16 October 2023 – Nothing dramatic, nothing important. Just moments that snag my attention and charm me, during a walk Sunday afternoon.

I’m looping through the pocket of Mount Pleasant lying south-east of Main & East 6th. With its preponderance of vintage wooden homes (early 20th c.) and slightly raffish but family-comfy residential style, the area evokes for me the Hillhurst neighbourhood of 1980s Calgary.

There’s the amended instruction on an alley gate west of China Creek North Park…

(which a passing dog-owner also enjoys, her pooch obediently silent…)

there’s the prancing kitten painted onto the end log for a volunteer-sponsored street garden at East 8th & St. Catherines…

the sulking VW Beetle farther south on St. Catherines…

(you’d sulk too if someone had knocked your lower jaw crooked and smacked open the top of your head…)

a tree trunk already flaunting its winter coat of brilliant moss…

and another flaunting an equally brilliant necklace of hearts…

the tree medallion set into the otherwise boring concrete surround for a traffic circle at East 14th…

the world’s tiniest plot of corn in an alley just west of Robson Park…

and an urgent World Cup Rugby Q&A at the entrance to the Sunday farmers market next to Dude Chilling Park.

Blue Shirt on the right has just asked the guys on the left if they know any pubs in town that’ll be showing the England/Fiji game. Coffee Guy slurps a bit, considers possibilities, names a place and then — having noted Blue Shirt’s English accent — adds, “But it’s an Irish pub, eh?” Blue Shirt replies, “What? They won’t let me in?” Jokey, but not completely jokey. “Oh yeah! No worries! But… you might be the only one cheering for England.”

That’s good enough for Blue Shirt, so I carry on into the farmers market with a light heart.

I pick up some meat pies from the Hanceville Cattle Co. stall, trucked in from their ranch on the Chilcotin River…

and leave the market.

In the home stretch on East 7th, I pass a line-up of food trucks. The usual chickpea-this and poké-bowl that and Korean-something I don’t recognize…

and then this.

I do not buy a brownie, but I do send the photo to a chocolate-obsessed friend in Toronto.

Who replies she is just back from treating her 10-year-old grandson to Chocolate Afternoon Tea at the King Edward Hotel, an event in the city’s Chocolate Festival now underway.

I am duly impressed.