Another Year, Another Visit to the PNE

I don’t know how many years in the last decade my ladyfriend and I have gone to the PNE, but it’s likely close to seven or eight. We went again this year, with my cousin Tama and his wife Beata. Our goals: eat mini donuts, eat a corn dog, look at farm animals, eat deep-fried Oreos, look for the Sham-Wow booth, walk through the prize home, watch the Superdogs, gawk at people, and generally enjoy a sunny day.

I can tell you every task was accomplished. I had a corn dog for the first time in my life, and it was actually quite good - not something I would ever buy outside of a fair, but the combination of animal assholes-n-eyeballs in convenient tube form, encased in a golden blanket of corn meal and fried in dirty cooking oil until crispy, and topped with mustard, was quite delicious. Never discount the combination of otherwise gross ingredients to create something marvelous.

The deep fried Oreos were also fairly delicious. Let’s face it, battering and frying almost anything will be at least moderately edible. Surprisingly, the deep fried Mars bar was not a hit. I didn’t try it, but those in our eating party were rather disappointed with its taste, especially compared to the Oreos.

The rest of the food? Well, I won’t go into detail, because the rest was pretty average and not much to write about. The mini donuts are always fantastic, and it’s one of the main reasons to go to the PNE, since they are never served anywhere outside the fair.

This year we took in a show of the Superdogs, something we hadn’t done in at least five years. Superdogs is a fair-traveling show of dogs that jump and run and entertain people. The show itself is mostly geared towards kids, of course, but anyone will enjoy seeing tiny dogs leap four feet in the air over obstacles.

As for the rest of the day: the prize home was like most years’ prize homes, although it’s located in Kelowna this year; we saw the Sham-Wow booth, which isn’t nearly the draw it was last year (maybe all the people who really, really wanted giant pieces of felt already have them); the farm animals were fun and cute as always. Next year is apparently the 100th anniversary of the PNE, so it’ll be interesting to see what they do to make it bigger or better.

Forward-Looking Statements

For the second week of September, and as what might be the last true vacation before Christmas, the ladyfriend and I are headed to our favourite part of the province, Vancouver Island, for a week. Some days will be spent visiting my father, some will be spent in Ucluelet/Tofino, and some will be spent in Victoria. While I hope the weather is good, I will settle for a trouble-free series of road trips in our slowly decaying vehicle. It’s still two weeks away but I’m definitely looking forward to it, and I used most of my pathetic accumulation of Air Miles to offset some of the hotel stays.

Between now and then I should also find out what my future at Vision Critical is. My contract is up at the end of September (another reason for our trip - must use vacation days in case I’m not kept on), and I’m hopeful that I’ll at least get an extension for a few more months. But if 2009 has taught me anything, it’s that nothing related to work is guaranteed, so until I know exactly what’s going to happen I’m not confusing my hopes with reality. Which also reminds me, I need to book some optometrist appointments before September is out too, in the event my medical benefits end.

And for an unrelated portion, please enjoy one of my favourite music videos of the past half-decade.

Introducing my Father-In-Law

He’s at roughly the 15 second mark, uttering the now-famous catchphrase “Good to go”.

My Decade in Vancouver: Part One

At the end of August, I’ll have lived in the Greater Vancouver area for a decade - and while I only spent about six months actually living in the City of Vancouver, for the purposes of this look back, I’m referring to the entire GVRD as Vancouver. It’s just easier that way, and besides, one can’t really separate the districts of the GVRD since they’re all connected. Like lobsters into the pot, to quote Jacques Parizeau.

Because I’m a moderately disgruntled person, I’m going to evaluate my ten years here in terms of what I like and what I do not like about living in Vancouver. Part one (this part) will deal with what I like; I want to save the negative stuff for last because acting all cranky is like icing on the cake for me.

Now the most obvious outcome of moving to Vancouver is that I ended up falling in love and getting married. You could probably say, oh, that would have happened eventually no matter what, but that’s presumptuous and quite irrelevant - it’s the ‘tree falling in a forest’ argument. The fact is, I moved to the lower mainland and have lived happily ever after not because of Vancouver but because of the ladyfriend I met while living here. So while Vancouver isn’t responsible for our wedded bliss, it wouldn’t have happened the way it did without Vancouver. I fell in love because of who I met, not where I met her, but I couldn’t have met her anywhere but here.

Anyway, on to less lovey-dovey things - don’t worry, from here on out you won’t feel like throwing up in your mouth a little.

Above all else I like the proximity to nature, at least relative to the parts of Vancouver I’ve lived in. In the City of Vancouver, I lived a short bike ride away from Queen Elizabeth park; in Burnaby, a 10 minute walk to the wooded side of Capitol Hill; in Pitt Meadows … well, it was a 30 minute drive to Sasquatch Provincial Park, but it is a mighty fine park full of trees and lakes; and currently in Port Moody we live a 5 minute walk from a trail along the ocean inlet and a 10 minute drive from woods filled with trees, deer, bears, elves, and lakes. If I were into winter sports I’d include the closeness to ski hills in this list of benefits. In general, though, there’s endless places to enjoy forests and trails if you head even the slightest bit north of the city sprawl (anything south of the Fraser River can fall off the face of the earth for all I care).

Vancouver also offers a lot to do - which shouldn’t be surprising considering it is a big city by Canadian standards. Sporting events, gay pride parades, less-mainstream movies, burlesque, civic celebrations, are all varied and constantly going on in one city or another. Sure, I don’t get out that much, but when I do there’s a lot to choose from.

An amazing selection of food is something that I think only the bigger cities can bring you, and Vancouver sure makes itself out to be a good place to eat (I’ve heard that’s a lot of PR nonsense, but I wouldn’t know). I’m not necessarily talking about the fancy places in Yaletown that get the most press, and in fact some of the best food I’ve had have been the hole-in-the-wall, non-website, zero ambiance places usually run by non-honkeys. The places that rely more on word of mouth than on flashy advertising, and might just barely skirt health violations. When you come from a city that had one Japanese restaurant, and is a place where the word ’shawarma’ doesn’t even exist, to a metropolis that has a sushi joint every three blocks and food from countries I couldn’t find on a map, it’s a whole new world of tastes to experience. Oh, did you see how clever that sentence was?

And of course, the reason I’m still here is the work. Sure, I like to complain about it like every person with a job, but I never would have ended up where I am now without moving to the big city. To think, until now, I’d worked almost totally in the video game industry, would have been impossible nearly anywhere else west of Toronto. The work side of things is a double-edged sword, of course, which will be touched on in Part Two of this look back.

There’s also friends, naturally, that I wouldn’t have made had I not moved here (again, this is like the falling-in-love view of Vancouver in the third paragraph). There’s the fact that despite living a fair distance from my workplace, I don’t need a car to get there and back. There are a lot of smaller things that I like about Vancouver.

But that’s not to say I love it. And you’ll learn why in Part Two.

In Case You Were Wondering

I still haven’t won the lottery… yet.

Small Business, Small Brains

As mentioned in an earlier post, my ladyfriend is in the middle of a struggle with her former employer. Her struggle? Getting the bare minimum under the law: minimum wage, a pay stub, and a Record of Employment. You know, the things that anyone who works in this province is required to receive.

In short, my wife was let go from a dog daycare a couple of weeks ago. She picked up her final pay only to discover the owner had cut her a cheque for $7 an hour and without any records or deductions included. She wrote an entirely factual email to the owner asking for what’s legally required, and called to talk to her in person after not getting a response. This resulted in being brushed off on the phone and having an email questioning my wife’s ‘attitude’, saying that she was paid the way she was because the owner was looking out for my wife’s ‘best interests’, and claiming my wife knows nothing about the Employment Standards Act (a document we’re both familiar with, having been laid off this year).

So, ladyfriend fills out a form from the Employment Standards branch, which essentially just restates what she needs, and sends it to the owner.

Two days later we have a two-minute voicemail message on our phone, wherein the owner calls my wife stupid, ignorant, says ‘it’s no wonder you can’t keep a job’, and dares her to take it to the ESB because she ‘has never done anything that hasn’t followed the Standards Act’, and that if my wife goes ahead with it she’ll ‘embarrass herself’.

Yes, that’s right. The owner leaves an offensive and harassing voicemail, yet my wife is the one who will be embarrassed. We are clearly dealing with a supreme genius.

So, yesterday my ladywife files a complaint with the ESB (hey, the owner said to go ahead!), with copies of emails, the original job posting, a copy of the cheque, and as soon as she’s assigned someone to look into her case, the voicemail will be included too, which we’ve both saved on the phone and onto handy-dandy MP3 format. Perhaps someday I’ll post that phone message here for everyone to ‘enjoy’. I can’t do it now because just hearing the first part of it makes me sick to my stomach from the anger it creates.

I’ll update this saga once the ball starts rolling (I’m guessing it’ll be a week or so - we are dealing with a government office - and probably a couple more before it’s all done). It just astounds me that my ladyfriend has been treated like shit by two small business owners, after being let go, in the last six months. It goes to show that any asshole can run a business.