Merry Christmas from Canada, eh!

Here's our little Christmas tree - I managed to kill it by not watering it!

Christmas Day is more than half over in Australia and still 11pm Christmas Eve here.  It's very strange - Christmas to me involves a BBQ, some cold ham and salad and a couple of beers, followed by a dip in the pool.  The cold and the snow - plus the lack of people we know - makes it feel like it's not really Christmas.  The Canadians all seem very happy that the forecast is for a clear, cold Christmas Day - no snow!  We, on the other hand, are disappointed - I was hoping for a big snowfall so that we could go tobogganing in the park again (the snow's starting to get a bit patchy with so many people walking on it).  So I guess Christmas will be white, but sort of a mushy sludgy white :)

Our Christmas plans are for roast beef and roast vegetables - roast potatoes, sweet potato, pumpkin, carrots and corn, with cornbread and Yorkshire pudding.  And apple pie with ice cream for dessert.  Should be good!

Merry Christmas everyone!  Hope you have (or had) a great day, full of whatever traditions you enjoy!

Cold weather running

So after 4 months off running due to stress fractures in my legs, I'm finally allowed to run again.  Unfortunately, there's no way of checking that the stress fractures have healed, so it's just "hope you've stayed off it for long enough".  Right now it's feeling fine, so my new running orthotics and heel-wedged running shoes are hitting the streets to try to get back into training for our goal of a marathon this year.

The streets are a little colder here than they were in Sydney, so we've had to learn about what to wear in the cold weather.  Here's my cold weather running outfit:

That's a thin running shirt under a thick running jumper (both made of that weird wicking material).  The front of the pants has a windproof layer and the back doesn't - fleece-lined on the inside and also made of that wicking material.  Socks made of the same stuff - apparently anything cotton is bad in this sort of weather because it soaks in the sweat which then freezes in the wind, so everything has to be about getting the water away from your skin.  The jumper even has holes for your thumbs so that it stays over the glove-shirt divide :)  I'm also wearing gloves and a toque (beanie).

Check out how awful my beanie is:

Yes, it has a hole it for my ponytail.  It looks ridiculous, but it keeps my head warm.  I think I have a big head though because the "one size fits all" womens' beanie doesn't cover my ears fully - maybe I need to stretch it a bit more.  We do need to solve the "cold face" problem, because your face gets seriously cold in when it's -11 windchill.  Perhaps we need to invest in some balaclavas!

The actual running part is easier than I thought it would be in terms of the terrain - they're amazing here at clearing roads and footpaths.  They put salt down on the footpaths, which lowers the freezing temperature of the water and keeps the footpaths completely clear - pretty smart.  So there's no issue of slipping and sliding all over the place like I thought there would be.

The bigger problem is that after 4 months off running, I can barely run 2km - ouch.  Hopefully I can get myself back to a decent level fast.

Tobogganing!

(Yes, that is how you spell it, I checked.)

Stephen and I saw some kids with a toboggan the other day, so we decided to buy one ourselves and give it a shot.  High Park (next to our place) has some big hills and everything is covered in a few cm of snow at the moment, so it was awesome fun!  You actually go much faster than you'd think :)

We went to Zellers (Big W) and bought this one for $5 - it's basically just a sheet of thin bendable plastic with two handles at the front.  One side is totally slick and the other side is corrugated for sitting on.

I managed to go straight... for a bit.

We picked a different hill (much steeper).  All I seem to do is freak out and end up going backwards down the hill, but Stephen seems to have perfected the art of tobogganing already.

Stephen and Jax share some quality time on the swing before heading home.  We've been trying to make him do all sorts of silly things to demonstrate leadership (he has to do whatever we say as we're the pack leaders) - we took him on the slides a couple of times which he hated, but he actually seemed to enjoy swinging with Stephen.  Awww :)

When Jax Attacks

I thought I'd try something new today and see if I could do anything with the video capabilities of my new HTC Desire.  Jax seems to go crazy at times - yesterday, his big thing was dragging the bedding (towels) out of his crate and death rolling them like a crocodile.  He spent about half an hour doing this, and every time I'd put them back in his crate he'd drag them out and start all over again.  

Maybe he just wanted to make sure that they were dead before sleeping on them :S

Flash Freeze

The last couple of days have been positively balmy in the greater scheme of Toronto weather - temperatures of +2 or +3 degrees, and all of the snow was melted away.

Not the ice though - the edge of the lake is a maze of ice chunks and the smaller ponds are all hard frozen and don't seem to be melting.

My phone sent me a warning yesterday afternoon about a coming "Flash Freeze", stating that a cold wind was on its way which would suddenly drop the temperatures right down and bring snow.  (The same weather system that caused the roof of the Minnesota Metrodome to collapse, apparently.)  Being used to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology warnings which are either too late or don't actually happen, I ignored this.

By the time Stephen took Jax out to pee at 11pm, it was -8 and everything had turned to ice, making the paths incredibly slippery.  And at 3am, the wind was at 50km/h, blowing snow against our windows and things around on neighbours' balconies.  They've had one of those moving platforms setup around the outside of the building to allow workers to clean the outside of the building, and we also discovered at 3am that the ropes for that are currently outside out bedroom window - the banging was so loud that we dragged our mattress into the second bedroom to see if that would improve things (it didn't).  So we didn't get much sleep.

So much for being a supposedly scaredy-dog, Jax slept fine.

I woke up this morning to this:

That's our bedroom window - condensation from our breathing has turned into a sheet of ice over it.

And this:

The top temperature is the actual temperature, and the bottom temperature is the "feels like" temperature including windchill.  -23?!  Argh!  There's snow on the ground too.

I guess the moose says it all.

Into the routine...

We've been unemployed for over 3 months now, and to be honest I'm not sure how I ever managed to get everything done while working 40+ hours a week.  Ah, the life of an unemployed bum.  I'm up to week 4 of my uni work, and getting into it slowly.  3 subjects is hard work when there are no time-locked sessions such as lectures to force you to keep up to date.  I'm trying to get it down to 1 subject a day, but that's proving difficult with the amount of reading that's required for each subject.

Jax hasn't really changed our routine all that much.  We take him for a long walk in the morning which takes about an hour - sometimes we walk to the gym where Stephen looks after him while I go to use the elliptical trainer, sometimes just around the park.

He's mostly well-behaved - extra well-behaved when he thinks someone is going to take him for a walk.  Overall he's a pretty good dog - he walks well on the leash most of the time, he is well trained in the basic commands, and he likes a good game of chase or fetch the ball or stick.  He's pretty smart as well - earlier today he wanted to play while we were working so he was bringing us the tennis ball and dropping it in our laps - we told him no and he went away and sat down.  An hour later Stephen said "come here Jax" and he looked at Stephen, walked over to the other side of the room, grabbed the tennis ball and dropped it on the ground at Stephen's feet, as if to say "now will you play?"  It was pretty funny.

Somewhat dishearteningly, the two behaviours we really didn't want in a dog are two of the behaviours that he's displaying at the moment - he's being a little aggressive towards other dogs, and he's barking and howling whenever someone walks past our door or when we leave the house, which is really not good in an apartment block.  We're doing our best to train him during daylight hours right now while most people should be at work, but how do you train a dog not to howl when you're not there?

After the walk, I study and Stephen codes, with intermittent breaks for WoW or Dollhouse.  There are sometimes trips to the shops, the laundry and the post office, and that's about it.  What an exciting life!

Monday night was the midnight launch of the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion, and our new guild was headed out to the official Canadian launch party (which was one of only two in North America).  We took Jax with us as we were worried about leaving him at home after only one day with us (he even managed the subway with only a few whimpers).  Despite it supposedly being an official Blizzard launch party, we arrived at 8:30pm to find a bunch of people standing around on a footpath in the snow, and that was about it - no crowds, nothing official.  The temperature was -8 and windchill brought it down to -12, and they were queuing outside for 4 hours?!  We were wearing everything we owned - I was wearing two t-shirts, a jumper and a ski jacket, plus stockings, jeans, socks, winter boots, gloves, a scarf and a toque (the Canadian name for a beanie).  The lack of organisation and the weather meant that we lasted around an hour before heading home.  I don't know how people waited around until midnight in that sort of weather.

Wednesday I was opening the front door to collect a parcel and I caught the door on my big toenail, ripping it most of the way off - ouch.  I haven't been able to walk very far since, and I didn't get much sleep the first night - it's amazing how painful a stupid toenail can be.  The only benefit is that when the temperature dropped to -13 (-18 with windchill) the next day, Stephen had to take Jax for his walk and I got to stay at home in the warmth :)

On one of our walks (pre-toenail) we took Jax to the zoo in High Park to see how he'd react.  Surprisingly he was ok with it, and we thought we'd take a couple of photos while we were there (only on my phone camera though).

This guy (highland cow) was standing in his feedtrough for some reason, blocking the other cows from getting to it.  Jerk!

The emu didn't seem to mind the snow.  Jax was a bit scared of him though.

The wallaby was scared of Jax and wouldn't come any closer - he didn't seem too perturbed by the snow either though, which was surprising.  I didn't think wallabies would like snow.  Poor guy.

With the drop in temperature, the local ice rinks are open!  Apparently this one is a tennis court in summer and an ice rink in winter, which is a pretty cool idea.  They're all managed by the City of Toronto and free to use, which is pretty cool as well.  We see the zamboni out every morning maintaining it too :)

Jax's first night, and real snow!

I think we should call him Jax, Harbinger of Snow, because this morning we woke up to this:

Wow!  I thought that noise was a bin truck going past, but I'm guessing it was the snow ploughs :)  Time to use my new boots!

Jax's first night was alright I think - he was a little whiny all evening and he likes to sit very close to people.  When it was time for us to go to sleep, we got ready for bed, got him to go into his crate, and then went into our room and closed the door.  Unfortunately he cried, whined, and occasionally howled and barked for an hour before going to sleep.  We didn't get up, but we were very close to it.  It's a bit worrying - we're in an apartment block and we don't want to cause problems with the neighbours.  He did the same thing at 6:30am when he woke up - we waited until he'd quieted down to go out to him.  Hopefully he's just nervous and needs to get into a routine.

Last night when we went to bed everything looked normal.  This morning, everything is covered in white.  It's amazing how fast the change was - the lake effect, I guess.

Just to prove that we won't lose him in the snow :)

The smaller pond in the park was frozen over.

So much snow!

It's still snowing, hours later.  I think winter has officially started! :)

Welcome to the family Jax/Knut!

We've just come back from a Toronto Shiba Inu Group meet-up where we adopted our new dog :)  He's a 4 year old cream Shiba Inu, which is a Japanese breed of dog.  He was given up to the local Shiba Inu Rescue organisation when his owners had kids and didn't have any time to spend with him anymore.  He's a bit overweight at the moment - a lot of sitting around and eating and no exercise - but we'll be fixing that quick smart!

His name is currently Jax, but we're hoping that we can change it to Knut (like the polar bear).  Apparently the name Jax came from a soap opera, so you can see why we're not too keen on it.

As you can see, his coat is mostly white with a bit of red in it.  

He's a bit nervous at the moment, but hopefully he'll get sorted pretty quickly.  Someone has put a lot of time and effort into training him - he's really good on the leash and the minute you correct something he learns fast, so hopefully we can take advantage of all of that hard work.  We're being pretty strict with him at the moment - we've been reading about how we make sure that he sees us as the pack leaders so that he behaves, so I'm making sure that he does what we say when we say it.  We can ease up a little once he realises who's boss :)

I think tomorrow will be a bit of a shock for him - he's coming to the gym with me, so that's a 5.2km round trip walk first thing in the morning after no walks in at least a year.  The rescue organiser said "an exhausted dog is a good dog", so here's to exhaustion :)

First real snow, and our present to us

This morning we woke up to this:

Snow!  Finally!  We of course ran outside to check it out :)

The squirrels were still out despite the sub-zero weather.

It really looks like winter now.

It was a little chilly, but not as cold as we would have thought - I swear it's felt much colder when it was supposedly 6 or 7 degrees.

The annoying part was that we walked home, and half an hour later it was all gone - melted.  This wasn't really what I was expecting!  In my mind, the snow was supposed to start and then it would be on the ground until February and snowing every day.  In reality, we've been waiting since the end of October for it to start and now we get one little snowfall and it all disappears within an hour!  I'm starting to think we should have moved to Calgary instead :P

America is having their "Black Friday" sales (the day after Thanksgiving - the same as Aussie Boxing Day sales), and they spill over to Canada, with a lot of places having the sales all weekend despite it not being a holiday here.  We decided that despite the agreement not to buy a TV until Stephen got a job, this was a good time to buy a TV :P

We're not that fussed on having the best TV out there - we just wanted something that we could watch the Apple TV on.  They don't seem to make small TVs anymore - for some reason the 40in TVs were all cheaper than the 32in ones, so we've ended up with this giant monster TV which looks absolutely gigantic compared to what we're used to.  For people who care, it's a Samsung 40in LCD with full HD, and it cost $700 including tax.  Not too bad!

Here it is in all its glory - so much to catch up on!  We will have to check out the Canadian iTunes Store to see whether it's worth having a third account.  I guess this purchase means that we now officially have nothing left to buy!

Tourism and Thanksgiving in NYC

Another day in NYC and it was time for what I was most looking forward to:  visiting the Statue of Liberty.  Excited, we lined up in a queue in the freezing cold to catch the boat across.

The Merchant Navy had a memorial statue on the pier which was a bit jarring - I imagine it's worse at high tide.

As an aside, our entire trip to the US was a nightmare of security - luckily we didn't get asked to go through the backscatter machines at the airport or there would have been a scene.  As it was, taking your shoes, belt and coat off every time you go through a machine as well as taking your laptop out was just ridiculous and turned the entire security process into a three-ring-circus of undressing and redressing yourself on cue.  Land of the free?  More like the Land-where-you're-treated-like-a-criminal-at-every-turn-but-you-have-no-right-to-object.  After going through the security to get onto the boat to Liberty Island, I saw the following quote on the wall:  "Where liberty is, there is my country." - Benjamin Franklin.  Oh the irony.

Security circus over, we caught the boat over to the island.  I was actually quite disappointed by the statue itself - it was much smaller than I thought it was.

The view from the island back to the city was saddening considering the difference between what we saw and the obviously pre-9/11 photo on the tourist board.  The Twin Towers looked impressive in the photos, and I wish I could have seen them in person.

We wandered around looking for the NYC Flatiron Building (they have one in Toronto too), and spent around 5 minutes trying to work out if we were looking at the right building or the book was wrong - until we realised that we were looking at the wrong side.  From this angle, it's much more obvious :)

The next day was American Thanksgiving.  We got up early to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade - it started at 9am, and we turned up at 8am to find a sea of people.

Giant balloons!  The good balloon handlers could make the balloons wave at the crowd!

The entire parade was very stereotypically American - marching bands, cheerleaders and flag-wavers, and the balloons were obvious marketing ploys by any company that could sell to children.

It wouldn't be New York City without Spiderman!

Santa finally arrived to finish the parade - by which time we were freezing cold and happy to run back to our warm hotel room before heading out again for a delicious Thanksgiving Lunch of turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potato and mashed sweet potato and beans... with some apple pie for dessert of course.

On our last day we headed to the American Museum of Natural History in the few hours we had before heading to the airport.  The dinosaurs were pretty cool!

The dinosaur makes even Stephen look small!  

And with that it was time to hop back on the plane.  I was actually pretty disappointed with New York to tell the truth - perhaps it was that everyone had built it up to be a magical playground of awesomeness, but nothing really seemed as shiny as it was made out to be.  That said, Stephen liked it and is keen to go back.  

We arrived back in Toronto to -1 with an apparent temperature of -8, and some snow flurries - lucky we bought those warm coats in NYC!  I was very jealous to hear that they've had an absolute dump on the west coast (damn you Liz!) while we're still hanging out for something that will stick the ground.  Hopefully we'll get it soon!

New York, New York

We decided to take advantage of our lack of employment to spend five days checking out New York City.  The flights were cheap - $300 each return despite it being over Thanksgiving weekend.  We were amazed when we turned up at Pearson International to discover that our plane was a tiny little thing - 3 seats per row.  Nevertheless, we arrived safely after less than an hour in the air, and headed into our midtown Manhattan hotel by subway.

We brought the hotel address, but Eleventh Ave was a long street, our map had no numbers, and we'd forgotten to bring the cross-street.  It wasn't until we'd walked a long way that we realised that the hotel named "Ink48" was on the corner of 48th street.  Duh!

New York hasn't been quite as I was expecting - I had in mind this sort of Coruscant-like area of tall buildings from horizon to horizon, and it's not like that at all.  There are plenty of smaller apartment blocks and shops - there's even a Toyota dealership next to our hotel.  It was a little disappointing!  The centre of the city does look just like the movies though.

We hit up Central Park in the afternoon.  It's huge - we spent hours walking around and still only made it to halfway up.

The park was full of beautiful little paths meandering through woods and lawns.

The autumn colours were out in force - it's quite a few degrees warmer in New York than in Toronto.

In the evening we went up to the top of the Rockefeller Center (Top of the Rock) to check out the city lights - it was beautiful if a little scary being so high and with the knowledge of what happened to previous tall New York buildings.

The next day we headed to see the USS Intrepid - an aircraft carrier from the Second World War that's been turned into a museum.  It wasn't bad (although I wouldn't recommend the audio tour) - I was a little disappointed that you could only see three decks of the ship rather than the full complement of them.

On the lower decks we saw the mess and some of the crew living quarters - sleeping right next to someone with someone else's feet in your face would be pretty rough.

The flight deck was covered in planes, including this Harrier.  The Harrier has the ability to take off and land vertically, but for planes that don't, they described how it works - the runway on a carrier is very short, so the planes are launched by using power from the engine to basically slingshot them off the edge of the ship.  And when they land, they hang an "arrestor hook" from the back of the plane - basically a hook that catches wires that stretch across the deck - and when the hook catches, the plane stops.  It's some very cool engineering.

The Intrepid was involved in picking up some of the returning astronaut capsules from the initial earth orbit missions - they had a replica, and Stephen decided to play astronaut.  

In the afternoon we hit up Macy's for some hardcore shopping - clothes are incredibly cheap here, and that's not even waiting for the Black Friday sales.  I picked up two pairs of label jeans, a winter coat and a jumper for around $210.  That would buy me a pair of jeans and lunch in Australia.

Our feet are sore and we're pretty exhausted - it's a pretty big place to walk around.  Tomorrow, the plan is to take a visit to the Statue of Liberty and perhaps the Museum of Natural History, before Thanksgiving on Thursday.

Arrival of the boxes!

We didn't want to take much with us to Canada from Australia -  mainly our bikes due to the cost of replacing them.  It was cheap to send a couple of boxes with it, so we decided on two boxes and the two bikes.  With the benefit of hindsight, we did it in the wrong order - our boxes for Canada were taken away before we'd packed anything in the rest of the house.  The boxes also had lots of extra space as they were twice as big as we were expecting, so we filled it up with whatever we found at the time - unfortunately, we discovered once they'd gone and we packed up the rest of the house that there were a lot of other things that we should have packed instead (such as my uni textbooks and sleeping bag).

We posted them on the 30th of August, and they were delivered today - so 12 weeks time in transit.  Once the boxes made it Canada, there were surprisingly few difficulties - we were emailed some papers, and we needed to personally visit Canadian Customs with those papers plus one that was stamped when we entered the country.  We were expecting a few hours of messing around and being sent from government department to government department, but amazingly, we spoke to one person and it took 10 minutes to get the stamp we needed.  After that, it was just a matter of faxing the paper with the stamp to the delivery company, and two days later they were delivered!  And there was much rejoicing!

Two boxes...

... and two bikes!

The best part about getting boxes that you packed 3 months ago is that you have absolutely no idea what's in them - it's like Christmas, finding things that you had no idea you'd packed!

In an awesome coincidence, the boxes were delivered 20 minutes before we left to see the new Harry Potter movie, so I got to wear my Ravenclaw scarf to the movie! :D

In other news - on Tuesday we decided on the spur of the moment to take advantage of our unemployed state in our new location and booked a trip to New York next week.  So on Monday morning we'll be in New York City :)  We didn't realise when we booked it, but Thursday is American Thanksgiving, so we'll even be in New York for the big Thanksgiving Day Parade!  If anyone has any suggestions about what to do in NYC, let us know - we're currently compiling a list :)