Shopping With My Father-In-Law, or A Quaint Afternoon In Hell

Ah, shopping with my father-in-law. If it's not a trip out to Home Depot to test the physical limits of a Dodge Caravan, it's a rice run to Chinatown. Whatever it is, it's always an adventure.



Every weekend we have a father (in-law) and son trip to the grocery store. That is a weekly treat in itself. My FIL has gifts. Skilz. And they are mad. Imagine you are in the meat section, a meat section full of every cut of meat possible from an entire herd of cattle. Imagine one of those thousands upon thousands of packages of meat is broken open and leaking blood. This is the package my FIL will choose. It doesn't matter if it's buried under a literal tonne of meat. It doesn't matter if it's still in the back and hasn't been brought out yet. Hell, it doesn't matter if it hasn't actually been wrapped up yet and put out on display. If it hasn't, if it will be wrapped shortly and fate has determined it will fall to the ground or be crushed under something else causing a tear in the cellophane, my father-in-law will wait for it. His senses are that good.

Beef, pork, poultry or seafood, he will find it. On a good day he'll find more than one. His other ability, which I believe to be supernatural, is to choose a broken package that I will not notice until I'm picking it up to give to the cashier. Why just get blood over the rest of the groceries when you can get it all over your son-in-law's hands? The show stopper though? Bones. Bones are much better because not only do they cause the container (I'm trying to stop writing package. Did you read Steenky yesterday?) to break, but they also stab your son-in-law! I love that. LOVE IT! Wondering what kind of bovine, porcine... um... chicken or fish disease is coursing through my veins as I empty the rest of the cart warms my heart. Or maybe that's the poison?

Last weekend was a trip to Chinatown for rice. Now for all my non-Asian readers, when an Asian family buys rice, it's not a family sized box of Rice-a-Roni. We're talking 50lb bags. Bags plural. My father-in-law likes to tell me about these trips at the last possible moment so I have no time to prepare, either mentally or with an excuse. Joking! I'd never make up an excuse. Honest.

Driving in Chinatown. How does one describe it? The throngs of pedestrians, the stream of cars fighting for non-existent parking, delivery trucks parked in the middle of the street, rabid sea gulls and pigeons, old men with cleavers hollering at you in Cantonese to buy something that, quite frankly, frightens the hell out of you. Oh, and those fifty pound bags of rice? They don't walk themselves to your car so you need one of those non-existent parking spots. (Ok, that's stretching it a bit, they will carry the rice to your car on a dolly, but it kind of spoils the story.) Imagine drinking a six-pack of Red Bull and then playing Need for Speed on your Xbox. Kinda like that. And then your father-in-law mentions, oh ya, heh heh, it's Chinese New Year next week. Ya. It's kinda like that.

Food Porn Saturday

Supreme Leader gets a jones for something she wants to eat and it must be eaten. The sooner the better or it's days and days of listening to, "oh, I'd love some ___," or "you know what I'd really love right now?" So today, after grocery shopping, it was dim sum! At our favourite dim sum spot, Sun Sui Wah.

Mmm, taro...


Alternative way of eating a barbeque pork bun...


Consequences of not just picking bun up (bitten tongue)...


Daddy's favourite...


And not for the faint hearted eater, Mommy's favourite...


And one, thank you Steve Jobs for putting video on iPods. Two, would you like a 3 year old?


Now it's a lazy afternoon at home with my extra large double-double (it's a Canadian thing) and a stack of books while I let the TV babysit the kids. Don't judge me.

Disappearing Cars

I saw this quote over on tumblr this morning:

Over the next four years, we are likely to witness the greatest mass exodus of vehicles off America’s highways in history. By 2012, there should be some 10 million fewer vehicles on American roadways than there are today—a decline that dwarfs all previous adjustments including those during the two OPEC oil shocks. Many of those in the exit lane will be low income Americans from households earning less than $25,000 per year. Incredibly, over 10 million of those American households own more than one car.

Soon they won’t own any.

- Jeff Rubin, CIBC World Markets

I don't know, Europe has been dealing with fuel prices even higher than we have now for decades without that kind of dramatic impact. Of course, Europe is pretty small compared to North America. Oh, and they also have transportation systems that don't SUCK ASS! It takes my wife an hour and a half to travel roughly 32 km (20 miles) to get to work. One way. During peak hours. Off hours it can take over 2.

Before my impending job loss we were seriously looking at downsizing from our gas dinosaur of a mini-van to a Honda Fit but that's been pushed to the back burner for the time being. I'd get a scooter in a second if it weren't for Bern's shifts being all over the god damned place. They're economical and tres cool but a bitch for carrying two children.

I had a good laugh on Friday when I heard about Translink's latest problems. (If you're not from the Lower Mainland of BC, think giant, money-sucking bureaucratic nightmare that magically taxes EVERYTHING and doubles the price of your gas but still manages to make it completely impractical for anyone outside of Metropolitan Vancouver to take transit.) Translink has been making a KILLING off fuel taxes now that the price of gas is so high. And, of course, the whole time their mantra to everyone is "take transit!" Well, now a lot more people are taking transit and not driving. And not buying gas. And not paying the taxes on that gas that lines Translink's coffers. Life's a bitch.

Oh well, I'm sure they'll think of another tax. They're good at that.

Found this as I was walking from my car to work Friday morning. Started the day off well.



Good luck B.C & M.N.

Circle of Life

As I was mixing sugar into my americano at Starbucks this morning I noticed a missing poster for somebody's kitten. I'm no fan of cats, but it's still sad. Especially since, in this part of Vancouver, if that kitty isn't inside a coyote's stomach right now, it's in an eagle's. It's not coming back.

Sunday and Inevitability

I love it when I'm trying to upload photos to Blogger and it takes so long I can't even remember what the fuck I was going to blog about in the first place. And what the hell is with the first picture? It looks great on my computer but like ass here? Whatever, it took so long to upload I'm not going to delete it now.



And speaking of frustration... This is what yesterday started out like. It was a sunny pink and blue flowery kinda morning. Or a Siberian something or other (not Forget Me Nots so shut up with that) and Virginia something something should-have-kept-those-tags kinda morning. Full of promise and hope.



Full of cute children doing cute things. Cute children who were apparently possessed by aliens this week because they were so well behaved and nice their parents did not know what to do with them. Parents who just decided to go with it and enjoy because inevitably it would end.



So then it was off for a pleasant lunch. Mmm, ginger sauce. What would I not eat with a little ginger sauce? Road kill? Nope, I'd eat that too. Plum sauce, meh.



Then inevitability caught up with us and it all went to hell. If you happened to be on Main Street in Vancouver yesterday and were passed by a light blue Caravan full of screaming banshees, we apologize. You probably thought the Hell Mouth had just opened, and you were right. Luckily for you though it was inside a mini-van heading south as fast as the law would permit... and then some. I'd like to say all was well once we reached home, but it wasn't. Some solitary confinement was dealt out, a hand full of Advil was taken and screaming carried on until it just got boring.

Ah, Sunday.

Snow Day!

Ah, snow in Greater Vancouver, the morning commute proving Darwin right again and again. We don't get a lot of snow here compared with the rest of the country. You may find this hard to believe if you are one of my American readers, but it's true. This tiny part of Canada is very temperate. Winter snow is a rarity here, it happens, just not enough to invest in snow tires. We get rain instead.

Aside from missing white Christmases (which almost never happen), it's not a bad trade off. Unfortunately, this means that the vast majority of people who live here are not used to driving in the snow. We also have a very large number of immigrants from other places in the world that don't get snow. We also have a large number of people from other parts of Canada where it does snow who like to think they can drive better than everybody else but who just end up doing stupid things trying to prove it. It's not pretty.

Then there are dumb-ass pedestrians like the one I almost ran over this morning because he decided he was going to walk in the tire tracks in the middle of the road to keep his feet from getting wet on the sidewalk. Good move, princess. Your feet are dry but now all of your bones are broken from being run over by a minivan. Too bad for you too that since I have no plans on paying you a lifetimes worth of pain and suffering I'm going to back up and run you over a few more times to make sure your stupid ass is good and dead.

Lot of run-on sentences today. BITE ME!

Christmas In The Lower Mainland, Sigh

What a difference 24 hours makes.




And yes, that is 3/4 of my back yard under water.