New Years Visitors and the Polar Bear Swim

 We had some great visitors to begin the new year with my cousin Sarah and her husband Aric passing through Vancouver just in time to start the year out by leaping into the sea. We hadn't seen these two since their wedding, so it was really nice to have a full afternoon to catch up and have a proper visit.

 On our way to the water we had the fun of seeing the hovercraft parked on the beach. We always enjoy seeing this thing in the area, so naturally the one time it was open to visitors we were too busy and cold to wait in line for a proper look.

Rounding out our day, here's our GoPro camera footage which Kathryn shot as we charged into the water. Since its in a dive housing, the audio is pretty terrible, so don't crank up your computer volume to try and hear our mutterings and curses, but its as close as you can get to being there without actually having been there.
For those of you that are impatient, things actually get moving around the 1 minute mark.

Canada Day Highlights

 Kathryn and I both really enjoy Canada Day and while it has long been a staple of our summers together, we have had a rough time getting our schedules to line up and enjoy it together the last few years. That said, we were delighted to both have the day off this year for a nice outing and visit with friends. The shot below is a fraction of the crowd downtown at the main music stage near the convention centre.

 On the other side of the convention centre we caught a Lumberjack Show and, while it was very similar to the Lumberjack Show at Grouse Mountain, it was never the less a good time out watching some woodworking hijinks and log rolling tomfoolery.

 On our way home from the family-friendly portion of the day we make a quick stop off at Vancouvers subculture festival 'Canabis Day' which happens every year at the Art Gallery and seems to be getting bigger and more popular with each passing year. I always enjoy seeing public art dressed up for holidays and it was fun to see this Rastafarian lion watching over the crowd.

We ended our day off watching the sunset on the beach with a good group of friends and thoroughly enjoyed having a chance to visit with people and relax and have a nice day together as well. Happy 147th Canada!

Manitoba Christmas Time Lapses

A little behind schedule here, but hopefully worth the wait, we shot a number of time lapses in Winnipeg and Pinawa around the Christmas season last year. Although the clip itself has been online for awhile now, I've finally found the time to pass it along to everyone in a proper place.

We have a few different types of time lapses here with an experiment in 5 second gaps rather than our usual 1 minute intervals the entire time. We had hopes of doing a few more ambitious outdoors shoots, but with daily temperatures around -40 plus windchill, it was pretty much impossible to go farther than our backyards.
Merry belated Christmas to you all and hopefully spring is right around the corner!

New Years Lanterns

New Year's Eve was lovely with a low key evening topped off by heading to the beach at English Bay where the tide was really low. We took with us some chinese lanterns that some friends of ours brought along.  You write wishes, or names of people you love or who want to wish something for on the paper.  Geordie and I wrote the names of people we had lost in recent years.

Then you unfurl the paper and light the flamable disc up.  You hold them as they expand with hot air.  Below Ginna and Travis have theirs almost fully ready for lift off.  Then they gently rise up into the night sky. It was their idea and it was a way of starting off the New Year that I have always wanted to do but never found the lanterns.

And off it goes.  These are biodegradable by the way. Some went straight up into the air while others got a cross breeze. The highest looked like teeny orange stars. Others had the same idea as us as we could see some lifting off from Canada Place on the otherside of downtown, Kitsilano and the East End of False Creek.  Aren't they pretty?

Happy Canada Day to You All

 Canada Day has come once again and while Kathryn was spending a sizeable day out whale watching, I took a chance to brave the crowds and take some pictures of the locals celebrating our great nation in all its weird and wonderful ways. Like these two chaps below, happily posing for pictures with passersby and generally being weird looking but absurdly patriotic at the same time.

 There are always street performers of many kinds with musicians, skateboarders, buskers and mascots among them. This year I chose this photo of a person dressed as an inukshuk to highlight the weirdness and neat costumes that fill the streets on July 1st. A worthy second place goes to the women wearing dresses made of cans that were arranged like drums and were encouraging passersby to play their drum dresses.

 

I always like to wander through the area around the old Olympic Torch by the convention centre on Canada Day since it gives you a neat perspective above the crowds. I have infact posted panoramas from this very spot in years past, but not with my weird little planet tweaks, so here's a new look on an old favorite to round out the day.

Christmas Lights

Every year Geordie and I take a bike ride around to look at lights. This year we split our time between a walk around the west end and a bike ride to the Fire Fighters Burn Fundraiser. Lights aplenty. It was very different this year as previously there were these sheds filled with rather busy and deteriorating dioramas.  The miniature train goes around too but is expensive and the line is insane.

One of our favorite things this year was the tree on top of the condo in the West End. Anyone who has been to English Bay has likely seen this. This year the owners had it nicely done with its branches all outlined in bright white lights.  It is stunning.

 A perennial favorite is this tree also at English Bay. It looks like a ball of lights and last year they added some twinkle down ones.  Geordie and I don't do lights in the apartment but we are do like looking at other peoples efforts.

Christmas 2012

 I can't believe how spoiled Geordie, Kodiak and I are.  Every year we try to cut back and every year I feel more doted upon. I hate to use the word swag in anything else but piratey jargon. But seriously, look at that swag!

Geordie is opening his stocking!  Kodiak is helping and looking jolly in his christmas collar.  The eyes are evil giving lie to the fact that he thinks that he his a good cat.  Every year I get Geordie ginger beer. (And every year it is very much appreciated -G)

Every year we go on a Christmas walk armed with treats for the animals. We go in search of whatever woodland creatures want a snack and even squirrels get a bit of corn (but we don't usually feed them as they can be aggressive and run up Geordie's pant leg or perch on my leg).  Chickadees are always a favorite for hand-feeding.  Happy Xmas!

Get off my lawn!

Dang kids. Every year like clockwork they show up for this fireworks thing that the city has to have on my front lawn. With their noise and their trash and their rappitty music.  Ok. Except for the huge amount trash (pick up after yourself if this is you) people leave behind on the beach  and sea wall and the odd excessive noise very late at night I love the Celebration of Light. See!

And this is why! Look at that! Crazy! And all set to music. The organizers could do a much better job of setting up speakers that those not paying a huge amount of money for the right to sit in a bleacher could hear. Fortunately they put the signal out on a radio and I have a little hand held that can sometimes pick it up. This year for Vietnam they did a poor job of signaling when it was going to start so I had to chance to find the signal. Found it for Brazil and random people next to us hooked it up to their speakers so we blasted it and everyone all around could hear the Batucada!

So early it is in the picture below. The sun is not quite down. By dark there is no green space left and people are on top of each other. No exaggeration in that. Geordie and I are lucky to live one block away from this so as soon as it is over we bail and watch the crowds swarm by from the apartment balcony overlooking Denman while the Blade Runner helicopters sweep.  'Hee hee.... suckers...' we chuckle as we drink our wine overlooking the streaming mass of humanity. 

Click on the panorama above to enlarge it.

Saint Patrick's Day: Aquatic Hippie Edition

 On St. Patricks Day Geordie and I participated in an off shore clean up at Belcarra Park near Port Moody. Most of the dive parks and sites are pretty clean as divers tend to be good about grabbing stuff that does not belong as they go. We had a really good day for it. Some media even showed up. Geordie and I did not get a huge haul as the bay to the left of the docks there was pretty clean. The majority of trash came from the right side. Wierdest thing that came out was a bong.

 We geared up in dry suits and I had so many layers it was kind of difficult to suit up. Ended up with huge boots and fins and carried 41 pounds of weight for the first dive and 44 for the second! That's what I get for being prone to being cold and having to wear tons of layers. It's fine once you are in the water but hauling it down was less then fun.

 This is some of the junk that was brought up: bottles, snorkle and scuba gear, fishing and crabbing equipment, a large amount of sharp things, nets, balls and odds and ends. One group brought up 24 pounds of stuff and the outing as a whole netted over 95 pounds of garbage! So remember not to throw stuff in the water people!

Vancouver Pride

Last weekend was also the annual Vancouver Pride Parade when everyone that is or strongly supports being fabulous gets all decked out and marches through downtown Vancouver. Its apparently the largest (or 2nd largest) pride parade in Canada and with all the floats, banners and starts and stops it can be a bit of an endurance contest in the summer heat.
You have officially been living in Vancouver long enough when things like this strike you as awesome rather than odd.
One thing I did find weird about this year which I have not reflected very well in the pictures (having avoided those floats) is that there was a lot more corporate and political floats this year and less naked weirdos. This gave it more of a feeling of "Your corporate masters have realized that this is a lucrative niche market to exploit and would like you to know that Safeway and the Conservative Party think its great that you're gay, and if you'd like to buy our cakes or vote for us, that'd be swell too" than I was used to. I am unsure if having your celebrations sold back to you and commercialized is the truest form of acceptance in western culture or not... it certainly worked for Jesus.

Happy Canada Day!

The skies were gloomy and grey and I think the city is missing Kathryn as well (for those not in the know, she's out doing field archeology) but I did my best to get out and enjoy the day despite my lack of good company. The parade was quite enjoyable and summed up Canadas multicultural vibe quite nicely through mounties, bagpipes, korean drummers, brazilian martial arts, local theatre groups and gay rights (with a few weirdos on stilts thrown in for good measure).
Vancouvers soft-drug laws are lightly enforced at the best of times, so the art gallery grounds were taken over entirely by a pro-drug party with all the amusement that comes from hundreds of stoned people hanging out together. I haven't seen pot sales that flagrant and in-your-face since Amsterdam ;)
Canada Place is a large convention centre by the waterfront and the area all around it was transformed into an pedestrian corridor with several stages for music, play areas for the kids and every imaginable kind of pastry or meat on a stick that your arteries could ever fear.

Click the panorama below to enlarge it.

Happy New Year!

We spent our New Years Eve with a group of good friends from Kathryn's capoeira group and hosted by the couple that run her academy, shown below in a battle of epic proportion.
After several hours of eating, drinking and making merry, we set out as a group to enjoy the crowds gathered on Granville Street and to generally be loud and obnoxious in public along with the rest of the downtown populace.And on the afternoon of the 1st, as if proving that the weather out here is nicer than we're used to, it was the 90th Annual Polar Bear Swim in which hundreds of people lined up and hurled themselves into the waters of English Bay for a swim. This would likely be an unpopular notion in The Forks back home.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

Every now and then we meet locals or long-time imports that will claim that Vancouver is just as cold as anywhere else in Canada because its a wet cold. These people are also delusional, wimps or bold faced liars. We took a walk on Christmas morning through Stanley Park and while there was indeed a light coating of frost on the grass, it quickly gave way as the sun rose and there were many little woodland creatures to be seen (as previously detailed).
On Christmas Eve we took our annual bike ride (because as Winnipegers we derive a sick delight from the notion of being able to bike ride in December) to look at Christmas Lights. The largest and fanciest concentration of these lights was found in Stanley Park where the firefighters have an annual display.
And rounding out our white-ish Christmas, we had incredibly thick fog on Christmas Eve that filled up most of downtown for the entire day and obscured vision more than a few blocks. The shot below is from our balcony and anyone who has visited and knows how far we can typically see will recognize the nearly obscured building a block or two over.

Halloween Roda

This Halloween we joined up with Kathryn's capoeira group for a Halloween Roda and general wander about and party afterwards. They played and leapt about for a little over an hour both inside the studio and on the street outside, much to the amusement of passing spectators who are unaccustomed to seeing a cowboy fight a pirate in the street. I also managed to win a costume prize by dressing as a capoeirista on the one day of the year that nobody else was.
A pixie fights a man in a dress, just like in the stories.
All under the wise and discerning eyes of Professor Nego
All in all a great way to spend the evening and get to know some of these folks a little better too, great times and hopefully more of the same next year