Cold Day

Looks like another morning.

And another visit by the bunny.

Making cookies.

I went on a drive alone back to a neighbourhood where I used to live.

We used to live here. The shape is the same but the colour and the trees are completely different.

Giant inflatable Santa.

Another snowy street.

That snowman has a butt.

I went up on a hill in the giant field. Sometimes when I was a teenager, I would sneak out of home late at night and go to this field. One time, while I was here, I saw something weird in the narrow row of trees seen here. It's only about 10 meters wide, and on the other side is a path.

On this one late night, I was standing in the field probably not on the hill like I am here. Some creature ran at high speed through the trees, not the path on the other side, snapping branches all the way. At night, I could see it silhouetted by the lights on the other side of the trees, and all I can really say is it was bipedal, but did not seem human. I returned home knowing that at least if it were to come back this way, I would probably hear it.

I went down into this ravine, where I had spent a lot of time in the 1990s. We set one or two snowmen on fire here, and we also had some pretty epic snowball wars in this ravine.

A closer look. I couldn't tell if this was a living tree that someone had damaged, but it seemed likely.

The bridge. I think it's been replaced since the 1990s.

Sometime in the 1990s, I had the idea to try to vault fences like this and run through people's backyards. Maybe I wanted to test myself against what I had seen running through the trees to the left, though I don't remember which came first.

I only did it once, but I vaulted the fence, ran through, vaulted into the next yeard, and ran through, repeating for about the four or five yards in a row here. The fences were all six feet tall and I was able to climb them a lot easier back then.

Fort Edmonton is visible between the trees.

In this wider shot you can see this slope directly down to the river, and one on the other side. It seems this runs over possibly an underground wire or something, but whatever is happening, it seems like a pretty frightening threat.

Looking down the staircase.

As someone comes up.

Another group of people came over to the top of the stairs, and observed that house on the top of the ridge. One woman with a British accent remarked that she found this house to be too close to the edge and she could never be comfortable there. I had the fun task of informing them that this was a legitimate concern, and further upstream, there were houses on the ledge that actually had stability problems.

The picture I hotlinked in the previous caption had been taken on the bridge spanning the river, visible in this image.

Fort Edmonton (not its original location).

The way to get around down here was over this frozen stream. It seemed pretty solid.

Looking out along the river.

I have climbed this feature many times in the past.

A crack in the river ice.

Lots of tracks leading over the river.

A little easier to see here.

So do I go up there?

Or follow along the river?

That looks too steep for me to go up.

There are people at the top.

That just goes underground.

So I climbed the stairs, the safest way up.

I really liked the small size for Slurpees, which I'm pretty sure didn't exist on my previous visits. Also worth noting, the smallest size Slurpee in Korea is larger than that, and costs only $1.20.

Does Ava like Slurpees?