It’s Earth Day every day here at hughstimson.org, but nonetheless I will take this opportunity to announce an official endorsement for Gavin Newsom in the upcoming California Gubernatorial race.

You can read Mayor Newsom’s announcement of his candidacy on twitter, and listen to a Long Now Seminar in which he nerds out for a solid breathless hour on the topic of environment, environment and environment. You may or may not agree with all the details of his comprehensive and sprawling plans for eco-infrastructure building in San Fransico (and now presumably the entire State), but oh boy has he thought it through. That is fan-tastic stuff. It’s especially satisfying to hear him state flatly the significant problems with some of his own propositions. Honest, open-eyed experimentation on a significant scale looks to be a precursor for our movement into a more localized adaptation-ready era, and this fella seems to be willing to roll the dice in the right direction.

Canadian residents: every time he talks about only including green energy in San Francisco’s (or now presumably California’s) portfolio of sources, translate that to “not BC’s run-of-the-river hydro projects, and not for God’s sake Alberta’s bloody tar sands”.

A side note: the above speech includes some back-story on the banning of plastic bags in San Francisco, which he claims was a retaliation against a previous move by the national grocery store association to ban their members from introducing bag fees. I was listening on the headphones while shopping at the Thrifty grocery store near my house, which hughstimson.org hereby endorses for best grocery store in south-western BC (I’ve been meaning to do that for a while). When I started packing my backpack with my purchases the clerk mentioned she would reimburse me the plastic bag fee, which I only then realized they had been charging routinely. Then when I walked past the newspaper racks the headline on the Times-Colonist was Thrifty’s announcement that they will be abandoning plastic bags completely come July.

Go Gavin Newsom. Go Thrifty’s. Go Earth.

Until recently I lived in a nice room in the Fernwood neighbourhood of Victoria. Fernwood is a nice place, but lacks the maritime character that Victoria neighbourhoods should aspire to.

My room had a big window looking onto the front yard, including the spot where the recycling bin was put on recycling day. Except that “recycling day” is a bit of an abstraction there, any day you put out your recycling binners will be by to take most of it away, and make sure it goes to the places where it will be most appreciated. In fact, the house would often be visited by two different binners between the time I started a thought and the time I ended it. No, seriously. And I’m not that slow of a thinker.

I now live on the very maritime Ross Bay, roughly at the intersection of the neighbourhoods of Fairfield, Rockland and Gonzales, but I no longer know which day is officially recycling day. And so my recycling bin sits permanently on my back stoop. I don’t think about it much, because I keep assuming that it will get taken care of. But it doesn’t. There are no binners down here.

Why is that? From my time co-habitating the Greater Victoria Public Library with a number of homeless intellectuals, I’m aware that binning is a tricky enterprise that requires well-planned execution for financial sustainability, but this is a residential neighbourhood and I assume there’s plenty of recycling to be had. And it’s not just that my stoop is somewhat set back from the street, I often work by my window and I hardly ever even seen anyone on the prowl.

If there are any internet-enabled binners reading this, there is a full box at 160 Memorial Crescent, easily accessible from the back of the house, which faces onto Busby. Even if you aren’t planning on setting up a permanent trapline down here, do make a stop. I’ve even set the large-sized glass bottles aside from the rest of the material.

Being on the south-east tip of Vancouver Island, the Big City of Victoria looks across the 20 odd kilometers of the Strait of Juan de Fuca at the northern end of the Olympic Peninsula. That’s a shame in a way, because it puts the lie to my claim of living “on the Pacific Ocean”. It’s salt water, sure, and they probably claim to be oceaners even further east in Vancouver, but I’m not sure it’s really accurate to say it’s the actual ocean.

On the plus side, it means that you get to look across the oceanic strait at the snow-capped little Olympic Mountains all day, which do neat tricks like fading in and out of the clouds, or suddenly becoming remarkably clear or remarkably pink. And it’s fun to see the lights come on in Port Angeles every night, a nice little town in a whole different country.

This photo doesn’t actually show much of any of that, but maybe that’s what some of the people in the cars are thinking about.

160 Memorial Crescent, #1. Come visit. We have an ocean.

My prayers have been answered. You can now watch the entirety of Carts of Darkness, right now or very soon.

Option 1:

Open Cinema is doing a showing in Victoria, 5:30 tomorrow. The mayor and others will be there to discuss homelessness and such.

Options 2:

The whole thing is now available on nfb.ca. Have I mentioned nfb.ca? Oh right, repeatedly.

Some people might think that putting entire movies on the web for free in high quality might reduce the number of folks who will go watch it in on a big screen. And maybe those people would be right. Then again, even though it is available right here, on this web page, below this text, I’m going to wait 24 hours and pay $10 bucks to watch it in a room with other people tomorrow. So there you go.

The sun goes down over the Juan de Fuca strait and the Olympic Peninsula. Worth seeing at full size, I think.

Why do we climb Mt. Wells? Because it is conveniently there .

— Jenny Kingsley, summiting without supplemental oxygen.

Encouraged by some vigorous semi-retired looking ladies who arrived afterwards to demonstrate yogic work-out moves to each other while enjoying the view, we found a route down the back of the hill, which drops you out not far from a bus stop. Convenient.

(More specifically, I think it is there).