Things I Miss

I miss being able to stay up late. It’s been a busy week of work, but so nice to have the Olys to relax with in the evening. I wish I still had my old night-owl abilities and could stay up to watch more of the live coverage but alas, Grammar needs her bed by 11:00 these days.

I miss my youthful multitasking skills. This busy work week has involved a fair amount of co-ordination between a number of transcribers and the office manager. There is a flurry of messaging and emails and phone calls first thing each morning as we sort out the assignment o’ day.

So yesterday I was attempting to start a work download, messaging with two people about how this particular task would be split between us, and phoning the office manager about a download problem I was encountering. In the midst of this, one of my stable of tradeserfs rang the doorbell. SRH was unhelpfully in the shower and although I bellowed, declined to leap out of it and answer the door in a towel. Well, I thought my head was going to explode.

I miss my Laddie. I keep forgetting that he actually doesn’t live with us anymore. We ordered Chinese food for dinner tonight (Olys! Beijing!) and I automatically warned SRH and VCCGirl, as they loaded their plates, to save enough for the Lad. He’d always go to the fridge when he got home late from work, you see. It really jolted me that I didn’t need to save dinner for my boy, tonight or any other night. Funny how it hit me after he’s already been gone over a month. You think you’re ready and more than ready, some days, for them to head out on their own. But it still feels so very strange.

I also miss weather under 25 degrees Celsius -- but I’ll get that back soon! (I can actually tell exactly when the temperature hits 25. That precise point is the end of my comfort zone.) Sorry, sun-worshippers, but I’ve got autumn in my sights, and it’s a-coming!

Windows and siding and gardens, oh my!

Good morning, Blog World. Are we all enjoying the Olympics? I am, for the most part. Can’t abide water polo and fail to understand why every channel would want to show us that rather than, say, equestrian events, which I’ve seen nothing of in (our) daylight hours. Wouldn’t you think more of us would want to see that than water polo? We’ve had a lot of beach volleyball, which I enjoy except for being distracted by my own annoyance at the outfits the women players feel obliged to wear. The men wear board shorts and T-shirts, but the women, oh, they must wear itsy bitsy bikinis. It irks me.

So I don’t really have anything witty or clever to say today but feel like keeping in touch. We’ve been in our new home for a month now and continue to settle in. There are still more unpacked boxes tucked away here and there than there should be, but we’re whittling away at them. We’re as busy with tradespeople here as we were in the last few weeks at our old house. But these improvements we get to stay and enjoy!

We’re focusing on the outside, initially, given the time of year and also given that it’s difficult to do too much inside until we finally finish unpacking! After chopping down the incredible house-eating pine tree, we have had people clean out our gutters, which were of course overflowing with pine detritus. We have had a landscaper draw up plans to rejuvenate and spiff up our garden. While the wild, untended look does provide for a sort of camping in the woods effect, it needs some taming. So he has planned a lovely garden that will require no more than two or three visits from him a year to keep in shape. At this place and time, we’re all about no effort on our part!

Two windows on the east side of our house are being replaced, and after that’s done, a fellow is coming to replace all the cedar siding on that side, which is rotting disproportionately to the rest of the house (which is not at all rotten). We are told this is common on the east side because most weather hereabouts comes from that side. Winds driving rain and all that. I don’t know, but it’s important to SRH that this be done.

So once we have new windows and siding and a lovely new garden this fall, we will turn our attention to the inside -- where I hope there will be no more boxes left to impede our improvement efforts there! Our friend KCL, wearing her decorator hat, has many ideas for us and we are excited about implementing them.

So that’s what’s up Chez Grammar: the buzzing of tradespeople. Oh, Grammar does love having serfs about.

EDIT TO POST: It was pointed out to me by eagle-eyed fan Missy Moo that in the above pic, it appears my new garden is going to spill way out into the street. It won't, of course. Obviously a problem with the software (or user thereof). The perspective is very inaccurate.

Boomer culture?

There was a little article in the paper this morning headlined “Boomers to remain ‘cultural titans’ as they continue to age, author says”. Caught my eye, of course, being both a Boomer and interested in being considered a titan of pretty much anything.

Turns out the author of the headline is a historian who will be speaking at the World Future Society’s annual conference in Washington on Monday. I have no information whatsoever on the WFS’ history of successful prognostication because although they have been around for over 40 years and have a website with some bits and pieces of information, nowhere does it provide statistics on how well they tend to forecast. So I suppose I’ll have to just hope for the best on this titan thing.

The main focus of the brief newspaper article was a specific aspect of culture: music. The writer opens by saying “Get ready for more radio stations blasting golden oldies…”, but a few paragraphs later expounds on “the disappearance of a generation gap in cultural terms [with] the iPod overlap between parents and teens, usually finding 20 to 30 per cent of songs in common.”

Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either the Boomers want only to listen to songs from the 60s and 70s and will commandeer the radio waves to ensure they’re played in plenitude, or we’re open to music outside of those two tired decades. Or perhaps her message was that what she calls the “millennial generation” (those who began graduating high school in the year 2000) include our golden oldies on their iPods.

I think it’s probably some of each, myself. I do agree that whatever gaps exist between my generation and that of my children, music is not one of the bigger ones. Rap and hip hop are not generally big with the Boomers (although Ellen Degeneres, who is one of us, has gone a long way in broadening the comfort zone of the older women who watch her TV program, as she is a fan of hip hop and opens every show dancing to it.) But there is much more to modern pop music than rap. My kids and I do have a percentage of overlap on our iPods, and it goes both ways. When I was 20, I listened to very little but the Top 40 radio stations of the day. It's a wonderful thing that my progeny are much more open-minded. They enjoy and have on their iPods music from a wide gamut of genres and times.

So I don’t know about this idea of a proliferation of oldies radio stations. I think most of us Boomers are actually pretty done with listening to the same armful of songs from 30 or 40 years ago. Some of the music from our youth has proved enduring and classic, and that’s the stuff that’s on our kids’ iPods. But a lot of it is just horribly cheesy and inane and needs to be left in the archives. If we Boomers are to continue to be titans of anything as we clump into the senior demographic, I think music is a bad example. Frankly, and sadly, I don’t believe we’re going to be titans of anything at all other than the paycheques of Millenials who are trying to support our health care demands.

Job One

Bye-bye, tree!

Today at Chez Grammar we are in the throes of the first big priority in shaping our new home to our own liking. There is an absolutely enormous pine tree in our back yard and three strapping and well-insured young men are currently involved in the long, careful process of taking it down.

Now, Grammar likes to hug trees and have her oxygen refreshed and all that with the best of them, but this tree is completely out of scale. Ours is a very small back yard and the tree is undermining the patio with its roots, eating the back deck with its huge scraggly branches, and generally looming ominously over our roof. High, high over our roof, at least again as high as our house. It is a tree that belongs in a forest, not an urban back yard. We cannot imagine how the previous owners allowed it to get this way. We do know that in notifying our immediate neighbours of our removal plans, they all expressed gratitude that appeared heartfelt, although I’m sure they are not enjoying the chain-saw-wood-chipper racket any more than we are. That kind of ceaseless noise just wears you down, doesn’t it? And it’s going to be going on for a long time yet. Did I say how big this tree is…?

And the Winner Is...

Further to my post of yesterday, Grammar received word from Jimdandy this forenoon that all is well in his telephonic world. It seems the fine gentleman at Telus he spoke to yesterday apparently does have the clout his title would suggest. A woman called Uncle first thing this morning to assure him that three years' worth of overpayments would be immediately credited to his account, meaning he will not have a phone bill for some months. She was very apologetic that they could not offer more than three years, but that was as far back as she was able to check the records. Uncle thought that was jimdandy and graciously accepted. The woman gave him her name and direct telephone number and told him that any future problems he had with Telus, of which she fervently hoped there were not any, he should call her and she would personally fix them.

Now, wouldn't it be nice if we all had our own personal customer service rep down at the utility companies? But no, the rest of us who are not 95, stubborn as mules and persistent as bulldogs will still have to Push 1 for service in English...

A Man on a Mission

There are days when Grammar feels every one of her 50-odd years. There are days when Grammar feels every one of them and a dozen or two more she’s not even entitled to. But then sometimes she gets reminded that her mere half-century is nothing.

SRH has an uncle who is 95 years old. To look at him or talk to him, you would peg his age at a healthy 20 years younger than that. He has every marble he was born with and a lot more he's picked up along the way. He lives in the same little East Vancouver house he’s lived in for the past 60 years. He will not entertain for a moment the idea of moving into any sort of older folks’ home because he doesn’t want to live with “a bunch of old people”. He has no help and wants none. He cooks his meals, including baking for dessert. He keeps his house clean. He tends his garden. The other day he didn’t answer the phone and we were a bit worried, but it turned out it was because he was out on the porch painting his front door.

Well, the other day he got his phone bill and noticed there was some sort of rebate on it, which pleased him very much. But he also noticed that there were two rental charges on it. Now, Uncle Jimdandy is one of the last people on earth who actually still rents a phone from the telephone company. He has rented this phone for about 40 years and we figure he’s paid about $3,000 for it by now. But he likes it because he is a little hard of hearing and he insists its volume control is better than any of the newfangled phones we’ve made him try. But it’s only the one phone, and he couldn’t figure out why there would be two rental charges on his bill.

So he phoned me, because about 100 years ago I worked for the telephone company for a few years, so clearly I would know what this charge was. I asked him if the charge had appeared only on this bill, or if it had been on previous bills. Jimdandy checked and gosh if it wasn’t on all his previous bills, too. (I’m not sure whether he checked all 40 years’ worth, but I wouldn’t be surprised.) I suggested he phone Telus to explore the matter.

Well, Jimdandy will never phone when he can speak to somebody in person. So he got in his car (yes, he still owns a car and a valid driver’s license which the powers that be, in their wisdom, renew for him every year) and he tootled over to the big corporate office known hereabouts as The Boot, because of its shape. Took him a long while to find a place to park, then the machine didn’t take cash, only credit cards, of which Jimdandy has never seen the need for one, so a kind -- or impatient -- lady also waiting to buy a ticket bought him one on her card.

Then he tootles into the building and marches up to the first desk he sees. He commences telling the young lady seated thereat his tale of rental woe, and she interrupts him to advise that he is in the wrong place; this building is just a corporate office. There is no customer service here, no billing inquiries.

Jimdandy is unsatisfied with this response. He does not believe this can be so. The building says Telus on it. He has a question for Telus, and someone is going to answer it. He begins wandering the building to find such a person. He goes up to the next floor and finds another young woman behind another desk. She gives him the same unsatisfactory response, so he gets in the elevator and goes up another couple of floors. In telling me this story, he notes as an aside that he saw a lot of people in the cafeteria. Was it like that when I worked there?

Finally he runs across “a nice East Indian man in a suit”, who kindly asks if he can be of assistance. This man listens patiently to Jimdandy’s tale, inspects the offending bill he is proffered, then tells Jimdandy that although the people he has spoken to are correct that there is no billing inquiry office here (and in fact they now only exist either at the end of a telephone line, where you are just as likely to be speaking to someone in the Philippines, or online), that he will take Jimdandy’s name and phone number and look into the matter personally. He gives Jimdandy his business card and advises him to call him directly if he doesn’t hear anything within a few days.

In telling me this story, Jimdandy first asks if I know this man, which amazingly I did not, then reads me his title off the card. I laugh: the man is the next thing down from a vice president. When I tell Uncle this, I can practically hear him puffing up with satisfaction. That’s more like it! He’s been a customer for 70 years, never mind renting this particular phone for only 40. He has never missed a payment. This is the sort of person he should be dealing with.

He also assured me that if he doesn’t hear back in the next few days that Telus will rebate every single overpayment he may have made, he’s going to the media. “They’ll eat this story up!” he declared. And he’s probably right, so if you see a dapper gentleman in a shiny suit and even shinier shoes on your television news one day next week waving a rotary dial telephone and ranting about ripping off the slightly elderly -- that’s our Jimdandy!

We're home!

Hello, Blog People! We’ve been in our new home three days now and are happy as little clams here. The move went as smoothly as such chaotic things can and we’ve organized a lot of stuff but still have a long way to go before we’re really settled in.

Although I am missing my old neighbourhood and particularly old neighbours (some of them are really, really old, not mentioning any names), I’m surprised to find myself not pining for the old house at all. I’d anticipated being terribly homesick for it and it just hasn’t happened. I think it’s because our new place is so perfect for us, we’ve bonded with it instantly. The layout couldn’t be more suitable. The kitchen and bathrooms are so much nicer than the ones we left behind.

You can hear the West Coast Express more clearly here, as we are just above Burrard Inlet. The wail of its horn is a sound that means home to me, as each of the two houses I grew up in were only a block away from the tracks. (On the right side of them, of course!) When you look east from my back deck you see the green hills of Belcarra across the water. When you look east from my front deck, you see the water of Indian Arm. Our back garden is a mass of mature indigenous greenery, huge rhodos and vine maples and the like, making us feel very cozy and private and part of the natural North Shore world. (Also, being indigenous, it won’t expect us to tend it.)

Also since we last chatted, The Lad has moved into his own place. He is over the moon with excitement and glee and phones us regularly to update us on how excited and gleeful he is. He phones us when he installs a shower curtain. He phones us when he cooks bacon and eggs. He phones us when he buys bananas. We know that soon enough he will stop doing this and are enjoying it while it lasts; it is touching that he still wants us to be part of his life.

So here we are. It will be weeks or months before we get ourselves totally sorted out, but we’re delighted to be here.