Having planned the menus for the next few days, I’m heading out to stock up before our friends arrive for a visit. We just got home yesterday from two weeks away, so the larder is bare. I stop to smile sweetly at the Big Guy, engrossed in his tablet.
“Do you want to get the wine, or do you want me to do that too?”
A typo, youthinks? You wonder whether I mean “plain faces”?
No, I have titled correctly. And my pareidoliac search for faces in inanimate objects finds new success, albeit of the after-the-fact variety. I noticed these faces when I was going through my photos, not when I was going through the Pima Air and Space Museum. Continue reading
I remember the first time I saw a white pine in the not-very-wilds of cottage country just north of Toronto. Unlike the pines I knew in Alberta, it was all twisted and bent from the wind. As my sister-in-law said, “There’s a reason all those Group of Seven paintings look like that.”
Indeed. They were painting what they saw.
There’s a reason, too, why so many paintings of the West Coast look sort of misty, even on an otherwise clear day.
A Member of the Order of Canada and two-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award,
King is often described as one of the finest contemporary Aboriginal writers in North America.
– The Canadian Encyclopedia
We share Thomas King with the Americans, both by citizenship and by residency. He was born in Sacramento, CA and lived in the USA for his first 37 years (excepting 3 years in New Zealand), but he’s lived in Canada for his second 37 years. I haven’t heard what he plans to do with his third 37 years. Continue reading
I don’t need to go to the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary to see chickadees: I can see those out my living room window.
But to get a picture – ah, in that case it helps to be in a place where they’re used to people, and perch for more than a millisecond at a time.
Identifying unknown water birds is often harder than it looks. I guess that’s obvious, eh? I mean, isn’t everything?
The pesky birds often don’t come in close to shore, making it hard to get a good look at them or to get a picture good enough for identification.
When they are close enough, the sun often complicates things with backlighting that washes out the bird’s distinguishing markings.
When I can see the dagnabbed bird clearly, I often ask obvious questions.
“What’s that duck with the long tail?
Obviously. Sigh.
Rather than be annoyed at my limited knowledge, I do try to be grateful for the identifications that others, more knowledgeable than I, can make from my photos.
And I do try to remember that in life as in birding, gratitude is often the best response. And that surprisingly often, the obvious answer is the dagnabbed answer.
Finishing up a rainy but great week on the Left Coast, I start looking ahead to some social arrangements with friends upon my return to, and before my next departure from, Ottawa.
Given an unfamiliar suggested rendezvous, I naturally ask Google Maps to find it and to give me a sense of how long it will take to get there from my home.
At least, that’s what I mean to ask. Instead, I ask for directions from My Location: Comox BC. Oops. And OMG. Google Maps gets as excited as I’ve ever seen it.
Using any old east-end Ottawa location to illustrate.
Watch out! This route includes a ferry.
Yes, that would be to get off Vancouver Island. It’s OK.
Alert! This route has tolls.
OK, I might reasonably expect to hit toll roads or bridges somewhere in the 4,564 km. What’s next?
Argghh!! This route crosses through the Excited States of America.
Thanks, I can see that, although most of the states actually crossed are calm, bordering on boring, frankly. Anything else?
Oh no! Your destination is in a different time zone.
A different time zone? That tears it. I’m not going. I’m so glad I checked.
The Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary is becoming a standard stop on my visits to Vancouver, even in sub-optimal weather.
The last such visit gave me another chance to practice taking photos of birds with flared wings.
The Big Apple.
The capital of the world.
The center of the universe.
The city that never sleeps.
Bagdad on the Subway.
And so on. New York is and has been a lot of things to a whole lot of people.
Last week, I didn’t publish a video for my weekly movie challenge because I was working on a travelogue of our recent trip to New York City. This week’s 5-minute video is the result of two weeks of work.
I’ve done narrated videos of trips before, mostly so my mother could see my photographs and enjoy our trips from the comfort of her living room. This was an entirely different effort, all theme/feel and no chronology. I knew it would take longer than the others I’ve tackled, and it did.
The first challenge was finding a soundtrack that would blend with (or at least not distract from) a wide range of photographs and video. The next was just not getting lost in all the photos and video clips.
Posted: 2025 Jun 13
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
