Blackberries; no, not hand-held devices, the REAL berries

It's blackberry season again! This is big news because somehow I missed it last year. Repeated declarations of "I want to pick blackberries this weekend" somehow never materialized. A classic example of time mis-management.

This year I vowed to partake in the harvest after our return from Winnipeg. The berries would be in full swing by then.

And so they were, but...after an usually wet Spring, right up into June and July, the blackberries were off to a slow start. I picked a few pounds last evening but they were much smaller than in past years.

Busy-work, as I would categorize berry-picking, is an absorptive task, sometimes so much so that I can "zone-out" to a degree. I mention this because last evening, after picking berries for probably half an hour already at my secret location in Richmond, I was "in the zone". Completely oblivious to distractions until a reflective flash of glass caught my eye. I realized that the massive thicket I was working on was actually concealing a large, long-abandoned greenhouse building. The whole thing was covered from one side t'other, including most of its roof. One can only imagine what it must look like peering from the inside out.

Right now all I'm thinking of is blackberry ice cream. Mmmmmmm.

Discovered Treasure!

I was walking our dog past one of our neighbourhood's more notorious dumpy houses a couple of nights ago when I noticed a change. The half hidden Jeep pick-up that's been stashed in a corner of the front yard for as long as I can remember (and we've lived in this neighbourhood coming up to 9 years) was gone. And there seemed to be a bit less foliage (i.e brambles) than I remembered.


I looked down the side of the house and saw a pick-up in the back yard. As you can see from the photo I took last December, there really wasn't much of a usable back yard. Almost all of it was covered in brambles. My interest was piqued. My dog and I went around the corner and down the back lane for a better look.

My guess is that the City received enough complaints that they came in and clear-cut the place. And wouldn't ya know it, there were 2 cars under all those vines and branches! I'm not bold enough to march into the yard to read the back license plates, but I'd really like to know what year is on the last insurance decals for both those cars. They're the current style of plates, but I'm pretty sure ICBC started issuing that style just before Expo 86.

The big Chevy has a large dent in the roof which would correspond to the fact that there also used to be a garage under all the overgrowth. You can't really tell in the photo. I guess the Chevy took the brunt of the roof collapsing, sparing the Datsun 510.

The pick-up is the one that used to be in the front yard.

p.s. I managed to see the rear license plates of both cars a couple of days later. The Chevy was last insured in 1987, and the 510 was parked at the end of 1991.

Summer 2011 road trip to MB

I finally got my sunflowers photograph this year on our summer holiday driving trip from Vancouver to Winnipeg. This field is on the way to Stonewall, MB.











Being somewhat of a geek for all things mechanical, I had to include a shot of this wind turbine blade being transported on the highway.

However, I can't take credit for the photo; I got it from the internet. Both times I saw a blade being transported, one in Montana and the other in North Dakota, I was driving, and the trucks were headed in the opposite direction. It's not really recommended to take a photo while driving, but I tried anyway. All I got was a shot of my windshield pillar. So thanks to whoever took this shot. It's rather awe-inspiring to see something this big traveling down the highway. That's an extra-long trailer, and the blade still hangs way off the end. I estimated the blade to be about 3 times as long as the average semi-trailer rig you'd see in BC.


Have you ever had to pull over on the highway for a house to pass? Things really are scaled up a notch on the prairies. I mean, you just can't make this stuff up.

I really like the sponteneity of road trips. We were headed East on Route 2 through Montana, and upon reviewing the map before getting in the car one morning we discovered that there were several options for us in veering North towards Manitoba. One of those options would take us through a small town called Rugby, North Dakota, which happens to be the exact geographical center of North America. Having been to Cape Spear, Newfoundland, a couple of years ago, the most Easterly point of this continent, going to Rugby was a no-brainer.

How does one determine the exact center of a continent anyway?

All we have left now is to visit Anchor Point, Alaska. It's listed on Wikipedia as the "Westernmost point on the continuous road system on the North American Continent".

But on a more Canadian focus we'd probably first check out Mount St. Elias, Yukon. It's listed as the most Westerly point in Canada.

We may already have our summer road trip planned for next summer.

New BC Place sun roof

The weather on Sunday was perfect for some playful shots of the new retractable roof being assembled on BC Place. An Open House was held on Sunday, July 31 to show off the recent progress of this high-tech wonder-roof.

2011 Ride to Conquer Cancer Vancouver (Surrey) to Seattle

Here are a few photos of this past weekend's 2011 Ride to Conquer Cancer. I'll tell you more about our wet weekend in a few days, after I catch up on a few things. Pretty busy around here lately.













A very wet 2011 edition of the Ride to Conquer Cancer began in Cloverdale this year, not Guildford Mall as in past years, because of current expansion construction at the mall.

2011 Ride to Conquer Cancer

This past weekend we raised $11.1 million in the 2011 Vancouver to Seattle edition of The Ride to Conquer Cancer, not $1.1million, as I read this morning in the 24 Hours newspaper. I hope they post a correction tomorrow.

Canuck-mania 2011