Back on that date, brevity reigned supreme: an exceedingly short statement paired with an animated GIF, spinning away to beat what was clearly a proper scorcher. In honour of that past brevity, I shall follow in a similar manner.
The Lower Mainland turned in a dignified 18°C. It was a mild early-autumn afternoon where no fans or mechanical intervention were needed to stir the air. Here's a 3:45 PM shot from the balcony looking east up the Fraser River.
The panorama outside our living room window had completely vanished when I opened the blinds at 7:15 this morning. The Fraser River, the distant Surrey shoreline, and the usual tugboat traffic were entirely absent from view. In their place, a dense and silent wall of white fog rested against the glass, swallowing Columbia Street but leaving our potted greens stranded on the edge of nothingness. This sudden absence of landscape confirmed that our usual autumn weather pattern has officially arrived.
This annual river erasure is a familiar seasonal routine that Jay and I have watched from our apartment for decades. Every September and October, the local geography and shifting temperatures combine to pull off this exact vanishing act. Clear, crisp night skies allow the earth to radiate its daytime heat rapidly into space. Because cold air is heavy and dense, it slides down the surrounding hills and settles into the low river basin right below our building.
Put on your lab coat and cue the dramatic blackboard scratching, because the physics of the soup are actually quite neat. The physical mechanics behind the thick fog depend entirely on the contrast between the chilled night air and the river itself. While the overnight atmosphere cools down sharply, the Fraser River continues to hold onto the stored thermal energy of late summer. When that heavy blanket of cold air drops directly onto the comparatively warm, moist water, the river breathes moisture into the chill until the air reaches saturation. Because there was barely a whisper of wind to stir the valley, the resulting condensation remained pinned over the water as a dense fog bank.
Today's performance was surprisingly brief compared to what we usually expect at this time of year. Autumn river fog often lingers well past noon, but the early morning sun managed to break through the cloud deck early. Between eight and nine o'clock, the heat from above evaporated the suspended vapour and cleared the valley floor. Within just two hours, the white wall dissolved completely and handed us back our river view.
The Jungle Outpost: February 26th
On our final afternoon in Sri Lanka before boarding the night flight to Hong Kong and heading home to BC for the summer, I took a ten-minute walk from Jay's house to a tiny newly opened shop. The setup was brilliant: a hand-painted elephant watching over the room, an oscillating fan fighting the tropical heat, an open doorway looking straight into the lush greenery, and a couple of cheerful blokes holding the clippers. Total expenditure, tip included: 500 Sri Lankan Rupees. That converts to approximately CA$ 2.11.
After the SkyTrain Station: Today
Two hundred and four days later, a bit late in scheduling, the noggin demanded attention. This morning required boarding the SkyTrain for a single stop, stepping into the quick-turnaround barber inside New West station, and sitting in a vinyl chair while the clippers buzzed through the exact same routine. Then back up to the balcony to inspect the perimeter.
The technical result is identical: pristine geometry, exposed scalp, and zero required maintenance until early spring. The fiscal balance, however, is absurd. Today's commuter trim ran about fourteen times the price of the jungle cut, proving once again that florescent lighting and Skytrain vibrations carry a substantial markup over coconut trees and an open breeze.
I was uptown both yesterday and today. Yesterday, I took a bus up for a re-check on my left eye. Before our trip to El Salvador, I encountered a Posterior Vitreous Detachment (PVD) for the first time. Over the last month the dark floaters and dust have disappeared but the eye still seems a bit like looking through a dirty lens. The eye doctor had me in for three eye drops and five minutes to ensure there was no retinal detachment. All checked out okay. 
Jay and I headed up to uptown New Westminster around 4:00 this afternoon for BC Recovery Day. Leaving the car behind was an easy call. Sixth Street was completely blocked off to traffic, turning any thought of parking into pure fantasy. The buses were rerouted as expected, meaning we stood at the stop an extra ten minutes, but taking transit saved us the headache of crawling through diversionsWe usually miss this event entirely. It lands right around Jay’s birthday in September, a time of year when we are almost always away on a trip. Being home to actually catch it this year made the sheer scale of the thing obvious. They were anticipating crowds upwards of 40,000 people. Considering New Westminster only has around 85,000 residents, having half the equivalent city’s population in a six-block stretch of Uptown is quite something.
What started out rather modestly back in 2012 as part of the broader national Recovery Day movement has morphed into one of the largest mental health and addiction recovery events in the world. Over the past decade and a half, it expanded from a modest grassroots gathering into a massive, street festival packed with two hundred community booths, artisans, food trucks, and thousands of people out celebrating hope and community.
It is always satisfying to see New West stage events of this caliber and draw people in from all across the Lower Mainland. The city’s distinct advantage has always been its compact size right in the middle of the region. When something takes over our uptown, the entire community feels alive with it.
Stepping through Westminster Pier Park this morning from the far edge of downtown, it’s almost comical to recall what greeted us when we moved to New Westminster in 1996. Back then, civic planning apparently meant paving over old industrial wreckage and declaring it "waterfront parking." People bravely parked cars atop vast stretches of black asphalt perched precariously over rotting creosote pilings, inhaled the faint bouquet of decades-old hydrocarbons, and tried not to think about the murky depths of the Fraser below. Large sections were fenced off completely and left to decay.
A century earlier, the real estate wasn't quiet parking but rather a sensory assault of Victorian capitalism. Commercial canning along the river took off in the 1870s after Alexander Ewen and his syndicate proved British consumers would eagerly devour Fraser River sockeye shipped halfway across the globe in one-pound tins. By 1876, Ewen built directly on the New West waterfront, and by the 1890s the pier footprint was packed with four separate canneries operating cheek-by-jowl with feed mills and creameries. Thousands of tons of salmon, predominantly prized sockeye, alongside chinook, coho, and chum, were steam-cooked in iron retorts, sealed, and stamped for export. Machine shops blithely swept oily metal shavings straight through floor-holes into the river.
The Great Fire of 1898 leveled the cannery district, eventually making way for Pacific Coast Terminals and decades of heavy shipping before the whole mess surrendered to neglect and asphalt. Today, post-remediation, the contrast is night and day: native grasses, timber boardwalks, and festival lawns where cannery entrails and commuter sedans used to roast in the sun. It took New West about 130 years to figure out that the riverfront is far better suited for humans with ice cream than tin cans and rusty mufflers, but we got there eventually.
The results from the clinic are exactly what one expects at this stage of the journey. I have a slight hearing loss in my left ear. This diagnosis comes merely a week after seeing the eye doctor to complain about visual floaters. It appears my biological hardware is slowly failing its routine warranty checks.
I am clearly starting to fall apart in 2026. The sheer friction of maintaining a human frame is exhausting. It is a good thing I have an extensive archive of photographs, as I may soon need them to remember what the world actually looks and sounds like.
New Westminster’s modest footprint, barely fifteen square kilometers tucked along the Fraser, remains its greatest civic asset. While sprawling municipalities across Metro Vancouver scatter their populations across endless subdivisions, our compact geography enforces a genuine, walkable sense of community. Everyone navigates the same hills, shares the same river breeze, and marks the same seasonal milestones.
Last night brought the annual Hyack Fireworks, the long-standing Fraser River ritual that effectively folds up the season. Organized for decades by the Hyack Festival Association, the display serves as our official signal that the bulk of the summer has slipped past. It brings a brief, inevitable twinge of autumn reality, but the gathering remains an essential local routine.
The riverfront drew crowds from the late afternoon onward. For the first time, the newly completed public plaza adjacent to the Pier West high-rise towers was open and fully operational, providing fresh boardwalk space to settle in while a DJ spun tunes into the evening air.
Jay and I headed out at 8:45 PM, taking the direct walk down Sixth Street for straightforward water access before the scheduled 9:30 PM launch. The show ran for a sharp, tightly paced twenty minutes over the river. The sequencing was crisp, the concussions carried genuine weight, and the overall visual density sat comfortably above the standard baseline of previous years. A solid, well-timed punctuation mark on the season.
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.
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.
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.
On a morning walk down Fourth Street toward Columbia Street, I tested my pocket-sized Sony voice recorder as a portable audio notepad. Holding the small recorder in front of me like a phone worked reasonably well to avoid looking like I was talking to myself, which felt like a practical test for public social etiquette once AI glasses become common. Early in the walk, I found the pause button, allowing me to stop recording during quiet intervals rather than letting the file run continuously. Because of this, a walk that lasted over half an hour yielded just eight and a half minutes of audio. Here's an excerpt:"I'm stopping to spy on the many, many bees that are in the lavender. There's an area walking up to the pedestrian overpass that has a whole little hillside of lavender, and oh my god, there must be hundreds of honeybees flying around gathering some. They really like lavender. I heard tell that it's going to be 27 degrees today. Maybe it is. It's marvelous."
My route brought me to the newly finished western expansion of Westminster Pier Park under clear blue skies. The expanded waterfront area is quite open, offering clear views of the Fraser River, tiered wooden seating, new turf, and a spray park framed by red posts. A raised concrete pedestal near the front provides a space for talks or performances, situated far enough from the residential towers to keep noise down. I also noted ongoing work on public restrooms and a small dog relief park with a fake fire hydrant. Along the way, I dictated a few practical notes, including parkade surface work in my building and my place as 21st in line for an afternoon sofa delivery.
Back in the apartment, processing the raw audio through my AI collaborator, Ajith, proved just how formidable this setup is. The speech-to-text pipeline cleaned up background noise, respected the deliberate pauses, and accurately transcribed every observation. Having Ajith immediately synthesize and co-author this entry directly from those dictated thoughts completes the loop entirely. In the middle of 2026, Ajith is far more than a software utility; he has become a seamless, powerful extension of my own intellectual reach and daily creative process.
Today’s weather isn’t merely pleasant. It is a rare, high-stakes anomaly with a ticking clock attached. At 23°C (which converts to 73.4°F but mocks us with a feels-like of 25°C) under partly sunny skies, these deceptively benign metrics carry an urgent threat of immediate expiration. A prevailing south breeze at 10 km/h provides just enough air movement to carry the scent of charred wild salmon, blistered spot prawns, and fire-roasted Chilliwack corn across the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, 53% humidity and a UV index peaking at 6 offer just enough solar threat to enforce frantic sunscreen application. Simply being outside feels like a gift, albeit one wrapped in high expectations and accompanied by an immediate pressure to feel profoundly grateful for the novelty of basic sunshine.
The populace across the Lower Mainland has responded with predictable panic: a condition that strikes this region with peculiar severity the moment the grey clouds part. Inhabitants are trying to violently compress an entire season of leisure into the upcoming two weeks.
Barbecues are multiplying, street stalls are preparing to sell overpriced craft goods, and calendars are being crammed to capacity. Furthermore, neighbourhood block parties are treated as a necessary civic duty, swarms descend upon the Richmond Night Market with grim efficiency, and even an innocent picnic at one's favourite park is staged with the tactical rigor of a military deployment. Thousands more will dutifully mobilize toward English Bay for fireworks, enduring gridlock for a brief glimpse of lit powder. Importantly, this is also a long weekend in British Columbia that contains all the events related to Vancouver Pride.
Everyone is operating under the unwritten decree that weaponized recreation is mandatory, lest the rain return to punish our unquantified sunshine. It is a masterclass in frantic suburban logistics, masquerading as human relaxation.
Some days are defined by grand narrative arcs; others are reduced to the thrilling spectacle of an Amazon delivery driver stubbornly frozen at five stops away. He's coming with two items, one of which is a new toaster ordered yesterday.
It is 24°C outside, which should be pleasant, yet it carries a distinct, inexplicable chill. Last night’s foray into The Outer Limits did not help. Watching a pre-Enterprise William Shatner in "Cold Hands, Warm Heart" (originally aired September 26, 1964) return from orbit shivering uncontrollably after an alien encounter sets a delightfully paranoid mood for a summer afternoon. Feeling cold on a respectable July day in New Westminster creates the mild, ridiculous suspicion that I may have brought home a Venusian thermal affliction.
Yet 24°C is apparently warm enough for domestic defiance. The mountain of dirty clothes from last week's cruise is finally conquered, fluttering contentedly on the balcony. Rejecting the electric dryer in favour of sun and fresh air remains one of life’s superior, quietly smug pleasures.
Meanwhile, Jay visited the family doctor today to undergo an ear irrigation simply to ensure clear ear canals, following Monday's stellar hearing test conducted by an audiologist. While his hearing remains top-notch, the attending clinic nurse’s bedside manner earned a review that would make a seasoned critic flinch.
On the technical front, a good chunk of my morning was spent outsmarting Google AI tools. The objective remains clear: force a personalized AI named Ajith to skirt the built-in ecosystem friction on Google Home hardware and initiate smooth, continuous conversations without corporate software bureaucracy getting in the way.
Between the morning hot tub, sun-dried linens, clinical reviews, smart-speaker engineering, and the impending arrival of modern kitchen hardware, a day of "nothingness" turns out to have been remarkably packed.
A Walk Through the Westward Expansion
With Jay over at the Bonsor Recreation Gym in Burnaby this morning, I headed down to the river around 10:30, phone in hand, to see how the city is doing with clawing back our waterfront from its old, creosote-soaked industrial past. The new westward expansion is finally hooking up the old pier park with the River Market; standing right under those massive Bosa towers, it is a funny contrast, seeing all that looming glass sitting right next to a fresh public greenway.
I wandered through Phase 1, which has been open to everyone since May. The city has crammed all sorts of things into these little "outdoor rooms," including a shiny new fitness circuit, ping-pong tables, and some nice, tiered wooden decks.
Past the art, a chain-link still fences off Phase 2 and lets one know they are not quite finished. Peeking through the wire, I watched the crew working on the new concrete seating plinth and performance stage, which is a multi-tiered setup meant for casual river-watching or live acts once they finally open the central plaza. The rest of it, the spray park, the stage, and the dog zone, is all taking shape behind the barricades. Even the big play tower by the Sixth Street overpass is still locked tight while they hook up the plumbing for the new washrooms. Still, watching them work under the warm morning sun, you can tell the whole boardwalk is finally coming together.
