10-12-30

The same picture two days in a row. Though the keen eyed amongst you will notice there's actually a day missing in between. Maybe I'll take the same picture tomorrow.

10-12-28

10-12-27

Bits of a building.

10-12-26

Working. Over the holidays. Driving home late at night. The days are short, the nights, despite being near their longest, are shorter still.

10-12-25

Christmas. She wanted a dollhouse. We got her one.

10-12-24

Christmas cookies.

10-12-23

Missed days. More and more of them. It might be time to take a break again.

10-12-21

10-12-20

10-12-19

Johann's old bike:

I promise to ride you in the rain, and in the sun, maybe a little drunk once in a while, with my iPod on listening to Joy Division, or just as likely Jimi Hendrix. Even though you're a road bike I'll take you off road once in a while, we all do things we shouldn't do once in a while, and I'll ride you to cute girls' houses, and to see bands play in back alley venues, and to watch hockey games in comfortable taverns with beer pitcher specials. There will be art gallery openings as well, and random meandering rides with a camera in my bag, there's no telling where those rides might take us. I've already bought you some bar tape and will get you some better brakes one day. I'm sorry I bought you white pedals but they were a better choice than the green translucent ones, and the wood grain print ones, and they do match your fenders. And if one day I decide to replace you I'll make sure you end up in the possession of someone who promises to do all these things with you and more.

10-12-18

Every time I see a space like this I feel the potential in it for something, a furniture shop, a bike manufacturing facility, a seedy bar. It's like I want to rescue the space from obsolescence and eventual demolition.

10-12-16

10-12-15

It's Christmas.

10-12-14

The construction materials used to run rampant around the building site until it got penned up every night...

10-12-13

They sell feminine items in masculine sizes. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

10-12-12

10-12-11

I wrote the better part of a thousand words describing this photograph and deleted them. It's a photograph of a romantic ideal slowly rotting. It's a tough one.

10-12-10

10-12-9

10-12-8

10-12-7

10-12-6

Days like today. Perfect. More.

10-12-5

From another time.

10-12-04

The Portland Hotel Society ran a soccer tournament for homeless people. The mayor showed up and though it might have been easy for him to give a short speech and shake a few hands and then move on to whatever better thing might occupy his Saturday he stuck around and played soccer for the better part of three hours. It was good to see.

Lots more pictures here.

10-12-3

10-12-2

There's something wrong with Christmas without snow. I'm alright with mild winters and riding bikes year round and not worrying about minus 30 Celsius temperatures like I faced when I lived in Calgary but when the Christmas lights come out it would be nice to see a little snow on the ground.

10-12-1

10-11-30

Says Sophie. It's hung on the wall in front of my desk now. I can get lost in it when I let myself.

10-11-29

10-11-28

Promised land.

10-11-27

10-11-26

10-11-25

It's easy to forget how magical snow is to a 4 year old who doesn't get to see it for much more than a week or so every year and has only been around for such a short time that so many of the things we take for granted seem magical. There was a lot of jumping into the snow on the walk home from daycare. It's a walk that should take about twenty minutes to half an hour. Tonight it took a full hour.

10-11-24

It's been cold out. And the days are again short so light is a rare commodity as is the desire to bundle up and head outside. The result is trying to make interesting photos in the least likely of contexts. You sometimes don't notice, can't notice your most common environment.

10-11-23

10-11-22

10-11-21

It's good that I'm not a fatalist or I think I would have checked out today. Or at least stopped trying. For a few days I've thought I might adventure out into this nature thing that Vancouver is so famous for. I hadn't much time to mountain bike or anything else lately but this weekend seemed to be making less demands on me so I thought I might make the effort to get to the shore, maybe hike up Fisherman's trail since it's pretty flat and at a lower elevation so though it may be a bit muddy it probably wouldn't be covered in snow which, for a guy without snow boots or gators to keep his hiking boots and pants dry-ish, is a good thing. So I loaded up a camera, some water and food and headed out to the van in order to aim it at the North Shore only to find the recent cold snap combined with a relative humidity of about 99.7% had frozen the fuel lines. The van wouldn't start.

I suppose I could have found public transit that might take me most of the way there but with short days and no first hand knowledge on what bus/boat/train to take I walked towards the 99 B-Line thinking I knew where it would take me and that walking the beaches around UBC and the Endowment Lands would be an alright 2nd choice to Fisherman's trail. Not to mention there are rare moments that one could walk through Wreck Beach with a camera and not be perceived as a pervert and a sub zero day might, just might limit the number of nudists there. But I wasn't at the bus stop for more than 3 minutes before I got a phone call telling me there had been a loud bang in the house and it smelled like something burning. Having had an electrician doing some wiring yesterday I worried about things shorting out or failing in some mysterious way and causing fires in the walls etc. So I went back to the house to find the pilot light had gone out on the furnace. I'm not sure what surge of gas or late ignition caused the explosion that probably knocked out the pilot light but nothing was on fire and the furnace has been working fine since.

With plan A and B being thwarted I resolved myself to doing a bit of work in the apartment in the basement since I was already in there. There was an exhaust fan I'd been meaning to hook up for months. So I got out my tick tester and hunted through the electrical panel to find which breaker shut off the wire that had already been run to fuel the fan with electricity. With it safely shut off I wired it up and turned it all back on. No power. I checked and double checked the circuit and the wire, everything appeared to be as it should be but still no power. I was at a loss but feeling I'd not accomplished enough already I figured it was time to take advantage of the two hours of sunlight that might be left and go for a bike ride.

Which I did. And it was good. But not without issues. There's a wonderful little lecture series available through the CBC called the Massey Lectures and this year Douglas Coupland reads a work of fiction in five parts. My feelings for Douglas Coupland are inconsistent, sometimes I think he's a genius and is succinctly describing my every emotion and opinion and observation using something like three words to do so. Other times I read fifty pages of one of his books and hate it so much that I leave it in a public place where maybe whoever he's talking to in that particular tome might discover it and be grateful. I had listened to the first of five installments and part of the second and took off on my bike ride with the remaining forty five minutes of hour two soulfully filtering into my mind via iPod. But then it was over and I scrolled through to find hour three it wasn't there. It was missing, not uploaded, or somehow vanished.

It just seemed like everything was working against me today.

But I got this photograph. When I lived in Toronto I would on occasion go to the waterfront and look out over lake Ontario at the horizon. I would feel a little less trapped and lately I've been feeling a lot trapped so seeing the edge of something was very therapeutic. You don't get to see the edge of things in Vancouver, many complain they feel claustrophobic living here. I understand this but despite how it felt like nothing was going to work out today for a little while this afternoon I didn't feel trapped. So in the end it was a good day.

10-11-20

The figs just didn't get ripe this year. Last year the tree in the yard produced two crops of them but this year the first crop never softened up. It was a little disappointing but on the up side we have enough eyes for a couple hundred snowmen.

10-11-19

Snow in Vancouver. This picture doesn't do it justice but the view from the top floor of the Lee Building is quite spectacular and the rare blanketing of the city with snow was quite beautiful.

10-11-18

I'd been to the CBC store looking for a toque three times but they've always been out of stock. Yesterday they had them and I bought one and today it snowed in Vancouver. The timing was good.

10-11-17

"I bought a painting today. At Value Village."

"What is it?"

"It's a velvet painting."

"Wait, let me guess what it's of. Is it of Elvis?"

"No."

"A toreadore?"

"No."

"Dogs playing poker?"

"No."

"A Spanish woman playing castanets?"

"No."

"A bowl of fruit?"

"No."

"I give up."

"A peacock."

"I love it, can I see it?"

"Yes."

"Awesome!"

10-11-16

It felt like I took a hundred photographs today. In the end I had taken maybe half a dozen. This is the first one I took.

10-11-15

10-11-14

Late night sideways moments. They are little stolen moments, not quite running away but finding a comfortable moment in an uncomfortable day. And this car was there along the way. I like the idea of old cars but don't like old cars. They are slow, heavy, don't handle well, but they embody such poetry about escape and freedom. On this night it was a symbol of an emotion I was feeling.

10-11-13

I love the blinds.

10-11-12

Cropped. I should have skipped today but I've skipped too many days lately.

10-11-11

There used to be a subtitle to this series of photographs that read "it's in the details." Maybe it should have read, "it's the little things" since that could be held to have meaning in so many different ways.

10-11-10

10-11-9

Am I overcompensating for missing yet another day? Truth be told I was sick yesterday. I did carry a camera with me to the walk-in clinic but I didn't take any photographs. Not sure why. But today, I took three photographs all day and I wanted to use all three of them. There's certainly a theme running through them and perhaps that's why I thought it appropriate to group them together.

There are sometimes days when I'll take a hundred pictures and I can't pick one I like so it makes me happy to have a day like today where I took exactly three photographs and I couldn't decide between the three of them.