The End of Days … Off

Oh mon dieu! The vacation is slowly ending, and in a few days I’ll be back feeling the happiness drain out of my body working at my desk. The second week of Time Off has gone according to plan: we met with the person in charge of our wedding reception venue and everything is a go in that respect. It is a huge relief to have one of the two major parts of the whole wedding shebang in place (the other, still to be decided, is what to do about photography). I have also taken two cars for test drives: the Kia Rio5 Sport and the Chevy Aveo5. They’re both economy-class cars (small hatchbacks, good on gas, under $20 000 fully loaded) and both have their pros and cons. At the end of the day, though, I preferred the Rio5. It has a nicer interior and felt a little more sophisticated. The Aveo5 was alright but the materials and handling felt like a car from 1995. I also sat in, but didn’t bother to drive, an Echo hatchback. I was immediately disappoined and can cross that car off the list of future considerations. It felt like a tin can and was about as comfortable inside as my cousin’s 1993 Toyota Tercel. Sure, it’s an economy car, but for the cost (used Echos run about $15 000 today) I would expect something a little more refined.

All this being said, I don’t think I’ll be ditching my 97 Protege as soon as I’d hoped. With the wedding coming up, and an unexpectedly large amount due on my credit cards, plus the unknown of where we’ll be moving, means owning a new car just isn’t a good idea. However this does open the door for a smaller frivolous purchase: A big screen TV! I will own one by January 1 2007, and no wedding or consumer debt can stand in my way. If I can’t get the car, I deserve the television, gosh darn it.

Leftover note from the Victoria trip: we saw the movie Little Miss Sunshine while in the provincial capital. It is a great little movie about a screwed up family that travels from New Mexico to California for their youngest daughters’ attempt to win a beauty pageant. It took a while to get going, but once all the characters are introduced, it’s funny and heartwarming without ever getting sappy. Go see it, if you get the chance.

Half done already?!

Well it’s already the halfway point of my vacation. Yesterday we got back from 4 days in Victoria, a city in which I plan to live someday. Most of our time was spent walking around downtown, window shopping and trying to decide where to eat. I had all these grand plans to visit some fancy dining establishments, but those fell by the wayside after our first day. For some unknown reason, after the first night, our hunger all but disappeared despite walking what must have been double-digit kilometers every day. Anyway, some notes from the island trip:

- the hotel pool was small and a little cold. There was, however, a steam room that was very nice. In the three nights we spent there, I only went swimming once.

- the private lounge on the ferry, called “SeaWest”, wasn’t really worth the cost. For ten dollars you are able to sit somewhere without screaming babies, read magazines, drink coffee and eat cheese or fruit or muffins (and as much of that as you want). It was nice to be in a quiet environment, with reclining leather seats, but I don’t know if we’ll do that again.

- we took in a performance by the Suicide Girls, which was a bit of a mixed bag. There were a couple of performances that literally blew our socks off (okay, the socks stayed on). One girl performed with hula hoops, and four of them performed a routine dressed as flight attendants. A couple other performances were barely interesting. The key to burlesque is either being in character and vamping it up both performance-wise and sexually, and a couple of the girls fell short in that respect.

- I need new shoes.

I may or may not write more about our Victoria trip in future posts, but this was a quick summation of what we did. Victoria is my favourite city in the province by far, and by gosh I want to live there so very much.

Not Working!

Today’s the official Second Day of Vacation for me. It’s been a long, long time since I took an extended break from work to have fun. The last time I had anything near two weeks off work was to heal my now surgically corrected arm. That does not technically qualify as a vacation. Yesterday we took a day trip to Port Moody, self-proclaimed City of the Arts, and unofficially City of Erwin, to explore the end of Burrard Inlet. I was agog to see such a nice area in Port Moody! That’s not to say I don’t like Port Moody; in fact I wouldn’t mind living there (and perhaps next month’s new-place-to-live search will include it) but I had no idea there was a very nice park and wooded trails in the heart of the city. Secretly I wish we lived in one of the new yuppie-villes in Port Moody called Newport Village. It’s a nice little area across from the parks and civic centres and despite the fact no one uses the word “yuppie” anymore, it’s filled with them.

That evening was the first Lions home game in a month, and the team laid a severe butt-kicking to the Montreal Alouettes. It was pom-pom giveaway day, too, so I got toys to play with. I came home after the game and my lady friend pretended to be a cheerleader, which was good for a few laughs. Then I pretended to be a cheerleader, which wasn’t funny at all because I take that sort of thing very seriously.

So what’s on tap for the rest of my vacation? Tonight we’re scheduled to bowl with Mister Tony Lee, one of the longtime readers and frequest comment posters at Garrettknights.com, to celebrate his birthday. After that, on Tuesday we head to Victoria for some fun. The second week will be test driving cars. Whee! It’s not quite a week on the beach in Cancun, but hey, it’s not sitting in an office.

Above Average

Last night I spent wasted time completing IQ tests online. I’ve never taken an authentic IQ test and I would still like to, someday before I start to lose my mind. In one of these online tests I scored an IQ of 130, which classified me as “gifted”, and in the other I garnered an IQ of 120, which put me as simply “above average”. In both situations I scored higher than 90% of all others who have taken the tests. What does this mean? Absolutely nothing. I don’t believe I’m any smarter than anyone else at this point. If anything I’ve probably become dumber since my college days. The tradeoff is that I’m making money now, and I’ll take positive cash flow through capitalism over smug intellectualism anyday.

One of my colleagues at work (I’ll call her Margaret) is leaving to pursue a dream that involves living in New York. It’s got to be exciting for her but I’ll miss her at work. Margaret is one of the longest-serving members of our group at work, being with the company for about two and a half years. Margaret, if you’re reading this, I wish you all the best. If you actually come back for my wedding I’ll squeal and clap my hands like those babies in the Playskool electronic crib toy commercials.

Burping and Crying like a baby

Last night we watched the final episode of Six Feet Under, which I believe is the greatest television show ever made. I don’t think there’s been a show that has made me think more about life (and death) and there probably will never be another show like it; it was so well written and superbly acted. Naturally the last episode wrapped up a lot of issues in the storyline, and being a gigantic sissy, I cried a whole bunch. That show manipulated my emotions! I’m such a pantywaist, crying over a TV show. Oh well.

On a less pleasant note I’ve been burping up stomach acid a lot lately. I’m not sure why it’s happening but I will be cutting coffee and pop out of my diet for a while, and will have to see a doctor about it next week. The trusty internet lists all kinds of horrible symptoms for things like acid reflux or peptic ulcers or hiatal hernias and none of them really apply to me. But as my lady friend has reminded me, the internet is not a doctor. Although it could be, if it had prescribed me daily doses of searching for Mandy Moore nipple slips.

Hot sun, hot head, and hot women

On the long weekend, the lady friend and I packed up some clothes and the dog and headed to Kamloops. My mother’s headed on a European Vacation for six weeks or so, and this was a chance to visit before she left. A lot of the visit was spent just lounging outside, in the 34-degree sun, trying to get a bit of suntan on my horrific white skin. That didn’t happen, but it was so unusual to just lay outside with only the sound of bees buzzing in the garden and an occasional lawn mower in the background. No foulmouthed louts, no subwoofered Chevy IROCs, no smell of cigarettes. Just blissful quiet and hot, dry weather. If there’s anything I miss about Kamloops — and after this visit I think I can confirm that I wouldn’t move back there at this point in my life — it’s the climate. To me, the weather there is perfect, even in winter.

Not much else to report though. My car is fixed, and thankfully cost just a bit over one hundred bucks. However, while trying to change my oil on the weekend, I discovered the shop had tightened the drain plug so tight I couldn’t remove it. I was very angry and said a lot of bad four-letter words while crawling under my car, trying my hardest to get that bloody plug out. So now I have to go back to the shop, tell them to loosen it and tighten it by hand, and seriously consider if I will ever go back to them for another repair. If they can’t treat something as simple as a drain plug right (and it’s obvious they used a power tool to put it on) then why should I trust them with anything else? In fact, since they rotated my tires a while back, I can now safely bet that if I ever need to replace a wheel myself it will be impossible, as they’ve surely used the same power tools to tighten the wheel nuts.

And since I usually end these entries with one sentence, our vacation to Victoria is shaping up, with (hopefully) a show of the Suicide Girls tour. The Suicide Girls are a neo-burlesque quasi-goth-punk community of exhibitionist young women that came to be via the magic of the internet, and they pretty much rock.