From the desk of Kurtlas Copegut
It's like a mobius strip of agony - Me, 4:05 pm
I was merely overstating the headache that is Life Under Rosa the Re-doer. Deja vu the first time feels pretty cool, but on the 100th time, it's rather like a neverending Tilt-A-Whirl after consuming cotton candy wrapped around a sizeable piece of fried kielbasa.
Or something.
Okay, riddle me this: out of all the DVDs out there on people's shelves, what percentage of them have fingernail-sized dents and divots along the tops where people have tried in vain to peel off that effing security sticker? "PULL HERE" MY BUTT! Why oh why oh why do those stickers always come off in one hundred thousand sticky pieces?!?!
Okay, let us move away from irritating subjects (I'll have to leave my 233rd cell phone rant for another post. Oooo! Enticing!) I really, really want to conclude my uninteresting Christmas holiday story. So. Yes. That.
My relaxing, cookie-laden stay in Edmonton sadly drew to a close on the 29th. The flight back to VanCity wasn't as hairy (the delay was less than an hour, and there were far less air traveler refugees camped out in the terminals), although I found myself annoyed by what I think is a permanent fixture in all airports now: televisions blaring the news EVERYWHERE. At one time, there'd be the odd television here and there, but now there's one over every group of seats, so you can't really escape the noisy distraction of it. Can't they just type out the news headlines and have people read them instead? You can't tell me it's going to solve the boredom of waiting for your flight because the news loops at least every twenty minutes. What is the value in remaining affixed to that? I don't know . . . I suppose it's me. I hate having a television on if I'm not watching it. Before, I could get a boatload of reading and/or writing done while waiting for a flight (or waiting for someone arriving on a flight). There's something about the busy energy of an airport that I find inspiring. But TV kind of ruins that. It turns a room where people used to sit together with an unspoken, patient unity into a room where everyone just kind of stares passively at a target whilst turning off their brains and ignoring the people around them.
Great lemon wafers, am I romanticizing like an octogenarian or what?
It took a long while for the luggage to arrive at the carousel at YVR, so I walked around and stretched my legs, and found the lost luggage carnage from the week before. Don't think I didn't count the numerous hassle-free blessings I received on both my flights. I found my car easily enough, although I nearly had a cardiac event when I saw a ticket on the windshield. Turns out it was a "good" ticket issued by ICBC, praising me for using an anti-theft device (i.e. the Club I purchased the week after moving to Vancouver when my car was broken into). That was nice and all, but they should make these things look less ticket-y, because I swore so hard when I first spotted it that I had to wonder if I'd been raised by a sailor, a trucker, and Samuel L. Jackson.
I was completely surprised to see snow still on the ground. In fact, there was a heck of a lot more. The main roads seemed clear, but after almost sailing through the parking barrier, I realized that black ice was everywhere, and my drive home would probably be as long as my 5 am drive to the airport in the snow.
Cutting through the city, my mind was fairly blown. I had never seen so much snow accumulate in Vancouver before. Ever. It was a lot even for places that DO get a lot of snow. The side streets were very picturesque, but impossible to navigate. Most of the roads had narrowed by at least half a lane (and a lot of right turn lanes had disappeared altogether), due to the giant plow-created drifts on the side of the roads, which buried any vehicle unfortunate enough to be parked in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don't belieeeeeve me? I fiiiinally made it home, only to discover that my parking lot, which was an utter mess when I left it, hadn't been touched in the week I had been away, and was pretty much impenetrable. I sat there for awhile, actually contemplating my chances of getting in to my stall, when common sense finally returned from its own holiday (I think it went on a Bahama cruise). I retreated to the covered parking lot, lugged my stuff upstairs, and called the building manager. He seemed pretty unphased about the whole thing. He assigned me an indoor stall until I could get back into my regular stall. "Until you plow it out, or until the snow melts?", I asked. "Until the snow melts," he replied. This . . . is a very Vancouver attitude.
It would have been extremely groovy to stay at home and enjoy the unusual beauty of the snow while getting intimately familiar with a variety of warm beverages and excellent books, but unfortunately, I had to return to work and deal with the commute. I didn't think it would be that bad . . . after all, the snow was going to melt, right? Riiiiiight. Three degrees during the day and minus three at night does not melt snow. It applies a fantastic layer of ice to said snow. And then it kept snowing. For another week, driving was unfun. And I went on and on and on with my superior northern-bred knowledge about how Vancouver should get its act together because all that ice was going to preserve the snow and that it WOULDN'T melt quickly and we'd be digging our cars out sometime mid-March. And then the temperature shot up to 11 degrees and the monsoon rains came and the snow was gone inside of three days. Of course.
And thus ends the epic. The minor epic. The pseudo minor epic. The mid-level event. The lesser happenstance.
Bed needs to be going I. Late writing me why? Always the mincemeat, always the mincemeat.