Westering (2)

Cal­gary

We arrived in Cal­gary about sup­per­time, and found S & J’s house with­out too much dif­fi­cul­ty. They live in a rel­a­tive­ly new part of town, and there are a lot (a lot) of streets in the area that start with “Val­ley”.

Both of them had tak­en Mon­day off, and so we would have two full days of hangin’ out all togeth­er. And that’s what we did.

S & J have quite the house. It’s a two-sto­ry job, with a mez­za­nine lev­el that has vault­ed ceil­ings and a fire­place. Four bath­rooms in the place, which is one more than the num­ber of bed­rooms. When we were there, they had almost all the rooms re-paint­ed. (I chat­ted with S recent­ly; they’ve now com­plet­ed the painting.)

I’d love to say that we did aston­ish­ing feats of der­ring-do and hab­er­dash­ery while we were out in Cal­gary, but in truth, we had a nice, qui­et time. We hung around the house, played cards, and ate more than we should have. (In some cas­es, much, much more.) We accom­pa­nied S & J on a tour of one of the lit­tle shop­ping dis­tricts, where they bought a cou­ple of vas­es, and then we gorged on choco­late at a lit­tle choco­lati­er. We played cards–did I men­tion the cards? We enter­tained Mon­ty, the cat.

Mon­day we hopped in the car and went to the moun­tains. Hav­ing grown up on the prairie, hav­ing spent most of my life on the flat­lands, I’m always impressed when I see the Rocky Moun­tains up close and per­son­al. There’s some­thing so–sharp–about them. They always give me the impres­sion that you could reach out, chip off a piece of stone, and very care­ful­ly shave with it. But be care­ful not to drop it on your foot, because it’ll slice a toe clean off. You would­n’t even notice till some­one said, “Hey, is that your toe?”

Pho­tos:
Mountain and lake

Yours truly

Mountain, tree, and clouds

End of the road

Mountain

Susie and Jeff

Monty and Pat

And then on Tues­day, while our hosts were at work, we packed up our rental car, bade the house adieu, and head­ed north, back up to Edmonton.

I did­n’t get any pho­tos of it, but on the way back up, some­where just before Red Deer (IIRC), there was a semi truck on fire. Seri­ous­ly. Ful­ly engulfed in flames. He was on the far side of the south­bound high­way, and I was in the right lane of the north­bound high­way. There was a wide ditch between us. I was prob­a­bly no clos­er than six­ty feet from the truck at any one time.

But I felt the heat from the fire through my closed win­dow. It spooked me somewhat.

When we passed, there were no fire trucks or ambu­lances on the scene as yet. A few peo­ple had stopped and had their cell phones out, though. I kept dri­ving. As we neared Red Deer, there were a cou­ple police cars screamed by, head­ed south.

Thank­ful­ly, my adven­ture was far less inter­est­ing than that truck dri­ver’s was.

Westering (1)

Some­time before Christ­mas, my dar­ling wife went online, to the VIA Rail web­site. She punched in some dates, a start­ing point and a des­ti­na­tion, and said “Show me the mon­key!”* Then she said, “Holy crap, it’s cheap­er to take the train to Edmon­ton than it is to fly! Even on Westjet!”

So she ordered up a cou­ple round-trip tick­ets, and gave them to me for Christmas.

* * *

We got on the train at around 8:15 pm on Fri­day night. This was only about an hour after we were sup­posed to be on the train–apparently Via’s got­ten bet­ter at stick­ing to a sched­ule than they were back in the day when my Dad and my Gram­pa were sup­posed to pick up my aunt and uncle, and end­ed up going back into town** to buy some play­ing cards.

We were to trav­el overnight through Saskatchewan, miss­ing the prairie scenery while we slept, and arrive in Edmon­ton at 8:05 on Sat­ur­day morn­ing. We were trav­el­ing in Com­fort Class, because “Com­fort Class” sounds bet­ter than “Seats like a Bus, but with More Legroom and Lit­tle Footrests Class”. It was­n’t my most com­fort­able night’s sleep, and the less said about the cry­ing baby and the snoring/murmuring woman behind us, the better.

We were late get­ting into the Big E, but not as late as we could’ve been. K’s sis­ter S met us, with her hub­by C and their two-year-old Miss J. We went to the pool to see Miss J’s swim­ming lessons, then out to lunch (drop­ping off S at home, since she had to work). After lunch we head­ed to the satel­lite city of Leduc, where a rental car awaited.

Too bad the rental place had closed at noon.

And would­n’t be open on Sun­day, either.

This was the cause of some con­ster­na­tion, and no small amount of swear­ing. I called the 888 num­ber for the rental com­pa­ny’s head office, and was told that there were no rental out­lets open near me. I was polite to the operator–it was­n’t her fault–but I kind of hope that they were record­ing the call for train­ing pur­pos­es, so that my com­ment “I find it dif­fi­cult to believe that a rental com­pa­ny would have no offices open past noon on a Sat­ur­day.” The best part is that this par­tic­u­lar office is con­sid­ered the “air­port loca­tion”, since they’ll come pick you up at the air­port. What hap­pens if my flight comes in at 1:00 PM?

So C drove us back to the air­port, where I dis­cov­ered that rent­ing a car in advance costs about a third what rent­ing a car by walk­ing up to the counter does. Ouch.

At any rate, we were on our way to… Calgary.

Next time: Our adven­tures in Cal­gary and the mountains!

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* This is pure spec­u­la­tion on my part.
** The Via train sta­tion for Bran­don is, iron­i­cal­ly, out­side of Bran­don. (And it’s not so much a “train sta­tion” as it is a “three-per­son shack, usu­al­ly locked”).

Westering: prologue

Last week we were in the West. Alber­ta, to be pre­cise. We board­ed a train on Fri­day evening, and were in Edmon­ton Sat­ur­day morn­ing. We rent­ed a car, drove south to Cal­gary, and spent a few days vis­it­ing with my sis­ter and her hub­by. Tues­day we drove back up to Edmon­ton, hung out with Kath­leen’s sis­ter and her fam­i­ly, then got on the east­bound train on Sat­ur­day evening. By 9 AM Sun­day we were home again.

That’s a cap­sule sum­ma­ry, of course. Over the next few days I’ll drill down in more detail, but for now I’m tired (I think I picked up a cold out West), and so here are some select­ed pic­tures from our trip (some of which will sure­ly be repeat­ed in the next few posts).

Susie and Jeff
My sis­ter and her hubby.

Mountain
You can tell I’m a prairie boy; every time I’m near any moun­tains, I feel the need to record all of them. This is a set of six or so pho­tos, stitched togeth­er with Autos­titch.

Orchids Orchids I almost stepped in this
Some of the plants in Edmon­ton’s Mut­tart Conservatory.

Sharon and Cy
Kath­leen’s sis­ter and her hubby.

The dome
Not far from home, I found myself alone in the dome car with my cam­era and my lit­tle mini-tripod.

More to come!

Cedric

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Nico­la and Joël, proud par­ents of a third boy. And con­grat­u­la­tions to Julian and Isaac, broth­ers to Cedric, newly-born.

OK, now I think I might be getting into the Christmas mood

Self-portrait in glass ball

As I took this pho­to, my favourite Christ­mas song was play­ing on my CD player:

Ça berg­ers
Ça berg­ers, assemblons-nous
Allons voir le Messie
Cher­chons cet enfant si doux
Dans les bras de Marie
Je l’en­tends, il nous appelle tous
Ô sort digne d’envie

Lais­sons là tout le troupeau
Qu’il erre à l’aventure
Que sans nous sur ce coteau
Il cherche sa pâture
Allons voir dans un petit berceau
L’au­teur de la nature

Dieu naîs­sant, exauce-nous
Dis­sipe nos alarmes
Nous tombons à tes genoux
Nous les baignons d’nos larmes
Hâtes-toi de nous don­ner à tous
La paix et tous ses charmes 

If there’s a great clam­our for a trans­la­tion, I’ll post one.

Appar­ent­ly the song dates from the very ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry: “Les paroles de ce chant furent com­posées par Simon-Joseph Pel­le­grin (1663−1745) et pub­liées pour la pre­mière fois à Paris en 1701.” (per this page)

party party party

So yeah. This week­end, three par­ties, two days. This should be a challenge…

Tonight: the judo party.

Tomor­row: the Sun­day School Teach­ers’ par­ty, and then the Kath­leen’s Old Depart­ment At Work party.

Sun­day: Repenting.

A couple of linguistic annoyances

I don’t say “aboot” when I mean “about”. No Cana­di­an that I’ve ever known has, in my pres­ence, ever said “aboot”. I don’t know where that per­cep­tion comes from.

Yes­ter­day on TV, I heard two com­mon mis­pro­nun­ci­a­tions that have always annoyed me. First I heard some­one pro­nounce “height” as though it has an “H” at the end of it, pre­sum­ably to come up with some kind of lin­guis­tic sym­me­try with the word “width”. But hon­est­ly, if it were sup­posed to be pro­nounced that way, it would be spelled “heighth” or even “heighþ”, right?

Then, less than ten min­utes lat­er, I heard some­one (okay, it was Oprah) pro­nounce the word “roof” like it was a dog’s bark: “ruf”. I don’t know what it is about that one, but it’s always just set my teeth on edge. Artic­u­late, intel­li­gent peo­ple, who speak Eng­lish with­out the trace of an accent, can still replace one of the most beau­ti­ful sounds in the Eng­lish lan­guage (the “oo” sound) with an abbre­vi­at­ed, clipped “uh” sound.

So from here on out, I don’t want to hear any jokes about “aboot”. Got it, eh?

Com­ing up next: Pat takes a coach­ing course.

Painting

We paint­ed the liv­ing room over the last few days.

We went from a fair­ly dark blue
The Tree

to a sig­nif­i­cant­ly lighter blue.
Painting

We primed it first, which annoyed me, but was prob­a­bly for the best.
Blue

I think it looks pret­ty good.
Self-portrait

Election Time!

So today I did my civic duty™ and vot­ed in the local may­oral elec­tion. I was­n’t alone, either; accord­ing to the local access chan­nel (which is the only chan­nel actu­al­ly cov­er­ing the local elec­tion, since it was also elec­tion day in the cap­i­tal and around the province), there was almost a 40% vot­er turnout. I have no idea if that’s high, low, or meh.

Any­ways. I cast my bal­lot, went and got flang about (this being a judo night), went to Tim Hor­ton’s and got inter­viewed re: the elec­tion in the park­ing lot, and then came home. Hop­ing to find some info, I traipsed over to the local news­pa­per’s web­site, and got this:

Brandonsun.com will be down for maintenance until Thursday Morning (October 26th). Sorry for the inconvience.

What? What kind of fool kills the web­site for the only paper in town on elec­tion night? Crap.

But they’re on the local access chan­nel, like I said, so at least I now know that the incum­bent has a wal­lop­ing 63% of the vote, with about 25% of the polls report­ing. So it does­n’t look like any of the mem­bers of the so-called three-hand­cuff cir­cus* will be get­ting in…

The cov­er­age of the elec­tion remind­ed me this evening of one of my pet gram­mat­i­cal peeves. Bear with me; this may seem pedan­tic. (Well, actu­al­ly, it is pedan­tic. But this is my blog, so I’ll do what I like.)

Now, ever since Microsoft added the so-called “Smart” Quotes to Word, their word proces­sor, I’ve always gone in, found the set­ting in Tools->Options, and dis­abled them. Why? Because they’re stu­pid, that’s why.

Smart” Quotes work fine in the con­text they’re intend­ed: wrap­ping a word or phrase in match­ing quotes. The prob­lem comes in when you try to use them in a con­trac­tion like ’tis or ’06 (when you’re so lazy you’d rather type ’06 instead of 2006).

So let’s say, for instance, that you want to have a big, huge head­er on your TV screen that says “ELECTION ‘06”. Here’s what it should look like:
ELECTION ’06

Here’s what it looks like on CTV:
ELECTION ‘06

Note the apos­tro­phe. If you can’t see the dif­fer­ence, you’re insuf­fi­cient­ly uptight about gram­mar. Some­times I’m amazed I ever went on dates.

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* We’ve got three out of six may­oral can­di­dates who have his­to­ry with the law. One was con­vict­ed of fraud about 15 years ago, served his time, and is now try­ing to get his con­vic­tion over­turned; one went to court today on var­i­ous charges; and a third goes to court on Octo­ber 30th for his part in an alleged assault on anoth­er can­di­date. I tell you, at least it ain’t boring.

Election Time

There’s a gen­er­al elec­tion com­ing up in town, mean­ing that signs adorn lawns and medi­ans every­where you look, cov­ered with pithy say­ings like “It’s Time for a Change!” and “Vote [NAME GOES HERE] for [POSITION GOES HERE]”.

Back when I lived in res­i­dence, in my sal­ad days at the uni­ver­si­ty, there was a bylaw on the books that I rather liked. In an elec­tion, any can­di­date whose signs were still up by mid­night on the night before the vote was dis­qual­i­fied. Now there was a lot about rez elec­tions that I would­n’t want to car­ry over into the realm of–shall we say–grown-up pol­i­tics*, but I have always, always liked that rule.

Hmmm, the votes are in, and the may­or-elect is John Smith. Too bad he’s still got eight hun­dred signs up all over the city. Oh well. Who came in sec­ond? Lord Volde­mort? Are you sure? Check again. All right, all right. Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, democ­ra­cy sim­ply does not work.”

And I know that a lot–probably a majority–of the signs in ques­tion are not put up by the can­di­date. But if you real­ly sup­port your can­di­date, you can take down the signs you put up for him or her, right? Right?

I thought so.

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* Things like bal­lot-box stuff­ing and vot­er intim­i­da­tion, for instance. Not that that sort of thing does­n’t hap­pen in grown-up pol­i­tics; I just wish it didn’t.