How did these adults manage to get this old?

Sometimes you just have to wonder how a person has managed to live as long as they have...

There was a flood in our apartment building a few days ago. Today the water was shut off for most of the morning while they fixed the broken pipes. For several days now, notice that the water would be shut off today has been posted in all the elevators. You can't get into your apartment without using one of these elevators, the doors to the stairs are locked, so unless you are being a hermit, you have been in an elevator and have seen the notices. Even if you haven't read them.

So lets take a count of who didn't know about the water being shut off... a staggering number in the teens, if not more.

The most egregious ignoring of the notices award goes to the dentist. She has an office on the lower level of the building and was in the middle of a dental procedure that requires water when the water was shut off. This is supposed to be a well-educated, literate person who needs to use the elevators to get to and from her car in the parking lot every day and runs her own professional business.

So what is the stupidest thing you can do during a water shut off... kill your children.

We have a pool. The pool is full of water. It is treated daily with bleach and other chemicals. The award for most dangerous stupidity goes to the woman who came down to fill her children's water bottles with water from the pool. She had to be told by other shocked adults in the elevator not to give this water to her children. Just imagine explaining what happened to your children to a person in Emergency at a hospital - this should get you locked up for life-threatening stupidity.

The children of tomorrow have no chance, the adults have doomed them, but how did the adults get to be as old as they have? What did our western society miss? Has wealth and over-abundance made everyone stupid about basic human survival? Has clean running water readily available in a million taps made people forget how precious that is?

Forget the danger of a comet hitting the planet and wiping everyone out... we seem to be doing the job ourselves.

Are crop circles alien skid marks?

We are experiencing more construction chaos at our home again. Luckily, we are moving!!! Yaaay! But before then, I need to use a temporary wooden ramp to get in and out of our building because the wheelchair ramp is blocked by construction tarps.

This temporary ramp will likely last until way after the middle of next month, when we are leaving, but it doesn't inspire confidence right now. It is made of wood, and they've stapled a black-gritty-sheet-of-something to it so it's not as slippery as bare wood. But it's not a stable black-gritty-sheet-of-something, it is a dispensing-millions-of-tiny-black-pebble-like-things-sheet-of-something. And those little black pebbles are getting into my wheelchair wheels.

On my way out, the little black pebbles don't bother me that much - they do eventually make their way out of my wheels - but on the way into my home they are a menace. I do park this wheelchair inside my home after all! So I've been driving back and forth and around in circles in the hallway outside my apartment door before driving in... which has made me wonder about crop circles.

The carpet in the hallways is reportedly going to be replaced soon (it's quite insane to do this when there is construction going on outside the building's front door, but the strata council is quite insane, so it's to be expected) so I'm not feeling so guilty about making a mess.

I can turn almost on a dime in my wheelchair and I can make completely round little circles of black pebbles in the carpet in the hallway. If I try hard, I can reproduce some of the more interesting crop circle designs in the hallway. Unless someone saw me doing this, how it was done would be a complete mystery to folks!

So do aliens in space ships use crop fields on Earth as places to get gritty stuff off their ships? Do they occasionally run through comets or other space debris, and they're just trying to get the gunk off?

If so, I can sympathize with them. It's just crap you shouldn't have to drag around with you. And if it can entertain the natives (or the neighbors) at the same time, that's a bonus!

Are there more odors down here?

It's been a while since I've ventured into busy downtown Vancouver during the lunch hour on a weekday, but I needed to go out today and it was about that time, so I steered my wheelchair slowly through the crowds to get to my destination. While driving I noticed a plethora of odors in the crowds. So am I being very sensitive, or are there more odors down here at sitting level?

The perfumes were extreme - both from people and from the shops that sold perfume. The oddest thing of late is that the men are wearing more perfume than the women! Seriously doused males wreaking to the max! Who are the advertisers who thought selling perfumes for men was a good idea, and how can we stop them? And why are men putting so much scent around their waists? Are they trying to attract females in wheelchairs? It isn't working.

The wreak of cancer stick cigarette smoke is always a problem, and down here at wheelchair level is worse than at standing level! On the other hand, the scent of smoke from recreational pharmaceuticals isn't that bad... and there was lots of that everywhere, not sure if I should complain about that... nah, relax, it's all good.

The sewers also have their own odors, and I'm closer to them now than I was before. Luckily I can hold my breath while I pass them, and I am as fast as your average jogger when I go at my normal outdoor speed. (I can go faster, but I reserve that for driving on the seawall when it's empty, because that IS faster.)

So there are many odors down here that I have to live with now. But I'm an adult and can understand all of the odors, what about all those children in child strollers? What are we doing to them?

Post Script: OH! That's where all the pot smoke came from! There was a marijuana rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery - as I drove my wheelchair past it! Well, that was timing wasn't it?

Will a washroom be a tourist attraction?

The new Vancouver Convention Centre is quite the tourist attraction. It is built out over water with a fish habitat especially designed to attract fish, and it has a roof with "thousands of indigenous plants" planted on it. (What plants - beyond moss - are indigenous to roofs? Now that's a good question... looks like a lot of grasses... maybe they're from the planet of the roofs.) But I digress.

The more interesting question is... during a hot, dry August day, will using a washroom at the convention centre be a tourist attraction?

Yes, it rains in Vancouver. A lot. A really great deal. Many days of non-ending rain. But that's in the winter. In the summer it gets hot and dry and watering restrictions are put into effect. In August most of the grass is brown in Vancouver - it will come back to being green in the Fall when it starts raining again, but August is a brown month. So what will happen to the grasses and other "thousands of indigenous plants" on the roof of the Convention Centre? It is prized at being a green building, so they will not be using water to irrigate it from the municipal water supply, not directly anyway, they will be using "brown" or "black" water from the waste drains inside the building. So if you wash your hands in the washroom of the convention centre in August... the water that flows over your hands will then go up to the roof to water the plants!

Cool. Does this mean the washrooms will be a tourist attraction? I'm thinking I want to go just to pay a visit! I'm not sure what kind of conventions will be going on there in August, but I'm going to keep my eyes open to see if I want to go to one of them! Or at least go to visit the washroom when they're happening.

Anyone for skiing?

In Britain they have a saying "Anyone for Tennis?" which is packed with British humour and actually means "Anyone for going outside and getting soaked in the rain?"

In Vancouver we should have a saying "Anyone for skiing?" which will mean "Anyone want to go for a jog on the snowless ski hills?"

So we just had the Winter Olympics, and one of the mountains that was used to hold many of the events had no snow. Well, it did have snow, but the snow was trucked in from other mountains, it didn't spontaneously fall from the sky onto the hills that the skiing was on. Seriously. But now, today, weeks later, at the end of March, there's tons of snow up on Cypress Mountain.

And a collective groan goes up from Vancouver.

Did the universe just end?

The search for dark matter and the Higgs boson particles using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has started! They started slamming particles together today!

See http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE62T26K20100330

So are we gone yet? Did replicating the actions that happened when the big bang started the universe make everything hit the restart button?

No. Looks like we didn't stop.

Or did we? How would we know? Maybe our existence has more to do with a collective belief in our existence than in physics. Maybe the people who believed that the hadron collier would end the universe and tried to get the work stopped in law courts are gone. Maybe they ceased to exist a few minutes ago. Maybe just little bits of the universe have winked out of existence. How would we know? Has anyone got the inventory list so we could check things off?

This may be the results of an overactive imagination with a cold, but it does make me wonder.

How old are those fashions?

Whilst sitting in the Public Market at Granville Island a couple of days ago I couldn't help but notice a lot of people who looked oddly familiar. No, I didn't know any of them - and most of them were in their late teens / early twenties, and I don't think I know anyone in that age group.

So why did they look familiar? Because they were wearing the clothes of the 1980s.

And because they were the same age that I was when those clothes were in fashion in the 1980s. Thunk. Am I that old now? If I was their age, I'd think someone my current age is... old. Oy vey. This is a time warping experience that I wasn't expecting.

Of course, skinny pants from the 1980s on the turn of the century women of today makes most of them look like... ice cream cones. The ones with the pointy bottoms that won't stand up by themselves. High definition is not always a good thing ladies and gentlemen! I hope that's not what I looked like back then! Sometimes reviving fashion is not a good thing!