Day 253: Twenty times around the sun

...is a little under 12 billion miles. :-) That's how far Maria and I have travelled together, a few thousand of them on foot.

On an unrelated note, we were stunned by the sight of a couple of Anna's hummingbirds the other day, which prompted me to hang out at the same place I'd seen them back in the summer. I waited for today's fine weather to go looking for them again and I found two of them. I followed their calls to a thicket of bushes where I spotted one of them resting on a branch, quite low down. I snapped a few quick photos expecting it to fly off, spooked by my proximity. To my surprise it stayed put, and as I moved a little closer, I was amazed to see a second bird barely three feet from my nose! It was sitting quite still, breathing rapidly, and was even better positioned to catch the sunshine. I took as many photos as I could, and even recorded a couple of video clips before it decided it had had enough and flew off. Wow - hummingbirds in November?

I had to go read up on the hummingbirds and it turns out that the Anna's have expanded their range along the west coast of North America over the course of the last couple of hundred years, to the extent that they are now largely resident year-round in the Vancouver area. Seeing hummingbirds at all is something I love about this area: having resident hummingbirds is even more amazing. I'm going to keep an eye out for these birds over the winter and hope they find enough to keep them going.

Anna's hummingbird at rest

Day 252: Library of the future

Rain again today, but I was lucky in that my afternoon sojourn picked a point when the clouds were drawing breath before starting to drop more rain. I did the usual circuit, and walked past the north end of the Barber Learning Centre, which has windows showing the library's automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS). Rather than browsing the stacks, you find your book in the library catalogue and request it, picking it up at the desk within 10 minutes. The UBC library is the first in Canada to deploy such an automated system. As ever there are pros and cons: you lose the serendipity involved in stumbling across a book as you browse, but you gain the ability to get the book you want with minimal effort.

I'd taken a photo of this once before, a couple of years ago, so I had to make sure I captured a different perspective on it. Looking down, the drawer handles appeared to create interesting Moire patterns, and I pointed the camera through the glass (angling it downwards also got rid of the annoying reflections) and took a few shots. As ever, I was hoping to see the robotic system in use and hopefully capture it, but all was quiet in this aisle.

Automated Storage and Retrieval System

Day 251: A sun-day on Monday

An unexpectedly-sunny Monday. In fact Saturday, the one day that fine weather would have been much appreciated, was the only really rainy day in the last four. Strange how that happens. I went out in search of photos, and while I've had this one in mind for a while, I've been trying not to use it, preferring to seek out seasonal shots that I can't repeat later. But today it was the best I could do, even on a sunny day. I actually think it's turned out really well - I used the in-camera lens-distortion correction to make sure the straight lines were straight, and stood on a high wall to limit the backward-leaning building perspective effect. Nice afternoon light, and remarkably few students turns this into a very pleasing photo. I can tick that one off the list.

The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

Day 250: BC Place

Today is the 99th Grey Cup game, something I'd not heard of before we moved to Vancouver. It's the Canadian Football League's championship match, a bit like the FA Cup in England, and they make a huge fuss of it. Which I think is quite amazing considering the league has only 8 teams. But it seems all very good-natured, unlike the hockey, and the BC Lions beat the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to be the first team to win it at home since, well, the BC Lions in 1994 :-) Which, coincidentally, was the last time the Canucks reached the Stanley Cup finals and we all know how that turned out...

As I mentioned a few days ago, I had sized up this shot on a bike ride around False Creek. Unfortunately the weather wasn't cooperating today, and the lovely reflection I was hoping for was nowhere to be seen in the choppy waters. I had a hard time keeping the camera still in the strong, gusty wind (even on a tripod), so I took a lot of very-similar photos. But all it takes is one.

BC Place

Day 249: Dundarain

It's time to turn on the lights on the Christmas trees across the inlet in Dundarave, and the Tiddley Cove and Black Sheep Morris dancers were part of the celebration. Of course, it was raining. A lot. If only we had some of yesterday's fine weather.... But a little (or a lot of) rain doesn't stop Morris dancers :-) And there's always the pub to warm up and dry out in afterwards.

Turning Tiddlies

Day 248: That otter do it

I still can't believe my eyes: on a walk around part of the Stanley Park seawall, we saw a trio of river otters swimming alongside the wall. What a wonderful sight!

Otter trio

Day 247: It's all a matter of perspective

I've been wanting to get a picture of these painted cycle route signs for a while. I particularly like the way they light up in the flash of my bike lights, and I wondered about getting a night shot of one. In the end I just used a rainy day to walk a couple of blocks from home and wait for a gap in the (what was exclusively car) traffic to nip out into the road and get a picture. The neat thing about these signs is that they're painted with perspective in mind, so that when seen on a normal approach, it looks like a regular bicycle. When standing over it, as I did for this picture, you see how elongated it is. Cool, huh?

Cycle route