Just because we need it lately. Canadian Content warning; stolen from the very American Captain KJ.
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
Category Archives: Canada
you can never step into the same River Street twice
Behold the magnificence which is Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan’s River Street.
Often has it been said that Canadians are too literal-minded; most particularly often it has been said to my face, although there’s nothing about my face in particular or in whole which is literal-minded, and indeed quite often the parts migrate at will or vanish altogether and I’ll end up all ears, ferinstance.
Quite embarrassing, especially when they see me writing down everything they say.
But that is neither here nor there. And it’s certainly not in Moose Jaw, which is not all that far from everyone’s favorite Canadian place name: Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump.
So…have you been to Moose Jaw? Have you seen it? It’s not Paris, let me tell you. So, when the city fathers/mothers/foster parents put their heads together and wanted to do something uniquely Moose Jawian, they quite naturally phoned Germany and brought over artist Edgar Muller and his team to turn River Street into a painting of a river, reportedly the world’s largest 3-dimensional painting.
How proud they must be, eh?
So they not only paved Paradise: they gravened themselves an image of it and now walk all over it.
Stephen and the Case of the Second Most Expensive Frisbees Ever Invented
So Stephen (you remember Stephen?) he was once even younger, and when he was younger he was, as is the way, more junior, and he wasn’t a restaurant manager at all but instead a busboy on the Princess Something, a Canadian Pacific cruise ship/ferry crossbreed cruising between Victoria and Seattle.
And CP, they had standards. In fact, they could be said to have standards the way the SS could be said to have been strict-ish. And one of their standards was that, by the time they docked in Seattle, every piece of cutlery and every piece of china aboard would have been washed and dried to perfection, regardless of time pressures, or staff would be fired.
And it always was.
And many were the evenings, pulling into port, that Stephen spent at the stern of the ship, gleefully tossing aft the plates that they didn’t have the extra 15 minutes to wash. Puget Sound is lined with CP china and silver flatware, should you ever feel like taking a diving vacation.
Friends
What would you do for unsuspecting victims without them? I mean, really.
So there I am, staying with my friend James. He is a lovely man. A kind man. A thoughtful man.
So thoughtful, indeed, that during the entirety of my visit with him he has arranged that all his scheduled appointments take place between the hours of 9am and noon, knowing well that I shall be (and, indeed, was) dead to the world during this time.
A kind, thoughtful man.
And so today, it was with a sense of shock that I endured the following exchange.
Now, I’m not the sylph I was at twenty-one, ’tis true. Nor yet the Amazon I was at thirty-six, when I ran the Marathon (4:33:09, quite respectable thankyouverymuch). Yet, I am 25 pounds lighter than I was in January and have the ability to take off the jeans I got then, which were skin tight, without actually going to the trouble of unzipping them.
Still.
We were getting ready to leave the house. James wished, as a thoughtful friend, to facilitate my ability to take coffee along with me, although it must be said that this could have been purely selfish in motivation, me being much easier to get along with when I have caffeine to put in my system and a beverage to occupy my mouth instead of talking.
So he suggested I pour the hearty mug of Anniversary Blend I had in my hands into a travel mug and we could hit the road. The problem is, he did so using the following wording:
“Here’s an old chubby. It’s perfect for you.”
Stephen and the case of the most expensive frisbees ever invented
So my friend, Stephen…not that one, and not the V for Stephen Steven either, but the other one, that one, he was once young.
I wonder what that was like.
And when he was young, he was employable, and so he went out and got a job, as one does. And his job was as a restaurant manager at a swanky hotel in downtown Vancouver which isn’t there anymore…well, the hotel is, but the company isn’t, if you catch my drift. It’s exactly the same hotel, it’s just the suits have all been changed.
But not the suites; they are all just exactly the same.
Although the sheets would have been changed, I would imagine. If I imagined things about the sheets of hotels which I cannot afford.
Which I don’t.
And one day, the chief restaurant inspector and, indeed, Vice President of the whole hotel company, the Suit di tutti Suits, was visiting, restaurant-inspecting, and, indeed, quite possibly Viceing or Presidenting as well (I didn’t ask; didn’t want to know). And so Stephen NotThatOneNotTheOtherOneEitherButThatOne was showing him around.
And he showed him the restaurant. And he showed him the kitchen. And he showed him the freezers. And he showed him the entrance to the stairwell. And he showed him, because it was there and because the Inspector wished to Inspect simply everything, the basement.
Now, did I mention the plates? This restaurant, it wasn’t just foodie, as many restaurants can often tend to be. No indeedy not. It was not merely foodie: it was artsie as well. And to express its artsiness it had commissioned, at quite a considerable cost and to, naturally, an even more considerable deal of publicity, bone china plates, hand-painted by individual artists. Collective artists were, one supposes, deemed too hostile to capitalism to work on plates for business dinners.
And these plates, they were indeed works of art and priced accordingly. And, as Stephen NTONTOOEBTO was leading the VP-Inspector towards the stairs back up to the restaurant, he happened to look up.
The VP-Inspector, also, looked up.
And they saw a common or garden wheeled metal cart, the kind hairdressers load up with dryers and curlers and sprays and things, the kind that bartenders load up with bottles and glasses and obscure forms of garnish, the kind that kitchens load up with dirty dishes.
It was loaded.
Bearing a Three Kings-worthy load of approximately $17,000 in handpainted plates, it was slowly succumbing to the embrace of an accursed combination of momentum, unfortunate floor slope and gravity. Yes, it was thundering stairward at a pace which was, quite frankly, better than that which your basic VP-Inspektor or, indeed, your basic Stephen could muster on a typical day, even if they had not been a full floor below, staring up the bare concrete staircase at it.
Things looked inevitable, as they inevitably do at some point.
They looked at one another.
They looked up the stairs.
They looked at one another.
The front wheels left the staircase.
They ran.
I never did find out what happened to the cart after that; whatever it was, there were certainly no witnesses.
raincoaster 