Um, I now realize I should have turned up the resolution on the scanner. But onward we forge, past that minor technical detail!

Here is a picture of me and Kristy, my gracious host for my Calgary going-away party. Look, woman, are you coming to visit or what?

And here is a picture of me and Dave, my gracious host for my Edmonton-area welcome-back party. This appears to be a favourite pose with Mr. Gordon, as I believe I was captured on film in July, being similarly assaulted. At any rate, this photo cut off my head, but I still think it’s funny and worth posting because, as my brother correctly pointed out, “I still know it’s you ‘cos you’re wearing sheep socks.” “Shut up, Al.”

Talk about the Daniel situation? I don’t even want to think about the Daniel situation. All I know is that it’s definitely a situation. You know: like how there’s that situation in the Middle East. That kind of situation.

At any rate, I want to open a gym and put up a big sign out front notifying skinny girls that they can’t join. No, you sexy thing, you can’t join. Why don’t you suck on some celery or something, unless today is a water-only day.

Seriously, the gym at the U of A is always packed to the gills and it is never the people who need to use the facilities that actually can. In all directions you’re surrounded by gazelle-like items in red lycra prancing on the treadmills, swooping on the ellipticals, emitting adorable grunts as they heft their two-pound weights. These women do not need to use the gym. But I, and plenty of my chubby schoolmates, do - and we can’t, because the machines are all occupied! Redundantly occupied! Unnecessarily occupied! It’s enough to make you want to go home and eat an entire bag of Doritos.

In my gym, you’ll have to get your body fat measured before you can join. If you’re too skinny, you’ll constitute a waste of badly-needed resources, so I’ll kick you out the door, or more likely just blow lightly in the direction of the door and watch you waft away. And it’ll be girls-only, too - none of this ‘Is that a PowerBar or are you just happy to see me’ business. Yes, it’ll be fat girls wall-to-wall, and no line-ups on anything. Hah.

Bitter? Who, me?

In a stunning upset (slightly reminiscent of a challenger beating an Iron Chef, say), I have been dumped.

Or anyway, I think I’ve been dumped. There are so many alarm bells going off it’s a little hard to think straight. But I think I can back this up:
a) The guy hasn’t called or e-mailed since mid-August. It is now September 12th. This fully encompasses the time I was back home between Calgary and Vancouver, and also my post-Vancouver time. And,
b) During this time I have called every couple of days, leaving three messages, and sent about four e-mails (polite and amusing, not accusatory) - all to no reply. This to a guy who spends approximately 18 hours a day in front of his computer within reaching distance of his phone. And,
c) I know that his preferred method of breaking up is to weasel out rather than confront directly, i.e. he’ll just go incommunicado and the girl will give up on the relationship out of frustration and start sticking tacks into a black-haired voodoo doll with a beauty mark on the right cheek, or whatever. Ergo,
d) I believe myself to be indubitably, inexplicably, irrevocably single for the first time in five years. (Yes, our five-year anniversary would have been at the end of this month; I already spent $115 on concert tickets to celebrate it. I actually don’t mind being dumped, but seriously, can we talk timing here? Those tickets are not refundable!)

Sheesh. At any rate, in case he reads this, which he won’t because I’m not sure he even knows I have a blog:

“Dear Daniel,

You could have said something before I bought the damn tickets.

Enjoy living the life of the mind,
Yours sincerely,
Premee M.”

Sept 14, 2006 - UPDATE:

OK, so he just called and wanted to chat.  No comments on the month of total silence and unreturned calls except “I thought you were busy.”  Oh, and I also got “I’ve been working a lot.”  He also still wants to go to ‘our’ fifth anniversary concert.  What the ass is going on here?!  I think I’m having a stroke.

So, Vancouver!
The train trip was exciting and novel and all that, except that my carriage was crammed with loud Australians (fine in and of itself, but they didn’t shut up for twenty-three hours, and it turned out also that they were carrying some kind of fabulous, Mission-Impossible type virus - more on that later).

This is a mountain we passed, with a lake. I had borrowed my dad’s Pentax Optio for the trip, which is an amiable little camera and pretty good for battery power, but I wasn’t sure how to use all the features. I took this using what I hoped was the ‘action photo’ mode. Turned out OK, eh?

I had started and finished Lew Wallace’s ‘Ben Hur’ on the train and started in on Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ which resulted in a scary dream where I was on a road trip with Jesus and He was bugging me to stop somewhere for burgers, and then He grabbed the steering wheel (???), and when I awoke from that - with a violent, all-body jerk and a crick in my neck - I was rewarded with the city of Vancouver at sunrise. Oh my goodness. Why don’t we all just move there?

The lovely and much-missed and very, very organized Ms. Scott came to get me at the train station, and after a couple of thousand calories at Denny’s, we embarked on a ‘Mountain Vista’ bus tour!

This started off at a salmon hatchery, where we got to stand over grates and go ‘Ooo’ at all the baby salmon, or ‘fry’ as they are known in the industry. Here are some eatin’-sized salmon, but these ones won’t get eaten due to being on permanent display for the tourists.

Then we went to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, or as our tour guide insisted on pronouncing it, ‘Cappy-lino.’ Regardless: here is a shot from the top of the bridge. This photograph by no means gives any indication of how marvellously high up it was, or how it swayed so you wished you’d had a big whiskey sour before you stepped on it, or how pretty and civilized the Treetop Adventure on the other side is. Hooray for the Cappy-lino Bridge!

Then, we took an aerial tram-car to the top of Grouse Mountain. I didn’t know what to expect from Grouse Mountain - perhaps some trees? Rocks? I thought the best we could possibly hope for was an ecological interpretation center and a hippy in a hemp hat. Instead, we got:

Lumberjacks… on a mountain!
On Saturday, we decided to knock it up a notch and headed out ridiculously bright and early to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology.

This is an excellent museum, with lots of hands-on exhibits and multimedia and a story in every corner. I liked that they encouraged photography and had employed skylights and glass walls to light up each exhibit to its most photogenic. Then we took a five-minute turn in the UBC rose garden, and talk about photogenic?:

The first thing I did was turn to Kim, I think probably with an upraised finger, and announce, “Why the hell aren’t you getting married here?” She explained that the idea had crossed her mind the moment she saw it, but that since her mother had threatened homicide for even thinking of anywhere other than Edmonton, Kim had wisely chosen life over a pretty wedding location. Siiigh.

After we left the rose garden we went to Science World! This was our first real example of that phenomenon whereby going to a major tourist attraction on a sunny day is an incredibly effective method of birth control. I mean, after a couple of hours surrounded by sprinting, howling, ratfaced brats dressed in $200 overalls with absent or apparently deaf parents who are doing nothing about their simian offspring… you start seriously thinking about the Snip. Or the Tie. Or that old favourite, Clawing One’s Ovaries Out With One’s Fingernails on the SkyTrain. But I digress.

Science World was awesome! They had a big Egyptian-themed Lego exhibit, and next to each exhibit they’d tell you how many blocks it took to make and how many hours. And we’re not talking Megablox either, we’re talking ordinary little Lego pieces.

Zowie, eh? I know! And here is Kim playing an infrared harp: all the music without the hassle of strings! (Notice the serious burn on her left arm, which you cannot see because I Photoshopped it out. That said, I couldn’t do anything about the farmer’s tan. Sorry, dear!)

Then, we went to Granville Island to celebrate my birthday.

We had spent so long enjoying the wonders of science that all the shops on Granville Island were closed, but we went to the Sandbar restaurant (their burners had been shut down due to a ‘kitchen problem’ - yes, obviously - so we consoled ourselves with several martinis while we waited for hot food to arrive).

They stuck a candle in my cheesecake and wrote birthday greetings in caramel sauce!  (As a sidenote: thanks again to all the thoughtful folks who sent me birthday greetings over the long weekend, and to those of you who didn’t, I hope you can see that I’m sticking my tongue out at you.  BLEAAAHHHH.)  Anyway, Kim and I then sobered up slightly on a swingset we found inexplicably behind some buildings on Granville Island, then we went to see some very funny, NC-17 rated, unphotographable theatresports.  Brill!  We got home somehow and then came… SUNDAY.

On Sunday we went to Storyeum, which is hard to describe unless you’ve been in it, which I understand some of my faithful readers have been and I invite them to comment on the experience, since I find myself temporarily at a loss for words.  At any rate, you aren’t allowed to take pictures in it, so we settled for making Kim poke her face through the cardboard cutout next to the gift shop.  (By this point I’ve taken approximately a hundred photos of her and she’s still not complaining, but she isn’t really smiling any more.  Probably something to do with the devil drink.)

Then we staggered off to Stanley Park.

It all sort of looks like this, except for the parts that have totem poles in them.  Our tour guide, who was also from Australia (as were most of the hospitality experts on my trip), was asked at one point why the totem poles had been erected in Stanley Park.  She thought for a minute and replied, “For the tourists!”  Upon further questioning, she also came up with this gem:  “And the poles are painted so the tourists can see them more easily!”  She wasn’t joking.  I almost cried.

We then went to the Vancouver Aquarium and took in a dolphin show (surprisingly more about physiology and ecology than splashy jumps, of which there were only two or three) and a beluga show.

I am not quite sure what this ugly item is or why I photographed it, but it obviously seemed important at the time.

At any rate, it was becoming increasingly evident by Sunday afternoon that I had picked up something lethal from the Australians on my train (who else could it be, we reasoned), and was hacking and wheezing and generally feeling sorry for myself, so Kim dragged me back to headquarters for twelve hours’ sleep and a vat of super-strength cough syrup, which first made me high and then knocked me out.  I felt very weird the next morning and we only managed the Vancouver Art Gallery (also good) and a quick stroll around Robson Street (an excellent site for peoplewatching), and then I got bundled on the next plane home just in time for school to start.   I had a blast in Vancouver, in no small part due to my wunnerful host, and I’ll be bahk!