and things went downhill from there

I hope the couple of you still reading LJ/DW had a lovely Christmas and a pleasant New Year.

We had a quiet Christmas at home, and then flew out to the coast to surprise Mom on her birthday. She is in her 80s, and her health has begun to slide in the past few months, so we wanted to do this before all we could do was regret not doing it.

Even though I booked the tickets a couple of months ago, I could only find a handful of flights to and from Victoria. The two best (and only moderately obscene in price) were a flight that left Winnipeg at what-the-fuck o'clock in the morning, and a return flight at noon the following Tuesday. Westjet either had flights at really inconvenient times, or flights that departed at a reasonable time, but took 8 hours because they had stops in Regina/Calgary/Vancouver or Saskatoon/Edmonton/Vancouver. Also, the flights were painfully expensive on both airlines.

Normally I prefer to fly on Westjet because they have given me fewer problems over the years, but I went with AC because of the timing. When I looked at how much we were spending, I realized I could upgrade us to business for about the cost of what our checked luggage would be (which is free for business class), so I decided to treat us for the flight. I have not flown business class since the mid-90s, so I wasn't sure what to expect. We discovered that they still give you meals in business, and the quality has improved a great deal since the 90s. The food was not just passable, but really good.

Unfortunately, the meals were the highlight of the trip.

The first hiccough occurred when we were getting ready to go through security in Winnipeg. We had our boarding passes on our phones, but when we got to the kiosk, we discovered that atara could check us both in with her phone, so I just jammed temporarily mine into the front pocket of my hoodie (or bunny hug as they call them in Saskatchewan. I don't know why I bothered to add this bit of trivia except that I love that name for it.). Just before we put our luggage on the conveyor, we removed our winter outerwear and stuffed it into our checked bags so that we would not have to deal with it on the plane. In retrospect that turned out to be unnecessary because the flight crews had a coat check on the plane. It was only when we were standing in line at security that I realized I'd left my phone in my hoodie when I stuffed it into my suitcase. Fortunately I had my Surface and iPod in my carry-on, so I was not terribly concerned about it.

When we boarded the plane in Winnipeg, the flow of passengers boarding the plane trickled to a halt shortly after we were seated. There was no word from the flight crew for the next 30 minutes while we sat there at the gate and fiddled with what electronics we had remembered not to stuff into our checked luggage. We learned that there was a mechanical problem with the plane when atara overheard the flight attendants talking on the phone with the gate agents. All told, by the time they got the issue resolved, finished boarding the plane, and got through the line for de-icing, we were about an hour and fifteen minutes late getting into the air.

We were scheduled for a 90-minute layover in Vancouver, so we knew it would be tight at the other end. The plane made up time on the flight, and since we were at the front we were some of the first ones off. We jogged to the departure gate of our next flight, and got there with fifteen minutes to spare. We noted that our flight was a half-hour delayed anyway, so it seemed to be working out in our favour. While we were waiting, it managed to accrue another half hour of delay, and they started announcing that the next flight had been cancelled. By the state of the departure lounge, it was clear that they were having a bit of a challenge getting flights out to Victoria.

When we went to board our plane to Victoria, Air Canada dropped another fun bombshell on us.

"There's someone else in these seats."

Apparently when they noticed that our flight out of Winnipeg was delayed, they pulled all of the Winnipeg passengers heading to Victoria (at least a dozen of us) off of the 9:00 flight and put us on the 10:00 flight.

The flight that they had been announcing the cancellation of from the moment we'd arrived at the lounge. Apparently, they had sent me a text message about it while we were in the air, but my phone was in my checked luggage, so it did not do us a lot of good. It looked like most of the other Victoria passengers from our flight were also caught by surprise. We checked with their service desk, and it seems that while we had been waiting to board, they had filled up the next couple of flights with all the other folks who had been on the cancelled 10:00 flight. By this point it was getting on toward 10:30, and he wasn't sure what he could do to accommodate us. He gave us a couple of $10 meal vouchers and told us to come back at around 11:30 and he'd see what he could do. We'd been fed on the plane, and neither of us were especially hungry, so we walked most of the way to the other end of the airport, and then returned and hung out in the departure lounge until 11:30.

"Good news! I've managed to get you two seats on the 12:30 flight. You won't be sitting together though."

We assured him that we were not too concerned about being separated for a 20-minute flight, and we took our new boarding passes. The flight was late arriving, but we sat at the end of the lounge by the departure gate and watched them unload the luggage from the inbound flight, then pull up and begin loading. We relaxed a bit when we saw our bags loaded into the back of the Dash 8.

Then the grounds crew began milling about, and a couple of technicians began fiddling with the plane. The process went on for some time until one of them came up to the departure lounge and spoke with the gate agent. She told us that they had found a problem with the plane and were sending off for a replacement part. She promised us that the delay would probably be about half an hour at most. About fifteen minutes later the technicians returned, and we saw them fiddling around in the cockpit of the plane. After a few minutes of this, they came out and spoke with the ground crew.

The ground crew considered what they'd said, and then began unloading the luggage again.

We were not the only ones who had noticed what was transpiring because a few others in the lounge spotted it, checked their phones, and then made a beeline to the gate agent because AC's website had just marked the flight as cancelled. The gate agent went into damage-control mode.

"As some of you have noticed, the web site is showing this flight as cancelled. Please don't leave the gate area yet as we are trying to arrange a replacement plane for this flight." A good number of people left the gate area and headed over to the service desk to lodge their complaints, but we stuck around until she came back on about five minutes later and said, "Never mind, it's cancelled. Please talk to the service desk to make alternate arrangements."

When we got to the service desk, there were nine people in front of us (I counted). Almost as soon as we got there, I overheard one of the agents say, "We can take seven more and that's it." Great.

When we finally got to the front, the service agent spent a very long time hammering keys before she said, "OK! I've got you on standby for the 14:30 and 15:30 flights. We might be able to get one of you on one of those flights. I've got you seats on the 17:30 flight for sure." We tried to be polite with her because the problems were not her fault, but we were a bit pointed with her when we asked about the odds of the 17:30 flight being cancelled, given we'd had three flights pulled out from under us already.

I also pointed out that even if we did not get bumped from, or have the 17:30 flight cancelled, we could hop in a cab to the ferry and be at our hotel before that flight even arrived. We'd been planning to do some shopping in Victoria - which is why we'd left Winnipeg so early - but it was already shot by by now. She offered us a taxi chit that would get us to the ferry (we'd be on our own after that), and gave us the number to call after our trip to get reimbursed for the Victoria flight. Then she instructed us to collect our bags at carousel number four.

We got to the carousel and split up. Her instructions had been a bit vague. atara took them to mean that we should wait for our bags to arrive on the carousel, but I had a hunch she'd meant for us to speak with the baggage agents there. She went to the carousel, and I got in line to speak with a baggage agent. It is just as well I did, because there really had not been a plan on her part beyond telling us to head up there. When I spoke with the agent, he said that it would probably take a couple of hours to get our bags up there (they had hundreds of them set aside because of all the cancellations), and that we would likely miss a sailing or two if we waited around for them. He took down the details of where we were saying, and promised that they would be forwarded to us there later in the day.

We made the ferry where my brother (who had also come out from Calgary to surprise Mom) met us on the Victoria side and drove us to the airport to pick up our rental car. The agents there had been very understanding, and held the car an additional 8 hours for us past when we had booked ourselves to pick it up. It was a bit awkward for us because even though Victoria is a much warmer clime than Winnipeg, it is winter there. We had a light jacket between the two of us (I'd kept that out of my checked luggage because I suspected we would probably be boarding on the tarmac in Vancouver). I let atara have my jacket because I deal with the cold a little better than she does, but that left me with just a long-sleeved shirt that I had donned for the flight because it has pockets.

Our bags did not arrive later in the day.

We surprised Mom with dinner, and then got back to our hotel to a disturbing lack of luggage. The hotel gave us some emergency toothbrushes, toothpaste, a hairbrush for atara, and the worlds worst disposable razor and shaving cream for me. No, really, this razor was awful. Cruel. It made no pretence of cutting through stubble, rather, it's blades had a special gripping action that pulled the hairs out by their roots. That was far and away the worst shaving experience of my life. Also, the bristles of the emergency toothbrushes were coming off in our mouths as we brushed. Definitely not keepers.

When we retired to our room, we logged into Air Canada's baggage tracing system to learn the fate of our luggage. Their site showed that it was last seen arriving in Dallas Fort Worth, with an estimated delivery date sometime in the year 2200. atara was beside herself because, among other things, my phone was in our luggage.

Then she had an epiphany.

"Wait, your phone is in your luggage! Let's check your movement history in Google and see where your phone thinks it is."

We checked, and it showed arriving on a Victoria-bound at about 19:00 and being toted to the far end of the airport.

They finally got around to delivering our luggage early the next afternoon. We got tired of waiting and drove up to the airport to pick it up in person. They could not find it there, and they assumed it had gone out for delivery, even though it had not been logged on the delivery sheet. We had passed their courier on the highway going the other direction. As we were leaving the airport again, the hotel called to let us know that our bags had just arrived.

The flight home was uneventful. The dinner in business class was as delicious as the breakfast had been going the other way.

Our area was hit by (what they are currently calling) a 4.9 4.3 magnitude quake last night. I was sitting at my computer trying to decide if I should go to bed when I heard and felt what I thought was my neighbours stomping around in their room. It quickly escalated, and I realized that it was not the neighbours, but an earthquake. At its peak, the building shook and swayed and made alarming sounds, but just as quickly it passed. Short as it was, it was probably the most interesting five seconds of my life this week.

One would think that with a big garden full of Christmas lights I could find something more interesting to take a picture of than a doughnut truck, but I loved how this thing stood out like a beacon in the cold and dark, attracting hungry visitors like a porch light pulls in moths.

This picture of Merry represents my vacation. It was fun, but now we both have places to be. So long, and thanks for all the lap.


I won't say how many work hours I logged during my vacation, but my managing director would have my hide if she knew. She is very strict about not working when we are on vacation, but usually I don't take off in the final stages of a complicated project. We are coming up to the final push to go into production with what we have, but the business is starting to push back pretty hard, to the point where they are threatening to stall it past the firm production date if we can't deliver on their latest demands.

And I don't blame them at all.

I think I have bitched about this project earlier (if not here, then other places) with its vague requirements and moving targets. The thing is that it did not start off with vague requirements; the business gave a list of eighteen core reports they needed replaced because the systems that house those reports are slated for decommissioning. At the start, we took that list of reports, started gathering requirements on them, and began delivering some of the easy hits, with a tentative time line on the rest.

That's when IT stepped in and said, "This suite of reports does not match our current reporting paradigm in the new environment. What we will give them is a single, massive dashboard with the bulk of their metrics in one place, with one or two supplemental reports to provide them with some of the details." That would be great if it was what the business had wanted, but it wasn't. The higher ups in IT assured them that they would love it once they got their hands on it and realized that it was the New Way Of Doing Things.

The business finally got their hands on it, and surprisingly they don't like it because it barely gives them a fraction of what they currently have and need. They are pushing back hard because they believe (rightly) that they were bullied into this by IT, and are not being given what they were promised.

They are not the only business unit that is starting to get annoyed with the new direction of IT. I have been caught in the middle of a battle between our service centre and IT over their refusal to deliver an important dashboard that the centre has been after for years. IT has built the dashboard, but it suffers because of bad records coming in from customers and other carriers alike.

Bad data is just a fact of life in this business - when Joe Shipper in Atlanta is sending a carload of sulphur pellets for export at the port of Vancouver, he doesn't know or care about the finer points of whether the facility he is shipping to is in Port Moody, Lynn Creek, Van Wharves, or Vancouver Wharf; he's sending it to Vancouver. We just have to accommodate that bad data because if we don't the other guys will. Most of our systems have tolerances built in to deal with it, but suddenly the new paradigm at the top of IT is that we are not going to do that any more. Even though our routing and billing systems will handle it fine, our reporting systems are now going to be G.I.G.O. engines.

On the one side we have the business saying, "Just give us the damned dashboard." On the other side we have IT saying, "We will give you this broken one, but we are under a strict embargo against modifying incoming data for it, so you'll have to live with something useless." I am stuck in the middle saying, "It's called an umbrella table, people. It's not modifying anything, and they exist in almost every application we've produced to date. Why the change now?" Oh, and the developer who was working on the dashboard has left the company. Guess who is probably going to get saddled with his unfinished work?

I worked with it a bit earlier when I had to try and interpret his work. I can figure out most of it fine, but there are some parts where I have no clue what he is trying to do - though I suspect that's because he also had no clue. He's a good coder, but is working from zero business knowledge. Our department head hinted that she has a project in mind for me once I get back from vacation. I am praying that it is not this.

We hit Chicago with rather vague plans, but most of them involving outdoors. It is just as well that we had no plans, because the skies turned ugly while we were caught out in the open and we got soaked to the bone. If we'd had solid plans, they'd have melted to a sloppy pool of ruin.

I grabbed this shot from the top of the Sears... er, Willis building. Something about the small army of tiny towers tickled my fancy.

First, thanks to everyone for the well-wishes about Jaws. We knew she was getting on in years, but she was active, happy and personable right up to the end, so it came rather suddenly for us. It was a rough week.

We finished training on Friday, and we were issued passports with stamps showing that we are now qualified car inspectors. I don't feel particularly qualified, but I guess if I can catch the majority of things, that's all they can really expect of a replacement worker. My thinking is that we just need to ensure that the car is safe enough to get out of our yard, then it is somebody else's problem.

I discovered that my little Canon does not like cold weather. I was packing it around in my coat pocket and it refused to work the last time I removed it for a shot. I powered it up, and it immediately flashed a message and powered down again. When I finally got it to power up again, I saw that it was grumping at me to replace the battery pack. I removed the battery and wrapped it in my hand until it felt more like a batter than it did like an ice cube. When I put it back in the camera, it was magically back at full power and working happily.


I was chatting with one of the other trainees as we were loading our cold weather and safety gear into our cars at the end of the week, and we were discussing best case and worst case scenarios in the upcoming weeks. Obviously the best case is that the union and company sign a contract, and we all just keep doing our regular jobs. A bad cased is that they cannot come to an agreement, and the union walks out on the 15th (which is their earliest strike date).

Worst case is that the company locks them out. Usually that happens if the union starts working to rule, or doing other things to cause delays. Under the new regime though, there is a good chance they will just pre-emptively lock them out at the earliest possible strike date as a show of force, and to prevent any kind of work-to-rule shenanigans. We both agreed that a lockout would likely drag on the longest, and be the ugliest in terms of picketer anger.


The above is one of the pictures I took during our late-spring vacation.

Today's drive was as bad as I had been anticipating - worse if you include the fact that it alternately rained and poured between Regina and Brandon.

We arrived home after fifteen(ish) hours on the road to a house that smells of cat pee, three cats who are ecstatic to see us, and 70 KM/H winds. All of the clocks are blinking, but they are blinking about the right time, so I am just going to leave them for tomorrow. Right now it is time to collapse into bed and see if the cats will let us sleep.

Among the things that are not concerns for me when I am working back home are the danger of flower petals falling on my keyboard, or aggressive vines vying for space on the table. Something else that could have pushed this a couple of more notches toward perfect would be a glass of wine beside the computer, and a newer, faster computer. No offence, laptop, you have been a workhorse and a tank since I got you in 2005, but you are definitely showing your age.


I bought his and hers computers back in 2005 when we still got a corporate discount for buying Dell products. The Inspiron 6400 got pretty good reviews, so I ordered a pair of identical units (with different colour schemes to tell them apart) and a couple of other accessories. Since then, I doubled the memory in mine to its max 2GB, and replaced XP with Vista when it came out.

Yes, I installed Vista by choice. I knew it had a bad (undeservedly so, I have found) reputation, but I was still the go-to guy in my office for support at the time, and I wanted to learn my way around it before others bought systems using it and started whining for help. It has actually been a solid performer. It struggled a bit in the early going until I installed a second gigabyte of memory, but after that I have no complaints.

After breakfast yesterday, we spoke with Fernando and let him know that we would not be there for this morning's 8:00 seating. We explained that we had to be out the door by 6:30 in order to catch the 8:00 sailing. When I told him what time we planned to leave, he gushed, "Oh, how uncivilized!" Shortly after we retired to our room to start getting ready for our day, he knocked politely at the door and informed us that he would be making some bagged breakfast for us to take on the road in the morning. He instructed us to fetch them from the small refrigerator just inside the kitchen door as we were on our way out in the morning.

He packed us each a drink box, banana, soft boiled egg, one of his delicious home-made scones with butter and orange marmalade, some yoghurt, and a little caramel-fudge candy. As we sat in the ferry terminal enjoying the snack, our morning felt slightly less uncivilized. It was very thoughtful, and one of those little touches that entices us to keep coming back to Albion Manor when we stay in Victoria.

I was a little concerned about making the 8:00 ferry in spite of our early start, since it is the Friday of a long(ish) weekend. Technically it is not a long weekend, but I suspect a fair number of people will be taking the Monday off work to get a 4-day weekend out of it. If I had been smart, I would have done that to buy myself a bit of extra time to unwind after out trip.

We awoke to rain this morning - or to wet roads after a rain. If it has already moved through, that means that we will probably be driving through it as we head east into the mountains. Yay. Nothing makes a trip go faster like poor visibility and wet, slippery roads. It is a long haul to Calgary. Wish us luck.

Unless we hear from my mother, today may end up being our first day of vacation that we have to ourselves. My sister-in-law browbeat us into coming out to their house again this evening, but today is all ours. We have some vague plans about doing some touristy things, and some shopping for a car adapter to charge our phones on the trip home, but nothing beyond that.

When we left my brother's place last night, I started following the route that the GPS would have suggested, then veered off when I spotted a familiar street name and thought, "I have a vague idea of where this street heads."

I made two more turns, both times following a hunch that I was turning the right direction on streets with which I was only passingly familiar. I never drove when I lived in Victoria, so my experience with many of the streets in that part of town was either being a passenger in somebody else's car, or recognizing them from the names of bus routes. What did not help was that the compass in our car is only moderately correct part of the time, and usually gives random readings that have no bearing on reality. As I took each turn toward what I thought was our hotel, the compass assured me that we were going exactly opposite of where we wanted to go.

Just as I was thinking about asking atara to fire up the GPS, we finally reached a street that I knew quite intimately from living in Victoria. It seems that in spite of our car's assurances that I was heading directly away from our accommodations, I had been making the correct turns all along. I guess my sense of direction is better than I had thought. I continued following my hunches - taking Quadra street rather than Blanshard or Douglas because I vaguely remembered that it emptied out into Beach Hill park, and it seemed to me that if we turned at the park, it would drop us fairly close to our B&B. Again, I was right.

I suppose I should not feel too surprised, nor smug about my Zen-like ability to home in on our destination by hunch. Victoria is not a huge city, and I spent almost half of my life here, so I still have a pretty good sense of direction, even at night in unfamiliar parts of the city. On the other hand, even after being away for nearly thirty years, this city still feels very comfortable and home-like to me. That kind of flies in the face of that old adage about how you can never go home again. Maybe you can.

The pace of things picked up a bit once we left the mountains and arrived in Vancouver, so I never got the chance to update here. Now, with 90 minutes to kill on a ferry crossing to Victoria, I can post one of those "so far, so good" updates.

We managed to hook up with most of the people on my list for Vancouver, and though most of the time was heavy on the "sit around and chat" while light on the "go do something", it was nice to catch up.

In spite of the fact that atara makes me slather on SPF 60 sunscreen every time we make any motion to head out the door, I managed to pick up a bit of a sunburn while we were up in the mountains. Fortunately it is a very minor burn, mostly cleared up already and unlikely even to peel.

I got us into a fancy hotel for our stay in Vancouver for very cheap using my work discount. While I was booking it, the agent asked if I wanted to upgrade to "Gold" status for only a few dollars more. That got us onto a special floor, where we had a private self-serve lounge that was stocked with hot and cold entrées and drinks for most of the day. It was like buying a sponsorship at a furry con, but much cheaper. We were out for most of the day, and only took advantage of the lounge in the mornings for the most part, but the free breakfasts and bottled waters more than made up the difference in the price of the room.

We never did order any of the complimentary pillows off of the pillow menu in our room, but some of them looked intriguing.

There were only two flies in our vacation ointment in Vancouver. The first is that my feet and ankles are covered in itchy little welts that look suspiciously like flea bites, and I picked up a few fresh ones each night in the hotel. At first I though they were residual bites from our stay at the cabin (I know we had mosquitoes and other biting insects in the cabin, and my feet were often exposed during the night), but yesterday and this morning I awoke to fresh bites.

atara was not bitten, and it was only my feet and ankles. I am 90% sure it was not bedbugs, because there was no evidence of them in the bed, and the little welts do not match the pattern of bedbugs. My suspicion is that I either had a reaction to something in the detergent they used on the sheets, or there were a couple of fleas in the room, because these look a lot like flea bites to me. And as I learned from having flea-bitten cats when I lived out on the coast, fleas love me. Also, the bites around the feet and ankles strongly resemble flea bites.

We are always careful to store our luggage and clothes off the floor, so I doubt any will be hitching a ride with us when we leave. Fleas are one of the things that I do not miss from living out here. That and the traffic.

The other downer was that I forgot to run a report for our accounting department before I left on vacation. I noticed that I had a missed call from my boss when we got into cell range on Friday, so I checked my work email when we got to the hotel and it confirmed my suspicion that he was calling me about it. Being the conscientious individual that I am, I remoted into my work computer and set up the jobs in our Business Objects. Two of them ran, and two of them failed after about 20 hours with puzzling errors. I tried running them a couple more times before emailing the office and letting them know that things were broken, and I was on vacation and did not care that much to try and fix them.

I left enough instructions for one of my co-workers to run most of the things for me if he can figure out what is breaking on our BO server. I let them know that I would remote in again this evening to finish things up if I could get a stable Internet connection. This is why they hate to let me go on vacation.

Today's itinerary was one of those ones that could just as well have been decided by throwing a dart at a wall map of the area. After some debate, we settled on driving west to Roger's pass to check out some of the hiking and sights around there. To date, my experience with Roger's Pass has been to drive through it at the maximum speed allowed by law, so I was understandably surprised to find out that there are actually things to see and do there.

Alas, there was not as much to see or do as we might have hoped because what was not closed due to slides or bears, was not yet open for the season. We took a short board-walk trail through a cedar grove (where I took the shot below) and then we headed on to Revelstoke for lunch. We wandered around the town centre for a few minutes scoping out a dining place before settling on a German/Indian fusion restaurant that smelled very good. I ordered the butter chicken spätzle, which was as quirky and delicious as it sounded. The outfit appeared to be run by a couple (not sure if husband/wife, or just partners). He did the German cooking, and she took care of the Indian cooking. She made me a salt & pepper lassi to order (they did not include it on the menu) and added nice hint of coriander to it.

I did not bring my tripod on the trip, but I did not let that stop me from slapping the 35mm lens on my camera and attaching a neutral density filter. I do not get a lot of opportunity to play with those filters.


The nature trail we took today was entirely a raised boardwalk. After slogging through 3+ miles of mud and tree roots on the first day, it was a welcome break in some respects. While we were stopped, taking pictures of the stream above, a group of about half a dozen came marching past us as if they were on a mission. We probably would not have paid them any attention at all if one of them had not had a Go Pro mounted on a stick, held aloft so that he could mug at it and document every step he took.

I have seen fursuiters doing this in the parade at MFF, and it has always struck me as being near the height of self-absorption. I can kind of understand why a suiter might do it - especially if it is a suit that they have made themselves. I would want to see my suit in action as well. For a "hiker" who is walking a notably unchallenging wooden board-walk, I just don't see any reason for it other than shameless vanity. I suppose he might have been a Vlogger, who was planning to dub over it later.

"As promised, here I am communing with nature along with several people who I shall refer to as real life friends."