I have to push off eastwards to see the anklebiters, pick up Heather, and get back here before Karl and Krisanne arrive from Seattle, so I’m just going to post one pic and direct you to Socar’s journal entry chronicling the Great Escape of her Gambian pouched rat, Stella, in the wee hours of this morning.

This was by accident… I didn’t put my camera on the proper setting, but it made for an interesting effect.

I’d invited some friends over to watch the fireworks display for Spain, so I picked up some nosh after work and made a batch of homebrewed sangria. I hadn’t made sangia since the fireworks last year, when Christa stayed here, and May and a bunch of people came over. We made SO MUCH sangria that we were still on the same batch by the time Steve showed up, but he drank it and didn’t drop dead, so it can’t have been that toxic!! Well, see for yourself.

Eliza and Tom got a fresh batch, though, so we were fine…

Just received today’s post, and here’s a wacky postcard from Copenhagen, courtesy of Jorgen.

“Our Beer” is the standard euphemism for Carlsberg,” he says.

This photo is clearly reminiscent of my Mud Mask Week avatar. Or, a thinly-veiled piss-take! *chuckle*

Postcard from last week, sent by Karl during his business trip to Florida. I was bugging him about being a tacky tourist, so he sent along a postcard that didn’t have Disney World on it.

… was FANTASTIC! Eliza and I loved it!!

Official Website for “Before Sunset”

This film is not going to appeal to anyone who is completely cynical about romantic love. Oddly, neither Eliza nor I are particularly romantic people in the conventional sense, but this film approaches the concept in a much more realistic way; its treatment is much more subtle and steeped in the awkward moments that occur between two people who’ve spent years apart physically, only to spend that time continuously and emotionally reliving the short moments they had together one night, nine years ago. All the fantasies collide and internalise/externalise in the 90 real-time minutes they spend together in this film, and I was fascinated by the feeling of fluidity and spontaneity in the cinematography and dialogue. It all felt so real, strangely enough because so much of it felt so familiar — it was only three months ago that I was in Paris, walking along the bank of the Seine with Claire, and persuading her to take a touristy boat trip along the river. We had conversations of a similar nature, in the shadow of Paris’ many bridges overhead and with national landmarks such as the Notre Dame as our backdrop. It had that surreal feeling, the kind where you can be semi-detached from your surroundings, yet feel “in the moment”…

I just checked my phone — Claire phoned and left a voicemail while I was in the cinema. Her ears must’ve been burning.

So, I’m kinda doing things a little different recently… posting photos first, adding text later. Last night I added text to the latest post first, working my way backwards, but I still have three posts to add some text to. I’ve got scads of e-mail waiting for replies, I’m backlogged with some other stuff, and I’ve got people coming over tomorrow. But when a friend called from Toronto this evening, I dropped everything so we could have a great ol’ gab. I much prefer phone calls to e-mail for catching up with people. For one thing, it’s more efficient this way — I write long-winded, rambling e-mails that take forever to compose. I mull things over, check my grammar and spelling, and basically make a nuisance of myself to get it to read properly. Easier just to phone.

I don’t know why, but I had so many wrong numbers today — people calling numbers quite different from mine, which makes me wonder if it’s a problem with Primus TalkBroadband??? Am going to check out the film Before Sunset tonight, so I’d better scoot…

It’s a Civic Holiday today, and it’s HOT. So what do we do?

Hit the local waterpark!

Allan and the three older Ms — Melissa (5), Michael (3), and Maddy (2) — picked me up at the Skytrain station and we went directly to the new local waterpark in their neighbourhood. This place is great: water cannons, a ship, lots of fountains, sprayers in the shape of giant fish, a large area surrounded by lots of grass.

The kids just had a ball! Allan dropped me off and said the kiddies were not likely to last 90 minutes. Ah, famous last words. (In the end, I had to bribe them to leave. Then they got cranky with hunger, and I got a bit lost walking back to their house… those crazy cul-du-sacs!!)

I didn’t bring a bathing suit, so I was at the mercy of the water cannons and sprayers that turned on by sensor… I ducked, I dodged, I ran for cover!

A child ran off in every direction, and it was all I could do to keep an eye on the three of them, camera in hand. Maddy is the worst — she won’t care where we are, she’ll just wander off in an oblivious state, not paying any attention to how far she’s gone. She will take other kids’ toys, balls, bottles, water guns — whatever is left unattended is fair game. There was a birthday party off to one side of the waterpark, and I had to watch Maddy like a hawk to make sure she wouldn’t make off with something that belonged to another child.

Funny thing is, whenever you try to scold her she puts on this big winsome grin… it’s her way of saying “I’m so cute! How can you punish me??”

It’s the annual Pride Parade in Vancouver, and this is the first year since I began volunteering at A Loving Spoonful in ‘99 that I haven’t been involved in some way, shape, or form, in the parade float. Last year I sequestered myself at the office to study for final exams, but I gave some stuff to the ALS office to decorate the float with. The year before, I helped blow up hundreds of balloons to tie to the float… that one was rather complicated — it even had a bubble machine on board. And every year they use my parking spot because the parade ends right in front of my building, so I’m wondering if they tried to send e-mail during my Telus snafu and I have dropped off the distribution list?? Will have to find out.

Anyway, as seen here, the weather was clear and sunny. What you don’t see is the heat — I saw a giant hot dog on rollerblades, and all I could think of was *pun alert*: man, that is one hot dog!!!

EDIT: Added a little videoclip, 33 seconds long, 4.9MBs.

Pride Parade.avi

Sunday, Aug 1

Allan was working, so Cheryl and all the kids came downtown, just in time to catch the Pride Parade. Cheryl was reluctant to allow the kids to watch the parade at all, but to her credit she let them… granted, some costumes are somewhat risqué, but they will see stranger public spectacles in their young lives — best not to shield them from it and make them think parades are sordid events. I chose not to narrate anything, though, as the Pride Parade always starts out with “Dykes on Bikes”… “Hey Attie Gail, look at those motorcycles!” — and they’re too little to query why some of the women are so huge.

Megan

After most of the parade went by, we went to get some food for the kids, then stopped for bubble tea before heading to Kits Beach to take the kids to the wooden playground there. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find there was no parking, so I took them to the playground near the Rose Garden in Stanley Park, instead. We hadn’t been there since Melissa was small, but at least I remembered how to find it. Stanley Park has playgrounds all over its 1,000 acres.

One day I must draft a map for parents that plots the location of playgrounds in the Lower Mainland. I haven’t, by any stretch of the imagination, visited them all, but I’ve been to loads of them, and I don’t think such a map exists. How valuable would that be? I would grade each playground according to safety, categorise them by level of difficulty, and display photos of them (of course).