Month: August 2024

On Sunday evening I went to pickup my Mom from the airport. She had been in Montreal for several weeks to visit her sister and help take care of her mother, who is experiencing some health issues. Of course, these are my aunt and my grandmother to me.

My Mom’s flight was supposed to arrive just after 11pm, which is quite late in the evening for a flight. The flight was delayed, however, which is a common occurrence these days. The delay wound up being an hour and a half long, which apparently due to a mechanical problem. That’s a long delay and my poor Mom had to endure that by herself.

I left my place around 11:45pm, to give myself time to drive to the airport, get a cart ready, and be present to greet my Mom. I have to say, if you have to drive to the airport, doing it near midnight on a Sunday is a good time to do it. Traffic was very light and I got there in almost record time.

My Mom’s flight touched down around 12:30am. It took several more minutes for the plane to get to the gate, several more for the plane to deboard, and even more for her to walk from the gate to the luggage carousel where I was waiting for her. I got her seated while I got her luggage because she was exhausted after almost eight hours of travel, if you include the flight, the delay, and the drive to the airport on the Montreal side. By the time we got her luggage, loaded it up in my car, and started driving to my parents’ place, it was after 1am.

Even with no traffic, it still took about 40 minutes or so to drive from the airport to my parents’ home. I helped unloaded my Mom’s luggage and brought it inside. By then it was almost 2am. I didn’t want to leave right away because I hadn’t seen my Mom in several weeks and it’d been about a week since I last saw my Dad. I had a quick chat with them and my Mom had brought me some food from Montreal. I got some bagels and some Montreal smoked meat, which was quite kind of her. My aunt also gave me, via my Mom, some vegetables from her garden.

By the time I finally left my parents’ place it was after 2am, which was quite late for me. It took me about 18 minutes to get home, which is incredibly fast because even on a weekend, it takes me about 30 minutes to do the same trip.

After cleaning up and getting ready for bed, I didn’t roll into my bed until 3am. I had a 9am meeting the next day, so it was gonna be an early day for me. Now I’ve had productive work days on six hours of sleep before so I didn’t think it was gonna be that bad. When I woke up at 8:50am the next morning, I was feeling rough. I’m not sure if it was all the driving I did the night before but I woke up feeling exhausted.

I somehow managed to get through the work day fine. I took a nap around 6pm for around thirty minutes. Now usually if I take one nap after work, I’m good for the rest of the evening but around 9pm, I feel asleep on the couch again. I must have been extra tired that day.

Despite the fatigue, I feel like if you have to pickup someone from the airport, a Sunday evening is a pretty good time. There’s almost no traffic, parking is easy, and the terminal is nearly empty.

For whatever reason, I decided to wash my bed sheets, pillow cases, and duvet cover at 10pm this evening. I knew this was kinda stupid because it’s after midnight now and all those things are still drying in the dryer.

One of the most annoying things about being an adult is being tired and wanting to go to bed but your bed has no sheets, pillow cases, nor a cover for the duvet.

I think the dryer still needs another 20 minutes and hopefully I won’t be too tired to put all the damn sheets and stuff back on. I know some people just sleep on a bare bad when faced with this problem but I can’t allow myself to do that.

I’m in the middle of a four-day weekend and on Thursday, I decided to do something new. I’ve been wanting to ride the Eagle Coaster on Cypress Mountain for while, so I finally got off my ass and did it. The Eagle Coaster is nearly 2km long and you drop almost 300m from start to finish.

I’ve been to Cypress Mountain a few times, mostly as a kid but this was the first time I’d driven there myself. I left around 12:30pm and at that time, traffic was very light. Even then, it took me over an hour to drive there, with most of it highway driving. I live super far from Cypress Mountain. I’m basically at the south end of the greater Vancouver area and the mountain is way up north.

The drive up there was uneventful. The coaster ride itself was fun but for something that lasts less than three minutes, paying $35 for a single ride down was hard to swallow. There’s a joke in there somewhere. I definitely think there’s some tourist pricing involved.

Anyways, once I was done with the ride it was about 2:30pm and I hadn’t had lunch yet. It was a beautiful sunny day and there was a patio with a spectacular view of the mountains that served Mexican food. How great would it be to have a burrito and just enjoy the weather and the view? On the other hand, I was cognizant that to get home, I would be driving in the same direction of everyone else in the afternoon rush hour. Also, I needed to cross a bridge for my commute home. My philosophy is that if a bridge is involved in a commute, you’re screwed.

I quickly checked Google Maps and it told me that if I left now, it would take me an hour and twenty-six minutes to get home. The route was dark red kilometres before the bridge and for several kilometres after the bridge as well. Traffic was heavy and congested. There were several icons on the route, which I just assumed were indicating a crash of some sort. It had to be, for traffic to be this bad as early as 2:30pm.

I made the poor decision to drive home immediately because I thought it would just get worse once rush hour actually began. The sooner I got in my car, the sooner I would get home was my thinking.

It was sixteen kilometre drive just to get back onto the highway from the top of the mountain and this drive was traffic free. Once I got back onto the highway though, I drove barely five minutes before I hit traffic. About seven kilometres from the bridge, traffic slowed to a crawl, like less than 20 km/h. It was bumper to bumper traffic, with most of the time, everyone just inching forward a few feet at a time. I kept expecting to see a wreck or emergency vehicles somewhere along the way, which would explain why the traffic was so bad.

I didn’t time how long it took to drive the seven kilometres to get to the bridge but it must have been at least thirty minutes or more. Once I got on the bridge, I realized there weren’t any accidents that was causing any of this. All of this gridlock was just from straight-up massive volumes of vehicles all on the road at the same time, going the same way. It was bonkers.

It was still bumper to bumper traffic even after the bridge, for about three or four kilometres after. Once the highway opened up to four lanes, traffic finally abated enough that I was able to speed up beyond 50 km/h for the first time since I left the mountain and merged onto the highway. The rest of my drive home was uneventful finally. All told, it took me about an hour and forty-five minutes to get home. Nearly double the time it took to get to the mountain.

I wasn’t sure if that drive was just anomaly or if this was a daily occurrence. So today, at around 2:30pm, I checked Google Maps again. I plugged in the route from Cypress Mountain to my home and the estimate was again, almost identical to what it was the day before. I checked the route and there were no accidents, just a ridiculous amount of traffic volume.

A long time ago, when I was a much younger man, near the turn of the century, I worked in North Vancouver, where the commute home was similar to the route I drove yesterday. I would drive home every day around 5:30pm or so, which I would say is in the rush hour and I didn’t experience anything like I did yesterday. Traffic is much worse now.

I know a lot of people who live on the North Shore, they love the proximity to nature and the mountains but that bridge exacts a toll. Not a monetary one but one that you pay with your patience and sanity. I’ve always had the opinion that having to cross a bridge for any commute just adds headaches and stress to your life. Some people drive this commute every day. How do they do it?

I’ve always had an appreciation for the fact that I get to work from home but that drive the other day, just reinforced that.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a new section in my YouTube feed when I loaded it up on my browser. Labelled “Playables”, I realized these were games but somehow hosted on the YouTube site. Looking through the initial list of games, it seemed like some of them were repurposed mobile games. Indeed, I immediately saw an Angry Birds game, along with Cut the Rope.

Curious, I tried a slew of these games to see how fun they could be. After about 30 minutes of playing, I had a few observations. First, I did confirm that many of these games were mobile games in some fashion in another life. Despite being played in a browser, without a separate download, many of the games had a playing area that was taller than it was wider, the aspect ratio for a phone, instead of a monitor. Also, many of the controls you could tell involved swiping or tapping the screen. In a browser, this got converted into mouse dragging and clicking. For some games, I discovered it sometimes didn’t register my clicks or drags, which made for a poor experience.

Second, it was clear YouTube did some work on each game to make it work on their platform. For example, all games have the ability to store high scores and/or progress on a game. This may seem minor in terms of a feature, but it can actually drive a person to play a game again because it can remember which levels you’ve finished and you can just pick up where you left off.

Third, it became clear to me some of these games are genuinely entertaining for what they are. Sometimes, I have five minutes to play something while I wait for my code to compile or if a meeting is starting soon, and I can’t play a full-screen game. These games fit that bill. Now, if you’re thinking mobile games on a phone are exactly what fits this need, you’d be correct. For some reason though, I never got into mobile games. These browser games, however, just are easy to play and they being on the computer, make it appealing to me. By the way, these YouTube Playables can also be played in the YouTube app on the phone, if that’s more your style.

Anyways, two of my favourite games from the current list are Freekick Football and 8 Ball Billiards Classic.