Coincidences

You know how I mentioned in my New York post that we'd been sitting next to a writer who'd just written a book about menopause and I'd google her?   Well I didn't actually find out who she was.  But, I bought a new book today:  The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein.  And when I got home and opened it up, I saw that the author was the man sitting next to us on the flight from Philadelphia to New York, who chatted with us as we waited to deplane, and who was the original source of my perception that there were a huge number of very good looking people in New York.  This is him:  http://www.garthstein.com/bio.php.

The book is great so far, but it will be quite a weepy, based on the first page.

It's a very grey and rainy day here in Vancouver today.  We went out for brunch to Reynold's house (no haggis was served), which was lovely.  I had an interesting coincidence involving Reynold when I was last in Vancouver in 1999 (Reynold commented how it was all of 11 years ago but seemed like so recently.  I reminded him it was actually 21 years).  Anyway, I was on a bus with my friend Sonja, heading from the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel where we were staying, to downtown, with my backpack that had an Australian flag on it, and my name and address.  A man sitting behind me on the bus tapped me on the shoulder and asked was I Bea, were my parents C & J, who used to live in Vancouver?  I was a little shocked but confirmed all of that, and it emerged that he was Reynold, a friend of theirs who had given me a teddy bear that I had in Australia until I was about 12, when I think it passed away.  The odds of that happening randomly must be pretty small (the chance meeting on the bus when I was only in Vancouver for a week, not the teddy bear bit).

We had a lovely brunch, and a lovely chat, and got some great insider advice about Vancouver.  Then we wandered up to Broadway in the rain, and got Angus some sports shoes (ie runners, sneakers, tennis shoes etc) for his Spring Break Multisports Program at UBC which is on for all of next week (9 - 5 each day!!  Yee Hah!  Er I mean, I'm sure he'll really enjoy mixing with other kids for a bit).   We also went to a shop called Kids Books, which is the best kids book shop I've seen, and bought us a book each (mine is the Garth Stein one).

Pictured above:  Broadway, view down Granville Street towards downtown, on a very cold cloudy snowy rainy day.  Mountain are covered by cloud.  When the cloud lifts, you can see the snow and ski runs.  Spring blossom on some trees visible.

Our street, 3rd Ave at Alma, pictured as well.

 I'm having a nice glass of BC chardonnay and some olives and cheese from Granville Island markets.  Angus is reading in the bath.  It's nearly dark, and only about 5 pm).   I think we'll have Organic Louisiana Corn Chowder for dinner, with bread from the nearby Aphrodite bakery.  The weather put paid to yesterday's plan for today that we would have fish and chips from Go Fish near Granville Island, which had a line up a mile long when we walked past yesterday.