Jay's Birthday Pivot: Rediscovering El Salvador

We have officially pivoted to an alternate destination to explore during Jay's birthday week. Mexico City was our initial target, especially because it remains an unexplored metropolis on our travel ledger. Unfortunately, the awkward flight timings and steep fares quickly dampened our enthusiasm for that option. Jay stepped in with his dependable flight-sleuthing discipline and found clean, affordable routing to El Salvador via Houston, TX. A sensible schedule with an included checked bag always beats an overpriced, midnight ticket.

Returning to El Salvador offers a front-row seat to one of the most dramatic social turnarounds in modern Latin American history. Back in 2011, we took a grand bus tour across Central America, but our stay in San Salvador was unusually brief because holiday bus timetables over Easter forced us along. At that time, the country held the grim distinction of murder capital of the world, registering homicide rates above 70 per 100,000 residents. Today, following a massive and controversial security offensive, the homicide rate has plummeted below 2 per 100,000, making the country statistically safer than the United States national average. History rarely moves this fast without a total change of scenery.

Our stop in San Salvador was short on a bus trip around Central America in 2011.

Frankly, Jay and I were surprised to see just how quickly the country transformed into a global travel hotspot. Tourism has rapidly become a vital pillar of the national economy, welcoming over three million international visitors each year and injecting billions in foreign exchange. The chaotic, barricaded street markets from our 2011 visit have given way to brightly illuminated plazas, manicured pedestrian corridors, and a modern national library open around the clock. International travelers who once bypassed the region completely are now filling boutique hotels and coastal venues. Clear streets and reliable infrastructure serve as the ultimate marketing campaign.

With our September dates locked down, we are now actively combing Expedia for the ideal hotel base. We are scheduled to depart exactly two weeks from today. We decided to stay directly in the capital city rather than basing ourselves in the mountains or along the coast. Staging from accessible urban districts like San Benito or Colonia Escalón makes day trips to volcanic calderas and Pacific beaches remarkably straightforward, while keeping level sidewalks and dependable elevators close at hand. We look forward to rediscovering the country, experiencing its modern transformation, and enjoying a memorable birthday expedition. A great travel adventure only requires an active volcano, a fresh plate of hot pupusas, and an elevator that actually works.

Digital Archaeology and the Unbroken Thread

There is something slightly surreal about opening the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and staring at a digital sweep of my own website captured on Thursday, December 11, 2003.

Back then, the homepage felt compelled to offer a polite, earnest public service announcement explaining what a "weblog" actually was. That was in case a wayward visitor thought they had stumbled into an obscure departmental bulletin. It proudly offered an AvantGo badge for PDA users synchronizing via desktop cradles, and cheerfully displayed both my home landline and mobile numbers to anyone on the World Wide Web with an internet connection.

At the time, Blogger had only just been acquired from Pyra Labs by a young, ambitious outfit called Google. In internet years, two decades is several geologic epochs. Yet despite Google's legendary habit of sending beloved products to the corporate graveyard, Blogger is still quietly running the machinery in the background.

The surrounding scaffolding, headers, and fonts have evolved over the last twenty-three years, but the core text remains untouched. More than two decades later, the words typed on a winter morning in 2003 sit exactly where they were put, still chronicling the road east over the Rockies.

The Missing User Manual for Ear Wax Warfare

Public education spends years drilling the Pythagorean theorem and the life cycle of a frog into our skulls, yet completely omits any practical manual for basic human maintenance. One arrives at adulthood fully versed in long division, but utterly ignorant about how to manage the biological systems on either side of one's head. The medical establishment solemnly warns against ever sticking anything smaller than an elbow into an ear, while consumer packaging actively markets cotton swabs that function precisely like miniature cannon ramrods. The inevitable result is an entire generation packing their auditory canals into acoustic soundproofing.

With a formal hearing test booked for next week, I decided to bypass the clinical embarrassment of having an audiologist inspect two solid plugs of cerumen instead of an actual eardrum. If one is going to have expensive diagnostic hardware measure frequency response, the runway ought to be clear of unnecessary debris. Jay recently had a clinic extract some stubborn buildup after a test of his own and wisely concluded that preventative home intervention beats an awkward clinical excavation every single time.

My domestic protocol began with straight 3% hydrogen peroxide, which immediately produced a delightful, effervescing cauldron of tiny bubbles that sounded like a miniature deep fryer working right next to my brain. Once the chemical storm finally quieted down, I recruited Jay to administer three drops of olive oil into each side. Lying stationary for ten minutes while kitchen salad dressing slowly soaked into my skull felt slightly absurd, but good engineering demands lubrication. Tomorrow brings the gentle warm water bulb syringe to flush the system clear, leaving the canals pristine, silent, and ready to face the decibel telemetry. The hearing test is entirely on the provincial tab, but I still prefer to fail the high frequencies honestly on my own biological merits. I'd rather not flunk out due to an easily-removable sound barrier.

The Slow Evolution of This Winter's Itinerary

Jay and I have spent just a single day in Ecuador. This is where these two pictures were taken. We visited the port city of Manta at the end of November 2022 on our cruise to Buenos Aires. We'd come through the Panama Canal and were heading down the west coast of South America towards our destination. However, Ecuador holds a profound treasure found on bucket lists for many serious world adventurers. Our buckets may be far from running low, but our time holding them grows shorter. We made a strategic Expedia purchase this afternoon.  The three-flight Avianca tickets form the first step in our return to Vancouver at the end of the upcoming winter away.  

   

One does not need to engineer an entire winter away in a single sitting. The genuine luxury of a long absence is leaving generous stretches of the calendar entirely blank, allowing one to turn ideas over, test routing variations, and let the itinerary take shape over time. Today, that process received a decisive push forward when we brought an AI into the room to poke holes in our assumptions and run the numbers on our return leg from Rio de Janeiro.

Our initial musings centered on using Guayaquil as a convenient stepping stone into the Galápagos. That notion did not survive scrutiny; treating a rough mainland port as a holiday base means spending far too much energy managing urban security perimeters. Shifting our gaze directly to the archipelago made far more sense. San Cristóbal may have charm, but Santa Cruz has the restaurants, the day-boat fleet, and Seymour Airport on Baltra with a tarmac built to handle full-sized commercial jets.

The flight logistics resolved themselves with almost suspicious precision. Brazil allows a strict ninety-day residency, and our newly booked Avianca flight departs Galeão at 1:45 in the morning on March 1st. That allows us to clear passport control before midnight on February 28th, stepping out of the country on the final valid day of our visa window. We bounce through Bogotá and Quito before touching down on Baltra just after noon.

It took only a short, focused conversation to turn a vague ending into a masterclass in routing. We resolved our exit vector and secured our arrival on Baltra. One more crucial corner piece of the winter puzzle has dropped firmly into place. The exact date and path home, perhaps wandering back through Colombia, remain open for a future commitment. Those reservations can wait.

New West Street Pride 2026

 

Sixteen years of official municipal recognition have turned what began in 2010 as a modest gathering at Tipperary Park into a complete takeover of historic Columbia Street. For those of us observing New Westminster’s urban evolution since 1998, the stationary street festival format, closing vehicle traffic between 4th and 8th Street, proves structurally superior to a conventional rolling parade. Rather than spectators standing pinned to a curb while organizations roll past on flatbeds, the dynamic is brilliantly inverted. Community groups and vendors anchor themselves in fixed booths along the heritage storefronts, leaving the actual marching to the attendees who circulate through the asphalt corridor at their own pace.

 

We headed out for our first walk between 16:00 and 17:00, strolling down toward the Anvil Centre. The crowd was as big and lively as ever, showing just how firmly this festival has planted itself into the local summer routine. To top it off, the weather turned out to be pure perfection. Right as the event got going, the skies cleared up and it became noticeably warmer and sunnier, almost as if someone had managed to schedule the sunshine right into the afternoon plans. The street was packed with an interesting mix of booths and displays. Local artisans and craft makers set up alongside civic outreach tables, union locals, and neighbourhood non-profits, while nearby restaurants ran busy front-door patios. Open liquor sales were permitted for anyone wanting a cold drink on the go, yet the entire strip kept an easygoing, family-friendly atmosphere with kids, dogs, and strollers sharing the street. It made for a very pleasant walk before the evening crowd really picked up.

To save a few steps for the evening run, we took the SkyTrain directly down to the far end of Columbia Street for the 18:00 drag showcase outside the Anvil Centre. Dandy's Drag Block Party anchored the slot, delivering a tight lineup featuring one drag queen and two drag kings. It was just plain fun to stand among the large crowd, watch everyone have a good time together, and enjoy having all that energy right down the hill from home. We walked back up to our building as things were wrapping up. Soon the barricades will come down and the street will return to traffic only.

Broadcasting to the Algorithmic Graveyard

Back in 2008, I was practically an unpaid evangelist for Facebook. My early eJournal entries were full of enthusiastic encouragement, urging sceptical friends and far-flung acquaintances to sign up for this brilliant new digital commons. It seemed like an efficient way to keep in touch across continents. Nearly two decades later, that open town square has devolved into an algorithmic landfill. I gave up on it once, maybe twice, before settling into my current, highly defensive posture. Today, I maintain a rolling one-week buffer of posts and a contact list slashed down to a mere thirty-five people.

With a circle trimmed that small, it remains a genuine mystery whether anyone on the list actually sees what I post. Most people stay on the platform purely out of nostalgia; they worry that leaving means forfeiting twenty years of birthday photos and family snapshots. Handing one's personal history over to a corporate landlord is not an archive, however. It is simply a sentimental trap designed to serve advertisements between slot-machine pop-ups of the past.

I only maintain my minimal presence because the alternative is complete silence from contacts who find typing a standard website address far too strenuous. My eJournal contains thousands of high-resolution images, full travel archives, and daily entries dating back decades, yet modern internet users prefer to wait for scraps inside a walled garden. Posting there is no longer a conversation. It is merely operating a reluctant relay station for those who refuse to venture outside the gates.

To survive the experience, I treat the site as a strict one-way broadcast tower. I upload the daily signal, ignore the corporate notifications, and refuse to scroll through two-month-old updates from people not seen in person since the previous millennium. It may be absolute rubbish compared to the open web, but at least the transmission goes out, even if the ghosts on the other end only stare in silence.

My Flickr Account and a Few Stats

Click a screenshot to load my albums page on the Flickr site.

 

A Final Curtain for New West's Antique Alley!

Throughout the 1990s and well into the 2010s, New Westminster's Front Street was a bustling retail ecosystem known as Antique Alley. Its gritty industrial aesthetic made it a prime backdrop for major productions. The street famously doubled as New York City in Rumble in the Bronx and a quarantined Tokyo in Godzilla. It also hosted filming for projects like The X-Files and Twilight. During this peak period, the area served as a massive physical prop closet for the entire 'Hollywood North' film industry.

Stores operated as massive supply depots for set decorators and locals alike. You could walk in and rent or buy an absurdly wide array of physical inventory. They stocked everything from lavish fur coats and Persian rugs to mid century modern furniture. You might even stumble across a 200 pound bronze ship's propeller or a horrifying 1930s hair curler known as the octopus. It was a thriving local economy built entirely on bizarre physical artifacts.

I took a walk down Front Street today. That historic bazaar is now entirely defunct. I was quite surprised to see how completely the antique shops have evaporated from the landscape. There is only one antique store left along the street. Frankly, it was rather junky and looked like a hollow shell of discarded inventory. The modern film industry has clearly traded physical curation for green screens and digital convenience. A scattering of overpriced garage sale leftovers is now all that remains.

Aligning Our Ducks and Smoothing Natalia's Feathers

We recently officially checked in for our transatlantic passage to Brazil, which means the countdown is actually ticking. We depart in roughly two and a half months to spend a few nights knocking around southern England before boarding our MSC ship in Southampton. After that, we have the remainder of November to float our way across the ocean to Rio de Janeiro.

With the reality of our arrival setting in, we decided it was time to message our Airbnb host, Natalia. We locked in this winter basecamp months ago. Since we are checking in on the first of December for a complete three months, sending a friendly "hello" seemed like a polite necessity. Naturally, it was also a highly calculated maneuver.

As anyone who has ever survived a cruise knows, MSC will inevitably want to eject us from the ship at the crack of dawn. Meanwhile, the universal laws of Airbnb dictate that we cannot breach the apartment's perimeter until 2:00 PM at the earliest. Rather than face the grim prospect of dragging our luggage through the streets for six hours like wandering refugees, we figured a little preemptive charm was in order. We're hoping this early contact softens the ground for a morning bag drop. We shall see if the diplomatic approach pays off.

Natalia answered within minutes of the query to indicate that an early arrival wouldn't be a problem at all. A host with a response time faster than a cruise ship eviction is always a very good sign!

An Old Discovered Artifact

Yesterday we dragged the old Hoover carpet cleaner out from its dusty corner behind the hot water tank. It had been so long since we last made use of its services that I suspect the warranty expired somewhere in the previous millennium. We stood there staring at it, completely unable to figure out what latches and buttons to press. It is a truly baffling piece of vintage machinery.

As the photographic evidence shows, Jay eventually came to an understanding with the appliance and got to work in his finest weekend loungewear. The weather was slightly less blindingly bright on Sunday, and the temperature was not quite as hot. However, it was exactly the kind of August afternoon when the balcony door could be left wide open all day. That made it the perfect afternoon for a little carpet shampooing.

We certainly did not attempt to do it all at once. That sounded entirely too much like actual work. The local weather forecast continues endlessly off the right end of the chart without a single drop of rain in sight. Because of this dry spell, we have the distinct luxury of going at the carpeting on different occasions. After all, if we were to successfully complete our domestic chores in a single afternoon, we would have absolutely no excuse to spend the rest of the month lounging around admiring our partial handiwork.

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.