About a year ago I got a pamphlet through the door calling my attention to an open house for a proposed bus route on my street. The logic was that, as it was busy everywhere else, why not make it busy on my street. There are problems with this as the street is very narrow and already has a high accident rate. Also it is built on a bog so buildings shake when heavy trucks come by.

My street is in the process of pulling itself up by the bootstraps. It is close to downtown. It did have a very active drug house. It was going downhill with house conversions but then that changed and as property values skyrocketed in the early 2000s, people started making a neighbourhood out of it again. Folks stayed. They formed a neighbourhood watch and worked with the police to force the druggies out. We issued yard challenges. It’s all different. But now they want to send a bus through every 15 minutes starting at 6 am and continuing until midnight (the concession is reduced service after 9).

I went to the open house and will not recount the experience here except to say it was poorly planned lip service and alienating in the extreme. I wrote to the transit authority and got no reply. I e-mailed several folks with the same result. My question was this: My house is immediately adjacent to the sidewalk. What recourse do I have if the vibration and noise from the buses makes it impossible to sleep at night? What happens if my property value depreciates because no-one would want to live in my house? It’s an ambulance route. What happens if the traffic is backed up and the ambulance can’t get through? No answer. I eventually found another flyer through my door from another concerned resident who was trying to organize opposition to the bus.

I got right back in touch with her, relieved that I was not the only one that had problems with the concept. She organized a meeting and a bunch of folks came. We went door to door on the street canvassing people on their thoughts. There was 99% opposition, not the other way round as Transit was reporting on their website. The difference was they were canvassing people off the route who might one day want to take the bus.

As a decision on the bus was to be taken by the Transit Commission we arranged to make a presentation on behalf of residents at the appropriate monthly commission hearing. we were booked in as interveners. We were all set and ready. Each time, for four months, the commission hearing was cancelled, until the next time when we got two days notice, it was on. I was out of town. One person could make it. The commission duly voted for the bus and it starts in January.

Since then some of the folks who opposed the bus have put up for sale signs or already sold. I don’t want to do that as I love my house. I just have a real problem with folks that tell me its NIMBY when it’s really a question of not having my interests respected. I have nothing against public transit, glory be, but I chose my property because I could walk to work and not add to the congestion. And also because there weren’t buses on the street. There are existing bus routes along the major arteries that parallel our street.

It’s the process that concerns me. Don’t ask my opinion if you don’t want to know, and you don’t intend to mitigate impacts. It upsets me more than not bothering to ask.

Montana Mines

Enter Janet Napolitana and her misconceptions about Canada. See Rex Murphy’s humorous and insightful commentary at http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/video/rex_murphy/janet_napolitano_myth_buster.html

Obama himself openly opposed a proposed coal mine project in British Columbia, long before even being elected. “Barack Obama supports efforts by Senators Max Baucus, Jon Tester as well as Governor Brian Schweitzer to stop the Cline mine,” Matt Chandler, of Mr. Obama’s Montana press office, stated in an e-mail about this time last year http://www.flathead.ca/news/86.

Baucus and Schweitzer have been banging on for years about how we should put a stop to any new coal mines in the area immediately above the border with Montana as it might affect Waterton National Park on the Canadian side and Glacier National park in Montana. No mention that we have had five major coal mines operating in the region, some for over a hundred years, and that the Elk River river running through them has a world class fishery http://www.bcadventure.com/ianforbes/elk/elk.phtml.

The same can’t be said for the other side of the border where the river becomes polluted in Montana by farming and residential development. In the southern part of Montana and overlapping into Wyoming, the Powder River Basin about 120 miles (190 km) east to west and 200 miles (320 km) north to south, is also known for its coal deposits. In fact, it is the single largest source of coal mined in the United States, contains one of the largest deposits of coal in the world, and thousands of coalbed gas wells. And the coal from these mines fuels over thirty coal-fired power plants throughout the United States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_River_Basin. In British Columbia we don’t have any coal-fired plants. Not one.

In June 2009 concerned citizens gathered in Billings for the first Powder River Basin Summit, when environmental groups, Native Americans and ranchers met to address issues affecting the air, water and wildlife. The summit was sparked by increased proposals for more energy projects in the basin. http://www.ktvq.com/Global/story.asp?S=10559319

But you can’t blame people in Washington for thinking that Canadians are a bunch of country bumpkins. After all if Montana is the back of beyond to the United States, what are we if we live beyond that? Well meaning but bungling caretakers of the land? America needs to step in, on behalf of the world, to make sure we are doing things right to save this jewel of land? British Columbia is full of them. Much of the Province could be a park. You can hardly move for mountains and lakes and nearly 4 million people live and work here. We are a relatively sophisticated people that quietly tries to get along with the rest of the world and we don’t need the head of Homeland Security and Montana politicians pointing over the border at us to deflect attention away from issues in their own backyard.

Don’t listen to them Barack. You need the American people on your side and not distancing themselves from ill-informed American foreign policy, especially towards your historic allies and friends in Canada. George W did much to try and damage the relationship. Luckily the American people knew better. Good fences make good neighbours, not armed or intellectual borders based on ignorance.

That night I couldn’t set my house alarm. It turns out (logically) that you need a land line for the alarm to communicate with the security company if someone breaks in. Plus I have six months left on my 3-year contract with the alarm company before I can get out of paying them a monthly fee. Following that the alarm would still go off but would not communicate itself to the security company. Perhaps I shouldn’t be discussing this in public….

So I phoned the wicked telephone company (Telus) and asked for their bare bones service. No voice mail, no call display, no long distance capability. It just rings and you can answer or call someone in the same town. So I got the phone reinstated for about $25 per month, but plus I still have the cell phone at $20 per month for 200 minutes and I have to had to buy it ($60) because it’s not on a plan as I am cutting down on expenses.

After about a week the cell phone ran out of minutes, and then a couple of weeks later it ran out of minutes again. I keep bumping up the minutes, but it still keeps running out, and now it has cost me about $50 for the first month and the same for the second. It turns out if people call me long distance from their cell phones this triggers the ability of the cell phone company to charge long distance as well as minutes, resulting in a rapid draining of the account. So I arrange to pay an extra $10 per month for unlimited incoming calls, but I notice that I have only been charged $20 for this month so I have to get back in touch with them before anyone calls me from far away.

Plus I bought the $60 phone because it has a camera in it, but when I went to send photos to my computer, the bluetooth didn’t work. My computer recognizes my old Motorolla cell phone (which of course I couldn’t use under the new plan) but says my new phone is there but not enabled. I phone the cell phone company and leave a message for a service person to call back, which he does, but I can’t pick up the voice mail because I have run out of minutes again. When I finally remember how to go on line and put money on my phone, I hear him telling me that I have to turn on the bluetooth in my settings in order for my computer to recognize my phone. What kind of stupid dimwad does he think I am?

That was yesterday and I still haven’t calmed myself sufficiently to call back the cell phone company and deal with the missing charge and the non-working bluetooth. If I had just phoned Telus in the first place and reduced the service on my phone, I could have paid $25 but as it is I am too frightened to add up what I have spent.

I did take some of the channels off my Shaw cable service though and so far nothing terrible has happened. I needed to do it to pay for the phone.

The Trooper at Seatac Parkade

Although I didn’t need to be in Seattle until late on December 20th I set off early to account for delays. Little did I know. It was after the ferry ride and drive down to the border, while I was waiting out the Peace Arch that things started to go pear-shaped. I had just crawled past the last U-turn before the border when I phoned my daughter to check how things were going. That’s when I learned that US Airways had overbooked from State College to Philadelphia; they were not able to get on the plane; and there was no other flight out that evening. Options were being pointedly discussed with the airline.

Twenty minutes later and well through the border into Washington State and down I-5, they called to let me know that they (she and her son and her boyfriend and his son) would drive to Pittsburgh that night where a US Airways flight would take them out to Seattle in the morning. The airline would put them up in a hotel and issue additional flight vouchers as compensation. They would arrive at Seatac mid-morning on the 21st. All was back on schedule if just a day late.
As time would be tight in the morning and rather than turn around and go back through the border wait, I decided to carry on driving down to Seatac and get a hotel. It was now too late to cancel the hotel in Vancouver, but I wrote that off for the sake of maintaining a relatively good mood, and carried on.

To make the black December evening even more interesting, the “Iffy” weather very quickly turned to a full-blown howling blizzard that could not be recreated in the movies. For the first time, I had to find, turn on and use the 4-wheel drive function of my 1993 Isuzu Trooper and its all season tires, no chains. A whiteout ensued on I-5 through which I could vaguely see the growing outlines of vehicles by the side of the road. Everything was slip sliding and soon the freeway was reduced to one lane in each direction. No snowploughs were out. At Mount Vernon previous broken up ice under the new snow made driving hilariously dangerous, traction non-existent, and the Trooper was bouncing sideways off the washboard underneath. By the time I got to Lynwood (about an hour north of Seatac and several tractor trailers on their sides) I had to accede to the cold and fear and get off the highway. I checked into the Courtyard Marriott, comforted by the thought that Sarah and her crew were safely at a hotel in Pittsburgh. I ate my supper at the amazing Buca di Beppo and the hotel was a perfect haven.

On the morning of December 21st I awoke to about a foot or so of fresh snow and it was still coming down. However it was daylight and I had driven in it the night before so I was fairly confident I could get to Seatac Airport. Over in Pittsburgh my daughter et al had got up early and gone to the airport only to find that all flights to Seattle had been cancelled due to the weather. Discussions were taking place with the airline. After some time it was decided that US Airways could fly her and my grandson to Las Vegas where flights were still leaving for Seattle. Things were back on track. So after retrieving my vehicle from the snow and ice, and knowing it would likely take me a couple of hours to drive through downtown Seattle given the weather, I left the safety of the Lynwood Marriott for Seatac to wait.

It was an eerie drive that Sunday morning as the roads were treacherous and there was hardly anyone risking I-5 at an early hour. It was so solitary that at one point a friend phoned me to ask if I had just driven over the Tacoma Narrows bridge, as she was sure it was me she had seen from KOMO’s Chopper Five weather helicopter. She was right. The helicopter had been flying above me as at that point as I think I was one of few things moving they could film.

On arrival, Seatac Airport was like a Stephen King movie at the end bit where we are entering the Heart of Darkness. With most if not all flights in and out cancelled, thousands of ticket holders of various shapes and ethnic origin were milling around looking for something productive to do other than wait and get angrier. It got progressively worse the longer people milled around with no news and no new flight times on the horizon. Finally, and seeming to sense something tangibly dangerous, Alaska Airlines got on the intercom and told their ticket holders to go home and wait as none of their flights would be arriving or leaving that day and the airport could not accommodate them. None of the other airlines was so bold, but the acknowledgement did seem to relieve the pressure somewhat even if no-one appeared to be giving in and leaving.

Meanwhile, at Pittsburgh, my daughter and grandson had had their tickets and flight vouchers stolen and were busily trying to get them reprinted before their flight took off for Vegas in a few minutes. It was only after logical deduction about who could have done it, and threats of exposure to a worker at the airport cafeteria, that her boyfriend got their tickets back and they were able to catch their flight at the last minute.
I learned this when my daughter phoned me (collect) on her arrival in Vegas to find that:
• All flights from Vegas to Seattle were cancelled for the day at least.
• Her luggage with all her clothes, toiletries and Christmas presents, was missing.
• Her cell phone charger was in her luggage and her phone battery was now dead.
• She had no money, no credit card, no flight out, and US Airlines was refusing to provide her with another hotel. Their limit apparently was one hotel per screw up and she already had that in Pittsburgh.
• In essence she was standing dishevelled at the Los Vegas airport with her four-year old with no money and no luggage; no place to stay, or anything to eat. You may wish to understand here that she has strong feelings about capitalism and gambling and Vegas is the antithesis of anywhere she might ever want to be. Conversley my grandson was fascinated and trying to play with the slot machines.

The only thing open to me was to find a hotel for myself near Seatac, check in, and arrange a hotel for them in Vegas until they could get a flight to Seattle. That is when I learned that phone companies won’t send collect calls to cell phones without a credit card to charge to, so each approximately two minute check-in call ended up costing me close to $25. All the hotels close to Seatac were fully booked with people holding airline tickets and nowhere to go. The closest place I could find that had any space left was the Howard Johnson at Tukwila. Remember that the roads were still feet deep and treacherous with snow and it was still coming down. I made my way to the Hojo, drove over a 2 foot snow bank to get to the parking lot, booked in, got on line and got them a room at the Flamingo. Then I transferred some cash to her account so that she could take the transporter from the airport to the hotel. Phone call: On arrival at the Flamingo she was told that she needed to produce a physical credit card or they would require a few hundred dollars deposit. So now she was in the lobby of the hotel, unable to go to a room, no luggage, no phone, with a hungry and tired four year-old who had been very good so far but was quickly going downhill at all the upheaval and the sight of his mama’s crumbling courage. The hotel said the only solution was to fax me a copy of an agreement that I could sign and fax back with a photocopy of my credit card and driver’s licence, authorizing charges to the room. I ascertained the fax number of the Hojo, advised the receptionist there that I was waiting for a very important fax and could she let me know when it came, and settled in my room to wait for a few minutes.

Not hearing anything I went back to the reception desk (remember I am trudging through feet of snow each time as the Hojo at Tukwila is in essence a very cheap motel that is long overdue for renovation). I draw her attention to the fact that the fax is sitting there on the fax machine. I ask to have it and sign it which confuses her. Nevertheless I do this and provide her with the number at the Flamingo to fax it back to. Meanwhile, more hopeful travellers are coming in out of the storm and requesting rooms. She is having trouble with the deluge of work being the sole person actually working at the motel desk, and says she will send the fax as soon as she is finished checking in the next customer. I go back to my room and after ten minutes phone the lobby of the Flamingo, where of course the fax has not been received. I don my winter clothes and boots again and go back to the lobby where the fax is sitting where I left it.

I say in a very loud voice and in a very un-Canadian way words to the effect of would you please stop what you are doing and send this. It is an emergency. I need you to do it now. And I can feel an edge of unrelenting urgency and wonder if they will have me arrested and put me in an American jail and my family will be abandoned in Nevada and I will never get out of Washington State. She commits to doing this and I must return to my room remembering that I do not bear arms but that may not apply to the receptionist or other staff of the “hotel”. My daughter finally calls. The fax has arrived. They are in their room at The Flamingo and she has access to the hotel including food and a phone. We can all eat and sleep and, if all is well with the world, they will fly into Seatac the following morning and I can pick them up and we can go home.

There was no restaurant or cafe associated with the motel. In the evening, I had to go out to purchase supper from an unheated supermarket that was full of second-rate very expensive produce and I was the only non-Hispanic person in it. This is not any type of comment, just an observation that someone appeared to be taking full advantage of the disadvantaged. It would have been a rip-off here in Canada apart from the cheese and wine which I purchased. Neither my motel room nor front desk had a wine opener so I had to go back out. I bought two, one of which I donated to the hotel on return. So if you ever stay there don’t let them tell you they don’t have a wine opener. Either that or the lady at the front desk took it home.

It snowed all night at Tukwila. I know this because my room was immediately next to the motel office where people were stamping in and out all night and having their smoke break outside my door. In the room the heater was one of those big insanely loud air conditioner things that had to keep cutting in every ten minutes as the unit wasn’t insulated and the temperature dropped dramatically within seconds of the clanking cutting out. It was so noisy I had to double the comforter over on my bed and shut the damn thing off.

Then I had to resort to lies so that I could sleep. I told myself that in the morning I would get up and there would be a garage across the street that had chains to fit my vehicle. I would purchase the chains and a mechanic would be available to install them straight away at reasonable cost and I could drive safely to meet the plane. When I awoke I realized this was a lie but thanked myself profusely for thinking it up and proceeded with the day. I skipped the lobby breakfast of cold cereal or bagel you had to toast with a crowd standing around waiting (who didn’t appear to know whose bagel was whose anymore and could have lead to a stand-off) or an apple with bruises or grey-looking coffee with powdered milk in a Styrofoam cup. Rather than give the motel any stars I designated it a Black Hole and sought out the day.

To top it off, US Airways had decided to fly them into Vancouver, Canada instead of SeaTac, scheduled to arrive at about Noon. So I had to get from Tukwila, this time through the Seattle Monday morning rush hour traffic in multi-lane roads of alternating black ice and mounds of snow between lanes. It was brutal again around Mount Vernon where the ice under the new snow acted like a washboard threatening to jolt my teeth out. And of course, it did not escape me that I could have waited in Canada all along and that last untaken U-turn became all that meaningful. So I make it to the Peace Arch in one piece where Canada border agents, despite my gesturing frantically to the contrary, decide to operate the window on my passenger side, which is broken and usually will not go up again. Remember it is still sub zero and I have to get to Vancouver. When I remonstrated with them they decided to pull me over and search (ransack) the Trooper.

After about half an hour of searching by at least four uniformed persons and meaningful looks “Please stay in the waiting room lady and this can be done all the faster” they manage to get the window back up and I finally get to drive away with the inside of the Trooper all pulled about and my grandson’s car seat not buckled in anymore, and it quickly becomes apparent they haven’t shut the engine hood properly so its bouncing up and down and threatening to fly up and break the windshield so I have to pull over into a quasi snow bank to get off the road to close it properly. Meanwhile the sun is starting to shine.

Amazingly, I get to Vancouver airport before their flight arrives and it takes about an hour for them to get through Customs. No pesky baggage to collect though as they have still lost track of that. We take off to catch the three o’clock ferry and they tell us “no promises” to get on, but we do. We are the next to last car on. It’s late coming in (with no explanation) and we don’t leave until nearly four… but we are starting to relax as we are on the home stretch. The sun comes out as we cruise through the Islands to home.

Things revert. We get to Vancouver Island and the road into town is at a standstill with multiple crashes on black ice the whole 20 km. We crawl into town at 5 kph and see five accident scenes on the way that restrict the highway to one lane and all that entails. Have to get some groceries so that’s another stop and we arrive at about 8 pm to find my street is nearly, but not quite impassable, but we are home.

In case you are wondering about the lost baggage: They delivered my daughter’s luggage two weeks later, the day before she left to return home. During that time we had to replace her clothing and her cell phone charger, but became well acquainted through daily visits and phone calls with Tiffany at Horizon Air who made it her personal quest to find and return Sarah’s luggage after U.S. Airways gave up and refused to look anymore. Thank you Tiffany.