Friday was my birthday, rounding out our 3 week stretch of birthdays. For my birthday, Gwen got me a GPS receiver: a fancy Garmin eTrex Vista CX. We intend to use it to do geocaching and for hikes. But that’s not what I want to talk about. On Friday night, Gwen took me to see “Hockey Mom, Hockey Dad” at the Arts Club Theatre. Tammy came over to babysit for us, and brought her two cats Keji and Jack — she and The Brit are going to Mexico for a week and we agreed to look after them again. At any rate, Hockey Mom, Hockey Dad is a two-actor play starring Cailin Stadnyk and Jackson Davies (you know, Constable Constable from The Beachcombers). It was written by a Caper, Michael Melski. It’s billed as a romantic comedy.

So, the play starts with a completely unrecognizable Jackson Davies (see pic from the play, below). Mind you, he looks 30 years younger. His character, “Teddy”, is a divorced custodian with a young son playing hockey in house league. In Trail, B.C. (apparently a departure from the original). Cailin Stadnyk’s character, “Donna”, is a divorced school teacher also with a young son playing hockey in the house league, on the same team (“The Leafs”). Teddy is one of those over-bearing, over-competitive, loud-mouthed hockey dads. Donna is a meek mother who’s never been to a kid’s hockey game. Right from the start, Teddy pursues Donna, and over the next 90 minutes (yes, it’s a short play) we find out more about Donna, but not that much about Teddy. As it turns out, Donna came from an abusive relationship.

Once we find that out, the play gets uncomfortable. Frankly, Teddy comes across as the same sort of abusive personality as her ex-husband. At one point, he incites the kids not to shake hands at the end of a game and instead to start a fight. Donna is predictably aghast at this urging to use violence.

Eventually, the two feed off each other. As the play wraps up, Teddy becomes a little less extreme and Donna become a little less meek, and they live happily every after.

The acting was great: both actors were quite convincing in their roles. The writing, however, was weak. Not awful, but we’ve definitely seen better plays. If you’re considering seeing it, consider giving it a pass. We had fun, though.

As promised, here’s video from the zoo:

First let me preface this by saying that I’m typing this on a computer that has a non-functional comma key. Given my proclivity for commas this will be a challenge but bear with me.

Today we went to the zoo. It was an unusual April day: sunny and hot. Real hot. 25 degrees hot. Boy what a weird year for weather. The snow packs are at over 150% of normal and they’re talking about bringing in the military to help with sand-bagging. In the mean time those of us who don’t live live in a flood plain are enjoying the warm weather. The skiers are enjoying the continued large bases (still over 300 cm base on the local mountains!).

So we decided to go to the zoo. The one of the big draws to the Greater Vancouver Zoo is the fact that they have a train that goes around the perimeter. The animal selection is actually pretty poor and it certainly doesn’t compare to some place like the San Diego Zoo but it’s not a bad place either. It is a little bit out of the way — some 50 km from Vancouver — but for an occassional trip it’s not too bad.

After negotiating the traffic — don’t come to Vancouver without expecting a complete and utter traffic mess — and a stop at Subway for nourishment (and some gasoline: did you know that gas in Aldergrove is more than 12 ¢/litre cheaper than in the city?) we went to the zoo. Seems like several hundred other people had the same idea as the place was packed.

We worked our way through the zoo with a stop at the train station for some tickets. The next available ride was over two hours later which was a good amout of time. The plan became that we would tour the zoo and then wrap it up with the train ride.

We started with the giraffes and worked our way through the wild cats and other exotics.

And as planned after touring through we went and waited in breathless anticipation for the train…

Excited does not begin to describe the boy. He was just thrilled and literally vibrating. Once we got on the train there was lots of “The train – the train!”.

Here’s a shot of what the train looks like:

All in all it was an excellent day.  Aidan fell asleep on the uneventful ride home and we all relaxed after arriving back at the condo.

I know it’s been just a teaser — hopefully tomorrow we’ll get some videos loaded up to Youtube.

Here are two videos from musicians of my generation that prove that they “get” how the music/entertainment industries are changing:

Alanis Morrisette parodying The Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps“:
(warning: stupid “adult” lyrics, brain-worming melody/beat in the original)

The Barenaked Ladies performing “One Week” in a water closet: