Do mattresses have a herding instinct?

You aren't supposed to do it. It's littering. It's illegal. But most people don't know how to get rid of old mattresses, so they go out in the middle of the night, find an alley, and dump them.

But that's not the end of it. When you have one mattress... there will be more very soon.

The empty lot beside our home now has 3 mattresses dumped in it.

We saw the same thing happen in the alley behind our old appartment building.

The empty lot beside our home contained dilapidated old buildings for about a year until we made enough noise to have the city force the owner to tear the buildings down. The chances of the owner of the empty lot doing anything about the mattresses are slim to none.

So now we have a look each morning to see if there are more mattresses. It's like they have a herding instinct. Stray mattresses will find each other.

Update March 15: How much do soaking wet mattresses weigh?

They are gone! Hooray! There was a very loud truck outside yesterday. It was out there for quite a while making quite the noise. When it was gone.... so were the mattresses!

It's been raining here for... um... months. Yep, not exaggerating... too much. So the mattresses that were sitting outside for days had to have been soaking wet. That would be heavy. No wonder the truck was making so much noise.

So the rubble from the dilapidated buildings has been removed, the herd of mattresses has left the watering hole and moved on to greener pastures... if an archaeologist dug up the site in a hundred years, would they find the remains of bed bugs and deduce that the shops were actually a human dwelling?

This vacant lot is getting interesting. I wonder what's going to be out there next.

Did more Vancouver residents turn off their lights for Earth Hour this year?

Last year I took a picture of Vancouver from out of our apartment during Earth Hour and it looked pretty much the same as it does every night. This year, there may have been a little less light, but I'm not sure people are getting it yet.

This news article shows the percentage reduction that communities around BC's lower mainland achieved last night.

The media are finally getting it. Last year it was almost a secret when Earth Hour was, and why it was. This year the local TV news actually mentioned it the Friday before it happened, so people could do something about it, rather than mentioning it briefly the Monday afterwards like they did last year!

But we still had glowing streets and people with every light in their apartments on during Earth Hour this year. Maybe next year...

Do I really want to know the construction workers that well?

Outside my window now, and for about the last year or so, there are construction workers working on my apartment building. Yes, a Vancouver condominium that needs repairs done on it from water damage, what a surprise! (Heavy on the sarcasm there, ALL buildings in Vancouver's West End neighborhood need repairs done on them due to water damage. No, we haven't had a flood or hurricane or any other natural disaster, we just live in a rain-forest area and no one can make a building that won't be damaged by the rain, which we get for six to seven months at a time. It's a soggy place.)

These construction workers talk a lot. They talk on the way up the outside of the building on the swing scaffold. They talk on the way down the outside of the building on the swing scaffold. They talk when not moving and the drilling momentarily stops (it's an occasional reprieve, they are replacing all of the tiles on every balcony, and drilling and refilling all of the joints between all of the wall panels out there).

The building walls are mostly glass, and they are also spending a lot of time replacing all of the caulking around every single glass pane. Glass is not a good sound barrier. So there is a looming shadow behind the blinds as the swing scaffold stops, they remove the old caulking, clean it out, and put new caulking on. This is not an engrossing task for them, they tend to talk the most when they are on the other side of this non-sound-proof glass.

It's a lot of talk about nothing in particular. Hockey is always a popular topic. Food – what should they have for lunch today. Games of various sorts. No debates about the dichotomy of good and evil, why don't humans have tails, or what is “colour” and is black a colour?

The problem is, I'm not trying to listen in. I really don't want to hear it. And I'd rather do my work without the chatter in the background. But I'm getting to know all about these men, and I don't want to. When I see them down in the lobby when we're all coincidently walking about, do I really need to be wondering which one had a great game of softball on the weekend? I'm going a bit nutty, and my ears hurt from listening to my Ipod all day! I'm beginning to think it would be quieter if I worked in an office building - at least it wouldn't be one conversation at a time going on! As a recent escapee from the corporate world, this makes me shudder!

Why do my neighbors wash the dirt from their balconies onto my windows?

Why is it called a "loo?" 

The British word for toilet, "loo", derives from the French "garde a l'eau!" In medieval Europe people had little conception of hygiene and threw the contents of their chamber pots out the window into the street below. In France the practice was preceded by shouting "garde a l'eau!" ("Watch out for the water!"). In England, this phrase was Anglicised, first to "gardy-loo!", then just "loo", and eventually came to mean the toilet/lavatory itself.

 Some of the residents of my appartment building seem to believe they are in medieval Europe. Throwing dirty water off your balcony or letting it drip out through the drainage holes and onto the windows of your neighbours below is NOT ACCEPTABLE in modern North American society. It is dirty and disgusting.

Do these people not know how much money the building pays to have the windows washed twice a year?

Why didn't Vancouver residents turn off lights for Earth Hour?

Robson Street, Vancouver during Earth Hour 2008

Earth Hour is an idea that started in Australia. The idea is to get people everywhere on the planet Earth thinking about how they use power, and the effect they have on the planet. So last night between 8pm and 9pm local time, people were encouraged to turn off the lights and anything else they could safely turn off to conserve power. The electricity companies would watch the consumption for the hour so they could report the results of these efforts.

The results are still being tallied and reported, but I've heard about reductions in specific places in B.C. that ranged from 3% to 30% power reductions during that hour.

The problem is, as my spouse and I sat on our enclosed balcony with a candle, we read a magazine by the light of Robson Street and the apartments across the alley from us. We had no lack of light. Neon signs, brightly lit restaurants, and neighbors with all of their lights in every room of their apartments glowing with no thoughts at all about the planet lit our magazine.

So did people Not know about Earth Hour? Or did they know about it and not care?

Yesterday we had a freak hail / snow storm in Vancouver and there is still a bit of snow on the ground today. We typically don't get snow in Vancouver, even in the winter – yes, that is odd for the city hosting the next Olympic Winter Games. So yesterday's “weird weather” was perhaps a result of “Global Climate Change” aka “Global Warming” aka “Wake the *** up, you stupid monkeys”. So it's not as if everyone was oblivious to the change in the weather. But many people were oblivious to the need to think about what humans are doing to the planet.

So Long And Thanks For All The Fish...