Back from Vancouver

I spent pretty close to three full days at the Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) conference, though in fact I got there midway through Monday.  I met a lot of people; while many of them I had known or worked with previously, I did make a few useful new contacts.  I had stayed through Thurs., hoping to spend more time with TransLink staff, but really so few people are coming to the office these days that it is just as easy to do this through MS Teams.  I was able to sit in on a meeting of the TransLink modellers on Tues.  So Thurs., I worked out of my firm's Vancouver office, though I did have a meeting with a subconsultant who is based in Vancouver.  All in all, I probably could have arranged to go back Thurs. morning.

Downtown Vancouver hasn't changed too much from how I remember it.  From what I gather, the Downtown East Side is quite a bit worse.  I didn't head over that way.  On Wed. evening, I did skirt Chinatown a bit, as I was meeting up with a friend for dinner at an Indian place on Main.  It's not a part of town I was ever in a lot, though I did visit the Sun Yat-Sen Garden a couple of times while I lived in Vancouver.  We had a long discussion about how things had changed at TransLink, though we actually covered some of this ground on my last trip to Vancouver in April.  We mostly talked about books.  I handed over Cela's The Hive and O'Brien's August is a Wicked Month.  I also passed along The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers, which I had abandoned as I was nearing the halfway mark.  I just found this so pretentious, even if it was sort of low-key pretentious.  I think the passage that did me in is when one of the older biochemists is explaining the history of classical music to another one, as if the long passages about unraveling the structure of DNA and the mysteries of Guanine (G) and Thymine (T) weren't enough.  Also, I wasn't convinced that the minor plot variations needed to hit 32 (to ape Goldberg) or that this novel really needed to stretch out to this length; 250-300 pages would have been fine.  While Stoppard's Arcadia came along a couple of years later, it just does this two love stories in two different time periods so much better.  I glanced through some Goodreads comments.  While most people who stuck it out thought this was a masterpiece, there was some dissent, including someone who said that Powers decided to squeeze in some absurd thriller-like plot at the very end.  I was almost intrigued enough to read ahead but decided I would be better off moving on.  So far I'm really enjoying The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams, and incidentally I am also near the halfway mark. 

I could have wrapped this novel on the red-eye flight back from Vancouver but decided I needed sleep better, so I only read up until the point where they handed out the snacks and drinks, and then I crashed.   (I think the fact that I only managed to get through 100 pages on the Stratford bus and then another 150 pages after 8 or so hours while in transit to Vancouver made it pretty clear that I was just not into The Gold Bug Variations!)  Friday, I pushed through a full day of work, though I was pretty tired (and am still feeling it a bit).  I should wrap up The Quick and the Dead this weekend and likely Waugh's The Loved One as well. 

I don't have a lot planned for this weekend, though I am about to head over to the gym.  I might spend some time working on the deck, and I will also try to swim on Sunday as well as get over to Word on the Street (which should be at Queens Park) and then I have tickets to a Tafelmusik matinee.