Unfortunately, and fortunately, that’s coming to an end. I say unfortunately because it’s so pretty to walk down the street and see hundreds of trees festooned in bright pink – a sure sign of spring here. It also means that we now get “pink snow” with sidewalks covered with millions of rotting pink petals as they drop from the trees making way for the green.

I say fortunately because it means that summer is fast approaching and the weather will stop being as unpredictable. Plus seeing Vancouver return to it’s lush forest-like state is the way we all want to see it.

It also means that Chris’ birthday is approaching. Early April and he’ll be, well let’s just say turning another year older. It always causes him stress and last year I didn’t exactly help alleviate that so I’m going to try to do something special this year. Not a big party, but something nice.

We’re also planning on a small mini-vacation either that weekend or the one after. Just a quick trip out of town for 2 nights to re-group and see someplace new. Technically it’ll be the first vacation we’ve taken as a couple. A few years ago we went to Calgary for a long weekend, but we stayed with my family the whole time and had a tight agenda of things we had to do. Not really a vacation.

This will be all about us – relaxing, no agenda (other than getting to the destination), no interruptions. The dog is coming with us, but he’s low maintenance generally.

Spring is in the air!

Anybody who knows me even a bit knows I’ve got a Starbucks addiction, but I’m trying to kick it.

In Downtown Vancouver, there is a Starbucks location within a few (read 2) blocks of just about everywhere. In the last 3 places I/We have lived, there’s been one within a block. And there is one within a block of my office.

Seriously, I didn’t plan it, but I think Starbucks did.

A few years ago I went to Yuma, Arizona for Christmas to visit my dad and step-mother and was tired most of the time I was there. I came up with my Starbucks Conspiracy Theory. Basically, the reason I was tired wasn’t that I wasn’t drinking coffee but rather, in Vancouver the air is so saturated with caffeine from one coffee shop or another (Starbucks, Blendz, Cafe D’Artigiano, etc) that you live in an artificially caffeinated state whether you like it or not.

So, this past weekend Starbucks finally released a store locator app for the iPhone into the Canadian iTunes store!

For me, it’s not about locating a store in Vancouver, it’s about remembering which stores are good (clean bathrooms, friendly staff) among the 100s there seem to be downtown.

And of course it will come in handy when we’re out of our comfort zone and I need a fix.

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So, this was the second weekend of the Olympics in Vancouver and things have certainly kicked up a notch or two!

Holy cow it’s so busy everywhere. We spent hours standing in line to see some of the Olympic pavillions or “houses” as they’re called.

By and large, they have NOT been worth the time spent in line. Here’s the ones that we saw and a rating…

• Royal Canadian Mint – 25 minutes for the non-medal line up. Time inside 10 minutes. Rating: 5/10
  We saw the $1,000,000 gold coin, and lifted the gold ingot. Whee!
• Maison Du Quebec – 25 minutes for the lineup before they opened. Time inside 2 minutes. Rating: -50 / 10
  Inside was another line to buy food/drink ($10 for a beer) and an empty stage with the promise of “entertainment” coming up soon. Uh – pass.
• Sotchi House – 2 hour lineup before it opened. We left.
• Ontario House – 2 hour lineup. We’ve been to Ontario, nothing they can do to tart it up will make us stand in line.
• Saskatchewan House – 15 minute line up. We could see it from the minute we got there and we saw it behind us as we left.
  Yes, that’s my take on the “My dog ran away 2 days ago and I could still see him” joke.
• Costco House – not an official house. 5 minutes in line, 2 minute wait for fried “pub” food. Failure to see what the fuss is about. Rating: 7/10, because were were hungry.
• Turner-Rose House – No line-up, good company, cheap food, comfortable surroundings and no crowds. We strongly advise you visit this one. Rating: 10/10

  We also recommend our Welcoming Emissary! He’ll make you feel welcome!

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• Royal Canadian Mint celebrates first Canadian gold medal with medallion and commemorative coin (newswire.ca)

One of the other gifts in the box was a super nice (simple) coat for Rumble. We’ve expressed to Dave before that Rumble hates getting wet and with Vancouver Winter upon is, tis the season to be wet.

So we put the coat on Rumble and he froze. No surprise there, he doesn’t handle change or clothing very well. We’ve shown video of him in boots before. Have a look… This is what happened with the coat.

So what’s the miracle you ask?

That was exactly a week ago. As of now, he’s actually walking with his coat on!

Sadly, this proves something bad. It means that anything Rumble doesn’t know and “can’t” learn is either our fault, or simply because he’s hard headed. But that’s not news to anyone who met him.

Downtown Vancouver is rapidly becoming Olympic central as you would expect with the games roughly two months away at this point.

One of the features is GIANT, building sized posters or banners or flags or whatever you want to call them. On the building opposite the VAG is a giant Canada flag, which I think Chris has a picture of, but I don’t. I’ll post it one day. Ok, here it is, I got Chris to email it to me. We do love our tech.

On the Hudson’s Bay building there are a series of giant pictures of Canada’s winter Olympic athletes, which is a great way to promote them, make the Bay building look good (nobody will be able to recognize it as the place they shot Blade 3).

The biggest reason I like this particular promotion is because the very first photo I saw was of Olympic cutie Carter Rycroft. I know, I’m a shallow, shallow, looks obsessed person for this and I’m sure I’ll be toasting in hell at some point.

Hey, I’m not saying I don’t think he’s a tremendous athlete or that any non-cute athletes don’t get my support, I’m a big athletic supporter – hey wait…  but it sure helps hold my interest in what they’re up to when they’re adorable at the same time.

I like the whole hot-men-in-speedos aspect of swimming and diving during the summer Olympics, but have you seen Michael Phelps? His face isn’t exactly model quality so I don’t care about it so much.

Anyway, in the mean time. I have a new interest in Canada’s men’s curling team and hope to find some time to watch it over the 2 weeks that Vancouver will become a complete zoo in February 2010. Best of luck Carter. Oh, and everyone else.

Translink Community Shuttle

I was cruising Google Reader last night and came upon a recommended feed that sounded interesting. Price Tags, it’s called. It’s an unassuming little blog by Gordon Price, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University.

One of the recent articles is entitled “Vancouver’s bus service tops in the world,” which had me scratching my head. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll know I regularly complain about the crappy service I get from transit in Vancouver.

Color me surprised to find out we actually have one of the BEST and most ON TIME bus services in the world.

I’ll have to remember that the next time the C23 comes every 15-30 minutes instead of every 10 during rush hour.

But I’m not going to blame them entirely.

Yesterday, I went to buy some shoes. I was feeling kinda crappy anyway, having one of those days where everything annoyed me and probably didn’t want to be there. So my dear husband and I ventured to a store downtown known for inexpensive sports shoes (note, this is not Payless!! They sell crap I won’t even touch much less pay for) to find me a simple pair of running shoes.

We enter the store and head for the shoe wall. We passed 3 employees without a single on of them making eye contact. We perused the shoe wall for about 5 minutes trying to find something I liked and finally found a pair. There was a bored looking girl leaning against the pillar about 5 feet away so Chris asked her for a size 10 in this style. She made eye contact with him, but as I watched, she actually rolled her eyes, looked bored, whispered something and wandered off.

Chris headed off to look at shorts or t-shirts while I waited in the shoe department, looking at other options in case these didn’t work out. A minute later, I notice she’s holding up the wall again. I assumed (wrongly) that someone else (taller?) was finding the shoes for her. I sat and waited. After about 5 minutes, I headed off to find Chris as I was tired of waiting. As he comes back to me, she says – “there are no 10s” to him. So I said “How come you didn’t tell me that, I was sitting there waiting for you to bring me the shoes” and things went down hill from there.

The girl in charge of the till asked us to leave. I said “Don’t you care that your employee doesn’t know how to do her job?” She told us to fill out a card to send to head office and told us we weren’t welcome back in the store. Huh?

There’s a Starbucks near us who has a pretty good staff overall. But there’s one guy who is almost never on the bar. He’s always on cash. Even then, he seems pretty stunned most of the time. I have no doubt that being a barista is harder than some jobs. Remembering how to make so many drinks and having customers customize them to within an inch of their names is tough.

I don’t know why they keep this guy on staff. He barely handles orders at the till and often needs them repeated. After going there regularly, the baristas know my order before I get to the till but he doesn’t usually get it when I tell it to him. Slow…ly.

Excellent customer service is hard, takes the right mindset, presence and thoughfulness. I understand this as I have been doing varying forms of customer service for 25 years, since my first paper route. I really appreciate the staff who really get it, own it and excel at it. My expectations are not that high. I honestly don’t expect the guy at Starbucks to remember my order. I expect him to get it right when I give it to him. If he wants to excel, he’ll remember it.

These days, whether because of high turn over, lazy management (I put the blame here), staff who have never had really good customer service to model from, low wages or whatever, your general retail experience in downtown Vancouver is less than stellar, and on the decline.

If you’ve had either great or crappy customer service experience, let me know. I want to shop at the good places.

I ended up buying shoes at Costco. Sadly, low expectations of service there and I’m never disappointed.

So, on this beautiful Saturday morning, Chris and I got up early, dragged the dog out of bed for his walk, and headed off to the ScotiaBank Theatre or whatever to see Terminator Salvation. While not quite as bad as X-Men Origins: Wolverine (bad), it was no Star Trek (awesome) either. It also had nothing much to do with any other Terminator product you may know.

Ok, that’s not true. We see a picture of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton style, thank-you), we have an Arnold-bot, John Connor, Kyle Reese, Cyberdyne and a bunch of killer robots. I guess the basics are there.

What’s different (without giving everything away)? John’s not the be all and end all for the revolution. Either he hasn’t gotten to that point yet, or this timeline isn’t quite the same. He’s a well respected leader of the rebellion, but NOT the boy-king he’s painted to be previously. There’s no time-travel here, although Sarah mentions it on a tape John listens to.  In fact, this story is more about Kyle Reese ultimately than John Connor.

John Connor is of course played by Christian Bale. Yawn. He chews on scenery and is cranky most of the time. Christian’s done some good work, but he’s overshadowed here by pretty much everything else in this movie, and the sourness of his character. He’s not the smart-alecy John Connor we saw in T-2.

This time out, Kyle is played by Anton Yelchin (Yeah, Chekov is fighting the terminators) and they’ve given him an adorable little sidekick named Star(r). Star(r) is great but other than being adorable and handing people weapons at the appropriate time, I’m not sure why she’s there. She reminds me of Newt from Aliens or Laddie from The Lost Boys. Fun little kids, but not 100% relevant to the core story. For the record, I think Anton does a better job as Kyle Reese than he did as Chekov, but I wish they’d gotten B.A.G. to do the movie. Much hotter.

Sam Worthington – handsome bloke. Needs serious acting and dialect coaching. Seriously, WTF? His accent was all over the place. For a few minutes it was flawless American. Then, for most of the movie, every third word sounded like a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Mel Gibson on a bad bender. The opening scene of the movie is an intense prison scene between him and Helena Bonham-Carter (huh?) and I almost quit the movie after that. McG may be a good action director, but give him an emotional scene and he’ll let the actors do whatever they want with no regard for  how it ends up. Like he delegated it to the 3rd unit and didn’t care.

Overall – the special effects are pretty awesome. Good scale, decent story, interestingly different from what you’d expect.

Now for the cookies.

In our quest for lunch, we ended up at FatBurger on Denman Street as we often do. Not sure why sometimes because the food isn’t that good. It’s pretty good, but todays Crispy Chicken Burger with Ranch just didn’t cut it and the regular chicken burger is bland. Don’t get me started on the Turkey Burger. It’s tried to kill me twice.

So, after our lunch, we needed dessert. Right across the street is Cookies By George (now you get the title of this post) so we went over and indulged in several (expensive) cookies. Considering the price and size, the cookies at Starbucks are a better deal, and actually taste better.

I had 3 (which is why I’m sick now). My first cookie was something with big chocolate chunks and that one was ok, so I boldly moved on to cookie number two. Peanut butter. Yuck! I love peanut butter cookies, but this was horrible. Like they waved some peanut butter near it and the rest was slightly undercooked dough. Blah. Finally I had an Oatmeal cookie (they have some other adjective at the start, I don’t remember what) and it was horrible. I gave it to Chris and he wouldn’t finish it either, even though he said he enjoyed his. This Oatmeal and Raisin cookie (again, LOVE them usually) was laced with orange peel or something and had a strong orange/citrus taste. I hated it.

Thus, after a morning of disappointment, I am now laying on the bed at 4:00 in the afternoon, tired, slightly nauseous, but finally happy. Why? Because I have an awesome husband and the world’s cutest dog right here with me, and outside is the gorgeous bright sunshine you can only find in a world-class city like Vancouver.

Christopher and some giant wood

Another beautiful day in the city of Vancouver, and another amazing weekend spent mostly out of doors along the paths and streets of this amazing city.

Today, we took a bus over to Kitsilano Beach and headed west from there. We really enjoyed the walk since it was something different from our usual strolls along the familiar shores of downtown. The houses, the views, the architecture and the surprising lack of smokers was amazingly refreshing.

We watched a lot of kids and families at play on the beach, and there were a LOT of cute dogs playing along the beach and walking politely with their people.

We took some video too, and I‘ll post that shortly. We‘ve been taking video whenever we can to share with friends and family in other places. Mostly to rub their noses in it show them how nice Vancouver is in the hopes they‘ll come and visit us once in a while. We have a borrowed video camera from work and figure that as long as we have it, we might as well take full advantage of it. Anyway, here‘s the videos. Enjoy, feel free to chip in with comments.

And this is from today:

Today is day 2 and I decided to take it on the road. Chris and I bought a laptop about 2 months ago (on credit card, 3 months no interest, already paid off thank you very much) and it’s never left the house.

That’s not quite true. I took it to Metrotown on Good Friday to meet Chris but we didn’t go anywhere to sit that I could pull it out and use it, so it stayed in the bag. I consider that “not going out”.

Today, I finished most of my self-imposed chores at home and took the dog on a good hike. The sun was out the whole time, some puppy friends were out and he had a good time. Then I decided to head downtown. I had to drop some checks off for the orthodontist and since it was nice, I decided to relax outside the house for a while.

I considered where I could go, and settled on the close and familiar Starbucks inside Chapters downtown.  Not very exotic or interesting, but I knew my Chapters card would get me some free wi-fi and I could have a little coffee. Having never done it on this laptop before (only on my iPod), I assumed it would be easy. WRONG.

According to the Bell WiFi Hotspot site, their connection/setup isn’t compatible with FireFox, my browser of choice. So I fired up IE. It worked “better” but the connection screen kept refreshing and never gave me the “You have 2 hours” message. In fact, it even yelled at me once saying I had tried to connect too many times before the connection was ready and I should “Stop it. Now!” – yes, it actually said exactly that.

I finally opened a new tab to my home page and it worked. I guess the connection was established but the Java applet they use wasn’t compatible with this 64-bit version of Vista. 20 minutes wasted.

So here I am, sitting in the middle of Starbucks, surrounded by a lot of people (it was empty when I arrived) and writing this blog post. Fun. I’ve been tweeting, checking email and generally trying to look busy, productive and somewhat less pretentious than most people I usually see, but guess what!

Starbucks, enjoying my mystery beverage.

Using your laptop while sitting in Starbucks with a giant coffee cup (full of mystery fluid, or empty) looks pretentious. No matter what.

Stop me? Not bloody likely! I love being able to do this. The freedom is pretty cool. I should activate my webcam and take a picture. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.

There you go! Now I have to leave. Not only do I want to get home before Chris, but 2 women just sat down RIGHT NEXT TO ME. They pulled 2 empty chair and just sat down. No table, no nothing. It makes me uncomfortable.

Aw crap. It’s raining. Thank god for the Sears viaduct to the Skytrain. Minimal wetness.

Thanks for reading…