Further discombobulation

Remember this bedroom in the beige Burnaby apartment I found in June?


Well, now it looks like this.


As the place in Burnaby looks and feels more and more like my home, I’m feeling increasingly discombobulated. Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? (Actually, that’s all rather more like existentialism than discombobulation, so perhaps I’m feeling increasingly existential. Time to change my name to Simone?)

The summer Mike offered me to decompress is suddenly almost over and I really do have to start thinking about employment. As previously noted, the odds of finding a decent job are much greater in Vancouver than on Gabriola (where the odds are virtually nonexistent), so it’s good that the flat here feels like home. (Which Gabriola also will as soon as I get back there next Monday.)

While I struggle with (and spare readers from) the tortured process of figuring out what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life, I offer as a diversion, further proof that I might want to consider interior decorating as a line of work.

From this…

to this.



And from this…

to this.


Turns out, as I discovered when I unpacked my books, that I’d had a rather more severe cull before leaving London than I thought I’d had. So, one of the tall bookcases Luna and I put together last month is actually surplus to my requirements. Just as well, really, as the storage room is overflowing with boxes of books from Mike’s old office at the University of British Columbia. (He was in hospital being treated for cancer when he reached retirement age. The university informed him – like there was a lot he could do about it from his hospital bed – that they needed his office cleared out. Grad students boxed up everything and the 42 boxes were sent – for lack of any other option – to Mike’s daughter Heather’s place, where he had been paying her to store them. Years and years of books and magazines and journals and theses and papers. It’s a laborious process going through them, but at least there is somewhere to put the books he wants as they come out of the boxes. Then there’s the question of what to do with the ones he doesn’t want. I’m hot wired to never just throw a book out, but where or where can they go?)

And I also have a nice place to smoke, complete with a Provencal tablecloth and the Ricard ashtray I stole from a restaurant in Montpellier decades ago when my friend Krys was a student there. That ashtray has crossed the Atlantic almost as many times as I have.