The mundane peculiarities of life have stacked up in a way that has thwarted any chance of 
Kelly and I going off somewhere for a vacation, even a short one, right now when she’s off work. She’s got a series of days right now when I still have job stuff to show up for, in other words. In a couple weeks’ time the reverse will be true–she’ll be commuting to her exciting new job while I have a week of loaf.
It happens, it’s no huge deal, and in the meantime I’m taking as much downtime as I can while she’s off. This morning, for example, we ambled to Gastown and tried out a new cafe, Finch’s Tea and Coffee House, that makes excellent tea, delicious little breakfasts and, from the looks of things, has a lot of potential for excellent sandwich. It’s a quaint, cute, inexpensive and somehow English-seeming place.
Then we came back to East Van, bought every delicious thing we could find at the produce store, including two pounds of strawberries, and I napped!
A half-day in, the so-called staycation has, in other words, been restful and comfortable. All that’s really lacking is the “We saved our pennies and went went Here! To this really cool place! On a plane! Or maybe by sled dog! And did this wholly sexy thing that doesn’t exist in Vancouver! Here’s pictures.”
Instead I can tell you that last weekend we went to Burnaby Lake! On the Skytrain! And hiked about eight kilometers. Where I captured a blurry redwing blackbird.
Redwings can be rather unrewarding subjects. When they’re sitting still, which is never, their colored patches aren’t all that interesting. The rest of the time they look like this, only usually the color contrast isn’t as interesting.
