The Hudson

I have to say, I do get to see some cool spaces with this job. Some are public, some aren’t.

Last week I was privileged to conduct a warranty review of the old Hudson’s Bay building in Victoria, which has recently been re-purposed as upscale condominiums.

I’m pretty keen on heritage preservation and revitalization, although the building envelope game I’m in doesn’t often get to play around in those areas. The last couple or three years I’ve taken quite a few courses offered by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, whose tag line is “Creating New Life for Old Buildings”.

Several high profile buildings in Vancouver have been saved from the wrecking ball in recent years. In fact I conducted a warranty review in Vancouver a couple of years ago for another big-name department store conversion; Woodwards. And although I’m happy to still be able to see the giant “W” revolving in the sky downtown, I was a bit disappointed that, in the end, only two walls of the original structure were saved. And this was for retail/ commercial space, not residential. The living units are 100% new construction.

My interest was indeed piqued when I received instructions to put together a proposal for a new home warranty review for The Hudson; doubly so when we received a signed Work Authorization to proceed.

Construction began on the original Hudson’s Bay store in downtown Victoria in 1913, but was interrupted by WW1. The store finally opened for business in 1921. Eighty-two years later the store re-located to its present location a few blocks nearer the Inner Harbour, leaving an uninhabited shell behind to gather dust. In 2006 a developer bought it and started the long process of re-design.

I’m happy to report that the original façade has been retained, and restored. The building even features the original restored wood frame windows! Being in the building envelope biz I know I should renounce all things single pane on general principle, but I find the allure of wood-framed, single-hung sash windows to be strong indeed. Yes, it can be draughty, but the restoration process tightens up loose sashes, and seals gaps that took decades to develop.

One nifty feature that non-residents won't see is the new inner courtyard that was cut into the center of the building. It enables suites in the core to attract natural light, although their views are limited to their neighbours across the landscaped gap.

There's also a magnificent landscaped rooftop terrace on which to recline, or barbeque, or just take in the vistas of Victoria.

Black Friday

My job took me to Victoria on, of all days, Black Friday. And ironically, the building in which I was to conduct a warranty review is a former Hudson's Day department store!

First off, however, I must share with you the spectacular sunrise I encountered en route. Every time I ride the ferry, which is almost always between Tsawwassen/ Swartz Bay, I stay on the deck through Active Pass. It's the best part of the trip. That passage is the narrowest and gives you the best views of both shores. Plus the wind funnels through there with fury most of the time.

Last Friday I had just finished my breakfast as we cleared the open water stretch of the Strait of Georgia. Perfect timing. I bundled up (it was cold at dawn!) and stood on deck, armed and ready with my trusted Point-and-Shoot. It wasn't lost on me that I was about the only person on deck, save for a few smokers. Perhaps photography is a bit of an addition.

The sun's rays were almost cresting the trees on Mayne Island as we rounded the northwest tip of Mayne. Between that tip and Village Bay is where I caught the sun's first wink of the morning. Honestly, there aren't too many things I'd gladly awaken at 4:30 in the morning to witness, but this is truly one of them.

p.s. Just to be clear, the sun didn't actually rise at 4:30; it came up at about 7:50, although I had to get up at 4:30 to make the 7 a.m. boat.

zzz's

I’m really letting the moss grow under my feet regarding our recent summer road trip. We’ve been home for 2-1/2 months now and I still haven’t shared our other great adventure from that holiday.

You’ve already been entertained (I hope!) by my harrowing tale of “I know precisely how far I can go on a tank of gas”. Well now I do, is the upshot of that little mis-adventure.

“Gas Gauge Blues” occurred on the way to Winnipeg. As much as anyone might think that was all the (mis)adventure one trip should accommodate…wait, there’s more!

Let me begin with a seemingly unrelated statement; over the years I’ve come to realize that I’m likely a lot less mechanically inclined than I ever really was (am).

Believe it or not, the adventure I’m about to relay to you brings back memories of a particular book that I referred to often in my late teens, “How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat (sik) Idiot” by John Muir. It was a bible of sorts to me, and I really believe it kept me sane on numerous occasions; those times when all I really needed was a simple diagram to tell me which engine cylinder was number 1, or which wheel brake cylinder one bleeds first, or what is the correct spark plug gap.

You see, I was a compleat (appropriate, n’est pas?) car nut in my teens. Maybe to say I wasn’t as mechanically inclined as I’d wanted to be is a bit harsh; perhaps it’s more that I didn’t have enough patience to thoroughly learn a task before jumping right in. Nonetheless, I really knew how to frustrate myself on a regular basis. I had several manuals to assist me with my 1962 Beetle, bought very much used (and abused) in 1984 during high school.

I bought my first copy of The Guide for this ’62 project. It had a spiral wire binding (the book, not the car). I couldn’t find it while preparing for this article, although I may still have it; it would be very grease-stained, and perhaps missing a few pages. My second copy of “The Manual” is the 34^th printing, dated April 1988, almost new when I was in high school. My two copies of this faithful tome assisted me many a dark night (aren’t those always the times an old VW breaks down?) with subsequent ’72, ’69, ’65 (Notchback), ’55 (Kombi), and ’64 convertible (my favourite thus far, btw) models.

Most mechanics’ manuals were too technical, or I was too impatient, or both. I drifted toward my favourite, the aforementioned Idiots’ Guide for my lion’s share of information. The illustrations drew me in (pun intended) as well. I’ve always considered myself somewhat artistic, although again, I’ve been too impatient to really apply myself to drawing. I used to sketch cars and trucks as a kid. But the cartoon style illustrations in the Idiots’ Guide (drawn by Peter Aschwanden) were definitely an attraction within themselves. Their ultra-detailed style reminded me of the Doodle Art posters I’d coloured with felt pens as a kid.

So, long-windedly, that brings me back to the memory that was forefront in my mind as we (my wife and I) experienced the second adventure of our summer road trip from Vancouver to Winnipeg, and back again, this past summer.

We had split up the return trip a bit differently. We were to attend Shauna’s cousin’s wedding on our return, thus breaking up our driving time. Usually such a trip requires approximately 24 hours of total driving time; either two 12 hour marathons, or three more sane 8 hour days. This time however, we drove about 6 hours from Winnipeg to Regina for the wedding, and stayed there a couple of days before carrying on to what we thought would be Calgary.

Our first mis-calculation occurred when we decided that we could actually travel further than Calgary; say Golden, BC. Our second mis-calculation was in leaving the hotel parking lot at 9 a.m. instead of 7. And the third mis-calculation revolved around having been driving on flat prairie roads for the previous two weeks. We (meaning me) had become unaccustomed to winding two-lane highways through the mountains, at dusk, in the rain. How soon we (and again, meaning me) forget.

Oh, and plus…the temperature plunged from a 3:37 p.m. high of 37^oC (photo-documented for proof) in Medicine Hat, to an evening low of 11^oC in Field, BC.

Yes, Field, BC. How is it we’d know with such accuracy what temperature it was in Field, BC, on that fateful late august evening, you might ask? Hmm, now therein lies a humdinger of a travel story.

From Regina, via Medicine Hat, we arrived in Calgary around dinner time, and for some reason we were at odds with each as to what to do about dinner. And as I tend to be more motivated by food than my better half, I wanted to go to a real sit-down restaurant for dinner, although honestly neither one of us were hungry enough due to afternoon snacking in Medicine Hat (who knew Timmy Ho’s had hard ice cream?). I topped up the gas tank, spilling gas on my sandal in the process. Events were definitely starting to snowball out of our favour.

We hit the road again after I’d changed from sandals to socks and shoes (in the end, a good idea). Out of Calgary, through the foothills, past Kananaskis, we finally decided to grab a bite to eat in Canmore. Sounded like a logical place to get some fast food and get back on the road quickly. Not quite a NASCAR pit-stop, but similar intent.

However…I mis-read the highway sign and took one off-ramp too soon. And do you think we could find the ruddy McDonald’s? Mein Gott im Himmel, where did they hide the McDonald’s in Canmore?! After several time-wasting laps of this small tourist town (although certainly not to suggest that Canmore is a waste of time in any way; we were simply pressed for daylight at that point), we dashed into A&W for a bite, then back on the road.

The weather was getting increasingly wetter and colder, the skies darker, and the highway narrower. (Welcome back to our 2011 BC summer!) With every passing third-of-an-hour we were getting more concerned. Although, to be perfectly honest, had it been a clear summer evening, which is what we’d been expecting (didn’t really pay attention to the weather forecast the previous evening), a drive after dark wouldn’t have been too bad. Darkness on its own doesn’t necessarily portend a bad trip. Prior to our arrival in Winnipeg Shauna drove the last portion of the trip from the US border to Winnipeg. That drive had taken a lot longer than expected due to road work and nightfall, but Shauna was reasonably familiar with the route, having grown up in that region, and it wasn’t raining. Thus, darkness really wasn’t a problem.

However, our westward tack was now combining nightfall, cloud cover (no moon), rain, streaks on the windshield from oily roadspray, lots of approaching semi-trailer trucks whose headlights were starting to cause increasing consternation due to the streaky windscreen, poorly marked road construction, numerous curves in the road, 2-lane traffic, and over-exertion on our parts from having bitten off more than we could chew in terms of driving distance. We’d already been on the road 12 hours at that point. To say the least, the atmosphere within the passenger cabin was tense at that point.

So…how did we end up in Field, BC you ask, and what on earth does this have to do with an air-cooled Volkswagen repair manual? Especially since we drive a modern Mazda?

I remember fondly from one of the first times I thumbed through a copy of “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive”, one of the illustrations in particular caught my eye. It was a sketched scene in which many Volkswagens were parked at a highway rest stop area, most with zzz’s emanating from the cars’ interiors.

I think the rest stop design is more of a US highway scene than Canadian. I’ve driven from Vancouver to Seattle many times, beginning in my late teens when I’d attended VW shows in Seattle in the summers. I was well acquainted with these rest stops as these would be the areas we’d pull into to let slower cars in our VW mini-convoys catch up. In those years we tended to make the trip in groups of like-minded car owners.

Back to Field; as more kilometres passed, I was starting to internally scroll through our options. Although (ironically) we had a reservation for a motel with a pool in Golden, I was becoming increasingly aware that we weren’t going to get the chance to use it, at least not unless the rain stopped and the roads dried up a bit. Oily roadspray, doncha know.

Around every curve I fully expected to see a road sign denoting a (very) short distance remaining to Golden. And every ensuing curve proved to be ever-increasingly, maddenly disappointing.

The last straws were a combination of curvy stretch of dark, 2-lane through a poorly marked construction zone, a line of traffic behind me, a very long line of glaring headlights through my streaked windshield approaching me, and a narrowly missed concrete median dividing construction zone traffic. I wasn’t going very fast, not nearly fast enough for all the traffic on my bumper apparently, but I really don’t know how I avoided side-swiping that concrete barrier.

This occurred a few minutes before seeing the fork in the highway for the Field Tourist Information Centre, as if heaven-sent. A quick left, followed by a right, and we were safely in the parking lot. Unfortunately it was around 10 p.m. and the place was locked up tight; except for the public washrooms. Again, at that point, heaven-sent.

The washrooms were the one glowing beacon in this whole debacle. They were brand-new, and apparently open to the public on a 24-hour basis. I did note, however, that at the late hour we had arrived that perhaps it hadn’t been such a great idea for someone (not meaning me) to leave the doors chocked open with garbage bins inside. Upon our exit from the facilities, I ensured the doors were closed, but unlocked. The last thing you want to meet is Mama Bear and her cubs rooting through the garbage in the washroom lobby as you stumble in rubbing sleep from your eyes.

We did attempt once more to make our reservation in Golden after the rain let up a bit. We got perhaps 2 km down the highway before I turned back. It was like thinking you could most certainly swim across that small channel, and then chickening out a very short distance from shore. Once we’d mentally kissed our comfy Golden hotel room good-bye, we aimed the car across the narrow bridge over the river to see if Field held any available lodging. Slow trolling of the few streets of Field revealed one full travel lodge and several Not Vacant B&Bs.

Back to the Tourist Info Centre. Did I mention it was an 11^oC summer evening? By this time, at around 11 p.m., we were resigned to catching as many zzz’s as could be caught by bunking in the car overnight. And I must say, it wasn’t anywhere as near satisfying as that cartoon freeway reststop appeared to be. It had completely lost any pretense of attraction that it may ever had held for me.

Fortunately our dog was safe at home staying with my Mom, or else rearranging luggage within the car in order to recline the seats would have been near impossible with her kennel stowed near the hatchback. As it was I moved almost everything into the hatch area, save for a few smaller bags we stashed between us.

We drifted off somewhere close to 2:00 a.m., serenaded by the sounds of all-night-long semi-trailer truck traffic, and were awakened at 6:00 by the slamming car doors of a Filipino family having just driven eastward through the night from Vancouver.

I think I can honestly say we’ve gotten the halfway-across-Canada driving trip out of our systems for the foreseeable future.

Wardrobe mal-function

Stangely enough, this morning as I was traveling to work I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be funny if I messed up and wore one shoe each of a different pair of shoes? These ones feel like a matched pair."

Just now I looked down at my feet and guess what I saw?




Not enough sleep this week thus far, is what I saw.

Good thing I keep another pair of dress shoes in my office for days when I ride by bike to work.

Sheesh, this could have been embarrassing.

How many more sleeps?

Hard to believe. Is it just me or does it seem like Christmas advertising starts earlier every year? Waiting for a bus last night (Nov. 1) I saw the Chistmas displays set up already in this shop.

I thought briefly about masking the name, but you'd know it by its colours anyway.

October scenes

October is very transitional. I remember thinking in early October, "It really seems like the leaves aren't going to fall this year." Of course, it's completely impossible, but nonetheless I have had that thought before. I suppose it would make an interesting novel; "The Year the Seasons Stopped Changing."

This past year could have been the one. We almost didn't have a summer. And when it finally arrived, it was short. I think the late arrival really through the trees for a loop. The leaves seemed to forget to loosen their grips well into late September, and continued into the early throes of October.

Fortunately my wife and I had already planned a summer trip to Winnipeg. It's always hot there in the summer. Vancouver had more of a summer that wasn't. So it wasn't an altogether abstract thought to imagine a year where the leaves remained firmly attached to their branches.

I was thinking recently that I do tend to have abstract thoughts while walking our dog. It's those times when I really try to take in my surroundings. When a new product hits the market I often wonder, "How did anyone come up that?." Sometimes it seems it's just not a product of rational thought. But whoever said you have to be rational all the time? The abstract leads creativity, in my opinion. And I have my dog to thank for accelerating my creative process, especially photographically. Who knows, maybe one day I'll successfully act on an abstract idea.

While not altogether abstract (except maybe the grandfather clock image), these photos are a taste of what I've seen lately, and are an example of what I've thoughtfully processed, in this month of October.

BTW, the "Keep out" photo was taken at the site of the old Jericho Beach wharf. It's been removed lately because it was deemed unsafe. This view is looking East early on a recent Saturday morning.

Coincidences

Coincidences are indeed thought provoking, i.e. things that make ya go, “Hmmmm.” (How the word “go” ever replaced “said” I’ll never know, but that’s for a future rant.)

A couple of days ago a work colleague of mine told me about two commuter trains colliding in China. The same or next day (I can’t remember) this same colleague phoned me on my way home from work to say he’d like to drop by after work to give me some documents I’d need for the following day’s site investigation. I was lying on the couch watching the news as he pulled up in front of my house. And wouldncha know it; I was watching the report of the collision of those two trains in China.

This morning my wife told me about a new fitness centre a neighbour of ours is planning to open soon. I started thinking about fitness clubs because I’ve started going to Fitness World again, and the company I work for has a reimbursement available to cover part of a fitness club membership. I was thinking I should contact our HR rep to find out how to do it. I opened a job file this morning to work on a current project, and there right in front of me was an old draft document I’d physically cut and pasted some project photos onto for a field review report, and lo and behold, on the back of it was the Health Club Reimbursement form I’d filled out in 2007. I guess I never submitted it. This was the same form I was going to look for this morning!

There was another one of those “Huh?” moments that happened in between the colliding trains and the fitness club membership reimbursement form, but I have forgotten what it was. I made a mental note of it at the time, but it seems to have been sucked from my head to blend with the ether as seemingly permanently as parfum de skunk does with my Spaniel’s big floppy ears.

But, never fear. Another coincidence has just occurred (these always occur in threes, right? Or does this count as four?) This morning I was arranging a business trip for early next week to Sechelt to conduct existing conditions reviews of some buildings. I had just finished arranging a time and place with the client when I received an email from my department manager, asking if I’d issued a proposal first. I hadn’t because I thought from the phrasing of his original email that that portion of the job was already complete. Apparently not.

Considering this assignment is out of town, I thought back to the last existing conditions review I’d done; it was in Whistler. Bingo. I’d use that as a template. I had just pulled that proposal file on screen at the exact moment that Evan, the project manager of that Whistler job, walked past my office in search of my department manager. He almost never comes into this department. I’ve seen him around here maybe twice this year.

If I could display that distinctive opening music from The Twilight Zone in easily recognizable characters (not everyone reads music), I’d do it right here.