Stuck in the Vancouver airport this afternoon, writing code reviews on my laptop, and plugged into Brian Joseph on my headphones (Cal’s Chevy).

Vancouver’s always felt to me like it was painted by a watercolor artist who’d run out of everything but green and grey – beautiful and blurry. Whitecap mountains covered in pine, rising out of an ashen harbor, glimpsed at moments through the lingering fog. Good stuff, in a winter kind of way.

It’s funny how different it is to “visit” winter than to have it come settle in on you. Living in Seattle, I looked forward to the change of seasons – wistfully to that time when the last leaves had not quite fallen, but the snow clouds had grown too impatient to wait any longer. Breath was crisp, wet in the air, and you shook the cold from you when you came in for the day.

And then it stayed. Stayed under the falling rain that froze when it ran down the city streets, clung to the bare-branched cherry trees in the university quad, and spilled from the gutter-clogged roofs of every solemn edifice on campus. The sort winter day that set Joni Mitchell twitching for her six-string.

I do miss the northwest.