As the 2022 growing season winds down in the Ottawa Valley, some parts of the country aren’t quite ready to throw in the towel. The Left Coast, for instance, still has abundant greenery.
Some is right at eye level, backlit by the angled sunlight.
Sigh. The baseball season is over.
While others will watch the Division playoffs and the World Series, Blue Jays fans know the truth: It’s over. And over in stunning fashion, with a Bichette/Springer outfield collision taking the latter out of the game, injured, and allowing three runs, effectively taking the Blue Jays out of the game, too.
The aroma of red cabbage drifts over the partial wall separating my desk and yarn-storage space from the mess in the kitchen.
Yes, it’s the first of the two annual Dread Turkey celebrations. This year I’m trying a new method for rendering a head of red cabbage into the requisite tiny bits for Danish red cabbage: chopping finely instead of shredding. This year I’m also trying a new turkey-cooking method, thereby splitting the dread between the turkey itself and the new air-fryer appliance. A spread dread is a lesser dread, no?
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the aroma of red cabbage cooking in sugar and vinegar. This sweet/sour dish appeared only twice a year in my childhood home (a restriction due, I believe, to the shredding-work involved), but it was a must-have for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.
Further to our conversations (here and here) about dog jackets, this week the universe had this comment.
This is Chloe. And this is her state-of-the-art coyote protection gear. She dares anybody to mess with her now. 12/10 pic.twitter.com/UJj8w9uveM
— WeRateDogs (@dog_rates) October 3, 2022
A week shy of Thanksgiving, the fall colours in the Ottawa Valley are just starting, but what a start.
They’re smooth and lumpy.
They’re partial and complete.
To solve last week’s puzzle I trudged-by-car to the west end on Friday afternoon. In anticipation of our major east/west thruway being closed for a freeway-bridge replacement this weekend, every driver in the National Capital Area had apparently decided — in a terrible example of synchronicity at its worst — to preemptively divert to an often-busy-but-usually-passable east/west road down in my part of the City.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
It’s a standard disclaimer in the financial-management business, but I didn’t know until just now that it’s a Rule.
SEC Rule 156 requires mutual funds to tell investors
not to base their expectations of future results
on past performance before they invest. – Forbes
Of course, the Rule applies to many things beyond investments: cooking (especially if one is, ahem, inclined to the casual with respect to recipe adherence), birdwatching, and any artistic endeavour.
Ah, the common flesh fly.
I’d never noticed one before this morning, so whaddya mean “common”?
Worldwide, there are 800 valid species (arranged for convenience into a mere 150 subgenera).
OK, common it is. I’m not sure I want the answer to this next one, but whaddya mean “flesh”?
The larvae feed on rotting carrion or decaying meat.
Kids these days. What are you gonna do?
This always happens. I am minding my own business, photographing yellow jackets in the sunshine as one random example, and something I’ve never seen/noticed before jumps into the frame.
This often leads to amazement: 800 species!
This sometimes leads to ickiness: eating rotting carrion! Mind you, I guess if we’re not to be knee-deep in rotting carrion, something has to eat it. Better a fly’s larvae than me.
And it occasionally leads to opportunities for immature humour: The species are hard to distinguish (one from the 799 others) and the process usually requires examination of the male’s genitalia. Under an, ahem, microscope.
Rain, rain, go away
Come again another day.
I don’t think we had enough rainy days in Alberta for this nursery rhyme to be a staple of my yute, exactly, but it comes from somewhere a long way back. I might have had more use for an incantation to banish or at least admonish snow.
Snow, snow, what the hey?
Go away, it’s May today.
Posted: 2025 May 24
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
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