Friday 9 November 2007

Arriving in Victoria

From the addled mind of Peter :


Here I am folks, 4000km away from where I started( literally )in a new city and province.

This blog will collect my thoughts on my move, what it means to me and where it takes me. I will add in my impressions of Victoria BC as well; the city, the people, the culture and all the little things that make life 'different' out here as compared to the big ON.

For now, a brief Tale of the Trip Out West, for those who would like to know the details!


Oct 29th, 2007 - St. Catharines

I was up early to finish packing. With something like 400 boxes, everything had slowly been boxed over the past month - the entire condo looked like a UPS shipping room, with some tasteful furniture amongst the piles of cardboard. Lots and lots of boxes and tape... at least I took a vacation from work this week, so I was being paid for all this work - a nice touch.

The movers showed up promptly at 8am( Stacey's in St. Kitt's - the best and only ones to use ! ) and started moving boxes down to the loading dock immediately. The final dozen or so boxes were taped up as that process continued( rather speedily too ! ), with a few final boxes left for 'last minute' items to be mailed out to use separately - like a backup hard drive of mine. :-)

The condo looked quite spacious once all the box piles were gone - the place actually looked great in the sunlight, with only the furniture left, all of which we were leaving behind for the building super's( they bought our bedroom suite, the dining room suite and many other items for a fair price, but it was still hard to see it go after all these years ). It was no longer our 'home'.

Off to Simon's workplace with the movers before 10am. The boxes were arranged skillfully on seven pallets, then shrinkwrapped for stability and protection, all within an hour's time. Thanks to Simon's kindness, they would be shipped rather inexpensively through his company's channels... or so I thought. More on that in a future blog, for those who don't already know.

The moving was done by noon, so I had the rest of the day to myself... I spent a good portion of it fiddling with four older PC's of mine, to try and get them to run using a free Linux OS called Ubuntu - with mixed results.

Later that evening I headed over to Pierre & Faith's place to relax. Rene, Shiloh, Brian and Mike were there too. Wine was poured, delicious snacks and desserts were consumed and puns were tossed with abandon all about the room. Shiloh announced that she had named the stuffed toy I had given her for her recent birthday as one 'The UnBearable Mister Ehm' in a tip of the hat to my online name at Cyberwalker.com as well as reference to my fave form of verbal discourse. :)

I also spent a good deal of the evening using Pierre's laptop to instantly call up videos from YouTube as the conversation jumped from subject to subject - I have to say I had a pretty good reaction time, on the order of under 10 seconds from hearing a topic to playing the video. Not bad considering how long a day it had been - loved the Yip Yip aliens, whooo-hoo!

More to come - once I recall what I did that week, I will post it in my next blog, and condense a bit so as not to bore some of the easily distracted out there... :-)

From BC, signing off...

Peter