Thursday, June 14, 2007

me new place

the reader poll indicated a desire for photos of my new house, so here ya go. part one is narrated by VTA, part two is narrated by me (and slightly longer, so if you're short on bandwidth i would just watch part one. also more entertaining).


i just got back from a long bikeride with winifred's partner, who i shall now name brad. (haha - oh the power!) we went all the way out to the ubc endowment lands and back. beautiful beautiful stuff. beach, mountains, city-scape, forests, you name it. we saw a cyclist hit by a car on the way back, though, which was disconcerting. his brakes failed at an intersection - he went up the bonnet of the car, but walked off okay. brad and i were both a bit wobbly. apart from that incident it was a great ride. i fixed a puncture on my bike the other day, and feel very self-sufficient. my shorts are covered in black smears.

studying a lot. we had interesting class on jamaica kincaid's a small place last night and got depressed about the IMF and third world debt. it's time to start boycotting chiquita bananas again. they're evil. then winifred, brad and i went out drinking with the new MAs, which was very grownup of us, cos they have no politics and make me cranky, and winifred is cranky anyway cos she's quitting smoking.

oh, gosh, this is sounding like a big whinge. things are good! i'm reading good things. i have yoghurt with blueberries in it and a dinner party/shabbat to go to tomorrow. also good pants.

ps. and black apricots! how exciting! in winter the only fruit available was boxes of tiny sweet mandarines - ppl would roll up to parties with a bottle of wine and a box of miniature mandarines and we'd fall on them like wolves. yum.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

will wait to download vids at work - had another lead on broadband connection, but will lead to nothing, as always, i reckon

beautiful winter day, calm and sun

have always boycotted chiquita bananas

reading history of gold in ballarat

all sounds good in BC

xg

Anonymous said...

black nectarines! i'm intrigued. what do they taste like?? ceri and i just watched "better than chocolate", and pretty much, in every other scene, we were both going, "OH! vancouver looks so LOVELY!" le sigh. i'd forgotten how good "better than choc" is - i'm callin it THE best late-90s lesbian rom-com EVER.

have not read "a small place" - do you recommend? have read "autobiog of my mother" and "at the bottom of the river". jamaica kincaid is a STRANGE woman.

was walkin down faraday the other day and i saw this cyclist almost get car-doored. she was totally PISSED OFF, obv, and yelled at the driver, over her shoulder, as she sped off: "watch it!!" reminded me of you.

and ooooh! shabbat dinner, eh??? me and erin went to shabbat dinner at jordy and ben's parents' house out in caulfield a few weeks back. their parents were overseas, so j & b thought it'd be cool to have friends over for shabbat - it was a small group, 10 people all up, incl. j & b, and felt v. spesh to be invited. twas a bit of a feast, with starters and everythin, and had special shabbat bread, can't remember what it's called now, and both j & b read at the beginning (in hebrew!), and then we all did some kind of toast at the end of the prayers, from little little glasses (almost like shot glasses). tell me bout your shabbat. goodness, this is more of a letter than a comment ... uh i think that was it though. lubs!

Anonymous said...

and BAH. was leavin the watching of the vids til the last, but now it is 5:37am, and i was planning on leaving at around 6:30ish, and now i have to get off the lappy cuz, guess what???

i still haven't finished packing. oh god.

gumtreefid farmer said...

dear grot,

hope you got to see the vids at MU. be assured that i'm no longer coughing like that.

it is a beautiful winter day here too, though not sunny.

glad you ahve politics and literature.

love aunty kant

gumtreefid farmer said...

tine,

oh. whoops. black apricots, not nectarines. sorry. they taste like normal apricots, actually, just a bit more juicy. they're still orange on the inside. very striking.

yairs, how pretty is my 'hood, yo yo? though bits of it (like that dock looking bit) were shot in other places, like north van.

i don't know that i would recommend _a small place_, actually. unless you want some angst. which maybe you do? hmm. i just read _my brother_ by her as well, and that is more recommendy. though also depressing. aren't i useful? how is _autobiography of my mother_? should i read that?

yay for shouting at car doors!

thanks for the story about j and yr shabbat. v. educational. we didn't do shabbat in the end, just dinner. next time. it's not nearly as formal as the one you've described. just ordinary bread and singing in hebrew.

you totally packed too much stuff, dude.

lots of love