We drove mom to the bus station this morning at ten. The bus didn’t leave for almost two hours, but mom likes to be early to the point of lunacy and she was getting really antsy at the house because we didn’t leave at 9:30. Okay, so being awoken at 8:30 this morning by my mom yelling “KEEM TIME TO GET UP” was likely unnecessary and made me regress 20 years or so, but I traded in the remainder of the gorgeous Sunday to pretend the weather was horrible – that way, I wouldn’t feel guilty about crawling back into bed with all three cats and engaging in my second-favourite naked Sunday afternoon activity (napping :P).

It was a good visit. I unlocked another achievement, which was fun – pot roast impresses my mom! Thai food makes her proud; pot roast impresses. This is valuable knowledge here! I should write a thesis. The scientific journey was a long and painful one – just look at my data:

The more incredulous I got, the worst my texting became. That last one says “She’s at Tim Hortons”.

Sadly, we ran into some serious technical difficulties on Saturday. Mom wanted to go shopping, so we took her to Metrotown mall. Ed came with us, because I needed help keeping tabs on mom (and even then I lost her numerous times). I figured we’d be okay because we could coordinate our efforts if we lost sight of the pigeon, but then this happened:

The Rogers SMS network shat the bed, and I was left with only four other ways to get a hold of Ed – the horror! To make matters worse, Ed decided to do some science of his own and he SET MY MOTHER FREE .. in a T&T Supermarket. Have you ever lost a small confused Asian woman in a supermarket filled with nothing BUT small confused Asian women? It’s bad. Really bad. On the up side, it’s almost Chinese New Year and everything in T&T is awesome.

Next time, we’re getting walkie-talkies. The kind that go in your sleeve, so we can pretend we’re Secret Service. Maybe this could be fun after all, but I think we’re off the hook for at least a couple years. We’re long overdue for a trip to Victoria though, so that’ll happen soon – and I WILL be scooting to the island more this summer; something I didn’t do at all last year and that is full of balls.

It was a good visit, but it was awfully nice when it was done. Next adventure: Seattle! Then Whistler, then Seattle again. I enjoy being upwardly mobile and free!

Remind me never to hold a “tell me a sad story” contest again, because then I feel really really bad that I can’t give stuff to everyone. Unfortunately, I only have one iPod shuffle to give away so only one person can win .. and after much discussion with Ed, we decided that Jin604 is most in need of some free love:

I would love to win your shuffle! I have many many many reasons why I think I should win, but I will only list some since the contest is ending so soon!

• I do not have an Ipod, no not any kind of Ipod! The only way I listen to music on the go is overhearing other people’s blasting in their ears or people singing to themselves on the street. I am so behind in technology gadgets, even my cell phone is an old old flip pay as you go cell that charges me 25 cents a minute so I don’t even answer it…ever (just ask any of my friends) The main “wow” feature of my phone is that it has an alarm clock and this phone is the biggest technology gadget I own (actually, maybe it is so old now that I cannot be considered technology!)
• I have a diskman that is probably 15 years old. It is black and very large and hiding in a storage box in my house somewhere. I would not even attempt to use it to enjoy my music on in public because I think people would laugh and teenagers would wonder what that box I was carrying around was…sort of like when I was a kid and we would see old men at the beach carrying around boom boxes….ewwww!!!
• I don’t have the funds to buy cool new things/technology now. I just finished 6 years of university and job hunting…so this win would be amazingly helpful when I am searching for a job or taking the bus (yes, I take public transportation now because someone wrote off my car and I can’t afford to get another car! (not even crap off Craigslist!) So listening to music on the bus instead of hearing other people’s conversations or listening to someone snore, would be amazing!

Hmmm…I could go on but I am hoping this will be good enough for the entry! I could tell you more in person if I won
Thanks!

Public transportation with nothing to block out other people. Job hunting after 6 years of university. No car. A cell phone that doesn’t DO anything. Those are all horrible, horrible things that could be made somewhat bearable with a rockin’ soundtrack to pass the time, so Jin wins. Thank you everyone who entered and shared a story, and I wish I could give iPods to you all – if I come across any more for some reason, I will share the love again!

One of the few traits I inherited from my mother is the tendency to wander (the other noticeable mom-trait my habit of using the totally wrong word when speaking out watermelon). Going anywhere with my mom is always an ordeal, because she has the attention span of a small child who is easily distracted and in the dead center of a 17-ring circus. If you take your eyes off her for one second, she will be gone and impossible to find. I tend to wander off when things catch my eye as well, but I never worry about it since a) *I* always know where I am, and b) I have technology to connect me with people in case I cannot be found. Also, I understand the things that happen around me, and don’t walk off in the opposite direction to talk about toilet paper when someone asks me to stay where I am.

I took mom to Ikea today, and lost her on an epic scale. Halfway through the store she decided she had to go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW (and I thank every god I can name at this moment that Ikea does not sell toilets; my mother has an extremely unfortunate tendency to drop trou any old time regardless of who happens to be looking on), so I escorted her as far as I could (the warehouse section) and told her to follow the signs to the bathroom, and come straight back. After promptly going in the complete opposite direction, I assume she found the bathroom (and probably peed in front of a stranger). I assume, because I didn’t see her for another half hour – as I feared, she exited the bathroom and immediately turned around four times and went northwest upeast sideways Tuesday. I hung out forever where I told her I would be, and had hopped onto Twitter to complain about losing my mother and the lack of a Find my Mom app. I was just about ask an Ikea employee to check the washroom for a confused looking Asian (it’s okay; we were in Coquitlam not Richmond) in a really cool pink plaid coat (purchased not because it was awesome but because it was only $10) when I heard my name being paged over the loudspeaker, asking me to go to the dining area. Okay, sure. Except I was in Ikea – did they mean the dining table section? The area with the plates and cookware? The dining ROOM? I took a chance and went to the housewares section, reasoning that it was where we last were before the Bathroom Emergency hit. Of course, there was no mom. But my phone rang! It was mom! She was in the restaurant, so I told her to stay put and I would be there in 30 seconds. Trying very hard to keep my sanity in check, I took the elevator upstairs to the meatball room to collect my mother.

.. who was nowhere in sight. Frustrated and barely able to keep myself from punching the bin of hippos, I called her phone (which, frankly, I was surprised she had on her – she left her bag in the cart with me) to find out where the fuck she went. After I told her four or five times to STAY THERE, she naturally wandered off instead and wound up downstairs in the bedding section. I told her to ask someone how to get to the restaurant, which she did while I was on the phone – the woman told her to turn around, go up the stairs directly behind her, and the restaurant would be to her right. Instead of doing what she was told, mom started walking off somewhere else saying “I don’t think the girl understood me, I think she was Swedish or didn’t speak English”. *@$Y@(*#&!(*@@KLN@:KNFJ I’m pretty sure I started yelling at that point, telling mom to just GO UP THE STAIRS and I was RIGHT AT THE TOP. I don’t know what she did, but mom eventually appeared .. behind me. Finally reunited and about to explode with incredulous rage, we ate some meatballs. I thought about tying a leash to her wrist so she wouldn’t wander off again, but I settled for not letting her out of my sight at all (and calmed my nerves by spending $230 on ginger cookies and a bench).

She’s been here for 24 hours.

We’re going to Metrotown tomorrow.

I will not survive the weekend.

So, my mother is coming to visit this afternoon. I’ve known about this for a while, but waited to plead for help because of the snowfall warnings earlier this week: even though my mother is taking various forms of public transportation the entire way, snow would have made her cancel her trip for safeties. No snow and the (confusing) phone call this morning means we’re still on, and I’ll pick her up at 4pm from the bus station.

Ed and I have lived in Vancouver for 6 years, and this will be her third visit. She made one trip to our first apartment in East Van, one to our place in North Van, and now our condo. If the past has told me anything, this will likely be her only visit to SPARTA – she’s just not fond of traveling.

As the clock nears 4pm, I’m getting really antsy. Do I look okay? Will she say I’m fat? Will she find fault with our home? Will she hate the pot roast I meticulously planned and arose at 6:30am to prepare? I don’t hold that much weight in what she thinks, but she’s awfully vocal with those opinions and I really don’t want to spend the next 4 days being criticized at every turn. Tomorrow is daunting; I have the day off to spend with my mom and Ed has to work so I’m on my own. What do you do with someone who has no hobbies other than lottery tickets? How do you solve a problem like my mother? Where are the singing nuns when I need them?

Other things currently up my ass at the moment:

I want to go somewhere for Dine Out Vancouver, but almost every menu I look at features lamb, duck, or the inside parts of a pig (belly, cheek, etc). In some horrible cases, all three are served in one tragic meal. I don’t like those things! I want to eat the pig, not the insides of the pig!

When petulantly pouting about the kind of blogs that seem to attract all the swag, it was pointed out to me that all the sites that marketing companies contact to do giveaways and samples have two things in common: one, they’re all family-friendly – very few, if any, spend any time talking about the vagina – and two, they don’t write bitchy blog posts calling out marketing companies for being stupid. Sure, they’re often boring, badly written, borderline illiterate Geocities leftovers, but hey! You could get a free cell phone or camera! Oh BOY!

Yeah, I know. It’s just hard not to be bitter sometimes. With this blog’s 10th anniversary coming up in March, I should probably just accept and embrace the idea that I’ll be underground forever – I’m not willing to clean up (and dumb down) my act just for the sake of swag, and I still manage to do alright for my readers out of my own pocket. You like me even though I can’t give away stuff often, right? (lie if you have to)

Lastly, where’s my package? It’s been “with delivery courier” since 10:10 this morning.

Two hours until mom. On the up side, that means it’s 4 hours until pot roast! Hooray!

keep on truckin'.

One of my fondest memories of elementary school was being a Patroller. In our school, being in Patrol meant you were a Big Deal – only the best and brightest were allowed to be on Patrol; it wasn’t a free for all that anyone could sign up for. Each morning, noon and night our little troops would head out to the two intersections our school monitored, and made sure people safely crossed the street/through the tunnel. We were respected and envied (more often than not we were also the teacher’s pets), and we got to do really cool things (leaving class early was particularly fun) all because we were All About Safety.

There’s an elementary school near our house, and every morning I see Patrollers at the intersection. I can’t help but compare them to my memories of being on patrol though, and this morning I mentioned to Ed that I was annoyed that the patrollers were so .. so .. sloppy. He looked at me strangely, so I went on to explain:

My elementary school patrol was run by the Grade 6 teacher, Mr. Nichols, who just happened to be an ex-Marine (or whatever the Canadian equivalent of that is). He ran the school patrol like a drill sergeant – we marched. In formation. We had uniforms, marching practices, and would stand at attention and at ease. Each patrol team had a leader, who would shout out commands when pedestrians approached the intersection: Attention! Flags up! Forward march! At ease! When heading out, we would line up (Fall in!) in order at the cloak room, stand one arm’s length away from the person in front of us (Arms up! Arms down!) and march to our station in unison the whole way (Left! Right! Left! Right!), doing the whole thing in reverse on the way back. While at our stations, we would stand at attention or at ease (full military at ease;  legs shoulder width apart, arms behind the back, flag rolled up against our right foot and extended at an angle away from our body), looking straight ahead. There would be no goofing off on patrol; Mr. Nichols would check up on us. If we were caught looking sloppy or marching out of step, we’d be in really big shit and kicked out of patrol after a single warning.

Each year, our school patrol (consisting of kids in grades 4-7) would march in the Victoria Day Parade. We had a strict, all-white uniform (horrible itchy polyester pants that Mr. Nichols provided somehow and a white shirt) and wore our bright orange safety vests and hard hats. Leading up to the parade in May, we could regularly be seen out in the field practicing our marching and saluting – Mr. Nichols would pull us out of class so we could march in formation, round and round. He would shout commands at us, become very angry if we messed up, and treated us all as though we were Cadets, not tiny public school students who liked the perks that came with being in patrol.

.. apparently, this was not normal. I honestly didn’t know until recently that all school patrols were not run like this – I thought everyone had the same experiences we did, and that kids today (in addition to being on my lawn) were just lazy and sloppy. My memories of being a patroller are far from a negative thing; I loved Mr. Nichols and had a great deal of fun during those years. It helped that I was totally his favourite, but I really respected him and under his command, we were the most disciplined elementary school kids ever. When our entire school traveled to Vancouver to attend Expo ’86, Mr. Nichols hand-picked his best patrollers for his group and off we went, in uniform and marching all over the place. In retrospect, we probably looked weird and hilarious – I know this because I have pictures of myself in patrol uniform that I’ll try to remember to scan – but they were some good times, and not just because I got the Patroller of the Year award four years in a row.

I’m pretty sure Mr. Nichol died some time ago; in the early 90s if I remember correctly. He wasn’t an old man when he was a teacher, but he was also not a seasonal chicken and this memory is 25 years old. If so, or even if I’m wrong and he’s still out there somewhere running a rest home as though he were in the Marines, I hope he knew how much my 11-year-old self thought he was awesome, and my 36-year-old self still remembers him with affection (and how to salute in time without missing a step). School Patrols today are totally missing out on being awesome!

HAH I just looked up a list of Drill Commands, and we totally used most of these (replacing guns with flags)! I remember being allowed to stand easy (so we wouldn’t pass out after standing at attention for so long; that actually happened once) and performing right wheels on the field. Oh, the memories!

I suppose there’s a pun in there somewhere, as my floor is a complete disaster of drywall and insulation thanks to this:

there's no ceiling cat because i don't masturbate in the kitc .. oh who am i kidding, of course i do

They cut a hole in our ceiling to find the leak, which was thought to be the fault of a sprinkler on our balcony. This was problematic for a variety of reasons; the foremost being that the sprinkler is in our unit meaning it’s our responsibility – except it’s actually on the balcony which is a “limited common area” and is therefore the building’s problem. We were worried that we’d have to dip into our epic savings/home insurance to deal with this when the building guys discovered that the leak isn’t due to the sprinklers at all – it’s definitely coming from Stompy Clomps, regardless of what she says. Until they get that sorted out, we have an industrial fan in our kitchen, a big hole in our ceiling, and drywall everywhere. I hate ceilings. They are no good at all.

Random Two: What the fuck, Diner Dash:

no. just .. no.

Random Three: Now that I’ve sworn off credit-fueled iTunes Spending, I’m relying on gift cards to get my fix. I bought one on Monday, but in my eagerness to shoot up, I scratched too hard and obliterated the first three characters of the redemption code. I tried to figure out what they were, but it was a lost cause and I didn’t know what to do – was I really going to be out the $25? Don’t hold out on me, man!

Luckily, iTunes has a fix for this. If you screw up a gift card, you can email them via the website and ask for help. You’ll have to provide as much of the access code as you’re able, along with the serial number of the card and where it was purchased, but with those pieces of information they can find the corresponding code in their database and send it to you. This is really, really useful – I actually had no idea I removed THREE characters from my code; I thought I only lost one. Thanks to iTunes Support, I now have $25 in my account for random app goodness (well, $22.78 now, and $15.75 in my US account). Bring on the apps!

Random Four: Check out my craft area!

crafty!

Okay more specifically, check out the walls of my craft area. I wanted to jazz up the walls a bit, but was hesitant to put holes because I don’t have anything that I’m dying to display. Then I remembered that I bought some reusable sticker frames from Photojojo a while ago but hadn’t used them yet – they’d be perfect for this. Hanging actual photographs is for newbs (and I didn’t have any; all my images are digital) so I cut up some random craft paper I liked and went to town. The result? Awesome wall art I can change out any time I want! When my mom leaves, I might even hang up some porn! Or .. put it in the bathroom! Yeah, I like that idea. Framed porn in the bathroom. What? I’m classy!

Random Five:

come, english, give us a hug

WHY WON’T YOU LOVE HIM?

I give up. No matter how long I blog, no matter how many posts I write, no matter how many Victorian-era euphemisms for my fruitful lady vine I post .. I will never, ever be able to top this website:

James Van Der Memes

I didn’t even WATCH the Dawsons, and this website speaks to me on levels I could only previously dream about. Everyone else should just close up shop and shut down their websites; the internet has been won.

It’s too bad, too. I was having so much fun.

I rooted around in my bag to find my wallet, and instead came up with a handful of dinosaurs:

baby, you so mesozoic

I can’t help but feel this would be more socially acceptable if I was a parent. As it stands .. no, I just have dinosaurs in my bag. Don’t you? Freak.

I am too cold to type. As much as I love the quiet times that come with working a stat holiday, I may have to rethink my strategy because it’s SO DAMN COLD IN HERE! The building saves money by killing heat on weekends and holidays which is fine and good and environmentally friendly but holy shit I am freezing my girl balls off. I even dressed warmer than usual on purpose because I knew the heat wouldn’t be on today, but it did me no good whatsoever. I can’t think because I am too cold – how am I supposed to master Sharepoint 2010 when I can’t even think? Poor Kimli. So cold.

Ed is at home, along with most of the city today. Unfortunately, he can’t really do anything fun – he has to wait for the building people to arrive. While gathering up all the empty bottles from our drunken day-to-day activity, he noticed a great deal of water pouring from our balcony ceiling. It was a little concerning as it hasn’t rained in a week or so, but the alarm intensified as soon as he took a closer look at the ceiling inside our unit, by the balcony door: water damage! Hooray! Water is leaking from somewhere and is being diverted to the northwest corner of our suite. Nothing is coming through the ceiling inside yet, but there’s a definite water stain that’s spreading and starting to sag a little. This is not good. We have no idea where the water is coming from; Ed left a note for Stompy Clomps and talked to her when we could hear that she was home – no water in her place. So what the fuck?

This is all our fault, really. We were just so pleased with ourselves for having gone a WHOLE YEAR without water leaking into our home regardless of where we live that the universe just couldn’t resist sticking it to us nice and hard. If we had been just a little less smug, none of this would have happened. As it is, I’m just glad the universe was in a relatively good mood and didn’t go for a full repeat of last year’s (err, I guess it’s two years ago now technically but really just November ’09) fun and instead delivered just a little reminder that we shouldn’t get ahead of our ceiling or count our chickens before they hatch or look spilled milk in the mouth; that sort of thing. I do know that water damage can be catastrophic though, and this is the first time we’ve ever had to deal with it as home owners (which is WHY WE BOUGHT NEW – so we wouldn’t HAVE to deal with this shit!). The building itself is still under warranty I think, and we do have insurance, and it’s likely not our unit that’s the problem as we do not pour water on our ceiling from above. Still, I could totally do without this added headache. And I really, really hate ceilings.

I am going to go buy a space heater and hump it madly.

SO COLD!