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I’ve been a fan of goat cheese for many, many years now. Surprisingly, I didn’t start buying goat cheese to use at home until this month. I’ve always loved goat cheese in my salads and the salads I’d been making at home have become a bit boring. I felt like a real adult when I went to the supermarket downstairs to look for goat cheese. I found a log of it in the deli area and not in the dairy case where all the regular “orange” cheeses are found.

I’ve been adding it in very liberal portions to my salads and it’s quite delicious. I love the taste and texture of goat cheese. That certain saltiness mixed in with the smoothness is so delicious. I sometimes mix in avocado chunks in with the goat cheese in a salad, with a berry vinaigrette dressing. It’s a very rich salad but so good.

I eat about 300 grams of goat cheese per week. I don’t think that’s too harmful but I’d like to keep my eye on my consumption. Maybe I should start spreading it on crackers!

Last year my dentist retired after many, many years of service. He’d been my dentist since I was a kid and was my regular dentist all my life. He sold his practice to a new dental group, consisting of several dentists. I believe there was only one employee from his office that continued to work in the new office. They transferred all the patients to the new business. I believe I’ve been there twice now for cleanings. I feel no connection to any of the dentists. I’ve seen a different dentist each time and it’s my belief they just slot in whatever dentist is free.

There’s a dental practice in the retail space below where I live. It looks very modern and inviting. I’ve been thinking about switching to that office for a while now. My current “dentists” are all the way out in downtown Vancouver, by Stanley Park. That’s super far to go. I finally made the decision to take my dental needs to the office downstairs. Two weeks ago I made an appointment for a cleaning, which will happen this Saturday (they even have weekend appointments). I used to travel almost an hour from my home to get my teeth looked at. Now, I will simply take the elevator downstairs from my apartment. I don’t think it gets more convenient than that.

I mentioned above that there is still one employee from the old office that works in the new practice. She’s the one that usually books my appointments. I wonder how I’ll phrase it to her that I’ve decided to move on. She’s seen me come in as this buck-toothed kid for cleanings and fillings and now I’m a buck-toothed adult. I hope she doesn’t take it personally.

It’s not unusual to like this gif.

So I was at my doctor’s office this week for a regular check-up. Everything was fine except that my doctor said that I needed to lose twenty pounds. He said he could see a bit of a gut hanging out and that I was developing a bit of a double chin. Ok, so the first observation you can quantify as he was using my height and body mass index to determine my ideal weight. The gut and the double chin remark I think was purely subjective. I may not have a rock-hard six-pack for abs but I think I’m far from having a gut. I’ve seen a lot of TV and movies where they have a fat dude for comedic relief and I’m not nearly fat enough to have a gut. As for the double-chin, I share my mother’s genetic trait of having a weak chin, so it doesn’t jut out like a finely chiseled movie star’s chin. As such, if I just slightly pull my chin towards my neck, it looks bad.

Now, I don’t dispute that I should probably lose those twenty pounds. According to the BMI, I’m in the overweight category (which a lot of people belong to) so I’m fine with looking at improving my diet and exercise. I just don’t think I have a gut nor a double-chin. Alright, let’s see how long it takes for me to lose this weight.

We return with more unnecessary censorship from Jimmy Kimmel, where he bleeps out certain words from various clips of TV shows. The funnier this segment is to you, the more filthy your mind must be.

This weekend I’ll be attending Fan Expo Vancouver 2013. Held at the older portion of the Vancouver Convention Centre, the show brings together fans of comics, anime, mange, sci-fiction, fantasy, and garden tools. Special guests will include comic book artists, writers, actors, and other personalities. If you want an idea of how the whole show will look like, you can watch the video above, which features footage from Wondercon Anaheim. Though no disrespect to Fan Expo, Wondercon is probably an order of magnitude larger and grander at this point.

I’m excited about going since this is my first real con. I know that might be a big surprise to some of you as my towering stature as geek and nerd would indicate I’d be a con veteran. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many decent conventions to my own specific tastes that are local to Vancouver. There is Anime Revolution, which seems extremely well-organized and attended, but I’m not a big fan of anime. Fan Expo seems general enough that I decided to plunk down my dollars.

The initial thing that got me interested in attending was the list of guests at the con. The highlight, at least for me, was to be Norman Reedus, who plays Daryl on The Walking Dead. He was going to be the only actor who is currently on a huge hit TV show, which makes him a hot commodity. Most of the other guests are years removed from their most famous roles. Unfortunately, Reedus had to cancel, which disappointed many ticket buyers. Yes, they did get Michael Rooker to replace him, who played his brother Merle on the show, but Merle is now dead. There have been several other cancellations as well, including Tom Felton, known for his role as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies.

These cancellations are disappointing and you can bet such things wouldn’t happen at Comic-Con San Diego but Fan Expo is nowhere near the scale of that. I’m hoping I’ll still have fun nonetheless. Ok, I need to put the finishing touches on my Jem costume. See ya on the convention floor!

The elevator is a great source of consternation for some people and you can count me in as one of those. Since I live in high-rise apartment building, using the elevator is a common occurrence for me. At a minimum, I use the elevator at least twice a day. Absurdly, we only have two elevators in my buildings for over 30 floors. Sometimes you can be waiting for an elevator for a long time and once you get one, your ride up or down might be lengthy as it picks up or lets people off.

You can gain precious seconds during the elevator trip, however, if someone uses the “door close” button once someone has left the elevator or has entered the elevator. The elevator is programmed to keep the door open for a generous amount of time to allow 99% of users to enter or leave before it needs to close. All this extra time is wasted time unfortunately as everyone in the elevator car just waits for the doors to close. Thankfully, most people are courteous enough to press the “door close” button to move things along. Here’s where things get me a bit annoyed.

I notice that people sometimes, by way of proximity, are the defacto “door close” button operator. As the elevator goes up or down, people are being let off or getting on. This single person then pushes the “door close” button to get the elevator moving more quickly. It has come to my attention some of these people have no idea how an elevator works. There is a sensor that detects if something or someone has broken an invisible plane that is located at the threshold of the elevator door. If the detector sense a break in the plane, the “door close” button doesn’t work. Numerous times I’ve seen people hit the button way too early as people are still tripping the sensor. We then just sit there with the damn door open for several seconds, as if the button wasn’t pressed at all. What’s worse is that these people don’t understand what just happened and they don’t even bother pressing the button a second time. Why don’t these people hit the button a second time? Why would they just sit there, dripping in their failure, and not try to fix things?

Every time I see this I’m tempted to tell them they pressed the button way too early and they should try again but I don’t. I just look at them with disappointment. I wish I could say something but I would look anal retentive. Am making a big deal out of this when this is something minor? Oh probably but I’ve seen this way too many times for me not to mention it.

So as many of you know I live in/over an integrated transit, housing, and retail hub. When the retail portion of the complex started to open up, I knew businesses would have to be smart if they were to survive. Though the area is changing, the majority of people moving through the complex is still mainly blue-collar folks. There’s also the consideration that people are just moving through that station to get to their final destination. Keeping factors like that in mind, I knew the more successful tenants would sell or offer things that have a cheap per item cost, the items would be required by almost everyone, and would not take long for them to buy. That led me to believe any shops that sold food that was relatively cheap and that could be made fast would probably be the most successful businesses. Some brave business owners tried something else and they have suffered the consequences. Three businesses have been forced to close since last November.

The first to go was a traditional smoke shop. This place sold tobacco, pipes, cigarettes, cigars, and other accessories related to smoking tobacco. It did not cater to the marijuana crowd and did not have any bongs or vaporizers. If I recall correctly, this business did not even last two months. Society is much healthier than it was in previous decades and smoking tobacco isn’t nearly as popular as it was before. The people who still smoke would just get their smokes at convenience stores. I think I might have seen one person open the door to this place and it possibly could have been just an employee. One morning on my way to work, I could see people inside taking apart the store. It was empty the next day.

The second business to go was a hair salon. Previous to that, I saw workers getting the store ready over a course of a month. There was drywall work, adding of walls, and electrical stuff. The chairs were delivered one day and they seemed ready to go. This salon never seemed really that busy. I think I saw at most two stylists in there at once. I’m hesitant to say this but the place did not give off a cool or hip vibe. I know that a cool vibe doesn’t guarantee a good haircut or style but when we’re talking about a salon, image does come into play. It looked like a very sterile and boring place to get your hair done. I’m also fairly certain that none of the stylists brought any old clients to this place. I believe it lasted about a month. One morning I walked past the salon and there were a ton of notices on the door. They had not paid their rent, ever I think and the landlord had put their own lock on the door. One of the notices said the landlord would and could take all their equipment and sell it to get their rent money. In fact, that’s what happened.

The third business to go was an Indian food takeout place called Rasoee. Now this is an interesting situation. I believe the entire chain of these restaurants went out of business rather than this being a single failure. Their main web site is now gone and all their social media went dark around late November or early December. All their locations, not just the one downstairs from me, have been closed. Normally they’d be open until 9pm but I remember seeing them being closed up even before 7pm in the last little while. I just thought it was because most of their business was for lunch. Then just last week, notices went up on their door. They had not been paying rent for weeks.

Unfortunately, there might be one or two other businesses that are teetering on the edge. They might be able to pull through but we’ll see. In the meantime, it seems like the most successful businesses are the ones that follow the fast, cheap, and food strategy. The Safeway is doing well. Both the pizza per slice places are doing great. The Starbucks is Starbucks so no big surprise there. The dollar store is always busy because people love cheap crap.

I wonder if it’s time for a McDonald’s.

I feel bad for all the homies that suffer from canker sores on the reg. those bitches hinder the spirit

— Macklemore (@macklemore) April 12, 2013

I don’t listen to the music of Ben Haggerty but the above tweet from the rapper sure eloquently describes the experience of having a canker sore. I think I’ve written about them before but I used to get canker sores quite frequently when I was in my late teens and early 20s. I used to just describe them as plain painful, like having an open wound that felt like a needle being jabbed into your mouth anytime anything touched it. Spirit hindering though? Yeah, that’s another apt way of putting it. It takes out all the joy of eating because anytime a piece of food touch a canker sore it’s just so painful.

Every year I look forward to the day where I can retire the winter coat to the closet until next winter. You never know beforehand that a particular day is the last day you’ll wear the winter coat until it gets cold again. One day it’s on and then a day arrives where it’s too warm to wear. It then never gets cold enough for you to need it.

I thought last week I had come to that point for this season, as a stretch of dry and sunny weather visited upon Vancouver. It also being April, gave me false hope that perhaps the winter cold had retreated. I was wrong. The rains came and not only did it rain heavily, the temperatures dropped as well. It was not a difficult decision to wear my heavy furs at the beginning of the week.

The weather calls for lows as far down as three degrees Celsius in the next seven days so perhaps winter coat retirement isn’t in the cards just yet. I’ll be waiting though.