9 December 2023 – Honestly, between fog-cats and atmospheric rivers… and the fact fog & rain are compatible while cats & rivers are not… You see? Venture into the metaphoric jungle (another metaphor) and you trip all over yourself and fall down boom.

So let’s just agree there has been a lot of heavy rain & fog in Vancouver lately, and exult in the bouncy bright day that intervened.

By the magic of the present historic tense, I take you to yesterday.

Look at that sky! All the best B-words: big and blue and blazing bright. (An “Alberta sky,” I still call it, in fond tribute.)

With such splendour overhead, I look up a lot as I walk.

Above Scotia Street as I start north, for example, with a repurposed candy factory and a purpose-built condo complex to keep me company…

and farther along a busy crane, plus orange tarps to show the sky it’s not the only colour in town…

and still more busy cranes in an alley just off Main & East 1st, proving the I-1 Zoning I showed you last August is still very much In Action.

At Quebec & Terminal, a Vancity window reminds us the sun is part of the day’s bright display…

and drives the point home once I’m at False Creek itself, bouncing light from window to water, back & forth, all that light and all that bright blue.

More light and bright blue, come evening, when I look up from my seat in The Orpheum…

as I await the opening notes of Handel’s Messiah, courtesy of Early Music Vancouver and the Vancouver Chamber Choir.

(Present present-tense update: today is foggy-rainy-slushy snowy. Oh, yes. The cat came back!)