Words are inadequate

The trouble with taking a vacation to write more is that being somewhere else doesn't magically make me not be me. Brain still fried, and not terribly interested in constructing coherent thoughts or stringing paragraphs together in a logical fashion. So here's a fragmented travelogue.

( Notes from a desert )

So a week or two ago I spent an extended weekend in Seattle.

( It was fun. )

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Facebook: wonderful. (Kirstein is also the author of the unutterably amazing and tragically so-far-incomplete Steerswoman series, making stanza VII all the more sad.)

Democracy: "It's fairly clear that Republicans don't understand how democracy works."

But we get up again: "We did what we could, and he died warm." Sniffly.

Your homework done for free! A brief synopsis of The Lord Of The Rings: "If you simply don't like to read, however, I'm sure the following synopsis and suggestions will help you make the grades you obviously deserve." Contains such memorable bits as "They make their escape [from Lothlorien] when Beruthiel's good sister, Galadriel, frees them from their prison-cell and floats them down the river in barrels," which is wrong in so many not-right ways. (I'm pretty sure I've linked to this before, but what the hey. It's amusing.)

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About a month ago I finally got a good raincoat (Gore-tex, long, lightweight, and green; I'm reliably informed that I look like a park ranger when I'm wearing it). A little while after that I acquired a good bag: a Timbuk2 Blogger bag, which is basically a vertical messenger bag with a laptop pocket on the back. (Poking around online reveals that there seem to be two versions: mine has two water bottle pockets on the sides but no external pocket. I would have liked the external pocket but the water bottle pockets are handy, too.) So I figured I'd put them to the test and lit out for a week in Vancouver.

Dulles has finally opened its subway thing and retired the godawful people-movers, so I've upgraded it from "horrid" to merely "bad." It's still too narrow and too decentralized for me to want to use it.

On the way out I caught up with babushek for dinner, since I had this three-hour layover in San Francisco. She seems to be adapting well to West Coast life.

The city was beautiful and compelling and wide-open and exciting, and I got to ride the bus or SkyTrain almost everywhere I couldn't walk to. I saw the Capilano Suspension Bridge (Vancouver's oldest tourist trap) and rode the Aquabus and found a lot of tea and some oeufs fondant. I caught an OmniMax (like IMAX, only projected on a curved screen using a fisheye lens) movie about beavers and ate dim sum in Chinatown. I also found a bunch more bookstores this time, which is a Good Thing. I still had the slightly embarrassing response of humming "Nova Scotia's dumb 'cos it's the name of a bank" every time I passed a ScotiaBank sign.

Mostly I wandered around and enjoyed the rain, the crepes, the lack of rain (on Tuesday and Wednesday), and the presence of mountains and water and city-ness. I'd originally planned to look at apartments but Vancouver seems to lack any sort of centralized "we have apartments for rent" like DC's Apartment Guide, and writing down a bunch of places to go to seemed like more effort than it was worth. So there was wandering, alone and later with nixve. I got to places outside the downtown peninsula this time, Kitsilano and North Vancouver and even a little of Burnaby. Mostly this reinforced my desire to live in downtown, near the water and the high-rises and all the bus lines.

And then I came home and went to work and haven't quite recovered yet. I'm pretty sure I needed that time away. I just also need a weekend of Not Going Anywhere.