'Car'rying on. Oh god that's terrible.

So I failed 3 stations at the OSCEs. Ah well, no biggie, and I know where I went wrong so when the retakes come round (hopefully March) I will breeze through them. I say no biggie, but obviously I was devastated, having never failed an exam in my life. But I pulled myself up by my - erm...what is it I'm supposed to pull myself up by? Bootstraps? Jockstraps? - whatevers, and got on with the business of getting the work and home bits of my life sorted out.

The exciting news for me at the moment is that I'm attempting to buy a car. I say attempting, since the fact that I'm new to Canada means that I have no credit history, so I might as well be a newborn baby as far as the financiers of this country are concerned. But when Isaac arrived here from Ontario in the Kia it was showing signs of exhaustion and has subsequently decided to take a little *ahem* rest from driving. Two people in Canada with only one car - when one is working full time - just doesn't work. Poor Isaac has been literally stuck in the house for a week (particularly since I was gone for pretty much 3 days straight when dealing with the hardest labour I've ever had) because this country is just not set up for pedestrians. Public transport? What's that?! And on top of that this is the worst winter for snow that they've had in Edmonton for around 20+ years and the fact that I have to be able to get anywhere at any time of the day or night no matter what the weather or road conditions, means that I need to have a safe and reliable vehicle.

To that end, the one I've chosen is a VW Tiguan. The bottom line for me is that it is a) awesome b) classy c) very safe and reliable and d) a Volkswagen. I just love them. I always have. And having owned a Golf and, to a lesser extent, my Polo, I know that they just do the job. They do it well and they go on for EVER. I am well aware that I can get another car for a bit less money. But this one had my heart, my head and all my other organs, so [blows raspberry]. Oh and a SIX year comprehensive warranty, FOUR years roadside assistance and an incredible TWELVE year anti-rust guarantee. Oh and it goes like the proverbial shit off the proverbial shovel. Plus, since I am now earning good money, and couldn't buy a house right now anyway (no credit history thing plus no down payment) I really want to have SOMETHING that I love and am proud of, particularly since I will be using it all the time. So at present we have submitted an offer and paid a deposit on a 2009 fully loaded Tiguan at a dealership in Edmonton and Isaac's mum - gawd bless her heart - has agreed to be a co-signer in order for me to try to get the finance sorted. With my income, and her excellent credit score, we hope it will be enough to secure me the car. Hopefully I'll be able to take her name off once I have a year or so of prompt payments under my belt, and I'll be able to build up my own credit score so I don't need to go through this hassle in future. If it all works out, I promise to post pictures!

I just realised I never blogged about Christmas. Well I won't tell the whole story now, since it would take ages, but suffice to say that my sister Jenny and her boyfriend James flew out to Ontario to spend Christmas with us and it was AMAZING. We skied and snowboarded, we snowtubed, we hot tubbed, we snowshoed, bought lots of coats and warm clothing (including two FABULOUS old fur coats* for Jen and myself), we had nights in and and out, and amazing meals (Jenny & I cooked on Christmas day and, though I say it myself, it was a triumph) and I was very sad to see them go. Hopefully they can come out and visit again very soon over here in Alberta. Secretly, I hope they enjoy themselves so much they want to emigrate here! Photos from the trip can be found here.

*I know the arguments. I sort of agree. But living out here with the kind of temperatures you can experience does change your view somewhat. I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole thing or how often I'll wear it, but I bought it anyway. So there.

Stampeding to Calgary

Chris, Amy, Gravy & I hired a car today, getting a sweet deal from our housemate Kevin who works for Budget, and road tripped over to Calgary to buy...well, loads of stuff to be honest. Living in a resort town don't come cheap, so you need the big city to get essentials at a reasonable price. Our first stop was Wal-Mart, where I bought a few grocery items - cornflakes were 2 bucks cheaper than Safeways in Banff for example - and some jersey sheets. Mmmm. As I may have mentioned before, once you've slept on jersey, you never go back.

We headed off to have lunch with some friends of Gravy's and arrived about 10 minutes before them. Lethal. Next door to the restaurant was the Ski Cellar, a mecca for my new obsession with ski wear. 10 minutes later a new pair of ski pants in bright green were mine, for a bargain price...compared to how much they were to begin with, that was. Believe me, you don't want to know. But I live in a ski resort and when I'm not working, I'm skiing, so I think I can justify the investment*.

However, our main task of the day was to go to Ikea, where I intended to buy a duvet. In Canada, people use flat sheets under something called a 'comforter', which is basically a thin synthetic duvet with a fixed and often lurid cover, with possibly a blanket over the top. It's bloody rubbish. Firstly, it's not warm enough, particularly for a winter where temperatures can go down to -30. Secondly, as anyone who is old enough to remember England before duvets became the norm, you invariably wake up with the sheet squished over onto once side, the comforter over to the other, and the rough woollen blanket fallen off the bottom of the bed. Thirdly, thin synthetic duvets do not cover you properly, they just lie over the top of you and create cold gaps either side of you. Last night I was freezing all night so today I practically ran round Ikea in order to buy myself a lovely down duvet.

Naturally they didn't have the cheap one I wanted, nor did they have the slightly more expensive one in the size I wanted, so I ended up spending $72 on a king size, but still, 36 quid for the pleasure of being warm and comfortable at night for the next 5 months is a bargain if you ask me. I had planned to buy a cheap duvet cover - they had a rather unpleasant yellow circley designed one at $12.99 - but spotted a jersey duvet cover in green, which I was naturally unable to resist, despite it being a fair bit more expensive. I also bought a couple of packs of twinkly lights, one red, one green, to put round my windows to make it a little more festive. I hope you like the effect. My room rocks.

After Ikea we went to the Chinook Centre, a big shopping mall, where we planned to go to the IMAX cinema to see Beowulf in 3D. We bought our tickets before browsing round the shops, and returned to discover that, irritatingly in the extreme, they had sold us tickets to the wrong showing. The IMAX 3D version had started half an hour before, and we had tickets to the regular version. The boys were devastated to miss the opportunity to see Angelina Jolie's gold nipples side-swiping their faces, naturally.

The film was purest comedy gold. I'm fairly sure it wasn't supposed to be a comedy, but we laughed our arses off all the way through it. If it wasn't for Ray Winstone's East London accent saying "I'm Beowulf, and I've come to kill your monstaaaahhh", or Beowulf's penchant for removing all his clothes before he fought said monstaaaahhh, necessitating a whole 10 minute sequence where something was always placed strategically in front of his - ahem - tackle, it was Angelina Jolie performing a particular act upon a sword with an inevitable, slightly messy, and surprisingly graphic conclusion. Well worth seeing: 9 out of 10 for comedy value, though only 2 out of 10 for achieving the original aim. My private theory however, particularly given the abundance of British actors in the film, is that they decided to see how utterly ridiculous they could make the film, and still get the Americans to buy into it completely.

Oh, just a quick update before I publish this: I slept last night on my jersey sheets/duvet combo and it was purest heaven.

*I'm doing a good job of justifying this to myself, aren't I?

A disgrace to the sisterhood

I'm sorry, I really am. I realise that what I'm about to tell you might mean I have to hand in my membership to Womenhood United but I've been officially outshopped by a man.

Omigod but Darrell can shop. The other day we went to the West Edmonton Mall (until 2004 the largest shopping mall in world) and spent 12 hours there. Man but it is BIG. To be fair, as well as going in most (but not all!) of the shops, we also had lunch (chinese) and dinner (ribs), went to the cinema (saw Shoot 'Em Up and it is baaaaaaaaaaad), watched a sealion show, went bowling (I whooped Darrell's ass so that's one back for the girls), though we didn't have time to go to the waterpark with waterslides (and hadn't brought our cozzies so might have got arrested for indecency if we'd tried), nor did we have time to go to the theme park (yes really) or see the aquarium. But for the main bulk of the day, we did go into a million different shops. By the end, I was to be found sat on the man chairs moaning quietly and rubbing my tired legs, while Darrell zoomed round like a whirling dervish saying "Come on now, if you sit down you'll never want to get up. Let's pick up the pace!" In subsequent days he has continued this trend by spending a small fortune on hoodies, computer games and - most importantly, a very nice new guitar. Pretty much the full extent of my shopping up till now has been the garment you can see me modelling above, which they call a vest over here, but clearly it is actually a bodywarmer. And green to boot. Oh and I bought some underwear. My god I'm going crazy!

Today we're just chilling out, eating left over Mexican food - those burritos are gooood but they are filling - and playing Guitar Hero, which I wasn't bad at on the easy level but now we're using four fingers I find I'm struggling to keep up with the guitar meister...

New photos here and here.

Russian Roulette

I like to play Russian Roulette. Not with guns, because they're illegal and I don't know where to get one, much less fire it, and I'd probably get arrested. Although if I did it with guns then I'd have to do it on telly and become famous and Derren Brown would want to meet me and obviously we'd fall in love and get married and have lots of lovely beardy children and live in a house full of stuffed animals. Sigh.

But instead, I like to play Russian Roulette with food. Every so often I'll forgo my usual brand of whatever and buy the 'basics' 'value' 'savers' 'no frills' version and see how it does. When it works, finding you only have to spend 13p on a can of chopped tomatoes in the future can be immensely gratifying. This week's purchase was Sainsbury's Basics Corn Flakes. For the record: nasty.