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.