Pairs for Lunch

When we were in London this summer, Mary arranged for me to go to Paris for lunch at the Eiffel Tower. Partly, it was the absurdity of going to another country and back for lunch, but mostly I had wanted to take the Chunnel. Ever since I can remember, I grew up reading about how they were going to push a tunnel under the English channel someday, but it was widely dismissed as scifi. I have crossed the channel several times by ship and hovercraft, but the Chunnel has always been on my bucket list as part of the future I had been promised in the 1950s. So, here it is, a reality, so had to take it. The Eurostar was well organized, very fast, and goes through a lot of (ear-pooping) tunnels before it gets to THE tunnel, so in someways a bit anticlimactic because it's, you know, just another tunnel, albeit slightly longer than the others. Still, you know, kind of cool that this SF future was real and I was actually doing it. Commuters all around me taking it for granted. So cool.

Halfway through the tunnel, the large black businessman squeezed into the seat next to me suddenly closed his computer and turned to me, and said, "We're under the ocean now, you know! Do you realize just how crazy that is! I mean, when you really think about it, how cool is that!"

And I said, "I know! It's the future!"

And we just sat there appreciating our mutual sense of wonder at it all, and then he opened his computer again and started typing and I went back to reading. But I loved that shared moment, and that at least some commuters still got it!

I'm still like that on airplanes sometimes too....

Retreat: Day 5

Finally connected with client over editing job, and manager apologized nicely for screwing up, but apparently had emailed me at the wrong address, and assigned the work elsewhere when I hadn't replied. Why the manager hadn't tried, oh I don't know, phoning me at the contact numbers they'd insisted on when she hadn't heard back, or why they hadn't responded to my correctly addressed emails to them is less clear. "Oh, we never got those emails!" The whole conversation has the same feel as when students insist that they have submitted their assignments on time, it must have gotten lost in email/ Moodle/ WebCT/ their dog somehow.... But whatever: it was pro bono work, and I'd much rather be working on other stuff during my retreat.

So actually go out and about in San Diego. The Westgate, where I'm staying, is on the edge of the Gaslight district, so walked around there for a couple of hours. Yesterday was pouring rain, nasty wind, too cold to walk very far, so I just went to downtown mall for some take away. Today was way better. Intermittent rain, but then really great sun when the clouds open up. Had the drinking chocolate at Ghirardelli's. Bought a few things for the kids at World Market. Enjoyed the architecture of San Diego (nice looking convention centre! Some nice towers. Even some of the smaller buildings colourfully painted etc.)

Above: Convention Center; below, just some colour

Thing that makes the strongest impression on me, however, are the number of homeless on the streets here. I count an average of three per block. I'm only approached by pan handlers a couple of times, and they're carefully low key, polite even, but every few yards there's someone sitting with a shopping cart, three to five large green garbage bags of possessions, and a resigned expression. In two cases, its families. And everybody else just walks by as if this is perfectly normal. I can't understand how average American can feel secure when so many of those around them are so obviously in desperate straits, though the other subliminal presence were armies of guys with "security" on the back of their jackets. One particular image burned into my brain is of an obviously homeless guy leaning against a parking meters, watching at a group of yuppies -- their clothes and smart phones and expensive sun glasses pushed back into their hair said 'brokers' or 'software moguls' to me -- yakking away in an sidewalk open air bar. The way he was starring at them -- though they were completely oblivious of him, three feet away -- I could see him thinking, "that's who I was four years ago". And I look back at the yuppies and think, one mis-step and it is a long way down....

No wonder the 'haves' are so focused on getting more. San Diego is a nice place to visit, but I don't think I could live somewhere where it is so literally every man for himself.

And all those guns.

Back to the hotel for productive day on various writing projects. Make excellent progress on my day-job Report. In between working on different sections of report, start negotiating a three book deal for Five Rivers while I still have reliable internet access. Author seems open to it. Another coup for Five Rivers, I think.

Work until supper time, eat at The Bandar. Unbelievably big portions, three times the size of anything ever served in equivalent Canadian restaurant. Again, can't help but think of homeless outside, conspicuous consumption inside. But would highly recommend Bandar to anyone who likes middle Eastern food. Superb meal. Had to wonder, though, how many of the customers realize that "Persian" means "Iranian"? (Aside from that group over at the next table who are themselves clearly Iranian and therefore, you know, potential terrorists. :-) Another productive writing session after supper. Things are starting to come together!

Retreat: Day 1

I drive from Lethbridge to Shelby to board the train to Portland. The steward hands me my dinner reservation as I board; I am later seated with three random strangers. The first excuses himself after a moment to join friends he has discovered at another table. After the usual pleasantries--interrupted by appropriate oohhhing and ahhhing as we pass through Glacier National Park--the three of us who remain slowly get to know each other. The man seated across from me acknowledges at one point that he used to be a corporate pilot. As the woman next to him draws him out, he allows that he was also a former test pilot. Later, a stunt pilot, and featured airshow act. He is, in fact Delmar Benjamin, whose plane and flying are featured on the covers of three different flying magazines, a one hour TV documentary, and a series of YouTube videos under his name and GeeBee. (Go have a look, I’ll wait.)

So this guy, this random guy, has a ton of fascinating stories, including the fact that he did 52 airshow performance in one year, clearing about $300,000. (The airshow scene, he noted, is now in decline and he doubts that this is still possible. Too many doctors and dentists, he says, have bought planes and are willing to perform for free.) He regales us with tales of his days as a flight instructor for the next generation of test pilots. He is one interesting guy.

Has he, I ask, ever considered writing a book? Well, yes he has indeed written a book. His first book was published by a small niche aviation press some years ago. He is now writing his memoirs, tentatively entitled, Ten Seconds to Impact. “There are so many stories, things that I’ve done and seen, that would just be gone if I don’t write them down.” We discuss publishing options at some length. He has 10,000 photos of he and his plane, youtube video, documentary video, magazine covers with which to promote his forthcoming book. I explain about Pinterest. He responds by noting that he has an email list of 12,000 people interested in his plane. After choking on my water, I explain to him why he must be the envy of every other author. Compared to others whose names mean nothing, he has a built-in market with which to launch his novel.

Meanwhile, the recently retired woman with us notes that her father had been an illustrator with publisher Ziff-Davies in the 1930s and 1940s, and crazy about planes. He had created innumerable covers for Popular Mechanics and Flying Magazine in which Delmar was subsequently featured… (twice).

I find her father’s name strangely familiar. Didn’t he also do some SF covers for Ziff-Davies? Spaceships and the like? Why, yes, yes he did.

Small world.

She is also interesting in her own right, an excellent conversationalist who not only took the lead in drawing out Delmar’s story, but had a number of anecdotes about her own life and family,

So, how great is this? Way more interesting a first night than I have any right to expect.

But I can’t help reflecting that here it is, only the second time I’ve taken a meal on a train as an adult, and the second time I’ve been seated with someone midway through writing a book. Can it really be that one out of three strangers is writing something?

Zebras and Giraffes

Like this photo I took at Honolulu Zoo last month.

Writer's Retreat Part II

Having done the Queen Mary, I moved across the street to the Carnival Cruise Line's port and boarded the Paradise for a four day cruise. The decor of the Paradise is pretty gaudy (especially in contrast to the magnificent taste of the Queen Mary), the entertainment painfully-excessive patriotic American musical tributes, and the passengers mostly out for a four-day drunken 'lost weekend', so not at all my crowd.

But the food was good and I was only interested in the cheap cabin and the chance to write. Indeed, I didn't even bother to disembark at either of the ports visited.
I mostly stuck to my cabin, emerging only for meals or to give the steward the opportunity to clean. I had brought my Neo2 with me, a wonderful portable writing tool, so would go to the library or an unoccupied corner to continue writing pretty much nonstop.

(The library on the Paradise is as tacky as the rest of the ship, with only a fraction of the bookcases of, say, NCL's Pride of America, and even half of that was given over to the storage of games or hymnals. The four tiny bookcases left for actual books contained nothing but trash -- the best I could find were two books by J.D. Robb and a Stuart Woods -- not exactly heavy-hitting literature. Clearly, "beach read" would be too challenging for the typical Paradise patron, interested only in gambling and duty free liquor.)

Unfortunately, I was mostly blocked. Under considerable pressure to put my retreat to good use, I ground away on the next chapter but without making much progress. The truth is, I had already written everything covered in my outline except for the final two scenes, but still have about 25,000 words of action between here and the end to fill in. Normally that wouldn't be a problem: I just start writing and see what happens. But I had stopped on a slightly complicated bit of business where the characters have to talk through who is going to trust whom, and I just kept getting bogged down in the problem that the basic premise of my hero winning over the others is completely ludicrous. Well, okay, that's largely the point of the novel, but there is only so much clever dialog a reader can wade through before somebody has to shoot somebody for the action to keep moving, and it just wasn't coming together for me. I'd try to speed things up and have one or other character cut through the chaff and say something to move things forward, but they kept balking and telling me they wouldn't say that until this or that condition had been met, which I couldn't get to without another 20 pages of dialog that was frankly beginning to bore even me.

Long experience has taught me that writer's block is largely a question of momentum, so rather than stare blankly at the keyboard, the trick is to get the juices flowing by writing something. (See anything by Natlie Goldberg for details on the technique.) So I switched to a short story I had wanted to submit to Tess14, though the deadline for that had already expired, but that wouldn't come either. So, I went further down the writing ladder to 'editor mode' and began work on a nonfiction manuscript that had been sitting on my desk, nagging me, for a month. That seemed to work, and I was able to bang through that in about a day (freeing up a day or two of writing time from my post-retreat schedule). Feeling better having accomplished something I turned again to the short story, and that started coming. As I got a bit of the story working, I switched back to the novel and made a bit of progress, though nothing like I had hoped. (But then, I always set unrealistic expectations for myself....) By the end of the cruise I still hadn't dug myself out of the corner I had written myself into, but I was starting to see a couple of possibilities -- when in doubt, you can always blow something up, and I had a couple of characters waiting in the wings I could drop in on the conversation prematurely....I just had to decide which one because each would take the story in very different directions.

Getting off the Paradise, I went to the Sheraton across the street from LAX for the day, wasted time bogging and emailing (Internet time on a cruise ship is too expensive for much of either of those) but did make some progress on the short story. Next day took off for Missoula, where I spent the night awaiting the bus to White Fish. Once again, the Neo2 came in very handy as I kept writing non-stop.


The view at the Lodge at Whitefish Lake

Mary booked me into the Lodge at Whitefish Lake, which was very nice indeed. The room they gave me was fabulous, with a spectacular view of the forest, and the dinning room was superb. We will definitely be returning there. Sitting with the Neo2 on my lap, looking out at that view was perhaps the most productive portion of the retreat, though it is fairly typical that I hit my most productive at the exact moment the retreat is over. Though in this case, I actually had the train from Whitefish to Shelby to go and was able to edit the first draft of the short story. The train back was even better than the first trip because of course during the day I had the benefit of the spectacular mountain views I hadn't been able to see going the other way. And the dinning car had real china this time.

So, all in all a successful trip, even though I did not complete my novel. The key, I hope, is that I was able to reconnect with the novel (I always re-read and re-edit what I have so far, before starting the next bit) which keeps the project alive. I have several colleagues who have half-finished manuscripts in their drawers, some as long as 100,000 words, that they just lost momentum on and stopped. I used to think that was crazy, but I'm starting to understand that a bit better now that mine has dragged on over three years with no end in sight, and with dozens of other writing projects jockeying for my attention. But devoting the week to the novel was enough to refocus me on the project, to get the enthusiasm back up, and to get me thinking about the characters whenever I have a moment. I've more or less figured out what happens next and can work on the details in my head until the next opportunity to get it down on paper.

And although I can already see that I will have to rewrite the short story before it can be sent off, I know what I have to do to make it work, so it is just a matter of squeezing a day out of my schedule somewhere to finish that up. I am quite pleased with it because it is entirely different from what I normally write -- it's good to push to the edges of

So, mission accomplished.

Irfaan in Belize

Irfaan, one of my favorite students, is currently doing his student teaching in Belize. His blog is worth following because he is a good writer as well as an all round interesting guy.

San Deigo Zoo Wild Animal Park

So this was pretty cool: the Lorikeet Landing exhibit at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park.

Tigana reacts to Lorikeet landing on her.

Kasia with Lorikeets



I love how my kids are enthusiastic about things others find less exciting (e.g., man behind Tigana, who is clearly less pleased with the birds mobbing people).

We were in San Diego over Reading Week in Feb.

Hawaii in the Summer

Our balcony at the Waikiki Sheraton -- Mary was able to get the room for $100 a night on Priceline, which has to be the deal of the year

We had only previously been to Hawaii in the winter. When I was growing up, Hawaii is where Edmontonians who could afford it went to escape Winter over Christmas. I never got to go as a kid, but I had always therefore assumed that Hawaii would be more crowded over Christmas holidays than at other times of year, and that Hawaii would be nearly deserted in the summer, because why would you pay all that money to leave Alberta for the two months Canada has decent weather? But of course, that understanding of Hawaii tourism turned out to be completely wrong-headed. Hawaii is way MORE crowded in the summer, filled to capacity with Americans from Texas and Arizona etc escaping the heat. So the experience of Hawaii is a little different in the summer, because the place is filled with American tourists (and a few Australians escaping their winter) rather than Canadians.

Having done Honolulu previously, we were focused primarily on the beach and fine dining this time through. One of Lethbridge's deficits is that there are no really fine restaurants, just chains (though that is slowly improving). So Mary and I in particular were really looking forward to Roy's, one of our favorite restaurants anywhere. We ate there twice, Hulla Grill twice, Duke's once, Keo's (a Thai restaurant -- order the 'Evil Jungle Prince'!), and Eggs and Things once (all highly recommended). We made up the rest of our meals at Planet Hollywood, the Cheeseburger Waikiki and Maui Taccos (which spoils you for any Canadian tacco chain ever again) because sometimes you just have to, you know, eat. Planet Hollywood is only okay chain restaurant food, but really good value for the money if you order the half price appetizers during happy hour or the breakfast. (We didn't get to eat at Le Mar, but we would have needed babysitting and a bigger budget to go there.) Roy's is especially wonderful, and to our amazement, a favorite of the kids' too. They have a great kid's menu, and give the kids the same three course dinning experience as adults, just with more kid-friendly food and prices. Almost worth the trip to Hawaii for Roy's alone.

Mary took the kids to the beach twice without me, giving me two mornings to write. That was great! Sitting on a balcony in Hawaii overlooking the beach and the ocean, is the way to write! An unexpected bonus was that, since I was essentially sitting still for hours keyboarding, a wonderful variety of birds came and sat on the edge of the balcony with me. I've never seen so many different types in a single day. And I made quite a bit of progress on my book. Other days I went with them to the beach, but since I can't swim, and burn at the mere sight of sunlight, Mary was still mostly stuck with supervising kids while I just found some shade and read. (Stephen King's On Writing, about which more in another post.)


The four day trips we planned were the trip to Sea Life Park, where we had the dolphin encounters (see earlier blog entry); the Hawaii Fire Surf Lessons for Tigana and Kasia; a trip to the Dole Plantation: a pleasant afternoon touring the historic plantation and doing the maze; and an afternoon in the Honolulu Zoo.


Tigana surfing well

Tigana surfing well -- but right into Kasia and her instructor! (The instructor had to pull Kasia under the water to keep Tigana's board from hitting her)

both kids going out to the waves

close up of Kasia with her instructor going out

We would highly recommend Hawaii Fire over other surfing lessons, especially when as in our case, kids are involved. Much cheaper lessons are available all along the beach at Waikiki, but the Hawaii Fire folk have two key advantages: one, they take you to a more sheltered, shallower beach which is ideal for learning on (lots of waves but manageable waves); and all the instructors are firemen --so, if you're going to have problems, these are the guys you want to respond.




The Zoo is considered a small one, but we found it highly enjoyable. As Mary pointed out, the entrance fee would have been worth it just to walk through the trees, bushes and flowers between the animal exhibits -- a great botanical garden. And the Zoo is cleverly laid out so that although its footprint in Waikiki is small, it seems quite big and takes a full afternoon to walk through. I was fascinated that even though we were only a few yards from apartment blocks on one side, the beach on the other, we felt completely isolated from the rest of the city; one really did feel as if one were out on the African savannah.

One of my favorites were the hippos, who were not only hugely huge magnificent beasties, but were enjoying themselves hugely playing ball -- no question about it, they were tossing that enormous green sphere around between them.


Kasia's favorites were the Zebras. Kasia is hypnotized by all things pony, and Zebras are apparently close enough to count. Here a zebra rolls in the dust to cool off. (I was tempted to point my hand like a gun and shout bang as it started to go over for a roll, but that probably would have meant years of therapy for Kasia, so I let it go.)

I'd recommend the zoo for anyone looking for a couple of hours away from the beach.

So, overall, a nice quiet vacation -- quiet days at the beach alternated with low key day trips. A great chance to detox from email and the stresses of our day jobs.

Dolphins Again

Strictly speaking, that's a Walphin that Tigana is dancing with: a dolphin -killer whale cross. But Kasia had so much fun kissing a dolphin on our first trip to Hawaii, we decided that the rest of us should try it.

Back to Hawaii

Following my teaching in Summer Session this June, we took off for vacation in Hawaii. Well, I went to Edmonton to check on my Mom for a couple of days first, and I took the dog with me to confuse the kids. Because we hadn't told the kids they were going to Hawaii, only that they would 'be joining Dad', whom they knew had gone to Edmonton. They understand the need to be in Edmonton to visit family and to attend to all the Estate matters I am still plowing through (even after all this time). Not fun for them, but borne with stoic understanding that the family needed to do this. So Mary picked them up from school on their last day, drove them to the airport in Lethbridge, where they boarded a plane for Calgary, the usual transfer point to Edmonton. Mary had set them up perfectly by telling Tigana that they would drive up, but then giving in to Tigana's asking to fly up instead. (Tigana had used the argument that since I had already driven up earlier in the week, we already had a car in Edmonton, so there was no need for them to endure the six hour car trip. Mary had graciously acceeded to this request, never letting on that it was all a con.) So I flew down to Calgary from Edmonton, and was sitting in the airport Tim Horton's as they got off the plane. Kasia sees me, runs over and hugs me, as Tigana goes, "I thought we would be meeting you in Edmonton?"

Robert: "Ready to start the Grand Adventure of Summer in Edmonton."

Tigana: "Yeah, right."

Robert:" What, you don't want to spend summer in Edmonton?"

Mary: "Kasia, where do you want to go?"

Kasia: "Hawaii!" (This was a safe bet: Kasia always answers 'Hawaii' to questions like 'where would you like to have dinner tonight?' Besides a standing joke, Kasia asks us at least once a week why don't we live in Hawaii. We're having an increasingly difficult time thinking up an answer.)

Mary and I look at each other and shrug. "Okay, why didn't you say so. Let's go to Hawaii."

Tigana: "Whaatt? Youmeanaghghghghghghghghghgyeaahhhwhoooo!"

And so on. So an hour later, three hours after school ends, we're enroute to Hawaii via Vancouver.

Of course, we will be paying for this for the rest of our lives because now every time we take them to Edmonton they're going to be spending the entire trip saying, "Yeah, where are we going really?"

On Air Travel

Flew up to Edmonton to check on my Mom (I was worried about her having been relocated within the nursing home) and to check on the renovations done to Doug's place, and to arrange for renovations to begin on the next condo, and so on.

On the plane up from Calgary the flight attendant asked if I would be willing to switch places with the guy sitting next to the emergency exit because he didn't want to be responsible for opening the door if it came to that. (He looked sick, so maybe he felt he was too weak to do the job.) "There's more leg room in that row" the Stewardess told me, by way of providing me with an incentive. I shrugged and moved rows because, what the hey. So she does her training spiel, which I've heard maybe 12 times this year, and on the Dashes, the emergency door really is not that complicated. But I'm feeling put out about having to go up to Edmonton in the first place, so when she asks if there are any questions, I reply by asking, "Is there a discount for sitting in the exit row?" Without missing the beat, the Stewardess leans in close and whispers, "Only if we have to use it."

Which seemed pretty funny until I got to the apartment and saw footage of the jet in the Hudson river.

Especially when a commentator pointed out that one reason that everyone survived is that no one panicked and opened the emergency exits prematurely. "They followed procedure for that kind of plane and only opened the forward door – if any of the rear emergency exits had been opened, the plane would have sunk much faster." Which made me wince, since I had spent half the flight up to Edmonton telling myself, "If something happens, I not going to freeze up like I usually do, I'm going to pull that lever like she showed me and shove that door out the plane before it even stops rolling!" Apparently you're supposed to await instructions before opening that sucker. (The other half of the flight up, I'd been thinking, "If it is just that easy to open this emergency door, what's to prevent some drunken idiot or sacrificial terrorist from opening it mid-flight? That can't be good!)

But it raises the question: when your plane goes down, do you get a full refund? It's the sort of question Larry King never gets around to asking the survivors. So did they give them just another flight to that destination, or do they throw in a couple of freebies to make up for the trauma of it all? At least an up grade to 1st class? (With Air Canada's recent attitude, I'd suspect they might say "Well, you can't expect a full refund! After all, we got you half way there!") Personally, if it were me on a flight like the Hudson river ditching or the Gimely Glider incident, I'm thinking Greyhound vouchers might be the way to go.

Still, I appreciate that my flight attendant had kept her sense of humuor when this has not been a good couple of months for Air Canada. I'd spent five hours in the Lethbridge airport last Thursday, for example, waiting for a flight that never arrived. When it became obvious that I wasn't going to make the last possible connection in Calgary and I had asked that my flight be switched to this week instead, the desk clerk had said "Certainly! I'm sure there'll be no problems next week at all!" with such hysterical enthusiasm you knew she was being facetious. Clearly, she considered booking any flight out of my local airport during Dec - Feb an act of pointless optimism.

The recent air travel problems are particularly aggrevating for folks like us in the smaller airports. When Toronto and Vancouver had their respective storms/problems, the airlines' solution was to give priority to long haul passengers, because they could bring in a couple of 747s and fly a 1000 folks out at a time. Which works okay if you're going Toronto to Vancouver, or Toronto to Halifax, but if you're like us and have to connect through Calgary, you're always the lowest priority, because Calgary to Vancouver is always considered a short haul connection, even if you are making a connection there to somewhere else entirely. Indeed, almost by definition, anyone living on the Pariries or Atlantic Canada is screwed by this policy, since going from your home airport to your hub connection is necessarily 'short haul', while going from Toronto to anywhere is, well, a long haul priority. Hmmm. Does this pattern look familiar to anyone? So no wonder that paririe assengers were often left stranded in airports for days at a time -- unless they were on WestJet, of course.

And what, the consumer may ask, has been Air Canada's response to the debacle of the last two months? Has it relented on the downsizing that left Air Canada so thinly staffed that if a plane misses its connection, there's no aircrew available to man the next leg? Has it hired sufficient staff to man the desks and telephones to keep people informed and to help them rebook? To hand out hotel bookings and meal tickets? Nnoooo! It's to introduce a new service called "On My Way", which -- for an extra $35 per travel segment -- will provide you with the all stuff the Transportation Ministry says is every passenger's by right. In one fell swoop, Air Canada simultaneously pockets a bunch more cash and shifts the blame from themselves to the consumer. "Well I'd like to help you re-book your arbitrarily canceled flight, but you chose not to purchase our "On My Way" protection, so I can't." By paying the $35, the folks at the airport still won't help you, but they'll give you the number of a call center that will actually answer the phone. "Priority access to our team of specially-trained Air Canada On My Way agents who are available around the clock to assist you with all your unexpected travel needs." And, get this, "Automatic flight information notification/updates sent to you by email or SMS." They'll actually tell you that your flight is delayed or canceled, if you've paid the extra extortion fee. In contrast to what we observed the last few months where the Air Canada staff would simply turn off the flight announcement monitors and leave their desks so people couldn't complain to them or ask them questions.

So the rich and the desperate can pay what amounts to a third-world-style kick-back to Air Canada for them to actually supply the services for which we contracted, while the rest of us schleps are left to just cross our fingers and hope for the best.

Or, take WestJet.