Category Archives: Vancouver

Happy New Year from Vancouver

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It’s been that kind of a year. Here’s to a better 2007!

The crowd down at the Heather. I told Sean not to have a sunken bar!

I resolve to go out no more than once a week, unless I can afford it (sorry Sean and all at the Heather). I resolve to get a nice, self-sufficient quantity of writing and editing clients. I resolve to make a deal for at least one book for an agency client this year. I resolve to work out so I can fit back into those damn jeans.

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the best prevent-a-hangover advice you’ll ignore anyway

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St. Mary MartiniFor whatever reason, my friends from far and wide seem unduly concerned with the state of my hangover tomorrow morning. In fact (and I hope you’re sitting down for this) I haven’t had a hangover on New Year’s Day for something like eighteen years, except for the time I was staying at Jaime‘s because the fact is that everyone who stays at Jaime‘s wakes up with a well-deserved hangover every single day, which is why it’s so handy he works at Starbucks: the remedy is right there in the vacuum pot.

I like staying at Jaime‘s.

But where was I? Ah yes, why I don’t tend to have a hangover on New Year‘s. Well, for the longest time I was a wage ape at Starbucks, as perhaps you are aware. Now, because I cannot tolerate cigarette smoke and because I am of a certain age that ensured that all nightclubs in my clubbing days were as cloudy as the tilapia tank at T&T, I never got into the habit of going to bars and nightclubs. And Howard and his angels knew that. They looked around their labour force and saw twentysomething clubber after twentysomething clubber, until they came to me.

*$, yoShe’ll work New Year’s Day, they said. She’s not going on a booze cruise the night before, no way. And, sadly, they were right. You know it’s bad when your own mother tells you to loosen up and get out more.

I never listened to her.

Consequently, they’d have me working New Year’s Day, which I did for seven straight years. And every. Single. Time. most of the scheduled workforce would call in with life-threatening hangovers. Every. Single. Time. I’m no fool: I’d called them all the night before, just to remind them they didn’t have to be 100%, but they had to be present, vertical, and soberer than the customers the next morning. I offered presents and free pizza to anyone who showed up on time. Did it do any good? Hell to the no, but where would I be if it had? I’d be desperately casting around for blog fodder, that’s where I’d be!

Now, you may know, if you know anything about me, that I’m a raging bitch, despite my low Wrath rating on the Seven Deadly Sins test. I am also a fully capable stalker type, but only for recreational purposes. So what was my response to these no-shows? hang ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen...

If the customer flow was slow enough, I would phone them every half-hour, “to check on” them. “Feeling better?” I’d chirp. “I’m worried about you, especially since you said you weren’t going to go drinking. Do you think it’s food poisoning? My friend got that after eating a boiled egg salad with blue cheese dressing. It was room temperature, and it smelled kinda funny but he choked it down and then he went skiiing and blacked out halfway down the mountain when the needle that the paramedi- are you there? Hello? Hello?”

In any case, on the off-chance that you work or live with someone as unbearable as me, here is some good advice for preventing hangovers on this, the hangover-producingest night of the year. But let’s face it: you won’t need this, as you are indeed not out pouring Mai Tai’s, Long Island Iced Teas, and carbonated Shiraz down your throats but instead at home, quietly reading blogs.

To this very sensible advice, I would add only this: AVOID COINTREAU. Avoid Grand Marnier, Curacao, and Triple Sec as well. They are the sword of the angel of death, believe me. As nummy as they are (and they are! Death is a seductive bitch) they are not worth it. They won’t drive you to madness (for that take two Negronis and call me from lockup) but they will drive you to think of suicide. Fortunately, you’ll be too hungover to actually kill yourself.

Oh yes, and Eggs Benedict was invented as a hangover cure. None superior to it has ever been found, so there goes your diet.

Cambridge News tips: if it’s good enough for undergraduates, it’s good enough for you. This one also includes the very sensible “hair of the dog” but neglects to say you should avoid very hairy dogs the next morning; a Chihuahua portion, rather than a St. Bernard, is more than adequate, except if you’re Lindsay Lohan, for whom only a medium-sized Labrador would be adequite. As for the legend that this only puts off the final pain, well fuckit, I’m all for putting off pain indefinitely. As the great Dean Martin suggested, just stay drunk!

1. Pace yourself: if you peak too soon you’ll be taking an early booze bath.2. Eat. Stuff your face with Christmas leftovers before you hit the alcohol.

3. Don’t mix your drinks: stick to your tipple of choice whether it be champagne, beer or sherry. A pint of the black stuff will not sit well on top of a crisp Chardonnay.

and so on.

And here’s LiveScience, with the predictable scientific “drink water, don’t drink booze at all” stuff that is why scientists are known far and wide as the life of the par-tay.

  • Try to eat because food will reduce the irritation to your stomach lining. Soups are good for replacing salt and potassium depleted by alcohol, and fruits and vegetables can help replenish lost nutrients.
  • You can take pain relief medications such as ibuprofen and naproxen sodium to reduce your headache and muscle aches as long as your stomach isn’t upset and you have no history of ulcers or bleeding problems. Antacids can help ease nausea and gastritis.
  • Drink a glass of water in between drinks containing alcohol. This will help you drink less alcohol, and will also decrease the dehydration associated with drinking alcohol.

Follow the link for more sensible tips. No Cointreau, Eggs Benny on standby, Designated Driver, and Bob’s your uncle!

Who the fuck is Bob, though?

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the fudgsicle of doom! #1 in a series of jobs you do NOT want

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The Golden Spruce, yoIn the presumably long list of Jobs You Do Not Want, Seriously, the job of backwoods logger looms large, or should. Why? Allow me to tell you the story of Hal Beek, heartlessly stolen from John Vaillant’s excellent book The Golden Spruce. I love books like this which are loaded with scientific trivia and anecdotal illustrations while looking at what a particular incident says about our culture at large; the best of these is Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, some factoids from which I can still recite from memory.

Also, Junger is purty.

Some background material, just to put things in perspective: logging towns are known to post signs listing how many days the mill workforce has gone without injury, and double digits are cause for celebration. Woohoo! For one clue as to why, Vaillant lists one logger’s typical breakfast: 17 boiled and peeled eggs and one cup of Cutty Sark.

Under ideal conditions, chainsaws function like noisy butter knives: one can buck up a large tree using only the weight of the saw and the pressure of one’s trigger finger. But they will also take off a man’s limbs as fast as a tree’s. Given the right combination of opposing forces, they can behave like Ninja helicopters, and their tremendous power encourages a dangerously casual attitude toward smaller trees. A faller named Hal Beek discovered this in the worst way imaginable while working a setting on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1998. Unlike second-growth tree plantations, which are usually monocultural groves all the same age, most old-growth forests contain trees from every stage of life; in between the giants are other aspirants of various sizes, including hundreds of saplings. As he travels from one big tree to the next, a faller will often use his saw like a slow-moving machete, swinging it back and forth in front of him – motor by the hip, blade angled toward the ground – to clear a path for himself. However, by cutting these smaller trees on a bevel rather than flat, the faller leaves a trail of “pig’s ears” – pointed stumplets – behind him. Beek had cut a trail through a stand in order to get at a windfall cedar about two metres in diameter, and while standing atop the fallen trunk, he reached over and cut off another nearby sapling, leaving behind a pig’s ear about a metre and a half high. It was raining (as usual) and while Beek was bucking up the cedar, he slipped backward on some moss and impaled himself on this living spear; it entered through his rectum and didn’t stop until it reached his spine. At that point, his toes were just touching the ground.

Fallers who have lost limbs to saws and shearing trees generally describe the experience as feeling like a “bump”; the real pain tends to come later. But an injury such as Beek‘s is different; the pain he felt was instantaneous and indescribable. Every motion, even his attempts to call for help, would have been an agony unto itself – the kind that would make most people pass out. Making matters worse was the fact that his legs were already fully extended: there was no way to free himself, and every movement risked driving the stake in further. Fallers generally work in pairs for safety reasons, and it is now customary for partners to call out to each other if they don’t hear the other one’s saw running, but Beek‘s partner was of the old school and he was oblivious; he heard neither Beek‘s shouts nor his emergency whistle. Beek realized that if he couldn’t save himself, and quickly, he was going to bleed to death. Somehow he found it in himself to restart his saw, manoeuvre its thirty-six inch bar behind him, and cut himself free – without amputating his feet, or collapsing back on the sapling or the saw. Then, with the metre-long stave still inside him, Beek crawled a hundred metres up an embankment, through heavy brush to a logging road. By the time the helicopter came, his friends were calling him Fudgsicle. After three months spent attached to a colostomy bag, and another three in rehab, he went back falling.

Hey, a man’s gotta make a living, eh?

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It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your stats are?

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I certainly know where mine are.

blog stats dec 28 06

In the toilet.

I suppose it’s a function of being offline for oh, say, three weeks off and on. Thanks to a unique combination of impecunity and historic windstorms in Vancouver, my apartment has been internetless for some time.

Naturally, I had to evacuate. I’m currently blogging from Ontario, which is, I admit, a little far to go, particularly since my neighborhood is dotted with free public computers; the problem is, of course, that these computer sources, being staffed by civil servants, aren’t open during the holidays or after four pm, which is when anyone really worthwhile really just gets going. Also, of course, I am in Ontario and not the Downtown EastSide now, so it would be really inconvenient for me to be using those computers, even supposing I could wake up early and everything.

But not to worry: Operation Global Media Domination will not be deterred by a momentary blip caused by the unique Perfect Blogstorm of the combination of the anniversary of the Birth of Jesus, the Windstorm of 2006, the Blight of Odeo, and the Great Internet Famine. Indeed, I’ve got a beaver shot coming that will be heard ’round the world, so stay tuned!

Refresh early, refresh often! 

getting carded

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This, for the record, is a post about Christmas cards.

First of all, there are two kinds of people: the people who divide everything into categories and those who don’t. Sure, you’ve heard it before, but it’s still funny, and it’s still true.

I’m the former, masquerading as the latter. Under this carefree, warm and fuzzy hippie facade you’ll find a heart of … well, science has, in fact, been puzzled by that for decades; it’s a bit like the elusive Giant Squid, only like way elusiver, and if they ever capture it on video I shall immediately post the YouTube, yew betcha.

In any case, I do find myself living in a dichotomous world, and whether or not that is completely subjective or not isn’t a question I bother my pretty (and newly red) head about: after all, if the world IS completely subjective, my take on it is obviously and by definition correct. If it is objective, my take on it is still obviously and by definition correct, and things are made much simpler by the fact that other people are forced to acknowledge this, even sometimes really stupid ones.

Christmas cards. It’s a post about Christmas cards.

There are two kinds of Christmas cards. There are the kind you fall in love with at Granville Island, deep in the heart of the bourgeois yet nonetheless charming West Side. For each of these, you pay approximately the amount I spend on my main meal each day, and for once I am not joking, although it must be admitted that my meals consist primarily of bean thread noodles, chicken stock, and whatever veggies were on sale that day at Sunrise Market.

They look like this:

West Side Cards, cuz that's how we roll, yo

And then there are the cards that you are just walking down Dunlevy past the Franciscan Sisters of Mercy Bread Jardin lineup (management must here point out that it is, at this time of year, actually a combination soup/bread jardin, to be technical-minded) of assorted impecunious individuals, and one of them (it is not clear whether he is a volunteer, a staffer, or just an above-noted assorted impecunious individual, although he is certainly not a Franciscan Sister of Mercy or, indeed, of anything else) just hands you out of a box.

A big handful. Ten or twelve at least. I’m talking Granville Island lunch money for a week-type number of cards!

And he says, “Merry Christmas, have some Christmas cards.” And he hands me a mittful.

And I say, “Huh?” because sometimes I am a wee bit slow on the uptake, and I’m wondering if this is going to be followed by some kind of pitch, or if, indeed, he has rolled some poor old widder lady, the sole hope of penmanship on the Downtown EastSide, and stolen her Christmas cards, but no, it appears that he merely has a whole whack of cards that the Catholic church wants him to give away, so he does.

Will I burn in Hell if I think to myself that his offer means I should be wearing a more expensive kind of jacket to be walking around this neighborhood in? Perhaps I will, and I struggle for a moment with the idea of handing back the cards to give to the needy, but that’s what he’s already doing, for lo, I certainly have more than eight friends, and I certainly have no more money for no more fancy West Side cards.

And, as it turns out, these Downtown EastSide nun-sponsored freebies do, in fact, look pretty spiffy:

Downtown EastSide cards, cuz that's how we ALSO roll, yo

So, the world of Christmas cards is divided into two kinds; the kind you buy at the store, and the kind that fall from the sky like flakes once you run out of money.