When I operated the Locarno Beach concession back in 1996-98 I checked weather updates with a near-relifgious fervor as business rested entirely on the weather being sunny and pleasant. Today, thanks to the vast richness that is the world wide web, I can check weather forecasts 24 hours a day. For example, there is The Weather Network (that should show the forecast for Vancouver). The Weather Network is about as accurate as one might expect.
Or is it? <ominous piano chord>
I have noticed of late a typical pattern. The last day of the forecast is always really nice. Then when that day actually arrives, it’s snowing or flooding or something. I’m thinking they have some standing order to make the end of the forecast look nice to fill people with hope and to have them keep coming back to see if it’s changed. When that day actually arrives it is, of course, snowing or flooding. I’m going to test this crackpot theory by linking a copy of their little graphic for the last day of the forecast then following up with updated images as we get closer to the actual date in question — January 18th. As you can see, there is no snow or flooding predicted:
The 0% is the chance for precipitation. The 18th is six days hence. How wrong could they end up being in just six little days? Let’s find out!
I made it over to the island for a late Christmas the weekend after New Year’s. The reason for the delay, of course, was the weather. If someone had told me back in the fall I wouldn’t be able to ride my bike to work for nearly a month due to snow I would have chuckled quietly and called them insane. Today I would call them Kreskin.
I get up on the morning of Saturday January 3rd and look out the window. It’s snowing. Again.
Undeterred, I head out and once downtown I catch the #153 bus to Horseshoe Bay. It is snowing harder in West Vancouver, nestled as it is at the base of the North Shore mountains. The bus driver advises the passengers that all West Van buses are on “snow routes” without explaining precisely what that means. Someone on the dispatch also relays this information. We eventually learn it means all buses are sticking to the lower roads and avoiding the upper levels highway until the plows get through.
We get to the terminal safe and sound thanks to the driver not being a maniac behind the wheel. The ticket booth at Horseshoe Bay is covered but outdoors. It is a bit chilly but the line-up is not too long as I am early. Unfortunately the line-up does not move. At all. A woman up at the wicket is having a problem of some sort. I am too far away to catch any of the conversation so I wait and watch the snow piling up. The line continues to not move. Minutes go by. Then more minutes. The cashier is on the phone now. I gnash my teeth. The woman holding up the line has a dog. It’s a cute dog but if it’s the reason I’m standing here freezing my skinny butt off then screw you, cute dog!
After about ten minutes (which feels like 20 once you add wind chill) I buy my ticket and am astonished that the price is something like five dollars cheaper than it was in October. I take a whiff and sure enough, there is the unmistakable smell of pre-election on the ticket stub. Thanks, Gordon!
Today I went looking for swimming trunks again. At Sport Check the answer was basically, “We don’t carry swimwear in the middle of winter” which would make sense if one assumes people in Vancouver never:
a) swim indoors
b) travel to other climes where swimming in the winter is not just possible, but done regularly and with great pleasure
I decided to check The Bay and after a helpful clerk pointed me to their selection, I discovered once again that nearly every pair of swimming trunks they had were for sizes XXL to XXXXXL. Really, I must assume that fat* people simply do not swim. I managed to find a medium pair of trunks and gambled that they would fit well enough to not come off and cause an embarrassing pool incident. The helpful clerk lauded me for taking up a good cardiovascular workout such as swimming, confessing that he did not swim particularly well himself. Then he cheerfully advised me to not drown.
I picked up the Mom Laptop™ from the Puralator store today. It’s a Dell Inspiron and seems pretty nice — 15.4″ widescreen display, fast Core 2 Duo processsor. It also came bundled with a 30-day trial of McAfee and the Google Desktop, already installed. I removed the McAfee stuff and substituted AVG for anti-virus protection, loaded up and made Firefox the default browser, grabbed the nearly 50 MB of Windows updates, deleted the Google desktop and got the line of icons in the bottom right corner of the screen down to a half-mile in length. I’ll be setting up the wireless connection tomorrow and exposing mom to the wilds of the Internet. I’m undecided on whether I am to be commended or condemned for this.
* if you find the term “fat” demeaning or offensive, please substitute the phrase “dimensionally enhanced”
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times…
Here’s a brief overview of 2008 in handy list form. I love lists. I bought something like 50 of those Book of Lists books.
Personal
I was told in April I was pre-diabetic and had to lose weight, exercise more and change my diet
I bought a bike in July and ride it to work every day (when it isn’t snowing all the damn time)
I stopped eating junk food and fast food; in June I weighed 187.5 pounds. I now weight 151 pounds.
I wrote and completed more fiction than I have in many years (five complete short stories plus assorted fragments)
I got new glasses. Hooray for no more scratched lenses!
The World
Stephen Harper decided we needed yet another election and he needed one of them fancy majority governments. We got the election, he did not get his majority. He then turned around and gave the opposition parties a big “screw you!”, prompting them to form a coalition that the Bloc said it would support for 18 months. Harper then went to the governor-general and said, “Hey, I’d really like to stay in power. Can I suspend Parliament for two months, even though we are in the middle of the worst economic situation the world has faced in 80 years?” The governor-general gave him the OK, so we are awaiting the budget on January 27th with the proverbial bated breath.
Stephane Dion resigned early as Liberal leader, becoming the only Liberal leader to never go on to be Prime Minster. He was replaced in a quick ‘n dirty leadership “review” by a unibrow named Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff has spent most of the last 20 years living outside of Canada. This surprisingly may work to his benefit.
Two byelections in BC result in two NDP wins. No surprise, the governing party almost always loses. The BC Liberals install their carbon tax and everyone pretty much agrees they hate it. Gordon Campbell looks more and more like a cranky old high school teacher.
In the U.S. John McCain goes off the rails and incessantly negative in his campaign for president, choosing an airhead governor as his running mate. Sarah Palin proves to be a gold mine (or perhaps more appropriately, a gushing oil well) for comedians as she keeps saying the darndest things. Barack Obama runs a very slick, well-organized campaign and cruises to a fairly easy win, becoming America’s first black president.
The year ends with Bush getting shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist. So much for boquets of flowers. Bush nimbly ducks the shoes, earning respect in a way no one could have predicted.
Ice shelves continue to collapse. Global warming, a new ice age — clearly Mother Nature has something up her sleeve and I have a feeling we ain’t gonna like it
No space shuttles blew up
Vancouver gets about 10 feet of snow, I roughly estimate
Entertainment
I score 1 out of 10 on an MSNBC entertainment quiz. I guess I’m a bit out of the loop now.
Heath Ledger is really good as The Joker in The Dark Knight. For once the hype matches the reality. Shame about his accidental overdose.
iTunes is going DRM-free which is great. Most new songs will now be $1.29 instead of 99 cents. This is not so great. Catalogue songs will be as low as 69 cents, though, so in the end I declare all of this Good.
I can’t think of anything else noteworthy. I’m actually blanking on what movie won Best Picture this year.
My 27″ Sony Wega is officially obsolete. This gigantic CRT is like a huge paperweight I can’t get rid of. I never watch TV.
Sports
The Canucks roar out of the gate until Luongo pulls his groin. Nearly two months later, they have played a little under .500 hockey, but have 98-year old Mats Sundin in the line-up now to shore up offense. Things should improve when Luongo returns. Whenever that is.
I’ll add more as I reflect back on the momentous year that was 2008. Maybe!
Damage is clearly visible on the modern plastic container I use to safely transport my sandwich to work Monday to Friday:
How did this calamity strike?
I fell on it.
I was walking to work this morning down lovely East 19th Avenue and it was cold, dark and as it turns out, more than a tad icy. I stepped off a section of sidewalk that had been left unshoveled and onto a nice, clear section that had been shoveled. This clean section of sidewalk also has lots of hard-to-see ice on it, runoff that had frozen from Bad Neighbor’s uncleared section. As soon as my foot hit the ice, I knew what was happening. I put out my hands. I fell back, as if taking the Nestea plunge. I went splat. I quickly got back up to my feet, the wind knocked out of me but otherwise unhurt. I was more concerned about missing the bus or worse, someone having witnessed my Funniest Home Videos moment.
I didn’t realize I had landed on and smooshed my sandwich container until I took it out of my shoulder bag (man purse) for lunch. The sandwich, oddly enough, was unhurt, thus proving the effectiveness of meal safety equipment.
After work I bought a pair of boots to replace the amazing treadless sneakers I otherwise normally wear. I know there’s no guarantee the same thing won’t happen even with a pair of boots but since personal jetpacks aren’t fully ready yet, they’ll have to do.
On an unrelated note, I also looked for swim trunks while boot-shopping and Sears had a (not surprisingly) small selection to choose from. The sizes ranged from extra large to hill giant, so I’m wondering if they overstocked or maybe fat people just never swim. Or they make their own swim trunks. Or swim nude. Or buy at The Bay. Or something.
UPDATE, March 13, 2022: As you can see below, the image that was linked has since moved to other parts of the internet or perhaps just into the abyss.
The name of the image file was evilclownz.jpg and doing a search in your favorite search engine will yield copious nightmare-inducing examples, so feel free to imagine one of those here instead.
First, I missed posting yesterday not for lack of things to say but because I forgot to say them. I could fudge a post with a fake date and no one would be the wiser but I’ll save that kind of chicanery for something more deserving.
So, Facebook. I signed up and now when I check my e-mail I find out I have a new friend or should have this new friend or someone has written on my “wall” or their wall or some other wall and you should see this or check out that or, well, on it goes. On and on and on. I’d say “like the ABBA song” but that ends after four minutes. Facebook is like a giant rug where you start pulling on a loose thread and no matter how much it unravels the thread never runs out because someone is busily knitting away at the other end of the rug. Let this serve as illustration to the axiom that all analogies suck. They really do.
So yeah, Facebook. It’s weird to get messages from people I have not spoken to in more than 20 years. I can’t decide if I like the whole thing yet or not.
I have not seen any movies this festive holiday season. Part of the reason is $12 for a ticket seems fairly outrageous. It’s like the movie theater chains are saying “If you won’t buy our $6 tub of popcorn and $3 small Coke from our bountiful concession, we’ll just add them into the price of the ticket”. The other reason is no new movie interests me, at all. That’s a bit odd, though I mulled over seeing Quantum of Solace, but as much as I like Daniel Craig as James Bond, I’m not coughing up $012 for 007.
On January 6th I start swimming lessons at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre. I may be the only person in town buying swimming trunks who isn’t getting out of town after doing so. Considering my usual swimming style can be described as “thrashing about wildly in the water as if drowning because I am in all probability, actually drowning”, I look forward to the potential improvement!
I’d never rented from iTunes before. The $3.99 price probably comes out to half a bar of gold given current exchange rates and the 640×480 image has artifacts o’ plenty when stretched across a 1920×1200 screen so overall I am kind of meh on it. Handy for impulse viewings. I’ll try the Xbox Live movie rentals next and see if I can cause a Red Ring Of Death by watching a bad comedy.
EDITOR'S NOTE, March 13, 2022: I swapped out a broken image link from imdb.com and tweaked the first sentence a bit. 14 years on and with streaming services crowding each other out, the idea of renting a movie seems downright quaint now, right there with rotary phones or buying CDs. Also I actually recently re-watched The Day After Tomorrow and yes, the science is mostly junk, but Jake Gyllenhaal is kind of adorable and the set pieces are still good. The cast is actually pretty engaging, so the movie is better than it has any right to be.
the first weekday after Christmas observed as a legal holiday in parts of the Commonwealth of Nations and marked by the giving of Christmas boxes to service workers (as postal workers)
You can find a more modern definition on wikipedia’s site, which sums it up nicely as:
Contemporary Boxing Day in many countries is now a “shopping holiday” associated with after-Christmas sales.
Normally on Boxing Day I am making my way back home from the island and my only typical exposure to it is joining the crush of people downtown for a bite to eat around 4 p.m. before catching the bus home. Since the snow kept me from traveling, I had all day to enjoy this pseudo-holiday. My plan was simple: catch the #19 downtown around mid-morning, deposit a few paychecks, check out a couple of nearby stores, maybe grab some groceries, then boogie on back home, total exposure to the public maybe two hours, tops.
The first bad sign came from the window. It had started snowing again, dammit. Well, with the forecast calling for the snow later changing to rain, I decide to keep to my plan to avoid the coming slushpocalypse. I bundle up and opt to not wait at the usual bus stop since there is a wall of snow there making the road inaccessible. I go down to the next one and in due time the bus arrives. We head downtown at a somewhat slower pace but it’s not too bad. I deposit my checks then head into Pacific Centre. It’s getting close to lunch so I figure a bite is in order. The place is packed. I check my watch — 11:20 a.m. The food court is totally jammed. I give up. I’l make a sandwich at home, save money, eat healthier and pat myself on the back — all at the same time!
I next mosey over to Future Shop. As I ride the (packed) escalator up, I note the people coming down, about half of them carrying no purchases, just looky-loos out looking because they enjoy feeling like sardines, I guess.
Future Shop, like everywhere else, is packed. After a minute of fighting my way through aisles crowded with consumer zombies, I leave for the London Drugs at the end of the block. It’s also pretty busy but since it sells more practical stuff, it’s not quite packed. Saving big money on a high-def TV motivates people, saving big money on a roll of paper towels, not so much. At LD I realize there is nothing I would be buying anyway so I get the hell out and go to the bus stop. I miss not one, not two but three buses, including one where the driver could have stopped but chose to drive three feet forward to the stop light and not let me on. Ho ho ho.
When I get on the fourth, I am joined by several others, including a street person who asks for $2.50 (I assume this is to cover bus fare, though most drivers will simply wave on those who don’t pay). I say I have no cash on me (I almost never do, in fact, carry any cash on me these days) and she proceeds to ask the other two people. The second is a young man who expresses his displeasure in a loud but not shouting voice. The bus heads off into the snow and the woman wanders about the nearly-empty bus for a bit before she takes the seat in front of me. She turns to me and starts to ask something; I’m not sure what because I’m listening to music by this point. I hear angry young man telling her to bugger off or somesuch. The woman and I make eye contact and she says nothing, I say nothing. She has what almost appears to be a wry smile. After our non-conversation yields no results, she finally moves off and leaves the bus a few stops later.
The rest of the trip is uneventful. I only have one block to walk from the stop to my place but sure enough, I manage to slip. I deftly spread out my hands and catch myself before splatting. Once back home, I make myself a nice cup of tea and vow not to go back outside until June.
While the weather made things worse, I must say the spectacle of all those people out looking for bargains in an atmosphere I can only describe as unpleasant at best and horrible at worst, makes me sad. I don’t expect everyone to be out saving beached whales today or working soup kitchens or even giving cardboard boxes to postal workers, but yeesh, you don’t really need to save 20% off something you don’t really want, anyway. Stay home with your damn family and drink more eggnog!
Here I am in Vancouver for Christmas for the first time ever, thanks to the MegaSnow. I had a nice lunch and pie (mmm, pie) with Tim and family and was accosted as per usual by Barley, the dog who seems to love me as if I were a cut of prime steak or something. Maybe it’s a chocolate lab thing.
It is quiet around here and I’m looking forward to my trip to the island that’s been delayed a week. The weather should be back to its usual cool ‘n rainy by then.
In the meantime, I’ve succumbed and created a spartan Facebook page. If it’s anything like this blog, it’ll be a few years before anything really happens there but all the cool kids have signed up and if I want to have the chance to publicly share my KFC sink as hot tub pics (okay, technically they used MySpace) this may be my best chance.
A week ago we got our first real snow of the season, and it was a bit more than usual for this time of year (if we get snow it usually comes in January).This was just the warm-up for the first official day of winter, though. This was the backyard on December 21st (click to enlarge):
Sadly, the shelter protecting the 1964 Ford Fairlane collapsed under the weight of the snow. Hopefully the car isn’t banged up too much as a result. More snow is forecast (followed by rain, naturally). Ho ho ho.
