Rahen Z takes the best “street” cat photos I’ve ever seen, and this one made me all squishy inside.

Stupid stupid stupid.

What I remember doing is clicking through the various “Buy now” and “Check out” buttons, and seeing that my billing and shipping address were still to my old apartment in Vancouver. So I changed the billing address to my new place in Kelowna, and I’m sure I chose the “same as billing address” for the shipping address, but it didn’t stick. The thing is being shipped to Vancouver. I didn’t notice this until too late, because the address information in the confirmation email requires you to scroll down, and I didn’t bother looking until two days later.

So I called up the 1-800 UPS number and asked what I could do about this package that was going to the wrong place. And what they told me to do was to keep looking at the Tracking Information page until it lists an arrival to Richmond, BC, at which point I’m to call them and tell them to either deliver the package to a different Vancouver address (they can’t reroute to Kelowna) or to keep it at their warehouse for someone to pick up.

I couldn’t give them the new address information then. I couldn’t call Richmond ahead of time. “Because we don’t have the package yet in our system, it’s still in China, even though we have this these things called ‘computers’ connected via an ‘internet’”. Instead, I have to watch a webpage until it boils says Richmond on it and then call, but yet I must do this before they deliver the package to the current occupants of my old place.

What is this, sneakernet? If I manage to intercept the package in time, will my father have to bring in a floppy disk of the GIF of my tracking slip? Or maybe I could send it ahead of time via carrier pigeon. This just strikes me as a really bad setup and unnecessarily complicated. And, for me, stressful, because I may have just paid over $200 for a free gift to whoever moved into #104 after me.

According to the webpage of slowly drying paint, my iPod is now in Richmond, but of course UPS is closed until Monday, both the Richmond location and their 1-800 number. So I have to remember to call right at 8 am on Monday morning and cross my fingers. I am not hopeful.

New city means new hairstylist. Luckily the place I randomly picked is the unofficial official salon for my new company as the owner is a coworker’s wife. I’m back to being a blonde, it seems. That probably works better with the sunshine.

I expect to lose some friends due to the distance but I hope the awesomest ones will keep in touch and maybe even visit. A good number of them are winos so surely there is reason to come see the wineries, unless they all are set alight by the current fires. You weren’t needing those grapes, were you? Or your house?

People have been contacting me making sure that my cat and I haven’t been turned to charcoal so I feel I should point out that I’m still in Vancouver. I was in K-town a week ago to find an apartment in a day, which I did, but I have been back here and won’t be heading up for good until August 1st. The fact you haven’t seen me is just because I’m antisocial, not that I’ve been set ablaze.

My apartment will be okay, as it’s across the highway from downtown and a good distance from forest. The great white wangsails will be the last thing to go, I’d think, possibly because the statue is made out of non-flammable material but also that the entire city is between it and the trees. I got the place I wanted, a ten minute walk to the beach or downtown, and work is 3 km of flat terrain away. As far as I can see the only thing that would’ve made it better would’ve been a Tim Hortons on my street, but alas, you can’t have everything.

This move also means living in a new ecosystem: desert. I definitely feel at home in Vancouver weather (I don’t get why people say it rains “too much”) so I’m going to miss the wet. I’ll be the one person in Kelowna standing outside in the rain and smiling. I may be institutionalized.

Last week was something else. I started it by quitting my two-week-old “recession job” and being told by that employer that he didn’t consider me a “real DBA” (DBA = database administrator, in case you’ve just joined us). I then ended the week with two job offers for DBA positions and it’s been hard for me not to send a “nya nya” themed email in a certain someone’s direction, but I will resist somehow. I was also crowned Queen of England and had a poodle breed named after me, but those events seemed less important.

Some of you might say I’m lucky to get the job offers, but you have to remember, I haven’t had a full-time DBA job in 10 months (!!!). Fate screwed me over multiple times by having companies promise to hire me only to back out due to policy or financial issues. The only times I haven’t been miserable this past year were when I was too busy doing contract work to notice how miserable I was. In other words, I was overdue for some awesomeness. I wouldn’t have minded a lesser amount of whee! at an earlier date, though.

I don’t have any details yet about when I’m moving and how I’m going to pretend to be a nice person in order to make new friends but I should have news on the former later this week. All this, and I haven’t been to Kelowna since I was a kid and I liked Penticton better.

There’s not much to talk about these days, as night school and looking for work are pretty dull topics, and I haven’t seen the new Star Trek yet. So here’s a glimpse into what life’s like in my apartment, i.e., the constant cat on the lap.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it was a tragedy at a football (soccer) stadium in Sheffield, England where, due to bad crowd control, 96 people were crushed to death. By the crowd.

The whole story boggles my mind, even now. I remember when it happened, because both my dad and stepdad were football fans and I was often forced to watch matches on Saturday mornings when I really would’ve preferred cartoons. I remember Dad asking me about it, too, the next time I was at his place. And I remember it never really made sense.

While I recall watching video footage of the crowd pushing onto the field, and of a few people being pulled up out of the crush by people hanging over the upper stands, my 11-year-old brain was confused. People die from being hit by other people. Or being shot by other people. Or by falling. They don’t die from being squished, right? Nobody dies of too many people around you.

I’ve always tended to push out of my head things that were beyond my comprehension, and due to the lack of further news coverage at home I compartmentalized the memory to just images from the TV and the connection to Dad’s family (he grew up in Sheffield) and erased the bit about the deaths. I think it was only a few years ago, maybe even when looking it up on Wikipedia, that I relearned the specifics.

What I didn’t know, until today, was about the aftermath, how the Sun newspaper originally blamed Liverpool hooliganism for the deaths, and how much the police screwed up that day but nobody was made accountable (to any satisfying degree) for the tragedy. “Justice for the 96″. After 20 years, you’d think people would’ve been granted closure.

But, going back to the cause of death, I still don’t get it. I do, but I don’t. What an inhuman way to die, by the crush of a crowd of regular people, fellow sports fans, pushing against you, none of them with angry or violent intentions towards you or anyone around you. The SPCA shuts down farms for putting animals in these conditions.

Today is also the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs, so I hope my friends who go to the Canucks games (may there be many) will appreciate that good stadium design and crowd management is helping keep them safe, because otherwise we’d never give it a second thought. Maybe we should.

I’ve been doing some database work for CBC Radio* since last fall, so I’ve spoken to a bunch of its producers over email and phone. I wanted to email my condolences, but it’s not really my place, nor do I know if any of them were directly or indirectly affected by layoffs. Or maybe the emails would bounce right back, which is a scarier possibility.

Because I am a lazy bastard who can’t do more than one thing at a time, I haven’t billed them yet for the work I’ve done this year, but this week seems like a bad time to do it. I wish I were rich enough to just donate that time to them, because I’ve been ridiculously proud to say to people that I’ve done work for the CBC. Surely this makes me extra-Canadian?

My love for Canadian content has grown since the CBC started publishing their podcasts a few years ago. If you’d told me before this that I, as an atheist, would be deliberately listening to a podcast about religion and spirituality on a weekly basis, I would have denied any chance of that ever happening.

And they put out all the great indie music from Radio 3, and the science news at Quirks and Quarks (Bob McDonald is my hero: Wonderstruck was one of my favourite shows as a kid). Vinyl Cafe was the podcast I most looked forward to, though despite the infinite awesomeness of Stuart McLean, I find myself liking other CBC programs more. I really had no idea our radio was this good.

Have any of you seen Being Erica on Wednesdays on CBCTV? It’s actually good! I know, I was surprised too. Let’s hope they don’t prematurely cancel it like they did jPod.

I know we’re entering a Depression and things have to change, but it saddens me to think what we’re losing in our arts and national identity with cuts to our crown corporation. The CBC is just so Canadian, if for no other reason than it is capable of laughing at itself:

(Thanks to my friend Mel for the link). If you’re confused, it’s a comedian and a news anchor pretending to be the other person. I wish I still had access to the great parodies This Hour has made of Stuart McLean, they were priceless too.

*In case you ask, no, I can’t take over CBC Radio via their databases. Other friends already asked, and so far my answers have disappointed them.