What yesterday taught me:

• After ten at night, downtown in the boondocks is filled with attractive, well-dressed young couples strolling and chatting to one another and greeting friends.
• After ten at night, downtown in Vancouver is filled with staggering drunks, beggars, dopey hipsters wearing secondhand clothing they haven’t even brushed the dead owner’s dandruff off, and those so outrageously obnoxious that their own mothers out in said boondocks threw them out of their basement apartments and told them to go “get some fresh air.” This is much like the tourist effect, to whit: the reason most tourists are so obnoxious is that they are not traveling because they wish to, but rather because they have been thrown out by their homes.
• When I have that nagging feeling that I’m forgetting something in my apartment, that thing invariably turns out to be the keys to the place where I’m headed.
• When I forget the keys to the boondock-ridden locale where I am supposed to be house-sitting, it will be on a night when I decide to take the Skytrain to the very farthest station in said boondock and walk to the house via the “scenic route” which, of course, takes place in the foothills of the Coastal Mountain range.
• I must be getting fitter because, although the walk wiped me out, I no longer smell like wet pennies when I sweat, so this is an improvement.
• Conrad Black has two sons, in addition to the daughter who’s been doing the “faithful supporter” thing at the trial. Funny, I read his whole autobiography and he didn’t mention them. Nor getting married, if memory serves. What a family guy!
•  Those graveyards that have the small, flat stones set flush into the ground? When you pass them at speed on the Skytrain on a dark and stormy night, they sparkle. Almost worth forgoing the weeping angels. Somewhere in Boondock, Ontario, my mother is sparkling. Unless it snowed; then she’s twinkling.
• It is indeed possible to live off nothing but meat, cheese, caffeine and scotch for a week, but when you do
• you will crave, I mean actively crave, multivitamins.

That concludes tonight’s lesson.