Tag Archives: Victoria

A Personal Worst that’s not really a “worst” at all

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I ran the GoodLife Fitness Victoria Half Marathon today in 2:21:09, a “Personal Worst.”

I am just fine with that – it was my goal in fact, because I am feeling uninjured and wonderful and I have a medal to mark another accomplishment. I know I can go out there undertrained and in the midst of a major life change and finish a challenging distance race with a smile on my face.

That’s huge.

I know my limits and my abilities and I’m so damn thankful that I have my health. Any day above ground is a supreme gift.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

 

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Tips for commuting by float plane

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When you live on an island you have to get off it sometime. Some of us more than others, because of the nature of our jobs. I travel by float plane a lot; 2-4 times per month actually, between Victoria and Vancouver. I’ve picked up a few tricks along the way.

  • They’re loud. Wear the ear plugs. You’ll need them.
  • Better yet, get yourself a pair of good in-ear noise-cancelling headphones. That way you can listen to music or podcasts without cranking the volume to dangerous levels.
  • Fraser River Delta from the air

    Fraser River Delta from the air

    The smell of fuel gets to me, but here’s a trick: single engine, sit near the back; twin engine, sit near the front. Or is that the other way around. Anyway. Works for me. I might just be used to it by now.

  • Ladies, the pilot with your life in his hands will ask you to put your oversized purse in the back of the plane, especially if you’re sitting near an emergency exit. Be a dear, swallow your bitchiness and don’t give him any sass about it. Your shit will be all right. I promise. I don’t want to have to trip over your shit getting out if the plane ever hits the drink.
  • Get yourself an account, sign up for loyalty points and book your flights online. It’s cheaper and you get points toward free flights.
  • Don’t ever miss your flight, stay over in Vancouver, party, then catch a flight in the morning hung over. Just. Don’t. (Ahem, this one was told to me by a friend. I swear.)
  • During the flight, you can look all you want for whales in the ocean below. I’ve never seen any though. :(
  • Look up instead. You never, ever get tired of the view, especially in summer.

    songhees from sea plane

    The Songhees from the seaplane (Victoria BC)

  • In winter or during peak periods when it’s busy, don’t be late for check in. They will sell your seat to a standby passenger. I’ve seen it happen a couple of times.
  • About flying in winter: sure we don’t get snow, but we do get wind and fog and low clouds. And wind. If you love rollercoasters, you’ll love flying float planes in winter. Did I say wind?
  • Better yet, if you fly a lot in winter and get air sick easily, and you’re made of money or have time, you could always take a helicopter or the ferry.

 

 

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Wordless Wednesday: Wannabe

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Poet performing

...a poet

 

Runner

...fast.

Vancouver Science World

...here.

Old couple walking hand-in-hand

..them.

 

 

The photo of me running is at the finish line of the Hatley Castle 8k, February 20, 2011, by Christopher Mackay. All rights reserved.

The other photos are by me and are Creative Commons licensed. Feel free to reuse and share, and credit me accordingly with a link back to here.

 

 

 

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Vancouver je t’aime

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I’m quite attached to Greater Victoria.

But I’m in love with Vancouver.

I have been since I moved to the west coast over five years ago.

It’s beautiful, it’s vibrant, it’s liveable, it’s diverse, it’s world-class. I count only once since I moved here that I’ve cursed Vancouver traffic. I’m sure more local people do that quite often, but that’s because they don’t have to commute in New York City, Mexico City, Los Angeles or even Seattle. We really do have a gem here.

When I got my job a year and a half ago it was with the full realization that although BCcampus’s head office is in Vancouver, I could continue to live in Victoria. We’ve made the arrangement work, but it’s about time I made the move to the mainland.

C'mon Vancouver, I'm going to give you a BIG HUG!

For one, being a strategic communications professional is ideal when you have ongoing, direct access to the management team. Skype helps, phone calls help, and I’ve been over there frequently for meetings and conferences. However, nothing can replace daily face-to-face contact with the people with whom you work most closely, and I’m missing those interactions. I am highly effective (I’m sure my colleagues would agree), but I could be even more effective based in Vancouver.

Our biggest stakeholders are based in the lower mainland too. Not only that but Greater Vancouver is a central hub for post-secondary institutions whether they’re based in the interior or in northern B.C. It’s more efficient to give service to province-wide stakeholders when you don’t have to get off an Island all the time. Example: the first time I met in real life some people with whom I’d been working for months from University of Victoria, Royal Roads and Vancouver Island University was at a meeting in Vancouver!

An important drawback to being a distributed worker: the isolation. Some people deal with it better than others, but I need people around me. I’m enough of a hermit as is (for instance I’ve spent most of this weekend reading) I don’t need to compound it by shutting myself up in my home. Some other client service managers were having similar issues, so we reconfigured the Victoria office to accommodate more work spaces several months ago. Now I have two official workspaces (in Victoria and Vancouver) rather than three (+one at home).

In reality, I can work from anywhere. I even worked four days from New Brunswick this summer. However, over the day-to-day, the long haul, nothing says “I belong” like having a base of operations with the rest of my team.

Frequent travel gets wearying after a while, and it is a time-sucker: both mine and the organization’s. (And I don’t even do it that much really; I know people who travel world-wide hundreds of days per year. Ack!) Although we keep travel down to a manageable, cost-effective level, it takes time to get over there and back. I’ve missed some valuable face-time with colleagues AND friends and family, not to mention the Wednesday night runs with the training clinic. Too much productive work time is spent making travel arrangements, filling out expense forms and waiting for ferries and flights.

But it all comes down to this: Victoria is paradise, but Vancouver is alive. Let’s face it, the final reason for relocating is: I have a better chance of improving my romantic prospects there.

I’m excited to finally be making plans to move there within the next few months. Stay tuned for details on my farewell bash.

 

Photo of me at the 28k mark of the 2011 BMO Vancouver Marathon,
by Christopher Mackay.

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Cookies Across the Nation

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By Tori Klassen, with contributions from Chris Mackay.

As far as we can tell, although we can’t be absolutely certain now, this was the Tweet that started it off, on October 3, 2010:

“@ToriKlassen True! @Unmarketing ‘When you’re new to Twitter it’s pretty lonely.’—Until you start getting into the conversations.”

Tori was at the Social Media Camp in Victoria, British Columbia where Scott Stratten (@Unmarketing) was a keynote speaker. The post (plus a couple of others) was retweeted by CBC tech journalist Theresa Lalonde (@TheresaLaLonde) who was also at the conference.

One of Theresa’s Twitter followers was Chris Mackay (@cbmackay), sitting in his office working in Sackville, New Brunswick that day.

He noticed Tori’s clever way with words. Then her smile, as represented in her Twitter avatar. Nah, who are we kidding, it was the other way around: he noticed her smile first! He started following her on Twitter. Tori noticed Chris started following her, and followed him back.

Chris’s Twitter bio consisted of only two words: “Skeptical Primate” (he has since doubled its word-count to “Skeptical primate is skeptical”). From this, and from reading his blog, Tori knew Chris was of like mind when it came to religious views: we’re both atheists. Also, she thought he might be handsome, despite the fact that his avatar expression looked a little serious. Those intense blue eyes drew her in. She kinda hoped he was single, even if he did live in Sackville.

Which is in New Brunswick – completely on the other side of the continent – on the east coast.

“Logistics can be complicated. Wanting to be together isn’t. We’ll sort it all out. Whatever that means.” Chris wrote in an email later on. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We just started to – you know – converse. Twitter-style. Chris is funny and smart. Tori is funny and smart. Chris posts pictures of his cute animals. Tori likes cute animals. Tori read articles that Chris retweeted. Vice versa. Chris said he liked to run. Tori added him to her Running list, and her Running Daily Twitter publication. Chris thought this was hilarious because he had never run outside before, nor has he run a race while Tori had run a marathon the previous year after several half marathons.

One day in late October or early November, Chris posted that he was helping his parents move. Two weeks later, he was still posting that he was helping his parents move, oh and by the way one of his dogs got into a skunk and he was cleaning up after her.

“OMFG are you STILL helping your folks with moving? This is epic!” Tori tweeted. “You are a man who needs a cookie!” she said in a later post.

“No cookies around here,” replied Chris. “You’re just going to have to send me some.”

So she did. She baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, packed them in a little box and sent them to Chris’s office in Sackville, along with a Christmas card and her personal business card. She Tweeted about it a couple of times, with the hashtag #cookiesacrossthenation.

Her card said something like “Wow – look at me, sending cookies to someone I barely know clear across the continent!”

Chris was so impressed he baked some shortbread and sent it – not to Victoria, but to Regina, Saskatchewan, where Tori is from and where she was spending Christmas with friends and family. In fact, the package was waiting for her when she arrived, much to the puzzlement of the friends with whom she was staying.

“Oh, it’s this kind of Twitter flirtation thing going on with this guy in New Brunswick,” she explained. “What could come of it, right? I mean, really. But I’ve made a friend at least.”

By then however we were sending more Twitter direct messages to each other than public @replies. Our first messages when we got to know each other better were along the lines of: “Damn, why do you have to live so far away?”

By the time Tori got back to Victoria after Christmas, she had convinced Chris a Skype video call was in order. By Tori’s reckoning, she wanted to know if there was any chemistry between the two of them “face-to-face” before the online flirtation went any further. In her professional life, she had already hired two people via Skype, and both had turned out to be good decisions. Why wouldn’t it work the same with a romantic interest?

So we arranged a New Year’s Eve Skype date. Because of the four-hour time difference between coasts (thank goodness Chris is a night-owl!) we arranged for a short, 20-minute Skype call to say hi, toast in the new year, and get to know each other, then we were both going to watch the same movie, and compare notes later, either by more DMs or a further Skype call, if all went well.

What was the movie? Oh – something forgettable really —

We never watched it. We were on Skype for four hours.

That’s how the weekly Skype calls started. The shortest weekend date has been a bit over three hours, the longest over six. We also manage to Skype each other once or twice during the week – it’s so nice to see each other’s face. We talk and text every day, several times a day.

On Jan 6, Chris bought his plane ticket to visit the West Coast Feb 16-22nd. Tori drove all her friends crazy with a daily countdown to his arrival on Twitter and Facebook.

We were both pretty confident meeting in real life would be icing on the cake and not a letdown, but there was still a nagging little “what-if” in our minds as Feb 16 approached.

The remaining niggling “what-if” dissipated once we finally got our arms around each other at the Victoria International Airport, 11 pm or so Feb 16. We hugged for the longest time. Then, just as he said he would, Chris took Tori’s face gently in his hands and kissed her.

We met through social media, and we are more connected to each other than many people who live together are. We don’t want to live so far away from each other for long, but we haven’t made any big decisions yet. It’s only miles that are between us right now.

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Searching for peace with the Christmas season

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Don’t even talk to me about Christmas decorations, Christmas music and Christmas parties before Novemer 25th. I’ve been feeling blows to the head by the holiday behemoth since before Remembrance Day and I’m already tired of it.

It’s expensive, it’s fraught with expectations, how-tos, obligatory receptions, parties, gift-giving, specialized appetizers, too much booze and fake cheeriness.

Bah humbug.

No really – it is a great big commercial free-for-all, the one time of the year when our self-control (in spending and eating) and discipline (in getting exercise and taking care of our inner selves) is challenged. Big time.

I know some people just love Christmas (er – the holidays…) and I say good for them. I’ll gladly attend at least some of their parties and have a good time. I’m grateful for their hospitality and the fellowship it affords. I’m not averse to connecting with loved ones and having fun.

However, for me this is the most stressful time of year. I take consolation in the fact that I’m not alone (but contrary to popular belief, there is no spike in suicides this time of year).

I’m worried I am expected to return the hospitality and I just don’t work that way. For me, as a single gal prone to depression, the holidays are a minefield I must navigate. As a person who’s got three children, one grandchild, too much debt and one income, it’s difficult and exhausting to live up to the seasonal expectations.

In previous years I had an automatic Christmas fund savings plan set up at work, but then I changed jobs in March. Had I only read this article in July – “just a little bit of forethought right now can save you a ton of time, effort, cost, and heartache this December,” and worked through this holiday tracking sheet. I pride myself on being organized – but unfortunately I wasn’t that prescient this year

It’s not just the expense, it’s the stress of not living up to the big happy family myth. I stopped visiting my parental units at holiday time years ago – why deal with family drama when it’s cheaper and easier to get together at a less stressful time of year?

In fact, there is a picture somewhere in my mother’s possession of a 12-year-old Tori on Christmas morning curled up in my new beanbag chair with a new book, completely oblivious to everything else going on around me.

Truthfully, I’d rather just hole up somewhere by myself, read a book by a fireplace, pump Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata through my iTunes to my heart’s content for a couple of weeks until it all blows over.

So I’m of two minds about going back home to Saskatchewan for the holidays this year. the best part: I get to see my grandson! Besides, the timing seems convenient – it’s the time of year when work slows down, school is out and nearly everyone takes off anyway.

On the other hand – I’m anxious about it. I’ll travel on the busiest airline day of the year, navigate Regina streets in the middle of winter, compete with a large “coodle” of Grandmas and Grandpas surrounding little Oliver that includes two ex-husbands. Yes two – they’re both, along with their Significant Others, very involved in my children’s lives, and then there’s my daughter’s husband’s family. It’s a good thing for my daughter and grandchild and we all get along great. But still – there’s a reason I’m not married to these men anymore, right?

That’s a a lot going on for someone who would rather curl up with a book and enjoy the quiet in the midst of chaos. Maybe I will get that Kindle for Christmas after all … and whatever happened to that beanbag chair?

Sometime between now and Dec 23, I’ll have to reach some kind of detente with Christmas, at least for this year.

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“Terrified” Christmas photo by Rumpleteaser; “Christmas Story” leg lamp photo by Kevin Dooley, both licensed under Creative Commons.

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Old hymns and bagpipes, and where’s the peace?

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I don’t know what to write about this morning’s Remembrance Day service that I haven’t covered already in my previous post. I’m ashamed to say it was my first one in a few years, first one since I moved to Victoria. All I have are scattered impressions and a couple of photographs, so I’ll share them randomly.

My daughter’s young man is a fourth-year cadet aiming to join the army, and I’m not sure how I feel about that because she seems to really like him and I know loving a man in a uniform leads to all sorts of complications besides the usual ones. Currently The Regiment he is attached to has members serving on combat operations in Afghanistan.

Bagpipes always make me cry.

During the ceremony we stood near a decorated Air Force officer. She was so tiny her medals hardly fit across the breast of her uniform. I wanted to know more about her. I’m sorry I didn’t have the kajones to introduce myself and ask.

People should probably not bring excitable dogs to a place where there’s going to be a 21-gun salute.

I really detest “Onward Christian Soldiers,” even when in the context of a Remembrance Day Ceremony. Even when I believed in Jesus, that hymn seemed just — wrong. I wasn’t the only one; the church choir I sang in for years resisted it as well.

You can really tell Victoria is a navy town. Either that or a lot more people show up to outside ceremonies here because the weather’s better than in Saskatchewan where I came from.

There are no WWI veterans left. There are few WWII veterans left either. I did, however see several blue berets and UN jackets.

When will all this remembering translate into true worldwide peace?

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I’m a Marythoner

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This year I’ve decided to kick my running up a notch by raising cash for the Mount St. Mary’s Hospital foundation. I’m running on the “Marythoners” team for the 8k division of the Victoria Marathon Oct 10.

As you know I run for my health and fitness (although running marathons goes way beyond just keeping healthy, but that’s a topic for another day), but I don’t want it to be all about me. One of my run leaders, Mandy, works at the Mount St. Mary’s foundation and she is passionate about her work and about Mount St. Mary’s.

I know your donation will stay right here in Victoria providing long term care for those who need it most. It will also help me take my running outside myself and into helping my community – that way we all benefit!

Please take a moment right now to pledge me online, then come out and cheer on the Marythoners!

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