The word of the week is indescribable.
Aug 30 - Falling For Mona
No haiku or life-inspired local poetry this week, just a comment from FB that I shared and some people liked: Fall? What's that? All the trees here are still green... butterflies flitting through the fields among the forested hills, deer cavorting amongst the flowers, and beach-goers still soaking up the fast-fading Westerly sunshine. Ah, BC... the ...last place in Canada where Summer spends its final sweet weeks. All in all, I’m enjoying the cooler weather, without any leaf-change underway.
Remember that Nicorette commercial from a year or two ago, where the cute brunette flight attendant freaks out from a lack of nicotine? I’ll bet you do; that was Anna Silk, and she’s starring in a new show premiering Sept 12th on Showcase called Lost Girl. It involves the supernatural( as seems to be the case of a lot of shows of late )but follows a different premise for the heroine. I’m interested to see where it goes, so I’ll try to catch it online or on YouTube as it goes along – also, Anna seems to have a Mona Lisa smile, which is intriguing to detect on the small screen. Try it.
Aug 31 – Nerf Sentries for your RV
Today’s the last day of August, and it occurred to me that I’ve not been camping in about a decade now, not since a trip to a far-north cottage with a giant industrial fridge and a dangerously-nail-filled plank dock on a lake. When I was younger, I really enjoyed touring through RV’s at shows held at the Pen Center every few years or so – seeing all the cool configurations packed into limited space still appeals to me. I’ve seen some interesting RV’s over the years, not ones that I’d buy myself( as they’re damn pricey )but I always appreciate the unusual – which this one has. I mean, come on – a hottub on the roof?
Some few months back, I mentioned that Nerf’s toy guns have exploded( pun intended )in popularity this year, with even machineguns making it to store shelves. Now a sci-fi fan has taken Nerf to the next level by adding heat-seeking capabilities to the machinegun – watch this video to see it in action. Aliens sentry guns, anyone? I wonder if you can safely add a taser element to those things...
Sept 1 – Crazy Rotation
Work this week has been hellish again – no matter what I do, how hard I work every minute of every shift, I still fall behind every day. I think the number of tasks and responsibilities being offloaded onto branch managers from our company is simply crazy, given the other expectations for customer service, marketing, managing the branch activities / employees and so forth we have to take care of as well. Trying to run two branches worth of responsibilities is wreaking havoc on my brain, and I can only hope that I can turn things around in the next month before I begin to seriously lose focus and ability to work. One comfort is that my current work doesn’t know about my blog, and I can mention such generalities here in passing, though I obviously can’t go into detail due to the nature of my employment. Rant rant rant... end.
Hmmmm.... seems in all my craziness, I forgot about one important aspect of car maintenance these last few years: tire rotation. Oops. I checked the tread on the tires this week, and the front ones were markedly more worn than the rear; obviously, since we’ve never rotated them. I took the car in to Wal-Mart where they performed this critical operation for a measly $5 per tire. Which apparently should be done every 20,000 km or so to keep the wear even. I also learned that BC law would not have let me do this come October, as apparently the tires with the deeper tread have to be on the rear of the car – how does that make sense with a front-wheel drive car where the weight is at the front? It doesn’t.
Sept 2 - JUST a phone? Really?
When is a phone just a phone these days, when it comes to portable devices? After moving to BC in late 2007, we were forced to replace all three Sanyo 4500 cell phones as Telus had just upgraded their networks here – they tried for hours to get them working, but the programming wouldn’t take. The replacement phones have a LOT of features... and commensurately lesser battery life as a result. My parents use them as phones, set the occasional alarm and still have yet to figure out how to take a picture or send a text message. Why can’t we get a phone that is JUST a phone and not pay for features that will never get used, like IM apps? I’m sure there’s a marketable idea here, to produce a phone that one simply makes calls with – perhaps an adult version of a kid’s cell phone? I’m not sure, but I’m going to see what I can do to find such a thing... or make some money from the idea if I can’t locate such.
Which leads me to my next question: should I get a new phone? My contract with Telus is up in November, and they’re already sending me offers to ‘upgrade’ my ‘outdated’ phone... which I still like a lot. As above, I don’t do much with my phone: I barely text( no QUERTY ), I rarely call anyone, I don’t surf the web on it( tiny screen / text based / expensive )and since it’s WELL before Android, I can’t do much for it in the way of apps. I’ve been considering an Android phone like the red-hot Samsung Galaxy S, but I’m really put off by the monthly costs, not to mention signing another contract to get the thing for a decent price. More and more I’m inclined to just wait, as the phones will get smarter, cheaper and much better in terms of screen quality / resolution... until they come with a full HDMI out with 1080p, I may just wait. And wait. And wait...
Sept 3 – MMO and Harlan
In all the crazy hours I’ve been working this week, I’ve managed to find a little time to update my iPod Nano – good to do if you have to spend an hour here and there waiting for your ride. I’ve added a few inexpensive shows to the thing, one of which is rather amusing: The Guild. It looks at the lives of members of an online MMO guild, who pretty much ignore real live in favour of the ‘better’ lives of the characters they’ve created to game online. Obviously tongue-in-cheek and overdone at times, it stars Felicia Day as the main character whose MMO addiction is so bad that her therapist fires her in the first episode. So far, it’s been quite enjoyable.
Heck since we’re on the topic of TV shows, does anyone remember that old stalwart of bad late 70’s programming, The Starlost? About a spacegoing ark of humanity, critically damaged and hurtling towards doom with the only hope of salvation being... Mormans? It was awful, low-budget stuff... and I loved it as my childhood imagination was fired by the concept, if not the execution of the show. Years later I discovered that the original idea was none other than Harlan Ellison’s, one of my more fave authors. Now word has come down that a comic series is coming out that reboots the TV show, which is a lot better news than hearing they were remaking the TV show – 70’s mullets, heavy moustaches and paper-thin effects budgets aren’t the stuff of new sci-fi TV standards any more, as BSG has shown us.
Sept 4 - Upscale around the clock!
Say, has anyone been into a McDonald’s lately? They’ve gone upscale without me noticing, as I was in there recently for their $1 any-size summer drink special. The new one here on Island Highway has plenty of designer-fabric seats, stone-block walls, a fireplace and flat-screen TV’s! Since when did they decide they wanted to go after the Starbuck’s crowd? I say that as there is now free WiFi at ALL McDonald’s locations... seems they want you to pay and stay, then pay some more. It can’t be the food, though they’ve added some less-greasy selections to their menu too, mostly chicken sandwiches that haven’t touched a deep-fryer.
The less said about work today, the better: I opened at Colwood and closed at Millstream, making it a 13-hour day... no major stresses other than the usual Busy meaning No Useful Work Got Done. I’m blessed with a fun, sane staff who are interesting people in their own right, but I have a lot of work that only I am authorized to get done that keeps piling up. At least the arrangement for getting my dad to work seems to be working out at Colwood: we drive me to work, he takes the bus to Victoria and I go get him at day’s end, usually hours after I’ve finished. So far, so good for the general timing of it all.
Sept 5 – A Visit to the USA!
Up early at 4am today to catch the ferry to Port Angeles, WA in the USA – my parents and I are visiting a cousin of the family we’ve not seen in decades. We boarded the ferry and left Victoria a little after 6am, at which point I discovered that a) ferries don’t have sea stabilizers and b) I was prone to motion sickness; no sea legs for me. Watching the railing dip several long feet from the horizon and back again was rather excruciating for me, but I made the 1.5 hour crossing without succumbing to seasickness to make landfall in sleepy Port Angeles close to 9am. We headed south to the town of Port Townsend where we met our cousin and her husband Bailey for breakfast at a little restaurant called The Bayview on the water – I had some stellar cheese-covered has browns with bacon and a sample of biscuits and gravy that reminded me of my trips to the southern USA in years gone by. We headed to Fort Worden, where I toured through the abandoned coastal defence bunkers, which are in remarkably good shape. It turned out to be a beautifully sunny day to spend there for a few hours, then we headed back to Port Townsend where we found the perfect patio spot at the Courtyard Cafe` : under a tree! With some root beer on hand, cheese-beer soup and a turkey sandwich on superbly fresh bread, I was in heaven until mid-afternoon. We strolled over to the local 50’s diner for some ice cream to cap off the day, puttered around the smallish tourist-driven small-town charm main street for a bit, then parted ways from our lovely American cousins to head the 55km back to Port Angeles for the ferry. I had wisely stopped to pick up some Dramamine along the way, so when we boarded the ferry at 9pm, I was feeling quite confident about my stomach.. and I wasn't disappointed. We were home by 11pm, none the worse for wear save being very, very tired - it was my first trip to the USA in almost ten years, so that was rather interesting in itself. Lots of good food! :-)
I’ve written most of this week’s blog while sitting parked in line, waiting to be loaded onto the Port Angeles COHO Ferry to return to Victoria. It’s been great to type it all up on the older Compaq laptop, as with the extended battery I get almost 3 hours of useful time per charge. Now that I know how to properly condition a battery, I expect to get a good few years of life out of this thing, more if I eventually add an SSD drive and Windows7. For now, I just slip it into sleep mode to eke out a few days between charges... again, useful when I want to pop out to a cafe` or elsewhere to compose my thoughts.
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