Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Another long, crazy day. Busy and crammed with stuff and enjoyable. The novel thing about being in the office is the random things you learn about each other. Turns out most of my officemates for the day are photo geeks of one flavor or another. Hurray! In among the craziness or perhaps as participation in the craziness, I got a lot done. Not that there isn’t an extended list of things to do in the morning.

The photograph here is Shannon Falls, a waterfall outside of Vancouver that we stumbled upon on the Sea to Sky Highway. The falls are just gorgeous. The Sea to Sky Highway makes me tense. “Oh what a whimsical little name it has,” was my first thought. Then I drove it - two hours up to Whistler. I’m glad I never had to drive both ways. My hands were sore enough from gripping the steering wheel on the drive up. They really mean Sea to Sky. On the drive north, to your left is a sudden and treacherous drop down to the bay. To your right is sheer rock face. It’s a two lane road. (They don’t mean the “highway” part of the name so much.) Oh, and to top it all off, it’s very curvy - sharp curves… often with little notice. The locals are all about driving it fast, furious and dangerously. Every week it seemed the news ran a story of a fatality or serious multi-car accident on the Sea to Sky. It’s a gorgeous drive. Breath-taking. But much harder to appreciate when you’ve got a death-grip on the steering wheel trying to keep the car from careening off the side of the cliff to the left or slamming into the rock face tot he right. (I got better at it… with a few trips… really!)

The views are amazing. When new folks came to Vancouver and had time, we’d take the drive if they were in town on a Saturday or Sunday. There are actually two waterfalls on the highway (Rte 99, by the by) as well as several other random pull-offs at which you can gawk at how blue the sky is, how green the trees are, how amazing the islands are below in the bays, or just how amazing the landscape is.

The hotel internet sucks tonight but I successfully got in to World of Warcraft and raided anyway. During our mid-raid break, a bunch of guild members sang happy birthday to me over Ventrilo. They were clever about it too - they didn’t try to sing together but picked up one line each. (Singing together on Ventrilo almost never works because inevitably the latency gets people out of sync. Hilarious but painful. Taking turns really worked for them!) So my lovely guildies made me laugh really hard with pure happiness. They sing “beautifully.” It was really incredibly sweet and cute.

tags: birthday, british columbia, driving, photographs, photography, sea to sky highway, travel, vancouver, work, world of warcraft

Spot the genetic variation!

Originally uploaded by cce_photography.

Throughout Longwood Gardens there are beautifully arranged plants, meticulously maintained and arduously perfect. This is one of the reasons the little spot of red on this tulip delighted me so much. Here, after strolling through an acre or two of perfect, snow-white tulips and other arrangements constrained to uniformity, here was a rebel! Go, little tulip, go! I admit, after I took the picture, I looked around for the maniacal garden gnomes to come remove the offending petals or even the whole tulip in the name of returning the garden to its intended perfection. After all, this tulip is clearly the bastard offspring of a forbidden romance!

In other news, the gods hate me today in so many ways… But luckily, it’s Friday. I will perform the appropriate sleep-worship tonight and everything will be better in the morning.

So, those of you familiar with exotic coffee or Jon’s blog may be familiar with Kopi Luwak coffee. For the uninitiated or just intentionally innocent, this coffee bean is harvested after it’s been pre-processed through a luwak. Luwaks are little weasel-cat creatures that hang out in Indonesia snarfing down coffee cherries right from the bush. They’re pretty darned cute. The luwaks are also coffee snobs and apparently only eat the finest, most perfectly ripe coffee cherries. The coffee beans then go through the luwaks and is discarded for silly humans to collect. The silly humans do indeed collect the luwak droppings, dry them, clean the beans and roast the coffee beans. Silly humans.

So where am I going with this?

Well, the other night I was wandering around the Outlands in World of Warcraft when a friendly NPC gave me the following quest: A Rare Bean

The point of the quest?

“To the west you will find dung heaps left behind by the wildlife of Nagrand. You must search the dung for the digested remnants of the Nagrand caracoli. From this bean I am able to make a tablet that will aid you in your battle against the restless forces of nature.”

Yep, wander around the zone, look for rather large piles of poop, and right-click on them to “search” for the digested caricoli bean. As a reward you receive processed caracoli beans that allow you to breathe under water for 30 minutes. Pretty useful since after doing this quest you’ll want to wash your hands for a long time. There were many grossed-out comments about this quest in my guild’s chat channel this week. This amuses me since this game routinely has us carry around heads, hands, ears and other sundry body parts for quests. A little poo-quest and they’re all “ick! this is disgusting!” Silly boys.

tags: garden gnomes, kopi luwak, longwood gardens, photographs, photography, tulips, world of warcraft