Theme change today, ’cause I’m seemingly pushed to post by changing my blog’s theme. Style over content, I guess.
{Let’s see how far I get with THIS}. Bets on how many days in a row I go before hitting the “pfft” button?
National Blog Posting Month begins now.
Saturday Brunchening. Paved Vancouver sky.
Right now, the kids are speaking gibberish and shoving orange pipecleaners (anyone ever actually used those things for cleaning a pipe?) into a big slab of red clay. Sense of scale is for *other* kids, it seems. These guys are going for broke. Big foot-tall things with super-bendy legs. They remind me of those vaguely alarming inflatable cactus things at the side of the road near used car dealerships.
So, Halloween went without a hitch, aside from me being sick and staying home all day. Slept from 10:30am or so until somewhere around 2:30, and still felt kinda groggy/spacey. Generally hated the world, and was sketched out by just about everybody everywhere. Took the boys out treating with the lady next door while a sick(er) Arwen stayed home and handed out stuff to kids. Rip (6) was Terry Fox – his own idea, with me taping a mini bicycle pump to his lower leg, and Tate (3) was a ghost (white dress shirt of mine and white tool for that ethereal look, with awesome makeup & hair by Arwen). Pictures to follow.
Remember when we were told to watch out for blades in our apples and asbestos in our popcorn balls? This year it was melamine in the chocolate pirate coins, and stolen police cars hitting cyclists hard enough to break the front forks on our streets.
Sorry, that sounds flip. I don’t know anything about the bike accident other than what I saw, which was a schwack of police cruisers over a block away from our house, and a bike that I thought had been stolen via hacksaw or something, since the front wheel was off and still had the forks attached, looking like they’d been cut. Turns out there’d been some sorta highspeed chase from Robson, ending in hitting two different bicycles. Suggestions of “suicide by cop” and hitting cyclists was the easiest way to be considered a lethal threat, if you can’t find any pedestrians to hit, or maybe they’re easier to pick off the road than sidewalkers.
Anyhoo, as winter comes, I’m watching every morning for frost and ice as I whip down Nelson hill at 40km/h (25mph). Much like the old saying “It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole,” in the case of bicycles and busy roads, it’s not the icy fall that’ll kill you, it’s the six cars right behind you that’ll do it.
So yeah, I’m looking at changing my routes (and have to tighten my brakes before I’ll even have a chance to wipe out, instead of just slowly rolling into an accident, ice or no).
We had a power outage at work on Thursday for a few hours. Enough to send everyone home. Fave moment was seeing Briggs sprint for the server room the *instant* he realized the lights were out, and start shutting down servers before the battery backup gave up (about 20 minutes). It was a strong techie moment for him, whether he realizes it or not. His techie instinct was in full flourish in that moment.
Arwen has surfaced from her sleepless night of coughing, so I’m going to sign off for now. More later, or at least the next day.
