How not to swim: During your first lesson you kick your legs so hard in the water in a futile attempt to keep warm you end up pulling a muscle in your left leg.
It reminded me of an injury I suffered in junior high, which I’ll get to in a moment. For the swimming, the muscle became very tender after the lesson had ended, so I figured it would be best to let it rest for a couple of days (lesson #2 was only two nights later). I now have a duffel bag and am getting goggles for lesson #3, though. I’m sure it will be totally awesome and flawless.
The junior high injury was during a gym class in the dead of winter, temperatures below freezing. We were doing orienteering in some local woods and at one point I carefully climbed over a barbed wire fence, wearing only a sweatshirt, a pair of shorts and my trusty running shoes. During the science class that followed, I felt something warm on my leg and pulled up the pant leg to reveal a prominent gash where the barbed wire had sliced through. There was much blood. I marveled over how the cold had completely masked this, then went to the nurse because the science teacher did not like the blood all over the place.
Tonight I took my first swimming lesson ever. Let me begin by summarizing my current swimming technique:
enter water
begin sinking
leave water before drowning
I figured if I didn’t drown tonight, I had already made progress.
Now, I do not have a duffel bag for my trunks ‘n towel so I thought I’d grab one after work. As I approached the bus stop at Venables & Vernon, I see that the rail crossing lights are flashing a few blocks down yonder, where my bus will be coming from. Hopefully, I think, it will just mean a few minutes delay.
25 minutes later, the gates finally lift, the lights stop flashing and the bus finally shows up. There was no actual train crossing the street save for about two minutes somewhere in the middle of that 25. The rest of the time the train stood on either side of the crossing, just close enough for the gates and lights to stay triggered. I’m pretty sure the engineer was doing it just to be a jerk.
As the bus became super-crowded, the rear doors decided they would stop working, leading to further delays. By the time I get home, it is 45 minutes later than usual. I won’t have time for a duffel bag tonight so I stuff my trunks and towel into my rather small shoulder bag.
I head to the Vancouver Aquatic Centre and the air is warm and heavy inside. After walking through sheets of rain in the cold to get there it’s nice and comfy. I explain to a cashier that I am here for the 7:20 class and she advises me to wait 5-10 minutes, then head on down to the changing room.
As I wait, I observe the various people swimming in lanes marked fast, medium and slow. Some are using those little surfboard thingies to help keep them afloat. I’m hoping I’ll get one of those. The crowd seems to be mostly male and most of these guys are, in fact, wearing Speedos. Many sport swimming caps and goggles. These guys are serious. I already feel inadequate. And speaking of that, I can’t help but notice one guy wearing a Speedo with a package that is sticking out like the arm of a cactus. I mean, dude, that’s just not subtle. Maybe I’m just used to seeing photos where the bumps are all airbrushed away for propriety.
After a few more minutes of observation, I proceed in. Your stuff is stored in one of those lockers that requires a quarter to get the key. I remember trying to use one of these at Canadian Tire and the locker denied me entry no matter how many times I tried to make it work. In the back of my mind I hear Jim McKay already talking about “the agony of defeat”. Turns out it works fine. I change into my spanky new trunks and wander around through the maze-like changing room until I arrive at the pool. I ask someone wearing a t-shirt labeled “Coach” where I might go for the class. He directs me to another gentleman who then tells me to head to the far end of the pool and wait for the instructor. I pad over there and a few minutes later a young fresh fellow by the name of Dave arrives and introduces himself. There are only four of us signed up for this class (not surprising, considering it’s the middle of winter) but only one other person shows up. I’ve forgotten his name but he was Eastern European, so I’ll call him Nicco for now. Unlike me, Nicco can actually swim. This becomes evident in short order.
Dave gets us to kick our legs in the water to get used to the temperature, then we head in and do a little running on the spot. At this point I’m thinking the water feels pretty freaking cold. Nicco concurs. I feel my muscles contracting, getting ready to put me in a safe state of hibernation. I try not to shiver.
The first part of the lesson is blowing bubbles under the water, followed by sticking your head entirely under the water and doing the same thing. The idea is to get you used to breathing out when under the water and just get comfortable with the whole thing. I am a bit hesitant, partly because dipping lower into the water makes me feel colder and my breath constricts, not exactly ideal for the exercise. I do manage to blow a few bubbles but the head-under-water bit has to wait.
We do a few more simple exercises, like pushing off from the pool edge and propelling ourselves by kicking. I am told my hips are too low and my butt is too high. I’m also too tense. I feel like I’m on a date trying to get to third base. A few more attempts yield better results. Dave moves on to having Nicco do more advanced stuff, like rolling over while stroking. Dave knows that if I tried this I’d roll over and sink. To confirm his suspicions, I do one of those head dips and breathe in at the wrong time, resulting in a coughing fit. Dave asks if I’m okay. I hold up my hand, the universal sign for “I’m not dying but I can’t talk quite yet”. I eventually croak out in a barely audible voice, “I’m okay.” He tries to look convinced. Such a nice man.
Dave emphasizes to me the need to relax, to just go nice and slow and steady. He compares learning to swim to learning to fly. I am a bit puzzled by this comparison because as far as I know, we can’t fly unless we’re using wings and jet engines. He goes on to explain that it’s similar because you’re not touching the ground and gravity is no longer a factor. Okay, I can grasp that. I’m still sinking more than I should, though, perhaps because I am a strong believer in gravity.
By the time the 40 minutes has elapsed, I realize the water still feels freaking cold. I ask Dave what the temperature is and he asks the guy I originally talked to. He declares the official temperature as 27 Celsius (about 80 F). This sounds pretty nice. Maybe it’s another one of those psychological things. It feels cold because I think it feels cold. I just need to think, “Wow, this 27 degree water is pretty warm!” Yeah, that’ll work.
As we get ready to leave, Dave tells me I should practise breathing out into a sink full of water. People hardly ever drown doing that. Or so I like to imagine. I’ll try tomorrow. It’ll be fun. I’ll make sure the water is warmer than 27 C, too. Stupid cold water.
When I’m changing back into my clothes, a guy comes up to a locker near mine. He has a towel wrapped around his waist. Probably just had a shower, I’m thinking. Turns out he’s rather coquettish, as he’s one of those people who puts on his skivvies under the towel, so as to not expose the family jewels to the light of day. It seems a bit weird to me. I mean, it’s not like anyone will suddenly look at him and shout, “Omigod, that is the smallest wiener I have ever seen!” Or maybe that’s exactly what happened and he’s been permanently traumatized by it.
I’m a bit disappointed at the progress I made with this first lesson, but it was progress and although I smell faintly of chlorine, no ambulances had to be called, so I’m calling tonight a success.
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.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to myself, “I should create a new character with a totally meta name, walk him to Goldshire and duel another meta-named character.”
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.
