Montreal

One of the other nice things I've done since coming back was go to Montreal a lot, once for capoeira and three (?) times to see the Boopsie. We bummed around in our usual way, babbling like crazy, watching Repo: The Genetic Opera, and eating vegan food at Aux Vivres. I had missed her very much while I was travelling, but she carried on perfectly well without me! She's found a very lovely walk-up to move into in September with three of her school friends. I am very impressed with her roomies so far: they are smart, funny, responsible young women and they are even nice to dorky policy analysts who threaten to crash on their couch all the time in the fall. Way to go! I cannot wait to have her back on this side of the continent in September.

Family Ties

My family and our dear friend Queensie/Ruth came out to visit me early last month. We attended my convocation, where I got to show off the fam to a bunch of my uni friends. Glinski has requested that my parents adopt him. The convocation speaker was, unfortunately, tedious beyond belief (old media is dead! Did you know?!), but other than that it was a nice ceremony. There were a lot of us taking the extra two or three semesters to graduate, which was nice because I got to cheer lots of people I knew across the stage. I took Thursday off work and we toured around Ottawa, looking at the Art of Papal Rome exhibit at the National Gallery (well worth the time, although we were a little Pieta'ed out by the end). Ruth returned to her native New Jersey, and the rest of us spent the weekend in Wakefield, canoeing and walking around at Lac Philippe and eating absolutely wonderful food at the Moulin Wakefield. Happy days indeed.

Bicycle Commuting

At the office, on June 2, to be precise, I had what I think will be a formative experience: I got my bike stolen. This was a bike I'd bought off Jacob for a very good price, and it was without a doubt the highest quality bike I'd ever owned, a 2002 Kona Cinder Cone. Very light, great shocks, and well-maintained. We'd gone out for a day in Gatineau Park, just shredding up the trails like nobody's business (well, it was pretty good for my first day, at least) and I'd resolved to make mountain biking a part of my lifestyle. The following Monday, I walked out of the office clad in my biking gear, ready for a relaxing jaunt home, only to discover that my bike was nowhere to be seen. I will long remember the unpleasantness of having to walk home, in one's nerdy running tights, sadly clutching a now-useless helmet. And I don't think it was my fault, is the thing: my combination lock was, admittedly, kind of shitty, but the ring where my bike was parked had been sawn through.

This experience has opened up new worlds of righteous indignation to me. At my building, people who cycle to work as their form of transportation are forced, effectively, to leave their personal property outside all day, unattended and completely unsupervised, as the security cameras don't even capture most of the racks on the south side of the building. Two e-mails to the facilities people haven't gotten them to remove the sawn-through ring on the rack. The bike storage situation means that people who make a choice to cycle to work - a lifestyle that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and I'd bet health care costs as well - are not being offered the same services as employees who drive to work and have a nice cozy parking garage in the basement, which cyclists are forbidden to use. We would be dangerous coming down the ramp, you see, and could get in the way. My favourite argument against letting cyclists put their bikes in the parking garage is that by permitting this, the government building could find itself competing with private bicycle storage providers in the area. Why, that would be preposterous! That would be like the government running a parking garage when there is a perfectly good privately owned parking garage right across the street!

As it is, my new and fabulous replacement mountain bike is not going anywhere near my place of work, and I'm going to purchase a beater for commuting. This doesn't actually reduce the risk of theft, since bike theft seems to take place mostly at random, but does reduce the financial impact of replacing bikes. As people become more aware of sustainability and environmental issues, as well as the advantages of an active lifestyle, I think more and more employees will place a premium on a bicycle-friendly workplace. I'm certainly learning to.

She's Baaack

It's been an awfully long time since my last update, and a lot has happened. I had a fabulous trip to the Caribbean, Argentina, and Tucson. If you'd like to read more about it, you can check out my travel blog. I got to spend time with one of my dearest friends and attend the wedding of another, celebrate my grandmother's Significant Birthday, and get to know people and places I'll never forget. I also learned the joys of setting your schedule according to your own whims (don't think I'll ever really recover from that discovery) and of spending lots and lots of time in the great outdoors. Since coming back to Ottawa, I've picked up more or less where I left off, singing with ORYC and training capoeira, but minus Carleton and plus work. Yes, I've started work as a real employee, at the same office where I had my co-op placement last year. It is going fairly well so far, and I have managed to outlast my director general, who is leaving for another assignment on Monday (the DG is my boss' boss, for those unfamiliar with the ranking system of Canadian government departments). Sometimes I feel a little under-employed, just because I haven't got people yelling at me about tight deadlines, but I've got a few files on my desk, and they are all really interesting to me, so that is a good thing. There are lots of good things.