Fixing furniture woes, a real bed, and a public transport nightmare

Saturday morning we headed out to the furniture sales store to try to fix the too-big-couch-issue.  I was pretty stressed about the whole thing, so Stephen said he'd handle it.  It actually all worked out better than we could have imagined - the guy was apologetic about it not fitting into our apartment and said we should have a look around for something else.  Sadly, there were no more awesome chaise lounges there :(  We settled for a 2-seater couch and a bench ottoman which we can put our feet up on - will have to do for now.  The guy discounted them a bit and they're delivering them for free - in two lots, because the couch is available on Tuesday but the ottoman won't be in until mid November.  So it all worked out fairly well I guess - although I don't get a chaise lounge, which makes me sad :(


Sunday morning we were woken up by a delivery call.  Companies in Toronto so far have been all about automated voice calling systems to let you know when something will be delivered - and they all seem to call at 8:30am, which is a bit rude.  Anyway, our real bed was finally delivered on Sunday morning.

Stephen was very excited.  Sleeping on the air mattress, which seemed to conduct freezing cold air from the cold floor up to our bodies, was getting very old, very fast.  

The finished product - hooray!  


The house feels a lot more home-like now that there's a bed, although I keep forgetting that it's there and tripping over it on the way to the closet.


On Sunday afternoon, we headed out to a local dog group's meet-up - we're looking at adopting a shelter dog, and the shelter suggested we take the opportunity to meet the breed.  Unfortunately for us, the meet-up was 30km away in Missisauga.  

We looked at our public transport maps, and thought it would be fine - take the subway to the end of the line, then take the GO Train (regional train) to the closest station and walk 1km.  Unfortunately, nothing went to plan.  We got off at the end of the subway line to discover that the GO Station next to it was closed on weekends (?!).  We asked someone for help and met our first rude unfriendly Canadian - "it's closed on Sunday" (full stop end of discussion).  


We decided to take a taxi 2 GO Stations down the line to station that was open on weekends - which we managed ok, although the meter goes up much faster in Toronto than in Sydney.  We bought GO Tickets from the machine and went to the platform - and waited, and waited.  Finally we realised from staring at the timetable that there are only about 6 trains a day and only on weekdays between 6am and 9am - the rest of the time it's run on buses.  The next bus wasn't for an hour.  Back to square one.


We found a local bus system map and discovered that a local bus would take us there, if we could get to the route.  We started walking... an hour later, we made it to the route, and discovered that the buses on that route are every hour as well, and the next bus wasn't for 45 minutes.  Missisauga, I stab at thee.  We gave up and found a bus that would take us back to the subway and headed home.  


At least a good thing to come out of the whole mess was that we discovered some of the, er, nuances of the GO system yesterday, when it didn't matter all that much, rather than today when we need to catch it to my job interview which is also held in Missisauga (I think the real estate is cheap out there).  I'm wavering on whether I think the retail sales job is a good idea or not (I'm concerned that we lose a lot of flexibility for it), but I'll see how I go today.