The Royal Visit

Even though I could sleep in, I was still feeling exhausted this morning. Thus, I was happy to just stay in and work on some job applications. Around 1:30 PM Katrina asked me if I wanted to join her on a walk around the golf course. I didn't really feel up to it but I thought that some fresh air might give me new energy and so I joined her and Jakki.The walk was nice and uneventful apart from a golf ball hitting a fence right in front of us. I talked a bit more about pronounciation with Katrina as she had been confused about my pronounciation of the word 'Battle' this morning.
Back at home, I quickly decided to make some potato pancakes for lunch. It took quite a while to make them. Since I was in a hurry because I wanted to leave in order to watch the ceremony for the royal visit, I ended up burning most of the potato pancakes. Consequently, there was a lot of smoke in the house as I hadn't opened the windows. That smoke actually set off the fire alarm upstairs. Katrina quickly disabled it and we opened the windows to let the smoke get out.

By now, I had convinced Katrina to join me and so we took the car Downtown. Katrina parked a few blocks from the Parliament building and we walked the rest of the way. It was very crowded when we arrived. However, after we passed through the first big group of people on the field in front of the parliament building, there was actually a lot of free space. We were confused and wondered why the people didn't use up all of that space. It was their loss anyway since this way, we could get a lot closer to where the ceremony would take place.
The Royal family was a little late and everyone was anxious for it to start. Before they arrived we could see Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and his wife as well as several other people leaving the Parliament building in order to receive the Royal Heighnesses. As soon as they arrived, there were a lot of handshakes and a military orchestra playing in the background. Some First Nation's people also performed a traditional dance to welcome the Royal couple. Unfortunately, I couldn't really see any of that from where I was standing.
There were 21(?) shots fired from cannons as a tribute, which seemed pretty impressive to me as I had never actually heard a cannon being fired.
After the distinguished guests arrived and took their seats in front of the Parliament building, I could finally catch a few glimpses of them. There were welcoming speeches by Justin Trudeau, Christy Clark, the Premier of British Columbia, and Judith Guichon, the  Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. The speeches were partly in English and partly in French, which was interesting since they seemed to be talking about different things in each language instead of just translating everything. Lastly, there was a speech by Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge. He tried to say a few words in French as well but his French was more than a little rusty so that this part of his speech was actually rather funny.
There was also a children's choir singing a few songs (mostly in French). Accompanied by this children's choir, the whole audience sang along to the national anthem 'Oh Canada'.
At the end of the whole ceremony I had lost sight of Katrina and it took a while for us to meet up again.

I had asked Katrina to drop me off at Save-on-foods on the way home. While we were driving close to the Government house, we were suddenly stopped by some policemen. A few moments later, the cars with the Royal Highnesses inside were turning into a street right in front of where we were standing, which was kind of cool.

I walked home after returning a lot of empty bottles and buying several groceries at Save-on-foods. When I arrived, Margo, Tuulia and Katrina were in the kitchen eating some macarones, which Margo had brought home. I tried most of them, too.
Katrina and I decided to watch 'The Conjuring' and even though they didn't really want to see it at first, we could persuade Margo and Tuulia to watch it with us. As we had started watching after 9 PM, it was petty late when we were done with the movie. As it had been kind of scary, Katrina started telling us about a few scary dreams she had had, which almost made me reconsider sleeping in my bedroom.

Printing at the library and being sleepy

After last night, I really didn't want to leave my bed this morning. However, I had no choice since I had to start working at 10:30 AM. Luckily, my shift was only about 4 hours but that was bad enough - I had the feeling that I could fall asleep at any moment throughout my whole shift.
When I was done at 2:30 PM, I walked to the public library in order to print something. I had to wait a while since all public computers were taken at that moment. While I was waiting for one of the other library visitors to be done with his or her session, I watched what the other people were doing with their PC time. There were several people just playing random games like solitaire or a golf simulation. There was also one guy who was just sitting in front of the computer and staring at the empty desktop without ever doing anything, which kind of pissed me off. I guess I waited amost 15 minutes until someone finally left so that I could use his computer to print.
After that was done, I walked to McDonalds and had two Big Macs for lunch. It really didn't feel like a healthy choice but I was not motivated enough to cook anything.
Back at home I pretty much just relaxed for the rest of the day. In the evening I watched a weird and kind of disturbing Japanese movie called 'Battle Royal' with Tuulia.

Sushi and the Electric Sex Panther

Today was just another day of work. In the morning I was quite busy restocking and checking expiry dates of food. In addition to that, we were quite busy in the afternoon with customers so that the day went by quickly.
When I came home this evening after my long 8 hour shift at the gift store, Katrina was just about to leave in order to buy some sushi. As I wasn't too keen on just eating bread for dinner, I decided to join her. However, the sushi store she usually went to had already sold out of sushi by the time we arrived there and the next sushi store we went to was already closed. During the car ride, we kind of started talking about our view on the afterlife and near death experiences, which turned out to be a very inspiring topic. I thought that Katrina's ideas regarding this topic were very interesting. We finally got lucky at the third sushi restaurant. Since we had to wait a little bit for our order, we walked to a nearby supermaket to check out if there was anything worth buying. I ended up buying some fruits and vegetables while Katrina bought cookies.
Back at home, we enjoyed our sushi while watching some more 'Louie'. It was quite good and my portion was a really big, so I was quite happy about my dinner.

Margo came home around 9 PM. Since we had planned to go out again together tonight, I quickly changed into a sexier outfit. Even though I was quite tired, I just didn't just want to spend another night at home. So we took the bus Downtown around 9:30 PM in order to go to the 'Canoe' to watch the Electric Sex Panther once again.  It was already quite crowded when we arrived and so we only got a spot right at the bar. Margo still ordered a little snack. I had another Merridale cider while the other two girls drank beer. Like last week, I just had to go dancing to the amazing music while Margo and Tuulia stayed at the bar - they were too shy to dance. As I kind of liked Lucas, the rap singer of the band, the two girls convinced me to try and talk to him. I managed to get him into a conversation twice, first during the music break and then after the concert, but as it turned out he had a girlfriend. Margo and Tuulia still said that I was their hero for talking to him as they would have never dared to do it even though they had urged me to. Nevertheless, I had a great time and I really enjoyed dancing to the music.
I checked for a bus home when we left the brewpub only to discover then that the last bus had already left about 15 minutes ago. As we didn't want to pay for a taxi, we walked home. Since we were chatting a lot, the walk actually didn't seem that long to me and we arrived just past 1 AM, which wasn't that bad.

Just a lazy evening after a long work day

I had a long shift at work from 9 AM to 5:30 PM today. It was slowly becoming obvious that the tourist season would be over soon, as we barely had any restock today compared to the amount of restock in the last few weeks. So instead of doing restock almost all day long, I had to clean several shelves, which was at least a good way to stay busy.
I had planned to go to the Open Mic at the Ocean Island Inn tonight. Thus, I quickly took a shower after getting home. However, as there was still some time left until it was supposed to start, I started watching some TV with Katrina. By the time I would have had to leave, I was just too lazy and too comfortable on the couch. Consequently, I just descided to stay home. Katrina and I tried to find a movie that we would both be interested in watching tonight but since we couldn't really agree on any movie, we ended up watching some more episodes of 'Suits' and 'Louie', which was still very fun.

Red fish blue fish, Uplands Park and Snowden

After sleeping in this morning, I went Downtown in order to buy bread and to exchange a shirt. I was a bit worried about exchanging the shirt since it had been a final sale and I had already ripped the tag off. However, the shirt had a little hole in it even though I had only bought it a day ago so I wanted to at least try to exchange it. As it turned out the exchange was no problem at all.
As the weather had turned out to be surprisingly nice again, I decided to go to the harbour and get some fish and chips for lunch. I wanted to give 'red fish blue fish' another try as Margo had told me a few days ago that she had ordered some food there without any lineup. Unfortunately, I wasn't that lucky - there was a long line again but it wasn't as bad as the last time I went to 'red fish blue fish'. As I didn't have any other plans for the day yet, I queued up. Just like last time, I was very pleased with the quality of the fish here and so I really enjoyed my cod and the fries I had ordered.

When I got back home, Jasper was there. He was just about to be picked up by his owner before Katrina spontanously decided to take him on another walk. So we took Jakki and Jasper and went to the Uplands Park for a nice long walk. Even though I had been quite exhausted when coming home, I absolutely enjoyed the walk. Walking such a big dog such as Jasper is definitely a challenge though. It was more Jasper pulling me along on his leash than the other way around during that short time when we had to put him on the leash because we were walking close to the street. But other than that, Jasper is a really kind and good behaved dog who just has too much energy and doesn't realize how big he is.

This evening, Katrina had planned to go to the cinema with a friend. When she told me that they were going to watch the 'Snowden' movie, it caught my interest. As she and her friend didn't mind, I decided to join them and just before we were about to leave, Tuulia decided to tag along, too. The movie was extremely interesting and quite disillusioning - I hadn't expected the US to be able to surveil that much so easily.
After we got home, I still chatted a little bit about that topic with Tuulia and Margo, who had just come home, too.

Cleaning the duck barn and working late

It was raining when I woke up this morning, which was worrying me a little bit as I had signed up for a shift at the Beacon Hill Farm. Nevertheless, I got up and ready for my shift which was supposed to start at 11 AM. However, when I arrived at the park, it had stopped raining. Consequently, I really enjoyed the walk through the still very beautiful park to the farm.
My task at the farm today was to clean the duck barn. This turned out to be a lot easier than cleaning the chicken barn: Apart from everything being more accessible, the ducks let me work in peace - while the chickens had complained loudly about me being there, the ducks only looked curiously into the barn to find out what I was doing. My only challenge today was to bring the barrel filled with the dirty sawdust up a ramp. As the barrel was fuller and heavier than usually, I had to give up after two unsuccessful tries. After that, I refilled the water and food containers of the chickens and the ducks.

On my way home, I stopped in Downtown in order to check out a store in which I had seen a nice sports bra yesterday. As the store had been closed yesterday, I had to go back there today to try the bra on. I liked it immediately and as the store had a 'two items for 20 CAD' deal, I tried to find a second item to buy. Unfortunately, I ended up liking 3 other items, so that I spent about 45 CAD in the store.
When I got home, I took a shower and cooked some lunch. Afterwards, I relaxed until I had to go to work again.

I only had to work from 5:30 to 9:15, but it felt longer than that since we were not too busy and the store was already pretty tidy when I started working. There was one customer who thought he'd be funny by asking me if we had any gifts or souvenirs. I wasn't sure what to respond at first but then I said something like 'Well if you open your eyes, you might see some.' His wife apologized for his stupid question although I actually thought it was quite fun.
I got home some time before 10 PM and Katrina was already half asleep on the couch. Nevertheless, we still watched two episodes of 'Louie' together while I had a snack for dinner.

Working on another Sunday

I knew that I wouldn't get too much sleep when I went to bed last night but I still really didn't want to get up this morning. 7 AM is just too early on a Sunday. I couldn't help it, though, as I was supposed to open the store at 9 AM.
Just when I arrived at work, I found out that our water cooler was broken, which was really annoying for me since I didn't pack enough water for the day. Consequently, I had to go to 7eleven next door and buy water during my lunch break. Apart from that my work day wasn't too exciting. I was just tidying up the messy store, doing some processing and organizing the name programs.
It started raining sometime in the afternoon. However, when I was finally done with my shift at 5:30 PM, the rain had stopped.
I walked to Centennial Square as I was wondering if there was any dacing going on despite of the weather. The square was actually surprisingly busy. I could see from afar that there were a lot of people dancing Salsa. For a second I considered joining them but I just didn't really feel motivated. Therefore, I just walked to Tommly's Market where I bought a few snacks.
While I was waiting at the bus stop for the bus home, it started raining again. At first I only saw the rain drops about 10 metres from me while though the sun was still shining. This was a weird sight. About a minute later, it started raining right where I sat but I didn't really mind the rain. My bus arrived soon after anyway.

When I got home, I just prepared a snack for dinner and then spent most of the evening watching TV. After about half an hour Katrina joined me and we watched several episodes of two comedy television series ('Louie' and 'Better Things').