Category: Urban living

Unpacking

Unpacked 1 kitchen box, hung up some clothes and then back to BGs3 and Ds1.

Keith was here.  I texted Paul to let him know he was here overnight.

My life is a long list of people who won’t pick up their phones. This won’t last, I’m just peevish.
Recently learned that the ‘professional’ painters left an open can of pain thinner at their place of work, which happens to be Kopper’s house, thank you very much, thus nearly killing the fume-sensitive occupants.  Bad word connoting bad manners and stupidity.

Cooked halibut, tater tots and corn last night, with crunchy veggies on the side.  Mind you, Jeff had to say something like, “Wanna order in?” before I got off my butt and started doing like Ah promised.  I am now officially a BG fan but I want to kill Baltar and slap the Colonel around some too.  At least I have a fighting chance of understanding the BG filk now!

Got home in exactly 55 minutes last night.  This is not the transit time – this is the time it takes me to walk up to the bus stop, wait for the bus, get to the Skytrain, transfer, get on another bus, and walk through my back door. This is half an hour faster than it used to take me to get home to 2nd St.  I am not displeased.
Seems like some boys at work shaved head over Easter.  Fanboy (a guy in my department) showed up with an extreme load of stubble, RobofNine took it down to his dome, practically.  All that shiny pink skin, disturbing somehow.

Expensive Sunday

So I got a KHS bike, plus trimmings, at Sports Junkies.  Holy diddle, the brakes on that thing… I am used to reefing on the brakes and barely slowing down, and this thing is so touchy I nearly came off the first time I put on the binders.  The Luddite walked me through everything I needed to know (he is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about bikes).  Then I fed him at Taco Loco and headed home, where I flatly refused to pack and curled up with Dorothy Dunnett’s To Lie With Lions for the umpteenth time.

Busy day

I HOPE I didn’t catch what Tammy had.  She was not exactly deathly ill while she was here, nor was she knocked much out of her usual cheerful demeanour, but man, she was sick, and I am really glad I could put her up where she’d get some TLC. I got the car around 9 and drove her to the airport.  We had an extremely long and involved conversation on the way out there – and Tom L. tried to run me off the road in HIS Prius, which was amusing after I stopped cursing at this bozo who couldn’t stay in his lane.
I dealt with the flat (total props to Joe at the Shell at Main and King Eddy) and then thought f*ck it, I’ll call ScaryClown and ask him what he’s up to, seeing as how he lives about ten blocks from where the tire got fixed.  He was sitting with Tyson and Luke, two buddies of his, in the Starbucks at Main and 14th, and then we had a late brekky at the breakfast joint on the south side of the intersection.  His buddies (whom I have heard MUCH about, mostly positive and somewhat in relation to alcohol consumption, life threatening illnesses and mischief making) were funny and sweet and entertaining and it was a remarkably successful lunch given I’d never met them before. ScaryClown had of course said much about ME, which gave me pause, but it must have been mostly positive because they seemed disposed to like me.

Got a call from Kopper saying that I need to do something political soon, and I agreed, smiling at the notion that given what an absurd bunch of clowns we have on council in Burnaby anyway, why not have a comedian run for office?  So I will be supporting same.  Updates as events warrant.

Then I paid the March rent for the new place, crossed the alley and tried my front door key for the first time, and in a burst of energy, unpacked the kitchen so that when Jeff gets there in about three hours there will be one room of the house (besides the bathroom) that isn’t a complete disaster.   Then I called him and gave him an update.

Sigh.  Unpacking is way more fun than packing. I have now reassessed how much room will be in the new place and I will be storing every stick of furniture I have except my bed and dresser.  I literally won’t have room for anything else.  Oh, and I must have been taking colour blindness pills when I looked at the kitchen.  The kitchen is red white and green. Yup, I have a red (REDDDDD!!!! RED RED RED counters) and white (trim and cupboards) and SLIME GREEN (remember slime green???) kitchen.  The slime green is going to get buried under eggshell white as soon as I have the paint, the energy and the buy in from brother dearest.

Tammy was all upset on my behalf that Jeff is getting the lion’s share of room for stuff, but I think we’ll both be reassessing things after we’re in, and his furniture’s way nicer than mine anyway.

I am SO excited.  My life is about to drastically improve, and I’m already thinking of ways I can improve the shining hour during my commute.

Gas leak

Man, the last 48 hours have been jammed with incident. I was supposed to go pick Kopper up at 6:10 last night but between me getting tied up with something at home and then having to get over to the other Can car and her working late, I was a full half hour late picking her up. Well and good, we’re prepared to get the evil eye from the instructor, and then we run into a roadblock on Lougheed Highway right after Kopper says, “The Skytrain’s not running,” and we’re redirected way the hell off the highway, and we’re contemplating what this might be about including, Gosh wow, an Olympic security exercise (only 750 days to go until we host the world, barfula gagula).

We turn on the radio to News 1130 (the flexible enema nozzle of capitalism in the GVRD) and pretty much simultaneously with the announcer saying something about a broken gas line WE SMELL GAS. We’re not talking about a little whiff. It’s pouring bloody rain and the wind’s blowing and WE CAN SMELL GAS. For, like, six long city blocks. I remember thinking “Well, at least I’m on the explosion side, I should mask Kopper from most of the shrapnel.” Then Kopper says the equivalent of “Sod this for a lark, I’m taking YOU to the Keg.” At that point we’d been stuck in redirect traffic along Broadway for a while and we were going to catch the last 15 minutes of the class.
So we went to the renovated Keg on Willingdon and we ate and my GOD what it’s like to hang around people who don’t require you to censor every single thought. I think Kopper feels much the same – we ate and talked and talked and talked and it was definitely therapeutic.

Stupid criminals

This happened in Toronto, more than 20 years ago.

A friend of mine had a daughter who worked at an answering service (remember those?) in the same building as a parole office. She left the office door open for cross ventilation because the building was rather stuffy and they could actually open windows. There were two women on shift at time. Their desks both faced the door.

As it happened, the open door was situated directly in front of a fire hose cabinet. The women watched in astonishment as a man on his way to the parole office stopped in front of their open door, looked up and down the hallway, and then carefully stashed his bag of pot in the firehose cabinet. Miraculously, the phone in the office didn’t ring while he was standing in front of the door. He then went to his appointment.

One of the women, who was vehemently opposed to pot use, got up from her desk, got the bag, flushed the contents down the john, threw out the bag, and sat back down at her desk. A few minutes later Mr. Stupid Criminal came down the hall, opened the firehose cabinet, and went wtf? He looked up the hall, he looked down the hall. He never once looked through the open door at his back, while the two women, purple from suppressed laughter, got a thirty second demonstration of the cognitive skills that had him visiting a parole office in the first place.

contradancing

Well, what a Vancouver Experience. First off, people I’ve paid money to see were dancing with me…. that was bizarre enough. Then I had somebody come up to me – actually two somebodies – & ask me if it was a nice break from singing funny songs. I’m famous, don’t you know (their word, not mine) for my appearances at Jericho. I had three men ask me to dance in rapid succession at one point, which was interesting. I danced with the Luddite two out of three times. I’m just not used to dancing that hard with no help from sweet sweet beer.
So I completed three dances and sat out two but my god by a little before 9:30 I was getting shooting pains down my right leg as my enthusiasm outstripped the capacity of my back to cope with the jiggling. (Rock and roll dancing is much easier on my back… and I got invited to go dancing at the Rage by the Chef next weekend TOO but alas I will be filking up a storm). Giblitz Fancy from Point Roberts was playing, and mighty fine playing it was, too. The Luddite, as promised, will be closing the place; it was very amusing watching him shed about six layers of clothing in rapid succession as he warmed up.
The dance is at the bottom of the hill so I was home jiggety jig, packed amongst young folk plotting exactly how drunk they plan to get tonight. Me, I’m going to curl up with Love, Actually, as I really like the actors. Has Chiwetel Ejiofor been in every frikkin movie in the last three years?

later….. it turns out the movie was very scratched and unplayable so I started on Man of the Year instead.

Does anybody have any idea why an Argus was flying around Vancouver?

Kopper and I saw it on Saturday.  Freaked the hell out of me… watching a long remaindered aircraft, which your father hunted Russian subs in, flying around Vancouver is right up there on the weirdity scale.  UPDATE

Oh, it was an Aurora.  Okay, nothing to see here.