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.

Evicting the Balcony Chairs

The living room furniture gap of July 2026 has officially closed. When Jay and I dismantled our twenty-year-old Sears hide-a-bed and wheeled its heavy frame across the parkade floor before our Alaska cruise, we knew we were signing up for a short period of indoor minimalism. We did not, however, anticipate the sheer visual oddity of our interim seating upon returning home.

For almost a week after disembarking, we watched television from a pair of red metal patio chairs brought inside from the balcony. We placed them on a couple of bath towels to protect the carpet, which made our living room look like a poolside party that had strayed indoors. The setup worked, but it was a constant reminder that our new charcoal grey leather sofa, a surprise purchase during a Surrey errand run three weeks ago, was still somewhere out on its supply-chain route.

At roughly 5:45 PM last evening, the delivery truck finally arrived. We moved the patio chairs back outside, folded up the towels, and slid the new sofa into place, matching my old napkin measurements down to the millimeter. Civilized comfort has returned to the apartment, and a battery-powered robot cat sitting on the side chair remained entirely unimpressed by the upgrade.

Audio-Sourced: Westminster Pier Park Walk

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.

Surviving Twenty-Three Degrees Celsius

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.

Our collective goal becomes to not waste a bit of precious sunshine and blue sky.

Cold Hands, Hot Toaster, and Digital Workarounds

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.

Post-Mortem for an Oster: Our Toaster is Toast

Our 2021, four-slice Oster gave up this morning, managing to slightly warm only one of the possible four slices. Given five months of annual travel and a lightweight domestic schedule, the appliance had barely logged three years of actual operation before the majority of its heating capacity vanished.

A quick post-mortem reveals predictable corporate design choices. Modern manufacturers have abandoned the thick, coiled nichrome wire ribbons of the past in favor of foil-thin heating strips mounted on a mica board. Designed with cheap tolerances, heat cycling rapidly fatigues the metal until the circuit breaks.

Searching for a replacement at London Drugs in New West highlighted an encouraging shift in retail strategy. Canadian merchants are increasingly bypassing US brand names altogether, opting to import European-sourced alternatives directly. Virtually all of these small appliances originate in Chinese factories anyway, so skipping the American corporate markup and Trump's tariff-mania is a sharp bit of supply-chain pragmatism. However, returning from uptown empty-handed meant I had to order via Amazon Canada.

This Elite Gourmet ECT5322 is coming tomorrow. Will it last through the summer?

This morning's toasting failure remains a stark contrast to the machinery of my youth. At my grandmother Nana’s summer cottage in Stoddard, New Hampshire, breakfast was handled by a 1920s turnover toaster, likely manufactured by General Electric or Westinghouse. It had no springs or electronics, just a central heater and two hinged metal doors. Swing a door open past forty-five degrees and gravity automatically flipped the slice so the un-toasted side could next face the heat. That machine endured decades of unheated, freezing New England winters, working perfectly every spring the moment it was plugged in.

After seeing the entry, my cousin sent a picture of the very object! Thanks, Rodney!

A quick dive into the industrial records confirms that this early mechanical durability followed a distinct evolutionary trail. While Crompton & Company produced the first crude electric toaster frame in Essex back in 1893, it was Minnesota mechanic Charles Strite who solved the problem of burnt cafeteria toast by patenting the spring-loaded, timed pop-up mechanism in 1919. Commercialized as the Toastmaster in 1926, his design became an instant staple once pre-sliced bread arrived in 1928.

What I find particularly telling in the historical data is how the British Empire turned Strite’s American invention into a global household necessity. Deep-seated Commonwealth tea habits meant Canada, Australia, and the UK embraced the slot toaster with fanatical devotion, while continental Europe largely stuck to stovetops and ovens. Britain later refined the commercial end of the market with Max Gort-Barten's heavy-aluminum Dualit.

Today, Charles Strite's ingenuity and Nana's indestructible gravity hinges have been replaced by fragile, thirty-dollar throwaways. We remain at the mercy of cheap foil strips until someone decides to build an appliance meant to last.

Our Cruise History: Now 249 Nights at Sea

In an effort to document our cruise experiences, I shall continue to update this information.  This list now contains the history for over twenty-five years of sea voyages.  The last time I changed the listing was in the spring.  We found a last-minute, AK cruise to celebrate my birthday week.  It was a nice time that ended just yesterday. Next, at the start of our upcoming winter away, we're planning to add one more cruise this year.

Cruise #22

July 2026 - An Alaskan Cruise for Dennis's 67th Birthday Week - Icy Strait Point, Skagway, Dawes Glacier, Juneau, Ketchikan.

Vancouver to Vancouver 

Celebrity Solstice - 7 Nights

Cruise #21

March 2026 - Western Pacific: Puerto Princesa, Boracay, and Manila, Philippines; Kaohsiung and Keelung, Taiwan; Ishigaki, Naha (Okinawa), and Osaka, Japan.

Hong Kong to Yokahama 

ms Westerdam - 14 Nights

Cruise #20

December 2025 - Middle East: Doha, Manama, Abu Dhabi, Baniyas Island.

Dubai to Dubai

MSC Euribia - 7 Nights

Cruise #19

September 2025 - Western Mediterranean for Jay's Birthday: Ibiza, Sardinia, Rome, Genoa, Marseille.

Barcelona to Barcelona

MSC Orchestra - 7 Nights

Cruise #18

January 2025 - Réunion Island, Madagascar, and South African ports.

Port Louis to Cape Town

NCL Dawn - 12 Nights          

Cruise #17

July 2024 - Alaskan Inside Passage

Vancouver to Vancouver

ms Koningsdam - 7 Nights  

Cruise #16

April / May 2024 - A Short Inside Passage: Ketchikan, AK and Prince Rupert, BC.

Vancouver to Vancouver

ms Noordam - 5 Nights 

Cruise #15

December 2023 - Sri Bani Yas Island, United Arab Emirates.

Abu Dhabi to Dubai

MSC Opera - 3 Nights 

Cruise #14

July 2023 - Alaskan Inside Passage

Vancouver to Vancouver

ms Volendam - 7 Nights 

Cruise #13

May 2023 - Pacific Northwest: Astoria, OR; Seattle, WA; and Victoria, BC.

Vancouver to Vancouver

ms Noordam - 5 Nights 

Cruise #12

March 2023 - Rio de Janeiro, Islands in Brazil, and Montevideo, Uruguay.

Buenos Aires to Buenos Aires

MSC Musica - 9 Nights

Cruise #11

November/December 2022 - Panama Canal, Inca & South America Discovery.

Miami to Buenos Aires

ms Oosterdam - 31 Nights    

Cruise #10

September 2022 - Alaskan Inside Passage for Jay's Birthday.

Vancouver to Vancouver

ms Zuiderdam - 7 Nights

Cruise #09

July/August 2022 - Viking Passage: Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada. 

Copenhagen to Boston

ms Nieuw Statendam - 18 Nights

Cruise #08

September 2019 -  Canada / New England Discovery.

Boston to Montreal

ms Veendam - 7 Nights

Cruise #07

July 2019 - Alaskan Inside Passage for my 60th Birthday

Vancouver to Vancouver

ms Nieuw Amsterdam - 7 Nights 

 

Cruise #06

September/October/November 2017 - Trans-Pacific to Australia and New Zealand.

Vancouver to Auckland

ms Noordam - 42 Nights

Cruise #05

August/September 2017 - The Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.

Rome to Rome

ms Westerdam - 24 Nights

 

Cruise #04

June 2016 - The Baltic Sea / St. Petersburg, Russia.

Copenhagen to Copenhagen

(New) Regal Princess - 11 Nights

 

Cruise #03

February 2008 - The Mexican Riviera.

Los Angeles to Los Angeles

Carnival Pride - 7 Nights

 

Cruise #02

May 2006 - Pacific Coastal Cruise.

San Diego to Vancouver

ms Veendam - 5 Nights     

Cruise #01

May 2001 - Alaskan Inside Passage / Hubbard Glacier. 

Vancouver to Vancouver

Regal Princess - 7 Nights

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This is the most recently-updated record of our complete cruise history.  I have found that keeping track of our comings and goings helps us recall key life events more easily.  This list starts with our first cruise in 2001.  I update information by creating a new eJournal post after completing new cruise experiences.