Llama-rama

Driving to work today (I’ve just realized that a lot of my posts have to do with driving. This one doesn’t, not really, it just starts that way!), I took a slightly different route. You know, just to shake things up a bit.

So I was cruising down this sort-of rural road, which was lined with hobby farms on one side and a subdivision of enormous homes with tiny yards on the other. I glanced over at one of the hobby farms and spotted a llama. It was a big brown one, laying atop a mound of dirt and gazing out haughtily at the chickens, geese, and the lone sheep that wandered about the yard beneath it.

It reminded me of the time, many years ago when DD was a toddler, when her grandmother (my ex mother-in-law) and I took her to a local petting zoo. Now, DD is an animal lover from WAY back (like in the womb), so there was no better way to entertain her than to provide animals for her viewing pleasure. If she could actually touch them, so much the better. So she was incredibly excited to be there.

At this zoo, there were a few animals in huge enclosures that were not for petting, simply for admiring. Like llamas. There were a whole bunch of them (is it actually called a herd of llamas?) in an area that seemed as big as one of the hobby farms that I spotted today. To my recollection, most of them were grazing far away from the chain link fence, but there was one – another big brown one – close to the fence. Of course, DD and I went to take a closer look, because I quite like llamas and think they’re rather esthetically-pleasing animals.

Her grandmother called her over to look at some other animal soon thereafter, but I stayed there, talking to the llama in question. It moved closer to the fence, almost close enough to touch. I kept talking to it, holding out my hand for it to sniff (Do llamas even do that? I mean, they’re not dogs! Still.). The llama came closer. I thought I was mesmerizing it with my melodious voice, so I moved closer too.

Can you see where this is going yet?

The llama and I were almost nose to nose, with the fence between us. We had serious eye contact.

Then it horked up something small but very, very hard and spit it at my face. I sputtered, wiping cud or whatever it was, off my face. The llama kept staring at me, then made as if to spit again. I leaped backwards.

DD and her grandmother just about peed themselves laughing.

I no longer approach llamas.

Look both ways

About a year ago, I had a confrontation with the driver of the car that almost knocked me down as I was crossing the street. With the green light. With the pedestrian signal in my favour. In a crosswalk. In broad daylight.

I was SO ANGRY! That cow came so close to me before screeching to a halt that I had time to consider where it would hurt the least when her bumper hit me, and to make my decision to jump up right before impact because I thought that way she wouldn’t run me over, that I would roll up over the hood of the car (and possibly smash my head into the windshield. But I didn’t have enough time to consider that possibility, apparently.).

Anyway, she stopped a scant 20 or 30 centimetres from me, and as I came back down from jumping, I slammed my two hands forcefully on the hood of her car. Heart pounding, I glared at the stupid woman.

She rolled down her window. “Sorry.”

Sorry. That’s it? She didn’t sound at all sorry. I stayed right in front of her car and started screaming at her.

“Sorry?! That doesn’t quite cut it! You just about fucking KILLED me, you idiot! How did you ever get your license?!”

She stared at me balefully. “I didn’t see you. Sorry.” Deadpan.

“No kidding you didn’t see me! I guess you didn’t see the pedestrian light or the crosswalk either, did you!”

By this time, cars were backing up behind her. People in cars and on the street were staring. I stayed in front of her and kept shouting. I just couldn’t believe that she expressed so little remorse. I couldn’t believe that I of all people had come so very close to being hit by a car, a car driven by someone who seemed to be that stupid that she didn’t realize the gravity of what she had almost done.

The light changed. People started honking. I gave her one last “You’re a moron!” and dashed to the median in the middle of the road. She continued on her merry way, followed by the vehicles that had been stopped behind her. When the road was clear again, I scurried to the opposite side and stood there for a few minutes to catch my breath before heading up the hill and continuing home myself.

I was upset about that for a long time, mainly because of her non-reaction, not really because I almost got smacked by a car. If it had been me, I told myself, I would have been absolutely guilt-ridden and anguish-filled, and I would have been shaking for a week.

Then today, driving home, I was at a busy intersection waiting to turn left. There was a gap in the oncoming traffic. I started to go. And there was a woman walking in the crosswalk. And I didn’t see her right away. I did stop safely though, albeit a bit more suddenly than I would have liked, and she stopped too. She gave me a look, I put both my hands up and mouthed, “I’m sorry!”, and she finished crossing the street safely without giving me another glance.

Some people are just so zen. I, on the other hand, trembled almost all the rest of the way home.

Desperately seeking …

I know lots of other people have posted about this before, so I’m not being terribly original here, but I find it quite fascinating to check out the search engine terms that somehow lead to my illustrious blog. Sometimes they make perfect sense, sometimes it’s very much a “WTF?!” moment.

For example, it seems that I am often found with the term “blog female”. Well, yes. I have a blog. I am female. Good call. I can see how that one works.

And the Porsche-related searches also make sense to me. My two favourites in this category right now are: “What kind of guy drives a Porsche?” (Can’t you just imagine the verbal inflection there? Especially if the person who used that search was cut off in traffic or had some unpleasant experience with some random guy driving a Porsche!) and “A guy who drives a Porsche is not cool”. I probably shouldn’t pass that one on to Porsche Guy, should I?

Some of the search terms do actually relate to one of my past posts, but it’s the way they were written that tickles my fancy, like “No snow day for you”. That would be Seinfeld’s Snow Nazi speaking, I suppose. Or “I waved your flag back”. I imagine that would be the person who found my Canuck flag that fell off my car just last week. Well, if you can wave it back, could you please send it back? How about “Racing cement barrier”? And here I thought cement barriers were just something to walk along the top of, when I could have been racing them all this time! Then there’s “Urge to pee only in car”. Well, PG does get the urge when he’s working on his car, but trust me, he doesn’t actually pee in his car!

But I’m truly mystified as to how these particular search terms got to my blog:
- What to look for when flooding toilet (Flooding a toilet can be a painstakingly precise operation, true, so obviously there are certain benchmarks that make a messy process easier.)
- Going crazy (Yeah, going crazy trying to figure out how that would link to my blog!)
- Ugly pink poodle (Let’s get this straight: THERE ARE NO UGLY PINK POODLES!)
- On and on and on and on (Would this be an observation on my writing style perhaps?)
- Meeting pictures (Hello, I’m Pinklea. How do you do? And your picture-title is … ?)
- Botulism (So I’m not the world’s greatest cook, but I do clean up kitchens rather well. What’s your point here?!)
- Honda fit wall (Actually, Honda fit double garage better.)
- Is there a new year’s ghost? (What happened to the old year’s ghost then?!)
- When my brother’s birthday is? (How the hell should I know?! Can you give me more information to go on – like his name?!)

Search engine terms: good for a giggle, if nothing else!

Canucklehead

Canadian readers may or may not be fans of hockey, but they are certainly aware of it (that’s ICE hockey for anybody out of North America, by the way). It’s one of those things identified closely with Canada – like snow and Mounties and polar bears and Timbits.

Canadian readers will also be aware that it’s hockey playoff time. And my home team, the Vancouver Canucks, is in the playoffs and has just swept the St. Louis Blues in four straight games. The next round will start for the Canucks in a week or so, and in the meantime, we hockey fans here are living in a state of high anticipation and excitation.

You see, the Canucks have never won a Stanley Cup, the pinnacle of achievement for teams in the National Hockey League. Well, okay, a team called the Vancouver Millionaires won it in pre-NHL days, back in 1915. They beat an early version of the Ottawa Senators, just so you know. But our modern Canucks, who came into the NHL in 1970, have not. They’re the only Canadian team who has never won – and it bugs us!

Anyway, my point here is that Vancouverites are hockey-mad. Our team is in the playoffs and is doing well so far. This is a rare occurrence for us. We are making the most of it. I myself have a Canuck flag attached to my car’s passenger side window, as do about half the cars seen driving around Metro Vancouver lately.

At least I did.

It was a warm day, and I wanted to open my sunroof to get some fresh air in. But the damn flag flaps pretty loudly, so I thought I’d open my driver’s window instead. Well, that was pretty loud too, what with traffic passing by and all. So Albert Einstein here decided to open the passenger side window, thinking she’d get the air she wanted minus the noise.

Of course, as the window was sliding down, I realized that I’d forgotten about my Canuck flag that was hooked to the top edge of the window. I glanced over as it flew away, down the busy four-lane road on which I was travelling. There was no way I could stop and collect it. In an instant of forgetfulness, I became flagless.

I am hoping that this is not a prediction of how the Canucks will do in the second round of the playoffs. I do not want to be responsible for their downfall.

Earth day

So it’s Earth Day. This is a big deal with the elementary school crowd. Lots of planting, cleaning up the litter from the playground and the street in front of the school, exhortations to walk or bicycle or take the bus instead of driving in the car, reduce-reuse-recycle, etc. etc.

I’ve done it all. Not that I’m anti-Earth day, oh no! I love our earth as much as the next environmentalist. It’s just rather repetitive. We do the same things every year, we teachers, just with different groups of kids. Does it make a difference? I don’t know. But I am glad that we do it and that we expose our students to the concept of taking care of our environment, because I don’t really want to think about what might happen if we educators didn’t do our small bit for the future. Kids are the future, after all, so we need to at least point them in the right direction, obviously.

But my favourite Earth Day moment has to be the phone call I received from my colleague Classy Dresser this morning, about fifteen minutes before the bell rang to start the school day. She called to tell me that she had just dropped her offspring a couple of blocks from their school so that they could walk part of the way. As she did this, she noticed that she was across the street from one of the local coffee establishments, so she thought she might stop in and get a coffee, and she wanted to know if I wanted one as well. I thanked her for her thoughtfulness and placed my order. Then she started giggling.

“Yep, here I am, on Earth Day, after having dropped my kids off three blocks from their school so they could walk part of the way, heading for coffee,” she laughed. “To the drive-through. In my truck. To get take-out coffees in styrofoam cups with plastic lids. To drive five more blocks to my workplace.”

This would be yet another definition of irony.

Happy Earth Day anyway!