shinnen akemashite omedetou gozaimasu
I know. I’m a bit late, but it’s been a busy year so far.
January 1 found me at PDX booked on a cancelled flight. Since I was going to miss my connection home and then probably miss my flight the next day, I managed to rebook everything so I could fly to Vancouver directly from Portland.
Then I realized my passport was in Sacramento.
My mom was kind enough to go to my house, pick up my passport and air freight it to me at 5:00 in the morning on the day of my flight. She called me from the air cargo office in Sacramento to give me the waybill number and I fumbled in the darkness as I was writing it down.
I went to the PDX Alaska Air Cargo office the following morning. There was one person ahead of me so I was hopeful that it wouldn’t take too long. I gave the woman at the counter my name and told her that if my package wasn’t under my name that it would be under “Sacramento Taiko Dan” because that’s my known shipper account name.
This cranky woman then tells me that there is no package there consigned to me and that there were no packages even on the first flight from Sacramento to Portland. I give her the waybill number that I wrote down and she tells me it’s useless.
I leave the office, dumbfounded, but I also grab a brochure and call corporate. The person on the other end of the line tells me that a passport was sent on the first flight, that it had arrived and been consigned to a Horizon Air Employee and should just be sitting in the office, and that I had missed one number for the waybill and had a zero where there should have been a 6 on one of the digits. Passports are shipped with special designation and are somewhat easier to track and so the receiving office should have no problem finding the package.
Heh.
I go back into the office. The woman who had “un-helped” me initially was no longer at the counter and another guy eventually comes up and offers to help the lone kid working the counter at this point. First thing the new guys says to me is, “Oh yeah. We got a passport in this morning.”
He pulls the files up, prints out the stuff I need and we go through the door and there is a big box waiting just for me.
Why the first woman was so very unhelpful is beyond me. I am still pretty well gobsmacked about it.
Anyway. I did manage to catch my flight after all that (it was a bit of a close call, but it all worked out ok). Then I got to experience the continuing saga of the Vancouver Snowpocalypse. Predicted light flurries and rain turned out to be 6cm of steady snowfall. It was beautiful, but crazy. The main roads had been cleared, for the most part, but a lot of transit was out of commission, even by the time I got there.
Thankfully I still got some time to practice with Eileen and Leslie and also to see a few friends before heading over to Victoria. Thanks to Leslie and her amazing 4×4 subaru, I made it to Tsawwassen for the 11:00 sailing of the Spirit of British Columbia and had a beautiful, smooth ride over to Victoria for my workshop with Uminari Taiko.
There was a quick lunch at The Roost (theroostfarmbakery.ca/about_us.htm).
Gayle Nye, whose son happens to work in the kitchen there, recommended the meatloaf sandwich, so I had that and some tomato basil soup. All very fresh and tasty.
The workshop went well, although 4 hours simply was not enough time (!), and then we all went to Futaba for dinner.
This restaurant is one of the few Japanese restaurants around that offers genmai as an alterntive to white rice with dinner, and they had a number of vegetarian options. I got the beef sukiyaki, though. It was cold and rainy and perfect weather for it. I regret that I didn’t have a chance to get to Posh this time around, but maybe in February.
If everything works out, Joadiako will be in the Cultural Olympiad concert at the QET on February 12. That should be a bit of fun.
Meanwhile I am home and getting ready to head to Moab. There will be Crestone folks attending this year, and I’m not sure who else. This should be a bit of fun, too.
The sun is shining here in Sacramento. It’s a beautiful day and I am happy to be home.