tomkarpik.com

Free cats, explosives, festivals, and scooters! Wow!

August 31st, 2008 :: 4 comments

I’ve long run out of excuses for not posting anything, so without any further delays, this is what Aga and I have been up to …

Sophie

On June 23, we found a cat. After some brief drama, she is now our cat, and she’s the sweetest little creature evar. Full story follows:

Coming back from a walk and having just made the turn left at the SE Marine/Marine Way fork, we saw a poor cat wandering down the side of the road, looking completely lost. I pulled over, Aga went over to her, the cat tried to run, they both almost got killed by a gigantic pick-up that squealed to a halt, etc. etc. and then — mission accomplished. Operation Cat Capture succeeded.

Upon getting home, we found a tattoo in the cat’s ear, we called up the SPCA, managed to track down the animal hospital she was tattooed at, and through them, left our number for the owners to call us back at. This was on a Friday, and by Monday no one had called me back. My oh my.

I called the animal hospital again, and expressed my concerns about the responsibility of these owners, so they directed me to the Humane Society (where the cat had actually been adopted from). I left a message with them. Eventually I got a call from a woman identifying herself as the mother of the girl who owned the cat (not as a result of the H.S. call, just timing).

Picture a middle-aged, gum-chewing, white Canadian woman who sounded like the retarded offspring of Fran Drescher and Lois Griffin (if human women and cartoon women could have babies together), and you’d have a pretty good idea of who called me. She began her sentence with “Yeahhhh …” followed by “I hear you found my daughter’s cat”.

The ridiculous conversation that followed enlightened me with the following information:

a) the cat is “feral”, in the mother’s opinion, and “she keeps running away”
b) the daughter is hard to reach, as she doesn’t have a stable contact number

Holy sketcheroo, Batman! Do these people live in a trailer park?!

Meanwhile the Humane Society took interest in the case and said they’d be monitoring the situation. I learned that the cat, Sophie, had been reported walking around on the Skytrain tracks, and that she originally lived in New Westminster (and walked to SE Marine/Marine Way). I also learned that she had been missing for almost 4 weeks by the time we were at this stage of things.

One call from the daughter promising to come pick up the cat went nowhere, while a second resulted in Sophie running away an hour or two before the daughter was supposed to come get her. Thank God. Sophie came back that night and went to sleep in our room.

I called the daughter again to let her know the cat had come back, but to this day I haven’t received a response.

Doreen at the Humane Society, a truly wonderful person, clearly got as fed up as me with the whole situation, and she drafted an adoption contract with us for what she termed “adoption, but we won’t be looking for a home for her”.

Today, Sophie is our kitty. She just turned two years old, has the freedom to come and go and explore the neighbourhood all she pleases, never fails to come back every evening for cuddles from Aga, and sleeps on my desk on a $2 chair pad from IKEA. And she was born in July, thus allowing her to piggyback on Aga’s birthday.

What a feral fucking animal, eh? People are ridiculous, and most of them shouldn’t be allowed to own any pets.

Fireworks

Aga and I have had a fireworks-filled summer this year, together having done the Vancouver/North Vancouver Canada Day show, a smaller show in Victoria last week, and Aga having done the China and Finale Celebration of Light shows.

While other shows are all at a rush, rush, and then die kind of pace, Victoria was more of a chilled out kind of deal. We made good time on everything, had a nice dinner with Gosia and Elliot, partied it up a bit in our hotel rooms, etc. ;-)

Aga laughs.

MacBook Air/iPhone

I bought a MacBook Air ages ago, and I love it. I sold the MacBook Pro to Jamie at work. ‘Nuff said. I’ve been eyeing a 24″ iMac for a bit, but that’ll have to wait (more details further down).

I also lined up for an iPhone 3G on the night of July 10th. My beautiful lady joined me because she supports everything I do. Including paying more attention to the phone than to her — for a day or two.

We were second in line at the Fido store on Kingsway, and I managed to get the second out of the two 16 GB white iPhones they had in stock. Quick review? It’s the same thing as my previous 2G iPhone, except it’s more comfortable to hold, has more features, and worse battery life with 3G on. iPhones are definitely handier with a reasonably-priced data plan and GPS.

Unfortunately the 2.0 software sucks balls and requires a reboot every day or two to stay snappy. We’re at 2.0.2 now and the contact screen lag has yet to be fixed. Oh well. I have an Apple sticker on my car, what does that make me?

Both gadgets have Invisible Shield on them, which is freaking sweet, but sucks to apply.

Soundwave

We worked at Soundwave this year. Soundwave = an awesome music festival out on a beach on Vancouver Island, near Ucluelet. If you can imagine great music and amazing stages overlooking the moonlit, open ocean at night, you can imagine Soundwave.

(haha)

Or maybe not. Get off your computers.

Shambhala

Not having had enough of drugged out people and thumping music all night long, we also worked at Shambhala this year (again).

I took two weeks off work for the event, and that made everything go by in a more relaxed manner than we did last year.

The first day of driving took us into the night, where I avoided retard semi drivers passing me on the right, around curves, in torrential rain. Having survived this, we stayed at a motel in Princeton for the night, and then set off for Grand Forks at noon.

The Grand Forks Hotel has amazing perogies, so we om-nom-nom’ed a copious quantity. If you’re passing through there, do stop by and try some. The rest of the time was spent camping at Jewel Lake, playing Scrabble, and driving.

Shambhala itself was insane, as usual. Everything and everyone was there — from naked chicks, to naked guys, to guys who look like King Leonidas, to balloons filled with nitrous everywhere you look, to security guys on quads getting rammed by fucking invalids in oversized pick-ups who were promptly arrested by the RCMP.

We worked 12-14 hour shifts for 8 days, went out a couple of times, and slept. Oh wonderful sleep. I’m promising myself to take at least a day of time off next year so that I can actually PARTY at the party, but the pay is good so I can’t complain.

Aga worked at Sunshine Gate most of the time and probably greeted (and was hit on by!) a majority of the 10,000 people who entered the ranch over the duration of the event, while I got posted at one of the slowest intersections in the whole goddamn place for a while.

The last day we spent speeding around on quads, picking up supplies, and kicking out the people who were still hanging around, having completely missed the fact that everyone else had left. Yay for drugs.

Lillooet

On the way back from Shambhala we om-nom-nom’ed more perogies in Grand Forks, then drove through Osoyoos up to Kelowna, through Merritt, through Lytton, and finally to Lillooet. If Lillooet was a person, Aga would marry it.

Anyway, Lillooet really is a beautiful place, and there are no mosquitoes there — which I love! Haha. No, but seriously, it’s full of great people, and the scenery is beautiful.

There’s a jade shop across from the museum/information building run by a Daniel Boersma. Aga and I must have spent a good four hours in that shop, chatting with Dan about everything from the history of Lillooet to the geological processes that result in the formation of all the wonderful and crazy stuff he has in his shop. I love rocks! They’re so neat.

Dan is a really great guy, and I highly recommend checking out his rock museum of a shop if you happen to find yourself in Lillooet. Tell him Tom and Aga sent you.

Finally, our trip ended with a craptastic drive through Whistler’s back door by way of Highway 99. God, I’m never going that way again — the speed limits make me cry.

Scooter

Last week I bought a scooter. Sitting around at Shambhala with a lot of idle time to myself, I started thinking about how much it’s costing me a year to insure and fuel up my already fuel-efficient car, and I realized that it’s stupid. Paying $4300 a year simply to drive my car mostly to school and work is ridiculous.

Aga’s neighbour’s little Honda Jazz probably planted the seeds in my mind, because by the time we stepped foot in Vancouver I had pretty much decided I would buy a scooter.

My 2009 Aprilia SR50 is the bestest thing I’ve purchased in a long time. It’s exciting to be doing something so new and different, and I feel like a little kid when I’m on it (even though I look depressed in the photo). It looks sweet, and it gets over 100 MPG! Paying $7.50 at the pump to fill it up makes me feel so smug around all the SUV, pick-up, and V8 sedan owners who are almost in the triple digits. Lollerskates.

My partner in awesomeness has a cute pink-striped helmet, and loves it too. I won’t let her ride it yet, after she almost destroyed it in a parking lot.

That’s all for now. You can expect another post next year! :-D (Kidding)