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No snow on her. Waiting for the bus on West Broadway -- with her umbrella, under a store awning.

 It's still snowing in Vancouver and my WordPress blog is still suspended.

Unfortunately the snow isn't enough to cheer me up. Still, I should just buck up and get on with it right? Life goes on around me, demanding my attention.

Bloody hell!

While I've been typing this post in McDonald's a woman has appeared at the counter. It's free coffee week at the Golden Arches but they weren't giving her one. I turned to see the woman, she was squat with a stolid expression and she was carrying a jacket and a plastic shopping bag. She had cross-cut slashes all down both forearms which were consequently covered in blood.

What the...?

See what I mean about not paying attention?

I jumped to the counter. There seemed to be an abundance of coffee denial and a shortage of 9-1-1-ing. I was a bit loud about that. A woman did finally call for an ambulance.

The woman with the cut up arms left. A customer at the counter actually declared the cuts were superficial -- self-inflicted -- and couldn't have hurt. Aarrgg!

The staff justified not calling an ambulance immediately because the woman had come in one time before in the same condition and that she left before an ambulance arrived.

In fact the woman left the restaurant. I couldn't convince her to wait. She didn't say a word, she just left. She immediately tried to get on a westbound bus but I watched as the driver took one look at the blood covering her forearms and hands and ordered her off the bus.

She trudged off down West Broadway. The woman who had called 9-1-1 was trailing after her trying to talk to her. I didn't go out and help. At no point did I consider trying to "detain" the woman with the cuts.

When I looked up a few minutes later the woman with the cuts was back; she was again trying to board a bus but now she had her jacket on with the sleeves over the cuts. A different driver still ordered her off the bus. As she walked  walked west up Broadway I could see bus passengers pointing at and complaining about something to the driver. Not a minute later I heard sirens and watched an ambulance and police car speeding west. Then there was the woman who'd made the original 9-1-1 call; she was walking east.

So a potentially mentally-ill woman, covering in blood up to her elbows, was, and may still be, wandering around Fairview in the snow and cold. She appeared to be willfully dodging help, which didn't seem too hard to do as most people just wanted to ignore her.

Vancouver is a wonderful city full of people who care. They just don't always care about other people. But then neither do I.

Did I mention my WordPress blog is still suspended?

 By now, most WordPress.com bloggers will have found they now have the ability to flag a referrer link as spam.

WordPress.com, the free service that hosts WordPress blogs, quietly rolled out the new feature on Friday in response to a two-month deluge of referrer spam, all generated by one Website.

The Website, semalt.com, was raining spam disguised as post views down on thousands of blogs, not just those powered by the WordPress content management system (CMS).

It wasn't exactly a rain of terror but it still left bloggers curious, worried, and ultimately pissed off -- the spam hits were skewing everyone's traffic stats!

Overlooking Arbutus Ridge and beyond from King Edward Ave. and Arbutus St.

Homes, home, homes and more homes, That's one strong impression you get looking over the Arbutus Ridge neighbourhood. The other impression is that it all appears to be comfortably well off if not flat-out wealthy.

This impression of comfortable hominess continues for several kilometres in three directions beyond the Arbutus Ridge neighbourhood, south into Kerrisdale, west into Dunbar-Southlands and north into Kitsilano.

[caption id="attachment_10555" align="alignnone" width="497"] How he rolls. Looks like Hansen's statue is about to run the barricade.[/caption]

As I rode west along 10th Avenue I happened to spy a big hunk of something behind barricades and yellow caution tape in the little parking lot beside the Blusson Spinal Cord Centre. It was a very impressive statue of the famous wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen.

This was not a new statue; it had previously been featured on the grounds of Rogers Arena in downtown Vancouver. I had no idea why it was parked here, but here it was in stall 2524.

The larger-than-life size granite sculpture was carved by sculptor Bill Koochin in 1997 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the completion of Rick Hansen's Man in Motion World Tour.

[caption id="attachment_10540" align="alignnone" width="497"] The scene as I was getting up: unusual snow and the typical snarl of poorly-driven SUVs.[/caption]

Thick fluffy snow has been falling steadily at least since I got up early this afternoon. Because the temperature has stayed above zero the snow has only been finding a foothold on lawns, parked cars and garbage bin lids; it hasn't stuck to roads or sidewalks.

[caption id="attachment_10541" align="alignnone" width="497"] This bottle depot has spare shopping carts for binners. Why aren't the boys taking this one?[/caption]

I skipped my usual weekday morning coffee because it was Saturday and I'd slept right through the morning. Instead I made my way through the snow to the bottle depot. The trip was uneventful; the snow was no more inconvenient than a light chunky fog.

The bottle depot wasn't very eventful either. When I arrived at Go Green there were only six other binners there -- at 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon! The staff watched the big open entrance of the bottle depot and complained about the snow.

How many people driving by this construction site will have already forgotten what used to be here?

It's probably about time to stop calling the crest at Arbutus Street and 16th Avenue the former site of the Ridge shopping centre. It is now the future site of Cressey's Arbutus Ridge condominium development. I say that without caring for it to be true.

I'll always miss the Ridge Centre. Over the course of 30 years, I shopped there, did my laundry there. went there with friends and by myself to see a lot of movies, and I ate a lot of meals there. I regret never trying the bowling alley.

It was a big old shopping mall with character that was associated with some of my fond memories. Now it only exists in my memory -- all the physical details I remember, down to the date stamped into original sidewalk on the south side: "1950" --all gone.

Soon to be replaced by an uninteresting condo for rich people. In three to ten years when it starts leaking I'll try not to feel good about it. Click the image to enlarge it.

This was the first of several photos I took this morning looking straight up through the glass "awning" at the Canadian Western Bank building on the northwest corner of West Broadway Avenue and Birch Street.

Water from overnight precipitation was making pretty on the glass and I wasted effort capturing the effect. I say wasted because nothing nailed the surreal look like my first quick zoomed shot. Click the images to enlarge them.