Vanity

As much as I love Canada and look forward to the day I step back onto Vancouver concrete, I will forever miss my accent. Over here I’m exotic, my voice is “beautiful”, I’m….Canadian! The people love me! It’s such a conversation starter, and a conversation that revolves around ME. I think it must be sort of like when you have a baby. People that normally might not take notice of you are suddenly absorbed in your life and want to know all sorts of personal details. It’s addictive. When I come home I’ll probably just stare at you and wait for ya’ll to ask me questions. I’ll eventually get over it but for now I’ll just enjoy waiting in the line up at the grocery store, looking forward to the inevitable conversation that will ensue when I go to pay. I enjoy when fellow customers in line suddenly look at me with interest. At work patients often ask me questions and initially I was sort of embarrassed with the attention but now when someone doesn’t bring it up, I’m like, well this is awkward.

In other news, our 3-month-old espresso machine bit the dust. It’s sad because it just needs to have a faulty part replaced. So Colin and I put her in the box, paid $12 to take the train to the mall, and brought her back to where we got her. Instead of offering to have her fixed, they told us that we could just grab another one. I scoured the department store and couldn’t find it anywhere. The lady helping us told us to pick out another model and recommended a Sunbeam machine, instead of our trusty Breville. We reluctantly took it and went back home to set it up. Everything on it feels cheap and it doesn’t work as well as our last one. It’s also very temperamental and if you tamp your coffee grinds a little too hard, there’s a hissing explosion that takes a long time to clean up. The steamer bit also doesn’t foam your milk as well, (and it looks like a weiner), which is crucial to a good coffee. Today I phoned the department store and asked for them to find me our old model so I could exchange it back. He phoned me 3 hours later to tell me that it was discontinued, there aren’t any more left in the Sydney area, and that I couldn’t return my Sunbeam machine just because I don’t like it. Hmmm….we’ll see about that. The only thing stopping me from bringing it back is that Colin finds it functional, it’ll cost me $6.40 in train fairs to return it, it’s super heavy, and it’ll be confrontational. Plus, I bought it on sale and I’d have to wait for a sale somewhere else to buy another one. This = more train trips to the mall. Ahhh, I will try to adapt.

On Tuesday I needed to buy lunch and decided to phone it in to save a few minutes. It didn't save much time because it took forever to span the language barrier. The old saying may be ‘you say tomato, I say tomoto’ but if you don’t say tomoto, people have NO idea what you’re alluding to. When they figure it out they ALWAYS say, “Do you mean tomoto?”

No I don’t.
E.