Last night

Standing on the balcony tonight it occured to me this was my last evening to take in the sight of Vancouver's skyline from our perch along the slopes of North Vancouver. Before we lived in this apartment, Meaghan and I looked out over Howe Sound. When we decided to move to North Vancouver we felt a sense of loss that our days would no longer begin and end with the stunning view of Anvil Island set against the southern edge of the Tantalus mountain range. We didn't expect the view from our new apartment to be nearly as stunning as that which we left, but it was. And now we're leaving that.
Our worldly belongings have been reduced to 30 boxes, 6 rubbermaid bins, 2 hutches, 2 sets of drawers, a coffee table, a desk, a kitchen table with four chairs, a stand for the tv and stereo, and our bed. Most if it has been relegated to what used to be our dining room (and I use that term loosely.) In a few days, movers will arrive and pack it into a truck for the long trip to New Brunswick. In the meantime, and for a period afterward, Meaghan and I will stay with family before she heads out by plane and still later I head out with the car.
In a sense, I'm glad we're moving across the country. I'd hate to imagine putting this much work into moving across town. The packing and inventoring has been laborious. On the bright side, we have probably rid ourselves of four or five large boxes of apparently useless clutter and we'll be starting relatively fresh at the other end.

wtf?

I had a short yet insightful talk with Meaghan tonight. It's remarkable that for 38 years I have wandered the planet, well mainly Canada and even then just little bits of it, and haven't really understood what it's all about.

People I know, many whom I know really quite well, consider me to be an intelligent fellow. Well, I have news for them: I'm not. Not in the sense people usually equate intelligence with. I may notice things and I certainly have an inate curiosity about the world, people and events around me, but on the whole, I consider myself to be rather thick, as it were.

Case in point, and this gets us back to the talk Meaghan and I had this evening. It never occured to my that the dreams I have and hold, of things I'd like to do in life, are attainable dreams. I never saw a relationship between dreams and goals. Dreams have always been nothing more than dreams; ideals thrown about my head of things I'd love to do, that certainly occured to me as being doable, by someone with the requisite skills, but never as accomplishments that could be completed by me. And this is the part that hooks into the bit above about spending 38 years lost in the wilderness.

I think I finally get it.

For years I've thought it would be nice to write travel books about the Maritimes. Hiking and camping to be specific, but in a general sense I've wanted to communicate through words and images the beauty of the Maritimes in a manner that compels others to come to this region to explore, and to provide concise information that will facilitate such a journey. It never occured to me that I could actually go beyond the wish and actually do it. That is until tonight.

For those of you who know me and are reading this you may think the idea is patently obvious. Well, good for you. For me it is a remarkable revelation and I now feel driven to get going on it.

Hooray for me, I finally have a goal to call my own.

rolling 30-day spam count: 85

A month ago I interviewed a woman who wrote a Japanese-fusion cookbook. We talked about the state of Japanese cuisine in Canada and about how closely today's generation of Japanese-Canadian follows a traditional Japanese diet. One of the dishes the woman mentioned was Spam sushi. I had heard of it, but dismissed it as a joke.
No joke.
The woman told me that when Japanese-Canadians were released from internment camps following the second world war they understandably faced considerable economic hardship. At the time, Spam was cheap and readily available, so they adapted it to their diet. Spam sushi was the result. However, this is one fusion dish that didn't make it into her cook book.

rolling 30-day spam count: 83

rolling 30-day spam count: 76

This is great. There seems to have been a spam bubble last month and the spammers have since slowed down. Good for them.

rolling 30-day spam count: 82