Wondering what to do in Vancouver next week?

I have a don't-miss suggestion – my friend Thomas Arthur's performance at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre!

A tour de force solo performance pointing to a unity of nature, nurture, mathematics, art, science and mythology. In a masterful weaving of sound and motion, lyrical juggler Thomas Arthur explores the nature of order. With a supporting cast of orbiting spheres, hoops, spirals, geometric solids, roots, sticks, stones and cones – and even a parabolic space-time tunnel! – Thomas spins a hypnotic flowing dance of visual music, poetic narration and projected imagery.

Thomas is one of my favorite people in the world, and if you're around, I urge you to support his work and come to the show, April 24-26, 2008. It'll be worth it.

Communicopia [that's where I work!] is looking for a web creator to join our team and work with some of the world's most exciting and inspiring social change organizations and sustainable businesses. If you like the thought of spending your days doing world-class work that matters, in a fast-moving and fun environment with a killer view, then this is the job for you...

Job Description

The Big Picture: our ideal candidate is a remarkable combination of a CSS wizard and a Drupal theming pro, with strong skills in Drupal development. Good design sensibility is essential, lead designer skills are a serious bonus. This position will test your aesthetic and user interface design skills from start to finish.

The exact job will depend on the skills of the perfect candidate, but one thing is for sure: your work will be diverse and ever-changing. You might start your week churning out beautiful CSS to match a design, move on to custom developing a Drupal site, and finish your Friday with a little Flash animation.

You may be asked to design wireframes, prototypes, or be tasked to design multiple website concepts, buttons, and banners. You could be asked to maintain client websites and give technical training when appropriate, and will be called on to participate in peer reviews of our website projects to improve the quality of our work.

Our skills wish-list is as follows (but we are more interested in finding the right "fit" for our company than in nailing every one of them):

I don't think I've ever blogged about it before, but tonight I'm coming clean online: I'm fascinated by childbirth. Some people seem to think it's weird to take an interest in birth before deciding to have a baby, but there it is. I do. I've even done some work as a doula, and aspire to do more in the future.

This weekend, Pomegranate Midwives are hosting a screening of "The Business of Being Born". You can see the trailer here:

It's at 1pm at the Rio Theatre, Broadway and Commercial. I will definitely be there!

Saving ZipCar

Sure makes me glad that I recently decided to sign up as a Deposit-Free member over at the Cooperative Auto Network, rather than trying out Zipcar...

I was a regular share-owning member of CAN for about 5 years before moving to Toronto. They are a great group and I have nothing but good things to report about car-sharing. Oh, except for that pesky problem of there not being a car parked right outside my house... ;)  

Just to wrap up what I realize has been a somewhat dramatic story...

I have moved into a new place, it is terrific, and I am a happy little homebody now. Yahoo! I intend to fight for the return of my damage deposit, but right now that is secondary to the goodness that is the feeling of being settled in a comfortable home. I could putter around all day. It's *fantastic*.

In slightly less good news, there were a few sad casualties among the things I shipped from Toronto on Greyhound. Of course, I managed to wave goodbye to my things just as the temperatures across the centre of Canada dropped insanely. So my boxes of belongings voyaged across this fabulous but frozen country, transferring between trucks 3 times I'm told, in temperatures averaging around -30ºC. (That's -22ºF.) Several of the boxes arrived terribly tattered, and one of the boxes didn't arrive at all – instead I got a bag of my things. "We hope everything is there," they told me. Blessing or curse I am not sure, but the likelihood that I will notice if anything small is missing is slim. They informed me that when boxes get unloaded in the snow, they get wet. Weaker boxes then disintigrate.

Lesson #1: Use new, strong boxes. Some of mine had endured several moves already.

Lesson #2: Don't ship things in plastic when it might be -40 outside. It cracks. (Luckily my only casualty was a plastic binder, which arrived rather shredded.)

Most everything inside the boxes was more or less intact... except for a few sad items. I found my favorite childhood mug in about 15 pieces, and my favorite bowl made by a Santa Cruz potter split in 3. Two other bowls suffered similar fates.

Lesson #3: Pack beloved ceramics very, very carefully. Insurance doesn't really cover these things.  

I just returned from a full 2.5 weeks away. The trip is a whole other story, but the question on everyone's mind (ok, it was probably only on mine, but it was there pretty regularly) was "what did they do to my bathroom while I was away?"

I figured there were two realistic possibilties: they either did nothing, or they patched and painted. I would have been floored with shock had I returned to a re-drywalled (ie properly fixed) bathroom.

Well, they patched and painted. Filled in the gaping mold filled holes, and slapped on a coat of paint. It looks better, I'll admit. But it doesn't change the fact that the walls are full of mold.

And it doesn't change the fact that I'm OUT of here.

Wish me luck fighting for my damage deposit back, because I'll be leaving without giving proper notice. Like, within a week. 

And if you ever find yourself renting in Vancouver, do yourself a favour and avoid Kitsilano Management at all costs.  

Well, whatever I have done to deserve the past year of struggles around finding home...

I'm sure awful sorry about it. Can we change the story now??? I'd like a new one.

So I moved into this apartment, which I mentioned yesterday. I was utterly delighted have found a one-bedroom apartment for far less than such a thing generally costs in Vancouver. And while the building is a little rough around the edges (a new carpet in the halls and a fresh coat of paint would do wonders), the suite itself is spacious and entirely functional. Big windows, big closets, etc.

The only thing that needed addressing was the bathroom. I figured that with a little scraping, a coat of paint, and *possibly* new grout and caulk, it would be fine. Last night, I went to Home Depot, and when I got home, I started scraping. It took about five minutes to realize that underneath all that flaking paint... is a whole lot of mold.

So I stopped scraping and did a quick internet search. It didn't take long to fully freak myself out about what I was dealing with. Today, I went out and added a particulate mask and some toxic bleach cleaner to the arsenal. I came home, put on gloves and mask, and began anew. It got worse.