4 : 26 A.M.
can't hear the beat

Mom and Beanie visited this week. I went to pick them up from Seattle-Tacoma airport (and saw this guy with like 12 teddy bears attached to him.) They visited Vancouver! I spent a little time with them during their one day stay here. I also drove up to Vancouver to see sights with them for a little while. As many people do, I find that Mom gets to me like no one else. My thing with Mom is: it seems like she's constantly disregarding me. I mean, sure, she's twice as old and way smarter and everything. But she said she was visiting me, and three times on the phone I told her that I live in Seattle, and that she should plan to stay there and see what kinds of things I liked doing around the city. Every one of those conversations wound up with her saying (in an unimaginably condescending tone), "we can see Seattle later, okay?" Yes. Okay. You can. But you won't. I think she avoids Seattle because Dad lived here. It's been two decades. How long does it take to get over a divorce? She also ignores my requests that she not spray extremely scented skin lotion on me while I'm driving.

It smells kind of PEZ-y. --Beanie

Anyway, so I drove up to Vancouver so I could spend more than a single day talking to them. We ate at "Floata", a very Chinese restaurant, and I explained Canadian money names to Mom. ("A one dollar coin is a 'loonie'. See the loon? And then they got two dollar coins, so they called em 'toonies'")We went up to a touristry tram ride / ski slope place and took the tram (like a ski lift but with only two humongous chairs. But with a bus sized container of people instead of the chair.) On that lift, I stood next to a Chinese guy wearing a "Countdown to 2000" hat, with a little digital readout of the time remaining before the big Y2K bug struck. (it had reverted to normal-clock mode, since ragnarok had passed already.)

On the top of the lift were a lookout, a "World Famous" lumberjack show (how do you qualify to be "World Famous"?), and captive animals, including 2 bear cubs and a bald eagle. My sister and I went to look at the tent where the animals were (before we knew what was in them) and just happened to be discussing the diet of eagles. "I think they eat fish!" "I'm pretty sure they eat carrion." Well, this particular bald eagle was tethered to a stake in the ground by a 2 foot climbing rope. After an abruptly halted attempt at flight, it started tearing up chunks of turf in what I could only interpret as psychotic frustration. "I guess they eat grass." It was an extremely depressing menagerie, featuring the world's angriest bird.

Hey look! I got one of those Canadian $2 coins! What are they called? Doobies? --Mom

Small clouds of bugs followed each person around the mountaintop, like valence electrons. Then there was a chair lift, some asian woman getting a tandem paraglider ride, fear of losing shoes on the chairlift down, more bugs, nanaimo bars, gift shops full of VERY ugly oven mitts (and wrist altimeters, which Helen drooled over), and finally my car again. Something had slammed into the rear passenger side trim panel so hard it had bent back off the door and fell off when my sister opened it. I was, to put it mildly, nonplussed at the damage to my car.

Ah. Instant Hoopty. --Beanie

So now I've got zero patience for Canada and Vancouver in particular. After two days of dealing with Mom in an unfamiliar country and waking up much earlier than I'm used to, I was a little bit snappy. I did find out from the tourist info people, though, that the big pile of yellow stuff you can see next to the water is indeed sulfur, which is shipped by rail down from the north. Uh... well, also I was driving around and a truck full of suits of armor drove past. Vancouver: weird and oddly endearing when it's not pissing you the hell off.

Also during the last week: I went to QFC for provisions and when I was checking out my stuff at the register, the cashier started keying in the code for the bananas I had selected. He suddenly swore and smashed his fist hard against the keypad a few times. He then unplugged the register control surface, turned it upside down, fiddled with something, and plugged it back in. The rest of my purchase went as normal. He was very beer scented.