The parents cometh....

Just a quick post to say that my parents and my aunt arrive here in two hours, hoorah!! They will be here for two and a half weeks, the first of which will be spent with me in Victoria, so my posts will be sporadic, perhaps non-existent (what changes?!!). To update you on the past week: the weather has greatly improved and it is now very hot and sunny, Christie and I have got back into our old Subway-followed-by-gelato habits, the swimming pool is still not fixed but the liner is on order, I can't go and see Turin Brakes next week because I'll be in Victoria, and I went on a date yesterday with a very nice man from Langley. It was a strange experience for someone like me who doesn't 'do' dates, but as meetings go, it was good. There will be a second....

Off to finish my work and then go to pick my parents up from the airport - the joy of jamming four people plus luggage in a two-door 1990 Mazda awaits!!

The madness on the roads

Did I ever blog about nearly running someone over in the car a while back? I don't remember writing about it, so I probably didn't. I thought about this tonight, for reasons that will become clear later, but for now, here's the story.

A few months ago I was driving back from somewhere or other, in the middle of the day, and was coming up the hill towards our house along one of the main roads. After passing through a set of traffic lights in the left hand lane of the two possible southbound lanes, I was merrily trying to get Fab to go at a non-embarrassing pace, when I rounded the left hand corner in the road and straightened the car out. Coming the other way were a few cars and a guy on a motorbike. And as I rounded the corner and started to go straight, I saw the guy on the bike start to slide. It had been raining that day and the road was fairly greasy, and he did this threatening little wobble before starting to topple and slide head first, motorbike and all, right towards my wheels. It's a complete cliche, but it's true; everything was in slow motion. Anyway, as his head was coming towards my left front tyre, I took a deep breath and wrenched the car over to the right, into the other lane, where luckily there was no car. His head whizzed past my tyre with about a foot to spare and he and the bike eventually came to a graceful stop at the side of the road. The guy must have had half his skin taken off, as it was hot and he was wearing a T-shirt, but he seemed to be so shocked and embarrassed that he just pulled himself and the bike up and shot off, after myself and another guy had got out to make sure he was in one piece. And after pulling off into a side road and doing some shaking for a bit, I drove home.

I thought about this earlier, because I have just driven back from New Westminster, after watching Sunshine play baseball, and I missed being caught up in a nasty accident by about a minute. Drivers in Vancouver seem to be notoriously bad at most skills, but generally they just drive too fast and they don't take enough care when changing lanes. So after having been tailgated by quite a few jerks on the way back from New West, I came off Kingsway and onto 41st, went through some lights, came over the top of the hill, and screeched to a halt before the carnage in front of me. God knows what had happened, but there were two wagon cars and a sports car spread across our lanes, with the sports car and one of the cars mushed together in the road, and the other car smashed to the side on the pavement. I pray that no-one was passing on the pavement at the time, because they were probably under the wheels of the car by now. Traffic ground to a halt, and I hesitated, because my instinct was to pull over and get to any people in the cars, but there were already horrified passers-by at the side of the road who obviously lived in the houses and had heard the crash. And as I hesitated, I heard the sirens of the rescue trucks coming down the road*. So after checking that there were no bodies in the road, I skirted round the wreckage and continued home. The two bigger cars weren't too badly damaged, but the sports car didn't have much chance. Neither did any pedestrians.

And after seeing this, you would have thought that drivers on 41st would have slowed down on the drive home, possibly thinking about what could happen to them if they weren't careful. But oh no, that would be too much to ask for....

*In England, the crash couldn't possibly have only happened one minute before I arrived on the scene, as the sirens wouldn't have been heard for at least 10 minutes, with all the trouble with the health service. However, here they have a different approach to the emergency services. Because Vancouver is so hellish to get through at a fast pace, and because there are few ambulance stations compared to fire stations, most of the responses to calls for ambulances are from fire trucks. Firemen are trained in CPR and first aid, and fire trucks also double as rescue trucks, so usually the fire truck will get to a scene within a couple of minutes, and the fireman/paramedic will give interim first aid until the ambulance gets there. It sounded like a bizarre system when I first got here, but it works great....

And just to qualify that....

Of course it's a man issue. Isn't it always? Well, either that or my lack of a job. No offence to the men out there, but I do find it hard to work you out sometimes, and I'm a bloody Psychology graduate. I'm sure you all have the same problem with me. But I find it slightly confusing that at 26, which you would think is a pretty sensible age, I can't manage to find a guy who isn't a commitment-phobe or doesn't want to just sleep with lots of girls because they can. Sigh. Of course this is free choice, and maybe if I had queues of people lining up to sleep with me then perhaps I would think that it was a good idea to be free and easy, but somehow the idea doesn't appeal to me. Not that having some fun wouldn't be, well - fun - but I have little energy to expend on things that are doomed to go nowhere nowadays. They do say that opposites attract, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised.....

On a completely different note, I am often heard by people in Vancouver to be ranting about the inability of the Weather Network to get weather reports right more than a few hours in advance. We'll see how they do with this one - for next Monday, the 18th July, they have the weather down as being sunny and 35 degrees. Yes, you read that right, 35 degrees. Watch this space as that gets revised to 10 degrees and pissing rain over the next week.

I have rediscovered the joys of Vertical Horizon. It seems they've done some damn good stuff since I last bought one of their albums some long time ago. Other more random aquisitions over the last few days include Credence Clearwater's 'Bad Moon Rising', Scarlet with 'Independent Love Song' which I remember buying the single of when I was rather younger, 'Whoa Black Betty Bamalam' (by Lynyrd Skynyrd?) and 'I'd Really Love To See You Tonight' which I never knew was by people called England Dan and John Ford Coley. Well I think there is a Barry Manilow version, but I've steered clear of that.

Oh, I survived the Sea Vancouver festival in once piece. And I saw Burt Reynolds yesterday. The words 'perma-tan' and 'botox' came to mind immediately, as well as 'yellow' and 'plastic'. He can probably sue me for that. But it was true........

I would just like to say

that I am a fuckwit.

A date with the Rhinos

So there was a change of plan for the 'date day' and The Guy (henceforth referred to as TG - I think I'd better ask him before I put his name in) couldn't get hold of his brother's car to come over to me. So I trundled over to Coquitlam, which is about an hour away (or an hour and a half through the damn roadworks going on in Vancouver) to watch him play ice hockey with his team. There are Molson Mens hockey leagues here, and the Rhinos are in division three of five. They were playing the Tri-City Ice Hawks, who they seemed to have lost to frequently in the past, but after a tightly fought first half the Rhinos came through 10-5. With a nice assist by TG for one goal, I must say.

After the game I gave him a lift back to Maple Ridge with his kit and assorted hockey sticks, then going on to the place he's staying at whilst he finds somewhere else to rent. We watched most of The Big Lebowski and then I was forced to stay overnight because it was pitch black and torrential rain, which I could hardly see in to drive. Even going from the hockey venue to TG's house I had to follow a slow truck because I couldn't see the road myself. So there was no way I was going to be able to find my way back to Vancouver from some random part of Coquitlam in the rain. No crude thoughts, dear readers, it was an entirely innocent decision, made with regard for my safety!

So today I didn't get home until 11am, and have now been confronted by volunteers dropping out left, right and centre for tomorrow's Sea Vancouver festival. Luckily I still have some die-hard fantasticos who are sticking it out. For the next four days I am going to be an emotional wreck and completely exhausted, as I am meant to be on site from about 9am-10:30pm every day. Ok, so this was the case when filming as well, but then I got paid for that..... If I don't post until Sunday, just believe that I am working hard and falling into bed at night without the time to blog. But I'll be thinking of you all!

In summary then, I am optimistic. Watch this space for developments :o)

The madness

It continues. After the insanity of filming came a day of relative calm on Thursday and then Canada Day on Friday. The bbq at Mel's house was good, although I ate far too much cake, and the garlic bread that I took turned out (after having been put in the oven for 20 mins and looked forward to by everyone) to be bread, sans garlic butter. Cue a complaint at the IGA on Saturday, which resulted in me being given another garlic bread and some free chocolate cupcakes, which I then ate too many of again and felt rather sick in the night as a result. I never learn.

The weekend has been taken up with trying to track down volunteers who said they'd work at the Sea Vancouver festival next week and are in my department, but who now seem to have gone awol and are refusing to answer my e-mails. If only people would be civil enough to send a reply back, even telling me to bugger off, that would be good. Of course as it's been the holiday weekend ringing people is less than useless, as they're all out. Grrrr!!! I also get the odd person e-mailing with inane requests and suggestions, none of which I can do anything about. But some of my volunteers are lovely and the whole thing should be fine once it gets going. At the moment I seem to be parking captain, joint volunteer check-in captain and dock crew, so my four days of festival are going to be sheer and utter exhaustion.

However, there are things to look forward to. Monday brings some shopping with Christie, as long as I don't have any work. Tuesday brings a date - yes, a date! - with the cute guy I met on my film shoot. Ok, so it's not really a date yet, he's just coming round to my house. Then depending on the weather, we'll decide what to do. Let's hope he's not an axe murderer, seeing as he now has my address. If I don't post in a while, dear reader, make enquiries. I'm giving Christie his description and phone number just in case ;o)

Above all, I need sleep. So I'm off to bed. Night!

Happy Canada Day!

And for your perusal, whoops...........