All right. Time for a frickin' update.

I haven't updated largely because up until yesterday everything has been sucking. Heavily. I tend to need a bit of distance from things that suck before I can write creatively about how funny they are.

I have moved out of my old place, passed through several intermediate places, and only last night was I able to occupy the new place. I'm a bit of a homebody, and am very much out of sorts when my body doesn't have a home to be in. So last night was the first one sleeping in the new place, and this morning, needless to say, my body wanted very much to stay in bed.

So far there's no shower in the house, so I have to do my ablutions at work. I came in this morning smelly, rumpled, and unshaven, and my hair was in full Performance Art mode. I ran into the CEO and some board members as I entered the building. Yay.

But even though things at home are pretty messy and cluttered for the moment, I am so happy to have a home again. Read on for the odyssey of my move.

The namesake of this diary was the porch at my old place. I loved that porch, and I loved that house. And then my landlords went crazy.

I used to think the misunderstanding with the landlords stemmed from the fact that they only speak Cantonese. After a while I realized that it was more to do with the fact that they're batshit crazy and probably not very smart.

Now I dunno. Retaining your language when you immigrate is one thing. Completely failing (or perhaps refusing) to learn the principal language of your new country...well, even then, a few years' leeway is fine with me. People get busy. But I checked with my neighbour as to how long my landlords had owned the house. He thought probably 35 years. I’m no Speak English Or Die type, hell I was an ESL teacher. But my Chinese was better than their English after a two-month night course. When you own properties and mostly rent to English speakers, well, that has to be some combination of lazy, stupid, arrogant and ornery.

I'm not going to give them much time in this entry, because they are truly terrible people and it makes me sad that they exist. I didn't notice how terrible they were because they were largely absentee landlords. They weren't around because they had little to no interest in fixing my house, and seemingly no understanding at all of the concept of 'a stitch in time'. With them it's all "my money, now", even for preventive fixing...parting them from any of it is next to impossible, even when what they need to fix is damaging their property. So mostly I fixed things on my time and my dime and just never told them about it.

When Lisa moved in with me, we quickly discovered that between the two of us and the guy in the basement apartment, there wasn't enough hot water for three morning showers. I looked at the tank and it was old and in dire need of replacement. When I complained, (via semaphore and interpretive dance) the landlords said "don't take showers in a row." But I paid good money for my place, so I insisted that they rectify the situation. They turned up the heat on the tank. We then had the same inadequate amount of water, but now it was too hot to touch. I bitched and moaned some more, they grudgingly replaced the tank (with a used one...where do you even get a used hot water tank?) and then the hating started.

I lived in the house for three years. My ex-roommate lived in it for a year before that with some other roommates. Before them, a couple lived there for nine years. It was just passed from tenant to tenant, so the landlords hadn't been in there for about thirteen years. Wear and tear happens in a place over that amount of time, and even so I left the place in a better state than I'd found it. I happened to be the last one in there, so I absorbed all the blame for it.

When they showed up to take possession, I had moved the last few boxes of my stuff over to my neighbour’s porch so I could move more leisurely-like...also because the landlords had arrived that morning and spent a good deal of time screaming at me in Cantonese. They wanted me out at noon like the rental agreement said. Two hours more? Totally out of the question, even for me, who was quiet and always paid his rent on time.

When you move into a house and there’s furniture already in it, you do not assume ownership of it. I assumed it was theirs, so I left it in the house. They didn't like that one bit. They were throwing stuff off the porch into the yard, screaming at me: "FAH KYU! FAH KYU!" OK, leaving a dresser in there, I can see maybe there was misunderstanding. But they threw the bathroom mirror. I am supposed to know to take the bathroom mirror.

Anyway, that ended, I drove away. I'm out of my place, and done with the crazies. All my junk's in storage. I can't move into Lisa's old place because the renovations are not done yet . I'm staying at my friend Cindy's place, and she has graciously allowed me to bring my cats with me.

The first morning of the Next Page: I go outside to my car to discover that some junkie decided he just had to have the thirty-seven cents in my ashtray. I hope it got him a truly excellent point of meth. And he didn't just smash the window, although he could have, because he definitely had some heavy metal tool to bend the metal of the door frame like that. And it's not even my car. I borrowed it from my Mom to help with the move.

I call the insurance place, and they tell me to take the car in and get the damage assessed. I find when I show the body shop the insurance papers that the insurance runs out May 4, and it's May 2. My Mom had extended her trip to NZ but forgotten to extend the insurance. I can't get it reinsured because I'm not on the title, and my Mom can't do it because she is in New Zealand. I can't get it fixed because they can't fix it before the insurance runs out, and I would have nowhere to put the uninsured car where it's off a public road. I had no choice but to take it back to Victoria (7 hours round trip involving ferries) and leave it, unfixed, in Mom's driveway. I would not be able to be at the airport for Lisa's return from France.

Anyway, after that the bad stuff petered out.

My wonderful Mom, through some magnificent legerdemain involving international faxes and some very understanding insurance brokers, managed to get the car reinsured from NZ before I needed to take it back to the Island. I was able to pick Lisa up.

The insurace company was still not done with our renovation, so we had to live in a hotel. It got old pretty fast...hotels are only fun when you're on vacation, and not when you still have to get up in the morning and drive to work. But because we couldn't get at any of our stuff or move into our place, we kind of got to do nothing for a few days, which was probably a blessing.

As a moving-in present to myself, I bought a pawpaw seedling. I didn't know about these cool things...I know about tropical versions of their family but had never heard of the temperate 'Ozark banana'. Anyway I’m stoked to try growing them, and I found a grower in Ontario, so I didn’t have to deal with agricultural import licences or anything like that.

We finally got our place back two days ago. It looks pretty nice. New plaster, paint and flooring...unfortunately it's filled to the gills with our crap, which needs culling and sorting. Combining households is challenging. We have doubles of a lot of things, so there has to be a lot of compromise when it comes to whose shit is better.

But we're home finally. It's beginning to be cozy. Our cats are stoked because they get to go out on our very large deck (which, incidentally, is even better than the Porch). I'm still showering at work, but I'll go to the hardware store this afternoon and hopefully resurrect our shower this evening.

Oh, and last night a friend from an online forum I hang out in called me. She's from Utah. She's been really sick in hospital for three months and just got out. I guess I kind of kept her company via emails and the like. She kept talking about coming to Vancouver to visit her boyfriend once she got out, so that's what she’d done. She called to invite me out to dinner. Her boyfriend turned out to be the drummer from my favourite band since I was 15. My Utah friend is moving here before long and buying a house with him, and since I'm one of her only friends in Vancouver, I'll probably get invited over for barbeques and stuff. Totally neato.

Our house is getting better all the time. Cool things are happening in many facets of my life. In two weeks we get to go on a three-week vacation to the Queen Charlotte Islands and other parts of the BC coast.

So again: apologies for the long delay in updating, but I had to wait until things started getting cool again. Hopefully happy things won't bore you guys, because that's what seems to be coming down the pike from this point on. That period of Shitty was pretty rough, but it's done. It's. Done. It didn't kill me, and I guess it made me stronger...

...or at least more tolerant of Cantonese epithets.