Cloudy in the morning

We are starting to discern the pattern, it is cloudy when you get up in the morning, unsettled with possibility of rain until mid-day and after that the sun quite often appears and the day turns nice. Sorta like Seattle (duh!), or Nantes.

The Weather Channel reported 7C this morning with 40 percent chance of precipitation, rising to a high of 10. 10 is acceptable if you have a jacket and another layer or two like, for example, the fleece vest that I have along.

The employed person headed off to her daily rounds. I killed a few more minutes and then layered up and went out to entertain myself. The nice thing about layers is that it gives you another whole garment with pockets. You can carry a couple more items that you might not include in a one jacket with only a couple of pockets trip. I took both cameras, for example. I can take video with the cheap pocket camera. The high rent SLR digital is early generation digital SLR and does not do video. I knew this when I bought it and could have gotten a later generation which did have video capability but part of the reason why I jumped in the first place is that the early generation (still a great, great camera) had gone on sale outrageously cheap. Anyway today I was carrying two cameras.

I was warm enough in my extra layers even though I did have to put up my hood. 7 isn't really all THAT warm. I met the employed person for lunch and then started to think about maybe arranging an afternoon sitdown. Before I ever got anywhere near our hotel I found a few interesting things to look at. Soon enough the sun came out and the temperatures sky rocketed up to 15.

The good thing about layers is that you can peel them off. The down side is that once peeled off you have to carry them. When you are carrying not only the extra layers but also the miscellaneous items that you piled into the extra pockets in the extra layer the whole thing gets to be quite a production.

Lengthy digression, on with the show.

Hey boat girl, sell anything this big lately?I didn't think so.

It is a cruise ship the name of which I have already forgotten but it is based in Nassau. There were people walking around with jackets announcing an around the world cruise.

An interesting bit, to me, especially considering the size of the water craft, is that Vancouver isn't by any but the wildest stretch of the imagination anything like on the actual sea coast. That's salt water out there alright but the body of water is Burrard Inlet. The brochures describe Burrard Inlet as the heart of the port of Vancouver. Down where our hotel is we are on Coal Harbour. You have to go around the end of Stanley Park to the north, the side opposite where we are to get to English Bay. English Bay is a bay on the Strait of Georgia. The Strait of Georgia is the famous inland water route to Alaska. On the other side of the Strait of Georgia is Vancouver Island. At the south end of the island the Strait of Georgia leads you to the San Juan Islands, and thence to the Strait of Juan de Fuca where if you get confused and head to the wrong side of the Olympia Peninsula you will find yourself in Puget Sound headed to Seattle. Only a swing to the west at that point actually leads you out into the Pacific Ocean.

I had pan fried Pacific Salmon for dinner last night. It was good.

End of another lengthy digression, on with the show.

I just stumbled upon this almost completely by accident but it was a very interesting diversion. It is downtown Vancouver's Marine Building.The book says this is the most famous building in Vancouver and that at the time of its completion it was the tallest building in the British Empire.

The building was begun in 1929 amid great fanfare and eventually completed for the then princely sum of $2.3 million. The book says it is a masterpiece of art deco comparable to the Chrysler Building in New York.

Perched on the bluff at water's edge the building was designed to resemble a huge ornate crag encrusted with starfish, crabs and other marine life and topped by a flock of deco Canada Geese.

Here is the main entrance with ornately designed archway including deco geese on the facade.The main lobby:And two of the five elevator doors in that main lobby.I hung around for a fair amount of time and gawked. It was way interesting.

Here's another bit of public sculpture on the Seawalk at the Convention Center. It is called "The Drop".According to the plaque, The Drop, "pays homage to the element of water and the untamable forces of nature which are omnipresent in Vancouver."

I don't make this stuff up, I don't have to.

The panel goes on to say that the piece "displays a technical perfection, artificially coloured to correspond to the sky, and contrasting with the pale yellow of the mass of sulfur visible on the horizon. The sculpture creates a visual dialogue with the architecture of the convention centre. It marks the interface between land and water, between nature and technology accented by its interaction with the lines of the cruise ship."

Apparently The Drop was taken down temporarily for the Olympics, as it was blocking the view of the television cameras. So much for "untamable forces of nature".

OK, there might be a little tiny bit in that last bit that I made up.

The sun was out and this may be redundant but I don't remember the other picture of the cauldron (and Digital Orca) having lighting this good.Finally, I learned another interesting bit about Dead Man's Island, the source of its name.

The island is 3.2 hectares, about 8 acres I believe. In 1862 an early settler who was interested in acquiring the island, found, upon inspection of the premises hundreds of red cedar boxes on the upper boughs of trees on what was then a heavily forested island. A local First Nation chief informed him that the island was a burial grounds of the Squamish nation commemorating the scene of a bloody battle in which 200 warriors were killed. Out of respect the new settlers of the area kept the place separate for use as a burial ground until 1911 when an American saw value in the trees and acquired the island for the purposes of logging off the trees.

You don't see any old growth cedar there now so I suppose we all know how that one came out.