Day 279: On the contents of boxes

Boxing Day, and these days that means dealing with all the empty boxes from Christmas. In this case, it means dealing with the contents of one of those boxes, and today's photo catches Ed and Maria assembling one of Kara's toys.

Some assembly required

Day 278: Christmas Day

It's Christmas Day - Merry Christmas! Today was dominated by present opening, with Kara doing all the hard work :-) Mostly I was using the external flash to get "nice" photos, but when the rain stopped and the sun made an appearance, I couldn't resist a natural light picture. At the time Kara was engrossed in trying out the Play-Doh set she had just unwrapped, with Brenda sitting behind her. Even though this is heavily underexposed, I like this shot for the lighting, which highlights just enough to see what's going on without needing to illuminate every part of the frame, and the human elements of the connection between mother and daughter and the expression on Kara's face. She loved the Play-Doh.

Playing with Play-Doh

Day 277: The night before Christmas

Last night we caught the ferry over to Vancouver Island to spend Christmas with our friends Brenda and Ed and their daughter. On the way to their place we drove past this house all done up in its Christmas lights. I ventured out to get a photo of it tonight and was treated to Christmas tunes along with coordinated lights. I had to wait until all the lights were on to get this photo, and there were plenty of near misses!

Seasonal dwelling

Day 123: The a-peel of trees

One of the many trees I've come to love on the west coast is the arbutus. It's a striking evergreen tree, with ruddy bark which peels off every year, revealing paler wood below. However, it's not a fir- or pine-type evergreen - it's more like a Mediterranean plant, with big waxy leaves. And as you'd expect, it grows in warm, dry spots such as south-facing rocky slopes. There are a few around Vancouver, but not that many. The bluffs of West Vancouver and along part of the Sea-to-Sky highway towards Squamish are good places to see them, as is the Sunshine Coast, southern Gulf Islands and southern Vancouver Island too.

When we first moved here, we noticed that one of the streets in Kitsilano is called Arbutus Street, but we weren't quite sure how it should be pronounced. Fortunately the bus drivers came to our rescue, as they called out the names of the streets en route. (That job is done by an automatic announcer now, which is sadly often indistinguishable and sometimes unintelligible.) And so we learned it was pronounced "arr-BYOO-tus", and not "ARR-buh-tus". Thanks to the ever-reliable Pojar & Mackinnon we also learned its alternative name, the Pacific madrone, a name that the Americans tend to use more often. Personally I rather like arbutus. Today's photo is one such tree, well into its peel, located near the home of the parents of a friend of ours on Vancouver Island.

Peeling arbutus tree

Day 44: Yes!

I started this project with a day spent looking for white fawn lilies (also known as trout lilies) in Lighthouse Park. I saw none there and I'd given up on the chance of seeing any this year. But then work took me over to Vancouver Island for a couple of days, and as I was driving down the hill at the end of the day, a white flower at the roadside caught my eye. Then another, and another. I had another car behind me, and the road was quite narrow, so I had to keep going and leave them behind but there was no doubt in my mind: I had seen white fawn lilies.

Today I drove in with a little bit of time to spare and stopped at the bottom of the hill to photograph a gorgeous patch of pretty shooting stars (quite appropriate for the Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics :-) As I drove up to the observatory, I saw that there were in fact dozens of lilies, some of which were barely a minute's walk from the parking lot. I picked up the camera and walked down the road until I found my spot. Several cars passed me on the way up, perhaps wondering what I was doing. I didn't care: I had found my lilies, and I was ecstatic.

More photos from this trip are on Flickr.

Raindrops on a white fawn lily