Nothing is Certain but Death and…?

It’s a bit of a boring one this week – the major activity for last weekend was filing our taxes. Everyone in Canada has to submit a tax return, even if your employer has been paying your taxes for you. It’s basically impossible to fill in the incomprehensible forms by yourself, but various companies have made online tools to make it easier. Ours was extra complicated as we have to pay tax on the rental income from our house in the UK and declare our UK income from the start of 2020 (the Canadian tax year starts in January). Luckily Rosie loves a spreadsheet and we have three masters degrees between us, so we got there eventually!

We did also manage a non-rainy walk to Jug Island beach. It reminded us of our months spent on Gabriola Island, but not quite as good and with way more people. We usually had the beach to ourselves on Gabriola.

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Life is continuing much the same since we’ve been living in the city. There is probably a few weeks left in the ski season, so Ollie is making the most of it. The weather has been good so far this week, the pictures below were taken a few hours before posting this.

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Tomorrow we have an early start planned. We’re determined to walk up Dog Mountain in Mt Seymour Provincial Park, but it’s very popular and the car park is always full. We’re hoping a 6am start should do it. In the afternoon we’re going to catch the SkyTrain a few stops to Port Moody for a shore-line walk followed by a brewery crawl. Even though we are allowed to go out to bars and restaurants, we aren’t allowed to mix with people outside of our households… so it’s not as exciting as it sounds.

We are jealous of the UK’s vaccination programme. Our province in Canada has just started taking bookings for ages 85+, so still some time until we get ours. You’ll all be back at the pub way before us.

To help you orientate yourself, here is map of the locations features in this week’s blog: