Part of September, for me, is catching up on maintenance stuff, which means the past week has been full of extra appointments–dental checkup, fireplace fix-it guys, that sort of thing. I am very much a creature of routine and the cumulative disruption was big: I am looking at a far smoother road next week, and it’s an exciting prospect.
Routine includes getting some pics online, so here’s a cormorant.
And Friday’s words: 1,077 for a total of 11,824.
Thursday’s verbiage: 1,374 words. (I’m trying not to overshoot 900 a day by too much, but I had less than that on Tuesday-Wednesday.)
Friday’s: 1,116 words.
My other big accomplishment of the week seems to be getting Met in HD tickets, which went on sale Friday. Cineplex, for those of you who haven’t tried it, has the most Byzantine and thoroughly evil online box office I have ever encountered.
And here’s a birdie for you all.
Happy long weekend, everyone!
If it’s Monday, I must be blogging over at Favorite Thing Ever, and this week I’m talking about one of my favorite green companies, the makers of Ecojot notebooks. Do you write longhand, or love to journal? Would you prefer to feel like you’re not cutting down forests to do it? Wanna trickle-down some of your stationery budget to schoolkids in need? Surf on over there and have a look at the eco-journal treasure.
And for those of you who may be putting in a few hours today, despite the statutory holiday, here’s a worker bee:
Nature photography is very much about showing up and taking what you get. Even so, I’ve been hitting Trout Lake and the Central Valley Parkway with American Goldfinches on my mind. They hang out there, barely on the edge of my 24x zoom. They’re deliciously, improbably yellow–the first time I saw one, I was sure it must be someone’s escaped canary–and I’ve never gotten a decent shot of one.
Instead, a recent trip yielded something just as precious–a bullfrog climbing out onto a lily pad.
I suspect there are a couple places in Alberta where I might have seen exactly this as a kid, but I never encountered one. Frogs on lilies are very much a fairytale sight, for me, and they haven’t got old yet.
I had a fallen maple leaf in my hand not an hour ago, a glorious tattered mosaic of red, orange, and green. It conveys a a sense that I blinked and someone whisked July and August away while my eyes were closed. I’m not complaining–at least, I hope that’s not how it seems. Just noting that the past ten or so weeks, which have been crammed with lovely things and people, have as a result zoomed past me without brakes.
Summer in Vancouver can have the pace of a leisurely saunter along the Seawall. Sometimes the good weather comes in May, and stays and stays, through a warm September that segues into the beauty of a West Coast autumn, so gracefully you can’t say where the one ended and the other began. Other years, the demarcation is sharp: the kids go back to school and the air’s suddenly chilly. The trees drop bales of leaves all at once. There’s frost in the air and the raincoats come out. Either way, fall means counting golden orb spiders along the Grandview Cut, where they proliferate in the dozens upon dozens. It means seeing the roofs steam with thawing ice in the morning, and watching how the fallen leaves get rain-sodden and leave their imprints on the pavement. It means squash and turnips and beets and all the other harvest vegetables; it means stews and casseroles and comfort food.
But even as it scatters maple leaves at my feet, the weekend is showing us a lot of gold and sun, reminding me that summer’s riches aren’t spent quite yet:
photo by Kristy Boyce
The Color of Paradox
The Cage