"home"

Hard to believe we've been out here for a little over a year now.

We've started the permanent-resident process, which will involve taking an English test on Satyrday and getting letters of recommendation from all my previous employers for the past ten years, on company letterhead. This... may be difficult in the case of Borders.

Vancouver is still amazing, and I still don't want to live anywhere else. I just wish everyone I want to hang out with thought the same way. :)

The good:

• The weather. Madison was thirty (er, "ninety," when in Rome and all that) and moderately humid for a couple of days. It wasn't quite like being mugged, but much more of either the humid or the heat and I would have wilted like the delicate flower I am. Home is where 15°C is.
  
• The landscape. Greenery and water and snow-capped mountains, morning fog and beach sunsets and glass skyscrapers.
  
• The culture. I am now much less likely to be the most left-wing guy in the room, and much more likely to be only the most left-wing guy in my chair.
  
• The apartment. This is easily the nicest place I've ever lived. Super-duper hi-speed internet, a gas fireplace, HEATED TILE FLOORS IN THE BATHROOM for pete's sake. It has a number of small flaws so it's not like I'm not still playing "If this were MY house" but overall it's been a really excellent place to live.
  
• Walkability. Grocery store: four blocks. Three-storey bookstore: eight blocks. Dessert restaurant: six blocks. Other awesome restaurants: at least a dozen within a six-block radius. Overpriced movie theatre: six blocks. Gigantic park filled with cedars and trails and such: four blocks, give or take. For everything else, there's...
  
• Transit. A half-hour bus or Skytrain ride makes me much happier than a twenty-minute drive. I can do something if someone else is responsible for navigating the traffic: read, poke at the Device, even write on occasion. And the buses go most everywhere and are reasonably on-time, except for the #19.
  
• Fish. Cheap sushi plus a community-supported fishery share makes for a full & happy jazzfish.

The bad:

• The cloud cover. I'd worried a little about this and I may have been right to do so. Some amount of my ennui or malaise or one of them french words has been due to a severe lack of light.
  
• My social network. It's improving, but slowly. I've been complaining about this for at least ten months now; just take it as a given.
  
• The cost. Except for produce, sushi, and transit, everything costs more out here. (And transit only gets a pass because the DC Metro is so bloody expensive.)
  
• The cost, part 2. Shipping anything to Canada adds an extra $10 to the price, if I'm lucky. In extreme cases, such as fifteen pounds of wargame, it can be upwards of $50.

... I think that's about it, at least for a quick list. Doubtless there are more things I'm forgetting, on both sides.

Overall: it's home, and it's where I want home to be. This is kind of a new thing for me.