Where everybody knows your name....?

I've complained, once (twice at the most), over the years about getting letters and emails and phone calls addressed to me using a title for the other gender, the one I'm not part of, at least not yet (no, I have no immediate plans, but the nights are long...). Why couldn't I have one of those you-can't-possibly-get-this-wrong names, like Dave, or Mike? I've always laughed it off, saying I'm confident in my orientation, etc, because basically it's not a big deal. That meant, though, that when my daughter complained to me about the name she got, I was all prepared to tell her to laugh it off, too...so that's just what I did.

Cell phones and the pictures you can take and send with them are great for promoting social justice, for saving lives in emergency situations, for capturing special moments that in the past would have just slipped away. They're also great for long term campaigns to make a point, like that the name we gave our daughter really may have some legitimate drawbacks. Yes, that's right, that IS why we put a man on the moon, so that my daughter has the technology she needs to complain about her name, and the way it's mistreated out in the world.

Over the course of the last year or so, she has texted images that make one or both of the following points:

1. The name we gave our eldest daughter can be incorrectly spelled a number of ways, and
2. Starbucks, while interested in giving you the exact coffee you want, doesn't hire for either listening or spelling acumen

Here is a short series of photos that make her point (and offer Starbucks' competitors a business opportunity - they can cater to people whose names all the other guys mangle up):

This is a pretty common spelling, but I think this one was after the instruction "...with two Ys.."  Let's see, checking, counting them off...one...yep, one. Good job. Got a Y in there.  Why don't I feel good?

Okay, look, anybody can make a mistake...busy day, lots of noise...be the bigger person and walk away. At least this one has two Ys.

Sigh...I suppose at least having the "i" in there makes some sort of sense..."Y after A except before L" is the rule, as I recall.

 

Finally, months and months into the campaign, a winner!  I think this barista is probably a fourth year MIT student using their barista time to look at the possibility of converting one of those huge espresso machine into a small scale cold fusion reactor.  It's the only explanation that makes any sense.

When she sent me this one, I accused her of gaming it, of putting the baristas up to deliberately outrageous spellings.  Didn't go over well.  Apparently on this one, she spelled her name out for whoever was taking the order, and this is what came up. Betcha that barista makes just a crazy good latte.  Probably a great dancer, too.



Because of my rigorous commitment to journalism, I spent actual money getting a coffee that would have my name on it, just to see what would happen. This is why I need advertising on this blog, to pay for this kind of in-depth research. I'm just glad coffee is gender-neutral.

I would love to see a whole series of this kind of thing. I really can't figure out whether they do it just to tick people off or because getting it right is just way too much work or what.

Why Even Hike at ALL!?

Today I went on a hike with my friends Reiner and Sharon.  We went up Mount Strachan, above Cypress Bowl. It took us almost exactly four hours to cover almost exactly 10 km. The route map and a pretty good description are here.  The only meaningful difference between what we did and that description is that we did it counterclockwise, the opposite of the direction suggested at the linked site.

I'm going to stick in pictures, because I was told that was a good thing to do when blogging, but they don't have much to do with anything in this post. Enjoy them, though; it was a great day with fantastic views.


Bridge out...made of two really  big steel beams. How on earth did they get bent?  How on earth did they even GET there?

We saw a LOT of people up there. Old and young, some carrying the very young, with and without dogs, using poles or not, labouring heavily or just walking, clearly seasoned hikers and clearly not seasoned hikers. If hiking has become a cool thing to do among some particular demographic, you'd never know it from the assortment of people we saw - that was about as democratic as it gets, I think....on the outside, at least. The only missing group seemed to be anybody at all between the ages of about 10 and 20.


The Lions from the south peak of Mt Strachan...very dramatic

In the spirit of overwhelming laziness that is a hallmark of this blog, I have not looked into where all the surly teens and pre-teens are on the hiking question. I haven't even asked the two in my own personal immediate orbit.


The Lions from the north peak.  It's not really much closer, I just used my high tech phone camera's precision zoom...better light, too.

The main reason I haven't looked deeply into that question is because I don't really care - as long as I can get MY hike on when I want, and as long as I make some trifling effort to sell it to my kids like showing the pictures and writing a mildly pro-hiking post, I'm good. After all, another hallmark of this blog, like all of them, is that it's all about me.

Bowen Island, Gibsons in the background, from top of Mt Strachan

 Here comes today's completely unverified-by-this-correspondent theory: I'm slowly coming around to the idea that the reason that the 10-20 group didn't seem to be hiking can be generalized to every active thing there is that they don't do. It's not the decline of western civilization nor the relentless march of super entertaining electronic toys, like the one I'm typing this on, not even risk-averse parents. It's way simpler than that.

Looking north up Howe Sound

I probably should just be saying it's not perceived as cool, but where's the fun in that? My theory is that it's because that age group hasn't really discovered endorphins. They have enough energy to do pretty much anything they feel like doing for pretty much as long as anyone could want to. Their bodies don't have to encourage them with periodic shots of mood enhancers to exert themselves in the search for food and prey, because exertion is a non-issue for them.


Looking east from Mt Strachan - big scary mountains

Looking WAY east, again with the super duper phone camera zoom.  I was told what this peak is but already forgot.  Long ways away, though.

 When I get to the top and experience that burst of smug triumphant self satisfaction, superiority over everyone who ISN'T up here seeing this, it's probably mostly just my body's drugs talking. Without the drugs, I'd probably just end up with the same question in the subject line and in the minds of all those surly teenagers - why even hike (or run, or cycle, or swim, or spin, or whatever) at ALL?! Dude, it's not even cool.

Bowen Island from Bowen lookout, and yes it really is that much closer than from the top of Mt Strachan (photo of Bowen above)

That was it. If a theory this weak, this easy to find out about or challenge or dispute, doesn't draw a remark, well, then, I just don't know.  I just don't know whether endorphins are involved in the processes of finding out, challenging, disputing, or remarking, because I'm starting to wonder whether endorphins aren't the reason anyone does anything.  Okay, not really on that last part.


 Spotted Saxifrage, between my thumb and forefinger. Oh all right, NO, I didn't know what it was called, Sharon had to tell me.  Three times, at least.  The last time in writing.

Kootenay Lake make-up post

It has apparently been weeks since I had a Deep Thought, or even a thought that seemed worth posting (and given some of the things that actually DID get posted, you will know that there's been a certain lack of inspiration lately). So, this post is a nice easy one: I went to Kootenay Lake to visit my brother, I did some stuff, I took some pictures, and this is my pictorial trip report. This is probably more like what normal blogs put up. I don't know, I haven't taken the Facebook "What Kind of Blogger Are You?" quiz. Pretty much certain there IS one.

Here's how it went: I got up at the crack of dawn (4 a.m. - yeah, I'm one of THOSE people) and was full of coffee and on the road by 5:20. The weather was not great down here, but my smug sense of superiority from being so ahead of the clock kept me warm. I saw I think 9 deer in Manning Park, 8 of them mule deer and one white tail. Don't worry, I won't sustain this level of detail for long.

Got near Osoyoos, the sun was shining, and I remembered somebody somewhere expressing interest in Spotted Lake, so I stopped at the one Spotted Lake I know:

This is a culturally significant site, which I didn't know til I stopped.

Climbing up out of Osoyoos, doing the hairpins going up the Anarchist Summit, I took advantage of a little-known option that was only ever offered by Honda on their 1998 Accords: the TiltoMeter. It tells you how close to skidding or rolling over you might be when cornering. Here's a shot of it in action (just ignore the guy lurking in the mirror):

Up nearer the top, having foregone my usual amusing shot of the cheesy Sasquatch statue, I was struck by how pretty an equally cheesy man-made pond looked in the mid-morning light:

Arrived at Christina Lake just before noon, and texted McNulty this picture of the lake in response to his "where are you?" His place is about 200 m to the left of where I was standing. What a wit, what a wag, what a pretty lake:

As we sat on the deck drinking coffee, this turtle made its way onto the dock ramp to glean whatever warmth the overcast sun offered. I had no idea turtles would live in a big lake, thought they only did little ponds...maybe this one was avoiding the nearby dive team, who apparently have full time jobs removing milfoil from the lake. I kind of wonder whether milfoil is what this turtle eats, and how many turtles we could buy for the cost of a full time dive team...:

Got to Kootenay Lake around dinner. We went for a short bike ride the next day, and I have a bunch of pretty boring GoPro footage of it. On the day following that, we did sanding. Here's a before and after shot of most of the deck furniture. I chose to add captions in case somehow you didn't find the incredible improvement startlingly obvious: 

Before

After

Hmmm...even with the captions, that didn't work out so well.  Here are two of the same kind of chair, sanded and not sanded:

Okay I give up already on the sanding. We did it and by now the doughty Uncle Sam will have stained and oiled them to a like-new sheen.

Thursday morning I woke up to this view from the deck, around 7:45.  This HAD to be a good day for a long ride:

We finally got ourselves onto our bikes and riding by about 10:30.  We went as far north as Kaslo, but we wisely opted to not ride right down into town...because we would have had to turn right around and slug our way right back up that big hill to get OUT of town. Here's the official sign. I still like the one outside Hope, BC, best. It says "Experience Hope". But Kaslo's doing okay with this one:

Here is one of very few photographs of the elusive Uncle Sam at rest, having a snack. My ear is in the photo because I had to sneak it. He thought I was only taking the picture of the bikes below, but I switched to selfie mode to catch him over my left shoulder, all unaware. The beauty part is he'll never know I posted this because he'll never read this blog. He looks pretty good for a 68 year old guy, eh? 

About 33 km in, having a snack...Uncle Sam.

This is the beard picture:

I am desolated to report that although it was a beautiful day, and I spent all of it looking like more of a dork even than usual with a GoPro mounted on my helmet, I screwed up the settings on it and so got none of the fabulous images of a very placid Kootenay Lake with snow-capped mountains to the east. Sorry. In all we rode 100 km over an elapsed roughly 6 hrs, of which 4.5 were spent in the saddle. In spite of all my time in spin class, and in spite of the 10 years he has on me, Sam is still a significantly stronger rider than I am. I'm about equally pleased and maddened by that.

Speaking of maddening, I've had a running debate with my hiking group leader about what is a huckleberry and what isn't. The picture below goes to explaining at least part of why that's such a confusing question:

I left the lake at the crack of dawn on Saturday May 30. Coming up out of Castlegar towards the Nancy Greene, I saw something I've never seen before in all these trips: what looked like a full grown moose crossing the highway. It took a second to comprehend what it even was - no frame of reference. Those things are HUGE, and if that one wasn't full grown I don't think I want to see what a big one looks like. I was so excited I failed to get a picture before it lumbered off into the bush, which is a big disappointment, to me at least.  By way of compensation for the missing image, I give you a picture that Rob Brown, whom I used to work with, took himself of Mt. Everest. It has nothing to do with this trip or Kootenay Lake, but I thought it was cool that someone I know has seen the big mountain:

There. Feel free to add comment remark. I'll put this one up and see whether I can make the subscription thing work...