Holiday Cheers

It’s understandable that some people get depressed around this time of the year. There is the uncomfortable weather, lack of sunshine, and incessant reminders of how we should all be out shopping, etc.. Fortunately, the flip side of that is that we can get cozy at home (with a tasty stir-fry of lemongrass-marinated beef), meet with friends in the evening (the blogger meetup was this Thursday night), give and get gifts, and perhaps even make plans for the new year. Pam has the jump on me this year in several ways: first, with one of the coolest gifts that you can give a nerd, an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO computer. Although it hasn’t arrived yet, I got the email confirmation of the gift so the cat is out of the bag. The way the OLPC purchase works is to ‘give one and get one’, so in getting me this interesting piece of technology, Pam’s also insured that some child in another country (like Uruguay and Rwanda) also gets one. It’s a project started by Nicholas Negroponte, the flamboyant and charismatic founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and now the of the Non-profit organization (OLPC) that has created the device with the idea of getting an inexpensive (the original goal was <$100, the real price is now a little less than twice that number) laptop in the hands of children in poorer countries all over the world, with the hope of bridging the information divide). Here’s an ad with Heroes’ Masi Oka for OLPC:

You can be sure that future postings will be about this new gift, and given that it has a pretty long wi-fi range and is one of the few laptops that has a screen that is visible in full sunlight, as well as long battery life and lightweight design, I’m hoping that there will actually be some postings for this written on it (perhaps from the park out back?) as well.

Big Travel Plans

I mentioned that Pam had the jump on me in the gift department. She’s also out ahead on plans for next year. She’s going to do something that she’s wanted to do for years now: see Antarctica. In February (the end of summer for that part of the world), she will first fly to Santiago, Chile, then board a charter flight to the southern tip of Argentina at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego (the world’s southernmost city). At that point, she’ll board the ship Explorer II, a “Double bottomed Ice Class vessel with an ice rating (Italian RINA Class 1-D) that exceeds the requirement for operating safely in Antarctica” (thank goodness for that, with the recent sinking of a vessel from Gap Adventures, the M/S Explorer) The ship cruises for 2 days through the Drake Passage to the Antarctic peninsula. She’ll spend about 4 days there, making excursions in Zodiac rafts to the ice,where hopefully she’ll see penguins like these. There are plans to land on the South Shetlands, including Half Moon, Cuverville, Paulet, Penguin, Goudier and Deception Island, depending on the weather conditions. I’m hoping that she’ll be able to send some of the day-to-day details of her voyage, although I’m not sure how easy email will be.

Before all of this starts, there are a few other (less impressive trips), including a visit to my parents’ house in Baltimore, and a week in San Francisco for MacWorld Expo. Looks like 2008 is going to get off to a busy start.

My First AF Birthday

Although today was my birthday, I decided that I wouldn’t take the day off, and we’d celebrate over the weekend. So, after breakfast with Pam (and a very cute card and her own Happy Birthday wishes), I headed into work, equipped as usual. By this I mean, pre-iPhone nerd attire: On the left side of my waist, my Treo smart phone in its beat-up holster. On my right, my iPod in its carrying case, white earphones draped over my shoulder. Both are attached to my belt, and like some gunslinger in the old West, I’m flanked by metal over each hip. Indeed, if I did have have an iPhone, I would have had only one device attached, but I’ll leave that for a future posting.

After I got to work, the little alarms on my Treo started.

I’ll back up. I’m on Facebook. It’s hard to find many people who aren’t these days, as even the most die-hard technophobes seem to have fun on the service. For a somewhat extroverted geek like yours truly, it’s a blast. There’s an option on Facebook to have the site send your cell phone a text message when someone sends you a message or ‘writes on your wall’, a free text field on your own profile page of Facebook. Usually I get 1 or 2 messages a week, or perhaps a few more. Never enough to become a nuisance, so I’ve kept this notification setting on.

I had a busy day, with a few meetings and deadlines to work toward. Nevertheless, all day, every half hour or so, my Treo would vibrate (I set it on vibrate when at work so as not to interrupt meetings). About 30 friends sent me birthday greetings of some sort via Facebook. While I’m not a Facebook junky as some people have admitted that they are (and I rarely check it at work), but even I had to admit that this was a bit unusual.

You might think that I would have been peeved by the steady stream of notifications from my hip, but I wasn’t. We all know that there are times that others think of us. Most of the time we don’t really know for sure. Our ears burn or some friend exclaims ‘I was just thinking of you’, when you call them. But today, I knew that quite a few friends thought of me, perhaps for just a few minutes or so, and wished me a Happy Birthday. Some of them were back in Boston, some were in Japan or San Francisco, and some were here in Vancouver. I have to say that it was really kind of fun getting so many little shout-outs.

So today I experienced my first ‘After Facebook’(AF) Birthday, and it was kind of fun. And to all of those friends who sent me a message today, thanks. I’m thinking of all of you, too.

The PNE and Labour Day Weekend

Last weekend, we paid another visit to the PNE, which is the ‘State Fair’ that is held yearly at the fairgrounds at the corner of East Hastings and Boundary Road. It was our third time, so we knew mostly what we wanted to see and do. The new addition of the Peking Acrobats were a great new attraction; you can’t but be impressed by some of their feats of strength and balance, like the woman who did a perfect handstand on top of 7 chairs stacked on top of each other, with the bottom chair perched on 4 Coke bottles. This year we arrived just as a calf had been born, and got to see the mother cow licking the newborn. We didn’t stay long enough to see it take its first steps, but I’m told they always do within an hour or two. I always like taking pictures of the animals, even if the most exotic thing you typically see is a Llama or Alpaca (and you can spy those along many roads in BC). We did see a Sow nursing a litter of piglets, but fortunately none of them squealed. That needle-sharp piercing cry is my first memory, from the West Virginia State Fair when I was perhaps 3 or 4 year’s old, and it has remained a sound that bothers me to this day. We also saw the impressive Sand Sculpture contest and the Card Stacking champion, and even a ‘Human Fountain’ powered by a bicycle pedal pump.

It was nice to have an extra weekend day, which is how this particular holiday often works out to be. On Saturday, Pam and I took a trip down to Crescent Beach in Surrey, and then the town of White Rock, and had a look at this charming and colourful seaside village. If this is where people are buying up real estate like mad for retirement, I can see the attraction. We had a tasty lunch (steamed mussels and salad for me, a Salmon burger and salad for Pam) and walked up and down the boardwalk, taking in the sun and sea. We went out to the pier and back, and generally just hung around people and place-watching. Pam posed for a photo by the ‘White Rock’ (a Glacial deposit) that is now painted white (but is is very big, to be sure). It was nice not to be on a schedule for a change.

Later, we drove to Point Roberts, which we had also heard of but not seen until now. I have to say that it was a little depressing. Maybe even a little creepy. Point Roberts, for those who are not familiar, is a strange result of the Tsawwassen peninsula of British Columbia extending south, beyond the 49th parallel, creating a small, isolated piece of the USA that you can only reach from Canada. According to the Britishcolumbia.com Website:

Point Roberts is located on the extreme southern tip of the peninsula that defines Boundary Bay’s western shoreline. Visitors must cross the Canada-US border on Point Roberts Road in Tsawwassen to enter or leave the tiny enclave. Except for a steep hill south of Maple Beach, exploring Point Roberts makes for a mostly level, 2-hour tour by bike. The roads blend into one another in a simple rectangular grid and are easy to follow. Whatcom County, Washington, of which Point Roberts is a part, maintains Lighthouse Park, a delightful and often overlooked park at the extreme southwestern point of the mainland. From this windswept point, cyclists are rewarded with some of the best views on the entire Fraser Estuary: Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca as well as the Strait of Georgia open up on three sides.

I don’t know about delightful and overlooked, but we did venture into Lighthouse Park, and found it pretty grim and desolate, with tumbledown wood buildings from the 1970s and a truly awful public toilet. There were a few people there, but it was a big contrast compared with the sunny, populated world of White Rock. The views (a least to the south) were nice, although it had begun to get a bit overcast by the time we got there.


Sunday and today have been far less adventurous. We relaxed and did some errands yesterday, before I made a Risotto with our beloved local Chanterelles, which are at their peak, as well as some amazing Japanese mushrooms from Granville Island including a big (expensive), aromatic Matsutake mushroom, which is like a truffle in its complexity and rarity. Also made a Pumpkin cake, which we brought to Matt and Oana’s ‘movie night’ , where we had some of Matt’s excellent fish chowder and saw Stalag 17, an old Billy Wilder WWII classic that actually came out after the war was over in 1953.

Close Despite the Distances

If any good can come of the theft of my wallet, it’s that I was reminded of how many family and friends, spread across many time zones and a couple continents are there, caring what happens, and offering words of reassurance. It does make it easier.

Next week I’ll be traveling to Baltimore to see my parents, and then up to Dublin, New Hampshire, for the 35th Reunion of The Walden School, an organization and group of people who I also feel close to, despite the physical (and temporal) distances.

I’m very happy that despite the fact that I’ve moved around a lot in my life, I’ve managed to keep friendships and other close relationships alive and active. I hope that will always be the case.

Catching Up

How to cover so much that has happened since my last post? As is often the case, I hold off on new entries when I’m about to upgrade Wordpress, and then put off doing the upgrade, which makes the gap wider, which makes me put off the upgrade, making this a vicious cycle. Well, cycle broken. Now, on to what went on during the gap:
A Wedding
Our friends Matt and Oana got married. We feel particularly privileged to have known both of them through all of the stages of courtship, engagement, and now getting hitched (they are on their honeymoon as I write this). The Romanian Orthodox ceremony was unlike anything either of us had ever seen, complete with chanting, incense, tin crowns, and all sorts of other ethnic touches that one doesn’t encounter in most marriage ceremonies. We were both a little thrown off by the absence of any music for the processional or recessional, the talking, passing out of candy, and other eccentricities during the ceremony by many of the relatives, and a chorus of women women singing a repeated refrain to the priest (which I later found out was roughly the equivalent of the Latin ‘Kyrie Eleison’ ). As I also found out later, we could have also been treated to magic tricks, stories, and bear training, so in retrospect, it was a pretty restrained event. But get those Romanians dancing at the reception! That was another thing entirely. The reception was a blast. Matt and Oana had chartered a boat that circled in and around the Vancouver area, including points as far north and west as Lighthouse Point, as far east as the Ironworker’s Bridge, into False Creek and all the way down to the Science Centre and out again. Despite a little drizzle, it was quite smooth and comfortable, and we all enjoyed an absolutely spectacular dinner including salmon (of course), chicken, vegetables and a piece of an enormous wedding cake provided by one of Oana’s relatives. We all had a great time and were glad we could be with them for the event, which I’m sure will be remembered fondly by all who attended for a long time.

The Blogger Meetup
This monthly event been covered by many others, including Jan and John, so I’ll keep this brief. We congregated at Cuppa Joe on Broadway and Main, who provided coffee, pastries and free wifi. At one point it almost seemed as if we would outgrow the room but we moved chairs around and some of us adapted. It’s nice to be a part of a group of so many clever people and we often find the conversations moving from one topic to the next at furious speed: the state of James Doohan’s (Scotty from Star Trek) ashes to videoconferencing to ‘The Secret’. A few new attendees also livened things up, and cameras caught a lot of us in mid-sentence (or laugh!) I regret that I’ll have to miss next month’s meeting, as I’ll be back East visiting friends and family then.

Eat! Vancouver
We made it for the second time to the food show that takes over BC Place (the air-supported dome that had a bit of a deflation problem this last winter). Once again we tasted, sipped and nibbled on all sorts of free samples and got tons of recipes and coupons. I noticed a big growth in the number and type of beverages, including not only teas and soft drinks, but vitamin-waters, juices, concentrates, smoothies, and coffees. I wonder if the fast pace of people’s lives is favoring liquids as they are easier to take with you in a bottle or can, and hence, a growing market in that sector.
We managed to make the demo by Rob Feenie, Vancouver’s most famous chef, who is actually quite a local celebrity. He demoed a recipe for miniature hamburgers made from shredded short rib meat, which I have to say was not a very unusual dish, at least in terms of ingredients and cooking method; Pam was shocked as I consistently knew what he was going to say or do next (‘now he’s going to add some mirepoix - chopped onions, celery and carrots…now he’s going to deglaze the pan with some wine or broth’…etc.)

My New Strategist
After my troubles with my Career Management company didn’t improve (and in fact, they seemed to me to get worse), I told them that things weren’t working, and that I needed a different strategist. They agreed, and tomorrow I meet with the new strategist. Here’s hoping they can help me and can work with me a bit better. So far I’ve been hitting a series of brick walls, and I’m trying really hard not to get discouraged during this period.

Coming Up
Besides my meeting with my new strategist tomorrow, that evening I’m planning on attending the big multimedia concert and Contemporary Shadow Play, ‘Semar’s Journey’ by the Gamelan I used to play in, Madu Sari. Since I’m still on their mailing list, I’ve been seeing the amount of rehearsals they’ve been scheduling and frankly I don’t know how I could have done it. I hope it goes well; they certainly have worked hard to prepare for it.

The weather continues to be gorgeous, and the sunshine stays until just after 9:00 at night. Vancouver summer is just about upon us, and it’s always worth the wait.