Greetings, all, and a thousand sorries. Every day that passes Dan and I get more and more sheepish at the painful lack of bloggage action. You’ve heard the excuses (erm, every waking moment at home has been dedicated to the art of DIY, folding Ikea boxes away and shoving crap in various corners), so just thought I’d catch you on what we’ve been doing for the past month. Sorry, this'll be another monster one but we promise over Xmas to be more blog-like in frequency.
The Home
We do plan on uploading some new pics of our uber-pad when it’s ready – but it’s still very much a work in progress. We’ve come a long way with it though, and despite the fact it seems like it’s the magnet for all the Earth’s dust, it’s transforming rather nicely every day. The bedroom’s done, wallpapered (complete with slightly different batch numbers on the paper, so it, erm, has an interesting fade) and filled with furniture. The living room is coming along, but if Dan and I didn’t keep knocking over our framed paintings and breaking them, it’d be more sorted.
BUT! We now have a delicious brand new EQ3 leather sofa in chocolate brown, and….erm…. a 46” high-definition, LCD 1080p flat screen Sony Bravia with 5.1 surround and mounted on a bracket so it looks like it’s floating on the wall. It took much planning and sweat on Dan’s part to get this beast on the wall (and I promised not to tell you that he was so worried about it falling off that he put our inflatable mattress under it for three days), but now it is a thing of beauty. Hell, after kitting out our place with furniture from those Swedish bastards, we figured we’d splash out on a posh TV and sofa. So we can unwind in the comfort of our own home cinema, don’t you know....
Dan’s also been a pillar of machismo and caning it by working on converting our closet-y room into his “Command Centre”. The “den” is now a manly oasis of deep grey, metal desk and metallic blinds and yes, he’s mounted his surround for the computer in here as well and plans on hiding his cables in the wall. He’s gone fracking insane but appears to be extraordinarily content to have his own ManLair (now with own outside deck that I’m calling the Dan-cony! And a special shelf bought specifically to display his Masterpiece Optimus Prime and Megatrons!) And as soon as his limited edition, 20th Anniversary Transformers lithograph is back from the frame shop, he'll also post a picture of it.
Yup.
Needless to say I have adopted the blue room as the “Rock Room”. Though blue is decidedly unrock/goth, I plan on making it my own by scattering rock paraphernalia, tickets, photos and drum sticks on every flat surface.
Anyway, the flat’s coming along awesomely. And judging by our mate Julie’s reaction when she saw it (she was our first overnight guest too) – “I can come house sit, this place is amazing!” – it’s looking and feeling pretty good.
The Social Life
UK DJ Seb Fontaine played a totally by-rote, asleep-at-the-wheel set at Sonar on November 9th. I took Dan there as an early birthday pressie, and we headed out in the rain to see one of our fave DJs “tear it up” in Vancouver. Unfortunately, the only thing we tore up was the pavement when we left early out of boredom (after waiting three hours to see him). Still and all, I did manage to put a wee note in front of La Seb indicating that we’d always gone to see him at the (soon-to-be-defunct) Cross club in London and it was good to see him here. He laughed heartily and blew me a kiss. Nice! Then it was off to our mate Luke and Bay’s leaving do the next night (they were off to Oz for a few months) where we spent most of the night chatting with Arthur, a heavily pierced and tattooed Aussie café barista who lives here.
Dan’s birthday ( Nov, 13 for those of you who missed it, and there were a few of you ;-) was fairly low-key but nice, as the flat was in tatters and we weren’t ready to throw a bash London-stylee. And I had a bad cold. Blech. But we headed out to the resto Lucy Mae Brown (a posh restaurant which had Dan’s fave burger), and he had a good meal, while the rest of us (Joy, Beth & Simon) suffered through an overpriced disaster cooked by the cleaners, we think. Anyway, our boy was happy enough with his Steak Tartare starter, followed by Beefburger and a chocolate brick cake I brought that I’d had decorated with his name and a little Minicon Transformer. Kudos to those of you who did send cards and calls and pressies – I know he really appreciated it, you lovelies. Tis hard when we’re all on different planets…
November 30 swept us away to the Vancouver Aquarium, late at night, for EA’s Christmas party! How bloody marvelous that EA rented the ENTIRE aquarium, inside and out, and everything was open to us to explore on our own, complete with DJs, a hysterical guy dressed as Neptune, a dancing starfish, a maritime band and of course, the real celebs of the night, all the fishies, jellymonsters and most amazing white beluga whales. The whales treated us to some belly rubs up against the windows and playful bubble-blowing action. They were amazing and Dan had to practically drag me away from every tank. Even the dolphin came right up to my window (though there were tons of people watching elsewhere), turned right around to face me directly and say hello! An absolutely brilliant night for those of us who are easily entertained by slimy creatures.
The next night we (Dan,
Julie – one of our Suite101 editors, music fan and general bon vivant – and I), trundled out in the snow blizzard to a new venue I’d not been to, the Red Room. Why ? To see my ex-thing – the most wonderful and awesome
Mike Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing).
I could write extensively on how weird and head-spinning and amazing and awkward this gig and our subsequent reunion was (I hadn’t seen him in 10 years and things kinda ended weirdly for us), but will spare you the drama. The most important thing to say here is that Dan – a fan of Mr. D himself – was the most awesomest husband in the world for his tolerance, patience and support of his wife's rock-induced insanity. Hearing that Mr. Rock Star had cheekily squeezed his wife’s ass, he concurred that his wife had a squeezable ass, and then offered gallantly to go beat him up. A great night– if totally bizarre – followed by a bit of partying back at our pad with Julie – who’d never played on the Wii or seen the Mighty Boosh.. ;-)
So that brings us to this week, Thursday. One of the amazing offshoots of losing nearly 50 lbs is the fact that I now seem to have an abundance of energy. So while Dan was cutting 1mm off each of the slats of his metallic blinds for the Control Centre, I ventured out in the icey cold lonesome to go see an old mate of mine and his new band.
Mark Henning used to be in a Vancouver-based band called Pure. I hung out with all of the Pure boys quite a bit in the early 90s (holy crap, that’s 15 years ago...) back in Toronto and since being back in Van, had been in touch with their singer Jordy Birch. So during the day, I sent a Facebook email to Mark saying hello, we’ve now moved here, and how was he? He was just fine, in fact, and his band Combine the Victorious were playing tonight at Richards – did I want to come? Of course! So I headed out around 10pm into town to see the gig. And in the process hooked up with Jordy, and Todd Simko, a producer and former guitarist for Pure, who both were at the show to lend Mark support. Very funny evening and nice to see old friends.
So, onward into December! A few parties in the offing but a lot of our close mates are away or on hols, so shall see. We're going to do a housewarming in late Jan. and I’m already looking ahead to Feb when the gigs pick up again (Dean & Britta with my old friend from Luna, Dean Wareham, the Editors and Hot Hot Heat, woot!) Mum arrives Dec 14 for her X-month stint at ours, which’ll be nice. And then we’ll do our first own Xmas in the new flat! Can’t wait for that. Even though I can’t eat any proper food or down booze this holiday, I think it’ll be a nice one. Dan did offer to do my diet with me over Xmas, but I told him not to be retarded - he’d just be scoffing chocolates and beer in his office behind my back. We’ll be around from Dec 21 to 2nd Jan, so do Skype, call or email.
Hope you’re not all too green from yer own celebrations. We’ll be in touch. And we miss you guys. A lot.
