48,000 Photos and Not a Single Yellowed Corner

If one wishes to scroll through a lifetime of memories without the hassle of a slide projector, the Flickr album view is wonderfully efficient. I joined the platform back in 2005. Returning from a trip to the BC Okanagan, it became immediately apparent that emailing holiday snaps was a dreadful way to share them. Now, the archive has swollen to somewhere between 48,000 and 49,000 images.

It has been a stroke of sheer brilliance having a dedicated repository to store and share images over the last 21 years. The very first photographs, uploaded several decades ago, still sit exactly where they were left.  Others, some scanned from various parts of my life, joined them. Miraculously, these digital pixels have not yellowed one little bit. It remains an absolute privilege to be able to quickly search for nearly every image I have ever seen through a viewfinder or captured via a phone's screen.

 

The screenshot provided shows my album view, organizing the years in reverse chronological order. It starts with the most recent adventures and works backward. However, the ability to search is what makes the collection approachable.  

Observant readers will notice an empty album sitting at the very top, eagerly awaiting fresh content. This Wednesday and Thursday, Jay and I are flying through Montreal to reach Casablanca, Morocco. We will be spending exactly four weeks on an individually-created circular path, winding our way through the ancient cities, up into the Atlas Mountains, and finally back down along the Atlantic coast. Expect that image count to cross the 49,000 threshold very soon.

View my Flickr Album page.

The Great Off-The-Cuff Catastrophe

It seems we've had an untimely casualty in the travel gear department. Just yesterday, the upper-arm, all-in-one blood pressure monitor which Jay and I have come to rely on suddenly lost its will to inflate. The convenient cuff has officially given up the ghost.

We truly loved that little unit. It fit neatly into a small box and was absolutely brilliant when packing. To have it fail after just a bit more than a year and a half is definitely disappointing. Still, looking on the bright side, I suppose I should feel lucky that it didn't decide to stop functioning two days into our month in Morocco, which kicks off this Wednesday!

Today’s mission involved heading uptown to hunt down a replacement. Strangely, nobody carried a similar all-in-one unit. The only compact options available were those smaller wrist monitors, which medical professionals generally do not recommend. When one uses an upper-arm cuff, one is measuring directly at the level of the heart. With a wrist monitor, you can get significant differences in pressure depending on exactly where your wrist happens to be resting.

After striking out at Walmart and one pharmacy, we finally picked up a new unit at London Drugs. The Bios-labeled device is smaller than most standard options out there, but still not as compact or easy to store since we're back to dealing with a tube. It'll have to do. Jay and I are quite religious about taking our morning and evening readings. In fact, I have the statistics to prove it: at least a decade's worth of data that I've dutifully logged into my Android app. Let's just hope this new machine keeps the metrics flowing without developing any inflation drama.

Our Hyack Multicultural Parade

 

We headed uptown this morning at 11:00 for the annual Hyack Parade, soaking in an hour and fifteen minutes of prime civic pageantry. The Hyack Festival is a New Westminster institution, a community tradition that has been rolling down Sixth Street for over half a century.

 

Things have certainly shifted a bit since the COVID closures. We’ve noticed far fewer out-of-province floats or large high school marching bands making the trek these days, though somehow the folks from Marysville, Washington, always manage to get here!

Interestingly, it used to be billed as an International Parade, but I noticed this year it was explicitly advertised as a multicultural one. A wonderful cross-section of Canadian ethnic communities takes part, marching right alongside the traditional hometown staples like the city's Fire Department, the Scouts, local teams, and entrants from local businesses.  Clubs such as a local owners of antique Ford Thunderbirds and Fraternal organizations like the Shriners always show up.

The weather today was a little mixed, but thankfully there was no rain and we were actually treated to quite a stretch of really blue sky. We always attend. It just wouldn't be May in New West without it.

Ducks Flee New Westminster

 

It was a nice morning with a temperature heading toward 23C. It was a perfect day for our scheduled 'duck dinner' with the guys. Ed and Shinji drove from Richmond but Tim and Jiwan came by Skytrain. Jay had worked hard on creating dinner. He put on the table after appetizers and I tapped the wine box. We didn't even walk along the river and just went for a dip in the hot tub before eating. Jiwan couldn't participate in the water activities because of his restrictions after surgery.

 

Dinner included stir friend potato and egg plant, dhal and chicken curries, yellow rice and black chick peas. He made a tomato-date-and rhubarb chutney. For desert this time, he chose to make a real fruit cocktail with tropical fruit. The vanilla frozen yoghurt accompanied the freshly-cut mangoes, papaya, and pineapples, raisins and cashews.

   

By deploying the ducks to Richmond, we are free to leave for Morocco on Wednesday without the obligation to host. Next, we know where we'll meet again when everybody has free time.

Clickety Keyboards

It has become an ongoing part of my everyday routine to expand my historical architecture with my digital 'fellow traveller,' Ajith. He is a personalized version of Google Gemini's AI.  In the process of reviewing these earlier, more pixelated chapters of my life today, we unearthed a photograph from the Flickr stream.  It is an image I have probably used before, but one that instantly transports me back to 1989. 

It is a shot of Jay, intensely focused on a session of Moonbugs on our beige, monolithic XT clone. We were living in Manama, Bahrain at the time, right around the strange and tense days leading up to the First Gulf War. Outside our apartment, the geopolitical landscape was shifting, but inside, the absolute priority was strictly arcade-level survival.

Looking at that photo, what immediately strikes me is not the massive CRT monitor; but the keyboard, a glorious, sprawling, buckling-spring keyboard. This was an era when operating a computer required real men; at least real forearm stamina. You did not just lazily brush your hands over those keys; you operated them like a piece of light industrial machinery. If you look closely at Jay in the picture, his hands are hovering with lethal precision over the directional pad, completely ignoring the heavy, early ball mouse sitting uselessly to the side. Every single keystroke back then was a percussive, definitive event that echoed through the room with a deeply satisfying, metallic clack.

Today, Jay and I are surrounded by frictionless, silent smart devices. We type on modern laptops with keys so utterly mushy they feel like drumming on a row of damp sponges.  It is a modern ergonomic reality that I absolutely will never get used to. Everything has become a sleek 'appliance', quiet, efficient, and completely devoid of tactile soul. The march of progress is relentless, but looking back at that photograph is a stark reminder that I loved that loud, clunky XT clone in a way I simply will never love the glass-and-aluminum slabs we rely on today. 

More Additions in 2027?

When Jay and I finally dragged our luggage back to the Lower Mainland this past March, we officially pinned the 99th and 100th countries onto the master map. It took over four decades of relentless border crossings, questionable transit hubs, and a terrifying number of passport renewals to finally hit the century mark. We never actively treated the globe like a competitive checklist. However, crossing that final threshold into triple digits felt like a profoundly satisfying bit of lifetime administration.

The rest of the calendar is certainly not lacking in forward momentum. We deploy for a full month in Morocco starting next Wednesday. We might actually exhibit a rare moment of geographical restraint and stay reasonably close to home for our respective birthdays in July and September. But by winter, the restraint completely evaporates. We will be flying to the UK merely to board a transatlantic vessel, taking the absolute slowest route possible to an Airbnb in Rio de Janeiro. We plan to occupy that Brazilian outpost for three solid months right through the glorious chaos of Carnival.

There is exactly one tragedy in this otherwise flawless logistical masterpiece. The remainder of 2026 will yield absolutely zero new additions to the map. We are entirely restricted to repeat visits. When one has already conquered a hundred sovereign territories, finding a completely untrampled horizon becomes a rather tedious burden. I suppose we will just have to dig a little deeper into the atlas next year.

Crimson on the Concrete

When the little red Floribunda finally unfurled its perfectly pointed petals, it fully expected a standing ovation. Or, at the very least, a polite smattering of applause from a passing, well-heeled gardening society.

Instead, it received the rhythmic thump-thump of a stray shopping cart rolling into a concrete pillar.

The rose took a moment to assess its real estate. It was not, as it had wildly hoped as a seedling, nestled in the manicured loam of a grand botanical garden. It was wedged into a partially abandoned, slightly chipped concrete planter on the rooftop parking deck of a thoroughly average shopping mall. Its immediate neighbors were a fading yellow line and a puddle of indeterminate origin.

At first, there was a brief spike of botanical outrage.

I am a complex hybrid, the rose thought, shaking a serrated leaf in the general direction of a parked sedan. I have layers! I have a subtle, velvety gradient! I deserve a dedicated irrigation drip and a small, tasteful brass plaque!

For the first few days, the rose aggressively struck a pose, waiting for the masses to arrive and validate its existence. It threw its petals open with theatrical flair. But the grand total of its daily audience hovered around a dozen people. Most were completely preoccupied with remembering where they parked, marching past the planter with their heads buried in their phones and their hands full of reasonably priced footwear.

But then, a shift occurred.

A thoroughly exhausted retail worker, escaping the fluorescent lights for a momentary afternoon break, slumped against the concrete wall. They looked up, spotted the unapologetically vibrant crimson bloom defying the grey expanse, and let out a long, slow breath. A genuine smile broke across their face.

The rose stood a little taller. Well, it thought. That was rather nice.

The next morning, a very fuzzy, delightfully unbothered bumblebee landed squarely in the center of the bloom. The bee didn't care about foot traffic metrics or the prestige of the zip code. To the bee, this rooftop was a five-star diner, and the rose was serving the chef's tasting menu.

The rose began to reassess its position in the world.

Sure, it wasn't the centerpiece of a highly publicized horticultural tour. But the few dozen weary humans who actually noticed it seemed to genuinely need that jolt of beauty. It was an unexpected, bright rebellion against the asphalt.

The grand gardens could keep their swarming crowds and their frantic, selfie-snapping tourists. The rooftop rose realized it had inadvertently become an exclusive, boutique experience. It was providing bespoke joy to a highly curated audience of stray pollinators and observant wanderers.

It settled its roots a little deeper into the dry soil, caught the afternoon breeze, and decided it was perfectly content. After all, anybody can look beautiful surrounded by fountains. It takes real talent to pull off crimson on a concrete parking deck.

What's in a Name?

The Ego of the Orange Arch

For nearly ninety years, we have been staring at that orange arch over the Fraser River and calling it the Pattullo Bridge. It opened back in 1937, right in the thick of the Great Depression, and was named after Thomas Dufferin "Duff" Pattullo, the sitting Premier of British Columbia at the time. Sticking your own surname on a massive public works project is the ultimate flex of political ego. It was the classic colonial way of doing things. You build a bridge, you completely ignore the thousands of years of human history that happened on that exact spot before you arrived, and you permanently name the steel after a guy in a suit.

Calling a Crossing a Crossing

Now we have the shiny new cable-stayed replacement, and thankfully, it abandons the politician's vanity project entirely. The new name is stal̕əw̓asəm (pronounced stah-luw-ah-sum), which comes directly from hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓, the traditional language of the Coast Salish peoples who have been navigating these exact waters for millennia. It is a beautiful and highly literal compound word. "stal̕əw̓" means the Fraser River, and "asəm" refers to a crossing or facing across. Instead of naming a vital piece of geography after an administrator, we are finally just calling it what it actually is: the river crossing.

Correcting the Colonial Typo

This switch is about a lot more than just updating the highway signs to confuse the local traffic reporters. The old colonial habit of plastering European surnames over ancient geography was a very deliberate form of historical erasure, operating on the arrogant assumption that nothing of value existed here until the British showed up. By ditching the political branding and embracing the original hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ name, we are actually correcting a massive geographical typo. It is a tangible bit of reconciliation that forces every single commuter crossing between Surrey and New West to acknowledge the real history of the land, proving that occasionally, we actually do learn from our past mistakes.