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A week or two back I was housesitting for my aunt and uncle who travel a lot.  Normally, when I do so, I earmark the cash I am to receive for something specific.  This is the way of one with no income.  No penny is left unaccounted for, even if that means I label $10 for miscellaneous purchases.  Well, this time around, my fee was set to cover the cost of a companion fair ticket to Portland with my mother to visit a friend of her’s in Vancouver, Washington.  And this all worked out quite splendedly in my mind until a couple days before leaving I received a call from my bank, Chase.  Chase wanted to alert me to some suspicious activity on my account.  And as a result I am now over $200 overdrawn.  Chase would not have caught that someone in Rhode Island was charging up a storm in my name even though I am in Oregon.  They aren’t that good and they don’t care that much.  They only noticed when my account became overdrawn.  If I lose money they don’t care.  If they lose money it becomes an issue.

allow me to take this moment to express my extreme displeasure at the demise of WAMU & the unwanted presence of Chase in my life.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

Anyway, a chase representative called my house and mangled my given name (which is in no way an obscure name anymore) and then offered to cancel my debit card and send a replacement.  They then told me that when the charges were no longer pending and had cleared to file a claim for fraud to have the charges reversed.  Um, Hello.  You caught the fraud and brought it to MY attention.  Why do I now have to report it as fraud. The person on the phone then told me how long it might take for my new debit card to come in the mail and suggested that should I want access to my funds sooner I could go to a local branch and they could give me a temporary card….  Really?  A temporary card to access my negative account?  thanks.

I left for Portland the very next day with a few borrowed bucks in my wallet, very uncomfortable with the notion of carrying cash again for the first time In several years.  My mother paid our way through most things and I spent the majority of my money on a couple gifts and a whole lot of vegan junk food at Whole Foods.

Being Vegan on an impromptu trip anywhere is difficult.  Without proper planning you are left eating incidentally vegan food and bland food at omni restaurants with your companions.  On the spot, while there, I could have googled a bunch a vegan options, but sorting through them to find something convenient for my host was far too time consuming and stressful since I did not know the neighborhoods.  And since I was in Vancouver, not Portland, there was very little vegan variety.

Yes, we could have gone over the Columbia to eat, but I felt that that would have been an inconvenience for our host, who had not planned on having to drive me all over the northwest looking for food.  SO I more or less just snacked my entire time there and enjoyed the company of lovely ladies while they ate whatever they fancied.

Apart from being defrauded and lacking a proper meal I had a wonderful time.  It was the Chinese new Year.  Metal Tiger. RAWR.  My niece is a tiger.  I love her to death even though Tigers and Sheep/Rams/Goats are supposed to be enemies.  Anyway, after sitting around eating green beans during a whirlwind Dim Sum session at House of Louie, I finally got my way and we went to the Chinese Garden in Chinatown.  The line was loooong and the gardens were small.  The main attraction, of course, being the lion dance and such.  I really couldn’t care.  I just wanted to see the gardens and go have tea and some incidentally vegan vittles at the teahouse.

While the people were packed tightly around the inner ring  of the garden to watch the dancers I made my way through outer paths and rooms to take pictures and enjoy the sites as best I could.  And it was a good thing I did, because the minute the dancers were done, the crowds dispersed and flooded the rest of the gardens.  When I finally found my way to my conpanions they had yet to walk through the entire garden grounds (though THEY had been there before).  And after they had their fill of walking, and after saying I want to have tea a dozen times in the most polite manner I could muster, we FINALLY went over to the tea house… which was now booked with a waiting list of an hour because EVERYONE waited until after the dancers to come in.  My mother and her friends had already had tea there before so they weren’t very put out.

We left the LanSu Gardens and headed across the street to a gift shop where I was tempted to buy a cheaply made, but very pretty Chinese shirt.  But the crowds were really starting to get to me.  As we walked back to our car, they pointed out a couple places where we could have tea, but perhaps for the 6th time after leaving the Tower of Cosmic Reflections (teahouse) I had to remind them that it wan’t so much tea that I wanted, but the atmosphere.

Don’t get me wrong.  I had a good time, but I could have had a better time.  Our time spent anywhere was limited by the ability of my mother to endure lengthy activities and time on her feet, and her friends’ eagerness to move on from something that didn’t hold the initial wonder anymore.  So next time I am going to have to take events into my own hands and set out a list of things I would like to accomplish and things I would like to do.  Then maybe next time I’ll get to have tea, dammit.

Throughout our stay my mother’s asthma got worse and worse.  Eventually, on the morning of the day we were to fly home we had to take her to an urgent care clinic where they gave her a nebulizer treatment and a prescription for a steroid.  She wanted to avoid an ER because she feared being admitted and just wanted to go home.  So instead of any last day activities, we pretty much drove around the remote areas around Vancouver.  My mother fell asleep.  I wanted to too, having gotten just as little sleep as her, but someone had to stay up and talk to her friend who was driving.  Tiring of nothing to do, we got the the airport a little after 1pm.  We made our way to the gate and my mom fell asleep.  I them wandered the airport for the next two hours, bored out of my mind and eager to just be home.

I’m not angry with my mother for having asthma or cutting short everything we did because of it.  I’m angry with myself for not being independent enough to walk a couple blocks down from House of Louie to the Vegetarian House to get something to eat alone.  I am upset I didn’t go straight to the teahouse alone instead of waiting for my party of four to arrive after the crowds had descended on it like locusts.  I’m upset I wandered endlessly through the overhyped Powell’s Books while they had coffee and tea instead of hitting the streets foe more interesting sights.  I willingly shackled myself to events that weren’t really meant for me.  But the one thing I would have changes, is I would have taken my mother to a hotel instead of sleeping in a small apartment with an indoor cat and dog that inflamed her allergies and asthma.

Portland also made me feel fat and lazy.  Which I am.  Despite all the negative though, it was a good experience.  But how to put that in words is beyond me.

At least I walked away from that ugly unwelcoming beast of a book store with a used copy of a vegan cookbook I’d been sort of wanting but never finding in stock.