I’ve Been Space Needled!

Our vacation to Seattle was a success: we did the full-on tourist thing, visiting the Space Needle, Seattle Art Museum, Pike Place Market, Experience Music Project, Sci-Fi Hall of Fame, and many other venues and shops. The weather was also better than expected, with no rain after the night we arrived and temperatures nudging close to twelve degrees.

The four-day excursion also brought us to a place called the Can Can, which featured performers/dancers. It wasn’t Can-Can dancing, and it wasn’t Burlesque; I can’t really describe it as anything other than entertaining. My ladyfriend swooned over one of the dancers, whom I’ll admit was a handsome man thing. I swooned over a coffee barista at the Space Needle, so she and I are even in that regard. We certainly had our fill of dining out for a while - with no grocery store and no hotel-room fridge, we were going out for meals every night (and I think we’d had enough of that after night two).

We hit up the shopping on the way back, with a visit to a Target store and the Premium Outlet Mall. Evaluation: bedding and housewares are cheaper. Clothes, at the outlet mall, are a great deal. Everything else is pretty much the same price, once you work in the exchange rate and the fuel used to get there. But we did come home with some new bedding, I bought some $25 pants from Banana Republic and $50 Nike shoes, and my ladyfriend came home with some a couple new shirts.

There was still a weird sense when visiting the US, even though it’s no more or less safe than Vancouver, and the people are pretty much the same, that we’re still not quite fitting in. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s probably not helped by the growing anti-US sentiment that Canadians seem to have. Or maybe it’s just the fact that we’re tourists, and we’re not supposed to feel at home. But it is odd, that driving just two and a half hours south, something still seems completely different.

I’m glad we decided on Seattle rather than Vegas, which was the original idea. Weather in Vegas for the time we were in Seattle: rain and highs of 13. Ha! Take that, sin city!

Weekend Update/Hiatus Notice

Last night my cousin and I took in a special midnight viewing of The Big Lebowski, one of my all-time favourite movies. It was the first time I’d seen it on the big screen since its initial run (12 years ago!), and it still amazes me how with each viewing there’s verbal and visual cues that are introduced then tied in throughout the movie. It’s probably a reason why it’s such a good movie - the subtle parts are what put it beyond just a curiosity. Plus, it’s the best role John Goodman has ever played. Jeff Bridges is pretty much perfect as The Dude, too.

Friday morning I also got results from my Holter Monitor testing. The diagnosis is that I have a heart condition called a bigeminy, also knowns as Premature Ventricular Contraction. Long story short, my heart will from time to time not beat like clockwork as it should, and it’s something not terribly unusual nor is it life-threatening (unless I develop heart disease). There’s no suggested treatment, other than keeping up my magnesium, calcium, and potassium levels. It is something I ‘need to get used to’, which isn’t the easiest thing, since it is basically a pounding in my chest at random times. Well, what can you do - keep on truckin’ I suppose.

Finally, the ladyfriend and I are headed south to Seattle for a few days, to be tourists and see things like the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project, and to drink designer coffee and watch people throw fish around. Hopefully the weather there will be just like it is here (unusually warm and generally less rainy than usual). Even if it isn’t I’m sure we’ll enjoy it. Obviously this means the blog will enter another week of dormancy, followed by an explosion of new Flickr photos.

Sad Days

Me, my special ladyfriend, and my Mom had to say goodbye to a good friend yesterday, quite unexpectedly. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with death but this one has hit me pretty hard, mainly because it has been such a shock. Lucy, our golden retriever, died in her sleep on Sunday night. Lucy pre-dated me and my ladyfriend meeting, and about a year and a half ago was graciously taken in by my Mom to start a second chapter in her life that came to an end sooner than any of us would have liked. I won’t eulogize Lucy here - this is a silly blog, after all - so I’ll just leave it with saying how much the three of us will miss her.

Some Upcoming Sporting-related Event

The Olympics are less than a month away and the city of Vancouver is in the last throes of preparation. Road closures will start soon, almost all ground-level parking lots are now home to giant vinyl barns to house equipment and/or people, and most advertising on billboards is exclusively Olympic-oriented. The purpose of this post isn’t to lament the Olympics - what’s the point, now? - but just to observe how parts of downtown Vancouver are changing.

On my walk to work, there’s a parking lot with a large concrete wall, that until three weeks ago was covered in graffiti. Not the lame teenage-gang-sign graffiti; I mean actual art, and it was apparently commissioned by the Steve Nash Foundation (read a bit about this here, and you can see photos of the graffiti here). I like good graffiti. It’s an art form that predates any other, and when done well, it’s a breath of fresh air in an otherwise boring cityscape. However, the decision was made to get rid of it, since the parking lot is an Olympic site, so early in the new year I passed by city workers painting the entire block of graffiti with blue paint. It made me a little sad - during the summer, almost every day I walked past it, locals and tourists would be taking photos of it. It stuck out in condo-land, and now it’s gone. And probably won’t be back, because that parking lot will eventually become more condos.

On the opposite end of the Olympic-change scale: transit hubs. Every Skytrain station has received a bit of a makeover - most now have large lit signs with the letter ‘T’, so you can spot the station from more than a block away. They’ve been more clearly named, and every station also now has route signs, so passengers can see which stations the east or westbound trains will take them to. Voice announcements of stops and transfer points are also added, and platforms in transfer stations have been numbered. For example, a train arriving at Broadway/Commercial will instruct people that they can transfer via an overhead walkway to Platforms One and Two. Previously it only said “the next station is Broadway.” It’s nice to see transit start to get some small improvements for people who don’t live here.

Finally, one odd change has been the removal of almost all newspaper boxes from transit stations. You cannot nab one of the lousy daily free papers, nor the Georgia Straight, nor even the Province or Sun when you step off the train or bus at a main station downtown. I figure this is a combination of newspapers not being approved sponsors and fear over another Atlanta-style Olympic bomb. Or maybe it’s to deprive homeless people from using them as bedding … although, they’ll be in jail during the games, so perhaps that’s not it.

MVM: Short Skirt Long Jacket

Somehow, amid the grunge and Marilyn Manson of my late high school years, a band named Cake was briefly popular. It’s an alternative-pop-rock band with brass-mariachi influences and usually with spoken word lyrics. Odd, you might say, but also pretty cool. They definitely didn’t hit total mainstream, and haven’t put out a new album since 2004. There’s not many official Cake music videos out there, but I thought this one was interesting: it’s just footage of people listening to Short Skirt Long Jacket, offering their opinions of what they hear. In film class you’d probably call this subversive.

The Heart of the Matter

Bad pun for today’s entry: today I was outfitted with a Holter Monitor, which is essentially a self-contained heart monitoring recording device. I have four electrodes stuck to my chest and something the size of a pager taped to my body. Why? Well, it’s certainly not for kicks. Leading up to Christmas, my wife noticed my heart rate wasn’t regular. It was kind of offset, with the occasional third beat coming in where there’s usually only two, followed by a pause, then returning to two. Repeat this a few times and as you can understand, it’s cause for worry. I’ve got a genetic history of heart problems in my family, too, so it’s not really something to take lightly.

Last week, a checkout with my doctor resulted in him saying it’s likely benign and nothing to worry about - something that won’t necessarily ‘go away’ but also something that isn’t a huge cause for concern. Nevertheless he scheduled me a Holter Monitor, which records my heartbeat over the course of 24 hours (or so), and I have to keep a log of what I do. Part of my doctor’s suggestion was to consume caffeine and alcohol in order to stimulate my heart more than usual too. Tomorrow I’ll also get some moderate exercise as well.

Obviously it’s not the most awesome thing to think about, but even since having a doctor’s opinion and assurance that I’m okay, I haven’t felt quite as stressed out about the whole thing (the holidays were more than a little distracted, and I had at least one sleepless night over the break, because of worrying). It’ll be a couple weeks until I have any results but I’ll try to share them once I get them.