I have been particularly bad about updating the blog, but I had my reasons. Two weeks ago, I was gone almost the entire week for a business trip. In fact, I had to leave Sunday evening because the main reason for going was to drop in on the TransLink model users' group, which was Monday morning out in Vancouver! I also really wanted to see Shakespeare Bash'd do their staged reading of Knight of the Burning Pestle. So I pushed to get one of the latest flights that I could, which I think was 10 pm. If the reading had been just a bit shorter or the Dundas streetcar ran a bit more on time, I might actually have run into MOCA, though I'm sure I'll have other opportunities before the new group show closes.
As it turned out, I had a lot of time to kill at Pearson, so I worked a bit on a bid for the new transit vision for Surrey and eventually read a bit. It was a game-time decision, but I took Nicholas Nickelby instead of Oliver Twist, in part because Oliver is somewhat shorter, and I thought it might be more likely I could just read that as part of my regular reading (and didn't need the boost of a long train or plane ride). It might be just as well I did bring that for reasons I'll get into a bit later.* However, I really read very light on any of the plane rides, except for Tues. afternoon when I went off to SFO. All the other times, I did my best to sleep on the plane. I wouldn't say it was a wasted opportunity, but I just hadn't expected it to play out that way.
I got to Vancouver just after midnight, but it took forever to get off the plane and then get my luggage from the belt. I decided not to risk running over to the Canada Line, since the last train was around 1 am. I took a 5 minute cab ride to the hotel and crashed. I think in the end, I left around 6:45 to try to get out to Sapperton (in New Westminster) by 8:30. I actually had to take everything with me, since I was going to transfer to a downtown hotel after work.
The meeting went well, and I saw a lot of consultants I used to work with, though nearly all the modelling team joined since I left TransLink. I actually managed to eat lunch with them. Then I had a meeting at 3. It took a very long time to get the wifi working, since in fact it was a largely virtual meeting. Then I hung around for another hour or so, and met a former work colleague, since we were going to have dinner together downtown. (I may have already mentioned that the weather was pretty overcast and in fact rained on and off all day. Given that the eclipse wasn't going to be that special in Vancouver, no one bothered to go out to see it. I was really sad to hear that the weather didn't cooperate much in Toronto either, and in fact the sky cleared up after the eclipse was over, though at least it got really dark and eerie. Just in general, Toronto weather never cooperates for anything like this, though the partial eclipse in 2017 was an exception...)
Tues. I went over to the company offices, and I had a few phone calls to deal with. I gave a lunch and learn on post-COVID forecasting. Four people from TransLink showed up in person, and quite a number were on-line. Then 3 of them were able to grab coffee afterwards, and we chatted about scenario forecasting and their new survey. The weather was much nicer, and I took the Sea Bus over to North Vancouver and had dinner there.
Wed. I had a morning meeting quite close to the office, and then a 11:15 meeting at Metrotown in Burnaby. I was a little early, so I just went a bit further on the Sky Train and took photos and videos of the view. I do miss the views from Vancouver, which are among the best I've ever experienced.
The second meeting also went well, then I had lunch in Metrotown. While a lot of restaurants had changed, there was still a fast-food Indian place. It was good, though certainly much spicier than I remembered!
I had the rest of the afternoon free, so I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Most of it wasn't all that interesting, though the had recently rehung a bunch of Emily Carr paintings.
I still had some time, so I went into the Bill Reid Gallery for the first time. It's pretty small but focused on his art, as well as rotating through other First Nations artists.
Then I went over to catch the Amtrak down to Seattle. It wasn't a bad trip, though it definitely shouldn't take as long as it does. I managed to finish up a shortish novel (Paradise Travel by Jorge Franco). In general, I was reading a lot more of The Decameron and very little Dickens, but I did want to see if I could just leave this somewhere in Seattle, which I did in the end.
Seattle was a bit more frantic. I ended up meeting two mobility data reps and someone in our Seattle office. Then I met up with my brother for an extended lunch at Spice King (an Indian place). Then I went over to the Seattle Art Museum. I was moderately excited that I had a second chance to see Jaune Quick-to-See Smith after seeing this massive retrospective at the Whitney last year. It's possible that some pieces were left out, but this felt a bit easier to get through in one pass.
I think the exhibit only runs through mid May, so definitely check it out if you are near Seattle. They also had a pretty nice Calder exhibit running as well. I was a bit surprised that they didn't have any Mark Tobey on display. I think this is the first time since I've started visiting that they didn't have anything of his on view.
After the museum, I went over to the Target, which is basically next door. Had I realized that everything over at Pike's Place Market shut down at 5 sharp, I would probably have rearranged my visit slightly. I was a bit bummed that I didn't get a chance to look at any of the used book stores in the market (not that I had much space left in my bag!) and essentially all the restaurants closed up as well. In the end, I found another Indian place, which was fine, but I would have preferred Thai or Chinese, since I had had Indian twice before in as many days! After dinner, I grabbed my bag from the hotel and headed over to the airport. The flight from Seattle to Detroit was uneventful, but in Detroit there was some issue with the plane and we got in an hour late. At least customs was a breeze. In an ideal world, I would have just taken the day off, but I had some work to do and to conduct a hiring interview. Then I was seeing a concert at Roy Thompson Hall (a combination of The Four Seasons and The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires). It was nice, but I was pretty tired and glad to get home and rest a bit.
In general the weekend was quite busy. Sat. I saw a matinee performance of George Brown's production of As You Like It, then worked on taxes some more, then saw Shaniqua in Abstraction at Crow's Theatre. (I wasn't that crazy about Shaniqua unfortunately.) Then I did more taxes after I got home. Sunday I met a friend to see El Terremoto at Tarragon, then wrapped up the evening with Lucas Hnath's A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney. I really hadn't planned on seeing this, but I had to move the date from the middle of the next week to that weekend. It was definitely interesting, and they made Walt to be a right bastard. One super annoying thing on Sunday was that it appears my printer has died, which then made filing taxes extra complicated. I had to file the US taxes after work on Monday, instead of around lunch time which had been my original plan. This is by far the latest I have filed them, but I just wasn't able to wrap them up between all the travel and waiting around on some critical documents from my bank. Oh well. Hopefully, next year will be better. For the Canadian taxes, my wife's are ready to go, and I am planning on wrapping my up this evening.
Monday was a relatively normal day, but Tuesday, I flew off midday to San Francisco. Again, I got there far too early, and I mostly used the spare time to read. I had actually managed to get halfway through The Decameron by this point. Sadly, the flight was fairly delayed, and I had a small child behind me kicking my seat on a regular basis and an infant up in front that was crying a lot. And we had turbulence for about 3 hours out of a 5.5 hour flight, so people were pretty cranky about not being able to get to the washrooms. I was supposed to get there before a group of people flying in from Vancouver, but in the end I help them up for close to an hour, which was stressful all the way around.
We actually ran into SF for dinner, which was probably wise as there was nothing to eat in San Ramon that late in the evening. Then we had two days of work, which aren't particularly interesting, aside from a very interesting opportunity that may manifest in LA. (More on that at a more appropriate time.) I was able to run by SF MOMA on Thurs. Someone in San Ramon office was able to just drop me off at the hotel on his way home. I was able to see almost the entire museum. However, I couldn't get tickets to Yayoi Kusama's Infinite Love for Thurs. I decided to shuffle Friday's agenda and go to SF MOMA first (instead of the Legion of Honor). SF MOMA doesn't open until 10 am, however. I ended up getting a Muni 1-day pass and took the cable car back and forth a bit, then went over to SFMOMA. I managed to get a timed ticket for Infinite Love at 11. I looked at a few rooms that I had hit too quickly on Thurs. Infinite Love is pretty neat, especially the second room. I've seen some of her infinity rooms before of course, but it was still worth it, especially the second room even though you don't get more than 2 minutes in each room!
If I had been just a bit quicker on the draw, I would have gotten a great photo from outside the Infinity Room before the door shut. C'est dommage.
Then I took the bus way out west to the Legion of Honor. In addition to some pretty interesting paintings in the permanent collection, they have a special exhibit called Japanese Prints in Transition.
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| Gustave Caillebotte, Sunflowers along the Seine, ca. 1885-86 |
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| Masami Teraoka, 31 Flavors Invading Japan/French Vanilla, 1979 |
I was a bit ahead of schedule, in part because I managed to catch the 18 bus down the hill. So I went down to Fulton and then into the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. I didn't pay for the special exhibit this time. Unfortunately, my phone battery completely died, so I didn't manage to take any photos. I probably would have taken 10-15. Oh well. The ones that I cared the most about are in the books about the de Young that I own, but it is probably just as well that their Stuart Davis was not on view at the moment, as that would have been terribly aggravating (to not take a photo of it).
Because the phone died, I had to retrieve my charger from my luggage (in order to prove I was a member of the AGO with reciprocal privileges) instead of going straight on to the Asian Art Museum. Well, I also hadn't had any lunch, so I grabbed a sandwich at a French bistro. This meant that in the end, I got to the Asian Art Museum at 4:15 instead of 3:45 or so. So I did see the Asian Art Museum, but it was a pretty rushed visit. Fortunately, I have been there a couple of times before and a lot of it seemed pretty similar to previous visits. I did snap a photo of Ganesh, as is my habit.
After all this, I didn't feel like walking around with my luggage, so I just caught the BART to SFO. It was a good if somewhat overstuffed day trip. Again, I had too much time at the airport, though security wasn't as much of a breeze this time around. The trip back only takes about 4.5 hours, but I was in the same row as an infant. The baby was fine for the first two hours, but then was fussy and crying most of the last 2+ hours, and then as we descended another young child across the aisle started crying. So not an ideal flight, but still better than the flight to San Francisco.
I got through Customs and came straight home. I actually had to go back way out west to the Theatre Centre to see Mad Madge, which is all about Margaret Cavendish, who was a female author during the English Restoration. They did take quite a few liberties with her life, but it was quite entertaining. I also managed to see the cherry blossoms at Robarts, which I generally prefer to making the trek out to High Park.
Then the day ended with a concert by Oumou Sangare. This was quite a nice concert, very upbeat. She managed to get the whole audience to their feet by the end, which is no small feat at Koerner Hall!
I had planned to go over to Hamilton to see Lobby Hero, but I was just worn out with all the travel.** I ended up going to the gym (late) and getting groceries instead. No Frills officially closed on Sat. (due to the Ontario Line construction), which is incredibly sad and inconvenient for us. So I will have to work extra hard to combine trips over the bridge with shopping at Food Basics. The rest of the day was spent cleaning up computer files and working on taxes (and blogging...).
Edit (04/28): I completely dropped the thread on The Decameron. I did wrap it up at the end of second trip, though I cannot remember if I literally finished it on the UP Express trip back from Pearson or later that day. This is actually my second time through it! I had forgotten just how bawdy some of the stories are, including a story that starts out as a wife-swapping escapade that ends in a happy, open marriage! There is even a story (or two) about homosexual acts that doesn't end in eternal damnation. I do think it is somewhat unfortunate that the final story is Patient Griselda, which is also retold in Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale and then recast again in Shakespeare's The Winter Tale. It's basically about a young woman, elevated from peasant status to become a lord's wife. The lord then tests her patience (& virtues) by taking away her children and saying they had been murdered, but she continues to submit to his whims and then everything works out in the end. Margaret Atwood was so bothered by this story that she wrote Impatient Griselda, where the perverse lord is murdered (by aliens perhaps) and then people live happily ever after. Anyway, it is not a particularly uplifting story... But I am through it (again). On to Shteyngart!
* I see that I dropped this thread. Basically, I agreed to gatecheck my bag on the way back, and it rained and I guess they left the bag on the tarmac or something, and Nicholas Nickleby got a bit water-damaged. I'll still be able to read it, but it's going straight to the Little Free Library as soon as I finish it. (Probably better that than Oliver Twist, though the odds I will ever read Oliver Twist twice are next to nil!) Maybe the next time I read a big chunk of NN will be on the trip out to Hamilton.
** It actually runs two more weeks, and I may go the last weekend, especially if I can spend most of the day at the Hamilton Library looking into some poetry books that are in their collection and not in TPL or Robarts! So that's my tentative plan at the moment, but it may get derailed.
