Much ado about much: Jim & Jean go to the Olympics

The Flame!

Well we didn’t really go to the Olympics, just to Vancouver to see the sights. Inspired by a local columnist, Jack Knox, we and half of Victoria decided to do the patriotic thing and make the supreme sacrifice by going to Vancouver to wave the flag. And also like everyone else from Vancouver Island we forsook our car and took public transit. You’ve probably picked up the implication that there were a lot of us. Over the weekend (we are WAY too smart to have gone on a weekend) the foot-passenger traffic on the ferries was overwhelming, at one point leaving 600!!!! passengers behind. The ferry terminal is not an airport, no lounges, and the expectation is that most folk will have a car to sit in, which of course these people didn’t have. Some have complained that BC Ferries should have done better planning but how were they to anticipate that a) Victorians would break down and go to Vancouver and b) they would go on foot? I/we think they’ve been pretty good about putting on extra “flights” and keeping us moving. But the numbers have been staggering; keep in mind that our ferries carry upwards of 2000 passengers.

Early ferry rider

Building wraps everywhere

That was an aside, the main story being that we went yesterday, Monday Feb 22, and had a fabulous day despite the hesitation when the alarm went off at 5:00am. Thanks to the ferry website we figured out where and how to park at Swartz Bay and joined about 500 red-mittened and like minded folk for the 7:00 ferry which got us to Tsawwassen at 8:40am. We bought seats on the PCL bus which drove us off the ferry and deposited us outside the Art Gallery 45 minutes later but we also got day passes for Translink which we used all day and to get back to Tsawwassen. Another aside is that PCL and Translink send extra buses to the ferry when their agents let them know they’ve sold more than the usual number of tickets so there isn’t a wait for a bus and that all this organizing takes place on the ferry.

We spent the day just wandering and being part of the crowds and hype that has marked these games as unique and un-Canadian. We may have to redefine ourselves from reserved to über unreserved. Our first stop was to the torch at the waterfront and we can’t figure out what the complaints were about. Sure the sightlines from street level were improved by the time we got there, but it didn’t seem like the chain link fence would have been much of a problem. We thought we might go to the Mint but the line-up to see/touch the medals was two blocks long and I figure they’ll probably keep a set for their archives so we can see them later.

Outside the Mint

On TV the medals look huge! Another super long line-up was to get into The Bay (open 24 hrs till the end of the Games) for Olympic paraphernalia. Has ever a retail store/chain made such hay over an event? The marketing has been brilliant; as soon as Oprah said she wanted a pair of mittens The Bay sent her 300 for the studio audience. I really want one of the red and black checked scarves but doubt I’ll get a special delivery from HBC. And the knit sweater that I didn’t buy three weeks ago thinking they might go on sale? Forget that pipe dream.

The Bay: the building wrap and the line-up

We went to Canada House and were there when the Stanley Cup made a guest appearance, and we went to Robson Square and Robson Street where the crowd was thick and happy. There lots of police in evidence, but having fun and chatting with the throng.
Belgium has loaned Vancouver a tram that runs back and forth from the Canada Line to Granville Island for free but sadly will terminate after the Paralympics. We lined up for it and everything else but it was all good and the day was perfect.

Granville Island

Does this even look like Vancouver?

At 3:30, standing on Robson Street, we decided we were tired enough to head home (how do people stay until midnight?) figuring there wasn’t much chance of making the 5:00 ferry but we’d give it a shot. So we elbowed our way the 4 blocks to the Canada Line station, got off at Bridgeport 20 minutes later and directly onto a 620 express bus to the ferry which pulled into the terminal at 4:30. All of this detail is tedious if you don’t live in Victoria but for us it is something of a Miracle Tale because it worked! We learned this morning that, in keeping with our blissful good fortune, the decision to come home at that point was the right one. The foot traffic was huge for the next two ferries with people left behind again and that despite it being a foot crowd like we had never seen before on our ferry.

To cap off our perfect day we were in front of the TV drinking a very nice bottle of wine, thank you Mary & Sydney, in time to watch Virtue and Moir in their exquisite gold medal ice dance, which if you missed you really missed out.
And yes, I am stiff and sore after only 6 hours of walking and standing.

Robson Street

Magnolia Tree on Robson Square

Another crisis of our own making

Well ‘crisis’ might be just a titch inaccurate. It’s more like “The Little Shop of Horrors” but not musical and not all that amusing. This one is called bamboo or rather Bamboo because it demands attention and a capital letter. When we moved to this house, 8 years ago, I decreed that I did not want the typical pyramidalis hedge between our front balcony and what sometimes is a busy street. Pyramidalis is like a black hole in space, sucking the life and love out of everything in sight. We have some in the back garden and they are much bigger than I ever wanted them to be and they are BORING. It’s a functional enough tree and ubiquitous in our part of the planet, but really drab and unimaginative.

We wanted something evergreen and relatively quick growing as well as hardy enough to withstand our occasional snow events. We’d ‘done’ photinia and I was feeling a bit jaded about it despite its very good qualities because it tends to attract tent caterpillars which is a big ugh for me and it is also rather dark. “Let’s have bamboo!” says I to long-suffering Jim who has to execute my many plans. We’d had bamboo before and thought we knew the pitfalls; we love it but being of the itchy feet clan we’ve never had it for as long as eight years in one location. BTW, there are two categories of bamboo, running and clumping. “Running” bamboo does just that, rampantly romping through entire neighbourhoods and making enemies of the perfectly nice people who live in adjacent postal codes. We had learned all about running bamboo, the hard way.

year one of the hedge, circa 2003

So, we planted 7 biggish “clumping” bamboos in a contained garden bed between our driveway and the street. The variety was pretty much guaranteed to develop slowly and to top out at 16 feet in about 10 years. You would think we’d know better by now than to walk down the path of believing what the nursery tag says. There was the Miss Kim lilac, a dwarf variety that would be 4-6 feet high in 10 years (they always say 10 years). Well that little gem grew to 10 feet in about 5 minutes and eventually committed suicide when we tried to move it. Did I say ‘we’ tried to move it? That would be Jim again, not we, after I whined and snivelled for 2 years about the space the lilac was wasting. If he had only listened to me when I first wanted it taken out it would have been quite a bit smaller and oh so much less work. But I digress. 
 From the balcony, 2010

So picture this gorgeous chartreuse green hedge rustling in any breeze and looking very light and lively for the first 6 years. One of the many good features of bamboo besides that they look great, have no bugs, and self mulch, is that they only grow once a year. They are evergreen but it is only in June/July that they put up new canes so you can really see what is happening because it is all at once. I am getting to the crisis! About two years ago I began to get a bit worried watching the canes grow 12 inches a day and noticed that some of them were approaching timber size rather than the light and airy of which I am so fond. Last year, Jim’s brow began to get quite furrowed as he fought the roots shooting out one end of the ‘contained’ area, and we found shoots poking up through the concrete seams in the driveway.  Recently I asked him if the sprig of bamboo I could see sticking out of our sprinkler system shut-off box was left over from the annual pruning (I forgot to say that we have to have 3-4 feet taken off the top of the bamboo every year now to keep it below our view and our gardener told me the other day he has to bring in help and bigger equipment for next year because it has outpaced his capability!) or if it could possibly be attached to a root. Well I know you know the answer to that question!

Jim hard at it, and mountains of cut bamboo canes. Notice how I am safely indoors taking photos from the kitchen window?

Jim spent the better part of two days hacking out the compacted roots at the other end of the ‘container’, and trimming out about 1/10th of the standing canes to re-expose a row of heathers.

For $3000.00 and a year of empty dirt we can have the whole hedge removed, (the process involves backhoes and hard labour and is NOT guaranteed) but what would we plant? The canes make the absolute best trellises for sweet peas, an idea I stole from Butchart Gardens, small birds love the refuge, and our hedge is a landmark. My nephew was coming by bus from the ferry and the driver knew exactly where “the house with the bamboo” was. For free I can send Jim out on “shoot patrol” every summer to try to keep it under control (you can tell I should have been a Brigadier General or Admiral I’m so good at delegating). So for the time being the bamboo stays and as I keep saying to Jim, “we can always move”. If we find any shoots coming up inside the house, just kidding I hope, you can bet I’ll be letting you know all about it. Actually you’ll hear me screaming from here to wherever you are!

And on a completely different note, we think Chelsea Grey, Benjamin Moore, is a very nice change from the navy blue walls, not that we actually have many walls when it comes down to it.