Katie and Sean

Late Winter Life Update

Sean McGrath -

As mum predicted, as soon as we settled in life became a little less exciting and fewer things stood out to blog about. However, with a little thought and time, I've found there's actually lots to tell!

Buying stuff

It's annoying getting things delivered to our house because it's not obvious to the delivery guys where it actually is. The first Amazon package that arrived (a phone holder for Anders The Volvo) was delivered to the house in front of us, so subsequently we've written 'Laneway house down the side path' on everything else we've ordered. That seems to have solved the package delivery problem, but mail still gets delivered to our road-side landlords Annie & Max. Annie brought over a piece of mail a few days ago addressed to Katie, very obviously from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the federal police force). While Annie was still standing outside, I tried to casually announce to Katie that her record check had arrived, but I'm not sure what she actually thought!

Driving places

My driver's license finally arrived! To be issued a BC license you have to exchange your previous license, as here in Canada you're not allowed to hold two licenses at once. I visited ICBC a few weeks ago to start the process, and they took my NZ license away and replaced it with a temporary paper one. They said that I'd receive my BC license in '10 to 60 days'. Really covering themselves there. But thankfully it only took about two weeks, and I finally have some non-passport identification again!

Katie has started driving, cautiously adapting to life on the right side of the road. I'll let her write more on this, but I think she'd prefer to be driving a small Japanese hatchback rather than a Scandinavian land yacht.

Working on things

My workstation at home is pretty nicely set up now. We went to IKEA and bought a desk chair, and ordered a monitor from Amazon. I was struggling for a little while working from a plastic chair and a 13" laptop, but now I've got my ergonomics sorted everything's a lot more comfortable.

I'm finding it pretty easy to stay in touch with my team back home. We are spread around the country, so using Microsoft Teams to communicate is already part of how we work. Voice and video calls are painless, so it's quite easy to have real interactions with people whenever I need it. I was a bit worried that I'd feel a bit removed from the team, but that doesn't seem to have happened! In fact, I think it's easier to work here because I'm entirely in control of filtering any interruptions (instant messages, emails etc.). When I'm concentrating intensely on something I can just switch everything to silent, and then nothing breaks my flow.

Seeing people

While we've been in Vancouver, we've caught up with several relations of mine. Not long after we arrived, we met Lauren, Tim and their kids Sean and Tanya (who I'd met first on my last trip to Canada, and Katie had met when they visited Auckland last year). Sean had other plans that day, but the rest of us went on a drive out to Steveston where we had a walk around and ate lunch. Steveston is a historical salmon fishing and canning town, with a pretty dirty history. These days the cannery is a museum, but the wharves are still teeming with fishing boats selling their catch direct to the public over the transom.

We also met up with dad's cousin Pania and her husband Erik, who have recently moved to Vancouver from Japan. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in New Westminster and then headed back to their place to be introduced to their picks from Vancouver's craft beer scene. We ended up talking well into the night (they both have such interesting lives!), and we left with the promise of a games night in the near future! These are definitely our people =]

Eating things

In an attempt to recreate the success we'd had in NZ with My Food Bag, we're trialling several different food-box-style delivery services. First on our list is Chef's Plate. They let you pick your meals from a list of around 10 choices, but I'm not sure if that's such an improvement over MFB. With Nadia's service your food just arrives, and as you've already paid for it, you have to eat it. I like that it introduced me to things I would not have voluntarily chosen to eat, and which I ended up really enjoying. Chef's Plate arrives in a big cardboard box with the protein at the bottom and the rest of the ingredients divided up into a paper bag per meal. All the pantry ingredients come in tiny bags, cups, or bottles, which while really cute probably isn't the best from an eco-friendly perspective. The food has been good though, and probably easier to prepare than most of the My Food Bag dishes.

Taking photos of stuff

We've been adding more photos to our albums!