Paulette

I have a new person in my life, Paulette. I met Paulette in New Westminster yesterday. Firstly, this meant encountering another part of New West, which unlike flat Richmond, has hills, oh my dear Lord does it have hills. At one point, although this was on leaving, I felt I was plunging over a near vertical drop, I feared for the car's ability to stay on the road, and in fact since yesterday had been particularly windy and the car had been buffeted by heavy cross winds on the freeway going over there, I was doubly concerned.

There is a logic to the road system here, although one which has taken me a while to get my head round. The main roads literally run from one end of Vancouver and the surrounding areas, to the end of everything. The numbering seems fried at first, because everything is numbered in blocks rather than individually, but I can see there is a logic to it.

New West however, has logic and confusion intermingled. Many of the roads there are simply numbered, so third, sixth, eighth etc. The confusion, which I discovered yesterday when I was actually IN it, is that there is for example a Sixth Street and a Sixth Avenue. When I did my usual maps.google search which I do before venturing anywhere, I had simply jotted down the numbers. No matter, I still managed to find Paulette.

The Canadian government have an employment resources department. But in New Westminster they have a special one for over 45's. On the steps of their offices it reminded you that you could only use this service if you were '45 or better'. Nice, and very Canadian. We don't refer to older people as 'OAP's' here, they are seniors.

I was a little put off at first because as usual I was asked to fill in a three page form, but wait, it wasn't anything like the crappy forms I have had to fill out before, this was clear and gave them information. To be fair, Canadian government forms are for the most part well thought-out.
Yes, you do come across some glaring incompetencies, such as the part on the immigration form where there was nowhere for Kevin to indicate he was Canadian from birth, but generally, their documentation is constantly being streamlined. The form you fill in whenever you enter Canada for example has become ever simpler and clearer.

Paulette took me into her office. It was spacious but cosy, there were pictures of her children, she had the most distracting screensaver I had ever seen, it kept renewing with new and breathtaking pictures of animals and landscapes. Paulette talked to me and listened to me. She didn't make me feel that I was completely useless for having an MA and not being able to type a million words per minute, in fact quite the contrary. She suggested some ways back into my own profession without the help of the BC College of Teachers. She showed me the room where, if I did want to improve my computer skills, I could come for a free course. She showed me the blue room and the yellow room, the resource library and the.....coffee-making room. She didn't have a George Hamilton tan nor a designer suit. I really liked Paulette and felt like coming back to the place rather than running away never to return.
The annoying thing about it all was really, that although this was a government initiative, genuinely there to help people, it had been difficult to find out about. But I did and more than anything else, Paulette made me feel that at 45 plus, I wasn't over the hill, although like I said, on the way out of New West I was grateful to be exactly that.

Back at the Nature Park, Lori had received feedback from one of the classes from last week. We had had a number of French immersion classes during the run-up to Halloween, and I had taken my cue from the teachers, if they spoke French to the children, then so did I.
'I'm not feeling the love,' said Lori, referring to the comments from one such teacher.
'I feel that we've done them the courtesy of speaking to them in French, which they had no reason to expect when they came, and what's their response to that? Why can't the whole programme be in French?' Except that Lori's Canadian so she said 'program'.
Quite so. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile. Although to some extent, now that I've gotten over the initial irritation of it, I can understand. You have to always make your case even if you have no hope of change. Just that, maybe,
'We really appreciated being spoken to in French, would it be a possibility for the future to....' would have been a politer way of putting it.

We have rain, really big rain and so for once the RCMP are evident on the roads, attending the scenes of continual prangs. I wonder where they go when it's not raining. I've never seen them in Tim Horton's.