General

A wedding in Chase, Day 2 of 3

We began Day 2 in Kamloops and with time to relax and take in some local scenery before journeying to the wedding.

We had breakfast at McDonald’s because I really wanted a Sausage and Egg McMuffin. And I liked it!

After, we decided to visit the disc golf course at McArthur Park. The park is billed as the second largest in BC and indeed, it is big. I think it has something like 40 soccer fields.

We discovered the course is part of UDisc and had an app. There truly is an app for everything. We downloaded the app, created accounts, selected the course, created a scorecard and were off!

As it turned out, we should have checked the course map, because we started off literally in the wrong direction, the ultimate golfer faux pas. A nice guy helped us out, but by this point time was already starting to run a bit short. I suggested we move the golfing to the next day, when we would have nothing else to do (except drive back home at some point before dark). I then shot a few pics with my camera. There was a marmot. So cute! I took a bunch of photos of it. Then we found that the marmots are everywhere. Then we also discovered the mosquitoes–or rather, they discovered us. I further suggested we get out instead of being eaten alive. We did so.

The first marmot. The first of about a million, as it turned out.

We planned on leaving around 1 p.m. for the 3 p.m. wedding ceremony, but ended up heading out around half an hour later. At first, things were fine. The weather was partly cloudy, and the drive to Chase is along a flat stretch of highway that parallels the South Thompson River. As we approached Chase, I entered the address into the in-car navigator. We end up on a gravel road, but it seems to be going the right way. We continue on and it tells us we’ve arrived a short time later. But we’re at some random farm. As it turns out, it mysteriously stopped us far too soon. We (or rather I, because I totally should have realized what was happening) made the first wrong move: We switched to Google Maps. It sent us back and way off course. Time was starting to run short. I keyed the route into Apple Maps. It wanted to send us around the far side of Little Shuswap Lake–a route that would take us many km out of our way. We finally figured out we had been going the right way initially and returned to the gravel road.

Jeff drove at what one might call a brisk pace. Perhaps just a little above the posted 40 KPH speed limit. Perhaps. We also saw a scruffy young bear, which was sort of cute. Mom was probably just out of view, waiting to rip out the throat of anyone getting close to her kid.

We arrived literally a few minutes before 3 p.m.–technically not late!

As it turned out, the ceremony was late in starting, so it all turned out fine in the end.

Taylor and Derek got married in a barn. Or a very barn-like building. It was rustic.

The marriage barn

After the ceremony, we had plenty of time to hang out and schmooze with people we didn’t know. I took a few more pics of horses, giant bugs and things, which I will link to in a gallery that will be magically edited into this post later.

While waiting for the reception and dinner, guests could choose from some snacks outside the hall, as shown below.

  • On the left: Meat, cheese and brownies
  • On the right: Veggies
Meat on left, veggies on right. I think I know which side won.

The dinner was nice, though there didn’t seem to be any butter for the dinner buns. Maybe they were trying to be healthy after plying us with prepared meats and brownies beforehand.

In all, it all went as one would hope a wedding and reception would–short, but ice ceremony, speeches at the reception that ranged from thoughtful to funny, and were also short (you may be detecting a theme here), and good simple food without anything totally weird that would make people go back outside to see if any salami was left over (there wasn’t).

After the dinner and dessert (more brownies! Plus cheesecake), we headed back to our hotel before it got dark and wound down the evening, tucking in around 11 p.m. We both slept very well that night, probably because we were worn out from driving up and down that gravel road about a hundred times. I still see it in my dreams.

Loakin Bear Hall. No actual bears attended the reception.

A wedding in Chase, Day 1 of 3

Programming note: I normally post vacation or travel entries on the day in question, but opted to just take notes and write them after the fact instead this time, so some details may be missing or totally made up for dramatic effect.

The last time Jeff and I went to Kamloops (in 2015), it was for his niece’s convocation (high school graduation). Despite it being June, it rained while we were there, and yet I still got a sunburn.

I did not get a sunburn this time.

This time we were heading there (actually further east to Chase) for her wedding at some quaint little ranch that is billed as a “wedding venue”.

A friend of Jeff’s provided us a gratis rental car, which was very nice. It was a BMW X2 and, as you might expect from a Beemer, was quite nice. The seats did not numb my butt, even on the long journey up the Coquihalla Highway.

We started out a bit later than intended, but would still arrive with plenty of daylight left.

Shortly after leaving, the grey sky turned even more sullen and showers started. We opted to stop for a late lunch in Chilliwack, where there is still a giant flag along Vedder Road. I had chicken strips at a Wendy’s and they were fine. We headed on past Chilliwack and began the ascent into the mountains. The rain picked up until it was coming down in sheets. This made for low visibility and a not-really-pleasant drive. It stressed me out.

Once we reached the Coquihalla Summit, the weather abruptly changed. This actually makes sense, because on our side it’s temperate rain forest, and on the other (Kamloops) side, it’s as close as you get to desert in BC. The mountains go from being covered in Evergreen to being covered in scrub and dotted with a few trees. There’s something about this forest minimalism I find aesthetically pleasing.

We got in and after a few minutes of the check-in clerk puzzling over our MoreRewards™ hotel voucher (we cashed in some points to get two nights free at the Best Western Premier, one of about 500 hotels on a stretch along Hugh Allen Drive. There is another hotel being constructed there even as I type this), we were given our key cards and went up to our room. Really, for the price (especially the free price), it was pretty decent.

But just like the hotel room I stayed at in Nashville 10 years ago, the office chair was broken, so in order to sit at the desk and not feel like a five-year-old trying to reach my laptop, I had to use one of the many pillows from one of the two beds to sit on. At least it was cushy.

By this time, I was feeling out of sorts from a combination of:

  • Stress
  • Right knee being a bother from the previous day’s run
  • Left hand being weirdly achy as well (I think I slept on it funny or something–it’s fine now)

I curled up on the bed and dozed, until Jeff got hungry. We remained indecisive as to what or where to eat as our options began closing for the evening. We finally settled on getting something from a Triple O’s down the road. I had some garlic Parmesan fries. They were actually not bad. We crashed early. Or rather, I continued to crash.

It was a somewhat ignoble start to the trip. And I haven’t even talked about how the various maps apps (Apple Maps, Google Maps, the in-car navigation system) would give us sometimes confusing or nonsensical results. Both Apple and Google REALLY want you to do U-turns everywhere. U-turns are mostly illegal in Canada.

I only took a single shot on Day 1. Behold our hotel room, my sexy legs and a Swiss Chalet ad on the TV:

Letting AI name your cat

I asked ChatGPT to come up with ten cat names. Here they are:

  1. Whiskers
  2. Luna
  3. Oliver
  4. Bella
  5. Simba
  6. Lily
  7. Charlie
  8. Chloe
  9. Max
  10. Lucy

I mean, Whiskers is probably the most obvious cat name, sort of the cat equivalent of Fido or Rover. The others are all just human names that don’t seem very cat-like to me, except for Simba, which is a little too on-the-nose.

I asked for ten more names, but didn’t apply any new conditions:

  1. Leo
  2. Cleo
  3. Shadow
  4. Ginger
  5. Molly
  6. Jasper
  7. Willow
  8. Felix
  9. Nala
  10. Oscar

Some of these are more cat-sounding, like Shadow and Ginger. Overall, the names are pretty unimaginative. Since ChatGPT is drawing answers from what it finds on the internet, you can draw your own conclusion on how clever most people are with naming their cats.

Finally, I asked for unconventional cat names:

  1. Moxie
  2. Ziggy
  3. Nimbus
  4. Pixel
  5. Pippin
  6. Sprinkles
  7. Quirk
  8. Whiskerdo
  9. Zephyr
  10. Glimmer

Whiskerdo just makes me laugh. Well done, ChatGPT. Ziggy is cute, and Sprinkles is about perfect for some kind of weird Calico.

Anyway, I’ll keep these in mind if we ever get a cat, and we decide not to go with Fuzzy McPurrPants.

Also, here is a cat I’ve posted before and continues to make me laugh every time I see it:

Unpacking colourways

English is a weird language because it cribs shamelessly from every other language and constantly breaks its own rules, making it difficult to pick up for non-native speakers and, well, native speakers, too.

It is, like any living language, constantly evolving and adding new words, some of them kinda dumb (like finfluencer, which sounds like an Instagram for fish seeking to be more beautiful, but is actually just a portmanteau for “financial influencer” which is so boring that zzz….), some of them inevitable (metaverse), and some that feel like they’ve always been words (janky).

Repurposed words or catchy phrases rise up in popular usage much more rapidly now, with the internet all over the place messing things up. Where once it might have taken years for “give no fucks” to enter the popular lexicon (at least in impolite company), now it gets memed to death after a couple of weeks.

Which brings me to unpacking colourways.

What is a colourway? According to my browser’s dictionary pop-up tool: “Any of a range of combinations of colours in which a style or design is available.” That is 16 words to describe just one: colours. And yet people constantly use colourway now to sound hip and in the moment. “The new MacBook Air comes in four colourways.” No, it comes in four colours. There is no meaningful distinction between colourway and colour. Go ahead and find an instance of colourway and substitute colour. It will always work because colourway is used by dopes trying to sound cool. Or whatever word is being used for “cool” now.

Then we have unpacking, or to unpack. Once it meant “open and remove the contents of (a suitcase, bag, or package).” But now it also means to explain something. You can see how this evolved to get the new meaning. Having a lot of stuff to unpack requires time, patience and care (unless you hire a gorilla to unpack for you, in which case it is quick, chaotic and likely to involve a lot of shredding and damage). Unpacking something carefully and methodically can be used as a metaphor for doing the same with a non-tangible thing, like an ethical dilemma, or a big argument over colourways.

However logical this metaphorical extension of the word may seem, I’m still pretty sure you’ll still want to barf if you do a search to see how often the word is used everywhere and all the time. It went from zero to trite faster than you can say pumpkin spice latte.

So, final score:

  • Colourway: Don’t use this word, it makes you look like a guy from the 1980s wearing suspenders to be edgy and “with it”
  • Unpack: You can use this word if you want to fit in, since everyone else is using it. Or try to come up with the next “unpack” and make your own mark on the language!

Ned vs. The Fruit Flies (Not part of the MCU)

A few weeks ago, we got a blast of hot, summer-like weather. With it, seemingly out of nowhere, came fruit flies. Did they come in off a piece of fruit brought in from the grocery store? Have a secret lair with eggs waiting quietly all winter to hatch? Come up from a sink drain like some subterranean horror? All of these things?

I don’t know.

All I do know is they arrived in numbers, and at first I was content to grumble and occasionally bat at them.

No more.

Today, war was declared. Surrender was not an option for the flies, only total defeat.

First, I consulted ChatGPT, which put together a bunch of sensible-sounding options. I later confirmed these elsewhere, then set about on my counter-attack. Below is how well each option faired.

Option 1: A bowl with a mix of dish soap and cider vinegar
How it works: The flies are attracted to the vinegar, but when they make contact with the soapy combo, they have difficulty flying and will drown.
Success rate: One fly caught. Close to a bust.

Option 2: Same as above, but the bowl is filled only with vinegar, then covered with plastic wrap, poked full of holes.
How it works: Flies go in through the holes, but can’t easily get out.
Success rate: No flies caught. A complete bust. UPDATE: This one just took time to work. After a few hours, it has now caught and killed 11 flies, with three more trapped.

Option 3: A small jam jar with some cider vinegar, with plastic wrap on the top, poked with holes and the wrap secured by a rubber band.
How it works: Same as above, flies can get in, but not easily get out.
Success rate: For some reason, the smaller jar worked much better, trapping a half dozen or so flies.

Option 4: Suck them up with a vacuum cleaner.
How it works: Kind of self-explanatory.
Success rate: Hard to say. The flies would disappear when the mighty hose of the Dyson was brought near, but I could never tell if they were pulled in or managed to dart off in time. I think I got a few, though.

Option 5: Spraying them with Dawn PowerWash (basically dish soap in foamy form)
How it works: The soap either sticks the fly in place or makes it drop to the counter/floor where it can be dealt with.
Success rate: This seemed to have success about half the time. Quite often, the fly would escape the spray entirely. But the kitchen and bathrooms ended up getting slightly cleaner.

Option 6: Whacking them with a damp cloth.
How it works: Self-explanatory.
Success rate: At one point, I was two for two. At others, I was not hitting any, so literally hit-and-miss.

Option 7: Accidental trap
How it works: We have a plastic tray that the dish soap, scrubber and PowerWash bottle sit in, because they tend to leave soapy residue behind on the counter otherwise. Every week or so, I will clean this tray, which by then will have a small amount of soapy liquid in it.
Success rate: Although this was not intended to attract fruit flies, it has somehow managed to catch and kill probably around 10 or so thus far, making it the most effective trap of all. Now I’m wondering if I should just set up another one of these trays on the kitchen counter.

Verdict: So far the small jam jar has been pretty successful, so I’ll keep using that. The soap tray is just kind of working on its own, so I will periodically clean it, then let it gather more. Mostly, I wish I could just clap my hands and make them disappear. But that only works when they happen to be between my hands.

NOTE: I updated Option #2, which has actually worked well after being given more time.

My vulgar youth

I have recently begun digging through my old creative stuff–sketches and stories from back in the olden days when I had hair and dreams. Now I just dream of having had hair.

One of the things I’ve noticed about some of the old short stories, dating back to the early 90s or even earlier–so some 30+ years ago, written when I was in my mid-20s or so, is how vulgar they are. Everyone curses, the guys are all leering monsters you wouldn’t let within 20 metres of a woman, or perhaps any other human. Everyone drinks or is drunk. I’d say I was repressed and letting it all hang out in my fiction, except:

  • I never drank other than an occasional beer, and never wanted more
  • I rarely swear in the flesh, feeling I can draw on more colourful metaphors to express myself than common cuss words
  • I have never leered at a woman, nor have wanted to

Also, a lot of stories revolve around death, which is also weird, because ruminations on mortality usually start when you’re, well, older. But I apparently had it on my mind a lot when I was 24 or 25 (this might partly be explained by my father dying when I was only 27, but that goes beyond the time when most of the referenced stories were written).

Anyway, no grand point here, just one of those things I noticed. That, and a lot of the writing is very first draft. I “finished” a lot of short stories that were never really done.

Bi-annual lamentation over iTunes

I tried to play music in iTunes.

A story in two images:

This seems easy to solve!

Oh, I am signed in.

Next: The software equivalent of “turn it off and on”, which is to say, I restarted iTunes.

This did not work.

I next logged into the web version of Apple Music. I needed to sign in there, but once I did, it played a song that I have only ever listened to through Apple Music (not purchased separately in the iTunes store). Yay, it works!

I tried iTunes again, thinking this may have sent a successful signal to the mothership.

It did not.

I thought about doing some searching on the interweb for other solutions or to see if other people are experiencing the same issue, then I remembered that I have several thousand songs I own–that I actually purchased on physical media and ripped (as we called it in the olden days), so instead of wasting my time hunting down something I probably couldn’t fix anyway, I just listened to my own music.

Using Windows Media Player.

Alas, iTunes, alas.

Bonus: When prompted to allow the Apple ID sign-in, it seems Apple places me “near Abbotsford”:

I mean, it’s right, if you consider 43 km away to be near.

The weather, May 21, 2023 edition

It’s cloudy, with a high of only 19C forecast today. What is going on?

What’s going on is after two weeks of weirdly warm summer-like weather, we are now back to normal weather for mid-May. I’m still wearing my shorts, though.

And 19C and cloudy is still perfectly pleasant. To celebrate, here are a bunch of cats enjoying the sun:

Banger shmanger

It occurs to me that as banger enters the lexicon as a word to describe something good, great or otherwise appealing, that I do not like the word. It’s a bit too affected for my tastes, sort of this generation’s “groovy.”

And then I realize oh yeah, I’m old! This is one of those ways I know I’m getting older. A younger generation, one that came after mine, is now pushing new lingo into the general vocabulary and if I get cranky at their twenty-three skidoos, I’m just an old man yelling at clouds.

So be it.

(Don’t even get me started on baller.)

BONUS: Can we also already retire “lives rent-free in my (or someone else’s) head” as an expression? I think I’ve seen it about a billion times or so this year. NO EXAGGERATION.