I've been a little bit behind in getting posts up on the web sight. It's been a bit of a crazy month or so, and I will get some other posts up to cover off a couple of small adventures we've had.
The main issue has been that we had to move out of our old place by July 26. We did that, and it was a huge amount of work to move all of our possessions into a storage pod, for the +/- one month temporary storage. Our new place is supposed to be finished on August 31st, so we have a little more that a month where we are officially homeless. For that time, Justine's brother and sister-in-law have graciously allowed to to crash in their basement in North Vancouver. The downside is the commute to work is pretty long; the upside is lots of time spent with our niece and nephew.
The first full week we were here, we had an interesting encounter. The street we are living on ends at a very nice park, that backs onto the north shore wilderness that runs north from Vancouver up towards Squamish and Whistler. As a result, there's lots of wildlife in the area. In this case, we had a very large black bear wander into the yard about 8:00 at night, and totally rip apart the garbage can that we were about to put out for pickup the next morning.
A huge black bear made an unwelcome visit to our front yard.
Justine actually noticed it, out the window of the house. Amazingly enough, the area where the garbage is stored is in the front yard, and is on a fairly busy street. I went out to make sure that people were crossing over as they walked out from the park, and were not going to get an unpleasant surprise.
My experiences with black bears has been that they're generally not all that interested in people, and will scare off pretty easy. Unfortunately, that was not the case with this guy. First off, it was huge - easily the biggest black bear I've ever seen. I leaned out the window of the house and made quite a lot of noise, but he really didn't care, and just went about it's business.
It seems that this bear is a bit of a local, and unfortunately isn't that worried about people. After it was done with it's meal, it wandered off across the road and into the park, and I had the pleasure of cleaning up the mess.
