comparative accounts
I did a sort of odd thing yesterday afternoon. I had written a rather long entry about my weekend in Vancouver with Ivan, and it made me wonder: how did that compare to how much I wrote about each of the other ten trips I've taken to Vancouver? (Eleven times makes Vancouver my third-most visited city outside Washington State, behind only Los Angeles and New York.) I made a list!
2004, with Shobhit: 4,402 words (7 pages, when pasted into Word)
2011, with Susan: 3,967 words (6 pages)
2018, with Ivan: 3,858 words (5 pages)
2005, with Shobhit: 3,261 words (5 pages)
2015, with Other Danielle and Andrea: 2,864 words (5 pages)
2017, with Shobhit: 2,537 words (4 pages)
2008 #2, with Shobhit: 1,006 words (2 pages)
2013, with Shobhit: 888 words on Vancouver (2 pages), but part of a massive 7,159-word post (12 pages) on the entire historical story of our wedding and honeymoon
2008 #1, with Shobhit, Shashi Ji and Barbara: 178 words (1/2 page; basically just photo links to Victoria/Vancouver sets on Flickr to read captions there
2007, with Shobhit: 156 words (1/2 page; basically just photo links to Victoria/Vancouver sets on Flickr to read captions there)
1999, with Barbara: 159 words in a letter to Grandma McQuilkin
I had been thinking that maybe I had written more about my trip to Vancouver with Ivan than any other trip there, largely augmented by pasting from long captions to photos I had sent in my requisite digest email yesterday morning, but -- nope! Turns out, Vancouver 2018 was merely my third-longest account of any trip to Vancouver.
A few other notes:
*In retrospect, it really makes sense that my record-length account of a trip to Vancouver is of the first out-of-town trip Shobhit and I ever took together, barely more than a month and a half after we met. We hadn't even moved in together yet; it was Vancouver Pride weekend; and we hung out with a bunch of people from Trikone-NW. It was a lot to process.
*Not having thought about it a whole lot in a very long time, given that I haven't actually hung out with her since early 2013, I never would have guessed that my second-most extensive account of a trip to Vancouver was that with Susan in 2011. That was a really fun trip, though, and we stayed overnight at the Empire Landmark Hotel -- something I referred to as "probably a one-time thing" at the time, and now is certainly true: the hotel has been closed and is set for demolition, making way for a two-tower complex that is not quite as high (28/30 floors and 300 ft compared to 40 floors and 396 ft). Honestly, in terms of hotel rooms, spectacular views notwithstanding, the Empire Landmark Hotel was kind of a dump anyway.
*Susan may have beat out Ivan, but only barely: I wrote all of 109 more words about the trip with Susan than I did about the trip with Ivan. It kind of fascinates me, in fact, that the only two trips I took on my own with a good friend to Vancouver in the 2010s are of nearly equal length in my written observations. (The 2015 trip with Other Danielle and Andrea is outside that specificity, as that trip wound up being with two people I really didn't know at all. That one got my fifth-longest account.)
*I went to Vancouver with Shobhit so many times -- seven -- that it makes sense for my accounts to get much smaller over time. The 2017 trip gets mid-range placement on the list just by virtue of it having been four years since the previous time we had gone together -- and the previous time, 2013, was our Honeymoon, itself a much smaller account only because I had so much more space to dedicate writing about the mass of other things to tell about our wedding.
*The shortest three accounts are sort of misleading, because in the cases of 2007 and 2008, I had written plenty of detail in photo captions on Flickr, and then just posted links to the photo sets on LiveJournal. Surely this list would jumble a great deal if I actually went through and copied and pasted all captions to add to word counts. (And jumbled even differently from that if going by number of photos taken.) But I don't have time for that! Captions don't count as prose, and here I'm talking about narrative, written accounts of my experiences in Vancouver, B.C. Besides, the longest written accounts still have their added photos with captions as well, so with that in mind maybe the list wouldn't actually be that different.
*The 1999 trip stands out the most, for two key reasons. First, 1999 was three years before I even signed up for LiveJournal. Second, under normal circumstances I might have a plenty-long account of that trip written in a letter, but that letter would have had to be to Barbara, the letters to whom basically served as my written journals at the time -- but, guess what? I took that trip with Barbara! There was no need to write her about it when she had already experienced it with me. Oh, and a third factor: that trip was to cover Vancouver Pride for the Seattle Gay News, and I was so busy writing articles for the paper then, I barely wrote letters to anyone at all, let alone in any journals, between 1999 and 2001. The best accounting I have of that trip is the article I wrote about Vancouver Pride in the following week's edition of the paper, which would not have discussed much about the experience with the friend as opposed to just what their Pride events were like.
Should I mention this fucking wildfire smoke again? I did not ride my bike to work yesterday because I needed to bus to Northgate to meet up with Shobhit and then do some shopping. I did ride into work today, though, even though the air quality got progressively worse over the course of the day -- the worst any of us have ever seen. We scrapped this evening's planned hike at Discovery Park yet again, just as we did last Tuesday due to the weather. This means we haven't seen a truly clear day in over a week.
I was thinking this morning about how, before just this past few years, this was never a thing. I moved to Seattle in 1998 and the worst any summer had to dish out was heat waves -- themselves now increasing in frequency. Now we have wildfires all over the west, and especially the northwest, virtually every year. It's becoming the new normal, it's preventable with progressive environmental policies that this country's dipshit "leaders" have long ignored, it's disgusting. It very much colored my experience of Vancouver last weekend. Just last year I posted a photo of the sun through smoke haze that made it look like a flaming meteor heading toward the city. That was on September 5. God, I hope this doesn't go on constantly for another two weeks.
The hope right now seems to be just for a shift in the winds. All that will do is, of course, just choke people to the east rather than us. I'm down with that though. Choke those motherfuckers!
Anyway, the smoke was so terrible I really preferred to keep the windows in the car rolled up and use the air conditioner. Shobhit allowed it for like two minutes, then turned off the AC and rolled down the windows, declaring that since the AC is almost never turned on, the buildup in there was more hazardous than the smoke outside. Uh, more hazardous than the equivalent of smoking seven cigarettes? I kind of doubt it. This is just another example of Shobhit pulling something out of his ass, with zero empirical evidence, to support his own obstinance. He hates the AC, I hate breathing wildfire smoke. Guess who gets his way? When it comes to struggles like this, it's always Shobhit. I guess I could stop whining about never getting my way when it comes to petty demands, but whatever. I'm still convinced the air conditioning would have been better than driving down the freeway with wildfire smoke-filled air billowing into the car.
We went to Costco. Also to Mud Bay, on our way back, for cat treats. We got a veggie pizza, and I was so proud of myself for having a single slice for dinner. I was so close to getting below 150 lbs again yesterday morning -- 150.9 -- I really wanted to get below it, if not today, then soon. Aside from four bites of chocolate, I did not snacking at work, which is far less than usual. I did have four small peanut butter cups at Costco. They were sampling, what was I supposed to do! I know it's ridiculous to obsess over normal daily fluctuations but I was most disappointed to weigh in at 151.6 lbs this morning. Maybe it was the large amount of sweets I ate over the weekend finally catching up with me. That's entirely possible.
I spent most of the rest of the evening at my desk in the bedroom. I updated my budget, complete with estimated foreign transaction fees for every transaction made in Vancouver. I discovered, unfortunately, that unlike every other charge that was made for Vancouver expenses, my AirBnB charge did not get converted based on the exchange rate -- it really was $104 for that one night. Had I known that would happen, I may not have booked it after all. (The hostel charge, which was later reversed, did indeed get the exchange rate conversion.) Maybe it's because AirBnB is an American company? Whatever, I can still make it work. Between that and a medical bill, though, no money gets set aside this pay period for the Australia trip. All things considered I think that's still okay: it's the first in several pay periods that that's had to happen. I still haven't had to dip into savings, and that's not nothing.
[posted 12:31 pm]