Words are inadequate

I have acquired a bed, my first new bed in, well, ever. Bought a mattress and boxspring from a place near work that delivered them, and went out to Abbotsford to buy a nice-looking new-to-me wood-and-iron bedframe. It's a touch large for the room it's in, which is likely to be true as long as I'm in a Vancouver apartment. But it's not a modern solid headboard, which I hate, and it looks nice with Pop Shackelford's dresser and bedside table. And the mattress is pretty comfy.

Been spending a stupendous amount of money on getting the household up to speed. I think it's more or less there at this point. Furnishing a kitchen can get expensive, I tell you what, and I'm deliberately staying away from (most of) the less-useful kitchen gadgetry. But one needs knives and pots and cooking implements and and and...

And I have a rescue plant. It was a buck at Canadian Tire. Apparently it likes indirect light and not being watered for a couple of weeks at a time, which ought to work out pretty well all around.

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Erin came down last weekend for a day or so, which was lovely, and then we (I) drove her new-to-her car north through a blinding snowstorm. I have never had the experience of not being able to see the road in front of me while driving, which happened for several seconds any time someone passed me in either direction. I can't say as I much care for it. Or for highway driving at 50 kph.

On Sunday the falling snow had all but stopped, but there were plenty of piles on the shoulder and slick spots on the highway. We passed a section where cars had been deliberately driving into a ditch the night before to avoid an accident in the road, and said "Yep, there's some tire tracks on the shoulder and a couple bits of car," and the next thing I knew I was headed into the ditch myself. Near as I can tell I drifted just a bit into the deep snow on the shoulder, and that pulled me into the rest of it, and there we were. Still drivable but no way to drive out of a metre of snow, so we waited a couple hours for BCAA to send a tow truck, and were fine if a bit shaken.

Other than that, we started watching Star Trek (the original). I'm finding it a curious and enjoyable mix of "of its time" (visuals, styling, occasionally the minor characters) and just plain good. Pretty sure most of my Trek knowledge comes from the first five movies and cultural osmosis. Somehow SF TV never really made an impact on me when I was a kid. I'm sure I've seen episodes but the only one I can recall at all is "Amok Time."

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And now I'm home again, with a list of things I'd like to take care of this week and some uncertainty as to how motivated I'll be to do any of them. We shall see.

Over the weekend uilos and I went down to the states for a Mouths of Babes show. We ended up in a wine bar in Gig Harbor, WA, which appears to be a high-end waterfront community. It's located southwest of Seattle, across the Tacoma Narrows bridge. As a sometime engineering student this holds serious historical interest for me. I can vouch for the strong gusts of wind on the way back, though luckily the new bridge doesn't actually twist in the breeze.

The show itself was pretty great. Ty is still amazing, and for whatever reason I like Ingrid Elizabeth more live than in studio recordings. "Beehive" is fantastic, and Ty did "Amaze Me" (the 9/11 song) and "Young James Dean" (possibly the most Ty of the Girlyman songs). And of course, of course, "Brighter In the Dark" was written for a friend of Ty's who killed herself last year, which meant that we both sat in the back with tears pouring down our faces.

Yesterday there was ice cream, though no cake.

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Today I have:

• Watered my plant. I mean, this is an ongoing thing, but it's also a thing that makes the world a very tiny bit better, so. (Plant was a gift from a friend, and had died back almost entirely over the summer due to being accidentally starved of water. It's been encouraging to watch the shoots poke up and unfurl into leaves this fall and winter. Any metaphorical similarities to the current life situation of this journal writer are left as an exercise for the audience.)
  
• Wrote to Jen Mooney, one of my college profs (RenLit and Tech Writing), to let her know that her classes meant something to me. I keep in touch with her via occasional Facebook comments, but that's not the same.
  
• Signed up for Evo, the other Vancouver carshare, because I'm tired of being annoyed by seeing Evo cars around when I'm looking for a car2go.
  
• Written an email to my folks that I've been composing in my head for a couple of weeks now, because the political events of the weekend warranted mention.
  
• Done a nontrivial amount of actual work for work.

Tonight, laundry and general chilling.

Could be worse.

My workplant is blooming again. Its flowers startled me last year; the plant is one of those big leafy things that you see in office buildings for Greenery. I rescued this one from an office that was closing down in September '06, and uilos split it in two. Last year at about this time it decided to put out weird-looking oval leaves with clear sticky drops on them. I had no idea what was going on until one of the ovals split to reveal a white column. This year the only startling thing is the sheer number of them. Last year there were three or four, and now it's easily double that, with more peeping up through the leaves every week or so. I guess with the heater kicking on, the plant has decided that winter is the new spring.

I rescued a bromeliad from the trash can last Xmas, too. A couple of months later it put out a couple of spikes. The spikes have grown and opened out, and are now roughly 1/3 the size of the original plant. Supposedly it's now time to separate and repot them. I dunno; I'm partial to the Benevolent Neglect Plus Water method of plant care, but if they're actually going to outgrow their pot. . .

As long as I'm talking about plants, I bought a small bamboo from a stall in the NRV mall back in, um, late 2004? to show that yes, I too can have nice things. The three stalks got to the point of overbalancing the pot some months ago, so I snapped them off and put them in water. Two of them are at home and moderately happy; the third is with $coworker.new and seems pleased. The original plant is at work, and growing two new stalks out from the gravel. Sadly, the third major stem seems to have died off. But, as Jack Nicholson once said, two out of three ain't bad.

I think this was originally going to be a more serious and reflective post. Maybe that'll come later.