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.
Fortunately there’s less than two weeks left in the year, so the forced inanity will end soon.
I don’t have anything to write about today so instead I offer a picture of my hobbit minstrel Beridoc being stalked by a chicken in Lord of the Rings Online:
Whoever said change was as good as a vacation probably took a lot of vacations. But in the spirit of renewal, I have updated the site’s theme to techmania. In looking for a new theme, I wanted something clean and simple, nothing more than that. As I traversed the web in my search I discovered a few things about WordPress themes:
there are about a hundred million billion of them out there now
most themes are cluttered, garish and often use color choices that make text difficult to read
Fortunately, a few designers still show enough restraint to provide a few reasonable options, which is why I am bothering to highlight techmania in the first place.
In the meantime we are getting our first real dump of snow as winter officially approaches. My bike is stored in the workshop, feeling cold and unloved.
Earlier this week I went over to the island (that’s Vancouver Island, we just call it “the island” because it’s bigger than some countries) to visit mom and took a few pics. Click the Photo Galleries link at the top of the site and select Duncan July 2008.
Duncan has changed quite a bit since I moved away in 1986. Back then it was only eight years since we got a McDonald’s. To me that was how you knew your town had arrived, you got a McDonald’s. Today, Duncan has nearly every fast food franchise you can think of. Not surprisingly a lot of the people I saw walking around were fat. Really fat. I don’t have anything against fat people, really, even fat people who like to wear skin-tight clothing that reveals every bulge in lurid 3D. But come on, Big Macs and Super Big Gulps are not food groups. The ground would often shake while we walked around town as these porcine citizens thundered about like big fat people who ate too much crappy food.
On the other hand, there is something very calming and wonderful about being able to drive only a few minutes out of town to get fresh eggs from a local farm or to watch deer, quail or other wildlife foraging within sight of your home. As long as they don’t poop on the lawn or eat your garden, of course.
I’ve finished restoring all of the old posts and stories to the site. This means from this point forward all additions to the site will be freshly-baked writings and doodlings.
One of the things I’ll be doing is using this space to relive the wonder and occasionally the horrors of my childhood. I present to you one small example below. This photo was taken in 1973 when I was about 9 years old. I was dressed up for my uncle’s wedding. There are so many fascinating things in this image one is almost rendered speechless as to where to begin.
The handlebars on the bike seem impossibly wide for someone with such spindly (but nicely tanned) arms. The collar on the shirt, if turned up, would probably cover most of my face. The hair — believe it or not, it got much worse. It’s probably safe to assume that the real focal point here are the pants. That is serious plaid. I never wore them again. For me, it was simply because they were not jeans, not because I was committing a crime against fashion. The shoes, which look like formal sneakers, I also never wore again. Quite the look, overall. Quite the look indeed. The best part is this ensemble did not raise an eyebrow in 1973. In fact, I was told what a sharp-dressed young man I was.
We were all mad, obviously.
This stunning photo and others equally charming will be added to galleries in the near future.
Thanks to the efforts of a certain mello elf, I have a copy of all of the blog entries from the previous site. I’ll be restoring them as time allows. Sorry, they still lack in profundity. They also lack user comments, but you can’t have everything. Or at least you can’t have user comments.
You may also notice the occasional really old entry. These have been inserted from journals or notebooks I kept in days of yore (yore meaning the 80s and 90s).
