Taking a Midsummer stroll
…to my local grocery store, and then looping back long the highway.
Having visions of grime, graffiti, and optional gore? Yeah, not so much. This is one of the many reasons I landed in Canada fifteen years back and I’m still here. Spring in BC is when everything with roots makes like a triffid and grows like mad, and today, at the official transition from spring into summer, it’s warm, slightly rainy, and the paths are surrounded in every shade of green. That, and all the little streams have plenty of water.
My path followed this stream for quite a long way, punctuated by occasional happy dogs, and my turn beside the highway included a patch of purple flowers. One of my other favourite trails in the area is lined in buttercups, which are one of the few flowers I actually know the name of.
One of the other nice things about this area is that mid-morning on a showery Sunday it is quite possible to walk for an hour and encounter only about five other people. This is just as well, as it seems that everyone has decided that physical distancing is far too difficult, and no one has a clue how long two metres is anyway. Much easier just to wear a mask under your chin and do what you want.
Between family and work drama, it’s been an interesting few weeks, and having crawled out from under my cats, I found myself in need of some perspective (sounds better than ‘I got up cranky AF’). Because of that, and because lockdown hasn’t been good for my non-existent exercise routine, I headed out for a walk. I’d say ‘I headed out for a walk in the forest’ but that’s the main option in this area (did I mention the phrase ‘things growing like hell’?), and hopefully the photos add any missing context.
Holiday plans
Despite the fact that I’ve been working from home since mid-March (which has been fantastic, and I wish I thought this meant my office was actually going to update their remote work policy once the crisis is over), I’m looking forwards to a few days off at the end of next week, even though what I’m actually going to do, as non-essential travel is still discouraged (in a very polite and Canadian manner) in the province, is sit on my ass in my apartment and read a bunch of new books I’ve laid in for said time off.
Honestly, three months into lockdown, and having not actually been outside Vancouver since autumn 2018, I do hope that at some point in the foreseeable future I will be able to at least take a trip to the Island for a change of scene without endangering myself or anyone else. However, despite the number of ‘ooh, look, VACAY AT LAST!!’ photos growing on social media, I’m not yet at the stage of cabin fever where ‘fuckitol’ looks like a good prescription, so books, cats, and tea stash it is. With some luck I’ll even get some more editing done.
Also, if we’re being honest, there’s a lot of worse spots to be stuck for the long term than Vancouver. Even the scabbiest parts of the city that I’ve come across are still pretty liveable, and where I’ve wound up is very far from a scabby bit. I really can walk to the store via a trail that could be the wilds of planet XZ472 in StarGate (and may have been, since most of StarGate was filmed in BC…), and there are a lot of other, even nicer, trails around.
Plus, my cats very much approve of this lockdown thing, and people working from home. It means their human is around pretty much full time in case of boredom, hunger, or a need for belly-rubs.
If you want to see (a lot of) photos of cats and how we spend our time in lockdown, my ‘author’ Instagram is a must-have resource, and you can follow me here: https://www.instagram.com/j_c_steel/
