thisCassandra

All the News That's Fit to Print

New things:

I think I've found what I want to do when I grow up: In August I'm attending a two week bootmaking course put on by the fellow who founded the Merrell boot & shoe company. I have registered, sent my deposit, bought my ticket, and it's only May.

The lab is in Vernal, Utah, which is located in the northeast part of the state, near Flaming Gorge (what a great name). I'm flying into Las Vegas, renting a car and driving through Utah up to Vernal, and back again. I'm excited - I've seen pictures of Utah and parts of it are incredibly beautiful.

I'm also excited about learning to make footwear; I've always wanted to do it, but didn't have the resources. Now I have them, so I'm going for it. I met with the fellow who makes and repairs shoes at Rino's Shoes for the Stars, and he is pleased that someone is wanting to learn his craft, and has offered to give me some guidance.

Making custom footwear is part of my retirement plan. More about this later.

In October, I'm flying to Montreal to hang out with my great friend Rob H, who has moved to his new place in a sketchy-but-up-and-coming part of Montreal. We'll then head to Toronto, where I want to go to the Bata Shoe Museum, and board a train for Vancouver. He has never taken the train across Canada, and I have done it once. We've booked adjacent roomettes, and we intend to do not much more than read and chat and eat things. I am really looking forward to those three days with nothing much to do. What with my vacation in August really not being vacation time, and all.

I've been ill with asthma since January, and I'm a bit concerned about the long term implications. Am I ever going to be able to not get sick when I'm around people who have been smoking or who use scented products? Am I going to have to exist in a bubble? I hope not.

About five weeks ago, in an effort to regain control of my breathing, I visited a naturopath. He determined that my liver and lymphatic system were weak and needed cleansing. He gave me a list of foods that are toxic to me - beef, pork, dairy products, nightshade (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers (even the spices pepper, paprika and cayenne), eggplant (not that I eat this one)), and fruit - all of which I have removed from my diet, and I am some, but not completely, better. That is the asthma is sometimes under control and sometimes not, depending on circumstances.

Even though the asthma is not yet controlled, the five weeks of changed diet has had some benefit, that is I have quite a lot more energy than I did and I am marginally less cuddly than I was.

Old things revisited:

I have not been writing much lately, but I have been busy - mostly trying to clean and organize thisCastle (a continuous and continual project). I've been here five years now, and you'd think I would have fixed it up more, but no, I have not. I still haven't painted most of the interior walls, still haven't done the roof. How lame is that?

Not so lame - I'm working on both of them.

Paint-wise, I've arranged a barter with my friend Glen, he'll paint my interior walls and I'll mat and frame for some of his art. We're both excited over this.

Roof-wise, I've had a few meetings with an architect who is interested in working with me to manage the project of the replacement and greening of my roof. He has seen the roof, knows what I want, knows my budget, and he'll be sending a list of possibilities and quotes in a few days. This is huge. I tried to manage this project in the fall, but it was too much for me, I wasn't able to make a decision then, but now, with the support of a professional, I think I can do it.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

I just got back from dinner at the New Town - wor wonton (broth way too salty) and tea. I love the apple tarts at New Town, but I would have preferred to have eaten my home-coming wor wonton dinner at Gain Wah, where the broth is better. Unfortunately when I looked in there no tables were free. Drat.

Dinner music at the New Town: Mr Roboto by Styx; Pilot by the Ian Thomas Band; Hell's Bells by AC/DC. Seems a bit hard core for a Chinese restaurant.

It's a lovely evening, and on the way back I walked through the Chinatown Night Market, where they sell lots of cheap and/or weird stuff - cell phones, CDs, snacks, trinkets, jewellery, clothing and hand tools. My favourite table is the one with the lingerie: seriously padded bras that hold their shape when they're lying on the table, for $5 each or 3 for $10, and underpants 10 for $10. Quality stuff.

Other than the ever-diminishing size (four blocks to two to one), there is something reassuring about the sameness of the oddness of the Night Market. I like to go there once or twice a season and imagine that I am in some foreign place. Sometimes the smells there conspire to help me believe I am not in North America.

The most interesting market I have been in was in Taxco, up in the mountains of Mexico. Taxco is known as the silver city, and I was looking for silver bells and thought I'd be able to find them there.

Taxco is about halfway between Mexico City and Acapulco, a four and a half hour bus ride on winding mountain roads away from either one. I was staying in Acapulco, and thought I would go up to Taxco for the day. So I bought myself a ticket for the early bus. I tried to buy un billete de Ida y Vuelta, but I could only buy Ida. One way.

When I got to the bus all the seats were taken, even the seat I had been assigned, so I sat on the step beside the driver and listened to him and his girlfriend talk about not much in particular. After an hour or so I was able to sit in a seat, and the rest of the ride was relatively unexciting.

Taxco is located on a steep mountain, and the market is sprawled over the topography, along sidewalks and stairways and through closets and tunnels. It is a maze up to where the cathedral is at the highest point in town. There is a lot of silver jewelry there, but I wasn't able to find silver bells.

After a few hours I decided to go back to Acapulco, so went to the bus station and tried to buy a ticket. There I found out why I had been able to purchase Ida, but not Vuelta. The bus starts in Mexico City and stops in Taxco, but only takes on as many passengers as there are empty seats. So if there are no seats, you stay in Taxco. There weren't so many buses each day, and I had a two hour wait to find out if I would even be able to purchase Vuelta to Acapulco. I didn't go too far from the bus station.

I hung around and waited, and bought some little Mexican porn comic books at the magazine stand. When the bus from Mexico City arrived there were two empty seats, so I had the great good fortune of being able to purchase a ticket for one of them.

I found the bells I wanted in a shop on the beach in Acapulco the next morning, and bought three for each of my friends. In Feng Shui practice, if you want prosperity to come to your home, it is recommended that you hang three coins on red thread on the inside of your front door. If you also hang three bells on red thread on the outside of the door, the effect is enhanced. So I gave my friends three coins, three bells and some red cotton yarn to attract prosperity.

OMG How Hard Can It Be?

It's 2am Sunday. I just arrived home, and other than hacking into an unencrypted WLAN near the Portland train depot to check e-mail and to send one reply, I've been away from the internet since about 4am Friday, that's close to 48 hours.

48 hours...It doesn't sound like it would be that hard, but it was.

I had a terrific trip, but I'm glad to be home and wired in as usual. Everything is as it should be.

Another Point South

Amy and I hooked up, and our original plan was to go to the zoo while Ru worked (at the conference), and then to meet up with him for dinner later. I didn't really want to go to the zoo again, so suggested something a bit more adventurous - a trip south to Tijuana on San Diego transit. You can get to the US side of the border on the Blue Line from Old Town to San Isidro, then you walk across the border, then you walk or take a taxi to Tijuana.

I have been to Mexico more than a few times - last visit was to Acapulco and Taxco in December 2000 - but Amy had never been. She was reluctant at first, but then spoke with the concierge at their hotel. The concierge told her it would be okay, and gave her a sheet of things to do, things to buy and places to eat. So she agreed to go with me.

Then Ru, also never having been to Mexico, decided to skip out of the conference and join us. So the three of us went on a transit adventure in Mexico (not really, but we're talking about adventure for people who never take transit),

Tijuana is touristy in a way similar to most other touristy places in Mexico I have been, and when you get away from the touristy area to the area where the inhabitants live and shop, then it's similar to those areas in other places. I was tired of being hassled, so it was a great relief to get onto a street where no-one hassled me. Tijuana is not as bad as I expected it to be.

Ru noticed that the downtown area of San Diego appears to be depopulated, post-nuclear somehow, he said. Where is everyone? Where did they go?

I'm glad they came to Tijuana with me, we all got to have a bit of unexpected adventure.

Today in San Diego

Yesterday I spent the entire day at the zoo, where my favourite thing was the giraffes. They are so gangly. I liked this lizard too.

Today I spent at Sea World, and I have to say that it's amazing what they can train an animal to do for snacks.

I had expected Sea World to be like the Vancouver Aquarium, but bigger, and was I surprised when I got there and found that it was a theme park. I should have done more research.

There was a show called Cirque de Mer, and the performers, citizens of "Amphibia", reminded me of Sea Monkeys.

Sea World shows are very loud. I went to see the Shamu show twice, the second time just to sit down somewhere and rest. Sea World is a tiring place to spend a day.

I got around on my own using transit today. There were no huge problems.

I am extremely tired from having two days in a row of adventure and walking about.

Good night.

.

.

One Point South

I'm in Los Angeles, staying at the Best West Motel on Ventura Blvd, visiting Anna and Rich who live nearby. This is not the first time I've visited LA (eighteen years ago I was seeing someone who lived here and visited a few times), but this is definitely the most fun time I've had here. I still don't love LA, but I like it a lot more than I did. I might even make it back here sooner than 18 years from now.

Anna and Rich have been wonderful hosts for me, taking me around and making sure that I am fed and well-housed. I am sick with the tail end of some sort of respiratory bug, so staying in the living room of their big cat squared apartment was not an enticing prospect for me. Ergo the Best West Motel. It looks like one of those low slung two-storey motels, built in the late 50s/early 60s, that were strung along highways like glittering beads on a forested dress. They weren't too clean, had poorly maintained pools, and they used to be called Motel 6 or Inn o' the Woods or Howard Johnsons, or they were named for a local attraction (Fred Flintstone's Bedrock Motel). They have made and still make movies about these places.

Now these places have been restored, patched and painted. They have wireless internet, and they are called Best West and Travellodge. I like to stay in them because of their relationship to my traveling on my own.

I turned the tv in my room on last night to watch indigenous television; the first channel I found had Da Vinci's Inquest on (produced and shot not only in Vancouver, but in my neighbourhood) and the tenth had Cold Squad (also produced and shot in Vancouver). I turned off the set then.

Other than LA TV being populated with a plethora of produced and shot in Vancouver shows, I've had a quintessentially LA stay here: Anna and Rich took me to Comedy at the Improv at midnight Saturday (Bobby Lee was the funniest on the lineup) and to a private preview screening of the summer penguin film, Surf's Up. There was a big party afterwards where I was not photographed with the Cody the Protagonist Penguin mascot. Anna has written about these events in her journal (Read here), so I shan't go into much detail.

When we were leaving the penguin party we each received a beachbag full of stuff including a frisbee, a beachball, a keychain, a necklace, stickers, postcards, a stuffed squid backpack, and a stuffed Cody the Protagonist Penguin, who was made in China and whose tag is printed in Cyrillic type.

At the Improv a blond transgendered m-f sat directly across a narrow table from me. I found her breasts, wrapped up in some shiny material, a bit distracting seeming, as they did, to jut across half of the width of the table. She had amazing posture, she was proud of her shiny new breasts, but she was ashamed of her hands and kept them out of sight in her lap. Not only her breasts were huge, her hands were enormous too, at least four inches longer than mine. I didn't see her feet, but I expect that they were bigger yet.

Anna and Rich make a hobby of checking out racks. LA is a container for a lot of designer racks (designed to draw attention that is), so they live in a perfect paradise for the two of them. One or the other of them will say "Leopard print" or "Zebra", and the other will look and agree. There appears to be a relationship between rack size and likelihood of animal print, so this game is a bit like big-game hunting for them, the two of them on safari in the wilds of the Hollywood jungle, on the lookout for the big animal prints.

The distances are large in LA, we seem to be in the car a lot (in fact I sometimes wonder if there is a relationship between average distance between two points in LA and the average rack size in LA - which could be considered the distance between two points). Other than the amount of time in car this has been a terrific visit, and I think I'll do it again. Maybe in November.

Near and Far

The next five or so months I have planned several small trips away from home, but no solo driving holidays yet. One flight and two road trips with three other people in the car. 

First trip is in May, a flight to LA to see Anna & Rich. I haven't been to LA since 1989, and even to the US since 2000. Long ago.

In July my great friend Rob H, two of his friends and I have arranged a one week stay in a lakefront cabin at a resort near Penticton called Sandy Beach. It was his mother's favourite place, and she used to spend 4 or 5 weeks up there every summer. I don't know the Okanagan very well, and I haven't been there since my driving trip to Nelson (July 2003), but I'm really looking forward to it.

In August the girls and I spend our annual week on Hornby Island at Amy's parents' house. We book a car and drive up there. Hornby Island is incredibly beautiful. Last year I discovered the best beef jerky on earth being sold in the food coop there, and ate a lot of it. This was not a good thing for me because I ended up breaking a tooth (which might not have been so bad, except that this particular breakage created a dental reconstruction situation which has yet to be fully resolved). Those non-meat-eating naysayers are right when they warn of the dangers of eating meat. No more beef jerky for thisCassandra.

I have just found out that my work buys Air Canada coupons and that we are able to buy and use these for  travel: one price for all points within Western Canada, and another price for fare from any point in Western Canada to any point in Ontario or Quebec. Western Canada includes the Yukon and the North West Territories, so this means I can fly from here to Yellowknife return for an absurdly small amount of money (less than $400, all taxes included). Unbelievable.

I don't have any trips planned for June. It might be interesting to go to Yellowknife for a few days...I think my eco footprint is expanding again.

Passport

I can't find my passport. I know I used it on New Year's Day, but I can't find it. I also can't find all the expired passports. Where are they? Probably together somewhere.

I also can't find a very important ring and a bunch of very important DVDs and very important VHS tapes (the momster asked). Oh, where are they?

Bad Customs: Speaking Gook

I have observed more than one intense interrogative experiences with US Customs, particularly when I have arrived at the border in a bus. In my experience the US Customs agents at airports tend to be much nicer to their clients.

The worst treatment I've seen at a border crossing was during the trip that I took with my friend Teresa in February 2000 to see Eliades Ochoa playing in Seattle. One of the customs agents was a Boss Hogg kind of guy and the other was an Asian-American who spoke perfect unaccented American English.

There was a couple who had a Granville Island salmon packed on ice in a cardboard box with a plastic handle. Their agent was Boss Hogg who waddled back and forth while he questioned them. "Where y'all going?"

They spoke so little English that they might as well not have spoken any, but they knew what they had to do: they showed Boss Hogg their tickets, Seoul - Seattle return. Boss Hogg announced this as though he disbelieved his eyes, as though the idea of people traveling from Seoul to Vancouver return by way of Seattle was completely revolutionary and without precedent. He repeated the question and they again showed him their tickets.

Boss Hogg walked to the far end of his counter shaking his head as though in disbelief. He walked back, then asked them again. They looked at one another and the rest of us, looking for someone who could understand and translate for them. They showed him their ticket again, and again he didn't understand, and it wasn't a failure of language comprehension.

It was a pretty easy concept for the rest of us to grasp, as was the salmon on ice in the box that he questioned them about next: "What do you have in the box?" They pointed to the printing on the side of the box, and he repeated his question; "WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN THE BOX?"

They again pointed at the side of the box and he again shook his head. This time he mumbled something about Vietnam. He looked at them, tucked his thumbs into the waistband of his trousers, hiked up his trousers a bit closet to his belly, and said out loud: "I was in 'nam and I hate gooks," then he said something about shooting gooks "just like them."

He made a few more attempts to make them understand, each one louder and more clearly enunciated than the previous. Then he gave up in frustration and said to his Asian-American colleague: "You talk to them, you speak gook, maybe they'll understand you."

The Asian-American colleague went and stood in front of the Korean couple. He tucked his thumbs into the waistband of his trousers, and hiked the trousers a bit. He pulled himself up a bit straighter, crossed his arms and said, "WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN THE BOX?"

They again pointed to the printing on the side of the box, and the Asian-American turned to his colleague and said, "Salmon," then returned their documents and waved them through.

I got through quickly, but was appalled by the treatment of these people. I have yet to make it back to the States by any mode of transportation.

That Flight: Strangelove and Snotboy & Lovergirl

That flight home from Montreal there was a two hour stopover in Calgary. I fell asleep, leaning far forward, forehead against the seat in front of me, and I had a dream, a nightmare of being anesthetized, like a patient etherized upon a table. In my dream I am connected to the people beside me in the row by tubes, our precious bodily fluids pumping in a circuit through the three of us. Our Purity of Essence makes us one...

When I'd arrived at the airport, I was told that I had a window seat, 23F. When I got to row 23, my rowmates were already seated, he sleeping in the aisle seat, and she sitting in the middle seat, awake and watchful.

He was a skinny, skinheaded boy, and looked a bit like a national front yob from Brixton. He was snoring gently, and his body was leaning forward slightly, head down, swaying gently to and fro. She was a First Nations girl, a bit older than he. She looked up, and I told her that I was their rowmate, and she reached over and pulled his head back so that I could get past.

He woke up a bit after I started to settle myself in my seat. Their eyes met, then their faces drew closer and met at the mouth, and they kissed, a deep, soulful, hungry, starving kiss. They traded more than a bit of spit, then he passed out again.

After take off, I looked over and saw that he was again leaning forward in his seat. He had a string of snot, a foot long, swinging to and fro like a pendulum, hanging from his left nostril. It had an amplitude equal to that of his upper body which was swaying back and forth again. She saw me looking at the snot and stood up, squeezed past him. She walked away, then came back a few minutes later with some toilet tissue which she used to catch the string of snot mid swing. She swiped it up and wiped his nose for him. In the middle of this Snotboy woke up again, and when Lovergirl was done cleaning his nose for him, they kissed again.

Deeply. Then he fell back into a deep sleep. If he was awake they were kissing. If they weren't kissing, he was passed out. Yum.

Breakfast arrived, and Lovergirl ate hers, keeping some of it for Snotboy. She woke him, they kissed, then she fed him his breakfast and her leftovers. After he finished eating there was another kiss. As deep and soulful as the others.

I like to sit in the aisle seat when flying, so while he was awake, I suggested that he and I trade seats so that he could sleep undisturbed if I wanted to get up and walk around. They agreed, and we all got into the aisle and then back into our row, him first. There was another kiss, then he passed out again...

During the stopover in Calgary I fell asleep leaning far forward, forehead against the seat in front of me, and had a dream of being anesthetized, like a patient etherized upon a table. In my dream I am connected to the people beside me in the row by tubes, our precious bodily fluids pumping in a circuit through the three of us. Our Purity of Essence makes us one.

In the dream, I believe that Snotboy and Lovergirl were planning suicide, and are planning to blow up the plane, taking all of us with them. In the dream, I sit up and shout, "No! I can't be on this flight! Let me off! Let me off!" In real life I woke up with my fists in the air in panic.

When the plane stops in Vancouver I get out as quickly as I can. While waiting at the baggage carousel, I see Snotboy and Lovergirl again. I am surprised to see that they are not kissing. What they are doing is glaring at me as though I have done something nasty, which leads me to wonder if I had been talking in my sleep

Oh well, talking in my sleep is not so bad considering some of the things that people do in their sleep.