Category: Travel

VACATION ALERT

My brain has gone birdsnesting already.

Work is interesting.  I backspaced over most of an email this morning that while righteous was, erm, inflammable, sent it, and received the benison of the account manager, who promptly asked me why I wasn’t running things. My response was that I am hysterical and of short attention span, but I thanked him for his kind words.

Saturday I clean, Sunday I church, Monday I take instruments to be set up, Tuesday I have to briefly stop in at work to get my new hall pass, Wed-Thurs I hope to visit me mOm and pOp, and Friday I fly to Toronto.  Monday I fly back.  In the middle I hang with Chipper and the Eastern contingent of filkfen (and I CAN HAZ SO MUCH NEW MATERIAL) and then Tuesday it’s back to work again.

Some restrictions apply, etc etc.

In Victoria

Jesus iced Christ on a pogo stick, it’s snowing.  Or trying to. We’re here, we’re going to go to Value Village and then Radjuli.  Then tonight we’re off to Brannigan’s for dinner and the trip up Island has been cancelled for reasons of harrumph won’t get into that now.  Katie has interesting friends.

I got into the wrong lineup at the ferry this morning and the car wrangler cheerfully said, ‘I don’t care, please get on the ferry.’

So much for reserved sailings.

MUMMY I love my mother, she found me a copy of Mother’s Day, so it’s on the site now.  Oldest Homily have got.

Happy Birthday to me!

I am settled into my room at the Double Tree Worthington

Cindy will arrive shortly and go straight to sleep in my room. I will find something to do with myself while she kips and waits for her room to be ready – I am thinking I might like to go look at the enslaved animals, if only in remembrance of the other Ohio animals who didn’t make it.  Besides, they have bonobos, and I ain’t never seen any.  Or I could wander down to the “German Village” room (!?) and see if anybody is filking yet.  Or maybe I’ll say fuck it and go to Macy’s.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Starbucks coffee is nauseatingly bad.  They may be proud to serve it but I’m a fool to drink it.

Gadhafi’s STILL dead, sic semper tyrannis.

So far, except for the coffee, I am loving this hotel.  The staff are really, really professional, friendly and courteous.  Room was supposed to be non-smoking, when I bleated they fixed it without a hiccup.

Weather’s like Vancouver, but windy.

I got selected for ‘special screening’ yesterday.  O goody.  I also got yelled at by every single one of the ‘security theatre’ staff, to the point that I would say “Please don’t yell at me,” not that it helped.  Note to self – travel in slip-ons next time.

“Miles Vorkosigan’s” filk of Lady Miss Banjola’s “Wreck of the Crash” MUST GET LYRICS and sing for my pOp.

It’s about the legal repercussions of losing your hotel room key, and it, like the song it’s based on is bloody hilarious.  YES there was filking last night and it was still going on when I went to bed at midnight local time.

Bullet (time) points

  • Migrainy
  • Talked to my mother last night
  • Very tired
  • Too much to do
  • Disorganized
  • Having hot flashes more or less continuously
  • My room is a disaster, although the clean clothes do outnumber the dirty ones
  • I actually cooked dinner last night – potato salad.  Jeff said there weren’t enough onions but that was because I was hoping Keith would eat it.
  • I am not going to Toronto for my vacation in November – I am staying here.  I’m taking Katie cross border shopping for her bday.
  • I am debating whether to cash out of all of my investments, because the end of the world is nigh
  • I am also debating whether or not to buy more musical instruments.  Because, you know, you can never have too many
  • Church continues to be interesting and challenging.  I have a meeting tonight.
  • Work continues to be interesting and challenging.  I have sworn a mighty oath to stop emailing people.  I have to relearn this over and over again.

busy tizzy

1.  Paul and kids over to watch latest True Blood.  Since I knew they were coming I went to Choices and got delicious om-nom-noms for them, like fresh bread and Dijon turkey and Avalon chocolate milk, which still comes in a glass bottle and is the best commercial chocolate milk in the known universe.  Even Paul had some and he stopped drinking cow’s milk years ago.  Damn, it’s fine!  Also edamame salad and fresh veg.

2.  Leo and Linda coming tonight…. can’t wait for them to meet kitties.

3.  Jeff biked to and from work yesterday… go Jeff. The last three 3 k involve about three hundred feet of elevation, so he was rather warm by the time he got back.  I took one look at him and asked him if he wanted some water.

4.  At church meeting last night (Nominating committee, my house) we had fun and got shiz done.  I was so happy to see everybody.  Now I have more work to do, even though an item came off my list!

5.  I’ll be doing a bed and breakfast thing in Bellingham in September but I don’t know which weekend.  I’ll be taking Katie for some CBS.  (Cross border shopping).  Clothing for women my size is more easily obtained Stateside.

6.  I’m helping train somebody at work, and as a consequence my house-fly strength attention span is even MORE truncated.  I’d like to thank her family for raising somebody so smart.  And she takes kick boxing classes, too.

7.  Keith was too – I don’t know – to check flickr for pictures of Animé Evolution, and when he said he didn’t know where pictures would be, I said, “You’re daft, check the flickrstream.”  Gosh all whacky, am I the only person in the world who knows how to use the internet, grump grump.  And there he was, in his costume.  Now I go looking for it and I can’t find it, but suffice it to say Keith made a GREAT Dr. McNinja. Grandparents are warmly encouraged to apply to him directly for photographs.

8.  Dropped by her workplace to see Lady Miss Banjola and inspect her tummy.  Yup, she’s knocked up.  She’s also artistically pale but I think she looks great.

9.  The spicy Thai beef salad yesterday was unbelievably yummy, but the transit time of 8 hours was accompanied by the burnination of a lifetime.  I can no longer eat hot peppers, unless I want multiple lashings of discomfort and abrupt departures from whatever conversation I’m engaged in at the time to flee for the house of ease.  It was worth it, but only just.  Ky can cook.

There’s more but I gotta go.

Lady Miss B shares flying tips with you

STUPID FLYING TRICKS FOR HUMANS!

1. Bother to collect frequent flyer miles! They eventually add up even if you don’t fly a lot, and then you can fly places for free or at a heavy discount. I fly everywhere I can on Alaska, even if the fare is slightly higher than another airline (usually they’re pretty good, though.) because they have a really generous mileage plan. (If it’s a route I’ve never flown before, I do a quick check on expedia to see if the fare is way out of line or not.) I get two or three free round-trips a year from them on miles. (Partly because of #2.) Whee! Plus after you collect a certain number of miles they start treating you like you’re a rock star, randomly upgrading you to first class, giving you bonus miles, waiving baggage fees, letting you skip lineups.

2. Get an airline mile credit card. I figured out that my alaska card works out to basically getting 4% cash back in the form of free plane tickets, which is better than any cashback cards I’ve had offers for. (Plus or minus a percent, depending on how expensive the tickets would have been if I paid cash.) Also it comes with coupons for cheap companion fares, and you get 1000 bonus miles this, 1000 bonus miles that all the time for seemingly random reasons. It makes me happy to pay my house insurance because I imagine the bill moving a little stick figure me across a map on a crayon airplane.

3. Book several months in advance if your dates aren’t flexible. Usually about 3 months out is the cheapest, except for last-minute seats on unpopular routes, but that’s dodgy to count on. This varies a lot by route – like, I know that _two_ months ahead of FKO is when Westjet and AC have the cheapest seats – but it’s a good rule of thumb. (Bing.com/travel has a fare predictor, since Microsoft bought farecast. I have never found it that handy because it has crappy data for my hometown, but your city might be one of their useful spots.) If you book more than 3 months ahead, you should go check your seats about 90 days before the flight, since they will randomly switch around what size plane they use. Check again a month ahead in case they went “Oops, this flight is way undersold, let’s put you on an Embraer and assign you the seat next to the stinky lav.” (This doesn’t happen to me with Alaska, since they have 737s, 737s, and 737s, but when I fly American it happens all the damn time.)

4. Check in to your flight as soon as you can on the web! Usually this is 24 hours ahead these days. Sometimes you can switch for free to a way better seat that they were hoping to sell for more bucks but didn’t.

5. Do you know about seatguru.com? It has the seat layouts for pretty much every airline, and commentary on which seats are good or bad and why. It’s SO HANDY.

6. It’s time to fly! Be polite, friendly, but not chatty with the customs officers. Be really organized with the TSA. If you have your shoes off, your laptop out, your liquids in a baggie, your boarding pass and passport in your hand, and a bored expression on your face, they usually save the harassment theatre for someone else. (If you’re white, cis-gendered and able-bodied, that is. :/ Oh Homeland Security.) I always bring a blanket and a stuffed animal big enough to use as a pillow on the plane so I can sleep through the parts where you aren’t allowed to listen to headphones.

7. Stay calm about things. Turbulence happens! Pretend you’re on a ride. Delays happen! It’s okay, you will get there anyway, they will take care of you. People budge in front of you in line! The plane’s not leaving until everyone is on, and once you’ve landed, even the last person off will still stand around waiting for their baggage. There might be crying babies, unpleasant seat mates, and gross food! Write imaginary articles about them for the in-flight magazine.

8. Read the in-flight magazine! Sometimes previous travellers have written in notes. If no one has yet, write in some notes or start a game of tic-tac-toe. Or take the magazine and switch it for a different magazine and really confuse the next person. Also, watch the safety demonstration. The flight attendants are way more bored of it than you are, and some of them spice it up with dance moves, seriously.

9. Bring hard candies and a decongestant nose spray, in case your ears get really cranky. The one time you need them you will be so happy. Also put the charger for your cell phone in your carry-on, in case you are randomly delayed between connections.

10. Remember to look out the window and think I AM FOR REAL FLYING THROUGH THE AIR LIKE A GODDAMN BIRD OH MAN HUMANS ARE AMAZING.

Okay now tell me your stupid flying tricks!

It’s alive

So after I left Deb and Jim’s place (such a nice house, but of course like most homeowners they see it as a succession of chores) I drove to London.

It took me from 9 am until 7:15 to drive 506 kilometers.  It should have taken six hours, tops.  It took from 12:30 to 5:30 to drive from where the 115 meets the 401 to Guelph.  Words cannot describe my irritation; the combination of it being the Friday before the long weekend, the weather and the continuous construction along that stretch of road fixed it so that in the words of Dorothy Dunnett, I explored tedium to its petrified core.

I got to Oakridge in time to register, then went to the Greek Canadian Club and arranged to stay at a motel on Fanshawe Park Road called the Lighthouse.  At this gathering, there were 400 people… at least … and I didn’t recognize a single soul.  Not one.  Nobody, uhn-uh, personne.  I bought a zipper hoodie with the reunion logo on it for $20, not unreasonable.

But for reconnecting, not so much.  Went back to the motel and decided to patronize ‘The Black Pearl’ a watering hole attached thereto, run by a married couple and their hot and hotter daughters.  The place is the size of two big living rooms back to back, and the place is closing in two weeks because the owners of the motel did not renew the lease.

It was the last Karaoke Night at the Black Pearl the next night.  I filed this away, in case the dinner dance out at the Western Fair building was a write off.

It was.  I came, I ate (I’d paid for the fucking meal, after all) I greeted Barb, the one person there I recognized, and my god wasn’t she just the picture of a nicely done up middle aged lady, including having maintained her girlish figure.  I drank one disgusting vodka plus sugar water which made me feel like hurling, and immediately drove back to the Black Pearl, where I grabbed a seat at the bar and watched the set up and singing.  There was a guy who channeled Frank Sinatra.  There was a guy with a voice… well, I told him to his face that if Tom Waits gargled a bucket of gravel before a gig, he’d sound like that.  Since he didn’t know who Tom Waits was this meant nothing to him, but the guy standing beside me spit out his drink.

I drank four beers, sang two songs, went to bed.  Or tried to.  About ten songs have tried to land on me in the last little while (car trips); I wrote out lyrics for one and the rough sketch of the melody for the other, and then worked on the homily a little.

Drove by the old place on Oakridge Drive.  The two maple trees are still in the front yard; everything else is different.

Drove by Sue’s old place.  It didn’t look any different except the trim is a different colour.

Drove by University Hospital.  It has nice new signs that look expensive and are very high off the ground.

Drove by where the Golden Pheasant Motel was, the first place I stayed when my family moved to London.  It isn’t there any more. There’s a lot of nice new houses.

Drove down Dundas Street and said hello to ‘the strip’.

Drove past Tak Sun.

Drove past where the Three Little Pigs used to be.  It’s still a family restaurant.

Drove past Jeff’s old place on Oxford.

Drove past where I used to live when I was working at the hospital.  I moved out of my parents’ place the day of the Jonestown massacre.  A fair piece back.

I passed Windermere but I didn’t go up that road.  I would have gotten very nostalgic and weepy.  I learned to play guitar in the married students quarters when I lived with my parents and they were going to Western.

Had tea and a lovely visit with Phyllis.  She is grimly determined to keep as much of her mobility as she can, but it hurts.  She is still as keenly intelligent and interested in the world as it goes by as ever she was; nobody just meeting her would give her 85. She looks 20 years younger than that to me.  Her cat Smokey is ADORABLE and allowed me to fondle him rather a lot more than most cats will on first acquaintance.  I miss MY little furball rather a lot.

Stopped at the Husky on the 401 for steak and eggs and now I’m safely ensconced at Catherine and Colin’s.

My, something sounds like a blowtorch.  I must go investigate.