weather without proper breaks, but that wasn’t exactly the selling point of it. The season pass and the “40 mins to the mountain” was. Then reality hit; the bus trip in the morning is 60 mins, and in the afternoon after waiting 20+ mins post-shift for the bus to depart, it’s often another 90+ mins before I’m home. And as fun as snowboarding is, coming up on a day off (for just as long as a regular work day) takes a lot of motivation, when it winds up being 6 days a week you’re on the mountain and away from home for 11-12 hours…
On top of all that, in the early and late parts of the season, when attendance is low and weather is poor, they’re likely to close the mountain at short notice. Closed mountain = no shifts. This week, out of 5 shifts I was rostered, only 1 has been worked, and weather permitting, a 2nd on Friday. I’m told the majority of the season doesn’t have closures like this, but with the already low wages, I can’t really let shifts just slip out from under me like that.
So job hunting again it is for me. Thinking about getting another full time job and switching this to part time hours, or giving it the flick completely. Obviously holding onto it in the meantime, but I don’t think I can just shrug it off and say “well I just have to stick it through the next 4-5 months”.
Anyways, enough of the rant, here are some pics from last week when I went boarding. Turned out to be an absolutely amazing day, if only Vancouver could put on more days like this:
