Fish Pakoras and Fishy Behaviour

I just went out to the 7-11 for some fruit and apple juice. I always go late, in the hopes of avoiding beggars (especially beggars that want to chat as well as panhandle). Tonight, however, I was shit out of luck. Some bloody kid had parked himself right outside the store--and I do mean kid, in the literal sense. This wasn't some teenaged student from UBC or Emily Carr. This was a child. Who knows what he was doing out on a cold winter's night, with his parents nowhere in sight. You see that sort of thing all the time in this neighbourhood. Hastings Street* is only a block or two away.

Child or no, this one had the right idea, begging outside the corner store. Unless they've paid with plastic, everyone coming out of there has some change on them. So, when you walk by a beggar, you can't just shrug and say you haven't got any change, unless you want to look like a tightwad.

I've never come up with a good strategy for avoiding bums entirely, but I have managed a dodge for those awkward pre-panhandle conversations: I don't even bother putting my change back in my purse. I just hang onto it, and dump it in their hands on my way past, like a freeway driver tossing his toll in the basket. They get money and I get peace. It's a fair exchange, all around.

It was cold out there tonight, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I hate getting cold almost as much as I hate socializing with strangers in the street. I wouldn't have gone out at all if I hadn't been so thirsty. The condensation actually froze on my apple juice carton during the two-block walk home, if you'd credit it. Beggars shouldn't be out on a night like that. Nobody should. Chilblains are no-one's friend.

I think, when I get to Sweden, I'm going to start eating three meals a day again. It's too hard to do that while I'm here alone, and with so much work to do. I've only been eating when the restaurants are delivering (after five, generally speaking). I get dinner at around seven or eight, and then finish whatever I couldn't eat a few hours later. Then, I don't get any more food until the following evening. I'm always half-famished by dinner time. Yes. I'm going to start having breakfast and lunch when I get to Sweden. I'll buy some vanilla yogurt. I like that. Maybe my bird** will remember that I like it, and have some for me when I get there. That would be nice. I'll get some instant mashed potatoes, too, and some meatballs. Oh, and some of that blackcurrant juice they've got over there. I love that.

In the meantime, I'm getting thoroughly sick of restaurant food. It's all the same, after a while. My favourite Indian restaurant changed chefs, too, and now they're just awful. I ordered from them the other night, and the food was barely edible! They sent meat samosas instead of vegetable. I wouldn't ordinarily have minded, but they'd pureed the mince somehow, along with the peas and potatoes, and it had the approximate consistency of mud. It was horrible! Their pakoras tasted like fish (and they weren't fish pakoras). I ate them anyway, Hey, I was hungry. I had to eat something. I ate their cardboardy chapatis, as well. I wasn't impressed at all.

Food obsession, much? Ha, ha. While I'm on the subject, I'm going to have to buy some salt licorice gum when I get to Sweden. They don't make that here. I bought five hundred crowns' worth of it at the airport before coming back here, but I ate it all. Finished my last packet last month.

I have spent most of the day today working on compiling my video--you know, adding transitions, credits, et cetera. Another problem has arisen, predictably enough: I need to import everything into Flash, so I can add subtitles. But I can't just put .avi files into Flash. First, they have to be converted into .mov or .gif format. Doing that is more difficult than it sounds. There's almost no software that'll do it reliably, and the one thing I did find is treacle-slow. It took over half an hour to convert one 900-frame .avi to .gif format (and there are almost 30 clips to convert). The only other way I can imagine doing this is by breaking down the .avi files into .bmps, converting those to .gifs, then manually inserting them into a .gif animation program. But that would take just as long.

I can't even paint while I wait--the conversion slows down the system so much that Photoshop hangs up every two strokes.

On that note, I'm off to stare at the progress monitor on my file conversion, and pretend I'm working.

* [Footnote added in August of 2005] - Hastings Street is a notoriously bad part of Vancouver--a real slum. It's oddly placed, right next to the affluent heart of downtown. One minute you're walking past the local Versace shop, and the next, some twat in a shiny suit's trying to sell you heroin. Sometimes, the beggars from Hastings Street spread out into other parts of downtown.

** [Footnote added in August of 2005] - This is not a reference to an actual bird, but to the boyfriend I had in those days. It was my pet name for him. I was his rat, and he my bird.