Garden Birds - November 2020. During this "lockdown and go nowhere" year Bird Protection Quebec have replaced their weekly guided birding field trips with a series of interesting virtual alternatives. Basically, they have been saying, here’s a challenge, go and do it and then tell us all about what you found. For the [...]
I have to give 100% credit to my friend Emily, the “Baking Queen” for this idea. Recently she posted about stuffed focaccia and her rolled creations looked so appealing I had to try. Especially I had to try as half the inhabitants here have to avoid gluten and my GF regular focaccia [...]
Looking to the future - When I was a kid over a half century ago Hallowe’en (it had an apostrophe in it back then) was an indoor party with "exciting" games such as apple bobbing. Nobody actually had these parties but we read about them in children’s story books, probably written pre-war. Sometime [...]
A Project Perhaps? We were walking near home recently, as we do every day to keep things working as they should be, and went along a short stretch of a road separated from the Autoroute 20 (that's the very busy and noisy road to Toronto) by a dense but narrow stretch of trees [...]
The End of Autumn We had thought that our last visit to the forest a couple of weeks ago would be the high spot of the tree colour this year but somehow the leaves have hung on and this morning's exercise found us walking under some more glorious golden trees. That and [...]
This is Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada and yesterday was our Golden Wedding - what better way to celebrate both than a walk in the golden light of the Arboretum. After 50 years our feet know the paths to follow rather well. [...]
I’m just getting into a collection of essays ("Vesper Flights" - Helen Macdonald) by a Historian of Science at Cambridge. I was struck by this paragraph from her introduction. "What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated [...]
West Island Wildlife #1 A new venture ... A 14 page illustrated "webzine" to introduce readers to the amazing variety of wildlife and plants to be found in the green spaces, parks and gardens of the West Island of Montreal. This is the first of what is hoped to become an occasional [...]
No particular reason to share this photograph other than that I like it. This was some 30+ years ago in the middle of Bordeaux ... it was a truly wet day to go sightseeing.
Playing with Light I was driving along the lakeshore in town (the lake being a widening of the St-Lawrence River) a couple of days ago about 7:30 in the morning when I was struck by the light on the water. Normally I would have had a camera with me but I was [...]