One of those moments...

Having been in Canada for over two years, I am delighted by the good stuff and have finally stopped whingeing about the bad.... and then one day, whamo, you are absolutely broad-sided. This happened to me this morning. There were tears, a complete over reaction but really, how in the hell can you call THAT an ice coffee??

We had been for a run and popped into our favourite coffee house. It is warm (at long last) so I opted for an iced coffee rather than my normal whole milk latte (that in itself is a whole other story). I was handed a glass with a squirt of burned, drip filter coffee topped up with water and ice. I mean - REALLY!!!! Following a short, incredulous outburst, tears and the offer of making me an iced cappuccino (I meant REALLY!!), I calmed down enough to laugh at myself.

Richard warned me about the the six month expat blues - when everything that was quirky is now just bloody annoying. After two years, I have come to terms with the enormous portion sizes, the fact that dinner is constructed (package of this, half a jar of that) rather than prepared, the coffee is absolutely crap, the plus is not superfluous in +20 degrees and winter does indeed last six months - but iced coffee should always be made with milk and topped with lashings of whipped cream!

Job Satisfaction

Sitting on a city bus traveling from Sidney to Victoria (Vancouver Island, BC that is - rather than those more familiar antipodean places...) with a bus driver with an dry, dead-pan sense of humour announcing the stops.....

"and here we are at High and Tenth, outside Wal-mart. Hundreds of thousand items for your buying pleasure and not one of them made in Canada"

Proof that any job can be made fun.

The Magic Garden

We have a magic garden. When the snow melted, our garden was bare dirt with two twiggy rose bushes and a juniper. Small green shoots started to push up and two weeks later, presto, a fully fledged garden with flowers!

Instructions for creating a garden:

Remove snow, add sunshine and water, wait two weeks!