S’getting cold out there already. Really starting to feel like Winter, which is weird, ’cause Vancouver doesn’t really do Winter. We get maybe two or three days of snow a year, and it usually melts into slush the same day. Smells like it, though.
Arwen was working today in Point Roberts, and I gotta say “I don’t get it.”
Point Roberts is at the Southern-most tip of this little spit of land that leans into the ocean near the Tsawwassen ferry terminal, and bits of it dip below the 49th parallel, which means that yeah, it’s in the States. We drove up to the gate (yeah, a gate, literally a seven-foot chain-link gate) and stood there looking through it. Yep, that’s America right there. All three square miles of it.
Sidebar: How many times a year does Coldplay need to play SNL? Seems like they’re averaging three or four, at least. Shouldn’t the musical booking folks be looking for the next Sugarcubes or something?
So yeah, there’s this itty bitty chunk of land that’s in the US, and there’s an airstrip on it and probably a bunch of boat docks, but here’s the problem, I don’t know about the horses any more.
See, about 20 years ago, someone told me that SCA folks do some sort of weird trick with taking horses down to Point Roberts, and then “going for a run on the beach,” across the border and then people picking them up on the other side and taking them away.
Only now that I’ve been there, I gotta ask “and then what?” Where do the horses go? Get on planes? Walk onto little boats? I don’t get it. So that happened.
While Arwen was doing her thing, I took the kids to Richmond to kill some time, and we ended up going to the Richmond Public Market, which was a nice little culture shock for the kids (and me, frankly). Bubble tea was had (mine was supposed to be green apple, but was plain chocolate, I think) while we sat on the upstairs seating and looked down at the people shopping below. Always fun to see vegetables you can’t name.
Oh, but before that, I had to go to the Telus store and get A’s Blackberry figured out, ’cause it’s constantly scrolling up, which is a bit of a problem. I had time navigating the first five minutes of the store because there were no less than four staffers in a place smaller than your average shoebox, and the one that stopped chatting to help me had fake eyelashes that I think still had the backing card attached to them. It was intense. Like, “Hi, {flap} can I {flap} help y{flap}ou?” Obviously from the Ghost Whisperer school of makeup flapplication.
I explained what was happening, and she said “I can try updating the software on it, and see if that fixes it, can you come back in about a half-hour, forty-five minutes?” I asked her how a software update was going to fix a hardware issue, but okay, fine, maybe it’s got to do with the sensitivity drivers or something. I remember seeing that with trackpads “drifting” when nothing’s moving, so okay, sure. I’ll go wander around the mall for a bit.
Orange Julius is a lot of sugar. Wooftie.
Eddie Bauer is trying to outfit me for the zombie apocalypse, but wants me to be stylish about it. Seriously: how many kinds of pocket knives do we actually need that are also bottle openers (but the old churchkey type) AND have flashlights AND whistles in them with a loop for attaching to carabiners?
I came back 45 minutes later, and was told the update was “still downloading” (um, shouldn’t you have a little stockpile of the latest updates for each of the devices you sell, to avoid this sort of thing?) and (oh hold up – this is a Telus STORE and you’re having “problems with our Internet.”)Â I refrained from asking if they were hitting the Telus speedcap at 160K?
We repeated this little “How ’bout now/come back later” dance for a total of 90 minutes before they did what I’d assumed we were going to do in the first place, replace the device with a loaner while the old one got swapped/repaired. Seems like maybe everyone in the store had enough coffee and had caught up on their Friday nights, ’cause they were suddenly all in full-on sales mode.
So, yeah.
