Hockey

Last night, I was invited to see the hockey match - one of my work colleagues had a couple of spare tickets, and wondered if I was interested.

It was the second one I've been to see - the first one was the day before the break-in, so I was a little too distracted to think about it much at the time. The arena is a good few miles to the west of Ottawa, and is pretty impressive; I think the seating capacity is around 20,000. There are a number of concession stands dotted around, including more than a few branches of Tim Hortons. Because you never want to be more than a hundred yards away from Tim's.

I enjoyed the game quite a lot - Ottawa lost, but it was pretty close; they were 1-0 down for quite a lot of the game, and the tension towards the end was getting unbearable. I vaguely understand the rules of the game - it seems to involve hitting the puck in a random direction, and then trying to punch a passing opponent, from what I understand - but I'm pretty sure there are subtleties that escape me. I wonder if I'll ever manage to pick them up?

It also took me a long, long time to realise what seemed to be missing... The tickets were up towards the ceiling (I mean, they were free tickets, so they're not going to give the good ones away), so I could see pretty much the whole rink. I realised part way through the second period that I was half expecting commentary - I've seen a few games on the TV, and I'd really gotten used to having voices there explaining what was going on. There's also a lot less audience interaction than I think soccer generates - the only chanting was "Go Sens, Go" (the local team are the Senators, hence the chant), and a couple of rousing choruses of "You suck!", interspersed with "You suck referee!" after what I'm assured was a particularly poor penalty decision.

But boy, is the game fast - it can shift from one end to the other in a couple of seconds, and I've really got to hand it to the players - they take quite a beating, for one thing (the seats were perhaps fifty yards from the side of the rink, and if a player is crunched into the wall loud enough to hear from that distance, he's going to be hurting); and they can definitely skate well. My experience with skating is such that I'm incredibly happy to not fall over; the players were happily skating backwards, all while busily trying to swing at the puck or opponents.

I'm also a tad put out that last night's seats were just a couple of blocks around from the seats I bought for my first game. Especially considering how much I'd paid for them, and that apparently the seats a few dozen yards away were being given away....

Spring has, er, sprung

It's hard to believe that just a couple of weeks ago, I was blogging about the most recent snowstorms.

The thermometer is currently showing 21 degrees outside - I set off to go downtown wearing my light jacket, and that was off again before I'd even left the porch. I was even tempted to put on my shorts, but I'm pretty sure that Ottawa's not yet ready for the sight of my knees.

Downtown was such a change from how it's been for the last few months, unsurprisingly. There were people just milling about and basking in the warm weather, and the buskers had resurfaced after their hibernation - the restaurants and bars have all started using their terraces again, too. And the coffee I treated myself to was iced, too!

The weather over the last week has been, shall we say, changeable. It's been warm - I don't think it's dipped below freezing all week - and we've had some spectacular thunderstorms. Including a couple where the thunder lasted long enough for me to get up off the sofa and go and see what was exploding outside because there's no way that thunder can last that long.

And even with the rain and the heat, there's still snow on the ground; it's mainly in places that doesn't get direct sunlight, but there are some impressively large patches, considering - I think it's testament to just how much snow has been piled up there over the winter.

I'm pretty sure it won't survive much longer, though. Apparently, today's already the warmest March day on record, and there's warmer weather forecast for the next week. So it might yet be time to figure out where I left my shorts....

Time change

The clocks went forward here overnight; which means that for the next couple of weeks, there's just four hours difference between here and the UK. At least I think that's how it works - it makes my brain hurt, trying to figure it out....

St Patrick's Day

(Is this my fourth post today? I don't know about you, but I'm impressed)

While I was downtown, I got to see the St Patrick's Day parade. Well, it seemed to spend more time stationary that it did moving, but it was fun nevertheless. I think the highlight was that it was led by not one but two Mounties - I think that that's the first time I've seen mounties since I got here; certainly it's the first time I've seen them in the red uniform.

I was also surprised to see a female Mountie - I think that that might have been the first one I ever saw. Clearly, Due South is a lot less accurate than I've been led to believe.

Slush!

It's -9 out, according to the thermometer. I'm pretty sure that's inaccurate, though, as I've just been out for a couple of hours, and I didn't feel the need to get out my hat and gloves.

Most of the overnight snow has melted, and it's warm enough that the large piles of accumulated snow are melting a little, too. And that means one thing - slush!

The city is very good at keeping the streets plowed after it's snowed. The problem is that when the plows go past, they don't get too close to the side of the road - driving a steel plow into the kerb won't do either of them much good. So the snow is pushed into a pile that normally takes up between a foot and a yard of the inside lane.

And when the sidewalks are plowed, the snow from there is also pushed onto the same pile. At least if you've got a sidewalk - I can't remember if I've mentioned this, but the street that the apartment is on doesn't have a sidewalk - it's a block too far away from the main road to have one. Which does make me wonder - when I'm walking to get the bus, am I technically jaywalking until I get to somewhere that has sidewalks?

Anyway. The streets end up with a pile of snow to the side (as a side note, for all these years, I've just assumed that I'm lousy at parking; it turns out that no, I was just practicing for here, when getting within a couple of feet of the kerb is the best you can manage). I've noticed that occasionally, these piles of snow are cleared by the city - I've no idea where they take all this excess snow, but I like to think of it being exported to countries that don't have any so under-snowed children can make snowmen. But the stuff that remains freezes into ice, and is pretty darned solid after a couple of months. And of course, it's exactly where the drains are.

We end up with a situation where the snow is trying to melt, but there's nowhere for it to go. So it builds up, and we end up with some pretty impressive slushy puddles. Maybe I should stay inside until it's all melted....

Another weather update...

The promised heatwave arrived - we had a couple of days of pleasantly warm days. I didn't think that it had made much difference to the amount of snow still lying on the ground until I got back home, and saw grass poking up through the stuff on the lawn, as well as being able to see the garden path for the first time this year.

Friday was back down to around freezing, and today is forecast to be the same; and I got up this morning (well, technically, I was rudely awaken by a telemarketing phonecall wanting to talk to me about the electric bill I'm not responsible for paying) to discover that there'd been a little snow overnight - just a centimeter or two; and I think it's going to be warm enough over the weekend that it's not going to last.

Six months

For those of you keeping track, today is the six month anniversary of when I arrived in Canada.

Does it feel that long to you? It feels like it's just flown for me!

(Bear in mind that it's a little over seven months since I actually registered as a permanent resident; the main reason I didn't post anything for that anniversary is that I forgot)

My permanent resident card needs to be renewed every five years; I need to be resident for two years in that time. Well, 730 days - I'm allowed to leave the country now and again. So I'm already a quarter of the way there.

The plan is to apply for citizenship once I can - the requirement for that is that I need to do it three years after I became resident, and the current processing time is somewhere around a year, apparently.

So there we are; I wonder if I should make a cake to celebrate?

Reading group

I've joined a reading group over here; being cheap, I tend to order the books on Amazon (as the local library system has disappointed me in the past when I've tried to reserve books).

I got home tonight to discover that the latest book has arrived - the next meeting is a week on Sunday, so I've got nine days to get through Neverwhere.

I was a little surprised to see that the book had been posted from the UK. I'd bought it from Amazon's Canada site, and most of the sellers on there seem to be based in the US. I skipped past those and located a seller called awesomebookscanada, who claimed that the book was in stock, and shipped from Ontario. I ended up paying a little more for the book - four times more than if I'd gone for the same book from a US seller, though admittedly it was still only 4 cents.

So clearly there's enough money in the postage credit to pay to airmail a paperback across the Atlantic (I think the postage comes out at about 4 pounts - and I've just noticed that the keyboard on this US laptop doesn't have  the pound sign.) I can't decide if it's from a drop-shipper, who buy books locally and post them on when they get an order - when I was selling on Amazon, I had a couple of orders from drop-shippers. The alternative, I guess, is that it's a Canadian company who have decided that it's actually cheaper to ship from the UK - given that there were a couple of business cards in the book being used as bookmarks, both for Toronto businesses, I'm wondering if a company's just sent its whole stock to the UK....

That was unexpected....

A couple of weeks back, I was chatting to someone at the board game evening - he's Australian, so we've been comparing stories about why we ended up here and what we're doing with ourselves. I mentioned that I was looking for web development work.

He called yesterday; his company is looking for a new web developer. So I've spent the day at their offices, looking over how they do things and trying to get my head around the vast number of acronyms they use. It's an internet telephony company - they sell phone access via the internet to companies, and my duties will be in a support role. They have a billing database that does almost exactly what they want, but there are a few amendments that they'd like; and the admin system was written using a technology that no one can support now that the developer has left.

They use a lot of technologies that I've never used, but I'm confident that I can learn what I need to quickly enough - it's just a case of getting to grips with how things work. I've had a look at the code they want to migrate on their admin system, and I can mostly understand what it's doing, though without any understanding of why it's doing it, which would definitely make things easier.

So there you go. I seem to have lucked into a job! Keep your fingers crossed that I can keep it for longer than the last one...

Winter is coming!

So we're now into the first week of March. I think we've had as much snow in the last ten days as we've had in the whole of the winter to date, and the temperature is currently at -16; I was out for the evening last night, and was very well bundled up with my coat, gloves, hat and scarf, and was still worried for my extremeties. This is what winter is all about!

On the other hand.... By tomorrow afternoon, the temperature they're predicting is 11, which means that over the course of a day and a half, the temperature will have shifted by 27 degrees, which I think is pretty darned impressive. It seems that the current lows are because we're getting the tail end of the system that sent all the tornadoes across the Southern US, so now that system's dying away, we're getting warmer weather again. There's still enough snow that I suspect even a day that that's warm won't be enough to clear it fully, but there should be more than enough slush to go around....