I added some of my Victoria/Nanoose Bay/Tofino/Vancouver pictures to my online gallery. Please enjoy, but know that the /Tofino/ part isn’t quite up yet. I’m slowly (and steadily) processing the incredible and festering backlog of images in my Aperture import folder, and hope that somehow, someway, in the next few days and weeks I will be caught up.

We’re off to Vancouver for the holidays. We were there last year around this time and enjoyed it a great deal, despite the traffic-seizing and headline-making snowfall and temperatures. Personal matters dictate this trip this time around, which I am for some reason looking forward to a whole lot more than the previously planned (and yet otherwise unannounced and now indefinitely postponed) Maui vacation in January. Vancouver for Christmas, with the right people and for the right reasons, is infinitely more satisfying than Hawaii. Modest detail may or may not follow regarding our trip. For now I’m leaning towards not.

In other news, lots is happening these days. We completed the follow-up Government of Canada eco-audit inspection and the numbers are off to the feds for approval and cutting of cheques. After installing attic insulation, three low-flush toilets and a new high-efficiency furnace I feel like something of a cynical apprentice handyman: capable, yet completely aware of certain projects that I will never do again (the attic insulation).

I recently admitted to my wife (and to myself, sort of) recently that if I could stock our wine cellar with nothing else, it would be Champagne and Sonoma pinot noir. It was truly remarkable in retrospect to think about the great wines we enjoyed in Las Vegas (a full report and photos will eventually surface, promise). Two bottles of Bollinger Special Cuvée, an Au Bon Climat Isabel Morgan pinot noir, Veuve Cliquot… Tough life!

Though thinking about the volume of my cellar, or at least its potential, I would have to find room for tempranillos from the Ribera del Duero region in Spain; some Italian Barbarescos; a few bone-dry Australian (Eden Valley, Clare Valley) rieslings; some ports (both vintage and tawny) for cold nights beside the fire, and of course my wife’s rosés. Oh, and some grassy, acidic sauvignons from Chile’s Leyda Valley for those truly blistering-hot days in the summer. But that would about do it. See, living with a vegetarian (ok, ‘pescetarian’) there’s not much room nor need for red wine, and it’s only our affinity for pinot, Barbaresco, temperanillo, and the lot of 2005 Bordeaux that we already have that we have any reds at all really. Sadly, I cracked a delicious 2004 Jackson Triggs SunRock shiraz last night and I know I’ll be in for a challenge to not pour any of it down the drain a week from now.

Such are the extravagant challenges life presents sometimes, I know.

I have several irons in the fire right now, speaking of blog post drafts that is, including (for my own inventory as much as your interest):

– the Blasphemous Province of Alberta: defending our destruction of the environment in the name of money

– Tiger Woods’ daily doings (and the fact that he’s currently sitting at 11 over par)

– Brand Loyalty

– Advertising and Creative agencies (both my love and spite for them)

– my perpetual and growing hatred for the Papyrus typeface (a project I’ve been working on for over a year now)

Cheers for now. More soon.