September was a pretty lousy month, weather-wise, being one of the ten soggiest on record. More positively, the first day of October was sunny and summer-like. It’s partly cloudy today but I may yet get proper closure on summer before The Dark Times (ie. winter) arrive.
I also plan on writing more regularly this month as I gear up for National Novel Writing Month in November, so more inane blog posts shall be on their way. Hooray!
I turned 46 today.
I did nothing of note, as is my usual way on birthdays.
The weather was mild but a mixed bag of sun and showers.
That is all.
Taxi drivers have a fairly bad reputation as drivers.
This post is going to add to that reputation.
This taxi is parked at the Esso station at the corner of Burrard and Davie, across the street from where I was waiting to catch the bus. A few minutes prior to taking this picture, I watched as the taxi driver attempted to defy physics by having his cab occupy the same space as an articulated bus (he was trying to cut ahead of the bus to get into the gas station). This led to the honking of horns and crunching of bumpers as the two vehicles verified the laws of physics still do in fact apply.
Seeing drivers do foolish things is pretty typical. You know the old joke that yellow means drive faster? Now it seems yellow is the new green and red is the new yellow. The mentality appears to be ‘if you don’t actually cause an accident, it’s okay!’
I’ve noticed more cyclists on the sidewalks lately. Given the typical Vancouver driver, I can’t entirely blame them for avoiding the roads. It’s unfortunate that many cyclists also kind of suck. Oh well. At least pedestrians can’t run each other over. Yet.
The new adult store down the way apparently no longer needs a ‘chemist’ as the CHEMIST NEEDED sign is now sitting upside down at the bottom of the window it’s in. Or maybe that’s part of the testing the potential chemist needs to go through, to be able to read upside down text.
On one of the store’s side windows, a new sign has appeared (click to see the full-size version):
Now, I have no problem with some people being size-enabled. As Morrissey once wrote, some girls are bigger than others, some girls’ mothers are bigger than other girls’ mothers but here the shop owner is not only offering large lingerie but extra large. It reminds me of that story about It’s a Small World at Disneyland being closed for months so they could make the canals deeper. This was needed because the weight of passengers over the years had increased enough that the boats would occasionally scrape bottom and get stuck. One can only imagine the madness that would ensue as the boatload of people was forced to endure that song for an extended period of time while waiting for help to arrive. (If you follow the link, you can see Disney denied the changes were made due to passengers getting bigger, to which I offer ‘fat chance’.)
The other sign in the window shows how out of touch I am with the latest in adult toys and things of that nature. The Stallion spray is labeled a ‘male genital desensitizer’. I am unsure why a guy would want to desensitize that particular area of his anatomy. ‘I can’t stand the pleasure anymore! Make it stop!’ As always, I fallback on my standard:
People are weird.
The third and final teaser image for the return of Angry Carrot:
Photo taken on Thursday at 2:13 p.m.
Recently I decided to create a new episode of Angry Carrot, the mad vegetable who wants to take over the world for some reason. I posted a couple of teaser panels to the Martian Cartel forum and reproduce them here.
Teaser 1:
Teaser 2:
More soon™!
This promises to be an interesting month.
Possibly for all the wrong reasons!
I don’t think I am going to reach 31 posts this month.
This animated gif is just plain creepy. (EDIT: So creepy, in fact, that I am not including it as an inline image.)
On Saturday night around 8:30 or so the power went out. A check of the neighborhood showed the lights were on two blocks east, on the other side of Knight, but were out as far west as I could see. I later learned that the outage extended to Cambie Street. The power doesn’t go out often here so it’s always a novel experience. It took a couple of hours to be restored and in the meantime I skulked the darkened streets with a flashlight, talked to a couple of young women at Kingsway and Inverness who had never experienced a blackout (but were soothing their nerves with some glasses of red wine), then sat in the candlelight on the deck with the others until the lights came back on. It was slightly annoying to be so close to the next grid that stood unaffected. Oddly, all of the traffic lights on Knight appear to be on the unaffected grid save for the ones at the major intersection of Knight and Kingsway. Much horn-honking ensued there as people tried to figure out how to navigate without having red lights to peel through.
Two days later, shortly after 10 a.m. the power went out again. Annoying, but it was restored in about an hour this time. The power then went out a third time just past 6 p.m. It was restored within 15 or 20 minutes but still, whoever is responsible, stop pulling the plug already! The CBC News website reports that there was actually a fourth outage in a nearby area and the others are blamed on ‘problems’ at an electrical substation. Odder still is usually you think of these things happening in the summer when the grid gets overloaded due to air conditioners and so on but the weather the past few days has been seasonal, not really hot at all.
Am I the only one who starts thinking of end-of-the-world scenarios when the power goes out? There’s something primal about being a big city plunged into utter darkness that gets the mind going. When the aliens arrive, they’ll EMP-and-awe us, no doubt. One minute you’ll be watching Leno, next minute you’ll be slaves of Xantor and the Zerbinians.
I finally got to heading over to the island again for the weekend of August 14-15th (I actually came back on the 16th) and as it happened it was during the annual heatwave, with record-setting high temperatures being set all over the province.
The ferry trip over was mostly pleasant, especially when the father of the family sitting behind me told his young daughter to stop kicking the back of my seat. Thanks, dad! A trip to the sundeck was marred by the presence of (permitted) smokers and a stiff breeze that nearly sent my cap off into the strait. I would have arrived on the island traumatized if that had happened. I really like my green cap.
After meeting mom and the dog, we headed first to Youbou, as it had been several years since I’d seen my sister Carole and her husband Gary. They had new digs on Lake Cowichan and this was my first chance to check them out.
Their house is…big. It has about 20 bathrooms, 15 bedrooms and a kitchen the size of my entire suite. I may be exaggerating a little. But only a little! It took me awhile to figure out where the music was coming from before I realized they had an integrated sound system that piped music into the house, onto the deck and even down to the dock.
We spent a good while sitting in the (relative) cool of the shade on the deck provided by a large umbrella. By this time of the afternoon temperatures were peaking at around 33ºC. We listened to talked o’ the lake, including one centering around a bear that had been seen for a period of several weeks trundling through the properties on this side of the lake. After calling conservation officers about it, the homeowners were informed that two bears had been shot. Poor things. That’ll teach them to wander through no-bears land! Carole pointed to the area just below the deck where the bear had been observed walking westward. A bylaw prevents property owners from landscaping or interfering with the natural growth along the shoreline, so to the bear, it probably just looked like his usual route to wherever it is that bears go.
We next moved down to the dock, which also had a large umbrella. There was a decent breeze coming off the lake and occasionally it would gust very suddenly. Several hats were nearly lost. I had made sure mine was affixed to the top of my head as securely as possible. I don’t swim well, so jumping in the lake after it would probably not have gone well. We then returned inside where preparations were made for a de-luxe dinner of steak, prawns, potatoes, cauliflower and halibut. Mmm. Post-dinner found Gary and me watching a National Geographic program which featured, among other animals, bears, much like the ones that had been shot here. Carole and mom headed outside to check the gardens. Carole pulled a few weeds and threw them down toward the shore. As she did this, the bush the weeds fell on moved. Gary looked to me as she began yelling. “Did she say ‘bear’?” he asked. More yelling followed. My mom was racing up the side of the house and around to the front, to a door that Gary had locked earlier. Much pounding on the door ensued. When all were safely inside, we stepped out onto the deck to see a black bear meandering along the exact same path as the others that had supposedly been shot. “A flesh wound, perhaps,” I suggested. I only managed one somewhat obscured photo but here is a cropped close-up where you can clearly see a bear-like shape in amongst the bushes. You can see the full-size image in the gallery.
After the bear excitement we headed back to Duncan to enjoy the sweltering heat of a mobile home that did not have its air conditioning turned on.
The next day was highlighted by a trip to Barry and Brenda’s for dinner (fresh salmon, potatoes and corn, mmm). The only notable wild presence there were a few persistent bees and one deer that walked up through the vacant lot between their house and the next. Apparently all it took to keep them from coming in and devouring all of their backyard gardens was the construction of a $4,000 fence. Easy!
After dinner I asked for some paper and a pen to record a few thoughts, as I was without my usual notebook. Naturally, this resulted in an inquiry as to what I was writing. I jotted down some details about a rather pampered young man who had been helping Barry with the drywalling. At the age of 18 he still did not know how to tie shoe laces — because he always wore shoes with Velcro. This is more proof of how technology is making us dumber and how Douglas Adams’ future vision of a world run by hairdressers is getting closer to reality. Hairdressers with Velcro shoes.
The other thing I wrote down was something I had quickly dubbed ‘Duncan Interruptus’ though to be fair I don’t think it’s a phenomenon exclusive to Duncan but more just small towns in general. It goes like this: In Vancouver, when there is a conversation taking place, things proceed about how you’d expect. Someone says something, then someone else comments. The conversation continues on like this, back and forth. In Duncan, however, Person A will start talking then Person B will interrupt with a question, comment or some tangential story or even something that has nothing to do with the current topic of conversation. Person C will then do the same to Person B. From this point forward, any of the three might start talking over the others and subjects are quickly abandoned in favor of another or another still. I have lost count of how many unfinished stories I have heard in Duncan. I have to interrupt to find out how they turn out. It’s a little irritating at times but mostly just odd. I haven’t really figured out why it happens.
For the ferry ride back, I took my cap off when I went up to the sundeck, but the smell of smoke kept me from staying long once again. I think smokers should have to climb into a little dinghy being pulled behind the ship, but that’s just me. I remember ferries were for a time exclusively no-smoking. I wonder why they decided to let them open them back up to smoking and at the same time restrict the activity to one pathetically small section of the outside deck (it has lines to mark exactly where smoking is A-OK).
Overall, the trip was rather pleasant, if a mite on the warm side. You can see a gallery of my mediocre photos here.
There was a video store about six blocks away from here in the mini-mall at Kingsway and Fraser. It closed a few months ago. Aw. But then it re-opened as a triple-X adult video store. Ew. But the thing that got me curious was this sign I saw in its window as I walked by today:
First, it’s interesting that they put the word ‘legal’ in there, like it’s an attempt to ward off the police investigating. “It’s all on the up and up, officer!” Second, I would assume an adult video store would have a variety of creams, lotions and oils to provide interesting sensations to its customers while they engage in the pursuit of carnal knowledge, so why would they need someone to come onboard to apparently craft entirely new ones? Cutting out the middle man? Reducing costs? Being able to brand it with their own unique identity? (“Tony’s Titillating Talcum!”) It is nice that you can call Tony ANY TIME, though. Maybe he’ll hire some enterprising chemistry student from UBC. Hopefully they won’t blow up the mini-mall.
