Tired

PG and I traded cars one day last week so he could take my car in to get winter tires installed. I’ve never bought winter tires in my entire driving career – this is Vancouver, after all, and it mostly rains here in the winter and doesn’t get super-cold.

Except last year. We had enough snow last year to cover our quota for about fifty years, and it lasted longer than our snow here has ever lasted. And there I was, in my brand new car with my all-season tires, stranded at home because I couldn’t get out of my driveway. And if I could have gotten out, I couldn’t have driven too far because we have no idea how to clear roads here. Oh, the excuse was that it was snowing so much that they just couldn’t keep up, but I’m not sure I believe that. Cities like Toronto or Montréal, which regularly have copious amounts of snow, seem to keep up fairly well. Those cities don’t shut down in the snow. But Vancouver? Wah, there’s snow, let’s all go hide under the covers!

But anyway, I don’t ever want to go through another winter like that – me and the other million people who live here. We’re all frantically buying and installing winter tires this year. It can be hard to get the tires you want, so many people are purchasing them. The first set of tires that PG ordered for me were sold to somebody else before they even were delivered to the shop, so he had to go on to Plan B. Fortunately, he is quite knowledgeable about tires, and loves doing the research and phonecalls to track down the best deal, so at least I had somebody with the time and expertise to do that for me.

The big issue, apparently, was that the all-season tires that came with the car are run-flats and the winter tires I ended up buying are not. When one of them is punctured or flat, run-flats can be driven for about another 100 km, at a reduced speed (whatever THAT means – is it 50 km/h? Reports I’ve read vary.) to safely get somewhere to get the tire replaced (most likely) or repaired (occasionally). This means that my car did not come with a spare tire or a jack. This means that now that I’m running regular tires, I still have no spare or jack.

The tire dealer was quite worried about this. PG reassured the poor man that I have both BMW Assist and BCAA, both of which can come to my rescue if ever I have a flat tire. And really, I’ve only ever had a flat tire twice in my whole life: once was from hitting a pothole in the dark in a construction zone and the other was when I was forced into the curb by the car beside me deciding to change lanes without checking to see if another car was already there. So I think the odds are pretty good that I’ll be just fine for the five or so months that I’ll be driving on my new winter tires.

It better snow like crazy this winter. I didn’t spend all that money for nothing, ya know!

Keyed up

Late Sunday morning, PG announces that he has to change the tires on his car. He’s just purchased new ones that are to be used mainly on the race track, and since he has a track day coming up this week, he wants to put them on today because he has time.

“Time? Today?” I say. “I thought we were going shopping.”

He insists that it will only take him twenty minutes, tops, to change the tires, so there will be plenty of time to head downtown afterward.

I dubiously agree.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but in case I haven’t, PG and his brother-in-law jointly own a warehouse. Both of them keep all kinds of crap – I mean, useful things there. PG keeps his hobby car, all his car parts, all his tools there. His new tires are also there. So, we must go to the warehouse for him to change his tires, and from there, we will go shopping.

PG starts shuffling around. “Where are my warehouse keys?”

I don’t even know what they look like, so I don’t help hunt. I stand at the door of the apartment and wait.

He looks around some more, then shrugs. “I must have left them in the car.”

We go down to his car. He hunts all over the car. I ask him what they look like so I can help him. “Keys,” he informs me. “They’re just keys.”

Oh.

We spend fifteen minutes looking all through the car for these keys. Finally, he goes back upstairs, muttering darkly something about the keys having to be in the apartment then.

I wait in the carpark. Fifteen more minutes pass. PG returns. With no keys. He decides that we’ll go to the warehouse anyway. Why, I don’t know. We can’t get in.

At the warehouse, the two of us search the car one more time. To no avail. Just then, PG’s brother-in-law drives up. He’s come to do some work at the warehouse too, but he at least has his keys. So PG gets in, collects his tires and the tools he needs to change them. I go for a walk, promising to be back within the twenty minutes that he reassures me the changeover will take.

I am back in thirty minutes. PG has, in fact, changed his tires. But he has not yet put anything away. He is standing there talking to his sister, who has come to help her husband. We chat for another twenty minutes or so. His sister invites us for dinner later. We accept. PG now puts the old tires and his tools away in the warehouse.

Back in the car, he suddenly remembers, “I recorded the F1 race. We’d better watch it now if we’re going to my sister’s for dinner later.”

Oh. Although I do like watching F1, that wasn’t exactly what I thought I’d be doing Sunday afternoon. But we do start to watch it. He has a beer. I have a glass of wine. I fall asleep. I wake up after five o’clock, having missed most of the two-hour race. It’s time to head over to PG’s sister and brother-in-law’s house for dinner.

First, though, I want to quickly check my work email. While I am doing this, PG starts to clean up a bit. He pulls out a dining table chair on which he has previously piled some magazines and papers, to put them away properly. On the top of the pile are his warehouse keys.

“Oh, here’s the warehouse keys,” he says cheerily, tossing them on the table beside me.

I drop my head to the computer keyboard with a loud thunk.

To serve and protect?

PG lives across the street from a neighbourhood pub. It’s a pretty nice place, with good food, and we go there often.

Unfortunately, so do a number of what appears to be homeless people. While they don’t exactly patronize the pub, they do pop into the liquor store that is attached to the pub, and pick up whatever they can get cheaply. Then they go outside, sit on the cement ledge around the corner of the pub entrance, and proceed to drink their day away. Illegally. In public. One person is invariably joined by a few more, sometimes with shopping carts full of cans and bottles (or even all their personal belongings), sometimes with a portable stereo system, usually with more liquor. They get progressively louder and louder, and nastier and nastier. They are not always there, but they are there often enough that they are annoying.

There are a lot of seniors who live in this area, and I can imagine that they would be disturbed by all this going on on the street in front of their homes. I don’t like it, and I don’t even live there (nor am I a senior). It’s hard to walk past these people drinking on the sidewalk, because they end up taking up a great deal of walking space and harassing passersby for cigarettes or money. They also swear a lot, and if my own mother is anything to go by, seniors most emphatically do NOT like that.

A few days ago, I arrived at PG’s place in the middle of the afternoon. As I got out of my car, my ears were assaulted by the tune “Barbie Girl” by Aqua on some street person’s portable stereo. That’s an inane song at the best of times, but to hear it at full blast on a hot summer day is unbearable. PG was up on his balcony, gazing at the owner of the stereo and his buddies, who had obviously been drinking out there for quite a while and were also yelling and swearing at each other over the sound of the music. I yelled up at PG, “How long has this been going on?”

He yelled back, “A while!”

They eventually turned the stereo off and moved on.

The next day, PG and I were returning to his place from a walk up the street for brunch, and this time there were two men and a woman sitting there on the ledge outside the pub. The men were clearly well on their way to being tanked, and the woman seemed to be trying to reason with them. They were all really loud. We gingerly stepped past them and made our way towards his apartment. One of the other apartment residents, an older man, was leaning over his ground-floor balcony railing, watching the proceedings. He and PG talked briefly about how this drinking in public just wasn’t right, and how noisy it always got, and how disturbing it was to the neighbourhood. They agreed that it wasn’t the pub itself, it was these people who seemed to feel that it was okay to sit on the street and drink and disturb the peace.

When PG and I went inside, we watched as the two men began yelling louder and louder at each other, while the woman tried to calm them down. One of the men shoved her, so the other decided to try to strangle him. The woman tried to pull them apart. Fortunately, they did little damage to each other and soon let go and settled down somewhat. Then they began to swear and shout at each other again. Again, the woman tried to keep them apart and calm them down.

In the meantime, PG called the police.

We kept watching, waiting for a cop car to show up. There was more shouting and swearing, but the men refrained from further physical contact, and the woman persuaded them to go somewhere else. Then it was quiet. Twenty minutes later, not one, but two cop cars slowly cruised by. Good timing, officers!

I think PG should keep calling the police every time he notices people out there drinking. I understand that these may be people who are somewhat down on their luck right now, but that still doesn’t give them the right to illegally drink on the street and upset the residents with their loudness and off-colour language. And the police can’t move them along if they don’t know about it. And if the seniors are too nervous to call, well, PG certainly isn’t.

Would it do anything for those unfortunate street people, like help them find homes or find steady jobs or get them off alcohol or get them treatment for their mental issues? No. But it might help the people in this neighbourhood sleep a little more securely at night. And sometimes that’s all you can do.

One ringy-dingy …

I think I should get a new mobile phone. My phone is so old it doesn’t even have a camera! (I don’t think phones should have cameras anyway, but the fact remains that pretty much all phones now have cameras and mine does not.) I cannot connect to the Intarnets on it, nor can I play music. There are only three stupid little games on it, and all three are so low tech as to be ridiculous (and I also can’t figure out how to play two of them). I have call waiting, but I disabled it because I don’t know how to work it. I have trouble turning the phone on and off because the power button doesn’t seem to connect to whatever it is that it needs to connect with inside to make it do something. It’s really difficult to find information about my phone on-line because Motorola doesn’t make it any more, so who would need to know anything about it now? About all I can do with my phone is make and receive calls. If I’ve succeeded at turning it on.

So, I think I should get a new mobile phone.

PG is not at all sure about this. You see, I am no longer permitted to touch his phone. He watches me carefully whenever I pick up my own phone. This is all because of a small incident several years ago, with his brand new mobile phone.

He was showing this brand new mobile phone to me, and I said, “But why does it show your name when you turn it on?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “That’s just what the guy at the shop made it do.”

“But that’s stupid!” I exclaimed. “You know your name, you don’t have to be reminded of it every time you open up your phone!”

Now it must be said that PG truly doesn’t care about petty little details like this. Live and let live, is his motto (well, that and ‘Go Speed Racer go’). Me, I care. Details matter to me. And this was a detail that bugged me.

So I offered to try to get rid of his name on his phone screen. I figured the date and time should be good enough. PG, to his eventual everlasting horror, said, “Go for it.”

So I tried. Oh, I tried. I punched every button on that phone that could conceivably have anything to do with changing that screen, several times over, in various combinations, and many buttons that probably didn’t. I worked at it so long that finally I could punch no more buttons. Well, I could, but absolutely nothing happened. The phone did nothing. I had somehow turned it off and locked it. It was impossible to unlock it and turn it back on. I froze it solid.

I was mortified. PG had had the phone for maybe two days, and now he couldn’t use it any more. Because of me and my meddling. And he needed it for work the next morning.

I offered to let him use my phone until he got his working again, but he good-naturedly said, that he’d be fine, don’t worry about it, he’d figure it out. I still felt awful.

I later found out that he ended up bringing the phone back to the shop where he’d purchased it. He explained that “somebody” had punched a lot of buttons on it and now the phone was locked. They said, no problem, and proceeded to try to unlock it. They couldn’t. Oh, they said. This phone is really locked. Could he leave the phone with them? It was obviously going to take longer than anticipated to unlock that phone. So he left it there.

It took them two days to get that phone unlocked and operational. And PG’s name stayed on the screen, along with the date and time.

And I am no longer allowed to touch PG’s phone.

So maybe I shouldn’t get a new mobile phone for myself?

I don’t get it!

You know about checking to see which of your posts are the most popular? It’s kind of like googling your own name, I think: everybody does it, but few people admit to it.

Well, I do it and I admit to it. And just for the record, apparently I do not exist in Google-land, only in the Blogosphere and in my own imagination. And it seems that my most popular post is the one I wrote about PG’s new pet name for me, Donkey.

I have no idea why this is. I have no idea why so many people google donkeys in the first place. I also have no idea how that particular post on my blog comes up when people do google donkeys. I’ve tried it. My blog did not come up. There were over 100 pages of donkey references, but my blog did not come up. So I am truly mystified.

DD finds this incredibly amusing. This whole donkey thing tickles her fancy so much that on our recent trip to Greece, she bought me this small stuffed donkey in Santorini. She MADE me choose one – and threatened that she would choose one for me herself if I didn’t.

The Santorini donkeys are actually quite famous, so she also fell all over herself with glee when we came upon these two fellows in the village of Pyrgos. I consider myself fortunate that she didn’t make me sit on one for the photo.

PG also thinks this donkey business is hilarious. He figures that he is now a major trendsetter. Calling me Donkey has given him his fifteen minutes of fame. He will not let me forget this. He also met us at the airport with this sign:

And I have now given search engines another of my blog posts to connect with searches incorporating donkeys. You’re welcome.