May 10: Happy Mother's Day!

New start! I forgot one photo. It's from 7AM this morning, what wakes me up these days: I open my eyes and there's this cat. About one inch away. This time, my phone was within reach, and the light was just enough to snap him. It's clearly his opinion that some breakfast would hit the spot about now, so that he can get back to bed. But he stayed up a while, and greatly pleased Eva in Spain when we Skyped.

Well, it's terrible that we can't be together this mother's day. Fortunately, I have my daily mother's-day ritual in Dora's Page, which I can just crank up a few notches for the formal mother's day. Today will feature a baker's dozen - a full thirteen, for luck - images from recent runs. No, wait, 13 is not luck, so let's make it FOURTEEN. Vancouver has been so beautiful this May, I'm drowning in good stuff to show you, it's time to open the taps.

Just to warm up, a Dora's Page tradition of a fine floral pic. Here's some tulips that were so white they were almost blinding.

Those are from my frequent visit, the Rose Garden. The western edge of the Rose Garden is interesting to me, because it's a wall of rainforest that just starts, the border between manicured, tame garden, and wild forest. The defining edge might be this tree: in bloom, but all the trees behind it are a green wall of wildness.

Next up, another favourite, our local geese, who are raising families this month. These are not the geese that have their kids nearly raised already, from May 6th. But the goslings in front are half-way there, nearly twice the size of the little ones in the background. And I noticed that while a couple of pairs of parents are supervising the gosling gaggle, the larger ones in the shade are kept separate by their one watchful parent. Do geese literally seperate out the bigger kids so they won't bully the little ones? If only humans did that better, too.

Last time I was up to Prominence Point - a little sad these days, as the restaurant up there is boarded up - I came down through the steep path near the bridge and wondered if it would be a nice shot to catch the bridge not fully visible, but through the trees. The way that structures and forest mingle in the park is one of my favourite things about it.

You know that great shot I found on my phone of the cherries and fountains by Coal Harbour, just yesterday? This is the same location, different angle, but you can see the fountains. The cherry blossoms are gone, but they've brought up some remarkable beds of flowers to replace. Bravo.

One shot taken just moments earlier in front of the Coal Harbour Community centre. Now that's gardening to enhance public buildings.

And just a few paces from that spot, the park has some bushes just starting to really take off. It's going to be an amazing May.

And, now, for the main event. It's time to say thanks again for that little camera. I kind of understood that with my old phone, I was missing a lot of good shots because phones don't have real telephoto lenses. The little camera is so tiny, its optics are modest, but there's all the difference in the world provided by even a slightly larger lens, and the ability to move it away from the light-sensor chip (formerly, "film") to let the telephoto effect work. How crappy the new phone was turned out to be providential: with that Xmas present, I've gotten a camera that picks up lovely scenes I was missing. Here are a few.

Least lovely, perhaps, if arresting, is that yellow mountain of sulfur across the harbour. It's been getting really huge, lately, bigger than I've ever seen it. Cleary, the pandemic is backing up production for lack of consumers, somewhere in Asia, most likely.

The clearer air is making some things look better in Vancouver, even, much less New Delhi. Here's that mountain that can only be seen about once or twice a year through the not-transparent air, looking straight east along the harbour and inland.

And then, along the seawall near the totem poles, I suddenly noticed a heron just standing there, out in the water, wings outstretched?

So, I fired up that zoom power and sure enough, he was drying his wings in the sun...or something. Stretching? It was beautiful to see, either way.

Wow. To finish up, here's a demonstration of how good that little thing really is. I looked out of the window this morning and saw some cute goslings feeding away in the grass down by the community garden, nearly a hundred metres from our window. If you look between the bicycles and the man watching them from the sidewalk, you might see them as little dots.

So I pushed the zoom lens to its maximum extent, where it's hard to hold the camera steady enough for a shot with no blur, and managed one. All the geese, plain to see, blown up from dot-size. I needed this telephoto all along.

I'm just having a lot of fun with this thing! Thanks again!

And Happy Mother's Day, Dora. We miss you badly.