Vancouver Tomfoolery

The stars aligned last month. Gareth and I had three days off together while one of my best friends was planning to be in Vancouver. As a general rule, we will look for any excuse to drive the 10+ hours to Vancouver, so this one was a no brainer. We took off early Wednesday morning, but not before stopping at the bottle depot to turn our hostel guests' drinking into free gas money for the trip. As per usual, I went crazy around Kamloops and started seeing sqarmots and turbits (translation squirrel-marmots and turtle-rabbits). We made it to town at 7:00 and immediately went to sushi with our friends Thea, Bob and Lawren. It was delicious as always, especially the yam tempura fries and the artichoke/cream cheese/pumpkin seed roll. How I miss Vancouver.

We opted to sleep near the water at the Jericho Beach HI, where we stayed for free...oh the perks of working for the hostel. I woke early the next morning as the frosty July air blasted through the windows, freezing me out of my bed. Refusing to let my hopes for a sunny summer day die, I put on a short skirt, a t-shirt, flip-flops and--sigh--a sweatshirt, and headed to Granville Island for a brewery tour. While I knew that it was Canada Day, I didn't expect such crazy crowds at one of the most popular places in Vancouver. Clearly, I wasn't connecting the dots because Granville Island is busy on an average day, much less a holiday. Wall to wall people, cancelled brewery tours, and ridiculous dog shows be damned, we had a great time. To replace our cancelled brewery tour, we went to a sake distillery where I learned that I really like sake. Who knew? Eventually we got to the Island's highlight, the market. We perused joyfully until we realized that our normal grocery store produce in the mountains is equally as expensive as the delicious, gourmet produce of the Granville Island Market. Chalk one up for moving back to Vancouver.

That night we met up with a bunch of my favorite people for a tasty Greek meal. You know you're with good friends when after a year and a half of not seeing each other the conversation revolves around things like squid feet and grape spoon sweets. After dinner we headed down to Jericho Beach for Canada Day fireworks and general tomfoolery. We quickly realized that we were not on the right beach for watching fireworks, but got to enjoy two different sets from really far away. Then we had a hilarious 'photo shoot' that had us all laughing until we cried.

Our second, and last, morning, Gareth and I cleaned out our storage unit once and for all. Within an hour it was empty and our van was full. The Goodwill happily took our 50 lb suitcase full of rejected stuff, my seriously broken guitar and a stack of 2 year-old, already outdated textbooks. I ended the trip with lunch at Stephos which was the perfect end-cap to a wonderful trip. Lovely friends, hilarious conversation, delicious Greek cuisine...nothing better. It was so sad to say goodbye, but I'm quite confident that Stephos will always we there.

Today's moral: Twenty hours of driving for 36 hours of visiting is 100% worth it.

One Decoupagey Mess

For the craft of the week, I decided to pick something 'easy' that didn't require too many supplies. Decoupage generally requires some magazine clippings and some glue, right? Once I got everything set-up, I realized that I also needed good scissors and a paint brush. Hmmm. I had dull, rusty scissors and my fingers. This was going to be interesting.

Then there was the question of what to decoupage? Gareth was not keen on the idea of a nicely decoupaged kitchen table or even a colorful lampshade, so I was left with the old hot chocolate tin that we keep rice in. My plan was to decorate it in an Asian-inspired style featuring pictures of rice paddies and neutral colors. When I sat down with a collection of old National Geographics to look for images to clip out, Gareth nearly had a panic attack. “What are you doing!?!” he asked. “You can't cut up National Geographics! You're supposed to keep them on a shelf... for decades..and never look at them! This is sacrilege!”

“Oh,” I shrugged as I put them back on the shelf.

I was left with a Canadian fashion magazine (oxymoron much?) and a middle-aged woman's magazine about aging, cooking comfort (read: fattening) foods and losing weight. After 10 minutes of paging through and finding nothing 'Asian' or rice- related save for a Chinese model in a trench coat, and cereal bars made from puffed rice, I decided to switch directions and cut out pretty patterns and textures instead.
Spreading the glue with my fingers was an imprecise mess, cutting magazines with dull scissors was like cutting steak with a butter knife and I couldn't seem to get the images on the can without ripping them. But, I did it and now our guests won't get excited about drinking hot chocolate to find that we only have rice.

P.S. If you are decoupaging a container you keep rice in, empty the rice out first or at least leave the cap on the container. This is especially important when there is glue all over your hands and the table. Just saying...

THE look of the season: Summer '10 courtesy of www.torontostreetfashion.com