edwards block

Perhaps it’s simply because I’m in possession of a plane ticket to the tropics, but I am feeling a little more sensitive to the cold this year than usual. Actually, I think it has more to do with the fact that I’m living in a house for the first time in many years. Most houses, it seems to me, are very energy-inefficient compared with solid buildings with a central boiler, but this one seems particularly ill-equipped to keep the cold air out, or to warm the cold air effectively. When I was in my apartment I was always warm, so jumping on my bike and riding somewhere was actually quite refreshing; but here, I’m chilled through before I’m even contemplating going outside. It’s very easy to just stay in the house – in bed even.

Now that there’s a foot of snow outside and it’s down to -7 celsius (feels like -18 with the wind, they say), I’m even less enthusiastic. It’s not just the cold, though. I can’t cycle, so I’d have to take public transit, also an annoying inefficiency. I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong with transit, but our local governments seem to try to discourage its use. Instead of fifteen minutes to get to school on my bike, it will probably take at least an hour, if not more. Fortunately, my school has been closed for the past two days due to the snow. You easterners (definition: anyone living east of Hope) will laugh at that, as a foot of snow and -7 sounds balmy to someone from, say, Winnipeg, but you have to understand that the snow here is much wetter than the dry stuff you’re used to, and the air’s much more moist. Also, many people here either don’t own snow tires, or they have used them as landscaping material and are now in their backyards with winter pansies springing from beneath their mossy rims.

This doesn’t stop people from driving anyway, mainly of those who would never lower themselves to share a bus with “smelly foreign poor people”, or who have completely forgotten that feet were originally invented for walking on. The first night it snowed, I watched from my bedroom window as a young man up the alley tried to take his BMW out for a spin at midnight. He has those really thin tires everyone is using now that I just don’t understand, and one of those “scoops” under his front fender that almost touch the ground and that I also don’t understand. Perhaps they have a purpose, but when there’s snow on the ground, they aren’t much good. That piece of plastic is getting ripped off by the first piece of ice it finds. Anyway, this guy actually shovelled the alley all the way down to the road so that his plastic thingy wouldn’t hit the snow. Trouble is, once he got to the road his front wheel drive Barbie tires just slid on the hard-packed snow and wouldn’t go anywhere, so he ended up leaving his car in the middle of the road all night.

Anyway, that’s Vancouver when it snows. Why did I bring this up? Oh yeah, I’m cold and that Caribbean beach is looking pretty enticing right now. This is only making it harder for me to concentrate on school, of course. I only have a week left before the exams, so… whatever. Here’s an interesting, though unrelated detail: when I got up this morning, I had a huge knot in my hair. In the back, about two inches from my scalp. I mean, huge. How it happened, I don’t know – it wasn’t there yesterday, and I can’t get it untangled, even after soaking it in conditioner for a while. I’m starting to wonder if my hair isn’t doing some sort of spontaneous dredlocking thing in anticipation of my soon-to-be adjacency to everything reggae. I may have to shave my head. I can’t just cut out the knot, or I’ll look like more of an accident victim than usual, and I can’t let it go dred. “Pale, middle-aged white guy in the Caribbean with dredlocks” just sounds pathetic.

Enough with the mental wandering. With all this time in house, I have had plenty of time to study Milton in anticipation of my coming exams, so naturally I have been doing lots of work on wesbites. Two are new, destined to become my Costa Rican projects (details later), but also this site. Besides the subscription thing that I added recently, you may notice some other new features. In the right side column, I have condensed the long list of ‘Archive’ links into a single pull-down menu; I’ve re-organised the blog categories for easier reading of specific topics; I’ve finally recompiled all my old blog entries from my last bike trip; I’ve started updating my ‘Travels’ page; I’ve added a Where’s Edward Now box so you can see where I am or what I’m up to at any given time; and I’ve added a weather indicator so that you can see at a glance what the weather is like in the area of Costa Rica in which I will be residing. Best of all (I think), I have opened a Flickr account and built a link to it, so that you can view my photos without leaving this site. I’ve recently upgraded my Nikon SLR to a digital SLR, so I hope to be doing lots of photography in Costa Rica, and uploading the pictures for you to see (expect lots of birds and bugs). The “Photos” link is in the top menu bar. You can also get directly to my Flickr page when you are vewing a particular image.