Having tohelp try and deal with the grief for family and friends, more so. 

And especially immediate family who has been to hell aand back with said person, and now trying to cope without her ? Don’t even get me started.

Yesterday, an absolutely amazing person, who also was my Mother’s most dearest, best friend, passed away after a recurring battle with cancer.  She was for all intensive purposes not just a member of our family, but a hell of a lot more.  She semi-joked that she was there as our ‘second mom” (because frankly, with how much i’ve had going on in my life at once at times, I need all the help I can get!), and has don more for my mother (especially) and myself AND everyone else than anyone even thought possible, that this will end up an epic task to deal with.

I have, however, at least managed to come up with a pretty oood  (not to mention obligatory) bit of irony about dealing with all of  this. After having spent some of  my time trying to deal with what’s happened, in the end it all was summarized with one retro song quote.

Because, you know things may start to look bleak for the moment when I dragged out an especially morbid Depeche Mode track:

"I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors  
  cauise I think that god’s got a sick sense of humor
And when I die, I expect to find him..
Laughing."
   -(Depeche Mode, "Blapsphemous Rumors")   

I think it sums it up nicely.

But Man, at the rate I’ve been headed now, I’ll be belting out tunes from WWII during the whole "blitz" in London, in no time flat.

Now, I’ll go watch a “Depeche Mode – 101” movie and cheer myself up with gloom all day.

So I walked around, went down Robson…then realized that I’d had a couple beers, and they went right through me.  So, I figured “hey, we have those cool automatic bathrooms downtown now, I’ll just go use the one down the street here on Robson.”  Never mind that I’d never seen the thing actually working.  So I went to it, and sure enough, it’s out of order.  So that got me to thinking…do any of the other ones bloody well work at all?  So after making a quick stop-off at Pacific Center, I went to look.

Sure enough, NONE of them work.  There’s one down at Davie and Seymour, one at Nelson and Granville, the famous one down at Main St. Station…none of the f’in things work! 

(In case you have NO idea what the hell I’m talking about, Vancouver, a year or two ago with great ballyhoo, got these automatic self-cleaning toilets for tourists and set them up with ads all over Vancouver.)  Keep in mind the ads are being changed and updated, but that’s it.

So just on a hunch, I tried to use a washroom nearby one of them, the owner said “no, go use the automatic one outside!”  Well, it doesn’t work.  “Well that’s not our problem!”

And people wonder why Vancouver gets a bad rep.

I do recall actually, one night a few weeks back.  I was downtown with Joel and some girls on a Friday night, and while we were at Ginger 62 I decided to go for a walk and get some air.  So I walked down to where the auto-can is at Granville and Nelson, and it was out of order of course, and there were cops there ticketing people who went to take a leak in the alley.

Isn’t that kind of entrapment?

Anyways, I doubt the city would ever do anything about this.  Good old Gregor cares about nothing but looking good on camera, and being seen to pretend to be doing something.  Which sucks because I enver ever used to think that.

Today, Translink started a bus link between Langley Centre and Haney Place, the 595.  So of course, being the transit-minded guy I am, I decided to try it out. Now, first, one of the coolest things about this route, is that on those days I have to actually head to downtown Vancouver, if it’s in the morning, the bus links up with the West Coast Express (Vancouver’s commuter rail system, for those of you out of town.)  It unfortunately only goes along the North side of the Fraser River, which was a problem until now.  Now, I can get on at Ridge Meadows station, and instead of it taking 90-120 minutes to get to Waterfront station, it takes…30?  It’s sick.  And they even have a coffee bar on the damn train.  ON the thing.  I used to take it when I lived in Port Coquitlam and Coquitlam, and it costs a bit more, but it’s worth every penny.

Anyways, on to my trip to Maple Ridge.  Now, I’d had a bit of experience with that area when I was younger and had a bike, and then when I still bothered having a vehicle and driving. I grew up in Fort Langley and was just a ferry ride across from the area.  Since then, it’s been kind of like the end of the world or something.  Needless to say, I hadn’t been there in a LONG time.  I was in for a surprise.

It’s nice over there.  I mean really nice.

I mean, I thought Langley was pretty nice.  We have nothing on that damn town.  It still has it’s small-town charm (something Langley lost years ago), but it’s still got better bus service towards town than Langley does.  No bloody fair!

Anyways, I could totally see myself moving across the river. Again. But this time, to the end of the world.

I forgot how to go out and have fun.  I’m serious here.  (Irony!)  This past weekend, I hung out with numerous friends of mine, and I DO mean numerous, from old, dear friends like Joel and Cam, to Kristen, to Nikki, you name it…

I’ve got a lot of fun to catch up on, I think.

All I know is, for the first time in a few years, IM LOVIN THE PLAYOFFS, BABY! WOO!

Wow, translink has really made a mess of themselves this time, I think.  Instead of asking the guy to take the blog down, they just up and fire him?

Disgusting.

http://www.iwatchstuff.com/2009/02/inglourious_basterds_teaser_wi.php

Background: In Metro Vancouver tonight, if you hadn’t noticed, it’s been STILL snowing.  A bit of rain has fallen in Richmond and downtown, but otherwise it’s been mostly snow or frozen rain.  Now, we already have over a foot of the bloody stuff as it is.  Anyways, I had to go downtown for a bit to see some friends, and while the trip there wasn’t TOO bad (an hour on the train alone), the trip BACK from downtown to Surrey took over two hours tonight.  Why, you ask?  Well, on the way into town, they had attendants at the controls at the front of each train, watching for ice or fallen trees, and also in case they had to manually control the trains. And they had a power outage in Surrey tonight (which doesn’t affect the system THAT much, because they draw power from all over, so they just rerouted power from another area…a few mins delay), and they were having problems with the electronic switching systems on the tracks.

In case you don’t know what I mean by switches, they’re the things that direct the train to either go straight or veer off to a side (or middle) holding track that you see outside of stations, or to switch trains between going over the bridge or through the tunnel and down the Millennium line.  Normally these things are automatic, but they were screwing up due to the snow buildup, the water runoff, and the cold.

Anyways, on the way in, that wasn’t that bad.  On the way home though, the switches at Columbia were hooped, the switches at Scott Road were hooped, and at King George.  So basically, we’d leave a station (say broadway), go normally to the next one (say, Nanaimo), then WAIT.  For an average of 10 mins, with the doors open.  Then move on to the next one.  Then when we got to Columbia, the attendants had to actually manually control the trains from Columbia, over the bridge, and all the way to King George.  It was nuts.

Anyways, the point of all this was, I was explaining to Lainey why I took 2 hours on the train alone (which normally takes me 35 mins or so), and she was commenting about the ice on the tracks the other day, which closed the train going over the bridge, and they had to shuttle people via bus from King George to New West.  And I mentioned they’ve been running the trains over the tracks nonstop all night since the snow got bad, so they don’t get buildup in the mornings (which would wreck the morning commute easily.) 

She then commented “they should run the trains all night for all the drinkers..”

And then I suddenly realized.  Remember a few months back when people were going on about bugging Translink to keep Skytrain open all night (there’s a facebook group about it with like 30,000+ members when i looked a second ago to get the link right there), and Translink’s response was that they couldn’t do that, because they have to perform maintenance on the tracks at night, and they’re cutting it close leaving it open until 1:15am (from Waterfront…so almost 2am at Surrey central) as it is.

Well, they said they’ve been running the trains nonstop to clear the ice 24/7 for like a few weeks now.  So, either:

1) They haven’t been doing all this apparently critical maintenance on the tracks all that time, cuz they’d have to get out of the way every 10 mins for a train

-or-

2) They’re full of crap and they’re just too cheap to run the trains later, and figure they can get by on the ‘Nightbus’ they have at 2, 2:30 and 3am going to a few select locations (but only to surrey central out this way…Langley doesn’t get anything past 12:30 at night at the best of times, even though we pay a TON of money to Translink.)

I wonder which one it is, because I can’t see any other explanation.  Either one is pretty bad, though.

PS: Happy Holidays, everyone.

Congratulations to the Conservatives on ALMOST getting a majority.  Next time, it’ll happen.

Condolences to the NDP, I seriously thought Jack Layton would make a great leader of the opposition.

And, congratulations to the greens.  You’re a bunch of crackpots, good riddance.