Garden Spiderlings

This afternoon the sun glinted on a tangle of fresh spiderwebs on my fencepost and on closer inspection I found a freshly hatched group of English Garden Spiders (Araneus diadematus). These spiders are one of the most common "orb weavers" and the adults are usually brown in colour. Read more at Nick's Spiders.

randomness in carnival form

Today, Hubby quit his job. (It's OK, there is a full Plan B in play.) He gave two weeks notice so his last day will be the 20th of May. How was I to know this would lead to mysterious carnivals being tossed in our path?

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This afternoon, since both of us were still officially on vacation, we decided to hit the road and head for Nanaimo. We wandered through Value Village (I got a new dress, a skirt and a pair of coulottes for Summer), then Jysk at the Country Club Mall. After that was dinner at Boston Pizza so the kid could have spaghetti as requested. On our way to dinner, both hubby and I noticed a carnival at the Rutherford Mall. Luckily the kid was otherwise distracted so we actually got through dinner before offering her the option to attend. Once it was offered, she was very excited...

At the carnival she managed to go on five rides (two with her Daddy, including the Tilt-A-Whirl®) and wasn't ready to leave until she got a big "balloon" (inflatable) hammer.

We headed back to Victoria but decided to stop in Duncan for gas and groceries. In the check-out we ended up buying a DVD on impulse -- four "classic" horror films for $4.99 -- but I think it was in the cards because one of the four is Carnival of Souls.

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Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day so you can guess where I'll be for at least a while.

Home Improvements

Wednesday we got up early and started the "Clean Sweep" attack on the office. About 12 hours later, we pretty much had it done. (We did go out briefly to get some storage containers and a new router with a firewall and both wired and wireless connections. As a result I am blogging from bed.)

Today was garden day -- well, it was garden day for me; hubby was doing battle with the new router ... which turned out to be a problem with our downstairs hub. (Once the hub was replaced, the offending peice of equipment was rudely dropped, dragged, kicked and thrown about until it splintered.) So anyway... the garden. I decided it was way past to get my summer veggies planted. We'll see whether anything sprouts or not. First I had to weed. Then top up some of my containers and my raised bed. I popped out to Capital Iron to buy some strawberry plants and some tomato seedlings (Roma and a cherry variety) and some new mesclun mix and spinach seeds plus I bought a new hose and sprayer (since ours actually got damaged in the week of snow we had earlier this year). Did you know that what looks like one strawberry plant is actually ten? I didn't. So now I have a LOT of strawberry plants (20) and the instructions inside the packaging assured me that they will fill in. Yikes! Good thing we all like strawberries around here. By the time all was done, I had planted mesclun mix, spinach, tomatoes, raddishes, dill, carrots, summer squash, corn, and said strawberries. The kid also planted her own carrots and some sunflowers.

Before I was done on the deck though, I deconstructed some college-style pine ladder shelving which had been sitting outside far too long. Quite by accident, I found that the shelves made a nice "boardwalk" over a muddy patch, so I just took apart the rotting ladders. It looks much better out there... I figure we are half done the deck now, but the rest will have to wait until our next combined vacation (or at least an un-booked weekend -- almost as rare).

Science World Overload

Monday morning we had breakfast in the hotel restaurant and then headed for Science World. Whee! The place is cool -- pricey (if we lived closer, I'd get an annual pass and squeeze some value out of it) but it is stuffed with fun things. Big bonus while we were there was a travelling LEGO exhibit! Long story short, the kid did not want to leave. She started whining, crying, and refusing to do what we asked. Since we had been there nearly 3 hours, and it was past lunchtime, we did leave. We headed for Granville Island with her screeching a good portion of the short ride.

After a meal in the Granville Island Market (sushi for hubby, greek for me, pizza for the kid), we tried to have a leisurely wander through some of the boutique stores but the kid started complaining about being tired, and not "able" to walk. And crying again. So we abruptly curtailed our visit and bundled her into the van. As we were trying to navigate through the many twists and turns in the area in a way that would get us to a mall where we could buy a new cooler, I looked back and thought the kid was just tired, her eyes were drooping and she looked like she was going to fall asleep at any minute. Then she threw up.

We found a suitable side street and pulled off to clean up the worst of it. Since we had spare clothes for her in the van we decided she wouldn't miss those she was wearing. She fell asleep after the cleanup. About twenty minutes of late afternoon traffic later, we arrived at Oakridge Centre and decided to wake the kid to go inside. We ended up spending almost two hours in the mall and came out with some healthy food for dinner from Safeway, some fancy Body Shop soap for the kid's bathtime, and the aforementioned cooler to transport all our produce booty back home. For her part, after a good barf and a micro-nap, the kid seemed much improved both for that evening, and since.

Tuesday morning we packed up our belongings, checked out of the hotel, had breakfast and wandered through IKEA. Biggest disappointment? No more "ball room" for the kid (instead it is a supervised play area for one hour). Biggest unexpected bonus? Scouting a dented desktop in the AsIs area then adding some legs to get hubby a new desk with a tower rack for under $50. After that it was a straight line to the ferry and back to the Island.

Vacation - Richmond!

One of the big reasons for coming over to Vancouver was to head for Yaohan Centre -- a mall which includes the Osaka Supermarket -- a place the size of the average Safeway but carries the foods you would normally have to gather from several crowded stores along Fisgard in Victoria plus a lot of items you just can't find in Victoria. Needless to say we spent over $100 there. I also happily purchased a VCD of A Chinese Ghost Story (with subtitles) for $4.99 from a kiosk in the mall.

On our way to Yaohan, we passed another mall, Aberdeen, which is new enough (recently rebuilt in 2003) that it's neither full nor finished. We came back after Yaohan to investigate Aberdeen. In one corner of that mall there is a store called Daiso which is a GIANT (two-floor) store where every item is $2. Here's the scoop from HRDC Canada:

The mall’s anchor tenant is Daiso, the ‘Wal-Mart of Japan’, a two storey, 26,900 sq.ft. outlet with 24,000 items each sold for $2, including cosmetics, gardening tools, household goods, storage boxes, snack food and stationery. It is the first North American location for Daiso, which in Asia opens between one and two new stores per day. Since its December 12th opening, the Richmond store has broken all the company’s previous sales records. Daiso Richmond will employ approximately 150 people.

Daiso also had two aisles of "massage tools" which gave hubby and me the giggle-fits, as we discussed which ones were "beginners" and which were "advanced."

The food fairs in both malls are totally Asian -- not a french fry in sight -- and while the kid happily munched through noodles, she asked for milk to drink which proved to be an impossible task. Bonus: the servings were so big that we brought our lunch back to the hotel and had leftovers for dinner.