scrubbedexpat091

All is well. My wife had a bad migraine and needed some pain relief, the doctor gave her something via IV and it worked and we are home now.

The interesting part was more about the waiting room, and the black lights in the washrooms, not fun on the eyes.

Shirtback

I've "met" some fascinating* people in the ER waiting room in the middle of the night, but also some very weird & downright scary ones!

* The Hasidic Jewish father with a very sick child, who spent hours soothing and keeping a very strung-out and agitated addict calm while watching over his own child was very interesting to talk to indeed. He also kept me sane!

Glad to hear you're both home & ok now.

BristolUK

I wondered if they had a name rather than the obvious one, and I thought that's maybe what you meant, but the lights I was thinking of are just blue lights after all.

bats

My car insurance has gone down $85 a month now I'm not working, stupidly I didn't think of this earlier so missed a few months.

scrubbedexpat091

Not been a good winter for the wind shield, 3rd time in less then 2 months it's been hit with a fairly large rock/gravel flying off the back of a semi.

This time a dime size damage, the rock was decent sized.

Piff Poff

Get it filled before it cracks

scrubbedexpat091

It already has a huge crack from last month when we went to the interior, hit by a rock on the Coquihalla, temp at the time as like minus 15C, and from time the rock hit to the crack maybe 10 mins, no chance at preventing that one, so the windshield was already going to be replaced.



Onto a new topic, went to Sear's today, they seem to have pretty much given up.

BristolUK

I bought this pair of chocolate bars today.

With my after dinner coffee I got through the whole of the mint one.

Best bar of choc in years.

scrubbedexpat091

There was one person in particular who was making people feel uncomfortable in the waiting room, security kept a close eye on him.

Stinkypup

Probably the ER doc..

scrubbedexpat091

The ER doctor was very nice, one of the nicest doctors I have encountered. He was a comedian as well as doctor...

New topic- One example why people in this city don't tend to use transit. (times per google maps)

trip by car- 9-10 mins

trip by transit- 29 mins + approx 15 mins to walk to bus stop = 44 mins in total.

Google puts walking the route at 62 mins, so almost easier just to walk the 6.2 km's.

caretaker

America's most popular beer, brought to you courtesy of immigrants and refugees, I love it!

BristolUK

Ooh, now that really annoys me. That sort of comparison really gets my back up but I'll let you off because you are not an annoying person...unlike some.

I can't speak for that route or the walk to the bus stop, other than to say there are possibly a lot of riders who live closer to the bus stop and consider that 29 minute ride to be a doddle if, indeed, they ride the whole journey instead of getting off at points along the way while other passengers get on at points along the way.

That's what buses do, pick people up and drop them off, something a car doesn't do, so of course it takes longer.

Lovely if you can get in the car and do door to door but how many consider that there may also be a walk involved with the car if they're not lucky enough to have parking at work and then don't include that in their personal comparison?

Back when I was working in Bristol, very few had parking at work. I don't mean my work colleagues, I mean among everyone.

The official car parks charged way in excess of the bus fare (between 3 and 10 times as much, if you were lucky) and you still had at least 10 minutes walk to the workplace and the cheapest car park was about 25 minutes walk to the retail part of town. Once you'd avoided all the puddles from the rain in the crumbling surface.

Door to door? My Aunt Fanny.

But the one that really annoys me is what happened here.

We used to have a bus route that went from the mall at one end of town (including/accessing cinemas, Walmart, Sobeys, Staples, Superstore, Canadian Tire) to the mall at the other end of town (including/accessing cinemas, Walmart, Sobeys, Staples, Superstore, Canadian Tire) and along the way it passed through the downtown with all the offices, banks, restaurants, dentists, opticians, bars etc and alongside a park, close to two hospitals and then along a large road with many fast food places, big box stores, clinics, before arriving at the other end in half an hour.

It was brilliant. If you lived midway you could be anywhere you needed to be in 15 minutes or less.

Then some clown came along and did a study which involved sitting on that bus as he went from one end to the other and decided that 30 minutes was too long and that there was a more direct route.

That direct route involved a stretch of highway. It didn't seem to occur to him - it was a man - there was little point in sending a bus along a route where nobody lived as there would be no passengers wanting to get on and off.

Such a journey might be useful in a by-pass kind of way sometimes, like in providing an express route from home to workplace, say, but all this did was provide an express route from Walmart to...oh yes, Walmart. Great. Who does that? Or cinema to cinema?

The price to pay for this 'improvement' was the splitting of the previously brilliant all serving route so that from each end it only went mid-way.

At a stoke they cut the half hour journey that nobody was making, except for the idiot doing the study, into one of a shorter time that didn't get you to where you needed to go (unless your journey was away from the downtown) and a wait was then needed at the transfer stop prior to a second bus ride.

But that's okay, you see, as no bus journey was longer than 15 minutes. Success.

caretaker

Pet Snake Gets Stuck In Woman's Gauged Earlobe

plasticcanuck

There's often comments on here comparing the NHS with the Canadian Health System. I think both are stretched at times to do satisfactory healthcare. There's a 3 part show on BBC iPlayer called HOSPITAL. It's an interesting insight into the NHS and what faces four London Trauma centers as regards lack of patient space and wait times.