"Goodbye, Single-use Plastic"

I think this is a good idea. My only question now is: "What do we do with our household garbage, before putting it down the building's garbage chute?"
It is a rule of the Strata Committee & Council that all garbage must be suitably bagged or wrapped before discarding it in the building's garbage chute, because otherwise, the chute gets contaminated, smells bad, and must be shut down for cleaning. So until now, the easy solution has been to put everything into plastic bags, frequently double-bagged, especially for those on higher floors, and there are 20 floors in the building. Show me a paper bag you can fill with kitchen  garbage and then drop down a 20-floor chute, and have it maintain its integrity and not burst inside the chute, creating a stinking mess later. Show me, please!


And if we have to take all our garbage down to the Level One of the underground garage, where our "Big Blue Bins" sit, then why are we paying for the convenience of a garbage chute available to each floor? And what becomes of the big Compactor in the Garbage Room? Who do we sell it to? When the planet-savers decided to ban single-use plastic, did they come up with solutions to these kinds of questions? Or did they expect all that to be worked out magically by others? These are my concerns.

Pageviews of this blog...

Here's a little graphic from the hidden inner rooms on here.... Things seem to be coming back up a bit. It takes time, after being neglected for so long, and considering that the vast majority now would rather be on Facebook or Twitter, or one of the many others, designed to milk you of your information and give you a pain in the ass for your trouble. Would I lie to you? My name's not 'Trump'. He thinks 'Manual Labor' means a Mexican Obstetrician!

Brother and sister on matching Hoverboards!

It goes forward, backward, and spins.

The hubs have colored LEDs in them.

The girl isn't as confident as her brother.
Mom says "It plays music, too!"

Then, I met a little girl with this kite...

Why am I thinking 'the Dragon from Shrek' ?

The dragon in 'Shrek' was much better nourished...

But this flies better...

And we had the breeze for it, too.

These are what I missed by half an hour.

If everyone stood on the same side, would it tip over?

Trying for detail and failing miserably...

Paco in Germany asks: "What comes after the blooms on it?"
And Paco, the answer is, "There's supposed to be a nut for
each individual little bloom, but they don't all mature.......
Just like people!

Speaking of which, almost everybody was here yesterday.

I wanted to give this little girl a hug, because  her brother had been up on that rock beside her, and he had taken something from her, and then jumped down where we see him now, and she obviously isn't very happy, poor thing. But she will never remember this on her wedding day... we hope.

This is on my way back from the supermarket, after leaving the park. I had realized there wasn't much for supper, and went shopping. I've been meaning to have the camera along for some pictures along here, and last evening, it all came together for me, just like I wanted.

I love the way this climbing rose is climbing the guy-wire of this power pole. Hydro's safety people would feign concern, but it isn't any risk, and it looks absolutely lovely. I wish I had one of these around here.

I know nothing about this, but it looks beautiful.

That climber, in better perspective.

 

Today's Top Ten on here...

Uncle Ray's Kitchen Hints....

Does your straw float up out of its drink, and you are constantly having to stuff it back into the thing again, and getting less than happy in the process?

Relax! Uncle Ray has the cure. Just slip a short piece of slightly heavier tubing over the straw, making it too heavy to float. - Works for me!

And what's in Old Uncle Ray's drink? Have I fallen off the wagon, after 49 years? No, Kiddies, I'm still disgustingly sober. Why? Because...... After much research, and three months in a rehab center where lawyers smoked empty pipes held upside down while talking to themselves about their past cases, and kids sat in the solarium on hard wooden chairs and talked to a thumb held up in front of the face, and I made leather wallets in the Occupational Therapy building because it got me away from all that, I came to the conclusion that staying sober was, if not always fun, at least better for the budget, and if I'm going to make an ass of myself, which I do frequently, then why not be clear-headed enough to enjoy all that myself? The drink is my favorite mixture of Ginger Ale and Tropicana No Pulp Orange Juice. It would be wonderful with about two fingers of Moskovskaya, but my Internal Medicine Specialist says, "I don't do house calls to the Rehab Center, and that antifreeze will conflict with your blood thinners and water pills and COPD meds, and you could end up in the Hereafter prematurely, get the picture?" I got the picture - in living color.

And besides..... I can't go back to that Rehab Center now, because I'm not sick enough, and I wouldn't recognize it now anyway. It has become a huge complex with 454 beds and a staff of thousands. When I was there, it was a refurbished old TB San, with about 180 kids and 18 of us older drunks. The kids discovered that it was more fun talking to me than to the staff, so they'd bring me all their problems, and we'd sit around and talk about it, and I'd ask them what they would like to see happen, and then I'd take all that to the staff, and we'd kick it around, and work something out that was a compromise but satisfactory to the kids. And I discovered that it was fun. I've always been good with handling kids, because I have a secret. The secret is, don't treat them like kids, treat them as equals, and don't be condescending. Kids are smart. Sometimes smarter than the so-called adults they are dealing with, and they respond a lot better to questions than they do to orders. So I asked lots of questions, and listened carefully to their answers, and then made a few suggestions, and asked more questions. It worked for me......

The Director called me in for a meeting after I'd been there about two months, and asked, "Ray, have you any plans for when you leave here?" And I said, "Aha! I knew this would come up sooner or later. When I signed in here, I was told there's no charge, and I can stay as long as I feel it's necessary, and I can come back any time I have a relapse, and sign back in again, and receive more treatment. And now, here you are, trying to kick me out of the best home I ever had!" He looked a bit taken aback, and said, "Now, now - it's not that bad! And I'm not trying to kick you out. Listen - It's like this.... If you stay here much longer, I'm going to be over there in the main building, in your bed, and you'll be over here, in my office, behind all these piles of paperwork, running the place!" And I said, "No! No! Doc.... That would never happen. I hate paperwork,
and I'm not going to let you take over my bed, because our delightful Sandy comes around every night at bedtime, to kiss us guys 'Goodnight', and I wouldn't miss that for anything. So I'm sorry, I can't run the place. I'm too busy helping the kids stay out of trouble here." And he said, "That's exactly what I was getting at - you're doing better with them than our staff does!" And I asked, "May I offer you a little suggestion.....a 'secret technique' maybe?" And he asked, "And what would that be?" And I told him about kids responding better to questions than to orders, and to being treated as equals instead of condescendingly, and to suggestions rather that a list of 'Do's and Don'ts'. And he said, "Hmmmm....That might just work, but we do need rules." And I said, "Yes Sir, we sure do need rules, but you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, don't you?" And he said, "Well, it certainly seems to be working for you!" And I said, "My point exactly. So be my guest - and if it works, let's not fix it."

And he said, "Getting back to Ray, is there anything I could do to help you get organized after you leave us - and I'm not pushing you toward the door, so don't misunderstand that." I asked if he would please write to the people out here where I'd got the boot for my drinking, and just give them his personal opinion on my stay here, and whether or not he felt I was successful at learning to cope with life unassisted by alcohol. And he agreed to do that. And then he said, "And I want to thank you for pitching in around here and helping us with these kids. You obviously have a talent for it." I replied, "If I had any qualifications in this field at all, I'd just love to make this a new career, but I'm too far along the road now for that. I enjoy working with young people, and I do think I have a talent for it, and it's very gratifying to have you say so - thank you!"

I left there a couple of weeks after that, and got my old job back out here on the coast, and time marched on, and now that place is a whole complex of research and treatment and several separate parts. I'd never recognize it. But it very literally saved my career and my life, and I owe those people much more than I could ever repay.

Fun with pictures....

Today, I decided to test Facebook's censoring, and the above illustrates what happened next. They said, "Only you can see this, because it violates our community standards..." There was a lot more to their continuing set of pop-ups, so I thought "Hmmmm..... Maybe I'll rework this just a wee bit, and then run it back up their flagpole, and see if it catches more flak.  So far, none.
And I included a rant about prudishness, just for the hell of it. They needed that. They are a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites who pay lip service to morality, but peddle 'fake news' and help foreigners influence elections. But the sight of an actual human body sends them into canniption fits of outrage. Woof!

Here's where this is being seen, and by how many...

This is the 'top ten' of countries accessing this blog.

I see in The News......

I see in the news that our fearless leader, Justin Trudeau, wants to have a one-on-one with President Xi Jinping of China to talk about our problems. Isn't that a lot like a flea climbing up an elephant's hind leg with rape in mind?

When charming young Justin first got elected, he assured the unwashed masses that he was going to do government differently. No more of the absolute ruler tactics of old 'Crooked Mouth' Chretien, we were going to have 'transparent government'. Sure we are! And another pig flew by.

Justin's father, old 'Painful Pierre', would be very disappointed with junior, because the junior Trudeau seems, for all intents and purposes, to be all show and no go. And that 'transparent government'? Hah! We've got the same crooked dealings and under-the-table work-arounds, and corruption that we had under the previous administration, and possibly worse.

Another typical West Vancouver sunset... (Love it!)

Alaska is toward the right, and Trumpistan toward the left.

Healthy Eating.....

Yesterday, while Barb was counseling me on how us Old Farts need to act in order to survive in the 21st Century, she asked about my eating habits, because a lot of us solitary survivors of Flower Power and the early days of Banyen's Books & Sound, on West 4th Avenue in Vancouver, have evolved a very haphazard feeding routine. She wanted to know if I eat three meals a day. (No, I almost never do that. It's against my almost-religion!) And she asked if I ever cook anything substantial. (Yes! I actually do that!) And how often would that be? (Almost every evening, if I don't bring home something from the Deli Counter at Save-On-Foods.) ........So here's a little example of what I cook in the 1200-watt microwave. These hamburger patties and the fresh frozen spuds on that special microwave platter take about three minutes and forty seconds. I add a big glass of cold milk, or a cold cup of Ginger Ale, sometimes mixed 50-50 with Tropicana No Pulp Orange Juice, and there's supper. With sometimes a cereal bowl of ice cream, or bananas & milk & sugar, for dessert.

Now, I'm going to digress into a short rant about oldies & eating problems.  To wit, a lot of us suffer from fatigue caused by a variety of medical issues, and that is often compounded by a lack of appetite, partially related to our stomachs having shrunk a little with age and possible lack of interest. And then some of us have read that lighter eating in our old age tends, somewhat surprisingly, to prolong life. Perhaps because of its reduced demands on the digestive system.

But we do need nourishment, and Dr. B., my specialist, says "You should have some red meat about three times a week, because it contains iron of a kind that you can't get from vitamin pills. Synthetic iron in pill form doesn't have the same qualities for working with red blood cells which carry the oxygen around as does the real thing in your natural foods." I put that to the test, and he's right! There is a difference. And I could tell by how I feel after taking his advice and doing that for a while. Problem is, I don't like red meat of the kind sold these days. Compared to the undoctored variety of several decades back, this modern stuff tastes like shit. And if it looks like shit, and smells like shit, and tastes like shit, then it's probably shit ! And I can remember when you could buy a whole side of beef for the price of a couple of today's steaks. And you could enjoy eating the whole thing, if you stored it properly. (End of rant!)

Here's one of a plane, above 'Old Blue' at Vancouver Wharves...

I didn't even see that plane above & behind the big blue unloading crane at Vancouver Wharves when I took the picture. I was concentrating on other parts of the scene. So this one is purely serendipitous! And really cool !

Continuing with pictures from the previous posting.....more flowers.

These are in or near a community gardening spot beside a dance studio which is in between John Lawson Park and Ambleside Park, in the eastern parts of the waterfront park system. Ambleside is the easternmost of them, almost under the north end of Lions Gate Bridge, our famous suspension bridge from 1937/38. (Back when men were men, and the gals wore their 'falsies' on the outside!) And on that cheerful note....(remember those 'torpedo' brassieres, and some daring young thing in a colorful ad saying "I dreamed I climbed Mount Everest in my Maidenform Bra!") - Woof! Enjoy your day, Everyone...

Guess What? - I came back! Almost from the dead....

I'm getting tired of Facebook - how about you? How much mundane idiotic babble can anyone stand? Survey says: "Certainly not an endless supply!"

So lately, and this is doctor's orders, I get off nice old $3,000 computer here, and go to the park, and ride my new-last-year ladies' model cruiser bike, with my Nikon P510 strapped around my waist, handy for pictures, like this one...

And this one was taken at the foot of 18th Street in West Vancouver, on the seaward side of the building where Denny Boyd, the famous Vancouver Sun columnist lived for years, prior to his leaving us in October of 2006. I'm actually trespassing here, by about fifty feet, into the 'pedestrians only' section of this scenic walkway along the waterfront, leading to its western termination at the Dundarave Pier, in (where else?) Dundarave Village, just outside the also-famous Beach House Restaurant, at the foot of 25th Street.

If I were writing a caption for this photo, it would be "Gee, Mom - Buy me one of those! - Don't wrap it up, I'll play with it here!" I am referring, of course, to that splendiferous creature in the black leggings, center-middle-distance. And I hear you thinking "This old geezer is a real Pervert!" Lewis Grizzard in 'Quotations With An Attitude' said, "Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck." And I must hastily add here that my own sex life is still two-thirds as good as ever; I can still think about it, and I can still talk about it.

But I took thirty-some pictures yesterday afternoon, after leaving the West Vancouver Community Center, and a meeting with 'Barb' who does Respiratory Disease Educating for those of us who are slowly dying because we supported the tobacco industry for too many decades during our wild and crazy youth. And my wild and crazy youth lasted from 1945 until September 6th, 2006, so there's not a lot left of Old Ray's lungs. But there is a God, because they're still working, and my blood oxygen level as I write this is 92%. And that in itself is something of a miracle, because I spent almost ten days of April in East Two Cardiac at our local hospital, annoying the nurses with silly requests, like "Could I please have a snack of crackers & cheese?" - (and I got it too!) But I'm digressing again - (I'm too good at this!) - The hospital thing was because I'd caught pneumonia, for the second time in five years, in spite of having had one of those pneumonia shots two years ago. That earlier shot didn't work very well for anyone, so they went back to the drawing boards, and whomped up another one, and now that I'm out & loose in public again, I've got one of those too. They are $130.00 at your friendly local Pharmacist's, and the jury's still out on whether this new-fangled one works any better than that previous abortion. So don't get me started on the subject of 'Big Pharma', please.....

Anyway, to wrap my session with Barb, let me say she thinks I need "more human contact". She's a lovely young lady, very patient with babbling old idiots like me, so I didn't have the heart to argue with her about that. But the plain bare-faced truth is, It was human contact that got me this way!

So let's move on, shall we? Pictures! Yes! I do have more. How about some geese in the water?

Or maybe a big container ship at anchor in our watery 'parking lot' offshore from Spanish Banks, on the south side of Burrard Inlet? This shot is a composite, made using Microsoft Research's 'Image Composite Editor', which is just the world's best panorama-maker. It beats anything Canon ever had, and I really like Canon products. This is better. I give it five stars. Why? Because it does all the 'heavy lifting' for you. Dump your pix into it, select 'Splice', and 'Poof!' - it has done it, without you dragging & matching up anything. That's all automatic in 'ICE'.....

There's more of course, but I'm going to open a new posting for those, because I'm having difficulty with allotted space in this one.... so do come back!

It's the 30th anniversary of the Internet...

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Internet, and as someone said on Facebook, nobody is celebrating.
And it looks like blogging has come and gone already. It used to be fun. And now it seems to be ancient history. And that's too bad, because it's a lot safer than some other forms of social media, with better controls.

Winter is still with us...

Here it is almost half-past march, and the winter weather is still with us.

This isn't normal, for sure. Usually, the spring flowers are here by now.

Welcome to 2019 !

A belated Happy New Year to you, one and all...
Possibly, the whole three of us. I've just been mentioning this blog on Facebook, so I'm here to confirm it still works, and add something to keep it alive, mostly for 'old times sake'.

Here's a picture from my posting on Facebook this morning, showing the beach at Bahia Feliz, Gran Canaria, Spain, one of the Canary Islands, where I've never been. But my friend 'Monsieur Beep' has been there and loves it, which is how I know about it.  Enjoy your day, Everyone!

Updating this: A little this and that.....

This past summer, I got back on the old mountain bike again, (actually a new one!) to get some exercise, and I've still got the bike inside the back of the SUV.

And now that the ski season is approaching again, and I'm fighting off "Ski Fever", I gave in on that one last week, deciding that I really do want one more winter on my favorite local hills, with a good digital camera this time, so I can come home with nice pictures.

And all that's costing me is $2,136.00. Why so much? Because I can't drive up to the main lodge, twenty-five minutes up the road, without proper winter tires installed on the vehicle. I didn't want just two snow tires on the driving wheels because nobody recommends that with radial tires like we're all using now. And so I bought a whole new set of four new rims with Goodyear snow tires installed, and new tire pressure sensors for those, and wheel-balancing and then the installation on to the vehicle. Along with that I opted for their storage plan for my summer set of wheels, for an additional hundred dollars plus tax, and so that whole thing came to $1,677.59. The seniors season pass was $250. with tax, and the other $208.89 is for the full season rental of Head skis & boots and liability insurance to cover those in case of loss or damage.

And now, I'm ready for winter 2018/19. All I want now is about 400 cm of base.
So I can't hit the rocks if I fall down acting stupid.... 

Lawrence Martin today in Washington...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-showdown-between-brett-kavanaugh-and-christine-blasey-ford-is-the/

Your followers numbers drop off if you don't write for weeks....

And nobody's a prophet in his own land, obviously. But I've never had a lot people in Canada reading my stuff. Maybe my computer talk, or my comments on American politics turns them off.  No matter, I'm not aiming this at any one specific tribe or culture or linguistic group. Есть дни, когда я делаю некоторые из них на русском языке. It is a global village, friends.

I came back! ..... Never mind why....Just go with it....

Everyone's still in a fuss over the most bizarre President that America has had in living memory. Or dead memory. Or any memory. The guy's a nut. A nut like the kind that would get you and I quietly salted away in a well-supervised rehab center for the discombobulated. Those divorced from reality as us unwashed masses think of it, whenever we have time.

But as Margaret Wente wrote in her periodic column in the Globe And Mail, yesterday, it's unlikely any recent cataclysms with him in the center may result in his early departure from the tawdry reality show called The White House.  And Margaret should know. She's semi retired now, but for many years was the Managing Editor of that Globe And Mail daily newspaper, billed not entirely pretentiously as 'Canada's National Newspaper', with local bureaus strategically located from coast to coast. It goes without saying she's extremely well connected in the media community. She's a delightful wordsmith, too. When she gets in the mood, ideas fly right at you. I wish I wrote like Margaret. Provocatively, but with a calculated message even her critics can grab in both hands. Margaret says Trump's here until 2020, come hell or high water. Upon reflection, I think she's likely right. She's right more often than wrong, because she knows people who know where the skeletons are buried, and she talks to them often.