System admin, marketing, business analysis in prepress

Well, if you don't know it yet, the 2010 Winter Olympics start in Vancouver tomorrow, or today by the time you are reading this. And not only does the family of Prepress Pilgrim live in Vancouver, we live right in the middle of Vancouver, like Main and King Edward, which if you Google-map, you will see we are pretty well dead-center in the middle of metro Van.

So I yanked the kids out of school this afternoon so they could watch the Olympic torch relay. At first they were so excited they could hardly contain themselves, but then they realized that watching the torch relay meant leaving the house and not playing games on the Wii. So a bribe was in order....

Umbrellas! Yes, here on the west coast, we bribe our kids with bright shiny new umbrellas. Then we take their pictures with a crappy $99 camera from Wal-Mart.

Anyhow, we make our way to Cambie Street near 19th Avenue, where the torch runner is to arrive at approximately three o'clock. We are to rendezvous with an elite battalion of youth ninjas, of which my oldest son aged 8, is a member. Of course they are disguised as:

Wolf cubs ie junior members of the boy scout organization. You see, they have to be disguised otherwise they would freak out the neighbourhood. But really, they are ninjas. Honest.

In the above picture, there is a ninja in full camouflage garb. See if you can spot her.
Anyway, we stake out a spot on the sidewalk and patiently wait. Well, the boys wait patiently but my daughter, who is training to be a supermodel, decides to put on her best impersonation of Naomi Campbell and throws a hissy fit. (No pictures taken).
Okay, so finally they close the road and my middle son can no longer play chicken with incoming SUVs. But it is the torch? No...what is it? Oh my goodness, it's... it's...

The Olympic torch relay procession sponsors!!!

Let me tell you, nothing symbolizes the games more to me than the sponsor wagon, complete with free swag. Except that I was holding on to a wailing 3 year old girl (not in picture), so I couldn't run forward and grab one of those groovy free Canada flags.

By the way, the first sponsor wagon was Coca-cola. Grab a coke and a smile. I'd like to teach the world to sing. Drink New Coke. Nobody paid me to write the last paragraph.

Now the second sponsor wagon was RBC, or Royal Bank of Canada.

Now I wouldn't say that RBC is smug or anything like that, but their new company motto is: "Yes, we are solvent because we didn't let crackheads or people on welfare take out mortgages like some *cough* American *cough* banks."
Anyhow, after the sponsors trucks moved on, they opened up the road to traffic and my middle son could start playing chicken with cars in the passenger lane again.
Finally, another procession, this time it's the real deal:

I get pumped, I tell my kids that this is once-in-a-lifetime-event. Not to be missed. And the wifey then tells me that Rachel needs to go pee. Now. Fortunately, there is a Starbucks on the other side of the street, and it's easy to jaywalk when the only cars on the road are police vehicles. Alright, we hustle over to the green mermaid, do our business, and hustle back just in time to get the snaps:

And here's a closeup:

Now we'll have two weeks of road closures and an inability to order sushi from our favorite restaurant because of the out-of-town curlers scaffing all the raw tuna (the curling rink is about 4 blocks from our house).
Wouldn't miss it for the world.

More posts to come.

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