An August Ritual at Carnarvon Place

Living in a high-rise often means you only cross paths with the people in your own elevators, the lobby, the swimming pool, or the parkade. But once a year, the two towers of Carnarvon Place, representing about 150 units, mingle at the ground level. Last night was the annual strata BBQ, a reliable August ritual.

I was thinking about the history of it all. I still have an old poster from 2013 advertising the 17th annual BBQ. This year's posters indicate it's the 28th year. If you account for the two summers we missed due to COVID, the math actually lines up perfectly. It means this annual tradition started the very same year Jay and I arrived in Canada, though it would be another two years before we actually moved into our apartment here.

While some folks at the gathering have been around nearly as long as we have, we also made a point to invite a young Asian couple with two little girls who just moved in next door to us about a week ago. It is always good to introduce the new arrivals to the community.

Jay and I went down for about an hour, just the right amount of time to socialize. It has always been a BBQ organized and paid by the strata, but in years past, potluck dishes from the residents were highly encouraged. While the current approach certainly makes things simpler, alas, we do miss the multicultural culinary variety of those older gatherings. Still, Dax, our resident manager, took on the role of head chef and handled the grilling. The menu was straightforward: hamburgers, sausage-type hotdogs, fresh condiments, various chips, and a few tubs of Costco brownies to finish it off.

It was a simple, well-attended evening, and just a nice part of living here during August.

West Coast, Best Coast

A morning stroll down Carnarvon Street took in the Salvation Army Thrift Store along the route.  It served as the anchor of my loop that eventually crossed the tracks and returned along the riverfront past the Pier West towers. I checked out the newly opened park facilities and plaza space installed at their base. 

This stretch of late summer reminds one precisely why living in British Columbia remains so agreeable. A persistent breeze finally swept up the Fraser today, evicting the grey haze of wildfire smoke that had settled over the river basin for less than two days and restoring proper visibility to the landscape.  Life in this corner of the province becomes effortlessly appealing when the weather behaves, and the upcoming forecast offers every reason to lean into it. With mostly sunny conditions stretching well into next week, daytime highs holding steady between 22°C and 26°C, and comfortable overnight lows around 11°C to 15°C, the calendar naturally fills itself. 

Whether mapping out extended afternoon walks, filling the days with outdoor errands, or simply lingering near the river, the immediate stretch ahead promises ideal conditions for an active agenda. Ultimately, turning a routine neighborhood walk into a smoke-free loop along the riverfront proves that when a favorable wind clears the air, life is perfectly fine. 

The Wearable Drama: A Trilogy in Three Short Acts

My relationship with Google’s wrist-borne hardware has devolved into an abusive cycle of misplaced optimism and premature electronic mortality. Averaging a fresh smartwatch every two years is not a badge of tech-enthusiast honor; it is a damning indictment of a company using its early adopters as unpaid beta testers. The original Pixel Watch set a low bar by surrendering after a mere 22 months, only to be succeeded by the Pixel Watch 2, which I naïvely trusted to manage the simple task of surviving a standard daily wear cycle.

Foolish me. On Wednesday, the heart rate monitoring temporarily stopped functioning, delivering a subtle prelude to the impending collapse. Prompted by a subsequent desire to test the device further and actually use the Always-On Display, I embarked on a brief experiment to see if the two-year-old lithium cell could handle an evening of passive monitoring. I was actively trying to rationalize keeping the aluminum slab and glass out of pure, unyielding pragmatism. The watch responded with a dramatic midnight suicide. I woke up at 1:00 AM to a pitch-black screen, no optical green sensors, and an ominous red thermometer icon warning me that the internal thermal cutoffs had triggered a terminal lockout loop.

Once I realized it was unequivocally dead, I was finally liberated from my own cautiousness. Its thermal meltdown won. So, a Lemongrass-colour banded Pixel Watch 4 is now en route via Amazon. I give it until the spring of 2028 before it, too, succumbs to the threat of spontaneous combustion.

Our City Opens Up More Waterfront

After years of construction dust right outside our front door, the westward extension of Westminster Pier Park officially opened yesterday. The city and Bosa replaced that bleak old surface parking lot with two acres of proper green space, capping the underground parkade and seamlessly connecting Pier Park straight through to the Quayside Esplanade at last.

It is a well-designed stretch of riverfront. Beyond the open lawns and new trees, there is a central festival plaza with splash jets, a shaded stage, and a striking Coast Salish art installation titled Ebb and Flow. They even managed to squeeze in an outdoor gym, ping pong tables, and a dedicated dog relief area.

The community turned out this afternoon. Families milled around a food truck, kids invaded the water jets, and a few brave souls tested out a cold plunge setup by the boardwalk. The formal speeches and ribbon cutting wrapped up around 19:00, leaving live acoustic music to drift over the Fraser as the sun dipped. It is a genuine, long-overdue upgrade to our city's connection to the Fraser River.

The Pinnacle of Modern Cinema: A Giant Strip of Plastic

The pursuit of genuine cinematic grandeur turned into a lesson in modern theatrical marketing this week. Jay was fully tuned into the superior results even without digging into the underlying technical details, insisting that such an ancient story deserved the best possible viewing environment. For us, that meant securing seats for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in true 70mm film.  This required purchasing tickets three full weeks in advance for the venue in Langley, located roughly 27 kilometers (17 miles) east along the Trans-Canada Highway. The process itself proved needlessly tedious, requiring a time-consuming registration process on the Cineplex website just to pay for admission with a credit card.

My initial skepticism regarding the necessity of booking nearly a month early vanished once the technical reality of modern movie projection became clear. Most multiplexes offering premium large formats actually utilize commercial digital retrofits, colloquially dubbed "LieMAX" by film enthusiasts. These digital setups project a standard 4K image onto a cropped aspect ratio, which pales in comparison to the uncompressed resolution of physical celluloid.

True 15-perforation 70mm film runs horizontally through a massive optical projector, yielding an analog image resolution equivalent to roughly 18K. The sheer scale fills Langley's massive 21.3 by 16.0-meter (70 by 52.5-foot) screen at a grand 1.43:1 vertical aspect ratio, capturing organic grain and visual depth that digital downscaling simply cannot replicate. Across the entirety of Canada, only nine commercial venues still possess the working mechanical apparatus required to run these physical film prints, making Langley one of the rare sites capable of delivering the director's actual vision. In fact, there are only forty-one screens in the whole world that can play this 384 kg (847 lb.) film. This is why nearly every local screening has been pre-booked online, save for the first, neck-pain-inducing front row.

There is a distinct irony in driving down the highway to chase a century-old analog technology simply because state-of-the-art 4K laser projection fails to match its raw resolving power. Planning three weeks ahead to watch chemical emulsion pass in front of a giant lamp might seem archaic in an age of digital convenience; nevertheless, settling for a pristine digital stream turns out to be the real compromise.

The Back-Seat Testimony to Laziness

 

Yesterday was the last day of a long weekend in British Columbia.  It took precisely 141 days from our spring return to finally haul the winter car cover out of our back seat. For nearly five months, this bulky sheet of fabric enjoyed a permanent place on the rear upholstery, acting less as protective equipment and more as a fixture we simply lacked the resolve to move.

Our capacity for self-justification relies on a tight sequence of excuses. First, contractors replacing the roofs on both residential towers routinely parked their work vehicles over our hose area, blocking access entirely. Next, a month-long trip to Morocco kept us away from basic chores altogether. Then, weeks of recovering from international jet lag consumed what little motivation remained. After that, municipal water restrictions took effect in New Westminster and banned garden hoses, handing our ongoing procrastination a lovely veneer of civic duty. Finally, watching Jay hose down months of accumulated dirt today forces us to admit that, on occasion, we might simply be a tad lazy.

Freedom Leaves No One Behind

 

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon at the Vancouver Pride Parade and Davie Village Street Party. Jay and I make a point of attending the Gay Pride Parade whenever we happen to be in town during the early August event. It aligns neatly with the BC Day long weekend, which makes for a lively city overall. Back in 1996, less than a month after landing in the area, we caught our first glimpse of the parade on television. It was an immediate revelation because this was the first place, we'd lived since meeting, that offered public tolerance and genuine appreciation for diversity. After spending nearly twelve years in Middle Eastern countries where known gay foreigners were routinely deported and basic acceptance was non-existent, that broadcast felt like a massive breath of fresh air.

Standing on the curb today, that initial feeling of liberation remains just as vivid. Attending the parade is a simple way to express our gratitude for the acceptance this country demonstrates daily. Being just two faces among thousands might seem insignificant, but physically showing up ensures that every participant is counted. That collective presence actively safeguards a crucial tradition of live and let live.

Yet that safe harbor feels progressively eroded in other parts of the world by acts of violence and opportunistic political populism. Public spaces and hard-won liberties do not preserve themselves without effort. Staying visible in the crowd is a modest defense against those who would prefer a return to quieter, darker times. This year’s official Vancouver Pride slogan, Unapologetically Queer, fits the moment perfectly. It serves as a necessary reminder that rights are maintained by living them out loud, rather than quietly ceding public spaces to the loudest bigots.

Trading the Colosseum for Dawn Departures

These pictures were taken on September 8, 2025.  Jay celebrated this birthday in the city of Rome, Italy.  Here's a peek at that day:

 

Jay and I always try to give ourselves the gift of travel whenever a birthday rolls around. Our recent Alaska cruise took care of my own 2026 milestone, but Jay’s upcoming celebration in September remains entirely unbooked. Our actual confidence in where or when we will fly is floating near rock bottom. Mexico City has surfaced as our primary idea for one simple reason: despite all our years of travel, Jay and I have never spent any time in the capital city. It remains a massive, unvisited five-century-deep megalopolis waiting on our map; it offers a full week of real exploration, provided we can accept the flight schedule.

A quick check of the flight options shows that the airlines make Vancouver-to-Mexico City travel feel like a test of patience. Reaching the city at a reasonable afternoon hour requires an 08:15 Aeroméxico departure, which demands a 05:30 alarm clock setting that borders on biological cruelty. The alternative is Air Canada, which burns an entire calendar day in transit only to deposit passengers at the terminal at 23:15. On top of that, even opting for budget carriers still guarantees a fairly expensive ticket for a trip that stays strictly within North America.

So our plans remain in limbo while Jay and I weigh the scheduling headaches against the thrill of brand new territory. Paying a hefty premium for terrible flight times rubs me the wrong way, yet staggering onto a tarmac before sunrise feels like the inevitable tax for diving headfirst into a premier cultural and culinary hub sitting practically in our continental backyard.