What a great way to end a fun birthday day … Fresh from a 3 hour Hustle workshop (think Saturday Night Fever! but not the line dance), I strolled along the False Creek sea wall to a small restaurant overlooking the water, to share tapas and wine with friends and listen to cool jazz.  

Vancouver, BC: I read a lot and my literary addiction is to thrillers so I anticipated with spine-tingling enthusiasm, the staging of The Hunger Room, a new play by local playwright and actor, Scott Button. This turned out to be an excellent event to end my 6 month hiatus from theatre reviewing and recharge my enthusiasm for seeing works by the many small independent theatre companies that have sprung up in the Vancouver scene.

As an urbanite living in Vancouver’s increasingly  dense downtown core, I have watched with increasing dismay, as housing prices and rents have sky-rocketed and rental vacancies have become rare as unicorns. Traffic congestion is appalling, little used bike lanes impede traffic flow while cyclists ride aggressively in streets one or two further over that do not have designated bike lanes. And we are told that the geniuses at City Hall are still planning to get rid of two of the busiest routes for entry and exit from the downtown core, the Dunsmuir viaduct and the Howe street on-ramp to the Granville bridge. 

I love eating the grilled fish from the fresh fish sheet at Sandbar so it is crazy that the memory that sticks with me from our Mothers' Day dinner was not the perfectly cooked Alderwood-grilled, miso-marinated Sablefish, but the potatoes that I got as a substitute for the regular rice accompaniment. The sablefish was delicious but it was the texture and smoothness of the potatoes that kept me having just one more bite, till - so much for my carb-restricted eating plan - my plate was empty.