midnight snowspirit, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.
It started snowing last night in Vancouver, and hasn’t let up. Late last night, I went out and made a snowman to greet the winter with his ceremonial staff and candle lantern.
Category Archives: vancouver
but what about the coffee?
Saturday, November 18, 2006
we sold out of water, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.
Vancouver is indefinitely on a boil-water alert right now, thanks to mudslides (with potential bacterial contamination) around the reservoir. The turbidity, apparently, is at levels never before seen in Vancouver. Never.
You can still drink the water if you boil it, but downtown especially, that just means you have boiled, brown water, which isn’t much fun.
By far the worst part, though, is that this affected the precious, precious coffee supply! I was working at my Yaletown start-up job when the alert was raised, and all the coffee shops in Yaletown stopped serving coffee. The next day, Starbucks started giving out free short coffees made with bottled water, and most places are now serving espresso-based drinks, but let me tell you, it was a bit of a crisis. (What? No! My priorities are Bīrjand just fine.)
Living in Canada, every once in a while nature throws something like this at you to remind you that whatever you may think, once you get past the city limits, you’re surrounded by several million square kilometers of rather inhospitable and untamed wilderness. The fact that the past couple of days have been cold, windy, rainy and very, very dark adds a pleasantly apocalyptic tone to that reminder.
Parade of Lost Souls
Sunday, October 29, 2006
After a one-year hiatus, the Parade of Lost Souls is back, and seems to be bigger than ever. This year, they even blocked off part of Commercial Drive for the event, which features incredibly elaborate pagan– and death–themed costumes, as well as more conventional costumes — the mad scientist! the undead viking! girl-Elvis! the Prince of All Cosmos! newlydeads! Borat! terrorpuppies! inexplicable demon-things!
While there wasn’t nearly as much house-decorating along the parade route as previous years, there were some delightfully morbid displays. And of course, fire, fire, fire.
My own camera battery died after about 5 pictures, but that’s okay: it’s more fun to participate than document. And I stumbled onto this pretty cool video from a couple of years back, which does a better job of capturing the spirit than my grainy digicam shots can.
Five Years!
Friday, September 8, 2006
Five years ago today, having quit my job in Toronto and been accepted to UBC, I stepped onto a plane with a couple of bags full of CDs and clothes, and moved to Vancouver.
I know Vancouver isn’t perfect, and there are certainly things that annoy me, but I love it regardless. Of all the places I’ve lived, Vancouver is the only one that really feels like home to me. Which is kind of strange, since I didn’t even visit Vancouver until I was in my mid-twenties. I mostly grew up in Regina, and I lived in Toronto for years after that, but I didn’t feel I was living in the right place until I came here. Toronto always felt kind of vast and impersonal, even though I came to enjoy living there. And it was pretty clear since high school that Regina didn’t have much use for me. I may not be the world’s most ambitious geek, but my aspirations are higher than a job debugging COBOL code for a crown corporation.
Vancouver, on the other hand, is the baby bear’s porridge. Not too big, not too small, not at the center of things or too isolated, not too anonymous, not too in-your-face (I like my social boundaries.)
And really, Vancouver is amazingly beautiful. Saskatchewan is beautiful too (Regina not so much), but it’s a stark, alien beauty that continually reminds you that human beings weren’t meant to live there. A couple of decades living on a barren and inhospitable prairie hundreds of kilometers from any ocean, mountain or forest primed me to appreciate British Columbia’s landscapes and, above all, its temperate climate — even if that means 40 weeks of the year are rather on the grey and drizzly side.
- Link>> to some pictures of my adopted home.
was ein flugtag ist?
Sunday, August 20, 2006
You know, my little handheld Canon ELPH might not be the best equipment on which to shoot zoomed-in videos of things falling into False Creek.
That’s pretty much the Flugtag experience. Watching things fall into False Creek from a couple hundred meters away. It was entertaining enough, but I’ll admit, walking through downtown after and running across groups of cute hipster zombie chicks returning from the Zombiewalk made me wish I’d done that instead.
Oh well, with any luck there will be a Zombiewalk 2007, and they might take a cue from the San Francisco Zombiewalk. There, they encouraged people to take the role of victims along the walk route — you wore a piece of duct tape on your shirt and zombies would attack you, slather you with blood and makeup, and you could join the ranks of the dead. Sounds a blast, it does. Plus, they invaded the Apple Store.