A Patch of Blue

As you can see from the Web­cam at Jeri­cho Beach, the rain has stopped. In fact, it end­ed yes­ter­day. So, we missed the record. In fact, we fell a few days short of it. So, noth­ing to brag about, unless you con­sid­er ‘near­ly as long as the record for num­ber of days of rain’ excit­ing.

I’m glad that I can go out with­out the near­ly con­stant drip of water on my head or feet, but I sup­pose I’d secret­ly want­ed to see what tru­ly unique rain­fall lev­els would be like. It does give us one less thing to talk about, I sup­pose. I’m told that Cana­di­ans always do talk about the weath­er, but it’s near­ly always in the form of a ques­tion (and I have wit­nessed this): It’s not ‘Gee, it’s been rain­ing a long time.’, it’s ‘Wet enough for you, eh?’

More baby steps, and a busy week ahead

We fêt­ed the arrival of Pam’s Work Per­mit. She already has some con­tract edit­ing work, and is glad to be reen­ter­ing the work force, even if it’s a part-time gig here or there until she finds some­thing per­ma­nent. We also received two inter­est­ing gov­ern­men­tal items in the mail this past week: First, there was a shiny white card with my new Social Insur­ance Num­ber (or SIN). I guess this means that they can start deduct­ing that from my pay­check, so I am also a par­tic­i­pant in the Cana­di­an Safe­ty Net. As for you who don’t have one of these and dis­par­age social­ized gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits, Let he who is with­out a SIN num­ber cast the first stone… Sor­ry, could­n’t resist one last pun on SIN (as if I was the only one to make one of those, yeah, right).

We also received a bill for the pre­mi­ums that we’ll have to pay to get social­ized health insur­ance. So, per per­son, per quar­ter, as many peo­ple know, the bill is $94 CAD (that’s about $81 US accord­ing to the lat­est exchange rate). For the two of us, it means that we’ll be pay­ing $288 * 4, or $1,152 per year for our Health Insur­ance. I’ll be get­ting den­tal and opti­cal from work. This takes some of the sting out of those sales (and now income) tax­es we’re been pay­ing. As some Sep­tic Tank Main­te­nance guy said in some com­mer­cial I saw years ago: “You can pay me now, or pay me more lat­er.”

This week has a full cal­en­dar: On Mon­day there’s a meet­up for the Graph­ic Design­ers of Van­cou­ver, Tues­day is Game­lan prac­tice, Thurs­day is the BC Apple User Group, and Fri­day is the Grand Old Man of Min­i­mal­ism, Ter­ry Riley (along with the poet Michael McClure) at the UBC Chan Cen­tre.

writ­ten while lis­ten­ing to: Schrek­er: Cham­ber Sym­pho­ny — i. Langsam, schwebend “, per­formed by The Musikkol­legium Win­terthur con­duct­ed by Han­na Wein­meis­ter