Won't those fried eggs get soggy?

It's been raining for um, when hasn't it rained? Oh yes, we had one day in a row of brilliant sunshine this month, so we went to a bird sanctuary to take photos.

But right now the weather forecast for Vancouver has these odd fried-egg like icons on it. They are round and yellow, and there is some white bits around the sides.

Won't those eggs get soggy in all this rain?

I don't believe it could actually mean sun is in the forecast, the icon shows up for about 4 days in a row!

Must be soggy eggs expected.

Is anonymous fame possible?

If googling yourself is the ultimate in vanity searching or egogoogling (is that a fun new word, or what?) then is googling for photos you've taken a vanity search for the introvert?

I have a very old name, I can still count on one hand the number of times I've met someone else named Clara. The name is coming back into fashion, I've heard of three or four babies being named Clara in the last couple of years, but mostly people with my name have died of old age many years ago, so I'm in a dip of name popularity (and generally very happy for it). So when I do a google on my own name I typically come up with a lot of pictures of grave markers. This kind of vanity search is not a cheerful thing, so I avoid it.

But I do use Flickr to post a lot of photos I've taken and lately I've found many of them right at the top of google searches! All of my rose photos have the full variety name attached to them, I don't bother taking pictures of roses unless I can also take a photo of a name tag to go along with them. Otherwise, there are millions of photos of roses with the tag "yellow rose" or "red rose" and mine would be just one of millions. But if you search in google or google images on "rotary sunrise rose" or "harwelcome fellowship rose" or a few other rose variety names, my photos come up first! I've also found other non-rose images of mine coming up on top in google searches. (And for a fun twist, my photo of an odd image in a tree came up first when searching on "sasquatch suicide" for a few days.)

So on a vanity search for my photos, I come out quite well. Does this mean I have achieved anonymous fame? Is this introvert ego searching?

Did we really move that far?

This is our first December in our new place. It is 4 city blocks over and 5 city blocks down closer to the water than our old place. It doesn't seem that far, but yesterday - a day after the parade - we realized we missed the Santa Clause Parade noise completely for the first time in a decade! We only realized this when we saw a balloon caught in a tree outside our windows and remembered it was that time of year again.

As I mentioned in at least one previous blog entry we used to be awakened on the morning of the parade by 6 or 7 marching bands at a time warming up outside our building. Then when the parade started we heard many bands walking the parade route a couple of blocks from our home. This year we heard nothing. We saw no traffic jams, no crowds of people. We didn't even notice there was a parade.

Of course, in August we had a great view of the Pride Parade from our balcony in our new home, and that was noisy too, as I wrote in another blog entry, but it was so colourful and fun and warm, it wasn't nearly as annoying. (That may have something to do with the complete lack of tired old Christmas songs being played to death... could someone write something new, anything new, for Christmas?)

So have we really moved that far away? It seems like such a short distance, but it is like a completely different city just a few blocks away! What a difference a few city blocks makes!