Lunar Bovine - Jason Cobill’s Weblog

Our stuff arrived this morning - we were up at 6am to go meet the movers and get things prepared for unloading, and then spent the rest of the day rediscovering (like Christmas!) all the fantastic stuff we own as we opened boxes and tried to find places for everything. There was a lot of progress in one day - most of our things are at least in the right room, but a lot of it needs to be organized and sorted.

Sorry about the lack of pictures and posts - I haven’t been carrying my camera with all of the heavy lifting going on, and we still don’t have phone or internet in our apartment for another few days yet. (It takes how long for Bell’s computers to configure my phone line? I can’t believe that it’s taking upwards of 3 days to change a database record.)

We went to Ikea this evening after unpacking and took a look at their couches - they look way better in the catalogs. The ones in the store were really abused and shoddy looking. We did find some awesome new kitchen drawer handles, though. And now I have a desperate craving for an Expedit bookshelf.

I’m hoping to see people this weekend - I’ve had to miss a couple of opportunities already in order to make appointments regarding the apartment, and I think we’re finally going to have some free time over the next few days.

A fuller post is coming once I have a chance to decompress, but we drove 856km today to get into Ottawa just before dusk. It was another beautiful (but long) day of driving! I really enjoyed the freeway through Sudbury, and the 17 east of North Bay. There’s really nothing out there except beautiful endless forests and lakes and rocks. Almost the entire trip was on new, well-maintained roads.

I’m happy to be in Ottawa, but it feels really strange. Driving my car through the streets of Aylmer this evening felt like someone had juxtaposed two pictures from my life - really weird. And yet here I am.

Off to see the apartment we rented for the first time tomorrow - I hope it’s awesome.

Today the weather completely improved over yesterday - we had fantastic blue skies the entire trip from Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie. I felt for most of the trip like I was in a car commercial - shiny black car running along the mountain roads into the sunrise.

Northern Ontario is gorgeous, but a couple of challenging spots in the topography (lots of up and down and twisty roads) got tiring, if only because my station wagon is packed solid with baggage and  only has a 4 cylinder engine. Lake Superior Provincial Park was especially like driving through a picture postcard. (A very lumpy picture postcard with lots of crazy hills.)

Not too many obnoxious tailgating logging trucks this time, either. Yay! I hope tomorrow’s as smooth - we might make it all the way to Ottawa if we get off early enough and get good weather. 1411km down, 792km to go!

The View from the Wawa Lookout

We’re in Thunder Bay, safe and sound, despite a harrowing after-dark drive through a torrential downpour an hour outside of our destination… it was a pretty low point in my decision-making history and left us both a little frazzled, so we’re spending an extra day here just to get some proper sleep and recover.

We got out of Winnipeg a little later than planned, and right out of the gate we hit bad weather (The remnants of the hurricane). Despite our efforts to make up time on the dry stretches, it seemed like every time we started catching up we’d end up getting caught in another rainstorm or stuck in construction. As dusk approached we decided we’d gun it for Thunder Bay, but because it was so cloudy it was pitch black at almost 7:00pm, an hour earlier than expected.

We were cruising toward the finish line in the dark when -another- torrential rainstorm dropped on us, and through the mess a logging truck nearly drove us off the road. We decided it was getting so stupid that we pulled over in a snowplow turning area in the middle of nowhere and just slept in the car for two hours while we waited for the rain to pass over and watched the lights of the huge trucks blowing past in the storm - it was a crazy experience that I never want to repeat. We ended up getting into Thunder Bay at 2:30am last night, feeling rotten and desperate to get off the road and into a bed.

Tomorrow the weather’s supposed to be sunny and warm, I can see the clouds opening up already. So we’re planning to leave at sunrise and take advantage of a few extra hours of sunshine, with a better contingency plan in case we get behind again.

So much for being stoked about the Canadian Shield. Rotten poop. I hope the rest of the trip is easier.

Wet Trees and Rocks on the Canadian Shield

Oh! Bonus road story: We pulled over right at the Ontario border (at the top of a huge rise) to grab some snacks out of the back seat, and while we were poking around in the mist and watching an old guy walking his dog, a lightning bolt out of nowhere struck no more than 100 feet away from us - there was a huge flah of light and a CRACKAAAAHHH!!! on the other side of the treeline and we scrambled back into the car and got the heck out of there. Crazy.

Natasha and I are on our way! Our plans are already a little behind schedule because the movers had to come late, but once they showed up everything went really smoothly. It helped that we started packing 2 weeks ago - pretty much everything was boxed up and ready to go. (And we even had a few hours to sleep last night!)

We’ve swept our empty floors and returned our keys… we’re officially unemployed and homeless drifters.

Here’s Natasha and I in the Fortress of Cardboard:

On the outside chance that the Large Hadron Collider tears our universe apart molecule by molecule today, I just wanted to state for the record that I’ve had a pretty good life. If the LHC produces no usable science results, the threat of imminent annihilation should at least give people the world over a reason to put down the guns and rockets and appreciate the subtle joys of existence.

That being said, I’m excited about smashing protons together - what an amazing feat of human ingenuity, that we can probe down to the basest known fundamental components of reality and find out what they’re made of. WOW! I’m enjoying watching the pictures coming out of the LHC control room this morning. Congratulations, particle physicists!

At my family going-away party I convinced Uncle Jim and Ron to pull out their guitars and jam to an impromptu set list of simple 70’s music I’ve learned. It was my first time playing for anyone other than Natasha or my music teacher, so it was a bit of a rush (even just in front of family and friends) when people jumped in with singing and dancing around.

They totally played circles around me, but I managed to hold my own through most of the stuff that I knew. I was pretty proud of myself! I don’t want to sound really narcissistic, but I can’t help but think that this picture makes me look really cool.

As a side note - Uncle Jim and I are playing each other’s guitars in this particular shot, we’d traded off for a few songs so I could try another instrument. I kindof like the look of the black guitar, but love the tone of my own. That’s my baby in the middle, the orange one!

Jay playing guitar with Uncle Jim and Ron

In a quirk of incredibly bad timing, my service provider accidentally blew up my blog, again, plunging you all into radio silence while huge important life-changing things happened to me. I could approach all of this stuff as individual posts later, but here’s at least the gist of what’s going on:

I’ve left MTS and am in the process of leaving Manitoba to head back east, with Natasha uprooting herself to come along! I’ve accepted a fantastic new position at Bitheads in Ottawa, doing design for video games and websites. We’re about 95% packed at this point, with the movers coming on the 12th to pick it all up.

We’re hitting the open road the same day to drive across Northern Ontario, which is something I’ve always wanted to do, so we’ve scheduled ourselves a little extra time to do some exploring while we’re out there. We’ll be in Ottawa sometime around the 15th, depending on weather and how many interesting rocks I want to pull over to take a picture of.  (Did you know there’s a giant amethyst mine in Thunder Bay?)

It’s both exciting and sad. The opportunity is fantastic and it makes a lot of sense for us to be in Ottawa as we start planning to have a family (no news there yet - don’t have a heart attack), but I’ve had so many crazy experiences here in Manitoba, and met so many awesome people, that it’s been hard to leave. I’ve really fallen in love with the place, and it’s starting to feel as much like “home” to me as anyplace else. I’ve spent nearly a third of my life here!

Now that my blog’s eaten a bunch of my old entries, I’ll have to figure out some way to reconstruct some of the articles before my memory of Manitoban summers starts to fade. Here comes an Ottawa autumn! We’re so excited to start over in Ontario!