Photos

Burnaby Lake runs: A pictorial guide

Reading about my runs is pretty dry for everyone but me and sometimes even I find it a bit dry. There’s only so many ways to wax poetic about exercise you do multiple times a week.

On August 18, 2011 my partner and I went for a stroll around Burnaby Lake. A full circuit around the lake takes about two hours when walking and covers a little over 10 km. I chronicled our walk in pictures that day and have (8 months later!) sorted them out for perusal.

Burnaby Lake is the largest urban lake in the Lower Mainland/Metro Vancouver area and has more lilypads than any other place on Earth. Or at least it seems that way. There are always plenty of birds splashing about, sunning, eating and doing generally bird-like things, copious numbers of black slugs in the warmer months and apparently turtles and fish, though I have yet to see a single turtle or fish and regard their presence at the lake as the stuff of myth and legend.

This is a modified copy of the lake map where I’ve superimposed my running route (the original is available here as a PDF). Click on it to see the detail better. My route is in red with a red dot marking the parking lot that serves as the starting point. I generally run the traditional counter-clockwise though I sometimes mix it up and run clockwise because I can be crazy like that.

Here are a few random highlights from the gallery. Click to embiggen each image.
[singlepic id=436 w=400 h=300 float=none] Cariboo Dam.
[singlepic id=460 w=400 h=300 float=none] View of the lake from one of the bridges.
[singlepic id=453 w=400 h=300 float=none] If you want to touch trees, you’ve come to the right place.

Full gallery of Burnaby Lake which guides you around the lake counter-clockwise. It’s like going for a jog without any of the effort or sweating.

Me: 1974 and 1975

These two images were taken a year apart, the first in July 1974 and the second in July 1975. I was 10 and 11 years old, respectively.

In the first photo I am at Disneyland, standing in front of Monstro, the puppet-swallowing whale from Pinocchio that serves as the entrance for the Storybook Land canal boats ride. Even as a little kid the ride was cool because the miniature models work on the same level as model trains, slot car racers and other things shrunk way down in scale. To a kid — to a boy, well, to this boy at any rate — these things take on a certain kind of magical quality when made miniature.

And speaking of cool, look at the self-assured pose I’m striking, as if to say, “Yeah, that’s right, I’ve got it, baby.” All while ignoring the fact that my jeans are several inches too short. What can I say? I was growing.

In the second photo I am at the San Diego Zoo, dressed remarkably similar to the year before. And look how I’ve grown! This time I am fitting the jeans a bit better. Perhaps by then my mom was buying ahead of the curve. This picture also reveals the early stages of my Big Hair, a phase that I wish I could go back in time and apply George Lucas-style after-the-fact special effects to because my Big Hair was also Bad Hair. Try telling a kid his hair looks ridiculous and his answer will likely be a thumbs up and “Right on!” As I type this my head is completely shaved.

The most noteworthy thing in the picture has to be the strange grip I have on that poor semi-domesticated animal. Am I trying to choke it? Preparing to kiss it? There are no good answers here. The little girl in front of me is wisely beating a hasty retreat. Perhaps I am trying to stop the animal from going through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door behind us, to keep it from getting into trouble. Yeah, that must be it. Not the choking. Or the kissing.

Out of the east side, down by the river

Which is my way of saying that after over 10 years of having an East Van address I am officially moved out to New Westminster, within spitting distance (well, spitting distance if you’re a hill giant) of the Fraser River in historic Sapperton. I haven’t fully checked out what makes Sapperton historic, though I believe it was settled by little people based on how absurdly narrow so many of the sidewalk around here are.

It felt odd handing over the keys to the old basement suite today. The first 15 years of living in Vancouver saw me moving on average once every week. Or so it felt like. But I got some unintended longterm living out of that East Van address where the lovely Everett clan put up with my quirks with nary a complaint for over 3,650 days so I thank them for that.

I’ll get out and get some shots of the new neighborhood as soon as the monsoons stop because it is full-on monsooning right now. Damn rain.

The move was done in three steps thusly:

Step 1: Mid-summer, moving a few things like the PC to the new place.
Step 2: Moving all other stuff I was keeping.
Step 3: Moving all the stuff I wasn’t keeping and taking it to the dump or recycling.

Step 3 was my bane as I tweaked my lower back when hoisting the couch or mattress onto the truck. It didn’t feel like much until later when it switched into Move A Certain Way to Experience Terrible Pain mode. Fortunately a day of not lifting anything heavier than a box of cereal has helped with the recovery immensely. It was nice to get rid of all my old electronics in an environmentally sound manner. Goodbye, 2X CD-ROM drive, you served me well!

I leave you with what is my most favorite picture of Barley ever. When I saw him earlier today he was as sedate as always.

Merry Christmas 1966!

Here I am on my stylin’ wheels in 1966. As a kid, Christmas was always good times. Presents, lots of food, yummy snacks, no school (okay, that part started around 1970) and sometimes snow to play in instead of rain. And since I never had to shovel it or drive in it, snow was always awesome. Snowmen, snow forts, snow whatever, it didn’t matter!

Vroom vroom

 

1979 (not The Smashing Pumpkins song)

Here’s a photo of myself, my cousin Dan and some midget dressed up as Mickey Mouse. Those red pants with the big white buttons always bugged me. That may be why I’m not smiling, because I’m thinking how much those stupid giant buttons are bugging me. Dan is holding a pack of cigarettes. Okay, maybe not. I believe his t-shirt is a depiction of birds in flight whereas mine is a groovy rainbow-colored advertisement for Zion National Park, which was a pretty cool place, even for a relatively lazy out-of-shape kid like myself (I was 14 at the time the picture was taken).

Dan’s big smile is ironic because he came down with a nasty 24 hour flu bug that same day and threw up in the Circle-Vision theater as it was playing the film “America the Beautiful”. As far as I know he was neither making a politcal statement nor trying to start an international incident. He was just throwing up.

I was going to recount some of the highlights of 1979 but the Wikipedia page on the year is entirely depressing. McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal and smallpox was eradicated. Other than that it appears 1979 mostly sucked.

Also, that is hair on my head, not some small furry animal.

 

7 Days of Shaved Head

No, it’s not the title of a Pearl Jam B-side (does the concept of a B-side even exist anymore?), it’s been seven days since I shaved my head and the verdict is in: I like it! Never having hat hair alone has made it worthwhile. I tried using shampoo but it really didn’t do much. Soap seems to work better now. Drying my hair takes two seconds with a towel — if I’m slow. It’s all around what I’d called darned convenient.

I tried a few more times to get a decent pic but mostly failed. Here’s one, anyway. Chances are I will update this at some point when I eventually manage a better shot. Nonetheless, the non-hair is clear.

This was taken on December 2nd, the day I I turned my hair into a tribble. My chin looks a bit scrunched up because I was holding the camera out in front of me.

A tale of mulch and mayhem in China Creek Park

At last, an exciting update on the mulch situation in China Creek Park. The update: they found a rake! After this discovery the mulch was raked into place, as seen below. What was once barren and root-covered is now covered in a luxuriously thick and spongy layer of mulch that is just crying out for me to jog on it. But I can’t.

Stupid ankle.

Look closely at the first image below and you can see the diligent raker working away at spreading the mulch over the last small section of the path. The rest of the crew were playing with string along the northern edge of the park, either measuring out a new fence or because they just like playing with string.

Curiously, the port-o-potty was sitting with its door askew. This would not make for a very private trip to the loo.

Upon closer inspection I discovered that someone had torched the thing. Gadzooks. Was someone trying to humorously light their flatulent gassings and have it go horribly wrong? Did someone think this was where you built port-o-fires? Whatever it was, it’s clear no one was ever going to poop here again (if they ever had. I sure as heck wouldn’t have).

Strangely, when I came back an hour or so later the park had already given birth to a new port-o-potty, even before the old one had been taken away, allowing for a convenient before and after comparison.

At some point in the new year I will actually come back here to jog. I hope by then the mulch is still new enough to be spongy and robust. I at least hope that flood corner will be under less water than usual.

 

Well, that was a riot

After last night’s 4-0 loss in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final, several hundred idiots in downtown Vancouver decided to have a riot. This may be the best image to capture the absurdity of rioting over a hockey loss:

Lovers in a dangerous time

(Photo courtesy of Rich Lam/Getty and is part of the photo gallery in this CBC news story.)

I will have more on the game/riot shortly!

New masthead, now with more picture

I finally got off my figurative butt and inserted a graphic as part of the masthead for the blog. As of this writing it is a photo I took at Buntzen Lake during a hike in January. I am planning on rotating through a number of images. I’ll probably jazz up the site a bit more in the coming weeks, though I am undecided on how best to do this. I can’t decide between animated gifs or auto-playing midi files. If only the <BLINK> tag was still supported.

In case the image mentioned above isn’t the current one, here it is below (click for full-size):

Two weeks after the election, the NDP are still picking up seats

And one last post on the May 2nd federal election. The Conservative majority has been trimmed slightly from 167 to 166 after a recount gave another Quebec seat to the NDP by a margin of a mere nine votes. This is why voting is important, people! (Ignore the fact that it changes nothing in terms of actual power distribution in the upcoming parliament.) The NDP now have 103 seats, tying it with the biggest Opposition Party ever (with Joe Clark’s 1980 Conservatives).

Don Davies, the MP for my riding of Vancouver-Kingway, handily won re-election with over 50% of the vote, more than the Conservative and Liberal candidates combined. In a vivid display of the Liberals’ fortunes in an election they directly contributed to happening, this is the campaign office of the Vancouver-Kingsway candidate the day after the election. That’s a lot of huge, unused signs. Ouch.

Newspaper editors gotta have fun, too

This composition is not accidental.

The mgic, the romance, the bullets

My personal favorite is from the West Hawaii Today, as seen in this this Poynter article:

West Hawaii Daily riverdancing and bullets
West Hawaii Daily: riverdancing, commando raids

The secondary headline makes it look like Bin Laden was taken out by a plucky group of riverdancers who just kept trying till they got ‘im. Maybe in the musical adaptation that’s how it will be.

Federal election 2011: Unclear on the concept

The two most striking things about the federal election so far are:

1) The strange surge in popular support for the NDP, especially in Quebec (see this poll as one example; note: for your own personal safety/sanity do not read the user comments)
2) The uniformly awful ads, which seem to be almost exclusively negative and regardless of affiliation, insulting to the intelligence

And speaking of ads (segue ahoy!) here’s an example of what I can only consider to be someone unclear on the concept. In general, I dislike businesses putting political ads in their windows. I don’t want nor need to know your politics if I’m just buying a loaf of bread or a pack of gum or whatever — even if we agree politically. But along Kingsway I have noticed a number of stores and restaurants with political ads slapped up for all to see. My favorite is featured in the window of Wing Shing, which is a fun name to say out loud, if nothing else:

On the left is a poster for the local Conservative candidate. To the right is a photo of the local Liberal candidate. The two parties aren’t exactly clones of each other in terms of platform so this seems a bit odd. Maybe both candidates shop there. Money is money, after all. I’d say the shopkeeper was trying to be inclusive but there are seven candidates running and I’m not seeing any posters for the NDP, Green, Libertarian, Communist or Marxist-Leninist party candidates (talk about splitting your [in some cases ultra] left wing vote). Maybe the Conservative and Liberal candidates have nice hair and the shopkeeper votes based on the niceness of hair. That may explain Don Davies’ absence. While he has done a fine job as the MP for Vancouver-Kingsway, his hair does weird me out a little.