Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Things I learned on my winter vacation
- In the olden days, when they showed a movie on the plane it was “edited for airline viewing.” I saw the movie “Rain Man” years ago and they cut out the whole scene at the airport where Dustin Hoffman refuses to get on a plane other than Quantas, telling Tom Cruise that Quantas is the only airline that had never crashed (mental note: is this true? must find out). Nowadays, you can watch live TV in your seat. So now you can sit on a Westjet from Winnipeg to Vancouver and watch a special all about the September 11th hijackings. Those towers must've come down a dozen times on that little screen in front of me! I don't wish to bring up bad memories or speak ill of the departed, but I thought it was AWESOME that I could watch that on a plane.
- There are a lot of pretty cool old building on Vancouver Island. A lot of them host Narcotics Anonymous meetings...what's up with that? I guess I shouldn't say “a lot” but I'm talking two out of two, which seems like a lot when you think about it proportionately. Seriously – one was the train station in Courtenay, which has traffic through it 7 days a week, and is a cool old building with photos of railways all over North America, old brochures, those cool wooden benches that you see in all train stations, and the twelve steps of NA posted on the wall. Another one was an old one-room school house in a tiny town further up the Island. Its walls proudly displayed the history of the building and of the Mennonite farmers who settled the area with farms and churches, portraits of the Queen and Prince Phillip, information about the local chapter of the Old Age Pensioners Association, and the twelve steps of NA. Now, We all know about how the kids love their BC Bud, but apparently the seniors out here in Lotusland really like the smack!
- Saddam Hussein and James Brown are dead! You can really miss stuff when you're on vacation and not reading the newspaper or listening to the CBC on a regular basis. I guess Winnipeg is also covered in a thousand feet of snow – I didn't catch that one right away. I guess a snowstorm is not such a big deal, but 2 years ago I didn't learn about the Tsunami disaster until almost a week after it happened.
- A person's balls can climb pretty high up when their owner jumps into the ocean on New Years Day.
- I'm too old to stay at people's houses if they don't have a spare room or guest bed.
- There are a lot of pretty cool old building on Vancouver Island. A lot of them host Narcotics Anonymous meetings...what's up with that? I guess I shouldn't say “a lot” but I'm talking two out of two, which seems like a lot when you think about it proportionately. Seriously – one was the train station in Courtenay, which has traffic through it 7 days a week, and is a cool old building with photos of railways all over North America, old brochures, those cool wooden benches that you see in all train stations, and the twelve steps of NA posted on the wall. Another one was an old one-room school house in a tiny town further up the Island. Its walls proudly displayed the history of the building and of the Mennonite farmers who settled the area with farms and churches, portraits of the Queen and Prince Phillip, information about the local chapter of the Old Age Pensioners Association, and the twelve steps of NA. Now, We all know about how the kids love their BC Bud, but apparently the seniors out here in Lotusland really like the smack!
- Saddam Hussein and James Brown are dead! You can really miss stuff when you're on vacation and not reading the newspaper or listening to the CBC on a regular basis. I guess Winnipeg is also covered in a thousand feet of snow – I didn't catch that one right away. I guess a snowstorm is not such a big deal, but 2 years ago I didn't learn about the Tsunami disaster until almost a week after it happened.
- A person's balls can climb pretty high up when their owner jumps into the ocean on New Years Day.
- I'm too old to stay at people's houses if they don't have a spare room or guest bed.
# posted by Pedro @ 3:46 PM 
