Escape from my own backyard

Although it wasn't the road trip I'd dreamed up, it was a nice drive to some old favourite places. This morning between my sore throat, the threat of all-day rain and the failure of my potential navigator to report for duty or at least report that they were bailing - I decided to nix the trip. It was of a scale that required being on the road by 9 or 10 and it just wasn't going to happen. So I attacked the kitchen and cleaned the neglected corners and generally didn't feel too bad about passing up the trip. However, my friend finally showed up around 3 and we headed to my favourite field site and a provincial park that I'd been wondering about for some time. And it rained... and it rained some more... until I was drenched to the bone. But now I'm warm and dry and wearing fuzzy socks - so hopefully it won't be a problem for my throat. I'm kind of glad I made it back to my old stomping grounds to drive on my favourite back roads and hike in the rain.


Here is a jewelwing at Cataract.

Potential

Not that long ago this was a mess of weeds, then it was a dug bed with decent soil, then it had some small new plants and now they were bigger.. but what is really exciting is to picture this down the road after say 2-3 years when each of those plants are huge and will create this awesome drift of yellow and purple in July-Sept....

Today was a productive day... dropped off my cargo boxes at the airport - hung out with the amusing folk at the Cargo warehouse - they thought I was cool, not because I was going north, but because I spent upwards of 30 minutes carefully applying duct tape to my boxes. Next to the spot where I was working, there was a rejected live cargo consisting of mama cat and at least three very young kittens (the kittens were too young to fly)... who provided adorable entertainment. Next - a few boring odds and ends and finally a visit to the MOH to drop off the "I'm leaving the province for a while paperwork".... I guess I should be glad that there were only 50 people queued ahead of me there... so I finally escaped, did some last minute shopping and then headed to my bros for quality family time. The kid did infant things mostly.. like cry... but watching my brother and wife parent was cute... That's one lucky kid. I guess.. he'll be doing some growing in the next 2-3 years too... so... potential there too. and his parents are good cooks... I'm going to miss dinner at their place :D and for the relatively sane and wise company too...

yawn... well, time to finish up the tasks for today and get some sleep... tomorrow my goal is to take pictures of things that aren't growing in my garden.... and spend some quality time with trees since I may not see too many for the next couple of months.. :D

A few more notes:

Walking the dog nearly ended in tragedy. I'm not sure if it was a subtle shift in her stance from docile to slightly predatory or just the way its tail was backlit (so it looked like a small dancing alien) but suddenly, the tree blocked the light from my eyes and there was a very nervous skunk backing up and ready to spray.... and me and my dog ran, ran away.. and still smell like a girl and a dog... thank goodness. Tonight.. for those farther north than here have a decent chance of seeing northern lights.. but none here yet.

Today is the.....

Well, today was filled with odd beautiful and entertaining moments. I'm currently sucking on one last zinc lozenge before heading to sleep - by the end of tomorrow I should have everything short of getting on a plane done for heading up north - I even managed to buy some glide wax (my favourite ski and bike store has some squirrelled away in the back, although it did take a while for him to find it... great people). So, no worries about me sticking to the snow... He asked me what temperatures I needed it for... and I said... "ummmm... cold" then explained where I was going and why I needed it in August. So, while winter boots are hard to buy in August - glide wax... no problem.

I took the back roads back from Guelph and enjoyed some wicked-crazy clouds. I stopped for an awesome butter tart and a throat soothing diet coke at a place I've passed a zillion times and never stopped at... its a good thing that I didn't discover their butter tarts before now.... they were delicious. I cleaned out my office at school... my key ring feels oddly light with one less key - most of what was there was junk..... pencils, journal articles, random pamphlets from the student center and old assignments - but I did find 2 fleece blankets, a bright yellow frisbee and my good rain pants (which I've been desperately searching for since the winter..... and while I have an old pair that works okay... they are too long in the legs, so I constantly trip over them and they are made of something that I'm sure makes annoying noises at -30 C.)

Well, I"m out of lozenge so its time to try some of this sleep stuff and see if I can get away without actually getting sick.

Jenn

The Final Sprint

I fear the rain wasn't worth it - as I seem to be perilously close to developing strep throat and I don't have time to rest or to be sick. So, lots of green tea, cranberry juice, zinc losenges, water, vitamin C and echinacaea in hopes that one of the above will help ward off a rather unpleasant afflication for someone who needs to be standing in front of people and talking in just over a week. Wow - so much to do. I have the theme music from Run Lola Run going on in the back of my head - hopefully, that'll keep me moving faster than I thought possible. So... remembering to breathe, believing in the impossible and adding some lemon to my tea.....and thanking my friends for being supportive.

Down Came the Rain

I was all excited about the rain about 2 weeks ago when I posted this hydrograph from a local creek - you'll note that the stage (water surface elevation) nearly reaches 2 m. This after some clearly serious rain.



Here is a longer view of the water surface elevationin the same creek. Even though yesterdays rain didn't seem that heavy - clearly there was a lot of water dumped in this watershed - because the level peaked at over 2.5 m - which is a big deal for a little creek.

I almost didn't bother to go out because the rain didn't seem that great - in fact I was surprised at the amount of water streaming down my driveway given that it didn't seem to be raining that hard. I mean it was raining hard - just not the kind of sheets of rain that I would call a downpour. So, here is my little water resource lesson. Rain events are often plotted on an IDF curve - Intensity (how hard it rains in mm/unit time), Duration (the length of time that it rains) and Frequency (the statistical likiness of it raining that hard for that long - usually in terms of a return period). So, water resource engineers often talk about a 5 year storm or a 100 years storm when planning city works - particularly those related to storm water management and flood policy. So, a short light rain may occur several times a year, where a storm that dumps 50 mm/hr for 45 minutes might only happen - once every so many years. If I were going to build a big, expensive highway bridge - I might be interested in making sure that even a catastrophic storm event (the dreaded 100 yr storm say) would not cause my highway to fall into the river, on the other hand - I probably don't care if my baseball diamond gets a little soggy every spring - so I'm not going to spend a fortune to keep it dry. So that is the basics. What I don't know, and I wish I could find it - is how much rain fell here yesterday - because I'm going to say that it was a whole lot more than 11.2 mm. Hamilton did record almost 50 mm - but its a long way away and no one else has a value for yesterday yet. I think if I wasn't leaving - I might just install a rain gage for my own curiousity. There is a lot more rain on the way it looks like - which means less time spent watering the garden and more for blogging and packing....

3 new day lillies

I think this is the last of the day lillies in the day lily bed.

Flowering currently - Day Lillies, Nasturtium, Mallow, Coreopsis, Pansy, Tomato, Hosta, Geranium, Echinacea, Brown-Eyed Susan, Lobelia, Chamomile, Portuluca, penstemon, Fern-Leaved Bleeding Heart, Jacob's Ladder, Heuchara, Strawberry, Raspberry, Campanula, Forget-Me-Not, Fucshia, Impatiens, Begonia, Snap-Dragon, Blanket Flower, Mullein, Mimulus, Showy Evening Primrose, Lithodora, Catmint, Beebalm, Lemon Balm, Johnson's Blue Geranium, Coleous, and a few others I'm sure.

Today - after all the rain - everything is bright and sunny and warm and green - the perfect breezy summer day... and I'm enjoying it thoroughly, knowing it may be one of my last for a long while.

Singing in the Rain

Well, I'm getting down to the wire... I did go puddle jumping and I'm hoping the sore throat I have is temporary and doesn't turn an innocent bit of puddle jumping into strep throat because I don't have time to be sick in the next month, never mind the next week. That said, there really are not too many activities that make you feel as alive as getting rained on... so, as long as I don't end up sick - it was worth it.

Its starting to set in that not only am I moving to a remote place, I'm about to go from temperature I normally associate with midsummer to temperatures I normally associate with early fall - well maybe a touch warmer - but anything much below 20 C and I'm wearing at least a long sleeved t-shirt - maybe even a sweater. So I guess I should enjoy my last few days of wearing shorts and sandals because come September - temperatures above 10 C are going to become rare and that is jacket and hat territory - and well, its winter by October.

I can relate to this a bit. When I did my education year - I did each of my placements in a different location and I was living in Thunder Bay to begin with - so in November I moved south for my first placement near here and went from early winter to late fall then back to full winter when I got to Thunder Bay. In March, the day I left for my last placement, in Nunavut, I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and feeling uncomfortable warm carting an armload of boxes to be mailed home from the post office - the next day well - it was Parkas and seeing my first parking lot full of Skidoos in Rankin. I think the toughest was when we headed back south in early May and it was 30 C in Winnepeg and the bunch of us were all standing there in the airport dying with our parkas over our arms in our winter boots (and probably looking foolish too.) So, according to the weather network, the day before I leave the temperature is supposed to be between 11 C (low) and 23 C (high) which isn't all that different from this week here - but that is fairly unusual I gather since the average max temp for this time of year is only 16 C and the average min temp is a chilly 5 C. Note to self... move mittens and hat into carry on bag.

Packing has been an adventure - It looks like it should work out okay, but I've been given a few different versions of what I can actually get on calm air. It sounds to me that your total weight includes your carry-on luggage (but not your camera, purse, or coat or reasonable reading material.) If anyone has recent experience about whether the 70 lbs limit applies to 2 pieces of checked luggage + carry on bag or if the 70 lbs is just the checked luggage and there is another 20 lbs allowed for the carry on - I'd love to know. But, I am going to give them a call anyways.

The photograph was taken on the Credit River near Cataract late last fall.... well on the up side I won't have to wait too long before ski season starts...or worry about if the snow is going to melt or if it is going to rain in January. I think it won't. Now... panicky thought... did I pack my glide wax...where would it be if I didn't - does anyone carry glide wax in August? Sigh. There still isn't anyone with the boots I want in stock either. Ah well, I'm sure I'll have a few more of these moments in the next few days. Its kind of scary moving somewhere where even if you were willing to put out obscene amounts of money - there are simply things that are not available to buy and I suspect that glide wax is probably on the list...

Darkskies Descend

Judging by the sky and the radar we are in for a doozy of a thunder storm - so far its just dark and there is a steady rain, a bit of distant sounding thunder - but the yellow and red dots on the radar are still headed in this direction.

I absolutely love thunder storms. When I used to work at camp, we were just west of the highlands - meaning that when it poured... it did it properly... Even Fredericton knew how to put on a decent thunder storm - and owing to the way the roads downtown were graded - so of the best puddle jumping that I've ever seen. Living in the burbs... all the storm water is quickly marshalled into a highly designed storm water management system.. so the puddles are pretty small. I suppose this speaks well for who ever designed the subdivision (Fredericton is older than suburban design and does have a huge, steep hill playing against the storm water planners) - but really... some days you just want to put on your sandals and go jump in a puddle.

Its weird.... the other day as I was leaving the gym in a rainstorm - I only had my good indoor shoes - which I didn't want to get wet - so having lived so many years in other places I shrugged my shoulders and walked to my car barefoot where I put my sandals back on... What actually surprised me is that it was the first time all summer I've been barefoot outdoors. I haven't even been to the beach. I got a few odd looks - but mostly I think they were wistful looks - wishing that they weren't mom's and dads and that they could do something as crazy and as practical as removing ones good shoes to walk barefoot in the rain....

Perhaps... I should take a break from the list and for old times sake go play in the rain.... even if the puddles are only little...

Cheers,

Jennith

Ostego Michegan

I went to check my site stats and noticed there were an insane number of hits compared to usual. Briefly worried it was some kind of attack by a bot.. I was relieved to find out that they ended up here looking for Ouimet Canyon... so welcome visitor and I hope you enjoyed the pictures :D Please feel free to leave a comment.

In other news... there is a potential new (cycle 24) sunspot in the works (http://www.spaceweather.com/). So, lets cross our collective fingers for the start of the new cycle...

Another snazzy poppy

This is a second poppy that flowered today - again similar to the really cool, but never photographed one, but again not the same.

Fancy Poppy

I'm not sure what they did to the genetics of this poppy to make it so frilly - but wow! This is a similar colour to the cool poppy that I've missed photographing twice, but its not the same.

Nasturtiums Close-up

Here they are again... but closer.

The Rise of the Nasturtium

Wow... you'd never believe that those giant Nasturtium came from 2 seeds the size of a dried pea. They have actually had a massive growth spurt in the last few days making inroads into other parts of the bed and spilling out onto the lawn. A third plant, on the opposite side of the bed is nearly in flower... its going to be orange rather than yellow.

Vanilla Sky

"Every passing minute is a chance to turn it all around" Sophia in Vanilla Sky

Here was the sunrise as seen from my window at some hour of the morning when aside from the cool sunrise - I wish I'd been asleep, but for some reason I woke up early enough to see the sunrise which was cool enough to warrent dragging myself from bed to find my camera and snapping a few - somewhat groggy photos before curling back up and trying to eke a bit more sleep out until normal people see fit to get up.

Every sunrise is another step from the past into the future - not nice even steps like those demanded by the building code - but the quirky kind of steps that you find on forest trails that are sometimes wide and deep and other times an awful lot more like a ladder than a staircase - and Heaven help you if you are trying to portage a canoe up one of those! In 8 more sunrises I'm going to take one of those giant steps into my future and I'm not sure what quite it is all going to look like, but its going to be a new postal code, a new set of people, a new job.... and I feel like I should be launching a new version release "Jennith V11.0", compatible with cold temperatures, slow postal service and rubrics. I guess we'll see how many bugs I find in the new version - hopefully less than Vista.

My room is clean, my final packing is nearly done, although I have a short list of little odds and ends (not to mention the still elusive winter boots) to get, but by and large - the practical steps are done and its all a matter of taking a deep breath, walking to the end of the diving board and taking the plunge or in one of my favourite sayings: "When you reach the edge of all you know, hope demands that you believe one of two things - either there will be ground to stand on or that you will grow wings to fly." (its a reasonable paraphrase - I believe I know it from a Madeline D'Engle's books) Cleaning of the moving variety always results in finding weird and forgotten bits of your past. I found some ID badges from Lakehead , my disection kit from Biology, some news paper clippings I'm at a loss as to why I kept them and various rocks and nicknacks and for the most part I packed them away to be refound at some later date - at which point I can scratch my head at why I kept them and then repeat the process.

I think sleep deprivation is making me overly introspective and not very coherant in my expression - so I'm going to throw up a few pictures from the garden and get back to that to do list and check the spaceweather to see if any sunspots have popped up in the last 2 days.

Cheers,

J

Chamomile For the Mind

Not very many days left and still a big to do list left to tackle, however, yesterday I did manage to put a fairly big dent in it and still squeezed a trip down to the big city to see the Beautiful Unknown (an indie band (I think they are an indie band) which was unknown to me until yesterday) with an old friend from highschool. Its sort of tradition. I get to play tourist in the city, but its nice to have someone who knows where they are going and all that jazz since I'm totally not a city kid at all. Usually I manage to do something dorky - like where a white t-shirt and light blue jeans when everyone else is wearing black - yesterday I grabbed the wrong pair of shoes. They look okay and they don't have a strap on the back (which I thought was a good idea because I cut the back of my heel yesterday and I didn't want a sandal strap rubbing against a sore spot.), but honestly they are insanely uncomfortable - which I always forget why I never wear them. They bruised the tops of my feets.. and seriously if it hadn't been garbage day and kind of gross in the city... I would have walked barefoot. (next time I'm wearing my hiking boots and forget about trying to blend into habitat other than my own) However, the band was pretty good and gets bonus points for being a good live act in addition to being competent musicians and its fun to do something that I haven't done in years and shocking how little some parts of the world have changed.

As for the flower - its indeed a chamomille flower and just the smell of it is relaxing. I'm going to try and make some tea from it sometime soon - I just have to surf the net to find out how.

Lobelia at length

Here is my final shot for today... I had a hard time picking a whole plant shot of the lobelia... I'm still not sure... but you get the idea... this is what the whole plant looks like and yes.. its totally surrounded by Nasturtium.

Sage Salvia

... just liked this one... and yes.. Salvia is in the sage family... but this one has much nicer flowers than the greenleafed shrubby sage I have growing from 3 years ago... which I don't think I've seen flower at all this year.

Gaura from the other plant

Here is the other Gaura... also cooperating today

Squirrel Snacks

I don't know what was up with the squirrel... it was digging through the wood chips and racing around like it had just drank 3 cups of coffee. It kept chasing its tail and running in circles and bouncing off the bottoms of the tree trunks... Maybe its been eating my pickled slugs from the beer traps... qui sait?

Lovely Leadwort

I don't think I've put up a picture of this plant yet. I actually don't know anything about it beyond its name "Leadwort" and that it will tolerate partial shade.