Nomi and Poke

This morning I left the house to go to Pilates like a good person with a healthy lifestyle, but then I phoned the Pilates studio from the car and canceled my time today and for this whole week. I need a break. I keep sleeping through it, anyway, and wasting my parents money. So I'll have a week off, and then the studio has its summer break. Two weeks free from Pilates guilt. The thought makes me want to shuffle around on the front lawn in bare feet, scrunching my toes in the grass and humming "Dixie Land".

Then I went to the bank and cashed the cheque from that Hong Kong commercial, and headed downtown to go the Vancouver Art Gallery. Art? What? No. I was going to look in the gift shop and try to spend a $25 gift certificate that's been in my wallet for months. But I stopped at Headquarter to spend $60 on art toys, instead, because I'm a sick lady. And then Burrard was blocked off at Davie by a motorcycle cop, and the traffic became nightmarish and weird, so I escaped across the Granville St Bridge.

I wanted to wash my car, because it's going in for its Volkswagen check-up on the 24th, and I don't want the people at Clarkdale to look askance at me for mistreating it. Which they will anyway, as it's covered in scratches from the bushes in our back alley and is rotting from the inside out, but no matter. At least it will be shiny. So I drove down onto 4th from the bridge and was suddenly smack in the middle of another weird traffic jam. People were leaning out of their car windows to see what was going on and some extroverted types were making perilous U-turns to get out of it, but I was satisfied with my earth-killing air conditioner and boxes of art toys to open one by one. Again, motorcycle cops seemed to be involved with whatever was happening, and there was much use of police whistles, which to me have always looked pretty funny. Like something out of Looney Tunes. But anyway.

Eventually, (this is an anti-climax), the traffic problem faded away into normal traffic, and I went to the car wash. Okay. Get this. The place I go to? The Chevron on 4th and McDonald? They've stopped putting the long-handled brushes and soapy water out in front of the drive-through wash. That means you have to rely entirely on the mechanical wash to get, for example, blackberry-filled bird crap off of your car roof, and the mechanical wash IS A FOOL. It doesn't isolate problems like that. It has no elbow grease. Why have they taken away my pre-wash ritual of scrubbing at caked-on violet bird crap? What do they want from us?

So, in closing, BOYCOTT CHEVRON. Probably for much more appalling environmental reasons as well, but mainly for taking away the special brushes and soapy water. Thank you.

And hey, look at this peach. Isn't this the greatest peach? Have you ever seen a peach like it? And it tasted so delicious. It did. I've never had a better one. I don't know where it came from, but here, on this blog, I honor it.