Apparently a Starbucks nearby (4 blocks away) was blown up last night, around 2:30am. As of right now, it seems that someone blew it up, and the Starbucks, and 4 other businesses have been complete destroyed. The medical offices that occupy the higher floors of the building seem to have lost windows, and I bet they have at the very least smoke damage. London Drugs and other businesses facing the explosion have lost windows, and even the Holiday Inn half a block west has lost some windows. The pictures on the TV news are pretty impressive, but I can find too much on the web yet.

As it is, we didn’t hear a thing, and are sufficiently away from the centre of action that the only thing that affects us is that Broadway is closed down for a few blocks and that busses are going to be rerouted until noon. Actually, since Gwen doesn’t need to go down that way, and since I commute by bike, the biggest effect is the swarm of news helicopters circling overhead.

(Image taken from the News1130 site, uncredited there, uncredited here.)

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More links:

• CBC Radio (with links to interviews)
• CBC
• Vancouver Sun
• Global TV

The only problem with these timelapse videos of life in Vancouver (taken near Pacific and Richards on the edge of Yaletown) is that it’s not raining in any of them.

P.S. SCQ is running an interesting experiment at getting the truth to the top of the Google ranks.

Here in no-fun-couver, one of the fun things to do is the four-night Festival of Fire (or whatever they’re calling it this year. Festival of Light, Symphony of Fire, the name seems to keep changing). Tonight was the first night this year. Of course this year it’s a bit more interesting because of the civic strike — there’s no garbage collection, and when you’ve got 500,000 people on the various beaches, they leave a lot of garbage behind. We’ll see in the news tomorrow if the other three nights are going to happen.

At any rate, the boy was asking to go to bed at 6pm tonight so there was no way we were going to get to go. We went last year one night (with Gwynedd and Andrew) but our traditional way of watching them is from the comforts of our dining room. Here are some shots from Spain’s efforts (they started with the Star Wars “Main Theme”, and ended with the Star Wars “Duel of the Fates” theme):

Ah, we love living in Fairview Slopes.

This past weekend was the Canada Day weekend. It was also Lorraine’s (Nana’s) few days visiting with us.

On Saturday, we went to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary down on Westham Island in Ladner. I’ve blogged about this before. It was a wonderful bright sunny day, and Aidan was finally old enough to fully enjoy the various birds. The big attraction (for kids, at least) at Reifel is the ducks. Hundreds and hundreds of ducks. And geese, but they’re much more annoying and aggressive.  You can tell from the photos and video how much fun the place is now.