Gwen’s already covered all the salient points, and pretty eloquently too. I thought I’d add my two cents for the sake of completeness. Plus, it makes for a good blog post.

So, as Gwen has noted, it was a rough night to start with. In addition to the restlessness of the boy, the weather has been pretty much the pits. Last night, we were subject to brief periods of torrential rain. It was pretty warm, so all the windows were wide open and these downpours would wake us up every once and a while. It was the type of weather that you’d associate with severe thunder and lightning, but Vancouver so rarely has thunder and lightning, and we didn’t last night.

I woke to a woman shrieking. It was a cry of pain and terror. It was followed shortly by an angry man’s voice and the sound of a dog going nuts.

Before I had a chance to fully appreciate what was going on, I was out of the house barefoot and shirtless heading down the stairs to the alley. Despite the hour (1:30 am?) our condo complex was reasonably well lit. The alley was a different story.

I reached the alley, opened the gate and made my way to the middle of the alley. It wasn’t raining, but it had been recently and the pavement was pitch black. The alley itself isn’t too well lit, but there was some sort of light at the end of the alley as I looked east. This had the effect of backlighting the scene laid out in front of me.

What I saw was a large-ish man dressed in dark clothes straining at the end of a leash. Well, at the business end of the leash was a large dog, pulling, and barking endlessly. It didn’t look like a Shepard, instead it looked like a large pit bull or some other large, muscular dog. Hidden in the darkness of a carport must have been a woman. She was whimpering and crying, but other than that and the dog barking, there seemed to be no other sounds. Certainly the man wasn’t saying anything, nor was he moving.

I took in the scene and tried to make sense of it. There was clearly a woman in some distress, but it didn’t seem that she was actively being harmed. In fact, it seemed that the man had pinned her in the carport with the dog, and was content to keep her there. At this point I was thinking domestic dispute or something, and I yelled down the alley inquiring if everything was alright, and if anything was needed. Clearly it wasn’t alright, but I figured we had to start somewhere.

The shadowed figure said nothing. Possibly he didn’t hear me over the dog barking, but I certainly did get a look. Some sight I must have made too. Anyway, I yelled down the alley again and this time I got a response: “Police”.

Now, this wasn’t the most helpful response in the world. Was he asking for the police? Was he claiming to be the police? Pretty unclear. Regardless, I’d seen enough. I started back into the condo to call 911 when one of our neighbours from the front of the complex came to the alley. After a quick discussion of what was going on, I resumed my journey back inside to call 911. Just as I turned around, though, a police car came down the alley from the east end with lights flashing.

At the same time, two unmarked cars came rushing into the parking lot at the west end of the alley. Two plainclothes officers jumped out and ran down the alley. At that time, it became clear that the man with the dog was a policeman with the dog squad. By this time (only a few short minutes later I’m sure) quite a crowd was gathering in the alley. Another neighbour from our complex was coming down the stairs, and some people from some of the neighbouring condos were poking their heads out. Suddenly feeling rather underdressed and ancillary to the situation I went back inside.

Gwen and her mother were on our balcony (which overlooks the alley) and I went up and joined them. Not much to see. The woman was now angry and was screaming bloody murder, and the police were going about doing their job. I’d seen enough and knew it was going to be an uphill battle getting back to sleep, so I beat it back to bed and started down the path to slumberland. It was going to be another hour and a half before I got there.

After discussing the happenings with folks throughout the day, I’ve come to a few conclusions.

I should have brought a phone with me. A cell phone or our mobile, it doesn’t matter. If there was something unpleasant happening, going back for a phone wouldn’t have been helpful.

Shoes would have been nice.

There was some discussion about going into the alley in the first place. Ali wondered what would have happened if the person had a gun. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind until then. In retrospect, though, I was in the alley before the cogs started turning in my head. Oh well.

Just part of living in a big city, I guess!

There’s something about the West Coast that seems to drive a certain type of personality right off the deep end.

OK, an early morning rant.

One of the (many) blogs I read is a local one called Beyond Robson. On the weekend, one of their contributors wrote a story about the flashing green lights in Vancouver. These are something that often cause confusion and disastrous results for people from away. In most other jurisdictions, a flashing green means that you have right of way while the opposing direction has a red light. Kinda like a green arrow and a green light wrapped into one. Here in Vancouver (and all BC) it means only that the signal is pedestrian controlled. That is, the light only turns red after a pedestrian (or cyclist) presses a button. Often in these situations, the cross-traffic direction has only a stop sign.

This creates an awkward situation sometimes, when the light is red for the busier direction. If you’re in a car or on a bike approaching along the cross-street direction and you see that the pedestrians have a walk signal (and therefore the main street has a red light) should you stop for the stop sign, or should you act as if you have a green light yourself?

Clearly the legal response is that, yes, you should stop for the stop sign. After all, it’s still a stop sign, and you don’t actually have a green light. In practise, if you were to actually stop in this circumstance, chances are high that you’d get rear-ended by the vehicles behind you who were not expecting you to stop. Oh, don’t get me wrong, some people stop but it’s a small number.

But that’s not what I wanted to rant about.

My rant is partially about Beyond Robson itself, and partly about know-it-all-and-refuse-to-acknowledge-when-they’re-wrongs. You see, part of the Beyond Robson post was:

… they inevitably repeat that I have a red light. ‘I don’t follow red lights, I follow the flashing hand and the walking man, of which there are none’ I say …

In a comment, I pointed out that this was not only wrong but dangerously wrong. I cited the correct part of the Motor Vehicle Act (Part 3, Section 129(4)). Pedestrians absolutely must obey traffic signals. Not doing so will get you injured, killed, or abused by raging drivers. The comment was held ‘for moderation’ (a typical happenstance). But guess what? It hasn’t appeared. 5 other comments appeared, all supporting the author. It seems to me that the author was unwilling to hear dissent. Or acknowledge that he was wrong. And in doing so, he highlights a typical problem in Vancouver. Out of control drivers who believe that they’re God on the roads (can do no wrong, know everything, omnipotent, etc) yet treat cyclists and pedestrians with contempt, out of control cyclists who believe that *they’re* God on the roads yet treat motor vehicles and pedestrians with contempt, out of control pedestrians … yeah, ditto. And then there’s the rest who have to put up and deal with all these idiots.

As someone who commutes 10 km by bike twice daily, I see a lot of stupid things. Mostly it’s dumb cyclists, followed closely by dumb motor vehicle drivers. Occasionally, it’s dumb pedestrians. For me, it’s the M.V. drivers who are the most dangerous since they make the most damage when we collide, but frankly any sort of collision is not going to be healthy for anyone. But encouraging people to cross against red lights is irresponsible, and I felt compelled to correct the record. Obviously BR doesn’t feel that they need to be socially responsible. Pity.

I hate it when plans don’t work out. It’s embedded in my personality I think. And, you know what’s crazy? The forecast on Friday was for a pretty miserable weekend, so I had planned (in my mind) for a pretty miserable weekend. And, wouldn’t you know it? It turned out to be a beautiful weekend. And in some small corner of my mind, I was irritated that things didn’t go as planned! Crazy.

Anyway, despite the expected miserableness, we planned to grab a few geocaches down in Stanley Park on Saturday (the expected better of the two days). If it was wet and cold, we’d go to the aquarium. As it turns out, it wasn’t. We grabbed four caches while strolling around the park in the morning. For the most part they were pretty easy but one of the caches, near the totem poles at the eastern end of the park, was pretty challenging. For one thing, it was out in the open — a magnetic micro cache attached to the back of a interpretive plaque. For another thing, there were somewhere between one and 10 million tourists milling about. Ok, maybe a little less, but there were seven (7!) tour busses parked at this particular spot. So how did we get the cache? Gwen went into Ninja Mode! With me shielding the plaque with Aidan and the stroller, she bent towards the cache and slipped the cache so stealthily from the back of the plaque that even I didn’t see her do it. We retreated through the throngs, logged our visit, and with equal casualness, Gwen replaced the cache like it had never been moved. Frankly, I was in awe. Here’s a shot near the cache of a Great Blue Heron doing some fishing. Stanley Park is home to more than 70 GBH nests.

The boy was getting pretty antsy and tired so we beat it back to the house for a nap. Well, that was the plan. First we stopped by the statue of Lord Stanley (sans Cup) because we were supposed to get a photo of the statue with the GPSr in frame in order to log one of the caches. Unfortunately the statue seemed to be the site of a drug deal, so Gwen took the photo from a distance.

And then, we thought we’d check out *one more cache* near the head of the Lion’s Gate. Unfortunately, I drove by the parking lot nearest the cache, and what with Stanley Park Drive being one-way only, we had to drive to the top of the hill (at Prospect Point). This wasn’t too bad; the cache was at the bottom of the hill (a 45m drop according to the topo in the GPS) so we got out and back-tracked down the trail. Some 10-15 minutes later we were at the bottom of the hill, milling about the inside of the hair-pin turn peering at one of the Real Big Trees. 5 or 10 minutes later, we were searching around in quiet desperation. See, I had left the PDA in the truck and so while we had the coordinates of the cache, we had nothing else. Purists will say that’s the way to do it, but we’re not purists. We don’t mind *easy*. Anyway, you can see where this is going. We didn’t find the cache, and went back up the trail empty handed, tails between our legs.

The drive out of the park was interesting. It was the first time since the Big Wind Storm (an extratropical cyclone that blew through in December) that we had drive through the western part of the park, and seen the amount of devastation of the forest there. It seemed incredible to see the huge tree trunks and blow-downs on the side of the road. And, to see West Van from the road.

Back to the house, time for a nap. After the nap … back to Stanley Park to grab the cache that we didn’t get! This time, we stopped at the correct parking lot, watched a cruise ship leave the harbour (there were 5 or 6 in or leaving port that day) and cross under the Lion’s Gate Bridge.

As you can see, I had Aidan in the backpack. He loves the backpack, but he doesn’t get to ride in it too often. Side note — like the haircut? You, of course, read about that on Gwen’s blog, right?

Well, it took us about 5 minutes to walk to the hairpin (on level ground) and less than 5 minutes to find the cache. In fact, Gwen walked right to it.

Buoyed by our success, we wandered drove down to First Beach to grab *one more cache*. This one was also within easy reach, but unfortunately there was someone sleeping on the bench that we think we were supposed to be looking around/under. Darned muggles.

Hmmmm, it’s late. And I’m almost totally engrossed in watching Jamie Foxx on Inside the Actor’s Studio. What an incredibly intelligent, charismatic, and engaging man. A little later in the week, I’ll serve up “One More Cache: Part II, or In Richmond, Bunnies are Evil.”