I bought art yesterday. Not something I do very often, but I like the feeling. It means not getting a new couch this month, but I can put up with the old couch for a few more months.
It was the closing of my friend Cecelia's show, and she hadn't sold anything. I didn't buy it out of guilt, I had been meaning to get one of her glass collages for a long time, and this piece really jumped out at me. Apparently it was the favorite at the show, and several people had said they wanted it, but didn't break out the checkbook. Suckers, it's mine now!
Had a quite nice 3-day trip up to Vancouver, B.C. this past weekend. The purpose of the visit was to see my one Calgary Flames game of the season, Vancouver being much cheaper and easier to get to than Calgary. We took the train to Seattle, then bussed over the border to Vancouver. The trip up was alright, albeit a little long. I wish they could get consistent rail service over the border, it's a bummer having to take the bus.
Checked into the Victorian Hotel, which was quite nice, inexpensive, and very conveniently located. Probably not the neighborhood that most tourists would stay in, but it was within a half-hour's walk of everything we wanted to see, so it was perfect for us.
I had done my research, so I knew where I wanted to have dinner the first night: Wild Rice, only a few blocks from the hotel. I had even picked out what I was going to order: oven-roasted sablefish. Highly recommended. Aaron usually doesn't like "tall food" restaurants, but even he was pretty enthusiastic about the BBQ pork dish he ordered. Drinks were also great, I had the Lotus with lychee-infused vodka. (I love anything lychee-flavored, it takes me back...)
We didn't really have any agenda besides the game, so we mostly just wandered around on Saturday morning and afternoon. We found the map store Aaron had ordered some maps from on-line, and it turned out to be one of the best map stores we've ever been to (and we've been to a lot). Finally found a Tim Horton's and had some doughnuts and coffee, not as awesome as I had been led to believe, but still OK.
Vancouver is really pedestrian-friendly, easy to navigate on foot, and generally quite a pleasant place to visit. I had visited once in the early '90s and thought it was the most cyberpunk city, and now it's even more so. But without the bitter cyberpunk edge. The skyline is packed with glittering blue-green glass high-rises, the streets are clean, the population is amazingly diverse and everyone is really nice (except Canucks fans, but I'll get to that). There's so much more to do, and I'll have to go back and spend some more time exploring. It joins my very small list of cities I could live in.
The game was pretty awesome, even though the Canucks won it in OT. There were hundreds of Flames fans in attendance, which I figured there would be, so at least I wasn't the only one in enemy territory wearing the flaming C. There was quite a bit of (generally good-natured) hassling from the Canucks fans, but they can have their little bit of fun looking up at the division-leading Flames from 9th place. The harassment would have been much worse if the Flames had won, so it's probably good that they didn't. I spent a good part of the game just watching my main man Miikka Kiprusoff through my binoculars (our seats were waaaay up). He made some pretty spectacular saves, and the rest of team put in a pretty good effort in the 3rd. Poor Aaron ended up with an obnoxious child behind him who kept kicking his seat through the whole game, which kind of ruined it for him (that and that the reader boards showed that Ottawa lost to Buffalo that night, any time Ottawa loses he gets really testy).
Anyway, there's some pics on Flickr, if you want to see them.