Personal Quotes

"Wouldn't the 1970's song, Escape (The Pina Colada Song) by Rupert Holmes now take place on craigslist?"

Dennis Sylvester Hurd (1959- )

Click This Image to Visit Craigslist Vancouver

Tradition Continues

It is summer now!

On today's walk uptown, I passed through Queen's Park just to take a look at the Petting Zoo. I didn't bother to go inside the fenced area but saw lost of kids and adults interacting with the animals.

Most probably as the Victoria Day weekend just occurred, additional animals are on the way.

I titled the picture to the right, "Irony". Doesn't it seem odd to see a photo of a peacock in black & white?

The Fabulous New Flickr!

I joined Flickr, the photo-sharing site, when it was still based here in Vancouver. The year 2005 is surely a long time ago in the online world. I began to think of it as just an old reliable place to store pictures. Flickr may have been one of the very first examples of a Web 2.0 app. That phrase was coined to mean a site which relies on its members to contribute the content and therefore value. Thankfully, after Yahoo bought the site they didn't allow it to become too marginalized. Over the intervening years, Flickr remained the gorilla of its online genre, but it failed to keep up with the social networking aspects of what the Internet has become.


Click this image to visit a Flickr collection of where I teach.
Yesterday Flickr moved forward about five years in one fell swoop. I loaded the new Android app on my tablet and began using the site in ways I never have. I never saw much value in following others. Yet just in the last 24 hour, I must have added twenty new Flickr contacts. The romance is back; the bold design makes it a fun place to go. The version on my phone now edits photos much better than Instagram. Flickr is again exciting and I am now ashamed of my little affairs with other photo-sharing sites.

Chillin' on a Chilly One

Today is Victoria Day in Canada. Of course that means it's the end of a long weekend, a long weekend over which we took no special, out-of-town trip.



So today, we ambled down to the SkyTrain just to walk a bit in downtown Vancouver. It takes almost a half hour to get to the end of the line at Waterfront. Today stayed overcast for a majority of the morning but filtered sunshine did bring a little brightness. We saw just one cruise ship at Canada Place as it is a Monday and most summer, Alaskan cruises depart on the weekend. We walked out on the pier to peer in the balcony windows of the ship. After, we walked up and got the #5 bus to English Bay. We sat on a bench and looked at the beach for a while. I had to come to terms with the reality that a lot of people living in a region with two million people do not have a sandy, downtown beach. After a bit of time, we took the Davie Street bus back to the Granville SkyTrain station and came home.

We made use of Jay's monthly pass which allows a free accompanying passenger on Sundays and holiday. We will probably go down a bit later this afternoon and take the train across the river to the T&T Supermarket near King George station in Surrey.

That's it. Just an kick-back type of relaxing day.

Personal Quotes

"Wow. Chicken tastes just like dinosaur!"

Dennis Sylvester Hurd (1959- )

The George C. Page Museum, The La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles - 2007

Tracking Down Siglinda

I'm pretty sure the whole purpose of my eJournal and images is to allow me an Internet version of my own gigantic scrapbook. I guess I should arrive at some definitive purpose for this blog as it's now approaching ten years of daily entries! I do know time and distance used to allow memories to slowly dissolve. An occasional incomplete misty fragment had to be left wanting as there was no means to refresh it. No way existed to revive a concrete image of little snippets of things gone by.

I somehow found my 2005 entry in which I first posted a photo from the 80's. Today, I added it to The Harbor Gameroom's Facebook page as it also contained old friends, Bret and Joel. I noted the title and wondered if I could find out more.

An exhaustive Net search for Siglinda Steinfuller turned up little, but here's the scoop. I remembered the name and was pretty sure pinup posters were a marketing campaign for a beer company. Eventually, although it required a substantial amount of image editing, I'm proud to present this:


She was the Dean of Beer. People, I guess, drank Schlitz in 1977. This was the year I was a college freshman. By 1982 Schlitz had been sold to Stroh Brewery Company. I'm not sure how effective Schlitz was in increasing college beer sales with these posters, but I recall them being a big hit in male dorm rooms. The legal drinking age, back then, was 18. Siglinda Steinfuller was probably the most popular girl on campus that fall.

The Big Fowl-Up

After Easter, the Superstore had a really good deal on turkey. We were not long back from a vacation, so the freezer had sufficient space for a frozen bird.

Last night, we put the turkey into the bottom of the fridge to thaw. I noticed the term "utility turkey" on the wrap's label. I sort of wondered what that meant. Try as I might to put the picture out of my mind, I could only imagine a live bird sauntering around the enclosure wearing a utility belt, complete with hanging hammer!

Today, when the bird was put into the oven, we came to the surprise understanding that our bird had only one drumstick. I guess the word utility meant it'd be best cooked simply for the meat and not as the main centerpiece of a fancy turkey dinner.

Still, I think the label would have better read, "physically-challenged fowl".