We’ve spent the last three and a half months in Vancouver “housekeeping” – taking care of business and further cutting bureaucratic ties allowing us to become nomads even more. The great blessing of this has been time to catch up with friends. Even so, we didn’t get to see everyone – people go away in the summer. Who knew?

Our itinerary has been:
five weeks housesitting for friends, five nights in the guest suite of the building where we used to live, five nights with friends on Whidbey Island, twelve days housesitting for another friend, ten nights in the guest suite, three weeks housesitting for friends in North Vancouver, one night in a hotel, four nights in the guest suite, two and a half weeks housesitting for a friend in Coquitlam, and finally two nights back in the guest suite before we fly out September twelfth. We are nomads even in our hometown. All this moving is second nature now. Each place we stay, no matter how little time we are there, becomes home.

A huge thank you to all of our friends for letting us stay in their lovely homes, and to David for giving us the use of his BMW for the whole time we’ve been here. He said if we drop by with it on our way out of town he’ll drive us to the airport. What a guy!

It has been a summer of both stresses and miracles, and the more often we get to see that the Universe takes care of us, the more we come to simply trust. But all this is for another post.

This post is about photoshop. I am terrified of photoshop! I LOVE photoshop, and I hardly even know how to use it. I’ve only just begun, and I’m having so much fun. My entire life could be sucked into the compelling, creative, addictive black hole that is photoshop. Help!

Here’s some of the results of my play:

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All the following pictures were taken on the Skytrain – like those above they are mostly dull, uninteresting, blurry photos. Delete. Delete. Delete. Ha! Now nothing can be deleted until I’ve played with it. Hours sucked away in a creative dream.

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No more befores – I’m sure you get the picture 🙂

















And finally, two versions of the same picture. I couldn’t decide which I liked best.





Next post – what we did this summer, and more about the process of becoming nomadic. When we first left Vancouver a year ago we could only do so much. This summer in Vancouver we took a few more steps.

Soon we fly to Australia for six weeks, followed by five weeks in Northern India, and three months travelling around Southeast Asia. 






All words and images by Alison Louise Armstrong unless otherwise noted.
© Alison Louise Armstrong and Adventures in Wonderland – a pilgrimage of the heart, 2010-2015.