And you thought Sears was boring...

Today, I took the second major leap toward submitting my capstone to the library, meaning that the capstone is dead, buried, and hopefully donating it's guts to other needy projects and research papers!

But that pales in comparison to the hijinx I was a party to this afternoon!

This afternoon, in an effort to prove to my mum that she's just as important as everything else in the remaining days I have left in Vancouver, I arranged to go out to see her and take her shopping for bathing suits and bras (incidentally, the most hated and second most hated items women shop for...no joke, studies have been conducted, and I learned about it when I worked at a swimwear store). We drove out to Willowbrook mall in Langley because mummy likes the Sears there for both items, and we wasted no time getting her into a room and some suits.

Well, partway through this operation, I noticed this old, sketchy man in the area of the women's bathing suits/fitting rooms, and I thought, "geez, keep an eye on that one..." Well, around that time, mummy foolishly abandoned her room to look for more suits, and just as I was about to shoo her back into the room, I looked up and saw the bastard coming out of her change room, holding a cell phone, which I first thought was hers. He started babbling to her about a phone call, and started to slip past us, and I told mum to check her purse for her wallet, as I watched him disappear around the corner into the stock room door. She told me it was missing, and I instantly ran to the stock room to track the bastard down. I kept an eye on the door as I went to the cashier desk about 15 feet away and reported it, and the lady got on the phone and called store security. I went back to watching the door, and was approached by a young man in street clothes, who was the loss prevention officer for the store (cute guy!), and filled him in.

He told me that the stock room had two entrances, and told me to stay at the one I was at, while he went in from the other entrance to see if the bastard was still in there. I was impatient, but eventually I heard men's voices, and the security guy and another staff man pulled the bastard out, lying and denying like crazy. They couldn't search him, but they could ask him to empty his pockets and such, which he did, arguing the whole time that he was looking for the bathroom, first in the fitting rooms, then in the stock room, and then he said he was following another guy in there...at this point, I must interject...I might sound stupid from time to time, but no one would ever make the mistake of believing me to actually *be* stupid. Fucking liar.

The manager went back to where he found the guy and found the wallet stashed, mostly intact, but for $100 USD that my mum had in her wallet, which was missing. At this point, it was time to bring the cops in. And the entire time, this guy is asking to go to the bathroom...no shit, Sherlock! You don't want the RCMP to catch you with the stolen money on you! We were sent to wait, and in that time, he was taken to the bathroom, where there is no doubt that the money was flushed along with whatever crack-laden piss he managed to force through his urethra. Bastard. So when the RCMP did show up, the money was gone, and there was nothing to be done, but escort him from the store and ban his dumb ass. Well, he's an idiot, and he came right back in, because he left his FUCKING CRACK PIPE in the lockdown room where he was being held. Are you fucking retarded?? Yes.

The store oh-so-generously gave me and my mother one $10 gift card each (what the fuck am I gonna do with a $10 Sears giftcard??) to encourage our (her) continued business. In the chaos of everything, my mum noticed she forgot to take off the swimsuit bottoms she was wearing when it all happened, and we ended up continuing the shopping excursion (at which point I saw the stupid fucker re-enter the store after his ejection).

The fucker walked, my folks are out $100 USD, and I get to say that I saved my mum the heartbreaking task of reporting a missing wallet.

PS- I gave my mum my $10 gift card...seriously, what the fuck would I do with $10 at a store I never go to?

Well, that was easy!

So that was the shortest, most succinct hunt ever. I found a place on the website for a professional management company, made the appointment to view, viewed, and took the apartment all within a matter of 4 hours!

It was quite fortuitous actually; I've been on that site before to scout out other apartments, and this place never came up before. Well, as it turns out, a young family is being transferred part way through their lease, and even though the company doesn't usually put lease-transfers on their website, this time, the manager did, and it worked out perfectly! The place has wood floors, a dishwasher (yay!), and it's in a perfect location to be at the heart of it all. It is a basement suite, which I swore I'd never do again, but the basement is actually not deep, and my windows are huge, so it's very bright and airy, and it gets southern exposure, so I'll have the sun warming the place considerably...which in the summer means I need to buy an apartment air conditioner unit. The cats will love the window ledges and watching various critters run around outside.

And of course the best part is that I'm taking over the remainder of the lease from the previous tenants, so for that time period, my rent is actually decently low, giving me time to have saving and earn more.

All things considered, I didn't feel I needed to see any more places. There had been a building just a block away from Etienne's place here that I was interested in too, but it was a bachelor suite, and I've been concerned about having two cats who don't particularly care for each other in such a small place, with no chance to get out of each other's face. So yay! I'm by Elgin, the Canal, close to work and the mall, and the market, and it will make me look forward to living in Ottawa a little more.

Now the focus changes to wrapping up things in Vancouver...and as of now, I have very little time to do that!