hexstatik

pemberton slow food cycle

saturday morning, zamlana, karob, jonnifer and neistal will be heading to birkenhead lake park near pemberton for some camping and the pemberton slow food cycle on Sunday.

the slow food (slow food = !fast food) cycle is a 26km bike ride along the Lillooet River Valley where participants can stop at various farms and rest stops to enjoy some good, wholesome, local food.  i’m probably looking forward to finding some good homemade cheese the most, followed by all the surprises i can’t even imagine. floating around the lake on our inflatable air mattress and roasting some spider dogs on a campfire with some friends while enjoying some cool beverages are definitely going be highlights as well.

the weather outlook for saturday and sunday is HOT! about 30C for both days, so hydration is going to be key, especiallly for us vancouverites - we aren’t used to these sort of conditions. :)

after reading an wired article about the clover, i did a quick google search to find out if any cafes in vancouver had managed to aquire one. luckily, of the only 250 machines manufactured by hand before the company was bought by starbucks, 8 are located in vancouver, 2 of which belong to caffé artigiano.

caffé artigiano is known locally for bringing in world class coffees and cup of excellence winners that often retail for $130/lb or more and over the past couple of years, i’ve tried a few different winners from the cup of excellence awards. it will be interesting to compare those (brewed in a french press) to the el salvador cup of excellence winner #2 i’ll be sampling tomorrow with my team for our morning coffee break. at $5.95/cup though, it’s not something i’ll be enjoying very often. i’ll report the results back here tomorrow.

Update: so, the results are in. the coffee was pretty damn good, and didn’t have a single tinge of bitterness. now, was it the clover, or the award winning coffee? i don’t know, i would have had to have a cup brewed in a french press and a cup from the clover at the same time to distinguish if the clover machine itself made that much of a difference. either way, it was a nice little treat.

yesterday morning, shortly after the work day started, a major fire broke out in underground power substation, knocking out power to a large swath of the downtown core. while my office was unaffected, leah was left at home all day without power. poor kid. the original estimate from bc hydro was that power was supposed to be restored by 3pm. unfortunately, when hydro crews were finally able to enter the underground cavern, they discovered the true extent of the damage, meaning the latest estimate is by 11pm tonight if we are lucky. our freezer is going to be completely thawed out, and it looks like another cold shower tomorrow. 

if you tried to reach this website yesterday, you wouldn’t have been able to gain access because the company that hosts this site is located in a building whose backup generator failed. (boo!) anyway, it seems like they have it sorted out now. 

You can get an updated view of the outage here.

last sunday, crystal and i were up early to meet some of her ex-coworkers for a hike up to petgill lake, just south of britannia on the sea-to-sky highway. while the weather was cool, it was also quite gray, so the views from the top didn’t stretch all that far.

it was a fairly good workout now that i rowing and hockey are done for the season, and took us about 4.5 hours with a quick lunch at the top.

have a look at the photos i took along the way in my petgill lake flickr set.

last friday, i met up with some friends at the vancouver art gallery to participate in my first critical mass.

Critical Mass is a grassroots reclamation of public space — a bike ride and skate — held the last Friday of every month. You are invited to enjoy the safety and comfort in the car-free space that we create by simply riding together! Bicycles, skateboards, rollerskates, self propelled couches, and any other form of human powered locomotion are all welcomed!

although i’d seen a few critical mass rides before, this once was quite large, with several hundred people. we rode through much of the downtown core, around false creek, along broadway to burrard street, over the bridge and around downtown some more. i’m pretty certain we did an excellent job of clogging traffic and causing chaos on the streets of vancouver.

it was very interesting to see the reaction of some drivers. while most took it in stride, enjoying the show as the hundreds of bikers streamed past, a few drivers got quite irate, some even getting out of the vehicles to yell at the “corkers” blocking traffic. they were always outnumbered and soon retreated to their vehicles once they realized the scale of the mass and the futility of trying to move their vehicles.

all in all, it was a great experience and a lot of fun. i do wish however that drivers would turn off their engines while they wait for the mass to go by - it seems a little pointless to protest against oil and our dependency on it, but then cause drivers to burn even more while they idle in traffic.

anyway, you can find a few photos on andy’s flickr page.