A New Secret Base.

It's been a dark time for the Rebellion, as per the opening narrative crawl for The Empire Strikes Back.  To our complete surprise, a couple of weeks after our 12 month lease came to an end, the property agent announced that the owners of our rental condo had decided to sell, and that we were being evicted.

The next couple of months were a whirlwind of apartment hunting and packing, with our move taking place just four days after we got back from our scheduled Ucluelet vacation.  

We've ended up back in Kitsilano, in a slightly older ground-level unit.  It's not quite as nice as the condo we were pushed out of*, not to mention being a bit storage challenged, but it's a great location with a huge kitchen, and we're getting nicely settled in.

Sadly, the move was almost as much of a comedy act as our last one.  In a strange coincidence, once again our promised three movers was only two for half the move, which added in some time, and they somehow managed to destroy one of my bookshelves to the point where they threw it away and took $50 off the bill.  Unfortunately, they also threw away the shelves from ANOTHER bookshelf, thereby leaving me down by two units.  

This means that the second bedroom is still mostly full of books in boxes, and thanks to the current supply chain issues, stock shortages at IKEA mean that those books are going to stay in those boxes for the foreseeable future, which is something of a nuisance.

Funny, I don't remember them ever talking about having this sort of problem when the Rebellion moved to Hoth...

- Sid

 * Odd how the title crawl for The Empire Strikes Back still works here:  we were driven from our hidden base, so to speak.

 

60: Premium.

On the way back to the ferry from our Ucluelet holiday, Karli requested that we make a stop in the small community of Coombs to visit the Coombs Old Country Market, whose rooftop herd of goats and wide-ranging retail selection make it a perennial tourist favourite.

As we wandered around after visiting the Market (and photographing the goats, I can add a photo if anyone's interested), we stumbled across the Cozy Corner Bookstore, a large used bookstore in the nearby mall area - large enough that, like the Market, it must rely heavily on tourist traffic rather than just the local community.

Unfortunately, as with Raven's Book Shop near Joshua Tree National Park, the Cozy Corner looked like it was losing the fight - boxes stacked in the aisles, books double-stacked on the shelves, and a general feeling of too many books and not enough time.

There's no denying that the Cozy Corner has a comprehensive inventory, but there's also no denying that it's not set up in a fashion that makes it convenient for the casual shopper.  I did manage to find some selections from my shopping list, along with a few new acquisitions, but it involved a lot of book juggling in order to get a look at everything.

My replacement books included a beautiful mint paperback edition of Bug Jack Barron, Norman Spinrad's brilliant 1969 masterpiece - I honestly don't know why Bug Jack Barron isn't better known than it is, it's beautifully written and the story remains topical and relevant 33 years later.*  I also found an excellent copy of Terry Carr's Jandar of Callisto, the first in a series of enthusiastically overwritten pastiches that pay homage to the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars novels, and a good quality version of Pat Cadigan's Synners, a dynamic novel which is generally classified as cyberpunk but really doesn't fit the mould. I've always found it more like a Philip K. Dick novel than anything else, although it's much more accessible than Dick.

Just for fun, I added The Guns of Terra 10, by Don Pendleton, to my stack of books - Pendleton is best known for the 70s Executioner series that "inspired" the Marvel Comics Punisher character. In this case, it wasn't a replacement copy, but rather based on a vague memory of signing it out from the high school library in my early teens. I honestly don't think I've seen a copy since then, and I have a good memory for books.

As I was paying for my books, I mentioned to the proprietor that I had a substantial list of replacement books that I was working on, but I didn't really have the time to take full advantage of his stock.

He gestured to the area behind me and announced, "See those boxes?  They're all SF and fantasy. Come back in a week after we've got them sorted out and shelved." I looked over my shoulder and was astonished to see a wall of Dole Banana boxes, presumably packed with paperbacks rather than fruit. 

With absolutely no offense intended, I couldn't help but think that adding 27 additional boxes of books to the Cozy Corner's stock would only exacerbate the embarrassment of riches that the store is already struggling with. In fact, the whole idea is maybe a little bit (slowly removes sunglasses)...bananas.

- Sid

* Unfortunately so, given the nature of the plot.

60: "One Ring to rule them all, one ring to find them."

Today we decided to go for a hike along the relatively manageable Ucluelet Lighthouse Trail located to the west of the town, and there was this little hiding place under some rocks and tree stumps that seemed terribly, terribly familiar...

- Sid