I mean, it was Mother's Day and I'm a Mother so on my day, things ought to go a bit right. We began the day by getting an early start in order to get on the 10:20 a.m. ferry to come back to Point Roberts from the Sunshine Coast. It seemed likely that the major Mother's Day traffic would come after lunch, at which point all the Mothers would have been fed. A 10:20 ferry would be safe even if the Mothers were all going to brunch.
Alas, although we were there in plenty of time, other people were there in even more plenty and we were Car #7 not to get on the ferry. (Is it worse to be Car #1 not to get on the ferry? We've been that car once before and it surely seems worse. But it really doesn't make sense: after all, #1 or #7, you're all still not on the ferry.) And where you are instead is hanging around the ferry terminal parking lot for a couple of hours, which is pretty much like hanging around any other parking lot for a couple of hours. Cold in cold weather, hot in hot weather, but yesterday was just medium, so there's that in its favor, but there's really nothing else in its favor.
After the two hour wait, we entered the 12:30 ferry satisfactorily. And drove the long route around Vancouver. Somewhere down hear Marine and Argyle, we were stopped at a stop light to make a right turn onto Marine. And, we looked and all that and made an appropriate right-on-a-red-turn. Except that two teen-age boys who couldn't see around the corner made an sudden angled run into the pedestrian crosswalk just as we turned. They couldn't see us, we couldn't see them... until we made the turn. Of course we could both have seen one another had they entered the pedestrian crossing from the corner, but there we all were. We weren't going all that fast, of course, but Ed made a very quick stop, which resulted in the three12-foot boards which were tied to the roof rack making a sudden forward exit, so to speak, landing immediately in front of the car in the street.
The boys run off across Marine, I jump out of the car and try to wrestle the three boards on to the side of Marine (with the help of a gracious young woman pedestrian), while Ed tries to get the car backed on to the side of Argyle, since he can't turn because the woman, the boards, and I are right in front of him. And he's got cars behind him. Oh, yikes! It was just a quick adrenaline rush, but it could have been dreadful and if that woman had not helped me with the boards, it would have been worse. And Ed hopes that those boys' mothers are reading this and will advise them to get their access to the pedestrian crosswalk at the corner and not ten feet into it by angling from the sidewalk past the intersection, IN THE FUTURE.
And then we got back to Point Roberts, turned on the hot water heater, and found that that precipitate action rewarded us with a collapse of the hot water heater's integrity of surface, and for the next 8 hours we were on our hands and knees, getting water off the floor and out of the carpet and out of the water heater, mostly using sponges and towels. And so those were the three great unpleasantnesses of this Mother's Mother's Day.
On the other hand, this is what the garden looked like from the kitchen window upon our return. The sight of the garden made me think that, on balance, it was a very good day.
